Mom wasn’t there.
“Mommy… Mommy…!”
I looked around for her.
She was nowhere.
“Mommy…!”
Far away, I heard an ambulance siren. The girl was wrapped in a blanket and carried off by a crowd of adults, leaving the river behind. Everyone was so caught up in her rescue that they didn’t even notice Mom was missing.
“Mommy!!”
I was the only one who kept screaming her name. Over and over and over.
I don’t remember very well what happened after that.
When I heard she had been found far downriver, it felt like a lie. Only much later did I notice that the rim of the mug she always used was chipped.
Dad had a picture of Mom framed and placed it in a corner of the kitchen. Every day, he put flowers in the vase beside it.
The neighbors made a point of talking to me whenever they passed me in the street, listening kindly to what I said and offering tearful words of encouragement.
The internet was full of anonymous comments about the accident:
Jumping into a flooded river is basically suicide.
I heard she thought she was a good swimmer, but a river’s not a pool.
She died to save someone else’s kid. That’s not fair to her own kid.
Sucks that we can’t hang out by the river anymore because of this.
That’s what happens when you try to be a hero.
The people who wrote those things probably don’t know what really happened. I bet they forgot what they wrote by the next day. But if you’re the one they’re writing about, the pain stays with you. Right after the accident, some people I knew showed me the comments, outraged. I was too young to grasp what everything meant. But as I got older and understood more, the unintentional cruelty of those words tormented me. I was still struggling to accept that she was gone. How was I, her next of kin, supposed to deal with all these people acting like the whole thing was her fault, even though she was the one who saved that little girl?
Mom just kept on smiling at me from the photo of her in the kitchen, oblivious to my feelings.
I think the accident caused a crucial shift within me.
One evening, I stood on a chair in Mom’s dusty room, wanting to remember our happy times together. I tried singing one of the songs we used to sing.
But once I began, I realized I couldn’t sing anymore. It felt like my voice was getting caught in the back of my throat and wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I was confused. Something deep in my heart was stopping me from singing.
Why? Why can’t I sing?
I started crying.
“Mom,” I mumbled. “Mom, why can’t I sing anymore?”
I knew the reason singing used to be so fun and feel so necessary was because Mom was listening. But objectively speaking, was it actually such a big deal that I couldn’t sing? Nothing bad was going to happen because of it. No one would criticize me for it. Life would go on.
I attended the local middle school. The uniform was suffocating.
A lot of the kids I went to elementary school with commuted to town for middle school. Less than half of us stayed at the local school, so we had combined-grade classes. During chorus practice, the principal accompanied us on piano, and all the students in the school sang together—all thirteen of us. And since there were only thirteen of us, I quickly got caught whenever I mouthed the words instead of singing them. I didn’t answer when the teacher asked me why I wasn’t singing. I thought I’d get yelled at, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I was allowed to sit in a corner of the music room and watch. I must’ve looked so apathetic just sitting there in silence.
Inside, though, flocks of wordless, bewildering things were swirling through my head. As soon as I got home, I went to Mom’s room. Brilliant evening light shone in through the window. The table was piled with cardboard boxes of dishes we didn’t use anymore and out-of-season appliances. It had turned into a storeroom. Years had passed since the accident. I wished they hadn’t.
I took the records down from the shelves one by one and listened to them. Day after day after day. Listening to them somehow quieted my raging emotions.
But one day, a moment came when I couldn’t stand it anymore. As soon as I got home, I went to Mom’s room and sat in front of the piano. I opened a notebook and poured all the bewildering things inside me onto the paper. I filled page after page, scribbling furiously.
Why did Mom go into the river and leave me behind? Why did she choose to save some girl she didn’t know over her life with me? Why am I all alone? Why, why, why?
I wrote a long, long song, adding pages to the notebook and sticky notes when I ran out of paper. I wrote down the endless melody that welled up inside me. Things that were neither words nor melody, I depicted in pictures. All of them swirled together. It was like an eddy in the river, like a black hole that swallowed everything, like a hole in the top of my head. The floor was covered with pieces of paper scribbled with lyrics and pictures and musical scores.
“……!!”
All of a sudden, I returned to my senses. My pen stopped. I was abruptly aware of how worthless, meaningless, and hideous everything I’d jotted down was.
What am I doing? I thought. I was completely fed up with myself.
I tore the paper into shreds. Without a second thought, I threw everything I had written into an old steel wastepaper basket. The wad of paper looked like fresh vomit.
I somehow made it to high school.
I felt truly worthless. It genuinely felt like my uniform necktie was choking me. I crossed the Chinka Bridge on the way to school staring at my feet.
I’d gotten into a combined junior and senior high school in the city and transferred there once I finished middle school. That was when I met my old friend Shinobu again.
“Suzu?”
“Shinobu…”
He had completely transformed. He was tall and he practically glowed. I, on the other hand, felt like I hadn’t grown at all since we last met. Absolutely mortified, I could hardly speak to him. What had I been doing all these years?