Three Days Later

He didn't move the magazines. But he stood in front of the case on Thursday night and he stared at it for a full minute, and then he moved the magazines.

The case was dusty. He hadn't noticed how much — three years of settling, of being the thing in the corner that you see without looking. He wiped it with a damp cloth. He set it on the bed. He unlatched it.

The guitar was exactly as he'd left it. Yamaha acoustic, natural wood finish, a small scratch near the sound hole where he\'d knocked it against a door frame in his old apartment during a move. The strings were dead — three years without tuning, two without even being touched. They would need replacing. He didn't have new strings.

He sat on the edge of the bed with the guitar across his lap.

He put his left hand on the neck. His fingers found the frets the way they always had — without thinking, without permission, the body remembering what the mind had tried to forget. He pressed a C chord.

The sound was terrible. Flat and dead and out of tune in three different directions.

He sat there with it anyway.

Eleven minutes. He checked afterward, because he was the kind of person who checked. Eleven minutes of sitting with a guitar he couldn't properly play yet, in an apartment that felt slightly less empty than it had an hour ago.

He put it back in the case. He did not cover it with magazines.

His mother called Saturday morning, the way she always did, from her kitchen in Saitama with the kettle going in the background.

"Did you eat?"

"Yes."

"What did you eat?"

"Real food."

"Isamu."

"Rice, miso and vegetables."

A pause. "I'll believe the rice."

He smiled. He was standing in his kitchen making actual coffee — not the canned kind, the kind that required a process — and this was different from last Saturday when he had stood in his kitchen doing nothing.

"Are you all right?" she said.

No. I haven't been all right in a long time and I can't explain how it happened, it just—crept up. One day I stopped getting off the train at the music shops. One day I stopped humming while I cooked. One day I stopped believing the guitar in the corner was mine anymore.

"I'm okay," he said. "I"m—" He stopped. "I met someone."

A long pause. He could hear her setting the kettle down.

"Someone?"

"Not like that. She's fourteen. A kid. I walked her home from the station. She—" He didn't know how to finish that sentence.

She told me she was dying and handed me apple juice. She told me to unbury my guitar. She said the night's not over yet and walked away.

"She reminded me of something."

His mother was quiet for a moment.

"Are you going to see her again?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Good," his mother said simply. She didn't ask more. She knew, the way she always knew, when to leave a thing alone.

"Come home for dinner next Sunday," she said.

"Okay."

"And buy new strings."

He looked at the guitar case on the shelf where he'd put it — on the shelf, not the corner, not under magazines. "How did you—"

"I'm your mother." The kettle started to whistle. "Buy new strings, Isamu."

***

He went back to the bridge on Tuesday.

He told himself he was just walking. It was a Tuesday evening, the October air sharper now, autumn settling in properly, and he had left work at a reasonable hour for the first time in weeks and taken the long way home. He told himself the long way happened to pass the bridge

He stood at the railing. The river moved the way it always moved — slow, patient, going somewhere downstream that wasn't his business. A bottle cap caught the light near the bank. No paper boats tonight.

He had been standing there for maybe ten minutes when he heard footsteps on the bridge behind him.

"I had a feeling you'd be here."

He turned.

Sora was in a different uniform blouse but the same pale blue plaid skirt — she seemed to have multiple of these, or possibly just the one that she wore every day without caring — and she had a larger convenience store bag than last time and a juice carton already half-drunk. She looked slightly tired around her eyes, the way people look when they've been working at something all day. But she was smiling in the comfortable way of someone who is where they expected to be.

"You had a feeling," he said.

"I live a mile that way." She jerked her thumb. "I walk this bridge almost every day. I figured if you were a bridge-stander, you'd be back." She tilted her head. "You bought strings."

He looked down at himself. He had the small paper bag from the music shop in Ochanomizu in his jacket pocket, slightly visible at the top. "How—"

"The bag. That's the Ochanomizu music shop bag." She settled her elbows on the railing beside him, two feet of space between them, looking at the river. "Did you play?"

"Eleven minutes. The strings were dead."

"Now you have new strings." She was matter-of-fact about this, the way she was matter-of-fact about most things. "What did it feel like? The eleven minutes."

"Strange." He searched for a better word. "Like visiting somewhere you used to live. You remember all the rooms but nothing is quite where you left it."

She made a small approving sound. "That's a good way to put it."

"You write?"

"I want to. I read more than I write." She pulled something from her bag — another folded paper. Light blue again, this time a crane, already finished. "I had this in my bag." She held it out to him. "For the guitar case."

He took it. It was small and precise, folded with the same practiced ease as the boat. "Why the guitar case?"

"So it remembers someone cared about it." She turned back to the river. "Objects remember things. It sounds crazy but I think they do."

He held the small blue crane in his hand. He thought about the guitar in the case, alone in the corner for three years. He thought about the sticker.

"Not crazy," he said.

They walked to her building again. Different route this time — she took him through the back streets of Jinbocho, the narrower ones with the used bookshops and the late-night printing shops and the one ramen place that was still open, steam rising from the ventilation in a thick white column.

"Have you been to that one?" he asked.

"The ramen place? Once. The tonkotsu is really good." She hesitated. "I can't eat as much as I used to. But the first few bites are always worth it."

He filed that away. The way her sentences sometimes had a small shadow at the end that she didn't comment on.

"Tell me about your list," he said.

She looked at him sideways. "What list?"

"The things you want to do. You have one, I can tell."

A pause. "Is it that obvious?"

"You said you want to see everything before you run out of time. People who say that have lists."

She was quiet for a moment, and then she said: "I wrote it down. After I got the timeline. I have a notebook." She didn't reach for it. "It's not— it's not the big obvious things. I don't want to skydive or go to Paris. I just want—" She counted on her fingers. "I want to eat taiyaki from a street cart at night. I want to see the city from somewhere really high. I want to sit in a jazz bar — a real one with live music. I want to put a paper boat in the river at sunrise and watch it go." She paused. "I want to hear someone play guitar. Not recorded. Actually play."

He looked at her.

"In that order?" he said.

"No particular order." She tucked her hands in her blazer pockets. "Some of them I can do alone. Some of them are better with company." She glanced at him. "I don't have a lot of company that knows."

She means me. The thought was simple.

She means me, and she is asking in her sideways Sora way, and the answer she wants is—

"There's a taiyaki cart near Kanda station," he said. "Open until two."

She stopped walking. She looked at him for a moment.

Then she said: "Now?"

"If you want."

The taiyaki cart was exactly where he remembered — a small red wagon with a canvas awning, a middle-aged man in a white apron turning the fish-shaped molds with practiced hands, the smell of warm batter and sweet bean paste drifting into the cold air. There was one other customer, a young couple sharing one taiyaki between them, already walking away.

Sora ordered red bean. He ordered custard.

She bit into hers and made a sound of complete, uncomplicated happiness. Just for a moment. Just a small sound.

That's the sound, he thought, without knowing what he meant by it. That exact sound.

"You know what I love about taiyaki?" she said. Her breath made a small cloud in the cold air. "It's always too hot. You know it's too hot, and you bite into it anyway. Every single time."

"Because waiting feels worse than the burn."

"Exactly." She looked at him. "You get it."

"I used to." He took a bite of his. It was, in fact, too hot. He ate it anyway.

They stood under the red awning while the cart man cleaned his molds, and the city moved around them, and the taiyaki cooled in their hands, and Isamu thought:

I haven't stood somewhere just to stand here in a very long time. I have been going from one place to another for three years and I have not stood anywhere.

"One down," Sora said. She held up the taiyaki wrapper. "Seven to go."

"Seven?"

"Eight total on the list." She finished the last bite. "Now you're involved whether you agreed to it or not."

He looked at her.

"That's not how it works."

"It's exactly how it works." She balled up the wrapper and tossed it cleanly into the bin three feet away. "You showed up at the bridge twice. You're involved.

You're involved. He thought about saying something. He thought about the guitar pick he'd put in his jacket pocket that afternoon — the one from the Ochanomizu shop that he'd bought almost without meaning to, a medium gauge, the kind he\'d always preferred. He had put it in his pocket without deciding to.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay." She seemed satisfied. "Good."