LATER that day, I waited for Towada to finish practice as usual. The sky had turned a gloomy shade of gray, and a chill sharpened the air. As he approached, he thrust a paper bag toward me; inside was the scarf I’d lent him.
I glanced up at his neck—it was naked and surely uncomfortably cold. “Do you not have a scarf or neck warmer of your own?” I asked.
Still holding the bag out in front of him, he ignored my question.
“You can keep that if you need it,” I tried again.
“I don’t.”
“I feel cold just looking at you. Or would you prefer this red one instead?” I pointed to the scarf I wore.
In a rare show of surprise, his mouth gaped open.
“I’m serious. If you don’t mind a hand-me-down, take it,” I urged. Noting his reluctance, I played my trump card: “Take it, or I’m going home by myself.” That appeared to do the trick—his resistance melted and he draped the scarf over his shoulders.
“You know, my grandma always stressed the importance of keeping your ‘necks’ warm,” I said.
“My necks?” he echoed, perplexed.
“Yeah, like your wrists or ankles. They’re like necks, right? Just for your hands and feet. You’ll get sick if you don’t bundle them up, or so she says.”
He hummed in response. A biting evening wind tore through a nearby alleyway, making me shiver. Recently I’d been getting home later because of Towada’s practices. I rarely arrived in time for Koro’s weekday walks anymore, so they had become my mother’s responsibility. Of course, when I handed the task off to her, she just had to ask the reason.
“I’m thinking of stopping by the library after school.”
“Oh, why’s that all of a sudden?”
“…Towada said he’d walk me back.”
She hadn’t pressed for more details, yet the glint in her eyes told me all I needed to know.
Jolted back to the present, I realized Towada hadn’t said much of anything. At a red light, I asked, “Are you okay just listening to me talk? I’m not being annoying, am I?”
“Not really,” he replied curtly.
“Should I talk less?”
“Not really.”
“Is ‘not really’ all you know how to say?” My voice came out snarkier than I intended. To constantly have to carry the conversation did feel a little unfair.
Towada looked at me—down at me, due to our difference in height—and he appeared almost amused. “You’ve changed since I first met you.”
“I have?”
“You talk a lot, you smile, you sulk.”
My back prickled. “So you do think I’m annoying?”
“Not really?” he teased. Yet his gentle gaze was reminiscent of how he usually looked at Koro, stopping me in my tracks. A lump rose in my throat, stoppering my reply.
“No longer shy, are you?” he added.
“Only with familiar faces.”
He chuckled. “Is that so?”
As the signal changed, Towada advanced, and I hurried after him. Since he was in a good mood, I figured then was as good a time as any to tell him. Just say it casually, like it’s no big deal. “By the way, Takanori said he’d help in any way he can.”
“Help?” he repeated.
“Yeah, when he walked me home from your house that day.”
“Oh, yeah. That.”
His voice was neutral, and I wondered how he actually felt about his father’s return. I’d wanted to pass on Takanori’s message sooner and in a manner that wasn’t too intrusive, yet the timing never seemed quite right. From what little I’d heard and the way he’d dashed out of the house that day, I certainly didn’t think Towada and his family had the greatest of relationships. But I nonetheless clung to Ayako’s perspective, preferring to believe that they simply didn’t “see eye to eye.” Perhaps that was why I thought he looked rather unbothered as he walked beside me.
“Sorry for springing that on you,” I said.
Hoping to transition to a different topic, I was floundering in silence when he suddenly preempted me. “Hey, are you free after this?”
“Um, yeah, pretty much.”
“Then can we talk for a bit?” Towada halted, planting his feet in front of the entrance to a park. Replete with a plaza, sandpit, and a set of swings, it was the kind of place that overflowed with children doing radio calisthenics during the summer. But that night, under the budding glow of streetlamps in the swiftly encroaching twilight, it hosted only a group of older kids playing soccer.
Instead of heading inside, he settled against a U-shaped bollard at the entrance. “So, you know about me,” he began vaguely.
Leaning against the next post over, I simply nodded. I sensed the import of his words.
“I was born like this, so this might be obvious, but as a child, I didn’t know what was ‘okay’ to see and what wasn’t. That creeped my mother out, to say the least.” He described how he had often stared, seemingly for no reason, into nooks and crannies or empty space. How he’d touched and interacted with absolutely nothing, much like a mime would.
He’ll grow out of it was the hope his mother had clung to. But when he started to converse with invisible entities, present her with rough crayon sketches of the figures he claimed he could see, any remaining chance of that hope coming to pass vanished.
“People born with the ability to see ayakashi have dwindled in recent years,” he said. “Before my uncle, it was my great-grandfather.”
Towada’s father, who’d vehemently denied the possibility that his children could be born with the sight, had concealed his lineage from his wife. Often absent for work, he returned home a mere once a month. Given the issue’s sensitivity, Towada’s mother sought counsel not from her peers but the internet, and the dubious claims and unreliable sources she found there only served to amplify her fears.
“Maybe she didn’t want to burden my father, but she kept my peculiar behavior a secret.” Anxious about the risk of societal judgment, she began to curtail their outings, progressively becoming more reclusive. In her isolation, the mounting stress wore on her physical and mental health. “I was told she had postpartum depression that escalated into a severe mental crisis.”
I nodded, hanging on to every word.
“Only when she could no longer manage caring for us did my father find out. That’s when he reached out to Uncle Kaoru, and I started to visit him and Ayako. My father couldn’t accept that I was one of ‘them’ and took me to get examined at all kinds of hospitals.”
Including the one where I met him…
“Maybe because of how they were, I never thought of them as my parents. We rarely talked, barely even ate together.”