Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (15 page)

“You haven’t been back?”

“Not even once in three years.”

“I’m sorry.”

Eighteen

She helps me carry the groceries home. For a moment I imagine that we are walking home together—to our own home.

I ask if she’ll have enough time to get some sleep before work. “Not really. Maybe a few hours. I’ll have to guzzle down coffee all day.”

“Where did you learn that word?”

“
Guzzle
? I don’t know. I like it because I can pronounce the two zs correctly. Most of my friends can’t.”

My street is just as lonely and quiet as before. This whole time, all these sleeping people have been dreaming. It’s like the air is filled with their dreams. She asks if she can help carry the groceries upstairs. “I can manage,” I say. I take the bags from her and set them on the top step, in front of the door. I put down my bags as well.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“It happened right there,” I say, pointing behind her. She spins around but there is only empty pavement.

“That spot on the road. Even now the stain doesn’t wash away.” My knee cracks as I sit down on the top step, facing her, facing the street. I fold my hands together. “I’m not doing this because you’re here,” I say. “I always do this. When I come back from my shopping in the middle of the night I set down the bags and sit here and look at that spot and think. In a way I’m sorry you have to witness it.”

“You never have to feel that way about me,” she says, the kind of thing people say as they fall in love, before things change.

“This is the first time we’ve been outside together,” I say.

“Our first date.”

“Is grocery shopping at three in the morning a date?”

“Sure. We were holding hands.”

I lean back against the step. Morris’s light is off. The concrete is rough, stones stuck together with cold gray paste. These same stones shattered my coffee cup. The coffee stain is gone. The bloodstain is still there, a black splotch. People step on it. People drive over it.

At this time of night the buses barely come and there are no cabs. She calls a car service. While we wait she takes a pen from her purse and fishes out and unwads a wrapper or receipt of some sort, then flattens it out on her thigh and starts writing. “Just in case,” she says.

“Just in case what?”

“You can call me anytime, or you can come over.” She hands me the paper.

“I don’t even have my own phone.”

“Memorize it. The address, too. If all else fails, find the wagashi shop on Minetta. Hamamoto.” I put the paper in my pocket. A few moments pass. I follow her gaze’s vector straight to the stain on the pavement. “I don’t know exactly what I mean by all this,” she says, “but when my brother . . . I just don’t want you to lose it or do anything—just come, okay? If something like that starts to happen.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Promise?”

When the car comes she kisses me on the lips. “Thanks for coming out tonight,” she says. “I feel so much better now. Because of you.” She rolls down the window and waves as the car drives off.

I carry my groceries up the stairs. Five plastic bags hanging from my wrist, I open the door. It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to the bright light. How could I have been so stupid, so careless, where was my mind? Another ambush!

Silke says nothing at first, she just sits there on the sofa, staring up at me. I’ve seen her in the dark as I pass by her room, but when was the last time my wife saw my face? I search and search but come up blank. I feel as though I am onstage, naked.

“I didn’t know you were out,” she says. Her legs are folded beneath her, as they were when I’d come home late from the studio, when she’d look up from her book and smile.

She comes toward me. “Here, let me help you with that.” She takes the shopping bags from my hands and goes with them to the kitchen. The most jarring thing is that she’s wearing the white sundress. I’d forgotten all about that dress, but now the entire memory hits me all at once.

She puts away my groceries, clearing room in the cupboard for my dried soups and macaroni and cheese. She puts the milk and butter in the refrigerator, as though I have come home, as though she called me with a list and I have delivered.

Her face has no particular expression. She crumples the first plastic bag into a ball, throws it away, and begins to unpack the next.

My food next to hers in the cupboard looks like nonsense. “What are you doing?” I ask.

“Putting away the groceries.” I tell her not to bother, that I’m going to take them back to my room anyway, but she continues to unpack. “Are you hungry,” she asks, “do you want me to make you something?”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“Are you hungry?”

“What are you doing awake?”

She tells me she was having dreams and woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Bad dreams? I ask, nightmares? No, she says, intense dreams. Not good or bad; just intense. “I haven’t forgotten that you hate when I tell you my dreams,” she says. “Don’t worry, I won’t bother you with the details.”

Every word would be the wrong word, so I stay silent.

“Are you sure I can’t make you something?”

“You don’t have to cook for me.”

“Then how about just a snack?”

We sit at the kitchen table under the hanging pendant lamp. Chips and salsa. The crunch echoes in my head, the tang lingers on my tongue. “They’re from a new store, a tortilla factory in Brooklyn. Pretty good, don’t you think?”

I nod. Here she is, within reach, all I’d have to do is extend my arm and open my hand and cup her cheek, fingers stretching into her hair.

Maybe that’s Megumi’s purpose, to simply get me used to having other human beings in my proximity. Why doesn’t she mention Megumi’s little shoes? I wait for it. I prepare a response.

Her fingers grab a chip and plow the salsa. Crunch crunch crunch between her teeth. A soft pulp. She swallows. A shared snack, each of us with the same taste in our mouth. Is this how it begins?

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Can’t I have something to eat with you? Is that against the rules?”

“But what will it change?” I say, and I’m startled to realize that I don’t mean it as some bitter rhetorical deflection at all but as an actual genuine question to which I really want to hear her answer. I want to know whether my sitting here could really be the beginning.

“Eat your chips,” she says.

For a while we do not talk. The salsa level sinks lower. The remaining chips are smaller, revealing the crumbs underneath, and the abandoned salt. She is beautiful, my wife. Whatever these years have done to her soul, her face is still beautiful. But stained with desperation.

“Maybe . . .” she starts, but then turns her head toward the window, toward the black, and in the glass I can just barely see her reflection and my arm extends and before I can change my mind my open hand settles on her cheek, soft skin, and my fingertips, yes, stretch into her hair. She does not hesitate, she places her warm hand over mine and presses hard. She does not turn toward me; she stares out the window. Perhaps she can see me in reflection.

I slide my hand out and stand up. “I should go.”

“Maybe you could stay,” she says without turning around. But I leave her there and go into my room and deadbolt the door.

I sit motionless on my bed and listen, but there is nothing to hear, and it is not the silence of emptiness, like the vacuum of space, the silence of nothing to say, no common point, of searching for words; it is the silence of drowning, of overflowing fullness. It is the silence of too much to say and nowhere to begin.

I pull aside the window shade but Megumi is not down there. She has not come back. She is somewhere else. It would be so easy, a fresh start, a woman I have not yet wronged.

Finally there is a sound, and it is a familiar one: Silke’s sobs. Quiet at first, she spends tremendous effort holding them back. She struggles. They grow louder. I wait for her to stop, a long time, but she does not stop. The stain is my fault. I can’t bear it, I go back out.

“What do you mean, Maybe I could stay?” I say. She is as she was, sitting at the table, facing the window. She wipes her tears. She tries to compose herself.

“Just for a night,” she says. She turns to me. How must I look to her? I am a stranger. Or maybe she looks at my body and face and sees only memories. “I don’t know if every day you’re dying to come out and be with me but every day something holds you back, or if you’re happy as a clam in there and have no intention of coming out, or if you’re about to run off with her. I don’t know anything. And my imagination . . . I get nothing from you, so I make things up. I’m going crazy out here.”

She takes my hand. So different from Megumi’s hands. Larger, stiffer.

“See,” she says, “it’s still you, still your hands and mine, still us. We’re right here.” And warmer. Warmer than Megumi’s. “Maybe you could show me something, progress, that you’re trying.”

So we sit on the sofa. I’m not sure how to hold my body on the contraption, it’s been so long. She keeps her distance, at the opposite end, arm against the rest, angled away. We face forward.

“What am I supposed to do?” I ask.

“Don’t be like that,” she says. I’m not sure if her meaning is limited to my comment or extended to encompass my entire life. Don’t be like that. Yes, darling, I wish I weren’t like that, I wish I could be like something else, someone else, everyone else.

“Maybe there’s no solution,” she says. “Maybe there’s no . . . maybe you just pretend and pretend, little by little, until it’s real.” She scoots closer. She tells me that problems don’t always get solved, but that we go on, that we don’t need to put our lives on hold over every little thing.

“You think of him as a little—”

“Stop,” she says. If we want to be together again, she says, if I want to be out of my room and happy again (she carefully avoids the word normal), then maybe all I have to do is pretend, all I have to do is act like someone who is (again she avoids it) not living in his room. “It doesn’t have to be real, at first,” she says. “You can just pretend. Like you are now.”

And enough pretending will make it real. Or maybe everything is in some way pretending.

She says she’s sick of talking about it. “When you’re out here, we’ll just live our lives as we otherwise would, and we won’t try to solve anything. Solving things gets so exhausting, don’t you think?”

“So,” I say, “what would we be doing now, at three forty-three in the morning?”

A late-night movie is flickering against our faces. She has moved closer but does not touch me. When we used to watch movies she would place her head on my lap. The wooden coffee table at my feet: it was hers and then became ours, after we threw mine to the curb. I rest my feet upon it, like I used to, and actually until now I had forgotten that habit, that I used to sit here with my feet out, watching television. How deep I’ve sunk. And there, on the nearest corner, is a notch, a hacked-out chunk, where my son one day took my pocketknife and decided to teach himself how to carve ornaments into furniture. Wait until your father comes home and sees what you’ve done, Silke must have scolded. When I came home she said, Look what your son did. At times like those he was never her son, he was always my son. She dragged him out of his room to feel my anger. I looked at the hacked void and the naked splinters on the floor, and the still-open knife (Silke had preserved the scene) and I looked down on his guilty face. He was about to burst into tears, but—my brave boy!—he looked me in the eye and did not waver. I cracked a smile, and said, “If you can’t improve the table, then don’t cut into it.” I patted his shaggy head and went into the bedroom to change clothes.

The wound is no longer fresh. The splinters have softened, worn smooth under waves of weeks and months and years. But I can see him there looking up at me—so guilty but unsure why—and I can imagine him finding the knife (had he seen me hide it?) and tiptoeing to see that Mom was occupied with chopping tomatoes, and I can see the glint of the blade as he opened it, his private little moment of discovery, and the joy in his eyes, the pure flowing life as the blade bit the wood. Was he surprised how easily the table yielded to his will? Was it his first taste of power? He had no wish to destroy, to merely hack and slice; no malice, no base mutilation. He was a creator: he had a plan, he had something in mind for that table. How could I be angry?

My life was not empty, as so many are, filled only with regret; it was not a sad life of wasted opportunity. My life was full and perfect. I had exactly the life I wanted; I had not squandered my talents or my intellect or even my love. And that could be the problem. The wasted life, we all think it’s a shame, but what about the full life, what about the full life that can never be full enough, the life full by every measure but time?

I can barely pay attention to the movie. Sitting on the sofa like we used to, I should be saying to myself, Look how far I’ve come! I should be proud. And happy. Whatever we had is alive, a flicker at least. But something feels false. Undeserved. How could I have forgotten about her simple white sundress when she used to wear it nearly every night after work? “More comfy than sweats,” she used to say. What else have I forgotten and how many thousand more little pieces will we have to reconstruct? A blind couple putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle, we finally found two pieces that fit together, a small triumph, but it does not solve anything. And it’s nothing next to what remains. No doubt Silke feels it, too. A little hope shows how little hope there is. It’s crushing.