Chapter 1
Of course, they didn’t have a plan.
Like someone who hated spiders but rushed headfirst right into a nest of them without realizing it, like someone who hated snakes but stepped on one, like a murderer bumping into a detective, Ryuuji had flipped directions and simply made a break for it. If he really were facing a spider or a snake or a detective, he might have actually been able to go into fight rather than flight, but the one standing in his way had been his own mother. He couldn’t bludgeon her with a club (not that he had a club, anyway)—no, his words had already hurt her much more than a blunt weapon could. His mother—Yasuko—had turned white as a sheet and sat down.
But he still ran without looking back. He did that.
“Ahh!”
“Whoa?! Careful!”
He promptly gripped Taiga’s hand as she lost her balance. Taiga’s wide-open eyes emitted an intense light for a second. He heaved up the hand he held, and Taiga somehow regained her footing in the melting snow on the road. He wouldn’t let go of her hand again.
Still umbrella-less, the two of them stumbled forward as they earnestly fled through the night snow. Taiga was just as frantic, he was sure. Their breaths were desperate and white as they focused on running. For the time being, all they could do was escape from that place.
Yasuko’s selfish parental desires made Ryuuji feel like his existence was meaningless if he didn’t do as his mother wished. Taiga’s mother was also an obstacle; she’d tried to separate Taiga from Ryuuji. They were all enemies to him, so in place of beating them with a club, he beat them with words, and then turned around and ran. It was all he could do.
Taiga was by his side.
He gripped Taiga’s hand again. He did it firmly, not even trying to hide his sweaty palms.
The moment he had tried to run, his hand had sought only one thing and only one thing had sought his hand—Taiga’s. That was all. He’d thought to run away with Taiga, and Taiga had thought the same.
Their mothers were probably following after them in the car. That was why, for the time being, they chose to dive into narrow roads that cars couldn’t enter, running through residential back streets. They wandered aimlessly, and then—
“We’re crossing the bridge. Careful of the cars.”
“You mean the large bridge…”
“Let’s cross it and get on a bus in the town over. If we stick around here, we’ll get caught. If we take a train, we’ll probably be tracked down right away.”
All he wanted was to ask Taiga about her feelings and tell her about his complex and overflowing emotions. That would have been enough for him. He wanted to hear from Taiga’s mouth, in her own words, how she actually felt about him. He wanted to tell Taiga how he felt about her. He wanted to ask her about it. He wanted to tell her about it. That was it.
He was sure that if he just did that, the world would take on new colors, like it was shedding its skin, and something new would begin. Ryuuji was sure he felt his heart beat like it were about to leap out of him.
So why had things ended up like this?
When he breathed in the sub-zero air, the very cells in his lungs hurt. Beyond the snow that fluttered down ceaselessly from the sky, two rows of streetlamps shone on the promenade of the bridge, the outlines of light blurring around them. The bridge straddled the flowing river, which looked black in the night, and led to the next town over.
Moving across the promenade, which was hidden by dead grass, Ryuuji pulled on Taiga’s hand. They crossed the two-lane roadway, keeping an eye out. Obscured by the sound of a small truck engine heading the same way, they slipped onto the large concrete bridge.
But…
“Oh, we need money!”
In order to ride the bus, they needed money. They thought of that simple concept a third of the way across the bridge.
“Oh crap, you’re right. We don’t have any money!” Ryuuji said.
He scowled. Ouch. This failure stung after getting this far. He only had change in his wallet, he hadn’t brought along the family cash card, and to make matters worse, he had thrown the envelope with his pay from Alps at Yasuko’s feet.
“It’s okay! I’m pretty sure I have a lot!” Taiga pulled her sequined cat-face wallet from her coat pocket as she ran. She took back the hand that had been holding his and opened the fastener with her seemingly numb fingers. “See, I have one ten thousand yen bill, two…”
“I can’t believe you’re doing that here. That seems kind of risky, you’re going to trip.”
“But I need to check! You’re worried too, aren’t you? I also have a thousand yen bill, two, three, four…but I don’t have any change.” She started to count the bills she had clumsily pulled out. “Oh, there’s something rustling in my pocket. Maybe it’s another bill? …Ugh, what is this?”
Just a receipt, she pouted. In that moment, a gust of wind laced with snow made the surface of the river warble and assaulted them on the middle of the bridge by blowing right through them.
It took just a moment for the twenty-four thousand yen she had pulled out of her open wallet to be swept away.
“…”
“…”
They couldn’t even make a sound.
The bills surfed on the strong wind, dancing as they blew higher and higher. They flew to the right and left, as if mocking them.
“Ah, ah, ah.”
“Oh, oh, oh.”
Taiga and Ryuuji stretched out their hands and hopped up and down as they tried to catch the bills fluttering through the sky. The wind seemed to ridicule the two idiots giving chase as it whirled through the bridge, changing directions.
“Ah, ah, ah, ahhh…!”
“Oh, oh, oh, ohohoh!”
Following the wind, they crossed the carless street in three bounds and practically leapt at the guardrail. They clung to the rail side by side.
The opportunity to nearly touch the bills immediately in front of their outstretched hands was expressly robbed from them as the twenty-four thousand yen fluttered and flitted—onto the dark surface of the river.
Their hands cut through the light snow in the air and stretched down futilely. As they turned their gazes downward, they realized they were already out of ideas. Cry or shout as they might, the flow of the river continued endlessly, and was steadfast and merciless on top of everything else.
They looked at each other at the same time.
“…”
“AHHHHHhhhhhHHHHHHHhhhhhh!”
“…”
“Why youuuuuu?! How dare you act all calm, like you’ve reached enlightenment or something?! What are you going to do?!”
“…”
It wasn’t that Ryuuji had attained enlightenment—he was just dumbstruck. This must be what it means to be struck dumb, he thought. He couldn’t make a single sound as, holding onto the guardrail, Taiga screamed at him.
What is this?
Guess it’s that.
My so-called divine punishment—what people call karma.
Watching the flowing river that seemed to swallow up the falling snow, Ryuuji was unable to so much as move a finger.
Flat out telling his mother “That was a mistake,” after she sacrificed her own life to give birth to him and raise him must have been that heavy of a sin. It was the truth—he really should have never been born—but even daring to say it out loud had led to this sad state of affairs. Did this mean he’d never have a decent life if he didn’t resign himself to his fate? Was that it for him? He couldn’t even ride a bus?
Is it that terrible a sin?
“What are we going to do?! What do we do…?!” Taiga held her head in both her hands. She ended up putting her face down on the guardrail, looking as though she were about to doze off in class.
Standing like that next to each other, they fell into silence.
Next to Ryuuji, who still couldn’t move, the shoulders of the white angora coat froze as though Taiga was holding her breath. The snow came down and down. On those shoulders. On the cashmere scarf covering her head that Ryuuji had wrapped around her earlier. On the wavy hair that flowed down her back. On the shoulders of Ryuuji’s down jacket, his back, and his cheeks…
…on the bridge that continued from the promenade of the riverside…
…at 8 PM on Valentine’s Day.
A layer of thin, faint ice started to build up on the ground like sherbet. They had stopped walking entirely.
They turned their eyes beyond the bridge. It was an ordinary residential area. The bright lights of the houses and condos blurred with their white breath. Separated by the soundless snow that fell ceaselessly, the other end of the bridge felt like an incredibly distant universe to them.
If they didn’t have money, they couldn’t ride the bus. They couldn’t ride the trains, either. They couldn’t go anywhere. Maybe it was because of how cold they were, but they couldn’t stop shivering. All the time they spent standing there petrified had made their joints freeze up, and a Porsche might still be following after them. They couldn’t stay standing there.
They belonged nowhere in the world.
Ryuuji looked at Taiga’s small, rounded back. He thought about what Taiga could have been thinking in that moment. Was she anxious, despairing, remorseful? She had to at least be cursing her clumsiness. She was gripping her head, which was protected by Ryuuji’s scarf, hard enough to make her thin fingers shake. She probably actually wanted to pull at her hair until it was a tangled mess.
“What are we going to do, Ryuuji?”