The Lake Read online

  My mom smiled brightly, and all of a sudden I remembered how, when I was little, I used to push the blanket off my stomach when I slept, and when my mom came in to check on me she would tell me to keep my tummy warm. Even in my dream, tears came to my eyes.

  All throughout my childhood, whenever my eyes fluttered open at night, my mom would be there, giving my bare stomach a gentle pat, rearranging my pajamas, spreading the blanket over me. How many times had I seen her do this?

  This is what it means to be loved … when someone wants to touch you, to be tender … My body still remembers that feeling, even now. My body knows not to respond to fake love. I guess maybe that’s what it means to have been brought up well.

  Mom, let me see you once more, I prayed. I want to touch you. To smell your smell.

  I miss even the club, in all its daylight dinginess, now that I know it’s gone.

  Maybe it wasn’t the most gorgeous place, but that’s where I come from. That world had my mom’s smell. In the end, I know it was as comforting to me as it was oppressive. I’m still a child, I still need my parents, and yet, suddenly, I find that I am walking alone.

  In my dream, I felt twice as sad and so weak it almost crushed me.

  Tears were trickling down my cheeks when I woke.

  Waking up with a start, I glanced over at Nakajima, who was lying beside me on a futon of his own, sound asleep. He had pushed his arm out from under the covers, and it looked cold, lying there on the tatami. I gave the comforter a tug, pulling it up over him.

  Now that I was back in the real world, the dream didn’t seem so sad. The sense of my mom, of her presence, kept radiating warmly through my chest, though I still didn’t feel any affection for the town where I’d grown up.

  Why, I wondered, had I suddenly gone back to being a child again? Probably somewhere deep down, a part of me was still holding on to the past, just a little …

  I was here enough now, though, to analyze my emotions.

  The one thing I kind of miss is the apartment, now that it’s not ours anymore. Sometimes I wish I could go back and live there again, and go back to being a child …

  I cast my memory back.

  The cheerful mood on Sunday mornings—the sounds of programs more fun and easygoing than anything on TV today streaming into the room as my dad sat taking it easy, waiting for what would be breakfast and lunch combined, while in the kitchen my mom experimented with a palette of imported ingredients, mixing up some sort of ethnic dish.… They were both slightly hungover from the night before, and looking back now I realize that something of the tender lethargy that follows sex hung in the air. Their languor made them seem so gentle, so sleepy. I used to lie in bed as a child, gazing out at that world, entranced.

  I wouldn’t mind going back to my hometown as it was then.

  And then, once again, I noticed with a start that Nakajima was lying beside me. That’s odd. What’s he doing here? If this is a dream, don’t let me wake up.

  Right, I remember. He decided to spend the night.

  Slowly my memory began to kick in.

  I found myself recalling, without exactly meaning to, the earnest sexual exchange we had bumbled through before we fell asleep, and I felt a bit embarrassed. Now we had our pajamas on, lying on our separate futons, as if nothing had happened. It was as though we had been living together for ages, and yet Nakajima’s presence still came as a shock. I felt somewhat bewildered, somewhat calm, somewhat giddy. Maybe that’s why I had dreamed of my mom.

  I don’t often get to spend time with such an unusual guy.

  For some reason I had made up my mind that Nakajima wouldn’t want to stay in the same room with anyone else for long. I had seen him in his apartment with a woman I assumed was his girlfriend, but I didn’t get the sense that they were always together.

  The night before, Nakajima had told me tearfully that he was afraid if he let this chance go, he’d never be able to have sex with anyone for the rest of his life. Oh please, I had said, you’re exaggerating. At the same time, imagining what it took for him to confess something like that, I started to feel a bit sorry for him, and I got sad myself. My mood grew somber.

  And then what happened? Did we go all the way? Or not?

  We hadn’t been drinking, and yet I could remember only fragments of what had happened. Whatever, I thought, who cares. He’s still here.

  Again the sense of my mom’s presence wafted through my mind.

  That was a sad dream, I thought. But it was beautiful.

  My mom was really there—the mom I wanted to see, who came so rarely.

  She always spoke her mind, she could laugh anything off, she was proud, and she made you feel that you could lean on her as much as you liked, it didn’t bother her, so eventually even I began to forget her true nature, which that façade concealed.

  But when I was little—on certain rare occasions when she smiled at me with a special, airy softness, or when we warmed our cold feet against each other in the futon we shared, or when we set out on an exhilarating walk the morning after a snowfall, leaving a line of footprints in the freshly fallen snow … at such times, her true self would surface, she was like a little girl, and it seemed as if she would stay that way forever.

  I stared blankly at Nakajima’s chest as I relived these memories, watching it rise and fall, and little by little I began to feel calmer, as if I were succumbing to hypnosis.

  Nakajima. Nakajima … funny-looking Nakajima.

  Those pinched nostrils, his stick-thin wrists and long fingers, the way his mouth gaped as he slept, the almost touching scrawniness of his neck, the childish fullness of his cheeks, and the way his smooth hair tumbled over his eyes, so that his narrow eyes themselves, with their long eyelashes, seemed to be hiding … I adored it all, everything about him. I found myself thinking that when, far in the future, Nakajima heaves his final breath and floats up into the sky to take his place among the stars (I know I’ve heard that metaphor before, but it seems to fit him so perfectly—in fact, the image of him becoming a star is almost too appropriate, considering how weak a hold life seems to have on him), my spirit will be with him. What I felt for him wasn’t exactly love, it was closer to a sense of surprise, even shock. And so I just kept watching him, unable to get completely involved.

  He’s still here today, I thought. He hasn’t disappeared. And I still feel the same way!

  Each day was so fresh, now that I had become hopelessly attracted to this puzzling young man, Nakajima. Ever since we started hanging out, I’d been out of sorts. For years now I had been thinking only of myself, struggling to get my own way, pressing relentlessly forward, my gaze trained on an ideal future—I’d been focused exclusively on putting as much distance as I could between me and my hometown, steadfastly refusing to put down roots. But Nakajima was so intense he had rolled right over me, and now he was dragging me along behind him.

  Here, time didn’t exist. We were cut off from rest of the world. Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.

  Sometimes I even wondered if what I was feeling was happiness.

  Time has stopped, and I’m looking at Nakajima, and that’s all I want.

  Yes, I felt, this must be what it’s like to be happy.

  I’ve lived an utterly ordinary life. Well, maybe not—I guess in a town out in the middle of nowhere, where just about anything provides fodder for gossip, being an illegitimate child was enough to make me extraordinary. But there’s nothing unusual about me as a person.

  So I can’t deny that Nakajima—who is rather odd—was sometimes a bit too much for me, and in my dealings with him, part of me was always ready to run away.

  All I knew about his past was that he had been through something terrible. We had never talked in any depth about what it was.

  Nakajima had adored his mother, but he said she had died, and whenever he talked about her he cried. Though I didn’t know the details, I could see he had been r
aised in a way that let him love her like that, openly and honestly; his heart, at least, was in the right place.

  And I could see that no one else in the world would ever be able to love him the way his mother must have loved him.

  I doubted I had the strength to deal with anything too awful, but somehow that realization seemed to make it easier for me to be around him.

  I’m not sure how long it took before Nakajima began staying over. At least a year.

  At some point, quite naturally, without either of us experiencing any big surge of excitement, he started coming to my apartment in the evenings.

  He’d drop by whenever I was there, and then when he felt the time had come, late at night, he would go home. Things probably continued like that, one unremarkable visit after the next, for a total of about three months, though I can’t say for sure.

  It wasn’t at all like we were living together. It was more like being roommates. We had our own rooms, they just happened to be a bit farther apart than usual. Nakajima’s presence didn’t put any pressure on me, either. Quite the reverse: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around. And that feeling stayed.

  When all this got started, I was living here in my own apartment, and Nakajima lived on the second floor of the building diagonally across from mine.

  I had a habit of standing at my window, looking out, and so did Nakajima, so we noticed each other, and before long we started exchanging nods. I guess it must have been pretty rare in a busy city like Tokyo for two people in two windows to nod to each other when their eyes met, but where I come from, out in the boonies, that was the most natural thing in the world, and Nakajima isn’t the sort of person to bother about such things. There’s a tenacity in him that’s beyond all that. The intensity of a person unafraid of death, at the end of his rope.

  Maybe that’s how I knew we would get along.

  That and the lankiness of his silhouette against the window, and the fact that it made such a perfect picture. Sometimes he let his scrawny arm dangle down over the sill, and I thought he looked wonderful when he did that, like a wild monkey.

  As time passed, I started opening my window when I woke up in the morning and glancing over at Nakajima’s. I didn’t care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything—it didn’t matter. I felt close to him, and I’d come to regard him as just another part of the scenery. For some reason I was convinced our paths would never actually cross.

  Even if I didn’t see Nakajima, I’d see his carefully hung-out laundry (he hung it so neatly it was practically an art form. I bet he could have worn his clothes straight off the line, without even ironing them. Compared to him, I was so slovenly I might as well have just bunched mine up and tossed them on the veranda), and every so often I’d see a woman who was clearly older than Nakajima lounging around near the window, and I’d think Ah, his girlfriend spent the night. Good for him.

  Little by little, an inch at a time, the distance between us narrowed.

  I always like to be near the window, no matter how cold it gets, so even during the winter, he and I were constantly waving to each other.

  “How are you today?” I’d say.

  “I’m okay!” I couldn’t hear his voice, but I could read his lips.

  And he would smile.

  It was as if living where we did had imposed a special destiny on us, giving us feelings that no one else could share. Day after day, we always kept an eye on each other’s windows, and so it felt almost as if we were living together. When Nakajima’s lights went out, I’d start to think that maybe it was time for me to hit the sack, too, and whenever I came back after a trip home and opened my window, Nakajima would lean out his and shout, “Welcome back!”

  Neither of us realized what was happening. That simply by keeping an eye on each other, without even giving it any thought, just by noticing the sound of a certain window sliding open, we were already starting to fall in love.

  Eventually, as I accompanied my mom down the long, long path she was headed down, making the trip back and forth from my apartment to my hometown again and again, I found myself taking as much comfort in the glow of Nakajima’s window as I did in returning to my own apartment. During those heartbreaking days, that was all the happiness I had.

  The time I spent with my dad and my dying mom in that other place left me with plenty of warm memories, it’s true, but the moment I stepped from the dark station platform into the train that would carry me back to my apartment, I would be alone. My mom’s only child, alone.

  I had to make this journey by myself.

  As I stood there on the platform, the hard reality of my mom’s imminent death would fuse with my memories of her, and with the air of boredom that clung to the people around me as they went about their ordinary lives—everything bled together, and I felt lost. I had no idea where I belonged, whether I was an adult or a child, where my home was, where my roots were. My head began to swim.

  I was so agonized, I couldn’t even think, Why don’t you fall in love with Nakajima, then? Let him be more of a comfort. Go on, put yourself in his hands! Wouldn’t it be nice to see that figure in the window up close? No, it never even occurred to me.

  And yet he was there, in exactly the right place, when I needed him. I’m convinced it would never have worked out if he had been any closer than he was, or any farther away.

  Our windows were pretty far apart, with a street running between them, but I didn’t feel the distance at all. We seemed, somehow, to be connected. It can’t have been that easy for us to hear each other over the voices of passersby and the noise of traffic, but I seemed to have uncannily little trouble making out what he was saying. The sight of his pale face hovering dimly in the darkness, a carefree smile on his lips, made me feel better than anything.

  I didn’t go out of my way to tell Nakajima when my mom died.

  He and I used to go for tea sometimes if we met on the street, and that was what happened when I finally returned from the funeral. I hadn’t been home for three weeks, so I cleaned the apartment and then went out to buy groceries; I ran into Nakajima on the way. We went into Starbucks, found two seats at the counter by the window, and sat down with our drinks.

  The hubbub of the place and the scent of coffee and the voices of so many young people left me feeling a bit dazed, since I had been away from these things for a while. It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambience was what I’d miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I’m sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.

  “I won’t have to spend weekends away anymore,” I said. “I have hardly any family left in my hometown now, so I’ll just go for the occasional visit.”

  Nakajima took a sip of his coffee, frowning at its heat.

  “Your mother died?” he said.

  I was taken aback. “How did you know?”

  “You’ve been going back so often lately that, well, I kind of …”

  His answer didn’t explain anything. I guess he noticed how out of it I’ve been, I thought, that clued him in. Nakajima picks up on these things. My reflection in the window looked a lot smaller than usual. I looked kind of wilted, fuzzy around the edges. Maybe if you knew what to look for, you could tell at a glance that I had lost a parent.

  “I won’t be lonely on the weekends, then. I shouldn’t say this, I know, but I’m glad. I mean, it was so dull without you, last week, and the week before that, with your window totally dark. You have the nicest window, you know? None of the others can even compete. It’s not flashy like the others, or bleary—your window gives off this nice, quiet light.”

  “Really?”

  I wasn’t sure I liked being told that it was good my mother had died, but I’d been subjected to so many formulaic expressions of shared grief in the past weeks that I was kind of touched by his honesty.

  “I mean it. When your light is out, Chihiro, I feel so alone I can hardly bear it.”

  Whene
ver Nakajima said my name, every single time, it sparkled like a treasure. I had no idea why. Wow—did you see how that flashed? Say it again for me, please!

  Only I couldn’t tell him that, so I simply replayed his voice, speaking my name, within me. Something in his tone made me feel, for the first time, a sexy thrill in being with him; but that wasn’t all—for some reason, it also made me feel proud.

  “I guess it’s good I came back, then, huh?”

  I couldn’t suppress my tears as I said this; I cried a little.

  “I know, it hurts when your mom dies,” Nakajima said. “It was hard for me, too.”

  Not knowing much about his background, I simply thought:

  So he doesn’t have a mother, either.

  “Yeah.” I sniffled. “But it’s a road we all have to walk, right?”

  I squeezed the big cup of chai between my hands as if I were hugging it to me, clinging to it. And then, the very next moment, all the things I’d had to confront in such a short space of time, and the fear that maybe I no longer really had a home or a family to go back to—all that lifted, just a little, and I felt free, at ease.

  About two weekends later, Nakajima started coming over. It wasn’t a big deal, he just came. One second, it seemed, he was in that window, and then the next he was in mine. So I didn’t even feel the need to rethink our relationship.

  We had run into each other in the street earlier, just like always, when he asked:

  “By the way, Chihiro, do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not anymore,” I replied. “I was dating this busy editor who only had weekends free, and after I started caring for my mother we never had time to get together, so he dumped me.”

  “Ah. The bozo didn’t like it that your mom was more important.”

  His use of the word “bozo” made me grin.

  Everything he did was adorable. I always saw the best in him. We’d taken our time turning toward each other, from our two windows, piling each little moment on the next until, deep in our hearts, something clicked. And so the surface remained unruffled.