“It took a long time, but he’s finally back. I’m going to start things over with Dad.”
“I’m so sorry!” Mio cried, bowing her head. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Kaname regarded her with surprise. She couldn’t bring herself to lift her head, but bit her lip to summon the courage to continue. “Earlier, while thinking of Hanaka, I said something very insensitive to you.”
Remembering it made the inside of Mio’s head boil. She was racked with shame.
“I said there was no way to make up for losing two whole years…”
“That’s just awful. In the last two years, I graduated high school and started college. And Hanaka’s done nothing but stay locked in that room, wasting away? It’s just horrible. There’s no way to make that better.”
Kaname had replied, “You sure about that? She can make up for two or three years, can’t she?”
Mio had been shocked that he’d acted like two or three years was nothing, but now she understood. And it was far too late to do anything about it.
Assuming Kaname was Mio’s age, if he lost his father at the start of elementary school, then that was a total of twelve years. His father had been gone all that time, yet Kaname would take him back so they could start over. The thought of so much time rendered Mio speechless.
Kaname grunted and slowly shook his head. “Why are you apologizing to me?”
“Because…”
“It might take a while, but we’ll get back to normal. And I bet Hanaka will, too.”
Mio didn’t know what to say. Her vision went cloudy from tears. Through the blur, she could see Kaname’s hand firmly clasped around his father’s.
Mio fixated on that image and said, “But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”
“What?”
“Your dad was the Kanbara family’s father. He was a normal person until he was taken and forced to play the role.”
“Right.”
“Then who’s the cause of all of this?”
That question had been stuck in Mio’s head all night. An ominous thought occurred to her, and it sent an unpleasant trickle of sweat down her back.
“Maybe…that boy was the center of the Kanbara family?”
Kaname did say that if the father came back for anyone, it would be him—the child in the room during the confrontation. Niko Kanbara, the younger son.
The baby-faced boy with straight bangs. That sleeping face with pure, unblemished skin.
He was the only one Mio knew nothing about, a total mystery. She hadn’t seen him awake or heard him speak.
What if this actually wasn’t over yet? A chill stole over Mio. What would become of Niko after everything else wrapped up? Were Kaname’s companions really watching over him?
“Is it the boy? Is he the one who kept replenishing the family and forced them to do all those things?” The panic was clear on Mio’s face.
“Oh, right,” said Kaname. Then, as casually as she could possibly imagine, he added, “Nah, he’s not.”
“Huh?”
“He’s not. He was absorbed into the family four years ago, that’s all. One of the women you saw earlier is his real mother. She’s always regretted pressuring him so hard for failing his elementary school entrance exams. That created an opportunity for the Kanbara family to slip in. When she saw that her son was back, she clung to him, crying and apologizing. ‘All I want is for you to be alive. You don’t have to be good or special or the best—just alive.’ Before he was Niko Kanbara, his real name was Taiga Miyaue.”
“Then you’re saying…”
“There is no center or root of evil,” Kaname stated.
The sirens outside returned, as though suddenly remembering they were supposed to be on. Even at this hour, there were ambulances and police cars on the road. People were still suffering.
“There’s no single person at the center of that family who rules the others. No one is the core or the root; the family gives them strength. If they lose one member, they replace them, and if another one goes, they replenish again. It’s continued that way forever because, as best I can tell, it’s the family that maintains the bonds that tie them together. No one person controls the bunch. If anything, it’s the family structure itself that rules over them.”
Mio recalled the apartment that felt uninhabited.
Cluttered rooms with no rhyme or reason to them. The smell of mold, rain, and sweets. She couldn’t have imagined them existing there, functioning as a proper family would.
A shiver overtook her.
She imagined coming home to a place where each family member was present but simply stored in a box dubbed “home.” They did nothing more than exist with empty eyes, the way Hanaka had sat on the bed, like it was her duty.
“That’s why you need to exorcise them all at once. Otherwise it never ends. If a single one of them remains, it will replenish the others. I’ve been trying to get them all, to keep them from running off and making a new home. It’s never gone as well as it did this time.”
“So you’re saying the vessel of the Kanbara family itself is cursed?”
Kaname stared at Mio with a questioning, wondering look. Hesitantly, he replied, “If you want to describe what that family did as a curse, then I suppose so.”
“You told me they just showed up at some point and have existed ever since. So even though the Kanbara family is just a collection of unrelated people, the family itself persists, despite the lack of any one person’s intent? They’re all normal people, and none of them does it for a particular reason? They just…exist?”
“That’s right. They just exist.”
Mio put a hand to her chest. Her pulse was racing, and her breaths came fast and shallowly. There was no point or goal. “They just exist.” A group of people who spread darkness, harassed others with that darkness. They spanned eras and generations, absorbing the personalities and natures of various people—a clan of darkness, self-updating and self-maintaining.
Kaname bobbed his head. “They’re not driven by any individual’s will in particular. If you had to call it anything, it’s the will of the family. The family controls them for the express purpose of maintaining form as a family.”
“And there’s no way to get out?”
The family exchanged its members for new ones. The members then spread darkness and malice around them, and that evil corroded and killed others. The damage expanded from the family, infecting others who continued the chain.
Kaname shook his head. “There’s no way to be free of them aside from not making contact in the first place. Once you have, it’s extremely difficult to totally protect yourself.”
“But now it’s finally over?” Mio asked. The question made her feel as though she’d borne witness to a historic moment, something that had never happened before.
A hollow family without a core that existed indefinitely, and the current of darkness they’d created had ended today. All the members had been driven out. At last, the cursed family had been dismantled…
Kaname nodded, although he didn’t exactly look thrilled about it.
“Yes, it’s over. The Kanbara family is, at least.”
“‘At least’?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re saying…”
Mio was shocked by what she heard. Kaname’s phone buzzed, and he answered. That drew his hand away from his father’s, and soon, his expression was grave again. It stiffened as he listened to the call.
“Of the…family, you mean?”
Mio’s ears started ringing from shock. She failed to make out the family name Kaname repeated.
Outside, sirens continued to wail.