I wanted to hear the truth from him, and I also didn’t want to hear it at all.
“Fumihiro-kun.” A masculine voice brought me out of my thoughts. A male doctor in scrubs was standing next to me.
“I’m sorry for the sudden call,” I said, recognizing the man.
“It’s been a while. No, don’t worry about it. It’s a good thing I haven’t changed my number. I must admit, you were quite lucky. From my understanding, you had no idea that Kadzuki-kun’s been a patient here, right?”
Fujieda looked at me quizzically. The doctor dropped to one knee and pointed to his name tag, which read “Yumihara.” At some point, he had become the head of the cardiac surgery department.
“Dr. Yumihara was my mother’s doctor...” I explained to Fujieda before turning back to him. “Are you also treating Nishikawa?”
“Yes. I’ve been looking after him since he was young, so we’ve known each other for a while now.”
When my mom’s condition had worsened, Dr. Yumihara had given me his professional phone number with a smile.
“I’m not supposed to do this, but if you’re ever worried about your mom, you can call me.”
Even after my mother’s death, I’d never deleted it from my phone. It let me connect to a nurse in his office rather than a generic operator.
Flashing us his gentle smile, the doctor motioned me and Fujieda forward.
“Let’s go.” As we followed, he cryptically said, “I’m glad Kadzuki-kun was able to find you after all.”
He showed us to the hospital room, walking us over to the bed. The monitor displayed Nishikawa’s somewhat uneven but otherwise regular heartbeat. He was wearing an oxygen mask, but he didn’t appear horribly pale.
He was alive.
I released a deep breath. In tears, Fujieda gripped the railing of the bed.
“Relieved?” Dr. Yumihara asked.
“Yes. Is he doing all right?” I replied.
“His condition is stable. Honestly, better than that. He’ll wake up soon enough, don’t worry. We’re getting him admitted as we speak.”
Then he brought me a stool and told me to sit. He closed the curtain to hide me from Fujieda’s gaze, then said all the doctory things, like “excuse me” and “right here” and “deep breaths, please” as he pressed his stethoscope to my chest.
“I hear nothing out of the ordinary. Would you mind if we ran some tests? I don’t expect we’ll find anything, but it’s just to be sure.”
“Yoshino-san just told me the same thing. Let’s do it.”
The doctor pulled back the curtain and headed for his computer. I couldn’t see the screen from where I sat, but I could hear him clacking away at the keyboard. He must have been completing my file. I didn’t want to distract him, so I kept quiet. Instead, he was the first to speak.
“I don’t want you to be mad at him.”
He was still smiling. He always had—during the appointments, while he was explaining my mother’s condition, when she was admitted to the hospital, and before the surgery too. There was only one occasion when he hadn’t been smiling in my presence: when he pronounced her dead. However, that meant I never really knew what he was thinking.
Dr. Yumihara’s kindness was real, but reality wasn’t always kind.
“Only issue is, I don’t know how much you’ve figured out on your own and how much Kadzuki-kun told you himself. But I don’t know when I might see you again, so let me tell you now. Just don’t be upset.”
“Why would I be mad...?”
“Well, you’ve got a strong sense of justice, and you’re the fussy type.”
“He hid his illness from me until today. Everyone apart from me knew. Of course I feel betrayed.”
The doctor chuckled. “Yes, well, I suppose I was a part of that pact of silence. I mean, I’m not allowed to disclose patient information to unrelated parties anyway, but it was particularly emphasized this time.”
The monitor beeped in time with Nishikawa’s heartbeat. While it was largely regular, the occasional skips made me anxious. That wasn’t what a healthy heart was supposed to sound like.
When he was finished with the computer, the doctor brought me a piece of paper spat out by the printer. It was a registration form for several tests. Even after I accepted it without protest, he watched me intently.
“You’ve changed, Fumihiro-kun. In some ways, you’ve grown a lot, and in others, you’re finally acting your age. Hmm... You’re less on edge now. You’ve mellowed out? No, that’s not right either.”
He held his chin in thought. When he finally found the word, it described exactly what Nishikawa had given me.
“You look as if you’ve finally found peace.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The investigator had spoken dispassionately.
“It seems he’s not going to school. He’s working the entire time, day and night. We asked one of his coworkers, and apparently he desperately needs the money. I mean, yeah, how else do you survive as an orphan? But his rent is cheap; surely he doesn’t need to work that hard. He’s paying off his mother’s medical debt bit by bit every month, but the amount is fixed, regardless of how much he actually earns. I don’t think he knows about his father’s debt. I’ll try to find out more.”
Hearing that reminded me of the nurses’ gossip I’d overheard at the hospital.
“And the funeral?”
“There won’t be one.”
“Right, can’t afford one. He’s falling behind on his payments to the hospital too. I mean, Fumihiro-kun is all alone at this point.”
“Yeah, I just... I can’t help wondering what he’s going to do from now on.”
I’d seen the very person they were talking about; I remembered how he wore a tender smile when he was with his mother but remained firmly expressionless when he was alone. I knew he was strong, so listening to the nurses talk about him, I thought, What do you mean, “What’s he going to do?”
He’ll keep fighting, because that’s what his mother would have wanted.
I then asked Masudzuki-san to take me to the construction site at night to investigate him myself. Given that he worked all night and slept through the day, that was the only way I could see him. He left the house only for work.
I’d wanted to see him. I’d wanted to be satisfied with a glimpse of him and then move on with my life.
I hadn’t recognized him at first.
Roughly a year had passed since I’d last seen him; he’d been smiling as he pushed his mother around in her wheelchair. He had lost a lot of weight and looked awfully pale. His eyes were much fiercer than before, and his expression as he waved the safety light sticks didn’t contain a trace of kindness.
No, I’d thought on impulse. No, this can’t be him.
I had seen his current expression countless times in the hospital—always on people who had given up on life.
If he’s lost the will to live but still needs money...
What does he need it for?
I considered it, and only one thing made sense to me.
“You’re so kind...”
That thought filled my mind. Putting together everything I’d heard about him, I arrived at a sad conclusion.
He must have wanted to fulfill his final duty after he’d spent so much time trying to act as her protector—a responsibility he’d taken on his own only after feeling forced to do so. Did he think that his life was meaningless now that his mother was gone?
And still, he kept going. Not for his own sake, but for hers.
He would stay kind to the very end.
I borrowed a notepad from Masudzuki-san and wrote my address. If he wouldn’t listen to what I had to say, I would at least give him this.
My plan went better than I could have hoped. It was all thanks to his compassion.
I didn’t care what happened to me, but I wanted him to be happy. So, I got ahead of myself, and even though I had thought about how to wrap everything up in the end, I never figured out how to tell him how this contract would end.
I’d let myself languish in my happiness.
I didn’t want to think about how all this might end.
So now that I’d collapsed before him, awoken next to him...what could I possibly tell him at this point?