Real World Read online

  I should state up front that this is all just conjecture. I really don’t know exactly what my parents thought about my commuting and my kid brother’s after-school activities. But I think my father, who worked at a bank, was the kind of person who had a deep-seated prejudice against nursery schools and after-school programs and the like, and secretly felt that children whose mothers worked never amounted to anything. Ever since I was little, Mom fought Dad over this and gave in to him.

  In the end, they wound up sending my brother to abacus class, a swim club, and various other lessons to fill up his time after school. From second grade on, they sent him to an after-hours cram school, thinking it was more efficient to consolidate it all in one school. Since then, his life has been filled with lessons and studying. The poor kid, some people might say. Others might think he’s a victim of adults’ lives. But that was our family’s new lifestyle.

  But I don’t feel that it’s anybody’s fault that my brother and I led this kind of forced life. I can understand my parents’ desire for us to get a better education, and I can really understand my mom’s wanting to go back to work. I can even, to a degree, understand my dad insisting that kids need their mothers at home. Everyone insisted on getting what they wanted—that was the only way. And this new life of ours, where everyone sort of compromised on their desires, began when my kid brother started elementary school.

  * * *

  I’m not sure when my mother, now out working, began to change. Maybe in the early spring, just after I finished my second year in junior high. All of a sudden she stopped coming home at night on the weekends (as a freelancer, she often worked on odd days). When I asked her about it, she said that they were busy at work and often had to pull all-nighters. Did any of us work up the nerve to go to her office to check out her story? No way.

  I started to feel anxious about the way Mom began to speak and act, the way she just sort of stared off into space half the time. I sensed that when she was home, her mind was on some destination far away from us, and it started to scare us. The reason being that, like I said, Mom ruled at home. Perhaps our life had changed because of her desires, not Dad’s. Plus, there was the fact that Mom had way more charm and personality than Dad.

  Every time Mom went on a trip I was afraid she’d never come back and I had terrible nightmares. I can still remember one in which she was dead. Dead, but still talking to me, repeating this one line over and over: “I’ve got to go.” I thought I’d never see her again, which made me so sad I couldn’t stand it, and in the dream I tried to stop her, and was crying. I still needed her.

  My mom always came back from her trips, but she seemed sad and didn’t look like herself. I sensed something was going on with her, but didn’t have the courage to ask her directly. When I saw her and Dad going at it, I imagined she was sad because she wanted a divorce, but I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to leave him so much. He was stubborn, to be sure, but other than that was a pretty decent person. Adults did such stupid things, yet they remained a mystery, making me suffer. That’s when I decided I had to do some investigating if I wanted to really know what was going on.

  One day, in my second year of high school, I stole her cell phone from her handbag while she was asleep. There were tons of e-mails from this one guy.

  Sorry I couldn’t call you today. I was so busy at work I couldn’t find a moment to call. Next time we meet I have lots to talk about. All I think about is you. Good night. Love you!

  I’ve been thinking about you, and about what you said. The two of us are like air plants. Our roots don’t grow in the soil. Which makes me wonder what’s keeping us together. Can love alone nourish a life? I don’t know. I love you.

  So Mom was in love with some unknown man. Finally it dawned on me that she’d totally abandoned us all—Dad, me, and my kid brother. She was no longer the mother I used to know. I struggled like crazy to find traces of the former phantom mother in her, because now she was living in a world made up of only her and this guy. Once I found all this out, I wrote down the man’s name and cell phone number and phoned him.

  “I’m Mrs. Terauchi’s daughter,” I told him straight out. “What sort of relationship do you have with my mother?”

  The guy didn’t know what to say.

  “I work under Mrs. Terauchi,” he finally replied. “I’m happy to be able to work with her, and respect her very much. That’s the only relationship we have.”

  So the man was a younger guy who worked at her office. I remember Mom saying he was a nice guy, who had a daughter Yukinari’s age. I suddenly felt empty.

  “I understand,” I said. “That’s fine.”

  I didn’t ask my mom anything, so the man must have gotten in touch with her about it, because she came to my room soon afterward and said, “It’s not what you think. Don’t worry, there’s nothing between us.”

  Her eyes betrayed her, but I went ahead and nodded. I had all the proof I needed. The e-mails. The fact that she didn’t come home. That sort of drunk look in her eyes. Those secretive conversations on her cell phone. The curt, abrupt way she and Dad talked to each other.

  But it never came to anything. I didn’t want to lose my mother, so no matter how much pain and humiliation it involved, all I could do was give in. So I chose humiliation.

  “It’s okay. I get it,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good to hear.” She looked uneasy, but once she realized there wasn’t anything left to talk about, she left my room.

  Now, a year later, Mom’s still coming home really late. Mom with her lies, me pretending not to notice. Maybe I’m being childish. No, that’s not it. The last thing I want to hear is the sound of our relationship—Mom’s and mine—cracking in two. I can’t trust her, but I have to trust her to keep on going. Maybe I’ll have to rework this whole trust thing.

  I started to avoid Dad. The hatred I had for Mom spilled over to him. I couldn’t express the hatred I felt for her directly, since I didn’t want to lose her. Dad being Dad, he probably directed his own hatred for her toward me and my brother for the same reason. Back and forth with this twisted, misdirected hate, and it’s choking me.

  I’ve hidden my distrust of my mother and am doing my best to trust her and love her. But it might not work out. Because I love somebody I don’t trust anymore, I’ve lost all faith in myself. I bet it’s like this when parents abuse their children. Kids lose their trust in the parents they love, but still accept them, so they end up not trusting themselves anymore. Check it out, Worm. This is what I mean by something irreparable. Not murdering your mother.

  I checked my watch. Eleven p.m. The air was smoggy, the sky around the sliver of moon all distorted. Mom still hadn’t come back. I took a telephone card out of the desk drawer. Ever since I got a cell I haven’t used telephone cards much and this one was unused, with a hundred units on it. I stuffed the house key, cell phone, and telephone card in my pocket, went out into the hallway, and listened to what was going on in the rest of the house. My kid brother was in his room, surfing the Web as usual, while Dad was snoring away in the living room, a lonely sort of sound.

  Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, I opened the door to our apartment. The night was muggy, without a breath of wind. Everybody must have been in bed in the neighborhood, because there was no one else out. But over in Karuizawa, Worm and Kirarin were still awake, planning how they were going to murder his father. In my heart, I’d murdered my own mother long ago, over and over.

  I walked down the road, looking for a pay phone, my sandals slapping as they stuck to the hot asphalt. The road still hadn’t cooled down. There were two pay phones, one next to the other, in front of the station. They were lit by a faint bank of fluorescent lights, and three taxis were lined up beside them, waiting for fares. Would they be able to trace the call? I turned around and looked for a pay phone in some darker corner of the neighborhood and spotted one next to a convenience store. Through the plate-glass front of the store, I could see several customers milli