A Stranger In The Subway

Grief

The next time Ren met his sister, it was in a funeral hall, the only remains of her existence carved on the wooden panel of the photo frame.

Her name. Age. A decade old picture of his sister, smiling at the camera. One of the fews polaroids they have of her in their family album. One of the only few they will have left for the years to come.

The police told them there was no body found in the aftermath of the incident, everything burnt to crisp, the line of their mouth grim, their voice soft when they tried to relay the news with the kind of brutal honesty they were taught to, a kindness in it's own way, because Ren thought he might break a little if they pity them.

‘ There was a fire. ’ they said, ‘ it appears to have been in one of the chemistry labs on the third floor. ’ they looked on in sorrow. ‘ there were a few more students aside your daughter in the lab. ’

That the preliminary findings suggest there was an accident involving volatile chemicals, possibly a gas leak or a reaction that got out of control, and that the building old wiring didn't help.

It started on the fifth of February, a week away from his sister's birthday when they got a call at three in the evening from a hospital at Shinjuku. An hour away from Hokone.

His father had driven them to the hospital in a rush, frantic, messy, something desperate in his eyes as he swerved through the turns, looking like he was only a minute away from crumbling, the tremble in his hand visible. He didn't say a word on their way, a few glances toward Ren, his smile so pitifully fragile, whispering fervently that it would be okay. His sister was going to be fine.

‘ Th–the nurse might have got it wrong, you know. ’ he had told him before they got into the car, a mad hopeful glint in his eyes. ‘ It can't be Sumire. Not our Sumire. ’ trembling hands reaching out for the coat in the rack, shaking his head, muttering. Looking as devastated as Kei felt.

A lie his father fooled himself to believe in, if only the thing that kept him from breaking completely.

And Ren who was foolish enough to believe in it too.

So maybe, that was why, when the nurse had handed them the only remnants of his sister carefully wrap in a cotton handkerchief, a tattered journal she had always kept around, grief in her eyes, her voice so impossibly soft and gentle when she told them it was what that was left of the incident, somehow, oddly enough, it was—

‘ I am sorry, ’ the nurse had said, a hand over Ren's own. Warm. In the distance, he could hear his father's voice rising amidst the tragedy around them, demanding answers from the authorities, the sound of mothers crying for their children. Already mourning.

No one asked them to quiet down.

‘ It was the only thing they could find of her. ’

And Ren had felt like he was sinking, memories of his sister last winter still so clear in his head, only a few months ago. She had looked so alive, so real. Something he could hold if he reached out. And not an intangible memory he had no body to mourn over.

He found he couldn't breath, drowning underwater, his head muffled. He couldn't remember what the nurse had said to him after, the warmth of her hand ebbing away and leaving him cold to the fingertips, a nauseous lurch in his stomach. A crushing feeling in his chest.

He remembers clutching the journal like his life depended on it, walking away, and then nothing much of it at all.

But he remembers his father’s face when he showed him his sister's journal, how he had spent the rest of the day drinking in the living room, crying, wallowing in his sorrow, while Ren had locked himself in his room, staring at the ceiling, thinking how the room at the end of the hallway would be always empty from now on.