All I can think is that it is far too beautiful of a day.
The Memory ends. I’m startled as the onsen reappears around me and Hideo, the peaceful fog of hot water and the glisten of early lamplight on the rocks. I look at him. He doesn’t say anything; he doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t even seem to be here anymore, for the look on his face is distant and grim. Afraid. After a pause, he brings up another Memory. It is the same sequence we just watched—except he has altered the park’s landscape, shifting the stream a little this way, a little that. He brings up a third Memory. Same sequence, but with the brothers in slightly different positions.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone over this scene in my head,” he finally says to me in a soft voice. He flips to another, and yet another, each with subtle details changed. This time, the scene shows Hideo turning around a few seconds sooner and calling Sasuke back before he can go into the trees. Another one shows Hideo steering Sasuke out of the park and back home before they can start playing their game. Yet another shows Hideo going with Sasuke to retrieve the plastic egg instead of leaving him to do it himself. My heart cracks a little with each new variation. This is his endless hell. “I can remember every single detail about that day . . . except the details that matter. Where he went. When I stopped hearing his footsteps in the leaves. Who took him. I think about what might have happened if I’d done this. Or that. If things had shifted even a little.” He shakes his head. His jaw is so tight that I’m afraid he might break it. “I don’t know. So I keep building.”
He’s torturing himself. I watch with a lump in my throat as he brings up another constructed Memory—this time of the same night, with flashlights dancing through the park. His mother’s and father’s voices are high and frantic, breaking. Then the scene switches to a young Hideo on his knees before his parents, sobbing, begging forgiveness, hysterical, inconsolable, even as they try to make him get up. The scene switches yet again to Hideo lying in bed, curled up, silent, listening to the faint crying of his mother coming from his parents’ bedroom. It switches to him waking every morning and looking in the mirror . . . and seeing a thin, silver streak grow steadily into his black hair. I wince. The trauma was what had slashed him in white. And even though I am not him, I understand, and even without the Link connecting our emotions right now, I can feel the vicious, unending shame that clouds his heart.
I try to imagine my father disappearing one day and never coming back, what it must be like to grieve with no closure at all, to live with an open-ended mystery twisting a knife forever in my heart. I think of the porch light at the entrance of his parents’ home, turned on even in the afternoon. I imagine that pain and, even in my imagination, I can feel my heart bleed.
A long moment passes after the Memories end, filled with nothing but the sound of water rippling against the rock. When Hideo speaks again, his voice is low, weighed down with a haunting, all-consuming guilt. “They never talked about Sasuke again after his disappearance. They blamed themselves, put the shame on their own shoulders, and bore it silently. Our neighbors and the police stopped talking about Sasuke, too, out of respect for my parents. They can’t look at photos of him; I could only save what I had. He exists now solely in their sculptures. My mother aged overnight. She used to remember everything; she led her neurology team. Now she misplaces things and forgets what she was doing. My father developed a cough that never went away. He gets sick frequently.” Hideo’s eyes follow the path of the Gemini constellation, the stars that form the shape of twins. “As for me . . . well, Sasuke loved games. We played every day, made up all kinds of games together. He was cleverer than me—had aced every exam he ever took, tested effortlessly into every elite academy you could think of.”
I understand now. “You invented the NeuroLink because of your brother. Warcross was inspired by that game Sasuke played in the park. You created Warcross for him.”
He pauses, and the water ripples as he turns to me. “Everything I do is for him.”
I brush his arm with my hand. Nothing I say can possibly be right in this moment, so instead, I say nothing at all. I only listen.
“I don’t talk about him, Emika,” Hideo says after another silence. He looks away again. “I haven’t talked about him in years.”
This is Hideo stripped of his fortune and fame and genius. This is him as a boy, waiting every day for his brother to come back, falling asleep every night to the same nightmare, trapped forever wondering if he had only done one thing, anything, differently. It is hard to describe loss to someone who has never experienced it, impossible to explain all the ways it changes you. But for those who have, not a single word is needed.
Hideo pushes away from the edge of the spring and nods toward the steps leading back up to the bathhouse. He offers me his hand. I take it, my eyes flickering as always to the scars on his knuckles. “It’s getting late,” he says gently.
24
We have dinner that night with Hideo’s parents. I look on at how carefully Hideo fries meat, chops vegetables, and sets rice in the steamer. While he does, his mother fusses over my complexion. “This tiny child,” she scolds gently, beaming up at me. “Hideo, why haven’t you been feeding her? Make sure you give her a big bowl. It will add some pink to her cheeks.”
“Oka-san,” he says with a sigh. “Please.”
She shrugs. “I am telling you, she needs nutrition if her mind is to perform at its best. You remember what I told you about how neurons use the energy delivered by your blood?” I exchange a wry smile with Hideo as she launches into an explanation about blood.
Hideo is the one who sets the table, who lays the food out for us, and who pours everyone tea. Dinner is so delicious that I wish it could last forever—juicy, tender cuts of chicken fried to perfection; gleaming rice topped with a fried egg; lightly pickled vegetables for garnish; soft mochi cakes made of sticky rice flour for dessert, each stuffed with strawberry and sweet red bean; soothing cups of hot green tea. As we eat, Hideo’s parents speak Japanese to each other in low voices, sneaking occasional smiles at me as if they think their movements are too stealthy for me to notice.
I nudge Hideo sitting beside me. “What are they saying?” I whisper.
“Nothing,” he replies, even though I see a faint blush on his cheeks. “I don’t usually have time to cook, that’s all. So they’re commenting on it.”
I grin. “But you cooked dinner for me?”