by Asha Lemmie
She took a deep breath and did not release it until the conductor nodded at her that it was time to begin.
Now.
Off she flew. With the first bravura of ascending notes, she claimed the piece as her own.
Perfect.
She could almost feel Akira’s hands on hers, guiding her. Over the sound of the orchestra, she could hear his voice in her head.
Good. Not too fast, now. Slow down for this part . . . it’s like a caress. It’s sensual almost.
Just like that.
Now, higher. Don’t go sharp.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
She was breathless. Her face was hot, but her hands were steady. She would not be humiliated. Not today.
The orchestra slipped away from her, and she hastened to catch them. The sound of the flute pierced her to the heart.
Is this what it feels like?
Is this what Akira always feels like?
To be in the middle of such a sound?
She opened her eyes. There was a different sound now, entirely unfamiliar.
It was applause. Thunderous applause.
Nori swayed. It did not stop for a full three minutes.
Her chest heaved up and down.
“Encore! Bravo!” someone shouted.
“Yes, more!”
Akira looked at her out of the corner of his eye. It was traditional to take a small reprieve between pieces.
Nori was already out of breath, but she nodded that she was ready to continue. This next one was her song.
The “Ave Maria” went perfectly as, deep down, she had always known it would. It was an extension of herself and therefore impossible to forget.
She heard someone crying.
And then the roaring began again. This crowd was insatiable, apparently.
She felt Akira’s hand on her shoulder as he leaned down to whisper in her ear. “If you need a break . . .”
“No.”
“It’s been nearly an hour. You look a little faint.”
“I want to finish this.”
If she stopped now, she would never be able to start again. The adrenaline was the only thing propping her up.
Unseen by the rest of the crowd, he lightly kissed the back of her head.
“Faith,” he whispered.
He went back to the piano. The murmuring from the crowd ceased. Nori could swear that some celestial being had actually frozen them.
Akira let the first note fall. Then the second. Then the third. Each lower and more ominous than the next.
She felt something shatter in her.
And then, without even thinking, she answered the call.
She was not behind him; she was not ahead of him. Her sound was entwined with his; they were two halves of a whole.
A tear slid down her cheek.
All of her fear, all of her pain, all of her hatred flowed out of her and into the sound.
The difficulty was forgotten; the audience was forgotten.
There were only two people here.
Faster and faster it went, until they were dancing in a delirious red haze.
And then, as the song slowed for the final time, a message clear as day:
The end.
She folded like a paper doll and covered her eyes. Her violin clattered to the floor.
She didn’t hear the applause.
All she felt was Akira taking her hand and whisking her through the hall, out the front door, and into the cold winter night.
She felt the air on her face and gasped.
“You’re fine,” he said simply. “Now, now.”
She continued to breathe in short, desperate spurts.
“I did it,” she wheezed.
Akira sat down, right there in the snow so that she could rest her face against his chest.
“You did,” and there was a quiet but powerful sense of satisfaction in his voice.
“Was it good?”
Akira snorted. “Sloppy on the trills. As usual.”
She knew better than to get upset. “But the rest?”
Akira was silent for a long moment. “I am . . . glad I came back.”
Nori tucked these words into her box of sacred things.
“I’ll get our belongings,” Akira said. “Pay our respects to Hiromoto. Unless you want to stay for the party and revel in your triumph?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s go home.”
* * *
The driver was the same man as before. He smiled at Nori as he opened her door. He gave Akira one brief, baffled glance before averting his gaze. Akira had taken a taxi straight from the airport and had only a small suitcase with him.
The night was perfectly still under a black, starless sky. There were no other cars on this winding back road.
Akira leaned against the window with his eyes half closed. Nori blew on her window and traced the characters of her name with her pinkie finger.
No-
Ri-
Ko . . .
Once that had been all she could spell.
She nudged Akira with her foot.
“Akira-san.”
He turned to face her. “Nani?”
“Do you think I could come with you, to Vienna? And we could play again? Together?”
She expected him to scoff or roll his eyes, but the look he gave her was clear and honest.
“You’re not ready for that yet.”
Nori bowed her head.
Akira lifted up her chin with two fingers and tugged on one of her curls. “But maybe next year.”
Nori started to smile but never got the chance.
Everything happened in an instant.
The car veered to the left so sharply that it knocked her back. Her skull hit the window. She thought, vaguely, that the trees were getting awfully close.
Akira’s face was frozen. She saw him mouth her name.
Nori.
Then the loudest sound she’d ever heard. His body came flying forwards. The last thing she felt was his arms closing around her.
Because in the next moment, she could feel nothing.
She knew the ground she was lying on must be cold, she knew that the flames around her must be hot, but she could feel neither.
She saw the driver twenty feet away. He was only a speck. His head was cracked open like an egg. She never knew people had so much blood inside them.
The light from the flames caught the shattered glass that lay all around her, covered in a layer of freshly fallen snow.
Her eyes found the large, jagged piece sticking straight out of her chest.
It blazed like a comet fallen from the sky.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AURORA
I think I have gone deaf. And blind. And dumb.
Every day, all day, people come in and out of the room. They sit by the bed and ask me questions, but I can’t hear a single word. If I try to sleep, they wake me up and ask me more questions.
I think something very bad has happened. I have this deep sense, even here in this floating plane, that there is a huge piece of me missing. I need to find it. I need to find whatever that thing is.
But first, I really need to remember my name.
* * *
Noriko.
There, I have it. I am not sure how many days it took me to figure this out. Someone has covered the window with paper, so I have to rely on my ears to tell me what o’clock it is.
Someone came today—or was it yesterday?—that I thought I recognized, but then I lost it. It slipped away from me like rain off a wing.
They rub an ointment on my chest that smells like sulfur. It stings and I cry out, but I can’t hear that either.
I can do nothing
but cry.
* * *
They let me out of the room.
If I walk between two of them and lean a little, I can move around the hallway.
I think now that I know this place. It is not a strange prison, as I first thought.
This is . . . familiar to me. I feel a tiny spark of affection, of hope, but I cannot remember why.
I take hold of one woman’s sleeve and look into her pale, tearstained face.
“Something’s wrong,” I tell her.
It is the first time I have tried to speak, and my voice is feeble and useless. But I think she understands. I still can’t hear, but I can read her lips.
“Nori . . .”
The other woman cuts her off. “Don’t tell her. She won’t remember. You’re just torturing her.”
“She has a right—”
“Remember last time? It’s pointless. And it’s cruel.”
I feel a deep pang in my chest, like someone is ripping me in two from the inside out.
I wake up many hours later. The pain is gone.
But I still cannot stop crying.
* * *
There is someone I must find.
I am Noriko, Noriko Kamiza, and I have a mother who is gone, and a father who I have never known, and a friend with silver hair who is across the sea.
And I have something else.
I have the warmth of the sun and the weight of it too.
Why can’t I remember?
* * *
It all descended on her in one moment of startling clarity. It was powerful enough to jolt her from her sleep.
Nori stood up. Every limb in her body was screaming, and she was half naked, stripped from the waist up, but she did not care. She wrapped the blanket around herself and walked.
She had the most surreal feeling, like none of this was really happening at all.
She made her way down the hall, stopped at the third door to the right. Knocked.
There was no reply.
She opened the door.
Akira’s room was just as he left it. The bed was made; the binders and binders of sheet music were stacked neatly on the desk. The many scarves she’d knitted him were hanging on a hook next to the mirror.
And there, sitting on the bed, was a figure half cloaked in darkness.
She crept forward, ignoring the fact that it felt like walking through flames.
The figure looked up.
“Ayame,” Nori whispered.
Ayame said nothing. Her pallor was deathly; her hair was greasy. Her blue dress looked dirty.
And she was crying.
Nori felt a deep wave move through her. Something told her to leave, to go back to her room and go back to sleep. To sink back into the delirium.
Because this was unspeakable. Impossible.
Nori shut her eyes. “Where is he?”
Ayame let out a broken sob. “I’m not . . . I’m not supposed to . . .”
For a brief moment, Nori allowed herself blind, stupid hope.
“Is he in Vienna?” she asked, in a squeaky little voice that sounded pathetic even to her.
Ayame stared at her, wide-eyed and white-faced, saying nothing.
“I know he was going to Vienna,” Nori pressed on. “But then he was going to come back.”
Her voice broke and she tried to take a breath, but the pain in her chest was so great that it nearly knocked her over.
“He was going to come back,” she breathed. “He promised he’d come back.”
Ayame rose from the bed. “He did come back,” she said softly. “For your concert. Don’t you remember?”
“I . . .”
The world turning upside down. Broken glass.
Fire.
“I . . .”
Ayame took another step towards her, and Nori found herself holding out her hands as if she could keep the truth at bay.
“Don’t,” she raged weakly. “Don’t say it.”
But Ayame did not stop. “He did come back. You were on the way home. But it was dark and . . . it was snowing. The car—”
“I said DON’T!”
“The car went off the road.”
Nori tried to run away, but she tripped over the hem of her blanket and fell to the floor. She bowed her head and put her hands up, pleading.
“Please don’t,” she whispered. “Please.”
“It slid down the embankment, into the woods. You hit the trees.”
Finally, Nori looked up. Her eyes were dry. And though she was kneeling, her shoulders were squared.
She took in this moment, this room, down to the last speck of dust floating in the air. She let it all absorb into her very bones. She forced herself to remember, with exacting clarity, the moment before. She held it tightly in her hands, like a wriggling little bird.
And then she let it go.
“Where is Akira-san?” Nori asked.
And in the smallest voice, Ayame answered her.
Nori’s mouth opened.
She remembered now.
Lying there, on that frozen ground, there had been someone beside her, just a few feet away.
Akira.
His body had been curled up, almost as if he were sleeping. His hair was slightly tousled, just as it always was.
And his face . . . his face . . . was gone.
Nori doubled over.
And then she screamed.
* * *
They give me something to make me sleep.
But I don’t sleep, though it is all I want to do.
I lie awake and I stare at the ceiling and I think over and over again: Let me die.
Please, God.
Just let me die.
* * *
I do not die.
Though I lie here all day, every day, and turn my face to the wall and wait for death, nothing happens.
I see Akira’s faceless body, just like my mother appeared to me all those years in my dreams, and I have to retch into the bowl beside my bed.
I drink a little water to appease Ayame, who looks close to death herself, but I eat nothing.
The doctor comes to check my wounds, and I feel a ridiculous, unworthy rage when I see him.
I hate him like a scorpion.
Where was he when he was needed? Where was he to help the one worth saving?
I tell him to let me die and he says he cannot, that he is a doctor, and anyway, I don’t deserve to die.
Yes, I do.
I have always deserved to die. But I refused.
And now I have killed him.
* * *
Ayame says that I must get up.
She says that I cannot stay in this bed forever. She has bathed and put on a new, starched dress. She is restored.
He has only been dead for three weeks.
I hear sounds outside my door, of people moving and speaking, of cooking and cleaning and life.
But the sun has gone away.
Don’t they know? Don’t they know that the sun has gone away and everything is finished?
So I cannot get up.
I will never get up.
* * *
AYAME
Tokyo, Japan
March 1st, 1957
The messenger arrives at the crack of dawn on a miserable day. The fog is so thick that I can scarcely see out the window. It poured all night, a wretched hisame: cold rain, the kind that seeps into the air, and seeps into the house, and seeps into your bones. You can’t get warm no matter what you do.
I have been waiting for this since it happened. I divide my time between sitting vigil in her room and sleeping by the front door with a knife beneath my pillow.
I wrap a shawl around my shoulders and meet him at the front gat
e. I won’t allow him to take even a single step past it.
He bows his head and hands me the letter. It is marked with the seal of the Kamiza family: a white chrysanthemum with a purple center.
“Please be advised, Ayame-san, that this will be her first and only warning.”
I want to be angry, but I cannot. I cannot seem to feel anything anymore.
I have known Akira-sama since the day he was born. I used to hold him, when I was just five years old, and sing him to sleep. I watched him change from a loving, happy little boy into a secretive child who rarely spoke.
When he left for Kyoto, I thought it was over. I even went to work for another great family.
And then he came to find me. He was standing right in front of me, smiling at me, just like a miracle. He asked me to run his household; he said he would trust no one else.
And all of these years, I have watched over him. As my mother watched after his father.
Every day I brought him his coffee, and every day he would look up at me, smile softly, and say, “Thank you, Ayame-san. You always take such good care of me.”
And every day I pretended that I wasn’t desperately, passionately, impossibly in love with him. Because I am a servant. And he is . . . he was . . .
I cannot fathom a world without him.
I clutch the letter in my cold hands.
“That woman can’t come here,” I say in a furious whisper. “It is out of the question.”
He smiles thinly at me. “Do make sure she reads it. My lady will be expecting a reply soon.”
I am shaking. “How soon?”
“Three days.”
He bows again, turns around, and disappears back into the fog.
I go back into the house.
It takes me too long to find the strength to go upstairs. I know what’s waiting for me there. And I don’t want to face it.
I finally will myself to move, and it amazes me how heavy my limbs have become. I have aged a hundred years in weeks.
I don’t knock. I open the door and I find her there, as I knew I would.
