Junko’s fever climbed steadily as the night progressed. She started to shiver violently and complained of the cold, so he covered her with blankets and had her drink the electrolyte beverages as often as he could. He refilled the cold pack with ice, replacing it frequently, and when the ice box in the freezer was empty, he ran downstairs to purchase more.
“How is your wife doing?” Shiba asked with a look of concern. He seemed to be taking the night shift. Takiji replied that she was conscious, and he thought she would be okay. “Let me know if there’s anything that I can do,” Shiba said, his voice gentle but firm. “I’m always here.”
The man that he had dismissed as so shallow and strange smiled at him. At least he had a certain trustworthy quality, Takiji thought, or maybe he just felt that way because he was so desperately out of his depth trying to care for his own wife.
“Thank you.” He bowed his head in acknowledgment and hurried home.
Dozing by Junko’s side, he kept a careful watch over her. In the middle of the night, she broke out in a sudden sweat, and he mopped it up. When she told him she was hot, he wiped the back of her neck with a towel soaked in cold water. “That feels good,” she said, smiling for the first time. “That’s much better. I may be past the peak now. I think the fever will start to go down soon, too.”
“How could you know that?” Takiji asked. But he heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that her pained expression had eased.
“Don’t you remember when Nanao used to get sick?” Junko replied. “I’d tell her that when she started to sweat it meant the bad germs had fled, and she’d soon be on the mend.” A little of the old firmness had returned to her voice.
“Maybe I do. Oh, wait, that’s right. I thought that was some sort of superstition.”
“Hmm…If there’s something you want to say, just say it.”
Junko seemed hot, so he opened the bedroom window a little. A slight breeze and some moonlight spilled around the edges of the heavy curtains that darkened the room. He spread the curtains a little more, and a milky glow flowed into the room. The gentle light touched Junko’s face as she lay in the bed. Indeed, her face seemed calmer than before. As she had predicted, it looked like she was past the peak.
“You’re not sleepy?” she asked him.
“I’m okay for now. Besides, my schedule happens to be wide open again tomorrow. It won’t hurt anyone if I oversleep a little.”
Takiji spoke in a playful voice, and Junko smiled. Then she lowered her voice and said, “Remember when Namie passed away?”
“Yes. That was very sad.”
Namie Toyota was a friend from Junko’s school days. Takiji had also come to know her quite well. She was smart and energetic, a born leader. She had a way with words, too, and had bested Takiji in verbal exchanges more times than he could count. She was a caring soul, and had even helped the two of them through some marital disputes. She had actively pursued a career at a time when the working world was still dominated by men, but for a woman like her it seemed natural.
Ever since she was young, Namie had always said that she was married to her work, but just before her sixtieth birthday, she married a man her own age. She said they decided to get together because they were both unwed and getting up there in years, but it was easy for all to see that they made a great pair. From then on, the two of them were going to spend the rest of their lives doing exactly what they wanted to do, together as a couple. They’d do their bucket list!
Namie, who had taken early retirement, related her many dreams to Takiji and his wife, and even showed them the notebook where she had collected them all. Touring the tombs of the royals in Egypt, viewing the northern lights in Finland, staying at an undersea hotel in Dubai, and so on. They wanted to make “his and hers” beer steins, too, and challenge themselves to run a full marathon. But a month before Takiji and his wife moved to Mojikō, Namie died. She had cancer.
The cancer was found shortly after Namie was married, and she was hospitalized. After an endless series of surgeries and hospitalizations, most of Namie’s dreams remained unfulfilled. When Takiji and his wife received the news and rushed off to the hospital, they found Namie lying in bed, weak and withered, with the exception of her eyes, which were still burning bright. “You know, I couldn’t do any of it. I had so much planned, but now it’s all for nothing.” In Namie’s hand was the notebook with her list of unfulfilled dreams.
“When Namie passed away, I started wondering when I was going to die,” Junko said. “No matter how you look at it, you have to admit we’re pretty old. That’s why we talked about this being our final home and moved here, but do you honestly think of your life as being so near its end?”
Takiji was at a loss for words. He was strong of body, and he hadn’t once suffered a serious illness of any sort. Death and disease seemed like faraway things to him. But when he looked around him, it wasn’t so easy to say. He had lost friends already, and colleagues were even now battling serious illness. There was the acquaintance at his mentor’s funeral, too, with his narrative of all the troubles attending the onset of old age. But that had nothing to do with him. Or at least he had managed to look the other way and avoid the subject.
Junko went on. “Since Namie passed away, I’ve become quite familiar with death. There’s nothing wrong with me physically right now, but you never know when that could change, isn’t that true? So I thought I’d try to write a list of my own—a list of dreams, like Namie did. Things I’ve always wanted to do but haven’t done. Things I want to do before I die. Like going to work, like drinks with colleagues, like grumbling together with them about the job, even.”
Bit by bit, Junko unspooled her story. She wanted to live a new life in this new land they had found. “The same way dear Namie was looking forward to her life after retirement, I was looking forward to my life after we moved. I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do if I ended up like she did, so I suppose I was just a little anxious to get started.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Takiji asked.
Junko was silent for a little while. “Nanao scolded me. She said that I shouldn’t talk as if I were preparing for my own funeral. She said that Namie’s death was pulling me under. I wondered if she was right, and I never found the right time to talk to you. It was really bad of me.”
Junko lapsed into silence. With a forlorn smile on her face, bathed in moonlight, she seemed suddenly older. Takiji looked down at the backs of his own wrinkled hands. When had those large dark spots appeared? He passed his hands over his cheeks, and the skin there was slack. Ah, that’s right, isn’t it? It’s the same for me, too. Both his legs were throbbing and plastered with compresses.
“Have you done everything on your list?” he asked.
“Well…” Junko let out a sigh. “At first, you know, I was able to do everything I had thought of. I checked off a lot of boxes. But lately…I don’t know. I started to wonder if I was doing the right thing.”
Junko continued. There were a lot of dreams on her friend Namie’s list that couldn’t be done alone. They were all things to be done together with her husband, Tetsuya. When she remembered that, she started to think that she might have made a mistake about what to do first.
Takiji looked at her quietly, waiting for her to continue, and Junko nodded.
“I should have talked with you properly when we moved here. I should have told you first about my list, instead of Nanao.”
“I don’t know. When we first moved here I was full of hope for my own second life. If you had talked to me about Namie’s list back then, I might have just yelled at you not to talk about depressing things.”
Takiji was being honest. If Junko had told him she wanted to make a list like Namie’s, he probably would have tried to put a stop to it and been harder on her than Nanao. He would have told her it was weird to go around imitating the deceased.
But now he listened instead, quietly taking in what his wife was saying. He was beginning to understand everything that had happened up to that moment, as if the tangled threads were at last coming free.
“I had a lot of fun on this last trip.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“We all took hot sand baths, soaked in the open-air spa, and ate until we couldn’t eat any more. Then we talked until we fell asleep.”
“Just like schoolgirls.” Takiji laughed. Junko laughed as well. But her smile quickly turned forlorn.
“It was tremendous fun. But…well, just as we were saying it was time for bed, Mrs. Nosé told us all that she was stepping down from her post as president of the Ladies’ Association. Her husband had to go on dialysis, she said.”