The message they ended up sending had been their second option.
“I wonder if we’ll be punished for this.” Still sighing from worry, Yasuko’s mother—he just couldn’t bring himself to call Takasu Sonoko, the baby-faced fifty-five-year-old, “Grandma”—wandered in and out of the kitchen. Takasu Seiji, who at fifty-seven was also too young to be called “Grandpa,” sat down on a stool by the counter that contained the sink. The man, whose name shared the same final kanji character as Ryuuji’s, seemed to have nothing to do.
“All we can do is wait, right? Calm down a little, please. We can’t do anything about something we already sent.”
“If we do get punished for this, I think it’ll be on me. I’m the one who did it, after all.” Shameless as usual, Taiga was right at the center of the Takasus’ kotatsu and had thrust herself deep under the blankets in the best seat to watch the TV. She still held her phone in her hand so she could reply whenever she needed to. Like an animal of the feline persuasion, she turned defiant and rested her head on the tabletop.
“If words can affect reality, then I’m headed straight down,” Ryuuji said.
He sat behind Taiga with his knees folded under himself, like a vassal or manager, or if anything, a hit man. Ryuuji had been the one who came up with the message, and he intended to take full responsibility for it. Only an hour had passed since they sent it, but all of them were restlessly pointing their ears to the front door.
Ryuuji’s been in an accident and was hurt really bad, just come over.
He had Taiga use her phone to send that incredibly cursed fake message to Yasuko. Their first idea had been a little tamer—There’s no house at the address anymore. The third was He’s been put in protective custody and can’t go home without someone to come get him. They rejected the first on the grounds she would probably ignore it, and Sonoko struck down the third with a single sentence: “Then he’d be at the police station.” No one could come up with another idea, so they decided on the extreme second option.
“It’s almost exactly like a scam message. Wouldn’t any normal person think it’s too suspicious to be real?”
“I left a missed call, too. I think she’ll fall for it.”
“She wouldn’t call all the nearby hospitals or something, would she?”
“Uhh…she might.” Realizing the clumsiness of the plan, Ryuuji was stunned. But regardless of what happened next, it was done. And in this case, two adults approved of it, too—though they seemed to be regretting it slightly.
The TV was off in the quiet living room, and four people’s worth of silence hung over them. Ryuuji stood up and slightly awkwardly flipped open his phone. “Um, here. It’s Yasu… It’s a picture of my mom from last week. We were having hot pot…”
Sonoko and Seiji hesitantly stretched their necks to peek at the phone in Ryuuji’s hand. They looked at the picture of Yasuko for a while without a word. Without makeup on, she looked glossy, like a peeled egg, and she wore a stupid-looking topknot and Uniqlo loungewear. She didn’t have any eyebrows drawn in, and she was flashing jovial peace signs with both hands through the steam of the hot pot. The photo might have been too stupid to show them, Ryuuji thought.
“Yasuko…really hasn’t changed…”
“She really hasn’t changed at all…”
Muttering quietly, the two of them came closer to take a better look at the small screen.
“I have a better one.”
He rummaged through a folder that he had left unorganized and tried to look for a photo that made Yasuko look a bit better. He felt like the one where she was walking in the middle of intense white light in the middle of summer might be good and let it fill the screen. He couldn’t remember just what possessed him to take the picture, but it might have been from when she was going to the river shore to have a barbeque with all the other women from Bishamon Heaven, based on how Yasuko had a cooler box dangling from one hand. Yasuko wore a hat with a large rim, a T-shirt, and jeans. Of course, she was smiling widely. A little ahead of her, the skirt of the dress Taiga wore fluttered, and she smiled in the same way. The photo itself was pretty askew. Ryuuji might have been smiling as he took the photo, too.
“Oh, she looks so good. It looks fun,” Sonoko muttered in a tone like she was talking to herself, and for the first time, wore a faint smile. “If she looks fine… If she was fine this whole time, then that’s good enough, right honey?”
“Of course not.”
“Why not? I think it’s fine. I’ve been worried this whole time, and then eighteen years went by. The neighbors told me that they saw Ya-chan.” As she smiled, she used her fingertips to gently wipe the corners of her eyes. “There used to be a park over there before. They said that Ya-chan had brought a little boy and was standing there. They said they saw her. That she was so thin and looked so pitiful.”
Heaven’s net is wide, but its mesh is fine—it seemed no one had heard Ryuuji say that in a low voice.
“Even if they made a mistake and it wasn’t her…I didn’t understand why they hadn’t stopped her! I was so angry that I couldn’t help myself. But it was my own fault. I was waiting every day for Yasuko to come home, but that day, I was at the bank and other places and doing trivial errands. Usually I’m at home all day, but I wasn’t that day. I was so full of regrets and sorrow and I couldn’t stop… In my imagination, Yasuko was getting worse and worse, and I thought maybe she might have died or been killed… I have dreams about that, of following Yasuko holding a little boy in her arms, calling out, ‘Mooom, help me, why aren’t you here for me?’ and running to that park as fast she can, crying… Ahh, I’ll stop. She was fine the whole time. I can stop.”
Sonoko lifted her youthful body and stood. “Want anything to eat? Do you need to use the restroom again?” she asked Taiga, who was buried under the table in the living room.