The wind sounded once over the branches. After that, there was no sound at all.
I opened my eyes. There was no feeling of something slipping out through my palms. Neither the warmth of my hands nor the weight on my shoulders had risen or fallen. What I had meant to offer up had not been taken anywhere.
Only the cold of the frost on the rim of the offering box came back to the backs of my hands. Beside me, now, there was no one.
I started to put my hands together again, and stopped. The shape of what I was offering hadn't yet come together on my side. I bowed my head and turned back toward the approach.
My footsteps on the gravel lined up along the way back at the same intervals as on the way there. Each time I noticed them lining up, my feet grew heavier by half a step. On the way down the slope toward the station, the hem of my coat brushed the tip of a withered hydrangea branch, just once. It was the branch that made the dry sound.
My face was reflected in the window of the train home. Neither around my brows nor at my mouth was there any line that hadn't been there on the way out. Beyond the window, the withered color of the ridges between the rice fields streamed past in one unbroken run. From the pay phone just outside the ticket gate, I asked to be put through to the ward, and a night-shift nurse's voice told me there had been no change in his condition. It wasn't that it had been refused. It had never arrived, I thought.
Which way had my grandmother herself read it? Had she herself been someone who offered something up at that shrine? I had to go and ask. On the December grid on the wall beside the kitchen, the square for the weekend where I had stopped my fingertip drew closer day by day.
The Saturday of the following week, I took a local train a little before noon. There was about a week left until the end of the year. On the phone, I had said only, "Can I come home this Saturday?" After a moment, my mother answered, "Of course. I'll be waiting."
At the last station on the line, my mother was standing just this side of the ticket gate. On the shoulders of her chestnut coat had settled an air a little early for the year's end. "Welcome home." "I'm home." A shopping bag peeked out of her handbag, and the scent of mandarin peel, one mandarin's worth, rose from its mouth.
The way to the house was the same as it had been since I was a child. My father was watching television in the living room. "How've things been?" "Fine. Same as ever." My mother didn't ask anything more. She said nothing about Toru, nothing about the hospital. What I didn't say, she was kind enough not to ask. I took a mandarin from the basket on the kotatsu and peeled away even the thin skin of each segment before putting it in my mouth. It was a habit from childhood, and my mother no longer said anything about it.
We ate a simple dinner early in the evening. I helped a little with the dishes, and as I was about to go up to my room, my mother called from the kitchen.
"Shiori. Do you have a minute?"
My mother went ahead of me to the altar room. She slid open the door and switched on the lamp at the corner of the low table. The yellow light raised the wood grain of the table at a low angle. On the tatami beside the altar, as always, sat the paulownia box. In front of the altar, my mother adjusted the position of the incense holder slightly with her fingertips, her hands moving a beat longer than usual. She sat down, lifted the box in both hands, and set it on the low table.
"This is Grandma's. We've been keeping it here all this time, but... I thought I'd give it to you."
Between "all this time" and "to you" there was a short pause that served no purpose in the sentence. Her voice was at its usual pitch, but only the last sound dropped to a place just slightly lower. "I feel like that would be better," she added, and stopped there. Without saying the rest, she stroked the lid of the paulownia box gently with her fingertips, just once.
"Okay."
Before we came into the altar room, my mother had paused once over the dishes and retied her apron strings. She had decided on tonight, I realized belatedly. On a call one day in early summer, I had told her just a little about Toru. On the other end of the line, she had shifted her grip on the receiver once, and then only answered briefly, "I see." That for the half year since, she had been thinking, little by little, of moving where this box belonged—that lay just beyond the weight on the low table.
I held out both hands. My mother set the paulownia box slowly onto my palms. It was lighter than I'd expected. The weight of the box told me first how few things were inside. After her hands let go, she closed her fingers once more, and rubbed the pads of her thumbs together twice at the waist of her apron. It was a motion like shaking off, from her own hands, a weight she had held for a long time.
"Thank you."
She nodded and went back to the other side of the sliding door. The lamp's yellow light cut out only the corner of the box's lid.
I stayed in the altar room. The sounds of the house falling asleep came down around me. My father's snoring, the hum of the refrigerator motor. On a mid-December night, with no preparations yet for the New Year's Eve bells, the road outside was quiet.
I checked how cold my hands were. They weren't trembling. The faint scent of incense reached as far as the table.
My grandmother's memorial photo was in its usual place. Her gentle smile, from a summer festival evening when I was in middle school. I lit a stick of incense, stood it upright, and put my hands together. The smoke rose straight and thin toward the ceiling.
"Grandma. I'm going to open it now," I murmured inside, without voicing it.
I rested both hands on the paulownia box. With the edges of my nails I pressed the four corners of the lid in turn, and traced the seam of the paulownia once. The fine vertical grain of the wood came back faintly to the tips of my nails.
I took the edge of the unbleached cloth and slowly removed it. On the lid, faint traces of my grandmother's fingers remained. They were a little narrower than mine. Without pressing down, I simply laid my fingers over them.
The fingertips of my right hand touched the watch face on my left wrist, just once. I took one deep breath. I opened the lid. The paulownia joint gave a single faint creak. The dry smell of old paper rose, mingling faintly with the scent of incense. Inside were a folded letter and a small omamori charm pouch.
My hand went to the charm first. My fingertips trembled faintly. I took it out with both hands. Its texture had sunk thin by as much as all those long years. The white ground had gone a pale yellow like old washi, and the navy silk cord had faded all the way to gray. From the edge of the cloth came a scent touched with sweetness, like an old sachet.
On the front, a little of the navy-thread embroidery remained. The color had nearly washed out, and the tips of the sweeping strokes were half dissolved into the cloth. Even so, I could just follow the outline of the characters. The stop at the end of a stroke, the angle of a sweep, the proportions of the horizontal strokes. With the charm on my palm, I laid my thumb on the embroidery. My finger read the raised thread before my eyes could.
They were characters I knew.
On the evening of December twenty-fourth a year ago, Toru had held out a small packet, white with a navy cord, saying, "Here." The same design was still inside my right coat pocket now. The way the outlines were drawn, the angle of the sweeps—they were the same.
I held my breath. That shrine, I confirmed to myself. My grandmother, too, had stood in those grounds where Toru and I had spoken the legend aloud. Before I had read the letter, the object had answered, ahead of any words.
I set the charm at the corner of the table. Next I took out the letter with both hands. The paper had grown thin and soft by as much as the long years. There was nothing written on the outside, and the edges of the folds had yellowed a little.
I slowly opened the folds. At the very top, in my grandmother's hand, was a date from the Showa years that I had never known. Her handwriting was younger than in her later years, and stronger. In the stop of each stroke remained the way she had set down her pen without hesitation.
—I was setting out to learn what my grandmother had known.