The Place You Called From Chapter 8

Save the Last Dance for Me

The phone rang at 2 PM on August 14th. I was perusing an astronomy book in my room at the time, studying the movement of variable binary stars. It was pouring outside, raindrops beat against the window, and wind relentlessly blew through the trees. My parents were out at work, so I was home alone. 

When I heard the phone, I tossed away my book and ran down the stairs to grab the receiver. 

“Hello?” 

There was no reply. A long silence. It had to be a call from Hajikano, I figured. I couldn’t imagine anyone but her doing this. 

“Is this Hajikano?”, I asked the caller. But still, no reply. 

It didn’t seem to me that this was a repeat of before, where two phones rang at once and the theoretically separate lines somehow got connected. This silence was full of conviction, leaving me an impression that the caller was staying silent with full awareness I was on the other end. However, it did feel like a hesitating silence of whether or not to say something, rather than a purposeful lack of speaking. 

And suddenly, the call ended. What was that all about?, I wondered as I put down the phone. 

The sound of the rain seemed strangely clear, and I noticed the window was left open, with a puddle forming. I closed it, wiped the puddle up with a rag, and went around checking the other windows. 

Once back in my room, I thought about that phone call again. And I had a sudden thought. 

Maybe I should have been the one to start talking. 

Maybe she wasn’t being silent, but waiting for my words. 

I felt uneasy. Putting a yacht parka over my shirt, I went out without even an umbrella and rode my bicycle to Hajikano’s house. Arriving in a few minutes, I mashed on the doorbell repeatedly. A few seconds later, Aya showed her face. 

“…Huh, Yocchan?”, she said with disappointment. That reaction seemed to confirm my bad premonition. 

“Something happened to Yui, didn’t it?”, I asked. 

“Yeah,” Aya nodded. “You look like you know something. Come inside. I’ll lend you a towel.” 

“What’s your bad feeling?” 

“Thinking about it, she was kind of weird last night,” Aya said, staring into the rain outside. “I happened to meet her in the kitchen just as she was leaving. I was hungry and fishing around in the fridge, and she was headed out the back door. Usually, Yui would just turn away from me, but yesterday was different. She stopped at the kitchen door and gave me a solid look, blinking like she was seeing something unusual. I acted like I didn’t notice. After about ten seconds, she stopped looking at me and went to the back door, but she bowed her head like giving a passing greeting. …You know how unusual all that is, don’t you, Yocchan? 

"Did Yui not say anything then?” 

“Are you certain she’s going to call here?” 

“Nope. But going looking now is pointless. If she really wants to die, we can’t stop her. She’s a very clever girl, so she won’t let anyone find her. She might have long since killed herself already. …But if she still has doubts, don’t you think she might call here like you called you, Yocchan? Thinking of it that way, my best option is to wait for that call here.” 

Aya and I glared at each other for a while. I hated to admit it, but it made sense. If Hajikano had no intention of being found, wouldn’t our search for her only end in vain? Was it all we could do to wait for her determination to falter, and not miss the moment it tilted to our side? 

But I had already let one such moment slip away. Chances were slim that we could wait for it to swing back. Which meant we had to take action. 

I passed by Aya to the phone and first dialed Hinohara’s house. After ten dial tones, Hinohara’s brother answered. I asked if Hinohara was there, and he said he was out. When I asked if he knew where he was, he bluntly replied “Hell if I know!” and hung up. It was unlikely he went to set up the telescope in this weather, so I had no guesses either. 

When I called Chigusa’s house, she herself answered promptly. 

“No time to explain details,” I said first thing. “Hajikano’s missing. Help me look for her.” 

“Err… This is Fukamachi, isn’t it?” 

“I don’t know. But her older sister says she has a bad feeling, and I agree with her. To tell the truth, just a month ago, I witnessed a suicide attempt by Hajikano. She might be trying it again.” 

I thought that explaining this much would get Chigusa to agree without another word. 

But that wasn’t the case. 

She was silent, like time had stopped on the other end. 

“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you saying anything?” 

“Um, Fukamachi,” Chigusa said calmly. “Please don’t hate me for this. I’m about to say something slightly mean-spirited.” 

“Yep,” Aya nodded powerlessly. “And you?” 

A sharp beam of light came through the curtains and woke me. In sharp contrast to yesterday, the weather was clear and pleasing. My head ached like I still needed three more hours of sleep, but I gave up and sat up from my futon. I felt like it had all been a bad dream, yet simultaneously knew it was reality. I went downstairs to the phone, called Hajikano’s house, and Aya answered at the second dial tone. 

“I was literally just about to call you,” she said with surprise. 

Once the call was over, I called Chigusa without delay. I had to question her about her detailed knowledge of my bet. 

A theory had formed in my head, perhaps while I was sleeping, about why information about the bet had reached Chigusa. 

Chigusa Ogiue had experienced this bizarre bet. 

Let’s say the woman on the phone proposed a bet to more than just me. It could be just a few people, or it could be hundreds, but say there were others who she offered bets to, and Chigusa was one of them. And Chigusa was able to win - or perhaps not win, but by some means make it through the bet - and successfully survived. As a result, she noticed her classmate Yosuke Fukamachi was taking on a bet like she once had. Also, she knew a loophole in the bet. 

Out of all the theories I could extract from the facts that had come to light, none seemed more plausible than this one. Of course, it was possible I was overlooking something serious. But even so, the theory that Chigusa had been through the bet had a unique sticking power. 

“Hello?” Chigusa answered the phone. “Fukamachi, I assume?” 

“Right. Hajikano was found. She jumped into the sea in the early hours. Luckily, she didn’t die, but it’ll be hard to meet with her for a while.” 

“I see,” Chigusa said, and nothing more. She didn’t seem to have any more thoughts on the matter. She was as calm as if she expected it to happen from the start. 

“I want to carry on with our conversation from yesterday.” 

“Then come to my house, please. It could be a long one. And there is something I want to show you.” 

The room I stayed in had four other children in all. There were three boys and one girl. Their injuries were in different areas, but they were all serious ones. 

The girl in the bed in front of me seemed to have broken a leg like me, as one of her legs was wrapped up in a cast. The thinness of her uninjured leg and the thickness of the multi-layered cast felt as unbalanced as a crab’s pincers. I wasn’t sure if she was depressed about being in the hospital or if she had a gloomy personality to begin with, but she always had a glum look. Of course, I’ve never seen a long-term patient in a hospital who was all smiles. 

Once every three or four days, the girl’s mother paid a visit. It wasn’t all that infrequent. Yet every time, without exception, within ten minutes she’d say “Well, your mother’s busy” and leave early, which only seemed to spur the girl’s loneliness. When her mother came to visit, she set out to make the most of those ten minutes, complaining about her every dissatisfaction to get across the hardship of her hospitalization. Her mother, exhausted from work, let it pass through her ears with a fed-up expression, then left with the excuse of being busy. It was probably an undeniable fact that she was busy with work, but I had to wonder if it was better to just not visit at all at that point. 

Once her mother left, the girl would bury herself in her pillow and sob. I got melancholy seeing the series of events unfold. Why couldn’t things go any better than that? Why couldn’t they be more honest? You don’t want to quarrel either, do you? I loathed her clumsiness - but now, I think that irritation came from the awareness that I had the same sort of clumsiness. 

I hated the crybaby girl, but she hated me too. She seemed annoyed by how my mother would visit frequently and stay for a while. Every time she came and replaced the flowers or doodled on my cast, the girl glared scornfully. After the visit ended and I was alone, she spent a long time glaring at me. Like saying “don’t ever forget this glare.” 

Only someone who’s been through it will really get it, but people in the hospital with broken legs taste all kinds of discomfort and misery. To take it to an extreme, they lose some of their dignity as people and are attacked by extraordinary powerlessness. Maybe she and I both kept our vitality by hating those nearby, so we could fight that powerlessness. 

Ever since then, once per day, I would perform a magic trick I’d practiced that day for the girl. After dinner was over, she’d beckon to me and politely put her hands on her knees, waiting for my show to begin. I’d walk over on one leg to her bed and sit in the chair there, then perform the trick I’d desperately practiced in secret all day as if I was very familiar with it. Regardless of the outcome of the trick, she gave a small round of applause. 

Eventually, we came to converse without any magic tricks involved. It was mostly trivial stuff like the food being good, or how we didn’t like the way the nurse wrapped bandages. 

Just one time, the girl mentioned my birthmark. 

“That bruise really doesn’t want to heal, it seems.” 

“Oh, this?” I lightly touched where the birthmark was. “I’ve had this since I was born. It’s not an injury.” 

“Born with it…”, she said curiously, staring at it. “It doesn’t hurt or itch or anything, does it?” 

“Good.” She smiled with relief. 

And also… Just one time, she had a complaint. 

“If you had to live your whole life in a wheelchair, what would you do?” 

She asked me this as I was headed back to bed, after cleaning up from a magic trick. 

I grabbed the windowsill and stopped, thinking about what she said. 

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. Why do you ask?” 

The girl hung her head and wore a hollow smile. “Because it seems I may have to.” 

“Did a doctor tell you that?” 

When I left the hospital, the girl said “I’ll come meet you when my leg heals” and asked for my address and phone number. I wanted to ask the same of her, but figured I could ask her when she called me. And I’ll have to learn a bunch of magic tricks by then, I also thought. 

I was more optimistic in third grade than you’d ever believe looking at me now. 

A month, two months went by after I left, and I heard no word from the girl. Half a year passed, and not a single call. 

After a year went by, I came to realize I would probably never meet her again. She hadn’t broken her promise. In other words, her leg never healed. 

Gradually, I forgot about her. Her presence within me grew weaker by the day, reaching the point where I might think “Oh yeah, there was that girl” when passing in front of a large hospital. Soon even that was gone, I forgot her face and name, and the brief summer memories I spent with her were buried deep in my mind. 

* 

That hill to the beach I had ridden my bike down that day, I was now pushing a wheelchair down. The rusty guardrails along the path had vines curled around them in places. Thousands of cicadas buzzed from the thickets on either side, making it as noisy as the inside of a clockwork toy. 

“Did you leave the hospital right after I did, Ogiue?”, I asked. 

“It couldn’t be right after, I’m afraid,” Chigusa said, looking straight ahead at the distant sea. “I returned to school nearly half a year after you left the hospital. By then, my classmates had completely forgotten about me. For children that age, half a year is plenty to forget about a girl’s entire existence. Of course, I never did have much presence.” 

“But there wasn’t that sort of "transfer student” interest either?“ 

"Indeed, not at all.” Chigusa weakly smiled. “Once I was wheelchair-bound, my avenues for friendship were greatly limited. It wasn’t quite that I was discriminated against for being handicapped. Luckily, Mitsuba Elementary School did have instructors familiar with that. …However, even with little discrimination, the simple fact that I could not walk couldn’t be changed. People’s actions when they were with me were limited. I couldn’t participate in any athletic play, and my wheelchair had to be carried every time there was the smallest step. The girls there did not hate me, but deeply hated the trouble that came along with interacting with me. At first, they found it curious and escorted me around, enthralled with the idea of looking after someone disabled. But given a week, the bother won out, and they came to blatantly avoid me. People naturally distanced themselves.” 

I could easily imagine that process. There was a girl in a wheelchair at my middle school, and while not hated, she was avoided. I remembered her always in the corner of class, desperately trying to keep up with a group of quiet girls in the culture club. 

“Previously, I described myself in middle school as "could be liked by anyone, but could not be anyone’s favorite.” But that was a bald-faced lie. I told such lies wanting to be thought of as a normal person. The real me was not only not liked by anyone, but estranged no matter where I was. I thought a hundred times each day, “I’m someone who shouldn’t be here.” At such times, I often recalled days spent with a certain boy with a large birthmark on his face to soothe my heart. That was a symbol of happiness to me. It was my sole proof that one could have wonderful memories no matter how restricted one was. And… that is why I never contacted you, Fukamachi. If you also refused me, the sole thing I was holding onto would vanish. …However, after entering Minagisa First High, I discovered that name on the class roster.“ 

Chigusa twisted around to look at my face. 

"Indeed, the name "Yosuke Fukamachi” was there. I would be lying to say I wasn’t happy. It was like a dream to end up in the same high school classroom as my first love. But more than that, I feared reuniting with you. You would not necessarily accept me now as you did then. Even if we could return to a cordial relationship like before, I could not hope for any further development. Since to a boy of sixteen, a girl in a wheelchair is in many ways inconvenient as a lover.“ 

She turned forward again and stroked her legs with her hand. 

"If only I could move these legs, I thought. I didn’t have to be able to run around freely; just to walk alongside others. I wanted to have an average love of my own. …Three months later, at school and after class, I heard a public phone ring. It was exactly fifty days ago.” 

At the end of the downward slope, the thickets on the side came to an end, and the sea glittering in the sunlight appeared. Seagulls loitering around the breakwater hurriedly flew away when they saw us coming. 

“The only ones surprised I could suddenly walk were the doctor and my family. All others had a reaction such as "Ah, your injury finally healed.” Though a lifelong worry to the one affected, apparently that’s how it seems to others. …And upon meeting with you after ten years, it seemed you had completely forgotten me. Of course, I could have reminded you by only saying “the girl you were with in the hospital,” but I decided against it. I thought we might as well start from scratch. Forgetting my miserable past self, and living as an average girl.“ 

Once at the edge of the breakwater, we silently listened to the waves for a while. Past the sea, there were thick clouds seeming to touch the top of the sky. 

"Say, Fukamachi,” Chigusa spoke. “If the girl sitting next to you that day were in a wheelchair, do you think you wouldn’t have been this friendly?” 

“Nah,” I shook my head. “Instead of walking along with you, I’d be pushing your wheelchair like today. That’d be the only difference.” 

Chigusa smiled happily. 

“…Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone along with any bet, and it would have sufficed to simply say "I’m the girl from the hospital room.”“ 

When I looked back, Chigusa was gone. 

Only a wheelchair without its owner was left behind. 

I looked at my feet. White froth from the waves floated on the water. 

I sat on the edge of the breakwater, and watched intently as the froth soundlessly dissolved into the sea. 

I’ll soon go the same way as her, I thought. 

Chapter end