The Rental Sister by Jeff Backhaus

Author:Jeff Backhaus [Backhaus, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2012-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

What happened to you?” Hamamoto says with the innocent worry of a friend, but Megumi knows that suspicion fuels her concern.

“I fell and hit a coffee table.”

“Let me take a look.” Hamamoto inspects her cheek, looking for signs of a lie. Later in the day she asks about Thomas. Megumi gives all the right answers.

“Can you get him out?”

“Yes. It will take some more time, but I can do it.”

“His wife called me. She’s not in a good state. I’m afraid that she . . . Megumi, you need to hurry. Do whatever you can to get him out. I wish we could force him, that’s how bad I think it is with Silke. He needs to come out.”

When the shop closes, she goes home. Her apartment has never felt so lonely. It is a waste that she and Thomas should both be alone. The worst kind of loneliness is when you’re unable to be where you want to be, where you wouldn’t have to be alone.

She opens a Kirino novel but can’t read more than a few paragraphs before drifting to his dark, round eyes, an image that is no mere memory, something apart from herself, capable of being remembered or forgotten, kept or discarded; rather, his eyes looking down at her have woven their way into her internal fabric, inseparable from the rest. And last night, in the silence of his room, the distance between them shrank down to nothing. He took care of her the way she once took care of her brother.

The clock on the wall ticks steadily. She watches the long hand sweep around the dial, not smoothly, but in rests and leaps. Maybe during one of the rests between the leaps Thomas sat paralyzed as the car hit his son. And maybe during one of the rests her brother sliced himself. Do everybody’s rests and leaps align, or are we missing each other?

Her father calls. “I have the most wonderful news,” he says, and his voice is filled with life. Gone is the begging, the bitterness. Swept away, replaced with light. “It’s about your mother,” he says, and the word stings her throat, a hive of bees, the mother she hasn’t heard from in over three years, who fled Japan in despair. “Here,” he says, “I’ll let her tell you for herself.”

Tell you for herself? The words don’t even register before her mother greets her in Korean-tinged Japanese, a casual Moshi moshi as though they saw each other just yesterday. “Moshi moshi,” her mother repeats into the silence. “Megumi, are you there?” But her mouth is dry as dust. “Megumi?” Her cheeks grow hot, then numb.

“Yes, Mother, I’m here.” She says it quietly, respectfully, to this ghost of a mother. Ashen tongue, she nearly chokes.

“You’re there, but I’m here, so why are you there instead of here?” her mother says with a girl’s giddy brightness.

“Mother?” She tells her mother that she doesn’t understand. She asks what she’s doing in Japan, why she’s not still in Korea.

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