For two days after the Kite I could hardly lift a cup.
Healing goes slowly after a long one. Kohaku says it’s like a well that’s been drawn too hard. I’d been drawn harder than ever before. The bruises from the storm came up on my arms and ribs on Monday and stayed there, yellow and green. I slept most of Monday. I slept most of Tuesday. When I was awake I lay on the sofa with the kitchen television on with the sound low, and watched the faces of the hundred and twelve go past, one at a time, with their names and ages underneath.
On Tuesday afternoon they showed the old man from Suka. He was in a photo from a wedding, in a suit, looking uncomfortable. His name was Mochizuki Tetsuo. He was seventy-nine. He had run the neighborhood association tent at the Hiratsuka festival for thirty years.
Mio had brought the paper fans home in her drawstring bag. Four of them. She’d put them on the kitchen table, side by side, and nobody had moved them.
The black phone rang twice that week. Small things, Nishikawa said both times. The second time, he asked me how I was before he told me where. I said I was fine. Kohaku, on the back of the sofa, made a noise.
I went to neither. Nishikawa said that was fine, too.
My own phone didn’t ring. It just filled up. Shun sent something every few days, the same as always, as if this time I’d answer. You alive? A photo of a bootleg keychain with the staff on upside down. Saw your mom at work. She says you’re fine. Ok. Ok then. I read every one, lying on the sofa. I typed answers to some of them and deleted them. I didn’t know who’d be sending them.
* * *
On Wednesday night Mom came into my room with a shoebox.
I knew it at once. It was the box from the top shelf of the hall closet, the one at the back that I’d reached for in April when I was looking for a charger. Not that one. It had a lid printed with the name of a shoe shop in Ofuna that closed when I was in elementary school, and there was dust along the top edge of it where it had stood against the wall.
She sat on the end of my bed with it on her knees. She was still in her work fleece. She didn’t open it.
“I watched you sleep,” she said. “For twenty hours. Sunday.”
“I know.”
“I sat there the whole time.” She looked down at the box. “I’ve been thinking about this box for twelve years. I thought about it the whole twenty hours.”
She took off the lid.
Inside there was a supermarket plastic bag, folded over and over on itself. She unfolded it. Inside the bag was a toy.
It was a wand.
A child’s toy wand, about as long as my forearm, in pink plastic gone pale with age, with a gold star on the end and a clear plastic jewel in the middle of the star that used to light up. There was a ribbon tied around the handle that had been white once. On the handle, in silver letters, the kind they print on toys, it said a name.
PUELLA.
I didn’t remember it.
And then I did.
It wasn’t like remembering a fact. It was like smelling something from when you were very small, and being there. A television in a different apartment. Pink light. A girl in white with long hair turning in the air, while music played, and stars came out of her hands. And me, on the carpet in front of it, with this in my hand, turning round and round until I fell over.
Her name was Puella. She was the heroine of a magical-girl anime that came on at eight-thirty on Sunday mornings, before Dad was up, and she was my favorite magical girl in the world. She was my favorite anything. Every week she turned in the air and the stars came out of her hands and she saved somebody, and every week I sat a bit closer to the screen, until Mom moved me back with her foot. I’d asked for the wand for my fourth birthday. I’d carried it everywhere, to the bath, to bed, to the supermarket in my coat pocket.
“Your father threw it away,” said Mom. “You were four.”
She said it the way she says the price of something.
“He said things,” she said, and stopped. “He put it in the kitchen trash can, under the vegetable peelings, so you’d see him do it. You cried for three days.” She turned the wand over in her hands. “On the first night, after you’d both gone to sleep, I took it out of the trash and washed it and put it in this box. I put the box at the back of the top shelf, where he never looked.”
“You kept it.”
“Twelve years.”
“You never said.”
“No,” said Mom.
I looked at the wand in her hands, the pale pink plastic and the gray ribbon and the silver letters.
“Why?” I said.
Mom was quiet. She put the wand down on the bed between us, on top of the plastic bag.
“You stopped asking for it,” she said. “After the three days. You stopped asking for anything.”
She stood up. She put the lid back on the empty box and held it against her side.
“I didn’t know if I’d kept it for you or for me.”
She went out. She left the wand on the bed.
* * *
Mio came in about ten minutes later.
She’d heard. She hears everything in our apartment; the walls are like paper.
She stood in the doorway and looked at the wand on the bed and put both hands over her mouth.
“Oh my god,” she said through her hands. “Puella.”
“You remember it?”
“Remember it?” She came in and sat down on the floor by the bed, and picked up the wand, and turned it over like it might go off. “You made me call you Puella for a whole summer. A whole summer. You wouldn’t answer to anything else. You made me be the bad witch every single day, and I had to stand on the sofa and you had to point that at me and I had to fall off.” She pressed the jewel in the star with her thumb. Nothing happened. “I was eight. I hated that summer.”
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t hate it.” She was still pressing the jewel. “Where’s it been?”
“Mom kept it. Dad threw it out and she took it back out of the trash.”
Mio stopped pressing.
“He threw it in the trash?”
“Under the vegetable peelings. So I’d see.”
Mio went quiet.
I hadn’t seen her go that quiet in years. She sat on my floor with the wand in her lap and looked at the wall.
Then she got up, and went out, and I heard her knock on Mom’s door. I heard her say, “You kept it twelve years and you never said?” and Mom say, “Yes,” and Mio say something else, quieter, that I couldn’t hear. They were in there a long time. Nobody shouted. When Mio came back past my door, her eyes were red, and she didn’t stop.
I lay on my bed with the wand on my chest and looked at the ceiling.
* * *
In the morning I sat on the balcony with it.
Mom had gone to work before five. I’d heard her go. Thursday is her short day; she’d be back at one. Mio was asleep. Kohaku was on the rail with her eyes half shut, in the early sun, not saying anything, which for Kohaku is a great deal of not saying anything.
I sat on the concrete with my back against the wall and the wand in my lap and the sweatband on my wrist. I hadn’t changed since the Kite. I was just myself, in a T-shirt and the soft pants with the elastic waist, with my hair on my shoulders and my bruises going yellow.
Puella was still turning in the air on that television in the old apartment, as clear as if I’d watched her last Sunday.
The cave came back after her. The cat in the dark said Hello, new girl, and I said I’m a boy, and the cat said Mm-hm.
Then I was on the escalator again, where Ono Rika had smiled at a stranger. Mom in the shoe shop had said Yes without looking at me. On the train home, Mom and Mio had said she across me in the sun, and I hadn’t wanted them to stop.
By the shaved-ice stall, a girl of about six in a pink wig had told me I could be Miko-chan too, if I wanted.
I’d been brushing my teeth looking at the faucet for as long as I could remember.
And there was the thing over the beach at Hiratsuka, that had come in off the sea looking for my shape. It hadn’t been confused for one second. It had gone straight past every boy on that beach. It had gone for the little girls in the red skirts and the pink wigs, and then it had gone for me, and it hadn’t seen any difference between us at all.
The sun came up over the roofs. The Kannon on her hill went from gray to white.
I sat there until I heard Mom’s key in the door at one.
* * *
They were both in the kitchen.
Mom was putting the shopping away. Mio was at the table in her pajamas, with her phone, eating cereal out of the box.
I came in with the wand and put it on the table.
They both looked at it. Then they looked at me.
I’d thought about what I was going to say all morning, and none of it was any good, so I said the first thing.
“I think I’m a girl,” I said. “I think I always was.”
Mom was holding a packet of tofu. She put it down on the counter.
Nobody said anything. The refrigerator hummed. Down in the street, a delivery van was reversing, beeping.
“Okay,” said Mom.
That was all she said.
She looked at me for a moment longer. Then she came over to the table, and moved her cup of tea out of the way of the wand, carefully, the way you’d move a cup away from something that might break, and sat down.
Mio was crying.
She was trying not to. She had her hand over her face and her shoulders were going, and she was making a small, furious noise into her palm. Kohaku had come in from the balcony and was sitting on the end of the table, upright, with her tail around her paws.
“Sorry,” said Mio, into her hand. “Sorry. I’m fine. I’m fine. Give me a second.”
We gave her a second.
She took her hand away from her face, and wiped her nose on her pajama sleeve, and looked at me with her eyes red.
“So what do we call you?” she said.
I hadn’t thought about that.
I’d thought about everything else, all morning, and not that.
I looked at the wand on the table. At the silver letters on the handle.
“You can’t,” said Mio, following my eyes. Her voice was still wobbly. “You can’t be called Puella. It’s a cartoon. It’s not even a Japanese name.”
“You called me it for a whole summer.”
“I was eight.”
“It means girl,” said Kohaku, from the end of the table.
Everyone looked at her.
“In Latin. The last one’s school had a French nun who taught it. Every morning, puella, puellae, all the girls in a row.” She looked around at us. “Well. It does.”
Mio stared at the cat. Then she started laughing, still crying, both at once, with her face in her hands.
Mom picked up the wand. She looked at the name on the handle, for a while, the way she reads a label at the market to see where something came from. Then she put it down.
“Asakura Puella,” said Mom.
She said it the way she calls out a name at the fish counter when the order’s ready. Clearly, once, so the whole shop could hear.
“Yes,” I said.
* * *
That afternoon I went to the konbini with Mio for ice.
It was thirty-three degrees. I was wearing the navy T-shirt, short sleeves, and the sweatband on my right wrist, over the cuff. Usually I walked with my left hand pulling the hem of my right sleeve down over it, all the time, without thinking about it, in case the sweatband slipped. Short sleeves didn’t help. I’d pull at nothing.
Halfway down the hill, I noticed I wasn’t doing it.
I’d stopped. I didn’t know when. My right arm was just swinging, with the black sweatband at the end of it, out in the sun where anyone could see.
Mio saw me look at it. She bumped my shoulder with hers, once, and kept walking. My white sneakers from July slipped at the heel with every step. They’d fit in July.
At the konbini the girl at the register, the one who restocks the fried chicken, looked at Mio and then at me and said, “Sisters?”
I said, “Yes,” and Mio made a noise like she’d swallowed her ice.
* * *
When we got home, Mio stopped me in the kitchen doorway.
“Stand there,” she said. “Back to the frame.”
The kitchen door frame has our marks on it. Mom started them when we moved in, a pencil line and a year for every New Year, Mio’s down the left side of the frame and mine down the right. Mio’s stop at fifteen, when she said it was childish. Mine went all the way up to last January.
I stood with my back to the wood. Mio put a chopstick flat on my head and squinted.
“You’re level with twelve,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. Look.”
She held the chopstick there while I ducked out from under it. The chopstick was resting on the line Mom had drawn four New Years ago, with a 12 beside it in her small square writing.
“You’ve gone back to twelve. You were taller than me in April.”
“Don’t,” said Mom, from the sink.
She hadn’t turned around. She was rinsing the rice. Kohaku was on top of the fridge, where she’d been since we got in, watching the rice go around in the water.
“Is it going to stop?” said Mom, to the rice.
Kohaku’s ears moved. “When it’s done.”
“And when it’s done. Does it let her go?”
There was a pause. Kohaku’s tail came around over her paws.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know.”
“None of them got that far.” Kohaku looked at her paws. “None of them got anywhere near.”
Mom turned the faucet off. She stood at the sink with her wet hands held up in front of her, the way she holds them at the fish counter between customers, and looked out of the window at the Kannon. Mio put the chopstick down on the table.
Then Mom dried her hands on the dish towel.
She took the pencil out of the jar by the phone and came over to the door frame. I stood back against it without being asked. She drew a new line on my side, under all the others, and wrote the date next to it in her small square handwriting. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
She’d never made a mark in August before.
* * *
That night Kohaku came to my room.
She came in her other shape, the one she doesn’t use much: a young woman with a gray bob and cat’s ears, in a dull blue work kimono with the sash tied wrong. She sat on the windowsill with her bare feet on my desk chair, and didn’t say anything until the cicadas had stopped.
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “About the fifth one.”
“Kiyo.”
“Kiyo.” Her ears went back. “I told you she hid. From everyone. I told you she fought at night and wouldn’t let anyone help.” She looked at her hands. “I didn’t tell you why.”
I waited.
“Fujisawa, 1855. The brewery. Everyone there called her Kiyosaburo. The master, the other apprentices, her mother. The bracelet rang for her. She followed it into the hills, found it, put it on, and it knew her. The same way it knew you.” Her tail, which she has in that shape too, had come around her bare feet. “She was the first one it ever chose that the world had gotten wrong. You’re not the first one the world got wrong, girl. You’re the second.”
“What happened?”
“I said what I always say. I said, Hello, new girl.” She shut her eyes. “And she ran. She ran from it. From me. From what it saw in her. She hid from everyone after that, herself included. That’s why she fought alone. That’s why there was nobody there, at the end.”
The window was open. Somewhere down the street one last cicada started up, late, and stopped.
“So when you came,” said Kohaku, “I said it before I thought, like I always do. And you told me you were a boy.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “I knew. From the first day. The bracelet doesn’t make mistakes. It’s never once made a mistake.” She looked away again, at the Kannon on her hill. “But I’d said it to Kiyo, and she ran. So I said mm-hm. And I waited. I’ve been waiting since April for you to say it.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Did I do it right?” said Kohaku. Her voice was very small. “Waiting?”
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded. She washed one hand, very thoroughly, the way she washes a paw when she’s upset, and then she noticed she was doing it and stopped.
“Puella,” she said, as if she was trying it on. “It’s ever so modern.”
“It’s Latin.”
“Well,” said Kohaku, “it’s modern to me.”
* * *
After she’d gone, I went up to the roof.
It was past midnight. The concrete was still warm. The town was quiet below me, the Kannon was white on her hill, and the sea was out there somewhere behind the dark, the way it always is.
I took the sweatband off and held it.
I’d said it to the wardrobe in April, feeling stupid. I’d said it to a water tank and a bathroom stall door and the inside of my own fist, under my breath, like a password. I’d never once said it the way the girl on Sunday mornings used to, turning in the air, with her whole chest.
“Transform!”
The light came up out of the cuff and filled me. It came off my wrist into my hand and grew, cold for a moment, into the staff. The rings at the top chimed against each other in the warm air.
Kohaku was on the water tank. I hadn’t heard her come up. She was a cat again, sitting with her tail around her paws, and she was looking at the top of the staff, the way she always did, at the eighth ring, the bright one, checking it.
Then, for once, she looked at me instead.
She was quiet.
I stood on the roof in the light and let her look.
* * *
I dreamed of the white shore that night.
The Lady was standing at the water’s edge, barefoot, with her back to me. When I came up beside her she turned and looked at me, all of me, the way she’d once told me her father made her look at a piece of iron before she was allowed the hammer.
Then she smiled. I’d only seen her smile once before.
“Good,” she said.
I looked at the shore.
It was narrower than it had been in April. The first time I’d dreamed of it, it had been a wide beach of white stones, going back and back to a gray slope I couldn’t see the top of. Now the sea had come in. It was lapping a few meters from where we stood, flat and gray, and the stones behind us went back only a little way before they stopped.
“The sea’s closer,” I said.
“Yes.” She looked at it. “When I was a girl, my father’s forge stood on the… on the…”
She stopped. She looked at the water, as if the word were out there somewhere, floating. Her scarred hand moved a little at her side, shaping something.
She didn’t find it.
“It was by the sea,” she said in the end. “It doesn’t matter.”
* * *
On Friday, Mio tried a nickname.
We were in the kitchen. She was doing my eyebrows at the table with the good tweezers, in the light from the window, the way she’d done them in June.
“Pu-chan?” she said.
“No.”
“Pu-chan’s cute.”
“No.”
“Puella’s long. People will want to shorten it.” She plucked a hair. “Ella?”
“Ella’s someone else’s name.”
“Pu?”
“Mio.”
“Fine.” She sat back and looked at her work. “Fine. Puella. I’ll get used to it. I got used to you being Haru in about a day.”
She got used to it. Mostly.
At dinner, with Mom serving the rice, she said “my imouto” about me to Kohaku, who was eating a fillet of horse mackerel on a saucer on top of the fridge. She said it far too loudly, the way you say a word in a foreign language the first time you use it in a real shop. Then she went red. Mom didn’t look up from the rice.
Before bed, she slipped. Twice.
The first time she was shouting through my door about the bathroom, and she said otouto and stopped dead in the middle of the corridor and said a word I’d never heard her say in front of Mom. The second time she was on the phone to a friend from college, in her room. It came through the wall, and then a stop, and then, “No, sorry, my sister, my little sister, I’m useless,” and the same swear word again, louder, at herself.
Then, through the wall, quietly, as if she was practicing:
“Imouto. Imouto. Imouto.”
I lay in bed and listened to her until she stopped.