When July began, rain started falling almost every day again.
One by one, the dahlias came into bloom.
Following the first bloom came a second, then a third. At the tips of ten stems leaning on support stakes, crimson flowers swayed while catching the rain. Far more than under the harsh light of a sunny day, that red looked even deeper in the dimness of a rainy day. In the grey garden, it seemed as though a fire was lit in that single spot.
That morning, when I arrived at Miyashita’s house, Akari was sitting on the veranda, holding a single dahlia blossom in her palm.
“It snapped off.”
It seemed heavy rain had fallen during the night. A single stem was cleanly snapped right above the hemp twine tied to the stake. Without being smeared in mud, the flower was still freshly opened inside Akari’s hand.
“The placement of the string was bad. I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t Ryo-kun’s fault.”
Akari shook her head.
“Even if it’s supported, they still snap when it’s time to snap, huh.”
Saying so, she brought out her grandmother’s single-flower vase from the kitchen. It was a slender celadon vase. She filled it with water, cut the end of the broken stem at an angle, and inserted the dahlia. She placed it in the alcove of the Japanese-style room.
In front of the hanging scroll, a single crimson flower stood. Inside the dim tatami room, it settled in with a strange, quiet presence.
Then the two of us went out into the garden and inspected the support stakes.
We checked the position of the hemp twine one by one. As the stems grew longer, there were several places where the knots could no longer support the weight of the flowers. We untied the strings and re-tied them at a slightly higher position.
“I want to try doing it too.”
Akari, tucking her umbrella between her neck and shoulder, took hold of the end of the hemp twine.
“You make a figure eight. Cross it once between the stem and the stake.”
“Like this?”
“Too tight. You’ll crush the stem.”
“Then, like this.”
“Too loose. With that, it’ll fall over in the wind.”
Akari groaned with a “Mmm” and re-tied it over and over. Her fingertips were numb from the rain, making it seem like the string wouldn’t move as she wanted. Unable to just watch, I placed my hands over hers from behind. Holding the hemp twine over Akari’s fingers, we drew a figure eight together.
“About this much. Just enough space to fit one finger.”
“…About this much.”
Akari inserted her finger into the knot to make sure. Then, she suddenly lifted her face.
The distance between us was closer than I had imagined.
I let go of her hands immediately. Akari moved on to the next stem as if nothing had happened. However, until we finished tying the very last stem after that, neither of us said a single word.
Not too tight, not too loose.
The boundary between supporting something and binding it down is no wider than a single finger.
＊
“Hey, Ryo-kun.”
Just past noon, Akari, who had been sorting through a bundle of her grandmother’s letters, suddenly stopped what she was doing.
“Won’t you drop the polite speech?”
“Eh?”
“I mean, I’m the younger one here. Doesn’t it feel a bit strange for Ryo-kun to speak formally while I use casual speech?”
“Because you’re the client.”
“I’m the client’s granddaughter, you know. Besides, when we were kids, you used to call me ‘you’ all the time.”
Akari pouted her lips slightly as if sulking. It was a face fitting for her twenty-three years of age.
“…All right.”
When I said that awkwardly, Akari smiled with satisfaction.
“Good.”
Stopping polite speech. Just by doing that much, I felt the air in the tatami room shift slightly. Should I say we got closer? Inside this room surrounded by the sound of rain, it felt as though the distance between the two of us shrank by about the width of a single tatami mat.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I understood that we shouldn’t get any closer.
From underneath the bundle of letters, an old photo album appeared.
Akari opened it upon her lap. Faded photographs were lined up beneath transparent film. Her grandmother in her youth. A person who looked like her grandfather. A young woman holding an infant who looked just like Akari.
Akari’s finger paused for just a split second over that photo. Then, without a word, she turned the page.
After turning a few pages, Akari let out an “Ah.”
“Here.”
It was a photograph of a little girl sitting on the veranda. She wore a white one-piece dress and held a bottle of ramune with both hands. Her eyes were still a bit swollen, but her mouth was smiling.
At the edge of the photo, the rear wheel of a bicycle was captured. A rusted luggage rack and one child’s shin. On the shin was a scrape from when they had fallen down.
“This is Ryo-kun, you know.”
“…You can only see the legs, though.”
“I can tell. I remember this scrape, you see. When you had me on the back and we crashed on the slope, Ryo-kun, you were the only one who got scraped up while I was completely uninjured. And then, you looked like you were going to cry, but you didn’t cry.”
Akari traced the shin inside the photograph with her finger and laughed.
“You were trying so hard to act tough.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Liar. Your ears are red.”
I remained silent and drank the tea from my teacup. Looking amused, Akari turned to the next page once more. However, on the pages following that summer, there was not a single photograph of a little girl left.
＊
Gazing at the dahlia in the alcove, Akari murmured softly.
“Do you know what dahlias symbolize in the language of flowers?”
“No.”
“Magnificence, elegance, dignity. …..Also, betrayal.”
I looked at Akari’s profile. She never averted her eyes from the flower in the alcove.
“They say it also means fickleness. My grandmother taught me that. Long ago, you see, Napoleon’s wife, a woman named Josephine, cherished dahlias immensely. She had them bloom only in her own garden and wouldn’t share the bulbs with anyone. But one of her maids secretly stole a bulb and made it bloom in another garden.”
“So that’s where betrayal comes in.”
“Right. Hearing about that, Josephine supposedly stopped paying any attention to dahlias at all. I don’t know if it’s a true story or not, though. …Grandmother told it to me that way.”
The rain grew slightly heavier.
“The summer I heard that story, I was ten years old.”
Akari’s voice was so quiet it seemed as though it would blend right into the sound of the rain.
“That summer, my mother left. She said she found someone she loved. She left my dad and me behind and went off to be with that person.”
I couldn’t say a single thing.
“When I woke up in the morning, she was already gone. There was just a single letter left on the kitchen table. …..It said, [I’m sorry. I found someone I love. I cannot lie to these feelings.]”
Akari gave a small laugh. She tried to smile, but she couldn’t pull it off right.
“She cannot lie to her feelings, huh. Amazing, isn’t it? Even though she lied to her family without a second thought.”
“…”
“Dad became completely unable to do anything for a while. And so, during summer vacation, I got dropped off here. Back then, dahlias were blooming in this garden. Bright red ones, lots of them.”
Akari’s gaze was drawn toward the dahlia in the alcove.
“I asked my grandmother. What is this flower’s name? And then Grandma made a slightly troubled face, and after that told me the story of Josephine. Saying it’s the flower of betrayal.”
For a time, nothing but rain sounds echoed through the room.
“Pretty awful, right? Telling a grandchild who had just been abandoned by her mother a story about the flower of betrayal.”
“…Why did your grandmother do that?”
“I don’t know. But she said one last thing. That flowers hold no sin. And also――――”
Akari started to say something, then clamped her mouth shut.
“…No. We’ll save that for next time.”
I stared straight at the woven lines of the tatami mat in the room.
The summer she was ten. Near the well. A little girl glaring at me with swollen, teary eyes.
――Just go ahead and yell out everything you’ve got to say right here.
Clinging desperately to the edge of the well, that girl screamed toward its depths.
――I’m not going to turn out like Mother, no matter what!
Those memories revived with vivid clarity, like being struck by the rain.
It wasn’t that I was pretending not to remember. I had genuinely forgotten. But now, that voice was ringing clearly deep inside my ears. It was thin, shaking, yet stronger than anyone else’s voice.
I’ll never turn out like my mother.
That girl made that vow to the well at age ten. And I had been right there beside that oath.
“That’s why, you see.”
Akari’s voice snapped me back to reality.
“I’m not cut out for romance. Feelings like liking someone so much you can’t help it have always terrified me. Because those kinds of feelings make people abandon others. Saying things like ‘I cannot lie to my feelings’ while casually leaving the most precious people behind.”
Akari interlaced her fingers on top of her lap.
“Mashima-san――――my fiance, you see. He’s calm, he’s kind, and being with him brings peace of mind. My heart doesn’t race very much around him. But I figured that’s fine. Because with someone who doesn’t make my heart race, I’ll definitely never turn out like my mother.”
“…”
“Getting married at twenty-three is fast, right? I know it myself, too. But I wanted to lock things down quickly.”
Akari stared down at her own intertwined fingers.
“Before I start wavering.”
Those words slowly sank down into the air of the tatami room.
Before she starts to waver.
Akari knew what it meant to waver. More than anyone else, she was terrified of the possibility that she might sway someday. That was why, before she could waver, she was driving a stake into her own life and trying to bind it tightly with hemp twine.
Just like the dahlia’s support stake.
＊
By evening, the rain had turned into a light drizzle.
While getting ready to leave, I looked at the dahlia in the alcove one more time. At the tip of the snapped stem, the crimson flower had not withered even a little bit yet.
“It’s beautiful.”
Before I knew it, those words had slipped from my mouth.
“Yeah. Even broken, it’s pretty, isn’t it.”
Akari said, standing right beside me.
What I was referring to wasn’t just the flower. But there was no way I could ever convey that to Akari.
While putting on my shoes at the veranda, a single word was starting to form inside my chest.
A simple word consisting of just two characters. Even a child could say it.
Yet the second I let it cross my lips, I would turn into the same entity for Akari as the “beloved person” who stole her mother away. I would be breaking the promise Akari shouted down the well when she was ten.
That day, it was me who taught the weeping little girl by the well to spit out everything she wanted to say.
Yet now, I was the one who wasn’t allowed to say what I wanted to say.
“Ryo-kun?”
Akari was looking down at me from the raised entryway step.
“What’s wrong? You’ve got such a difficult look on your face.”
“…No.”
Getting to my feet, I popped open my umbrella.
“I’ll come check the support stakes again tomorrow. I’ll re-tie them.”
“Yeah. Please do.”
Leaving through the gate, I kept walking without turning around.
Behind me, I could hear the sound of raindrops striking the dahlia blossoms.
A short way down the old road, I came to a stop.
Looking back, Miyashita’s house roof could be seen blurred through the rainy haze. Beyond that, the shadow of the persimmon tree. Beneath that tree was the well.
Akari had sworn to that well at age ten. That she would never turn out like her mother. And for thirteen years, she had guarded that vow all by herself. Frightened of romance, frightened of wavering, and binding herself tight before she could ever sway.
The one and only witness to that promise was myself.
――Say everything you want to say right here.
Back on that day, I genuinely believed that. If you say it, you feel better. If you say it, it sinks and disappears. It was the simple logic of a twelve-year-old child.
The twenty-five-year-old me already knows. Words do not sink. What is spoken remains inside the person who heard it forever. Not at the bottom of a well, but at the bottom of a person’s heart.
That was why I couldn’t say it.
That day, for the very first time, I almost gave a name to my feelings, and then stopped myself.
Unnamed emotions did not sink away anywhere. They didn’t rest at the bottom of a well, but continued to linger right inside my chest all this time.
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