I was wrong. This time, her expression changed its color slowly. The corners of her closed lips lifted at a snail’s pace. Her wide eyes narrowed with the speed of a curtain lowering at the end of a play. Her stiffened cheeks rose as fast as ice melted.
She gave me a smile that would have taken me more than a lifetime to replicate.
“Shall I tell you?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“Yes,” I said with the trepidation of a kid who was about to incur an adult’s wrath.
Her lips parted, and she sounded content as she answered, “Nothing at all. I’ve just been thinking about you.”
“About me?”
“Yes. I wasn’t even going to ask you anything special in that truth or dare game. If I was forced to say what’s been on my mind, it’s that I want us to get even closer.”
“Really?” I asked with a skeptical tone.
“Really. I don’t lie to you.”
She may have just been telling me what I wanted to hear, but I couldn’t entirely hide my relief. The tension melted from my shoulders. I knew I was being naïve, but I believed her.
She laughed, low and slow.
“What?” I asked.
“I was just thinking about how happy I am. I could just die now.”
“You better not.”
“Do you want me to keep living?”
I said, “Yes.”
Keeping her eyes on me, she giggled. She sounded exceedingly happy, even for her. “I never imagined you would need me that much. I don’t think anything could ever make me happier. Why, with a shut-in like you, I’m probably the first person you’ve ever needed.”
“Who are you calling a shut-in?” I said, going along with her joke, but I felt so mortified I thought my face might explode. I was embarrassed for worrying about her, for not wanting to lose her, for needing her. All of that was true, but putting those emotions into words embarrassed me vastly more than when they were just feelings. I felt like all the blood in my body was racing to the top of my head. Maybe I would die first after all. Somehow, I managed to take deep breaths to expel the heat of my embarrassment.
Apparently, she didn’t feel like giving me time to recompose myself. Still radiating happiness, she continued, “You thought I was acting strange because I was about to die? And I was keeping it from you?”
“Yeah. Your hospitalization was suddenly extended, too.”
She rolled on her bed, laughing so hard I thought her IV might pop out of her arm. I could only be laughed at so long before I started getting annoyed.
“It’s your fault,” I protested. “You’re the one who made me think that.”
“I told you I still had time, didn’t I? If I was going to die so soon, why would I keep practicing magic? That explains why you were reading so much into my pauses and everything. You’ve been reading too many novels.”
When she’d finished talking, she laughed again and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when I’m going to die.”
Still more laughter. She’d laughed at me so long I started feeling silly, too. I was forced to admit how tremendous my mistake had been.
She said, “When I die, you’d better eat my pancreas.”
“What if I just ate the bad parts? Would you keep living then? Maybe I should go ahead and eat your pancreas for you now.”
“You want me to keep living?”
“Very much.”
I was glad my humor was dry enough that I could speak the truth and have it come across as a joke. If she took the truth as truth, I may have been too ashamed to ever come out in public again.
I didn’t really know how she took it, but she jokingly squealed with delight and spread open her arms to me. “Maybe you’ve taken an interest in other people’s warmth, too,” she said, snickering.
I could tell she was joking because of her laugh. I joked in my own way, by obliging.
I stood and approached her, and—as a joke—I put my arms around her for the first time. She pretended to be embarrassed and put her arms around me. I’ll ask you not to be so ungraceful as to wonder what this all meant. If you think about the logic behind a joke too hard, you’ll only spoil it.
We held each other like that for a while, when I wondered, “Strange. Kyōko-san’s timing must be off today. She isn’t showing up.”
“She has volleyball today. What do you see her as, anyway?”
“A demon who comes to tear us apart.”
We laughed, and the timing felt right to let her go. I did, but before she released her embrace, she gave me one more tight squeeze. We saw each other’s faces, beet red from our joke, and laughed again.
Once we’d settled down, she abruptly said, “Speaking of me dying…”
“You know, that might be the first time anyone started a conversation with those words.”
“I’ve been thinking about starting to write my goodbyes for everyone to read when I’m gone.”
“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?” I asked. “Or maybe you were lying when you said you still had time.”
“No,” she said, “I just want to do it right. That means revising and rewriting, so I want to start the rough drafts now.”
“That sounds like a good idea. I’ve heard revising a novel can take longer than writing the first draft.”
“See, I knew I had it right. I hope you’ll like what I write for you.”
I said, “I can’t wait.”
“You mean you want me to die faster? That’s mean. Of course, I know you don’t actually want me to die, because you need me too badly.”
She gave me a grin. I considered nodding in agreement, but I’d had about all the sentimentality I could handle for one day. I gave her a bored look instead, but she persisted in grinning at me. Maybe that was a symptom of her illness.
She said, “Tell you what. Since I caused you to worry needlessly, I’ll make it up to you by visiting you first thing after I’m released.”
“If that’s an apology, it doesn’t sound very humble.”
“So you don’t want to see me?”
“I don’t not want to see you.”
“[???]-kun, that’s just like you.”
What was like me? I felt like I had a vague impression of what she meant by that, so I didn’t ask.
She said, “The day I get discharged, I have to go home first, but after that, in the afternoon, I’ll be free.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know yet. You’ll come back a few times before then, won’t you? We can think about it.”
That worked for me.
Over the next two weeks, we settled on a plan for our “date,” as she called it, even if it wasn’t. She wanted to go to the ocean. We would also stop at a café, location to be determined, where she could show me her greatest magic trick.
By setting plans for what we would do after she got out of the hospital, I felt as if we were tempting fate for something worse to happen—a sudden decline of her condition, for example. But nothing eventful occurred, and the days simply passed by until she was able to go home. Maybe she was right; maybe I had read too many novels.
During those two weeks, I went to see her four more times. One time, I ran into her friend. Twice, she laughed so hard her bed shook. Three times, she whined when the time came for me to leave. Four times, I put my arms around her. Not once did it become routine.
We joked a lot, laughed a lot, insulted each other a lot, and admired each other a lot. I grew fond of our uneventful days together. They reminded me of being a little kid again.
A detached part of me observed this change with surprise.
This is what I would have explained to that observer: I was enjoying human contact. For the first time in my life, I was spending time with someone without ever thinking I’d rather be alone.
Surely no one else in the world had ever been so deeply moved by human contact as I was during those two weeks. For me, the four days we were together in her hospital room comprised the entirety of those two weeks. Everything else just fell away.
And four days wasn’t a long wait at all.