When I passed through the library's automatic doors, the sound of the tires, which had vanished on the carpet, came back over the seams of the pavement as a trembling in the wheelchair. The December evening sky had already tilted toward its darker colors. It was the hour when moonlight begins, faintly, to fall.
The taxi was waiting a little past the shade of the shrubbery, its engine running low.
"To the shrine next, please," I asked in a low voice.
In the mirror, I saw the driver give a short nod. It was the nod of someone who knew the old shrine.
By the time we reached the entrance to the approach, the thin December sunset was tracing an orange edge along the base of the torii gate's pillars. I got out of the taxi and lowered the wheelchair onto the sidewalk.
"We'll be back in about an hour. Would you mind waiting a little farther on?"
The driver nodded quietly, switched off the engine, and pulled the car over to the edge of the roundabout. I stopped the wheelchair just before the torii gate. Pillars with their paint worn away, moss at their base. —When Toru and I had climbed up here that summer in the first part, hydrangeas had been heaped up here. Not one of them was left now.
I went around to the front of the wheelchair and crouched, straightened the blanket, and redid half a turn of the scarf at his neck. As I drew my hand back, the pad of my right finger brushed the watch face at the left wrist, just once. The white of the omamori on his lap had stayed where it was all afternoon, and even in the thin light of dusk it still kept its whiteness.
"This is the shrine. The shrine I came to with you."
"On the night of the summer festival a year ago, on the street at the foot of the hill, we ate Uji kintoki shaved ice, with one spoon."
I went on with only the shape of my lips. At summer festivals, my grandmother always had this. That was what I said. Tonight, it isn't too early anymore, I said too. You really did take a bite. Tonight, we won't eat anything.
There was no answer. I passed under the torii gate. On the gravel path, the feet of worshippers had trodden down a level strip just wide enough to push the wheelchair's tires through. It was the same width Toru and I had walked, the two of us, that summer in the first part. What I hadn't noticed that summer, I noticed tonight.
I went up the gentle slope one push at a time. A faint tightness rose between my shoulder blades, and I adjusted my grip on the handles. With a hundred and eighty centimeters riding in it, the chair was less pushed than sent forward, held up by my weight. A tire rolled back over a single piece of gravel, and the chair slipped a little forward. I pushed back against it with my shoulder and shifted my feet. Twice I steadied my breath through my nose. —Grandmother rested twice somewhere on this path too, didn't she.
Partway up the approach, the wheelchair passed the base of a stone lantern. A year ago, in summer, a small faded omamori had been left here. I said to you, "It seems people used to leave charms here before they went home." You didn't answer.
But at some point—I don't know when—you had come all the way here by yourself, hadn't you. From the little window of the shrine office, which opens only a few times a year, you bought a single charm, white with a navy cord, and took it home. That charm lay now on the blanket over your knees. The white with the navy cord that you gave me on the evening of Christmas Eve a year ago, after the rescue.
Without my noticing, the crunch of gravel under the tires had settled into a steady interval. It was the feeling from when I was a child, walking half a step behind my grandmother, measuring the distance left by footsteps alone.
The water basin on the right. On the low stone walls on either side, the tiers where hydrangeas had lined up in summer were now only the shadows of black branches. At the top of the slope, a level space thinly spread with gravel opened out. There was no wind, yet from the very highest part of the air, white flecks came drifting slowly down, one, then two. Ahead, a modest worship hall, and before it the offering box. Behind the worship hall, the main sanctuary had let only the outline of its roof sink faintly into the darkness. Tonight my steps would not go that far. I could take him only as far as the front of the worship hall—and that was enough.
I stopped the wheelchair just short of the offering box and stepped on the brake to lock the wheels. I went around to the right side of the chair and placed myself so that his right shoulder was half a step behind me. It was the mirror image of how we had stood that summer.
I crouched slowly and set one knee on the gravel. The night's cold rose from the edges of my leather shoes up to my kneecap. I tucked the hair that had fallen over Toru's forehead behind his ear. I brought my face close and touched my lips to his forehead. Briefly, just once. The skin beneath my lips was not cold. It was the warmth that the artery at his neck had carried, inside the scarf, for months.
I straightened up. There was no lipstick mark on his forehead. That morning, in front of the mirror, I had hesitated for half a breath and not put any on. I had chosen to leave no trace.
I rose and stood again before the offering box. Toru's wheelchair was just behind the right side of my body, about a shoulder's width away. I put no offering in. I didn't touch the bell rope either. The legend says nothing about putting anything in or touching anything. Toru hadn't put anything in, and hadn't touched it.
I slowly closed my eyes and recited it in my heart. Word by word, so as not to make a mistake. In the form my grandmother had taught me.
To take back the one you love from fate, there is no way but to erase their image from two hearts.
Grandmother, too, stood here. In the same place, the same words.
I slid my right heel back by a heel's width. The outside of my heel just barely touched the metal of the wheelchair's footrest. His weight was surely there, half a step behind me—I made sure of it with the edge of my foot, and then, in the space of one indrawn breath, I went on.
—This time, from two people's hearts. I have come, myself, to complete the half that was left.
My eyes still closed, I moved the little finger of my right hand, resting on the wheelchair's handle, just once. Not so much to feel for the outline of his fingers through the blanket as to let him know the outline of mine.
That day at the end of December, when I had put my hands together alone before this offering box, there had been a gap the width of a finger between the hand I held out and whatever was supposed to receive it. Tonight, his presence filled that gap.
—The second person's share—I offer it myself.
I recited it briefly in my heart, toward the offering box. Then I laid one more line over it, toward my own body. Before I finished saying it, there was a pause of half a breath. I lowered my eyes toward the charm on his lap and stroked the edge of the embroidery once with my fingertip. The cloth had settled at the temperature of skin. My breath stretched out long and white and lingered a beat without coming apart.
—I will erase you, the one I love.
There was no wind. The warmth that had been right beside the coolness of the cloth when the sides of our fingers touched at the library shelf. The voice on the shrine bench, lowered half a step: "Two hearts, hm." The weight of his right hand, laid today on the cloth cover of the book. Not one at a time, but all together, I offered them up. Not the outline of his face, but what moved in my chest when I thought of it.
Below my collarbone, a single passage for breath narrowed. My side and his side behind me drained away all at once, at the same height. The breath I had drawn in did not come back; becoming neither the sound of gravel nor the wind, it receded faintly somewhere into the shrine grounds.
A single line of damp down my cheek. I didn't wipe it away. Toru's face blurred slightly in my mind. I remembered his face. I remembered it, and over it a single thin film had come down.
I opened my eyes. The edge of the offering box, the last orange of dusk, the moonlight beginning faintly to fall. From half a step behind me came a single, very faint sound, like the rustle of cloth—or so I thought. There was no wind. There was no reason for anything to make a sound. I didn't check. I didn't turn to look half a step behind me.
I crouched and took the charm from the blanket. Holding it in both hands, I set it gently down on the gravel beside the offering box. In the dim light, the loop of cord cast a semicircular shadow on the ground.
"I return this to you." I set it down without putting it into words.
The shadow of my hand fell over the white on the gravel for an instant, then drew back. On the outline of the white after it had gone, I thought I saw, for just an instant, the shadow of my grandmother's hand laid over it. At an angle shifted by all those years, there had been a hand that set the same white in the same place. I didn't check.
I drew one deep breath.
"Did Grandmother leave hers here too, I wonder?"
When I breathed out, the shadow of my grandmother's hand could no longer be seen. Only the shadow of my own hand remained. I stood up.
Beside the worship hall stood an old cherry tree. I looked up at it. At the end of December, not even buds had yet risen at the tips of its branches. On the branches, the powdery snow that had just begun to fall was starting to settle, one flake, then two.
But the branches were there, surely. Next year they would bud again.
A slight wind blew. It passed through as if coming undone, and stopped. It wasn't cold. A single snowflake touched my cheek. Without checking, I closed my eyes.
On the white of the charm I had left on the gravel beside the offering box, a flake of snow had come to rest. It had not melted; it stayed on the embroidery, still in the shape of a crystal. I turned to face the worship hall once more. Slowly I bent forward, bowed my head deeply, and slowly straightened. The shadow of the bell rope was not swaying. The wind had already stopped.
I rested both hands on the wheelchair's handles. Under my palms came the faintest sway of the frame bearing his weight. For a moment I looked at Toru's profile. Closed eyelids, the shadow of his lashes, the faint warmth of his neck inside the scarf. The man he used to be was not here.
I raised my head. At the tips of the branches above the torii gate, the outline of the cherry boughs, thinly beginning to gather snow, cut into the night in narrow shadows. Below those branches, when I sent my gaze beyond the torii gate, the last orange of the set sun still lingered faintly in the western sky where the approach went down. A little above that light, low over the trees, a single strong blue star was shining, tilted toward the west. It was that star of the instrument, in Lyra, the one Toru and I had looked up at in summer. In summer it had been nearly straight overhead; on this winter evening it leaned deep into the west, and was about to descend slowly, over the course of the night, toward the side of darkness.
For a while, I watched that star.
—I'm coming now.
Once more, under the palms resting on the handles, I felt for the weight half a step behind me. We won't lose each other again—just before putting it into words, I drew a breath.
I closed my eyes.
Everything went dark.