At the end of the funeral, they did not open the window of the coffin. Her mother had decided that, someone said in a low voice. Her face unseen, she lay beneath the flowers.
It was two nights later, past three in the morning. Only the desk lamp was on. The desk calendar had been turned on the day of the funeral, and no one had turned it since.
At the edge of the desk lay the cloth-bound book I was still keeping for her. Her laughing voice from the night of the twenty-third, at the front door—"Please don't be late tomorrow, okay?" "Five o'clock. I'll be waiting."—was still there, deep in my ears.
There was one more thing on the desk: a paper bag. I had taken it out of my inside coat pocket on the way back from the hospital. I had taken what was inside out of the bag and left it lying bare. An omamori charm pouch, white, with a navy cord. The thing I was supposed to give her the next day.
Outside the window it stayed black, and now and then, far off, a single car went by.
I didn't know how long Sakurai's voice had been flowing at the back of my head.
"My grandmother—when she was young, something seems to have happened to her here."
"I was told they were never able to be together."
It was her level voice from the night of the summer festival, on the wooden bench at the shrine.
—there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts.
Only the end of what that voice on the bench had said rose up in my head, all in one piece.
In a corner of my mind I knew it was absurd. Doing something like this would never bring her back.
Even so, there was nowhere else I could go. There was only that place, the one she had taken me to.
I stood up. I took my coat and wound my navy scarf around my neck. I put in only my wallet and my phone. My eyes stopped on the cloth-bound book at the edge of the desk.
—I want to give it back.
I thought it.
I picked up the omamori and put it in the right side of my inside pocket. In the same place as on the morning I had left the house.
—I'll take this too.
I checked the feel of the cloth once, through my coat.
I took the first train. There were three people in the car. At the end of the priority seats, an older man slept with his hands folded on his lap. In a seat in the middle, a woman with the shoulders of her coat set at a slant had a paperback open. By the window at the very back, a young man pressed his forehead to the glass, only his eyes open to the darkness outside. Every face stopped just short of its outline. Each came into my field of vision and, once in, went no further.
I got off at the station and went over one slope. The hydrangeas above the wall had withered, shriveled all the way to the tips of their brown edges. Between the bare winter branches, the white sky before dawn showed through. It was the wall where, on the night of the summer festival, she had stopped and looked at the blue. There was no blue left anywhere now.
In front of the torii gate, I bowed at the same angle as that day and passed through. That day we had bowed side by side. All that remained was the memory of her head rising a little before mine. Halfway up the gravel slope, I set my right hand on the moss at the rim of the water basin. The moss was frozen white with frost, and fine crystals like thorns pricked my palm and stayed there without melting. The cold reached halfway into the bone in a single beat, deeper than on that night. The grounds opened out in the color of dark gravel, and the sky overhead was still the color of night. The moon had long since set, and only along the eastern edge lay a whiteness, like a single thin sheet of paper pasted there. There were no lights, no people. It had not started snowing yet.
It was less that I knelt than that my knees gave out. Both knees dropped onto the gravel. Every single grain came up through my kneecaps and along the bones of my shins. I pressed my forehead to the ground. The corners of the gravel dug into the thin skin of my forehead, and the cold climbed from above my brows to the backs of my eyes. My breath spread white close to the ground and was gone at once.
I drew both hands out of my inside pocket. In my right hand I held the omamori. I gripped it again in front of my chest. The corners of the cloth pressed into my palm. With the pad of my thumb, I traced the embroidered characters once. The edges of the raised stitching still came back clearly to my finger. A wind blew once from beyond the torii gate, and stopped.
—Please, bring her back. Please bring her back.
With my forehead still on the gravel, I repeated only those sounds.
The edges of my vision lurched and tilted, and a ringing rose in my ears. Behind my eyelids, a white light grew stronger.
The whiteness thinned from the outside in, and the cold along the edge of the futon came back. I was lying on my back, and the grain of the ceiling was in its usual place. The clock by my pillow said two minutes past eight in the morning. Through the gap in the curtains, a single shaft of low December morning light fell across the floorboards.
At the edge of the desk, the cloth-bound book lay at the same angle I had set it down at on the twenty-third.
I sat up. For one beat, my legs remembered the cold of the floor. I opened the top drawer of the desk. The omamori, white with a navy cord, was there, still in its paper bag. It was there, in the place it had been before I moved it to my coat.
At the base of my right little finger was a faint bruise where a grain of gravel had dug in.
I picked up the phone by my pillow. At the top of the screen, in white, it said December 24. The day of the week, the pale color of the lock screen, were just as they had been that morning. I opened the calendar with my finger. In the box for the twenty-fourth, the evening meeting was still there, not erased.
—I've come back.
—I have until this evening. I can save her.