Chapter 4
“Was the landlady awake~? What happened~?”
“I said don’t worry about it. She said she’d bring up super concentrated essence that’ll make your skin feel bouncy next time.”
Ryuuji, who had come back from the downstairs landlady’s home, responded to Yasuko as he quickly reordered the three people’s worth of scattered shoes at the entrance. Even his landlady, who normally would already be putting out her bedding at this hour, seemed to have been waiting to get word back from Ryuuji to make sure things were fine. He was glad he had some nice-looking mandarins that were good enough to give away as a gift.
He came into the apartment and peeked into Yasuko’s room. Yasuko saw her son’s face as he came back in and smiled. “Hee hee.” Her face was white, as though it had been bleached. The normal flushed color of her lips and eyes had been robbed from her.
“I really worried the landlady… I wonder what’s going on with the shop. I should call in…”
“No, you can’t!”
The one who stopped Yasuko from trying to get out of bed to reach her cell phone was none other than Taiga, still in her school uniform. “You need to stay in bed. Your blood pressure will drop again.” She held Yasuko’s shoulders down and pulled the blanket back up.
“I just called the shop, so you’re okay. I got the owner on the phone,” Ryuuji said.
Looking up at Ryuuji, who was still standing on the other side of the sliding door, Yasuko sighed, Oh no.
“He said you should just rest today. He said he’d call tomorrow at noon.”
“Did he say that this was why he shouldn’t hire older women~?”
“He didn’t.”
“Did he say that Mirano is an old hag and that he should have left things up to an energetic, youthful girl?”
“I said he didn’t say anything like that. Anyway, don’t worry about anything weird like that and just sleep. Even the doctor said that if you just take a break and sleep for a night that you’d feel fine after. I’ll get dinner ready, so if you feel like you can eat, you should.”
“Night, Ya-chan…”
Ryuuji watched Yasuko bury herself in the blankets as she heaved and sighed, then he turned off the room light. Taiga also stifled her footsteps as she got up and left the room, then slowly and quietly closed the sliding door.
It seemed that even Inko-chan had, in her own bird-like way, sensed that something was wrong from the living room. Bluish-green blood vessels were showing in her eyes, which were half-filmed over. Her legs were scaly (it was winter, so her skin was dry) as she hung upside down in her birdcage like a bat. “How’d it go?” she said in a creepily human-like voice, but Taiga stared at her and said, “Shh.” Inko-chan nodded and went silent. It wasn’t as though she understood human words, so the coincidence was alarming.
“Sorry… I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
Taiga brushed Ryuuji’s apologies aside and sat down on the edge of a floor cushion. It was facing the TV and to the right, which had previously been Taiga’s designated seat. She seemed a bit uncomfortable as she stretched out her legs and looked at the tips of her own toes.
She said she had seen Yasuko when she casually glanced into the Takasus’ window after she went home early. It seemed Yasuko had just come back from her lunch job, and Taiga waved a hand from her bedroom window as Yasuko came into the living room. Then, Taiga noticed Yasuko’s strangely blue face when she stood stock-still without replying. The next moment, she flopped right to the ground without even cushioning her fall.
Taiga left her condo right away and ran over to the Takasus’, realized she forgot her spare key at the condo and, according to her, went into a “maddening panic,” and banged on the landlady’s door downstairs like a “rampaging taiko drum.” Luckily, the landlady was home and opened the door, and once they saw Yasuko pale and collapsed, called a doctor immediately.
While the doctor came to their home, Taiga nursed Yasuko, and the landlady tried to get hold of Ryuuji. At that time, Yasuko’s idiot son had been throwing his female classmate’s shoe, getting in a fight with her at the park, and making her cry.
“I wonder if Ya-chan will be okay… She will, right? They said it was just anemia.”
“She’d better be…”
“She looked better than before.”
“I think so, too.”
He had been panting and running as fast as he could. By the time he arrived at home, he felt like he might collapse, too. The landlady was waiting for him at the front doorway the whole time. Yasuko was in an even worse state, and her face was surpassingly pale. She looked green, and her mouth wasn’t moving right. A man and a woman he didn’t recognize were next to her, and they had their hands on Yasuko’s chest and arms. To Ryuuji, it looked as though she’d been caught by some villains and was being dissected. The people weren’t even wearing white and didn’t seem like doctors, and if Taiga wasn’t sitting there, he might have even screamed in his confusion.
Yasuko moved only her eyes as she noticed Ryuuji had come home and then moved only her lips as she apologized, I’m sorry for ending up like this.
She had too much to drink and went to bed at five in the morning. Then she woke up at eight and apparently went to her afternoon job without getting any food or rest while the alcohol was still in her system. It seemed that might have caused her anemia. Her already-low blood pressure was also a problem, and they were just lucky it hadn’t been something more serious. The doctor, in short, had said not to worry, to take iron supplements, to sleep, and to not drink too much.
As Ryuuji soothed his heart and listened to the doctor’s specific directions and medical jargon, he thought he caught a whiff of a certain smell. It was a soft odor, like a mix between the light-brown, mushy, melted food made for the old and sick to eat and cleaning detergent. That slightly nauseating, warm air even followed them here, Ryuuji thought.
When Ryuuji was very small, long before he moved to this town, Yasuko was in the hospital for a long time. Ryuuji still didn’t know what disease she had had, and his memories were vague because he had been too young. When he was surrounded by that smell, he immediately remembered the overwhelming odor that would wrap around his whole body whenever the automatic doors opened, and the emotions that would come with it when he saw the patchwork pattern on the roof of the daycare at the hospital he had been going to, and the duck and alligator wallpaper on the walls.
He remembered the book he had fully memorized, the dark part on the end of a blinking fluorescent lamp, the hair and dust that gathered at the corner of a hallway, the tanks lined up next to the restrooms along the wall that had some mystery use, the plastic name plates on them, the quiet stairs leading to the basement, and the iron door with the terrifying mark.
He didn’t like the boredom, or the unfamiliar kids and adults, or being talked to. His heart would start to race oddly, and his throat would get hot, and he would feel like sobbing and wailing. During that time, Ryuuji had been an anxious, scared, quivering kid.
He was still about as useless now as he was then.
“What should I make for dinner… I guess we don’t have anything… I guess I should go get something that Yasuko can eat today when she wakes up.”
“Then I’ll stay here and watch Ya-chan.”
“It’s okay. You’ve got to be tired, too, so you should go home. I’ll bring something you can eat at your condo.”
Yasuko had said that she was feeling queasy, so he thought about making an easy-to-digest gruel that might be good, or maybe soup. Maybe he would make soup with some noodles. He would give her a Pocari sports drink to hydrate her and her favorite pudding, popsicles, and almond jelly. If he got her a magazine, she might even read it the next day.
He’d do something like that.
He had enough wisdom to select those things, but there was something even more vital he really needed that his current self couldn’t do. He had grown enough to have that wisdom, but he himself was the cause of this situation.
If Yasuko hadn’t started a day job, this never would have happened. If she hadn’t wanted Ryuuji go to college, this wouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t said things the way he did before, this wouldn’t have happened.
“I said I’m fine. More importantly, I’m worried about Ya-chan, too, so…Ryuuji?”
He held his head. For a moment, he couldn’t remember what was going on and what he was trying to do. His mind went blank, and he was in a stupor…his wallet. Right, his wallet.
Ryuuji grabbed his wallet and stood up. He needed to go shopping for food. He slowly took a step and then started walking.