Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (19 page)

“Is it the fancy Japanese rice?”

“Of course.”

“You’re spoiling me.”

She kisses him on the way out. His lips are warm, but leaden.

She assumes Silke would contact Hamamoto, but Hamamoto goes about her business, coming down from her office from time to time to check on the shop, then going back upstairs.

Her father calls but she ignores it. She listens to the voicemail. It’s her brother’s little voice. Noona, when are you coming home? She listens to the message three more times. After that there’s no need: his voice rings all day in her head, in her bones.

When she returns home the table is already set. The chopsticks are perfect. Thomas is in the kitchen, mixing something in a small bowl. He turns but he doesn’t stop mixing. “How was work? Hungry? It’s almost ready.”

“It smells amazing, it smells Japanese. Is it?”

“I tried to make it like you do,” he says with a smile. “Sit. Let’s eat.”

Broiled saba marinated in miso. Green beans with black sesame. Potato salad. “The rice is very special rice from Japan,” he says, laughing.

“Thomas. How did you learn to make Japanese potato salad? I’m shocked.”

“Don’t say anything till you try it. I have no idea if I got it right. I found all the recipes online and I walked all the way to Sunrise Mart to get the ingredients. Can you believe that?”

“It’s incredible.” She takes a bite of the potato salad. “I don’t know what to say, it’s perfect.” Only a slight exaggeration.

“Really? It’s so different from any other potato salad. I wasn’t sure I got the flavor right.”

“Next time I’ll tell you my dad’s secret ingredients. You’ll go crazy for it.” She’s giddy. Apart from her parents, nobody’s ever cooked for her. Her past boyfriends couldn’t even manage a ham sandwich. A Korean word comes to her. Kamdongiya. Touching, tender, affecting, poignant. This meal: kamdongiya.

While she cleans the dishes, he sits on the sofa. “I still can’t believe you made all this. I had no idea you could cook.” What other secrets, what other gems, are waiting to be discovered?

She finally gives in to her hope. She can see the two of them together, like this, night after night. Her brother and her family, they could wait a little longer, or maybe he’d want to try living in Japan. It’s not a crazy thought. He could do his photography there. Every season they could spend a weekend in Hakone and stay at the same onsen and watch how the trees and birds and sounds and everything changes throughout the year. On the train back to Tokyo they could split a beer and bento. She could teach him a little of the language. There’d be no end to what she could show him. Tiny hidden izakayas. Yoyogi Park spiders. Walking around Jingumae, holding hands. Her parents would love him. He’d have to learn to bow. Cherry blossoms in spring. She bets she could even get the man who once never came out of his room to one day sing karaoke. Well maybe not in a bar, but at least in a private karaoke room. They could sing to each other. She can’t sing much either. It doesn’t matter. In summer, drinks at skyscraper bars high above the bustle and heat. He’d be so inspired there. So would she. Maybe Hamamoto could use her contacts to help her open up her own wagashi shop. Someplace small and special. He could take the pictures. Baseball, obviously, the Giants at the Tokyo Dome or maybe the Swallows at Meiji Jingu. In autumn, they’d share a big simmering pot of nikujaga. There is a whole district in Tokyo that is nothing but block after block of camera shops. Day trips to old country villages, where the food is best. The gray beach in winter, all to themselves.

“Look,” Thomas says. “It’s like the one you slid under my door.” He picks the origami penguin up off the shelf next to the television. “Remember?”

“Actually,” Megumi says, “that is the one I slid under your door. The one you pushed back.”

“You kept it.” He stands the penguin in the palm of his hand. “I was such a jerk.”

“You’ve come so far.”

He places the penguin back on the shelf exactly as he found it. “I never imagined I’d have such a reaction to you. I didn’t see it coming. Back then I just wanted you to go away. I thought you were going to try to fix me.”

“I wasn’t. But you can’t shut out the world forever.”

“It never felt like I was shutting out the world. More like my world had simply gotten smaller. Like if you’re here in New York you don’t spend your days obsessing over what’s going on in Istanbul or feeling bad that you’re not keeping up with the news in Boulder or Sri Lanka. It doesn’t feel as if you’re missing anything. My room was world enough.”

She knows the thing to do is to ask, What about your wife. But she does not.

“And I was your pest,” she says.

“You were. You kept coming.”

“I promised myself I would visit you only once. To get everyone off my back. I was going to make up some excuse.”

“Then why did you keep coming?”

“Why did you open the door?”

They laugh. The moment hovers.

“You burrowed pretty deep,” he says.

The doorbell rings. Megumi’s heart leaps. Like a defendant when the jury returns, it’s time to stand up and hear the verdict. She suddenly realizes that adrenaline and trembling and sweat and syncopated breathing and a concussive heartbeat are not how the body shows fear but how it purges fear. But there isn’t enough adrenaline, her heart can’t beat fast enough, her lungs can only expel so much, her muscles, too, have a limit to their twitch. Thomas grabs her hand. Skin suddenly moist. Whose skin? Both of theirs? A far-off moment, suddenly here. All too suddenly. And yet she wants to know the outcome faster, right away, to somehow know before she learns. It’s the waiting. The struggle to keep composed no matter what. She prepares all sorts of responses, depending. She should have started preparing sooner. It’s too late now. Caught up in her own delusion. But what did any of them expect? Like he said, she burrowed deep. She had to. Too much was at stake. The beach in winter, all to themselves, she can see it. Some delusions win, some lose.

“You want me to get it?” he asks. He lets go of her hand.

“No, I’ll get it.”

The only way to tell if her acting is good enough, if her face is managing to hide every last one of her swelling emotions, is to gauge Silke’s reaction when she opens the door. But Silke’s face is perfectly warm and neutral, which could mean that Megumi’s concealment is successful or that Silke is working on a concealment of her own. Megumi leads her up the stairs. The expected small talk. Concern answered with reassurance. Sticking to the script.

She wants it to be over. She wants the whole world to skip ahead an hour. It does not. It slows down. Just for her. Each minute slower than the last.

As far as Silke is concerned, there is no reason she shouldn’t hug her husband in front of Megumi. And there’s no way Thomas can refuse. But do they have to hold it so long? At least from this angle she can see only Silke’s face, not Thomas’s. Silke has one hand higher than the other. Megumi can see the pressure Silke exerts on his back. Fingers pushing. Why is the heart so impractical? In this scene Megumi has no place. But does that mean she has no place at all? Silke rubs his back now. Thomas’s posture is not as stiff as Megumi had hoped. But his hands are still. He is mostly the recipient.

The hug finally ends. She listens to the conversation just closely enough to hit her cues, that’s all. She has nothing to add. Any closer and she might remember the exchange. Silke’s offer and Thomas’s acceptance. She does not want to remember any of it.

It’s never been so hard to smile. Silke says she can’t thank Megumi enough for all she’s done, that it’s all because of Megumi. She gives Megumi a bow-wrapped Tiffany box. “Try it on, see how you like it.” Silke tells Thomas to help her with the clasp, then asks for his opinion on whether Megumi looks beautiful in the necklace. Thomas answers honestly. The pain deepens.

Time stays slow even after they leave. She sits on the floor. The apartment is silent. The penguin stares at her.

Twenty-two

In the taxicab my wife apologizes in advance for the condition of the new apartment. “I’ve been so busy just setting up, I haven’t had any time to clean. I didn’t go to work. You were right. Took some personal days. It was the second place I saw and it was available right away and I’ve been running around like crazy picking stuff up and accepting the deliveries and all that. I hope you like it. Probably needs a coat of paint, so maybe Saturday we can go to the store and pick out colors. If I don’t have to work to catch up on what I’ve missed. I was thinking of pale green for the living room.” She fumbles with the new key but finally pushes open the door and flicks on the lamp. “What do you think?” she says.

There is only one bedroom. This is where she has brought me to heal. Or brought us to heal. We are downtown, on Bank Street, a world away from the old place. It’s softer here, leafy. It’s too expensive, but she decided it’s worth it for the calm street that cuts a diagonal through the grid, for the newness, a place with no stain on the concrete outside the front door. A place to heal. That is how she sees it. She expects us to start over. Past is past, future is future. America is the land of starting over.

“The rest of the furniture arrives next week,” she says.

I am careful with her. She is careful with me. We circle each other. This is strange for us both, discovering what still holds true and what is new as we face the same question. Now what?

No doubt Megumi is asking herself the same thing. But she is alone. The only sounds her own. Nobody to share her fish and soup and rice. Nobody to catch her smile. Can she feel what I feel? Does that make it better or worse?

Silke sits on the kitchen floor scrubbing a spot on the cabinet. Green elastic holds back her hair. Some strands fall to her cheek. I open the refrigerator. There is some fruit. A bottle of orange juice. Three bottles of Miller High Life. My old favorite.

The bedtime awkwardness is inevitable. She diffuses it by feigning early exhaustion and the need to wake up early for a breakfast meeting at work. That way I can decide later where I’d like to sleep, without the weight of her stare. It’s touching, her concern, her sympathy, her ability to think a few moves ahead. She says goodnight. She pauses, then kisses my cheek. She keeps the bedroom door open as she sleeps or pretends to sleep.

It’s hard to fall asleep on the sofa. Unfamiliar creaks and clicks. A strange smell. When sleep does come, it is blank, black, a void.

When I wake, the light in the sky is just a whisper. Too early to tell if it’s cloudy or clear.

I know why she’s so happy, so confident. I know how she sees what happened that night during the fire, and if I’m not sure she’s right, I know she’s not wrong.

On her way out the door she tells me to think about a color for the living room. “Maybe a pale blue? Pale green?” she says. “I made a set of keys for you. Go outside, okay?”

The apartment still smells like the previous occupants and their stale lives, no cigarettes, no pets, but I can smell wine sticking to the paint. Lots of wine. And perfume and sweets. Have they gone somewhere together, maybe a place with another bedroom, or have they gone their separate ways? I open all the windows as high as they will go. The screens need cleaning. A spring breeze blows in. The air is fresher down here.

I walk up to Fourteenth Street to find a cell phone store. I buy the prepaid kind, with no contract.

Megumi doesn’t pick up. There are all sorts of things I want to say, but after the beep I just tell her to call me back when she gets a chance.

“How about some music?” Silke says at dinner. I take another bite of pork chop. There is no fish, there is no soup, there is no rice. There are no chopsticks. There are potatoes and there are Brussels sprouts. Fork in one hand, knife in the other. From the bedroom she brings in the little clock radio, scrolls through the static, and settles on jazz. She puts the volume up but then back down a little.

“That’s the problem with digital music,” I say. “The fortes are too forte and the pianos too piano. Not like real life. Not like live.”

“But radio stations have compressors.”

“Yes,” I say, not questioning where—from which man—she learned that radio stations have compressors, “but jazz stations don’t use them as much, and it’s still not as good as live.” Well anyway, she says, now we have some music.

I cut into the pork chop with a shining new knife. Juice spills out. Not blood. Juice. I wonder why meat has juice. I say it out loud. “Why does meat have juice?”

“It’s just water,” she says. “The water from inside the cells.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but aren’t we made of sixty percent water?”

“Pigs too?”

The trumpet stops abruptly and the piano picks up the riff, tentative at first as though trying on stilts for the first time, searching for balance and rhythm. The trumpet plays a soft reminder, just a few notes, a gentle nudge, and then the piano takes off again, on its own now.

I wash the dishes. She put up a mild, fleeting protest, I insisted, she put up an even flimsier counterprotest, adding an “Are you sure?”—and now she sits on the sofa thumbing through a magazine while I clean the plates and utensils and glasses, jazz at my side.

“I have some movies,” she says. “Oh—and before I forget, the cable guy is coming tomorrow to hook us up. Between twelve and four. Will you be here?”