“Brothers in arms.”
The expression was Reiko’s, but it echoed Kaoru’s thoughts. However, Kaoru doubted her words, having observed their expressions in the cafeteria the other day. It was resignation he’d seen then, wasn’t it? At the very least, their faces hadn’t been those of people dedicated to battling an illness. Kaoru still remembered the affectless way she’d eaten.
He took this opportunity to clear up the doubt that had been nagging at him since their first encounter.
“Haven’t we met somewhere before?” It embarrassed him as he said it, it sounded so much like a pickup line, but he couldn’t think of any other way to ask it.
Reiko responded with a laugh whose import escaped him. “I get that a lot. I’m told I look like an actress on an old TV show,” she said shyly.
It sounded like a lie to him. She didn’t just look like the actress—he couldn’t help but think they were one and the same. But if she was the actress, and was lying so she could escape her past, then he didn’t feel he should press the issue.
When they parted, there in the courtyard, Reiko gave him their room number and said, “Why don’t you come visit us sometime? Please.”
Three times they’d met, he and Reiko Sugiura. Now more than ever, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
It was the very next day that Kaoru took Reiko at her word and knocked on the door to Ryoji’s room.
Reiko greeted him, with a smile that might have been a bit overdone, and showed him into the room. Ryoji was sitting up in bed reading a book, his legs dangling over the side. As a medical student, Kaoru knew how much the room cost the moment he entered. It was a private room with a private bathroom complete with bathtub. The daily rate was five times that for a normal shared room.
“Thank you for coming,” Reiko managed to say. Evidently she’d only invited him as a social courtesy, not really expecting him to come. Now that he was actually here she couldn’t disguise her happiness. She turned to Ryoji and tried to stir his interest. “Look who’s come to see you!”
It hit Kaoru that Reiko had invited him up as someone for her son to talk to. He should have realized it before.
It was Reiko, not Ryoji, who had piqued Kaoru’s interest. Kaoru didn’t know much about women, but he’d sensed something sexual, some kind of desire, in her unwavering gaze. She had full lips and wide, alluring eyes that drooped a little at the corners; her breasts weren’t especially large, but still there was something undeniably feminine in her five-foot frame. She had a refined air about her that he hadn’t found in women his own age, and it aroused something within him.
In comparison with that, there was nothing for him to hold onto in Ryoji’s gaze. As he sat down facing the boy in the proffered chair, he was astonished at how little light the boy’s eyes held. Ryoji didn’t even try to meet Kaoru’s gaze. He was looking in Kaoru’s direction, but plainly he wasn’t seeing anything. His eyes looked right through Kaoru, their gaze wandering across the wall behind. For a long time, they wouldn’t focus.
Ryoji set his book down on his knee with a finger still stuck in between the pages. Trying to find something to talk about, Kaoru leaned forward to see what the boy was reading.
The Horror of Viruses.
Patients want to know as much as possible about their illness. Ryoji was no exception. Naturally he was concerned about this foreign thing that had invaded his body.
Kaoru informed the boy that he was a medical student, and asked him a few questions about viruses. Ryoji answered him with a level of accuracy and detail astonishing in a sixth grader. Clearly he understood a great deal about viruses. Not only did he understand how DNA worked, he even had his own views on matters at the farthest reaches of current knowledge about the phenomenon of life.
As they went back and forth, questioning and answering, Kaoru began to imagine he was looking at a younger version of himself. He looked on this child, armed with scientific knowledge, the same way his father had looked on him. Kaoru felt like an adult.
But it wasn’t to last long. Just as they had warmed up to each other, just as the conversation was really taking off, Ryoji’s nurse showed up to take him to an examining room.
Kaoru and Reiko were alone now in the small sickroom. Kaoru was suddenly fidgety, while Reiko, who had been leaning on the windowsill, now coolly came over and sat down beside the bed.
“I had no idea you were twenty.”
Kaoru had mentioned his age during his conversation with Ryoji; Reiko had noticed. Kaoru was always being told he looked older than he was; he was used to it.
“How old do I look to you?”
“Hmm. Maybe about five years older …?” She trailed off apologetically, afraid she’d offended him.
“You mean I look old?”
“You look mature. Really … together.” To say he looked old might hurt him; to say he looked “mature” would sound like a compliment, she evidently figured.
“My parents got along well when I was growing up.”
“And that makes kids look older than their age?”
“Well, they always looked like they’d be happy enough to be left alone, just the two of them, so I had to learn to be independent pretty early.”
“Ah.” Reiko’s expression said she wasn’t convinced. She looked at her son’s empty bed.
Kaoru found himself thinking about Reiko’s husband. Something about Ryoji suggested that he didn’t have a father. Maybe there had been a divorce, maybe he’d died, or maybe he’d been absent from the start. In any case, Kaoru had the impression that Ryoji’s relationship with his father was, at the very least, extremely attenuated.
“In that case, maybe my son will never become independent,” said Reiko, still staring at the bed.
Kaoru braced himself and waited for her next words.
“It was cancer …”
“Oh.” He had expected that.
“It was two years ago. Ryoji didn’t mourn his father’s death one bit, you know.”
Kaoru could understand that. The kid probably hadn’t let her see him cry once.
“That’s how it is sometimes.”
But he didn’t mean it. When he imagined his own father’s death an uncontrollable sadness came welling up from the depths of his heart. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to overcome it when he faced the actual event. He realized that, at least in that sense, maybe he wasn’t all that independent yet himself.
“Kaoru, would you mind …” Reiko trailed off again, fixing him with a clinging gaze. “Would you mind watching over his studies?”
“You mean, as his tutor?”
“Yes.”
Teaching children was his specialty, and he had time for one or two more students. But he wasn’t sure Ryoji actually needed a tutor. Just from their brief talk together it was obvious that Ryoji was far more capable than other students his age.
But it wasn’t only that. If the cancer had already spread to his lungs and his brain, Kaoru knew that all the tutors and all the studying in the world wouldn’t make any difference in the end. There was no chance that this kid would return to school. But then, maybe that was precisely why she wanted to hire a tutor, in the hopes that letting him prepare to go back to school and resume his studies would restore his faith in the future. Kaoru knew how important it was for those surrounding the patient to show by their actions