Mei came with Mochizuki to visit me only three days before my release, on August 15th. I’m sure they weren’t aware of it, but it was the day when, many years ago, our country had seen the end of a war.
“…Even so.”
Mochizuki was the one who’d spoken.
“I wonder what made Mrs. Numata do such crazy stuff all of a sudden. She didn’t look like she was about to do anything like that at dinner.”
And so the events of that night had spontaneously become the focus of the conversation. As soon as he’d learned about the fire that night, Mochizuki had escaped out the emergency exit on the western wing of the building. He had then fled to the area near the gate, apparently just missing me as I was heading for Mei’s location.
“There’s no way to know, since she died. That’s what the police said.”
The day before yesterday, I’d received a visit from Detective Oba of the Yomiyama Police Department. That was also when I’d learned the details of the incident.
“I heard she bit her tongue off,” Mochizuki said, his eyebrows knitting in disgust. “That’s a pretty tough way to kill yourself.”
“Sometimes people bite their tongues off, and the piece gets stuck in their windpipe, so they suffocate. That’s probably what happened to Mrs. Numata.”
“Hm-m-m.”
“So we wound up with seven ‘deaths for August.’”
I heard Mei’s blank statement and cocked my head. “Seven? Are you counting the Numatas?”
“Mr. Chibiki looked into it more, and he found out the Numatas were Takabayashi’s grandparents. On his mom’s side.”
“What? You mean…”
Ikuo Takabayashi, who had died of a heart attack in June.
“Since they were his grandparents, that means they were blood relatives within two degrees. So they were actually linked to the class and in range. Incidentally, the Numatas became the caretakers there around ten years ago. So someone else was working there for the trip fifteen years ago.”
Feeling thoroughly defeated for some reason, I sighed. I gently rubbed my ribs through my pajamas, where the incision from the surgery still was.
“Of course, that’s all purely a coincidence,” Mei said, sighing as I had done. “It would be wrong to think any kind of unseen will had intervened there.”
“Did Mr. Chibiki say that?”
“He probably would, huh?”
“…Even so,” Mochizuki said again. “I sure am glad you’re getting better, Sakakibara. When I heard you were having surgery, I was really worried about you.”
“The surgery was really simple,” I replied with as blasé an expression as I could muster, but I could see the tears pooling in Mochizuki’s eyes.
“But come on, considering the ‘disasters’ for this year, you could imagine the surgery being botched or all kinds of terrible things.”
“You’ve got a soft heart, boy. But it’s fine. The ‘disasters’ are over.”
“They are?”
Mochizuki looked from my face to Mei’s, suspicion plain on his own.
“Misaki says that, too…But still.”
“I think the ‘extra person’ must have died in the fire that night.”
“Misaki said that, too. I wonder if it’s true.”
Mochizuki blinked his watering eyes and folded his arms over his chest, frowning.
“It was one of the five students who died that night? But no, because according to what Matsunaga said on that tape, once the ‘extra person’ dies, they instantly cease to exist. Hm-m-m…”
“It means that the ‘extra person’ existed until that night, but we can’t remember who it was anymore,” I told him, struggling to keep the morose feelings at bay. Then I changed my tone slightly and asked him, “How many people went on that trip?”
“Um…Fourteen people. Fifteen, if you include Mr. Chibiki.”
“There must have been sixteen people originally. It’s just that no one remembers that anymore.”
No one…No one except Mei and me, who had been so deeply involved in her “death.”
Not Mochizuki, not Teshigawara, not Mr. Chibiki…No one remembered her anymore. No one remembered that an art teacher named Reiko Mikami had existed since April, the assistant head teacher of third-year Class 3. Or that she had become the “substitute head teacher” after Mr. Kubodera’s death, had half-remembered her own experience fifteen years ago and planned the camping trip—which must have seemed to her like a desperate measure to take—and had been there that night as the chaperone.
It was on a phone call with Mei that I learned that. The day before my surgery, with some effort I escaped my hospital room and called her house on the ward’s green phone. I had my cell phone with me in my room, but it was out of battery and I couldn’t use it anymore.
“Nobody remembers Ms. Mikami,” she had told me without even asking how I was doing, coming onto the phone after Kirika had handed it to her, as usual. “They keep saying she died two years ago in the fall.”
“Two years ago…”
“Yeah. That kid Sakuma abandoned his role of being ‘not there’ right after summer break, and as soon as October started, one of the students died…followed by Ms. Mikami. They said she drowned in Yomiyama River. You still don’t remember?”
“She drowned…?”
“There was a lot of rain at the end of October, and the river was swollen. The next day, they found her body downstream. They don’t know if she jumped or got swept away by accident…”
I couldn’t speak.
“I can’t remember yet, either, but that’s what really happened. Someone linked to the class who died in the ‘disasters’ two years ago. So it was actually eight people, not seven. And everyone’s memories went back to normal. Lots of records and data did, too. Probably all of it. I looked at the class list, and the part where it said ‘Assistant Head Teacher: Reiko Mikami’ is gone, too.”
“So then she really was…”
That would be the best proof that Reiko had been the “extra person.”
“People are saying that after Mr. Kubodera died, Mr. Chibiki filled in as the substitute head teacher. It was an exception, and he was still serving as the librarian of the secondary library. They also say that Mr. Chibiki was the one who planned and led the trip…Just him.”
“What about the art club?”
The thought occurred to me suddenly, so I asked.
“I wonder what’s going on with the art club now, after it got revived in April.”
“It’s true that after Ms. Mikami died, the teacher who was supervising it with her transferred the next year. The new art teacher who came in said they didn’t want to run the art club, so it went on hiatus. But now they’re saying that teacher agreed to do it this spring.”
“Oh.”
I had guessed a lot of things about Reiko’s existence from talking with my grandmother when she came running to the hospital. She never questioned the safety of her daughter, who had participated in the trip as its chaperone, and had only dabbed at her eyes and said, “Oh, if only Reiko were alive right now.”
She even told me, “You know how she was. She thought of you as her own child, Koichi.
“She would say that if Yosuke had been a cruel father to you, she would have taken you in and raised you. Even though she only saw you every once in a while when you were small.”
I wondered what it was like now inside the side house Reiko had used as her office/bedroom.
For at least the brief window of four months, she had continued her life in this town, in that house, as a “casualty made flesh.” Some trace of it must have…But no, even that would have disappeared. Or taken on some other identity with some other meaning.
“Obon is almost over, but when you get out of the hospital, would you like to visit Reiko’s grave?”
When she said that, it was all I could do not to turn my face away from my grandmother’s well-intentioned gaze.
“I know it would make her happy if you came with me.”
…
…
…
I thought it would be all right if I talked to Mochizuki and Teshigawara, and even to Mr. Chibiki, about what had really happened. Although I got the feeling that, aside from Mr. Chibiki, no matter how much I explained it to them, it wouldn’t feel real to them and they’d just be confused.