It was a night in December.
I left the lab, stopped by the hospital, and went back to my apartment. I made tea in the kitchen. I always poured the hot water into a teacup once before pouring it over the leaves. The warmth that reached my palm grew softer by the length of one breath. I carried it to the desk.
The book was in the middle of the desk. An old cloth binding, its edges faded. The book my grandmother had paged through again and again when she was young, the one that had stayed on Toru's desk all that time. Ten days since I had received it from Toru's mother, and it had lain face down in the same spot. Several times I had touched the cover and put it back without opening it. On my fingertips, only the direction of the old cloth's weave remained.
I set the cup beside the book. I pulled out the chair and folded my hands on the desk.
—Today, I'll make this the end.
That day too, he did not open his eyes in Room 408. I spent the usual hour in the chair, left the usual words there without saying them aloud, and went home. Looking at my face reflected in the train window, I thought I looked a little tired. Perhaps it wasn't a little.
When I stopped short of a crossing light, I thought about the book on the desk. Tonight I would open it. Like a ritual to draw a line. I had not yet put together any reason beyond that.
I laid both hands on the cover. The smell of old paper and cloth rose a moment late. I slipped a finger under the edge and turned it.
In the lower right corner of the endpaper, in my grandmother's hand, was a date from some year in Showa. It didn't say what the date was for. The next page, and the next. On the left, foreign verse set horizontally; on the right, the translation set vertically. It was a book I had opened now and then ever since it was handed down to me in middle school.
Just past the halfway point, my finger stopped. There was a step in the thickness of the pages, and the pad of my finger caught it first. Folded letter paper had been tucked inside. It wasn't old. The way the paper had dulled spoke of years different from the yellowing of my grandmother's endpaper. From a little over a year ago, perhaps.
Before I picked up the letter, a single line on the right-hand page of the open spread came into view.
Farewell. The darkness takes me back.
Act Three. The page where he turns around. The meaning, and its connection to the bundle of paper in front of me, did not come together yet.
I left the book open and drew the letter out with both hands. It was thicker than I had expected. I set it on the desk and unfolded it.
The cover sheet. A single line in the center. Written in fountain pen. The ink had bled at the first sweep of the stroke, and at the final stop, a long time had been left to rest.
It was handwriting I had seen many times in the signature column of library checkout cards. It was written more carefully than any of those. "To Shiori Sakurai." In handwriting I had seen many times, my name had been placed on the front of a bundle of paper I knew nothing about.
The back of my throat narrowed without a sound. The breath I had started to take stopped halfway down my chest, and into the pads of the fingers holding the edge of the paper, my own pulse came back late.
I turned the sheets. One, then another. Toru's handwriting moved across the paper, with wide spaces between the lines. Only my eyes slid over the words. Several times along the way, the meaning of the words caught up late, and was left behind again. Whether I had finished reading, or had only run out of pages, I couldn't tell. Beneath the last sheet, six lines had been added in a different hand, set down in writing that was too neat. There too, only my eyes traced them.
I put the bundle back in its original order and refolded it. I placed the cover sheet on top again. The steam had stopped rising. It was long past midnight.
At last I opened my mouth.
"Ah."
That was all that came out of my throat. The fingers that had rested on the edge of the paper stayed in that shape, then dropped soundlessly onto the desk.
Tomorrow, I would read this bundle at his bedside, from the beginning. I would read it aloud. Words read at a desk had nowhere to go here.
I wrapped the letter twice in a cloth handkerchief. As I wrapped it, behind my eyes I was measuring the empty space on the side table by his pillow.