The Last Leaves Falling

by Sarah Benwell

  “I don’t know.”

  “A doctor? Surgeon? Pilot?”

  “I don’t know, Sora.”

  “But you have to know!”

  She is silent, and I know she wants to use the line that every parent gives: “As long as he is healthy, I don’t care.” But I cannot even give her that.

  “Please?” I say, softer this time. I don’t know why it matters. It shouldn’t, but I see that face inside my head, and somehow it does.

  She sighs, and perches on the bed next to my chair.

  She stares and stares at me, until suddenly the faintest of smiles appears on her lips, and she says, “When you were three, your grandmother taught you to make cupcakes.”

  I nod. I remember the feel of the batter as I dipped my fingers in and squelched it between my hands. I remember standing at the oven, Bah-Ba reminding me every two minutes that the door was hot and not to open it. And I remember my excitement as I tasted the first one.

  “And for weeks you told everyone exactly how to make them, step by step, in your impatient three-year-old voice. And I knew right then that you would teach, one way or another.”

  And somehow, although she has not really answered, my mother’s words are perfect. And for a moment, she doesn’t look sad at all, just proud, and I don’t know what of, but I don’t care, and I wish that I could make it last forever.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can we have cupcakes for dinner?”

  76

  I watch as my dear, wonderful mother digs out ingredients from the back of the cupboard, and tips them all into a bowl: flour and butter and sugar and eggs, and sour dried berries.

  “Chocolate chips?” she asks, and I nod.

  “Of course.”

  And then she looks across the counter, and she smiles. “Would you like to stir?” And her smile’s so bright and warm that I almost forget everything else.

  “Yes.” I so want to forget.

  She rests the bowl on my knees and folds my hand in hers, just like my grandmother did that first time, and we stir.

  • • • •

  We do not have a proper meal tonight. We sit with mugs of tea and a whole plate of cakes between us, and we eat until our stomachs hurt.

  77

  I do not sleep well. And every time I wake, I see Yamada-san’s gaping fish mouth, desperate, twisted in pain.

  My bones ache, and I think I must cry out because I remember Mama’s face, hovering above me, and I think she slipped something onto my tongue and made me swallow, and then everything was warm, and almost-safe, and somehow I ignore the shadows watching me and I go back to sleep.

  When I wake again my mother has already drawn the blinds, and sunlight spills onto the bed, half-blinding me.

  “How are you feeling today?” My mother’s voice sounds distant. I groan. “You might feel groggy. Last night . . . I gave you extra—”

  “I know. I remember.” My own voice is loud and slow and slurred.

  “Here.” She pulls me upright, helps me sip at a glass of water and swallow pills that feel far too big and stick at my throat. “Better?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  Everything feels heavy. My head, my neck, my tongue. The blood that slugs around my veins. And when my mother lets me go, I slump back onto my pillow and I feel like I will never move again.

  My mother keeps checking on me, peering down at me as though I am a creature laid on ice at the morning market. A squid: all sadness and ungainly limbs and slime. She peers, and makes unhappy noises, and I know that she will leave the market empty-handed. But on the fifth or sixth time that she gently slips into the room, one set of drugs is taking over from the other, and I’m starting to feel better.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hello.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you worry.”

  She sits next to me, brushes my sticky squid-hair from my forehead.

  78

  I’m not doing this.

  I’m not even saying I want to. I’m just . . .

  I type it, and delete, and type it and delete, and type it again several times before I have the nerve to click, but every time I start to turn away, I see those faces, imagine myself in Yamada-san’s bed, and I type the words again.

  Still, as I hit search, I remind myself, You’re just looking.

  The first page, 50 Dumbest Ways to Die, is filled with people who walk into meat lockers in nothing but their underwear, or try to fit three packets of rice crackers into their mouths at once. But the next is serious. And it scares me.

  Some of the suggestions I can’t even read. I never want to know the details, never want to think of them again.

  Some are less horrific. But at the fifth one, as I ask myself for the fifth time, What would Mama think? I realize . . . I can barely move, and my mother is home all day. I could not do it anyway. I couldn’t get pills or tubing or whatever without somebody noticing, and I couldn’t use them without help.

  Even if I wanted to.

  Which I’m not saying I do.

  79

  Mai looks up at me from her place, sprawled across my bed, her arms hanging down over the edge.

  “We should do something.”

  “Like what?” Kaito asks, tapping a bored rhythm out on my desk.

  “I don’t know. Sora?”

  “I . . .”

  “Shh!” She snaps a finger to her lips. “No arguments. We need a bucket list. Paper!” She roots around in her bag and pulls out a tattered exercise book.

  I shake my head. “No thanks.”

  “Why not?” She glares.

  And I explain about Wish4lLife, how I know it is meant to bring hope and joy, but it just feels cruel, and everything I want to do, everything I want to achieve is long-term and impossible.

  My friends are quiet for a moment, lost in their own thoughts, and part of me wishes that I could take it all back, but the rest just hopes they understand.

  And then something clicks in Mai’s head, brings her back to me. She grins. “This will be different, I promise.”

  “What will?”

  “We are making a list. Three lists—one each. Full of anything and everything. No time or physicality or money worries. Just things we’d like to do.”

  I stare at her. Did she not hear what I said?

  “Come on . . . oh, fine. I’ll start . . . I would like to visit the ocean floor, thousands of meters down. I want to find a cave to stay in for a while and meet all of the crazy things that live down there. I bet it’s like space, only weirder. And I’d like to work with all the greatest animators, and be famous just like them.” She scribbles away as she talks. “And I’d like to meet that boy in my school with the bright red guitar.”

  I glance at Kaito, his ears glowing guitar-red as he chokes down jealousy.

  “I’d skip forward to a time when I could write code that works,” he butts in, “and make sites and games and everything to benefit the masses. And I want to invent a machine that studies for you—”

  “That’s cheating!” Mai squeals.

  “Not the point. It would free up time for everything else.”

  “Fine!” she huffs, adding it to Kaito’s list.

  “And I’d like to go to Hollywood. That would be cool.”

  Mai nods. “I’d like the three of us to go to Disney, or go visit the snow monkeys. A day trip.”

  “And go to the moon.”

  “And the desert.”

  “Yes! And eat roasted marshmallows around a fire and look at the stars.”

  “And learn how to make food from other countries. Hamburgers and pasta and . . . whatever they eat in the desert, too.”

  My friends shout out one thing after another, and Mai scribbles until several pages of her book are full, and finally, when Kaito says, “I want to fight a simulated monster and feel as though it’s really there in front of me!” I can’t resist.

  “All right. I’ll play. On one condition.” />
  “What?” Mai’s eyes shine bright with pleasure.

  “You add ‘I want to study art instead of law’ to yours.”

  She does not answer me, but I see her turn the page from Kaito’s list to hers and write, so I say, “I want to explore a library that takes a week to walk through, and sleep beneath an igloo made of books. And I want to teach in huge, old lecture halls, with dust motes hanging in light that streams in through high windows. And drink root beer on a desert island. See the cherry blossoms fall in Yoshino and learn how to swing a bat like Tomoaki Kanemoto. And”—and I know I’m going to say it and I wish that I could stop, but I cannot—“I want to get up from this chair and run, and know that everything will be all right.”

  “Okay.” Mai sits up and smiles, not batting an eyelid, and if we were online I would be sending her a million text-based hearts. “I think that’s enough for now. I need a minute. Kai, can you read on from where we left off?”

  She lobs the book, this one about a girl-spirit-thing who eats books instead of food, at Kaito, and he opens it, flicking the hair out of his eyes to reveal bright embarrassed cheeks. And he begins.

  Kaito’s voice is awkward, stumbling, and I find myself watching Mai instead of really listening. She pulls her knees up and rests the book against them, and I can see that she is concentrating, brow furrowed, chewing on her bottom lip.

  Kaito sputters words about the sweet sweet taste of romance novels and the chewiness of mysteries, and Mai’s pen sweeps across the page.

  Finally, she looks up, stretching.

  “Okay. I’m done. Here.”

  Kaito takes the notebook and holds it up so I can see it too.

  The Brilliant Adventures of Professor Crane and Friends, she’s written at the top. And then, in a series of boxes, a comic strip.

  “I wanted it to be a flip book so that it moved, but there wasn’t time.”

  Kaito shakes his head. “It’s brilliant!”

  “Read it?” I ask, because I want to hear it in her voice, so she shuffles around behind us so that she can see the page.

  “Professor Crane was wise, but he was sad,” she said, and I let the pictures—a crane, folded awkwardly into a wheelchair, staring through the window at a gorgeous sunny day—tell the rest.

  “His wings were broken, and he could not fly.”

  My heart wrenches as I see his tear-filled eyes, and I do not care that birds don’t cry.

  “His friends came to visit him, but it was not the same. He wanted adventure. And sunlight on his feathers.” She pauses to let us take in the scene: Professor Crane, dejected, while his friends—Raccoon Dog and Macaque—do their best to make him smile.

  “Science and medicine had tried and failed, and Old Crane was ready to give up. But his friends were not, and one day, they arrived with arms full of bits and bobs and hoojiwhatsits, and heads full of ideas.

  “They circled him, and scratched their heads, and finally, AHA! Ideas! Snowy the monkey tried first. Taking a ruler . . . and her paint box . . . and a big roll of paper, she painted him new, magnificent wings.

  “But the wet paint was heavy, and when she tried to fix the wings to the professor—”

  Grinning, Kaito points at the little drawn-in noises, stopping her midsentence. “Do the sound effects!”

  “You do the sound effects.” She laughs, digging him in the ribs.

  He nods.

  “The wet paint was heavy,” Mai continues, “and when she tried to strap the wings to the professor . . .”

  “Rrrrrrrrrp!” he yells.

  “. . . the paper sagged and tore.”

  I look from my friends to the ink strokes on Mai’s page, the way she’s made the paper look heavy and waterlogged, so you know that the poor monkey’s plan could never work, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  But I don’t have time to work it out because Mai plows on:

  “But the friends would not give up.”

  They scratch their heads, and frown, and pace around in circles, until finally:

  “AHA!” Mai yells.

  And Raccoon Dog rushes off to find his toolbox, and he’s bashing and clanking and twiddling away until finally he emerges with . . . robot wings!

  “Professor Crane’s friends helped him strap the robo-wings in place, and they all held their breath as Raccoon Dog switched them on . . .

  “They buzzed . . .

  “And beeped . . .

  “And whirred . . .

  “And then they twitched, and the professor stretched and flexed his steely robo-feathers. And with a huge smile, he stood and flapped his robo-wings.

  “His friends threw open the porch windows and cheered as the professor leapt into the sky.

  “And he stretched out his shiny new wings as far as they would go, and he flew!”

  And Mai’s voice, in those last words, is so full of wonder and promise that as I’m staring at the final panel—a vast summer sky, and in the middle, heading higher still, a tiny, glinting crane—I feel like I am flying too.

  • • • •

  Finally, Mai breaks the spell.

  “You see?” she whispers. “This way, we can do anything we like.”

  80

  Over the next week the three animal friends go everywhere: taste huckleberries in an old saloon while wearing cowboy hats and boots, see the sun set over the Sahara, and rest their weary limbs in steaming rock pools at the top of mountains. A new episode appears in my in-box every day.

  They’re beautiful. And each one makes me laugh, and wish that I could jump into the screen and go adventuring; taste the berries and feel the water on my skin, take my friends to wild, exotic places.

  But every day it’s getting harder even to get out of bed, to click the mouse and pull my face into a smile.

  Today’s episode sees Professor Crane and Snowy and Raccoon Dog building a Super Special Time Machine, only Raccoon Dog miscalculates the size of the battery, and there’s only enough juice for one round trip. They argue over where to go, whether to see the dinosaurs or pharaohs, or go forward to spy on their future selves. But eventually, the promise of a little T. rex action wins, and off they go to vast, unblemished lands to search for leathered wings and footprints big enough to stand in.

  “Are you all right?” Mai asks. I stop reading, switch windows so that I can see her, and her frown spills across my screen.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  As I say the words, I realize how deeply true they are. I’m tired.

  I stare harder at the screen, push the thought away because it is too big and terrible, and I do not want it. But I’m tired. And I wish that I could travel back in time to when it wasn’t so.

  81

  “Mama!” My voice cracks the night, but I don’t care. Hot pain sears my legs and spreads into my groin, and if I could move I’d curl up into a ball and die. “Mama!”

  And she’s here, soothing, smoothing, asking what it is that she can do. I cannot answer. It is all I can do to squeeze the tears out from my eyes and keep from screaming.

  “My son,” she says. “My son. What can I do?”

  But I do not know.

  I just want it to stop.

  She reaches for my pills, and I so want them. All of them, until it stops. But I see her eyes, her stone-set jaw, and I cannot let her watch me float away. Somehow I shake my head, and when I part my lips my words spill out. Dry and desperate, but there. “No. Please. I don’t—”

  My mother does not listen. She pops the foil and tries to slip the small white tablets onto my tongue. But they stick to my lips and I twist my head, spitting them away.

  “No.”

  She stands there, helpless, pillbox in one hand and water in the other, and looks on as a fresh wave of pain takes hold, and I bite down so hard that I taste iron.

  “Sora—”

  “No.” It hurts, but it will pass.

  This time, I
win. She pulls me up into her arms, holds me, nestles her face in my hair. And I can feel her warm breaths, as sharp and erratic as my own, and her heart beats hard against my back, and if I’d had those pills, if I were floating away, I might think that there weren’t two of us, but one.

  • • • •

  Finally it breaks, and my breathing steadies. We stay wrapped together for a moment longer, and I let the poststorm calm wash over me, until my mother shifts beneath me and the moment’s gone.

  She lays me back against the pillow and crosses the room, and I’m half-confused until she says, “You’re soaked,” and reaches for a fresh, dry shirt. Now that she has said it, I can feel the dampness on my skin, cooling fast. I feel hot-but-cold, and sticky, and I really want a shower, but the clock beside me flashes 03:00 and I cannot make my mother haul me out of bed.

  She helps me into a new shirt, which catches on my clammy skin, and I wonder whether the fabric is instantly prickled with sweat. Then she kisses my forehead and steps toward the door.

  “Wait!”

  She stops. I know it’s late, and she is tired, but I don’t want her to go.

  “Stay?”

  She shuffles back toward me. “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  “Hush.”

  “No. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. And I’m sorry.”

  She stares, clenching her jaw, and I don’t know whether she is angry or just trying not to cry, and then she whips around without a word and she is gone, leaving an emptiness behind.

  I did this to her. Me and my stupid sickness. It’s so bad that she cannot even look at me, cannot be in the same room as her own son.

  But then she’s back, filling up the room. She’s smiling, though her eyes are heavy, and she has something in her hands. An album.

  She slips onto the bed beside me and opens it to the first page. My mother’s face, younger then, stares back at me, and with her is a scowling baby.

  “That was the happiest day of my life,” she says. “The day I brought you home.”

  She turns the page, and there’s me, maybe two years old, on a tiny purple trike. “You loved that thing. So proud of it. You’d go up and down Bah-Ba’s yard all day.”