Memory Lane

Part 26: Camus's Egg

I don't exactly wake up. Instead, I drift between the conscious and the subconscious, catching snippets of the past and present.

In the past, I hold your hand. We're on a camping trip, peeking our heads out of the tents to see the stars. The two of us are in the mountains, giving ourselves a week to reach the top of one of the peaks. It isn't a particularly difficult climb, but each day ends with sore muscles and hot cups of cocoa over a portable stove. You hold me, arms wrapped around my body like I was your favorite teddy bear. It's peaceful here. No one yells at us about what we are.

In the present, I'm in a hospital bed. I can't open my eyes or move my body, but I smell the sharp scent of rubbing alcohol and hear the low voices of my family mingling with the doctors'. It's unclear if they know who put me here, but I know Angry, Dumb, and Fat are somehow responsible.

My heart beats slowly, registering on the monitor in steady methodical beeps. Vital fluids enter my body through plastic tubing. I cling to the few strands of life within my reach, hoping that it's enough to keep me here.

"I was afraid this would happen again," my mother murmurs. "She's been adjusting well to life here. The teachers even tell me that she has a friend. Was a fresh start too much to ask for?"

"It's different this time," Mr. Watanabe says gently. "Her sickness is gone. Airi says it was the students at the school. Three girls did this to her. Once she points them out, we'll press charges."

"Oh, Nana. It was never supposed to be this way." My mother presses her cold lips to my forehead. "She acts too much like Yuta, always getting into trouble. She was more her father's daughter than she was mine. I carried her for nine months in the womb and she turned out exactly like him."

"I miss him, too." Mr. Watanabe's voice grows softer, something I had not thought possible.

"The doctors think that it will be a while before she wakes up. She just needs to get more nutrients into her body. Maybe she'll forget everything this time, too. It would be a blessing, I think. She was nearly beaten to death! Look at what they did to her face. My poor girl ..."

"I got rid of the bat. We're lucky that we were able to track her phone's location and get to the scene first. If the police knew that her prints were on it, we wouldn't have a case. There was also blood that wasn't hers on it."

"Are you telling me the treatment didn't work?" There was a sharpness to her voice that I never heard before. "Because we paid the best doctors. We even flew in that woman from Columbia. There's no way that none of the methods from the world's most brilliant minds affected Nana. The doctor before that woman said she was susceptible enough for the experimental trials, more so than the average teenager. My daughter was fixed. I saw it with my own eyes."

"It had nothing to do with her sickness. Her friend said that she wanted to protect Airi. She was motivated by revenge, nothing more. She was still a normal girl before those students dragged her to death's door."

My mother sighs. "She's not going to die. Not after everything we've done for her. We were lucky that St. Catherine's skipped the background check."

"Generations of Watanabe girls have been going there. She will be fine. I have Tokyo's best looking after her. It will be more than enough. After all, they've kept Airi alive longer than we thought possible."

They leave the room for lunch after their conversation. I want to wake up and chase after them, ask them what they meant by everything they said. As far as I'm concerned, I was never sick, not in the way my mother suggested. Nothing happened in California that should have warranted this reaction from them.

I try to chalk it up to their nerves. They said those things because they were going through a fit of madness. But whatever happened before was absent from my memory, at least according to my mother. My mind blocked it out as an act of mental preservation. It's what happens to trauma survivors. That's what Chiyo tells me about missing people who are suddenly found by the police. Some of them don't remember being taken.

But I trust my memories. The past has always unfolded as a vivid tapestry for me. I always see the colors, the exact stitching. It's how I'm able to remember you, Elle. If I were the absent-minded type, then I wouldn't miss you the way I do. My feelings wouldn't be as intense. Whatever my mother thinks happened to me, wouldn't have escaped my mind. No doctor or treatment would have changed that.

Something else worries me. She told Mr. Watanabe I was just like my father, an otherwise healthy man. There were never any concerns about him, physically or mentally before his death. He was a charismatic swimmer with a balanced diet. I would go as far as to say that he was healthier than the average person.

I wasn't anything like him, shy while he was outgoing and sedentary while he was active. Whatever disease he had would have been obvious.

It wasn't like my mother to lie about serious things. But whatever conspiracy she was behind, Mr. Watanabe was working with her. He knew what was wrong with my father and I. The question was, why hide it from me? Didn't I out of all people deserve to know?

Maybe I didn't know myself as well as I thought I did. What a scary thought. I've spent so much time in my head that I should be the authority on myself. Nana should be the Nana expert.

The next person to visit me is Chiyo. She's just as emotional as my mother, if not more so, but for different reasons.

"I told you not to go after them," she says, grabbing my arm. If I was conscious, I would have pulled away from her grasp. "Didn't I say how stupid it was to use violence? I get sick for one week and you end up in the hospital. You should have waited for me. We could have figured it out together."

Her hands slide down my arm, stopping at my palm. She holds it gently, so tender that I feel it even in this submerged state.

"You are the person that I feel closest to out of everyone in the entire school. I've never been so at ease with anyone else. With you, I can speak freely, and say things that I've locked up in my heart for years. I think we were meant to meet, if not as students at the same school, then maybe as two friendly strangers. The universe would have contrived some other way for our paths to cross.

"I'm saying this because I think you need to know how I feel about you. A part of you may already know, and yet I want to make it clear that you're precious to me. Not more precious than my missing sister, but I find myself thinking that you're a close second. Because of this, you cannot die. That can't be hard to do, right? Just make up your mind not to leave me."

I hear the tears in her voice. I didn't consider abandoning everyone in my life while stuck in my coma. In fact, the possibility hardly occurred to me. But as I loosen my grip on the strands of life keeping me here, I realize that it was easy to let go.

Nevertheless, I hold on, daunted by that possibility. Life was comfortable in Tokyo, more luxurious than it had ever been in my past. My mother had orchestrated a lot getting me here, giving us a new family to be a part of. I couldn't bear the thought of never experiencing any of it again.

Airi is the last person to visit me. She doesn't touch me like my mother or Chiyo do, but I sense her in the room. Although I can't see her ghost-like appearance, the air around me grows a few degrees cooler. It's similar to standing next to a large block of ice.

"You have to get better soon," she says. "I never thought I would like having you around, but you've made my life brighter. If only you weren't so incredibly stupid. Maybe it's because you grew up in America. You know, I meant it when I said that I would deal with my bullies. I was going to have our father do something about those girls. He would know how. I've seen him get rid of people before."

She pauses, unused to speaking more than a few words. "You were only supposed to be my sister, not get yourself almost killed. I waited six months for you. They said that you were sick and that you needed treatment. Six months. Do you know how long that is? It was practically forever. When you wake up, you better not do something like this again."

So even my sister knew about my sickness. But the six months that she was talking about made no sense. It was the time between your disappearance and my arrival in Japan. And I hadn't been sick then. I was sad, crying over you for so long that time lost shape.

Has it really been that long since then? It felt like two months of wallowing because of the way my life was now. I was content before this accident and it shrunk the length of the misery I experienced in the past.

When I try to look back at that time, I only see darkness. I cannot recall a single concrete moment that I lived through in those six months.

I shiver inwardly. My mother was right. I really did forget everything.