By the time we reached the front of the library, the western sky had already begun to take on a pale orange. That pale orange lay at a slant, too, across the glass of the automatic doors, the one thing about the old building that looked oddly new.
The taxi stopped a little short of the library's main entrance.
I lowered the wheelchair onto the asphalt. The university had already gone into winter break. It had always been a library few people used. On the evening of Christmas Eve, almost no students came down the slope this far.
Three steps short of the automatic doors, my feet stopped. My weight tipped back onto my heels, and for a while I didn't move.
I put a foot forward again. I stopped the wheelchair squarely in front of the automatic doors, crouched, and looked at Toru's face. In the evening light, the navy of his scarf had sunk into a deep gray-blue.
"I used to see you here. Many times."
My voice was neither low nor high. Toru's eyelashes did not move.
"From the end of spring until the beginning of summer. You would come out from between the shelves with books in your arms and pass right by me."
"'Oh, excuse me.' 'Not at all.' There were so many evenings that were only that."
The aisle was only as wide as one grown person. We hadn't walked side by side, and our eyes hadn't met. I was speaking of the evenings when our shoulders had simply passed each other in that aisle. I hadn't even known his name, and yet somewhere along the way I had come to know his footsteps.
Then I let my voice sink a little.
"One rainy day, here, we shared an umbrella."
It was a night at the end of May, at the very start of the rainy season. You had stopped just short of the exit and were looking up at the falling rain. I took a long dark-gray umbrella from my bag and held it out to you by the handle, with both hands. One umbrella wasn't enough for two, and we walked up the slope to the research building with our shoulders drawn half a step closer. In the rain-damp air, my right shoulder alone went cold before the rest of me.
"A few days later, you came with the umbrella in your arms, dry now, and bowed your head to me."
"You said you wanted to thank me, and so, before I knew it, I was the one who asked you out."
That there was an old planetarium on the edge of town, that I had wanted to go and see it on my own—once I said it aloud, my voice sounded brighter than I'd expected, and the ends of my words rose a little too high. Only after I'd finished asking did I notice my cheeks were hot. That night, even my steps up the slope were light.
I stood and pushed the wheelchair one step forward. The tires rolled in right under the sensor, and a beat late, the glass slowly parted to the left and right.
—Oh. That day, too.
That day, on his way out into the rain, he had stopped once in front of the automatic doors. I had not remembered the sight of his back until tonight.
The library's lukewarm air flowed out into the winter air. The smell of books, the smell of paper, the faint smell of floor wax—smells I had breathed every day of my life here—came today to meet me on the outside of the glass.
"Let's go in."
The tires rolled onto the old boards. Beneath my feet the floor creaked faintly. The jolting of the seams fell away, and for the first time the whole wheelchair moved forward without shaking. The automatic doors closed behind us. I didn't look back.
Half the fluorescent lights in the lobby had been switched off, but the lights over the stacks were still on, waiting for us. No one was at the counter. Only the hum of the air conditioning reached my ears, a little louder than usual. On the boards there was nothing but the sound of my shoes and the sound of the tires.
At the back of the lobby, on the left, the entrance to the stacks. Up the stairs, at the far end of the second floor, beyond that, the folklore studies section. The last place we would trace today. I slowly pushed the wheelchair toward the entrance to the stacks. The white of the omamori was still white on the blanket.