"My brother is lying about being okay."
Rumi Kenzaki said it to her cereal.
The cereal did not respond. This was expected. Cereal almost never responded.
Her father, sitting across the kitchen table with his coffee and his newspaper, did not respond either. Which was less expected. Her father usually responded to things she said even when she said them to her cereal.
She tried again, slightly louder.
"My brother is lying about being okay."
Kujuro turned the page of his newspaper without looking up.
"I heard you the first time, kid."
"Then why didn't you say anything?"
"Because I was thinking about what to say."
"Did you think of something?"
"… Not yet."
Rumi nodded. She approved of this answer. She approved of grown-ups who admitted when they hadn't thought of something yet, because the grown-ups who pretended they had always thought of something were the worst kind. Her teacher, Mrs. Aiba, was the worst kind. Her father was the best kind. She had a list.
She ate three more spoonfuls.
"Dad."
"Mm."
"He thinks I don't know."
"…"
"He thinks because I'm nine I don't notice when he hides his hand under the table. He thinks I don't notice when he comes home and puts a sweater on even though the apartment is warm. He thinks I don't notice when he doesn't finish his food and Hiroshi pretends not to notice that he doesn't finish his food."
"Rumi."
"I noticed all of it, Dad."
"I know you did, kid."
"Then why does he think I didn't?"
Kujuro folded his newspaper. He set it down. He looked at his daughter. Rumi was wearing the cream-colored sweater that had once been Ryo's and that hung past her hands so that she had to push the sleeves back constantly. Her star-shaped hair clip was on the left side of her head this morning, slightly off-center, the way she always set it because she insisted on doing it herself. Her socks were mismatched. One striped. One solid.
"Because he's seventeen, Rumi. Seventeen-year-olds think nine-year-olds don't notice anything. They were nine very recently. They remember being nine. They have decided that the way they remember being nine is what nine is."
"That's stupid."
"It is."
"I notice more things than he does."
"I know you do, kid."
"He notices big things. I notice the small things. He notices when somebody's sad. I notice which somebody, and why, and when it started."
Kujuro looked at her a long moment.
"Rumi."
"Mm."
"That is a true sentence."
"I know it is."
"Don't tell anyone you know it is. Please."
"Why not?"
"Because some people, when they find out a person sees more than they're supposed to, they get strange about it. They want the person to stop. Or they want the person to do it for them. Both are bad for the person."
"… Okay."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She ate three more spoonfuls. She made the promise the way she made all her promises, which was very seriously, the way she said yes to all the questions that mattered.
-----
The walk to school was eleven minutes if she walked at a normal pace and seventeen if she stopped at the stationery shop and four if she ran, and most days she walked at the seventeen-minute pace, because Mr. Onishi at the stationery shop had a small brown dog named Botan who liked to be greeted in the morning, and Botan had begun to expect her, and Rumi did not believe in disappointing dogs.
"Botan."
"Wuf."
"Good morning."
"Wuf."
"You look very serious today."
"Wuf."
"Mr. Onishi, why does Botan look serious today?"
Mr. Onishi was sixty-something, large, wore a knitted vest in all weather. He was sweeping the front of the shop. He looked up.
"Probably because he's old, Rumi. Old dogs look serious. We earn the right."
"You don't look serious."
"Because I'm not as old as Botan. In dog years he is one hundred and four."
"That's older than my grandfather was."
"Yes."
"My grandfather was very wise."
"Botan is also very wise."
"Okay."
She gave Botan one more careful pat between the ears. She went on.
She was thinking, the whole walk, about what her brother had looked like when he came home last night. The wrapped hand. The way he had not taken his coat off for forty minutes after coming inside. The way his breath had still been pale white at the dinner table, even though the apartment was warm, even though the rice was hot.
She had pretended not to see it.
She was going to keep pretending not to see it. Pretending was a kind of kindness, when used correctly.
She was nine. She had decided already that some kinds of love were quiet, and that the quiet kinds were sometimes the heaviest.
She arrived at school. The bell had not yet rung.
-----
"Rumi! Rumi! I saved you a seat!"
Yuki Sasaki was nine, loud, missing both her front teeth, and the only person Rumi had ever met who was capable of producing volume that filled an entire classroom from a single small body. She waved both arms above her head in case Rumi had not heard her. Several other children turned to watch.
"Yuki, you don't need to wave. I see you."
"I was waving so the other people would know the seat was taken."
"Nobody else was going to take that seat."
"You don't know that."
"Yuki, the seat next to you is always empty. You scared everybody with your science fair project."
"I did not."
"You explained how a snail's mouth works. To Mrs. Aiba. For nine minutes. Without stopping."
"Snails are very interesting."
"They are. But you cried when she tried to make you stop. You held the model up. You said the snail had not yet been understood."
"…"
"You cried for three full minutes."
"Are you going to sit next to me or not?"
Rumi sat next to her.
Yuki was the kind of friend a careful person needed in her life. Rumi had figured out by age seven that being good at noticing things made you tired in a way that other children weren't tired, and that the cure was a friend who never noticed anything but was loud about the things she didn't notice. Yuki was that friend. Yuki had once stepped in a puddle the size of a small lake and not realized her shoes were wet for the entire morning. Yuki was a treasure.
"Did you finish the math homework?"
"… Most of it."
"Most of it?"
"There's one problem I couldn't do."
"Which one?"
"The one with the train."
"The trains are easy, Yuki."
"They are not. Why does anybody need to know when two trains pass each other in a tunnel? Why are there even two trains in the tunnel? The tunnel is for one train. The tunnel is underground."
"Yuki."
"What?"
"… I'll show you on the way home."
"You're the best."
"I know."
The bell rang.
-----
Mrs. Aiba was the worst kind of grown-up, in Rumi's analysis. Mrs. Aiba was forty-something, wore her hair in a bun so tight it pulled her eyebrows up, and pretended to know things she did not know. She corrected children's pronunciations of their own grandparents' names. She told Rumi once that observation was not a real subject and that she should focus on participation instead. Rumi had nodded and made a private decision.
This morning Mrs. Aiba was reading from a story about a fisherman.
The fisherman's wife wanted a bigger house. The fisherman caught a magic fish. The magic fish granted wishes. The wife kept asking for more. At the end of the story she had asked for too much and lost everything.
"And what is the moral of the story, class?"
Hands went up. Yuki's went up first because Yuki's hand always went up first.
"Yes, Yuki."
"The moral is fish are magic."
Mrs. Aiba sighed.
"No, Yuki. Anyone else? Tomo?"
Tomo was a small quiet boy with a scar through his eyebrow that he had gotten from a swing-set when he was six and that he refused to talk about. He stood up.
"Be grateful?"
"Yes, very good. Be grateful. Anyone else?"
A few more hands. Mrs. Aiba called on a few more children. Their answers were all variations of be grateful. Rumi did not raise her hand.
"Rumi."
"…"
"Rumi. You haven't said anything."
"I know, Mrs. Aiba."
"Do you have an answer for the class?"
"… Yes."
"Then please share it."
Rumi thought about not sharing it. She thought about it for two seconds. Then she stood up, the way Tomo had stood up, because that was the rule.
"The moral of the story is that the fisherman didn't say anything."
"…"
"He let his wife ask. He kept catching the fish. He didn't say we have enough the first time. Or the second. Or the third. He kept fishing. He kept bringing her the fish."
"…"
"So the story isn't about being grateful, Mrs. Aiba. The story is about what happens when you love somebody and don't tell them when they're hurting themselves. The fisherman lost everything because he didn't talk. The wife is the one who asked. The fisherman is the one who let it happen."
"…"
"Be grateful is what you're supposed to say. Be honest is what the story actually says."
Mrs. Aiba's eyebrows, already pulled high by the bun, did not have anywhere left to go.
"… Sit down, Rumi."
Rumi sat down.
Yuki leaned over.
"That was amazing."
"It was just the answer."
"That was not just the answer."
"… It was, Yuki."
"Mrs. Aiba's face was purple."
"Mrs. Aiba's face is always purple. She holds her breath when she's mad."
"How do you know that?"
"I noticed."
-----
At recess she sat under the persimmon tree at the edge of the schoolyard and ate her rice ball and watched the other children play.
She did not play.
She had played, when she was younger. She had been seven, and she had played, and she had been good at it.
Then somewhere between seven and nine she had begun to find playing tiring in a way it had not been tiring before. She had begun to find watching less tiring than playing. Her father had noticed the change before she had noticed it herself, and he had told her one evening on the porch that watching was a thing some people did with their afternoons, and that there was nothing wrong with it.
She had understood at that moment that her father did the same thing. That watching was a Kenzaki kind of habit. That meant her brother probably watched too.
Her brother did watch.
He watched differently than she did. He watched bigger things. He watched the ones that were about to fall.
She watched the ones that were about to lie.
She finished her rice ball.
She thought about the fisherman story. Mrs. Aiba had not liked her answer. She had not given her answer to be liked. She had given it because she had been thinking about her brother since breakfast, and the fisherman story had been the wrong story for her to hear today, and somebody at the front of the classroom had needed to say so.
She wiped her hands on the napkin Kujuro had folded for her this morning.
She stood up.
She walked toward Yuki, who was now trying to teach two other children how a snail's mouth worked, with the same model from the science fair, and the two children were already starting to back away.
"Yuki."
"Rumi. Come help me. They don't believe me."
"They don't believe you because the model is not very accurate."
"It is accurate."
"Yuki, the radula is a ribbon, not a zipper. You drew teeth on it. Snails don't have teeth. They have tiny scrapers."
The two children, who had been backing away, stopped backing away. They had not known there was an alternative version of the snail mouth.
"Tell us the real one," said one of them, a girl with two long braids.
Rumi sat down with them.
She drew the ribbon.
She did not know it then.
But the girl with the braids would remember this moment for the rest of her life. She would tell her own children one day about a girl in her class who had drawn a snail's mouth correctly in the dirt with a stick at the age of nine, and how the drawing had been so precise that even Yuki Sasaki had eventually nodded and said fine, it's a ribbon.
She would tell them that the nine-year-old had been the first person she had ever met who told her something true and made her feel smarter for hearing it instead of dumber.
The girl with the braids was named Inori. She had not yet learned what she was. She would not learn for a long time.
The afternoon went on.
-----
After school, Rumi walked Yuki home. She showed her the trains. She drew them on a scrap of paper. She explained the speed-sum trick three different ways until Yuki got the right answer on her own and lit up and said oh, that's actually easy, why did the book make it hard.
Rumi did not say because the book was written by adults who think children don't notice.
But she thought it.
She walked home alone after that.
The November light was lowering. The sky was grey-gold. She passed Mr. Onishi's shop. Botan was sleeping in the doorway. She did not wake him.
She walked the rest of the way thinking about her brother.
He was on the roof again. He had not been on the roof when she left this morning, but she knew he was on the roof now, because the apartment when she opened the door felt like a house with one person in it instead of two, and that was the feeling that meant Ryo was up. Her father was at his desk by the window. He was supposed to be reading. He was holding the book at the wrong angle.
"Dad."
"Hey, kid."
"He's up there again."
"… Yeah."
"How long?"
"Couple hours."
"Did he eat?"
"Half."
"Did you eat?"
"…"
"Dad."
"… Half."
Rumi set her schoolbag down carefully by the door. She took her shoes off and lined them up the way she always lined them up, with the toes pointing toward the wall.
She walked over to her father at the desk. She was small. He was sitting. They were almost the same height like this.
She put her hand flat against his cheek.
The hand was small. The cheek was warm.
She did not say anything for a moment.
"Dad."
"Mm."
"You're sad."
"I am."
"Because of him."
"Mm."
"It's okay to be sad."
"I know."
"You can be sad and still eat."
"… You're right, kid."
"There's leftover rice from Hiroshi's mom in the blue container."
"… I'll eat."
"And I'm going to go up there with him for a little while."
"Rumi …"
"Just for a little while, Dad. I won't ask him about the cold thing. I'll just sit. He likes when I just sit."
"… Okay."
She went up.
-----
The roof was cold. Her brother was sitting where he always sat when he was thinking. The wrapped right hand was on his knee. His shoulders were tight.
She sat down next to him without saying anything.
She didn't lean against him this time. She had decided on the way up.
Today he needed her next to him. Not on him. The difference mattered.
Being nine did not stop her from knowing the difference.
He looked at her.
"… Hi, kid."
"Hi."
"How was school."
"Mrs. Aiba's face was purple."
"… Why?"
"Because I told the class the fisherman in the story was wrong, not the wife."
"…"
"She read us the one with the magic fish."
Ryo made a small sound that was the closest he had come to laughing in two weeks.
"… Was she wrong?"
"Yeah."
"Tell me the part you said."
She told him. She told him about the fisherman not saying we have enough. She told him about how the story was about silence, not greed. She told him about Yuki and the snail mouth, and the girl with the braids whose name was Inori, and Mr. Onishi and Botan, and the train problem, and the napkin Kujuro had folded for her.
She talked for nineteen minutes.
She had decided on the way up the ladder that nineteen was the right number.
He did not need her to ask anything. He did not need her to fix anything. He needed her to fill the air with a normal day. He needed proof that the apartment downstairs was still a place where Mrs. Aiba's face turned purple and Yuki couldn't draw a snail and Botan was old enough to look serious.
He needed the small world to keep being there.
She gave him the small world.
When she was done he was quiet a long moment.
Then he put his good hand on top of her head. He did not pat. He just rested it there, the way some big brothers did.
"… Thank you, Rumi."
"You're welcome, big brother."
"…"
"I noticed, you know."
"…"
"I'm not going to ask. But I noticed."
"… I know you noticed."
"Okay."
She got up. She went back down the ladder.
She did not look back.
-----
Inside, her father had eaten. Most of the rice was gone from the blue container. The book was still on the desk. He was still holding it at the wrong angle, but a little less wrong. He looked up when she came in.
"He's still up there."
"He'll come down."
"Did you …"
"I told him about Mrs. Aiba's face."
"…"
"He almost laughed."
"…"
"That's something."
Kujuro looked at his daughter for a long time.
He did not say what he was thinking. He never did when he could help it.
But Rumi was nine, and Kenzaki, and noticed more than she was supposed to. What her father was thinking was very loud in his face. She heard it anyway.
He was thinking this is the daughter you and I had, my love.
He was thinking it at someone who was not in the room.
-----
Later, after Rumi had gone to bed, after the lamps were down to their lowest setting, after the apartment was the kind of quiet only late hours produced.
Kujuro Kenzaki sat at the kitchen table.
He had Ryo's old training schedule from when the boy was thirteen open in front of him. He was reading it. He had been reading it for an hour.
Some pages had small notes in the margins. The notes were in his own handwriting. He recognized the handwriting because he was the one who had written them, four years ago, when he had thought no one was going to see them.
He turned a page.
There was a small dried flower pressed between two of the sheets. A persimmon blossom.
He did not remember putting it there.
He sat with the page open for a long time.
He did not turn it.
He did not close the schedule.
His hand rested on the table beside it. The hand was steady the way hands are steady when they have spent twenty-six years being steady on purpose.
He looked at his hand.
He looked at the flower.
He looked at the schedule.
He looked at the door of his daughter's bedroom, which was closed.
He looked at the ladder to the roof, which was empty now, because his son had finally come down.
He did not move.
The lamp behind him burned low.
The night went on around him.
He sat at the table, alone, with a four-year-old training schedule, and a pressed flower, and a hand that did not shake.
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 77