I squared the sheets on my knees and looked down once more at the name written on the front. The closed bundle of paper had grown a size heavier than when it had been in my bag on the way here. The monitor at his bedside went on setting down its sounds at the same unchanging interval.
Without leaning back in the chair, I kept my back straight on the front edge of the seat and laid both hands on the bundle on my knees. So as not to look at his unmoving face, and so as not to be aware of not looking, I lowered my eyes to the edge of the paper.
I decided to put things in order, once. He doesn't wake up. The doctor had said there was nothing abnormal in the numbers, not in his brain, not in his heart. The tests had picked up nothing. The cause was unknown. Something that didn't show in the numbers was keeping him asleep. That was not on the doctor's side of things. It was probably on the side of that legend.
Toru's voice came down to me from that day, when we had stood side by side before the offering box. I had told him the line as a story I'd heard from my grandmother.
—"To take back the one you love from fate, there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts."
Toru thought for a moment, then traced the wood grain of the bench seat with only his eyes.
—"Something like the two sides of your own heart, maybe, I thought."
I didn't answer right away. The hydrangea leaves were stroked once, then went still again.
—"So that's how you read it."
I repeated it, still looking at the hands in my lap. After a moment, I went on.
—"I—"
—"I'd been reading it as two people's hearts."
Toru drew a short breath,
—"Oh."
—"That might be more natural."
The conversation moved on to the blue of the hydrangeas, to the forecast and whether we'd need umbrellas. Leaving the line of the legend set down deep inside the conversation, we passed on over it.
I brought my eyes back to the letter on my knees. It was I who had turned the talk aside to the color of the hydrangeas. That day, I had certainly said "two people's hearts." Having said it, neither of us had stepped any further. What we hadn't stepped into had piled up, now, inside the silence on his side written on this paper. That it had not been a reading one person could see through to the end alone—that much, at least, the thickness of these sheets was telling me.
I brought my forehead close to the backs of the hands on my knees, just once. My forehead didn't touch them. Before it touched, I drew back. No tears came. Instead of coming, something heavier than breath sank deep below my collarbone. I let out a long breath. His eyelashes didn't move.
I raised my face. As though looking at the joints of my fingers one by one, I wrote it down on the paper inside my head. I am alive. The accident on Christmas Eve has become something that never happened. His prayer was heard. It was heard, and I am breathing. The letter said that he had not been in a position to choose between the two readings, and had prayed alone. It also said that if he could have chosen, he would have wanted it to be the reading of two people's hearts—if my love disappeared too, he wouldn't have to leave me in the pain of loving someone who didn't love me back. Read as it was written, a divided heart. If that reading had been enough, the price should have been his feelings for me inside himself, that alone. And that is already gone.
That far, I could put in order.
But past the order, one line remained.
—And yet, he doesn't wake up.
I lowered my gaze to the edge of the sheet. It's still here. The color of the scenes he's in. The pitch of his voice. The shadows of the branches in the hospital window. Something like a warmth that rises up inside me when I touch those things. If it's been left, I can go and lay it down.
—Maybe a divided heart isn't enough.
An image of myself standing before the offering box rose behind my eyelids. In the same place as that day, standing alone this time. Putting my hands together, and offering up one piece of the warmth that is here now.
Two hearts, my grandmother had said. He had prayed alone. The line of reasoning beyond that hadn't yet come together anywhere. There was only a shapeless premonition that one side had been left behind. And the one in a position to go and lay it down was, now, only me.
I'll go and try, I murmured at his bedside, without voicing it.
—Next time, I'll be the one to save you.
I told him so without voicing it. I wrapped the bundle of sheets twice in my handkerchief, folded the same way as on the way here. My fingers remembered the movements from wrapping it on the way here. I laid it on the side table, face down, the name underneath.
"I'll leave them here. Your words."
There was no answer. I stood, and returned the chair to where it had been. Just before the door, I turned around. On the side table, the bundle of sheets wrapped in the handkerchief lay white. The western light had already climbed to the top of the wall.
The Saturday of the following week, I left home early in the morning. I changed trains once, and from the station I climbed the hill. On the December approach, not a single hydrangea leaf remained. Where the leaves had all fallen, only rows of damp black branches lined the edge of the gravel slope.
The moss grew in the same places, in the same amount, as on that summer day. I reached the top of the slope and stood before the offering box. Compared with the summer, when Toru's right shoulder had been half a step ahead of my left, today I placed myself a little closer to the center. There was no one beside me.
I didn't ring the bell. I only put my hands together.
—I offer up one part of what I feel now for him, inside me.
—Please save him.
Let his eyes open, I added at the end.