My eighth day in the hospital, Monday, was the day of a modest liberation.
When they confirmed that the “leak” of air from my lung had stopped completely, they took out the drainage tube. This meant I was finally freed from my link to the machine. When the procedure wrapped up in the morning, I left my room to escort my visiting grandmother out of the building so that I could breathe the open air for the first time in a long while.
According to the doctor, they would watch my condition for another two days, and if there was no change, I could be released. But I would have to rest as much as possible for a little while. I understood that part painfully well without having to be told, given my experience six months earlier. So I couldn’t go to school until May 6, which was after the break, after all.
I watched my grandmother’s rugged, inky-black Nissan Cedric drive off, and then I sat down on a bench I’d found in the front lawn of the inpatient ward.
It was beautiful weather, befitting the day of my liberation.
Warm spring sunbeams. Brisk, cool breeze. I could hear the chirping of wild birds here and there, probably because the mountains were so close by. I even heard the cry of a warbler, a sound unheard-of in Tokyo, occasionally cutting into the other songs.
I closed my eyes and took slow, deep breaths. The place where the tube had been ached a bit, but the chest pain and difficulty breathing had disappeared completely. Yeah, this was good. How wondrous a thing to be healthy!
After sinking into a momentary swell of emotion that I wouldn’t exactly call youthful, I took out my cell phone, which I’d brought with me from my room. This seemed like a good enough time to call my dad. I was outside the building, so I didn’t have to be worried about the warnings against “interfering with medical devices” and whatever.
I was pretty sure the time difference between Japan and India was three hours, or maybe four. It was after eleven o’clock where I was, so seven or eight o’clock there?
After some hesitation, I ended up turning off the cell phone I’d just activated. I knew very well how my dad slept in in the morning. He was probably pretty tired what with his survey/research activities in a foreign country, too. It would have been cruel to roust him from bed for this after all this time.
I sat on the bench zoning out for a while after that. When I got to my feet, it was because lunchtime was approaching. I want to be clear: The hospital food did not taste good. But for a fifteen-year-old recovering from illness, hunger is a life-or-death issue.
I went back to the inpatient ward, cut through the lobby, and headed for the elevator bay. The doors to one elevator were just starting to close, so I quickly squeezed through them.
There was already someone on the elevator.
“Oh, excuse me.”
I apologized offhandedly for my intrusion. But the moment I laid eyes on this other person, I couldn’t help gasping.
It was a girl in a school uniform.
The same navy blazer as Yukari Sakuragi had worn when she’d visited the day before. Did that mean this girl also went to Yomiyama North Middle? Shouldn’t she have been at school at this time of day?
She was petite and slightly built and had an androgynous face, the bone structure of which was too fine. Pure black hair in a shaggy bob cut. Her skin color was quite washed out, in contrast. I’m not sure what to call it, but it looked like white paraffin, to use a somewhat old-fashioned term. Plus…
The thing that caught my attention more than anything was the white eye patch bandaging her left eye. Did she have some kind of eye disease? Or had she been hurt?
With my mind caught up in all these thoughts, I was embarrassingly slow to realize the direction the elevator I’d chosen was traveling. It was going down, not up. I wasn’t headed for the upper floors; the car had started moving toward the basement.
I looked at the buttons arrayed on the control panel and saw that “B2” was lit up. Letting my own button selection slide, I seized on an impulse and spoke to the girl with the eye patch.
“I’m sorry, are you a student at North Yomi?”
The girl barely nodded her head, silent, showing no hint of any other movement.
“You’re going to the second basement level? Is there something you need to do down there?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not—”
“I’m dropping something off.”
Her tone of voice was cool and detached, as if all her emotions had been shut off.
“Half my body is waiting there, the poor thing.”
While I stood bewildered by those enigmatic words, the elevator stopped and the doors opened.
The girl in the eye patch slipped silently past me and went out into the hallway, her footsteps making no sound. Something sickly pale protruded through a gap in her hands, pressed tightly against her chest. My eyes fixed on it. I could see something pale, a tiny doll hand…
“Hey.”
I held the elevator doors open and stuck my head and shoulders out to call after the girl.
“What’s your name?”
The girl, the only person walking down the dimly lit hallway, reacted to my voice and came to a momentary standstill. But she didn’t turn around.
“Mei,” she answered curtly. “Mei…Misaki.”
Then the girl walked away, as if gliding over the linoleum floor. I watched her go, not breathing, while experiencing a touch of despondency and, at the same time, a foreboding that I could hardly find words to describe.
The second basement level of the inpatient ward.
I didn’t think there were even exam rooms or nursing rooms on this floor, let alone patients’ rooms. It was knowledge I’d absorbed naturally while hospitalized. All that was down there were the food storage rooms, the mechanical rooms, and—I was pretty sure—the memorial chapel.
…In any event.
This was the first up-close encounter I shared with the strange girl—Mei. By the time I learned that “Misaki” was written with the characters for “viewing the cliffs” and Mei was “sound,” April had ended and May had just barely begun.