“Tell me, since you’re both in high school, how does the neighbors’ boy strike you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he handsome, or the type who’s popular with girls?”
The female detective smiled, and I could see her white overlapping teeth through her bright red lips. Lipstick was smeared on her teeth. I remembered the woman next door with her bright red lipstick, and though I didn’t have any feelings for her one way or the other, I suddenly got frightened thinking that Worm had murdered her. I couldn’t figure out why he’d do something like that, and it gave me a weird, spooky feeling. I was sitting there staring into space when the female detective rested her hand on my knee.
“Well?” she said.
It felt hot and awful to have someone else’s hand on me like that, and I shifted to the side so her hand slipped off my jeans.
“To tell you the truth…”
“Please, go right ahead. He’s the victim’s son, so there’s no need to hold back. We’ll forget we heard it from you.”
If you’re going to forget it, then why even ask? I thought. But my mom was watching me with a worried frown, and the older detective looked all serious as he was scribbling notes, so I went ahead and told them.
“Well, he’s kind of gross,” I said. “Nerdy, and sort of gloomy, like you never can figure out what he’s thinking. Like a withdrawn loner who just studies hard all the time.”
A withdrawn loner who just studies hard all the time. That seemed to strike a chord. The two detectives shared a glance and stood up. My words seemed to make them label Worm a typical nerdy guy from a family that pushed its kid too hard to succeed in school—so he flipped out.
They questioned my mom, too, as she sat there at one end of the sofa. What kind of woman was the lady next door? How did the family seem to get along with each other? Any hint of domestic violence? I noticed that even before they began, the police had a set pattern of questions. It was after nine p.m. when they finally finished. All the lights were on next door, so they must still have been combing the place for evidence. I could picture Worm’s father, in shock, leading the police from room to room. I let out a deep sigh. He’d always treated me like I didn’t exist, but still it seemed outrageous for this to happen to him.
* * *
“This is terrible,” my mother said. “The police haven’t said anything but it’s pretty obvious they suspect the son. They told me the father’s a doctor who works in a hospital. We’re neighbors and yet I didn’t even know that. I wonder if they forced their son to study all the time to get into med school.”
I was looking at the TV guide in the evening paper and didn’t reply.
“How can you be so easygoing at a time like this?” my mother suddenly yelled at me.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with us,” I said.
“True, but you knew the lady next door, didn’t you? And now she’s dead. Whether the son did it or not, I feel sorry for him and the mother. I even feel sorry for the father, that stuck-up man with the ascot. His own son killed his wife, can you imagine? How could they ignore things until it came to this?”
“So what?”
I don’t know why I lashed out at her. What she said made sense, but something just wasn’t right about it, which really bothered me.
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” my mom said.
Her eyes were fixed. The front door opened and Dad came in. He had on a crummy light brown jacket and a black briefcase under his arm. His navy blue polo shirt was all sweaty. His eyes had the same fearful look as Mom’s. She must have called him and he’d rushed home. He always says he’s busy, but if he needs to he can come home right away. He turned to Mom first.
“Man, what a shock,” he said. “The police just questioned me outside. I didn’t know anything. They were amazed when I told them I didn’t even know they had a son the same age as Toshiko.”
Mom looked at him with this look that said, You’re always out drinking and never come home, that’s why. The whole thing was too much, so I tossed the newspaper on the table and was about to go upstairs to my room. Dad looked over reproachfully at the scattered paper.
“Toshiko. What happened to your bike? It’s not outside.”
“Yeah, what happened was…I parked it in the parking lot at the station but it got stolen.”
“Why don’t you report it? The place is swarming with cops.”
Dad chuckled at his little joke but soon turned serious.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We wouldn’t find it anyway. Sometimes people just use bikes and bring them back to the parking lot. Whoever took it will bring it back.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
Dad didn’t seem to care one way or another. You’re so careless! Mom would normally have yelled at this point, but she was preoccupied, boiling noodles, slicing ham, preparing a late supper for us. As I walked up the stairs I could hear my parents talking, keeping their voices down so I couldn’t catch anything. I stopped halfway up the stairs to eavesdrop.
“The inside of the house is apparently a wreck,” Dad said. “The glass door to the bathroom was shattered when the woman was thrown against it, and she was covered in blood.”
“I don’t doubt it. They said her skull was bashed in by a baseball bat.”
“What could possibly have made him do it?”
“He must have gone crazy. He took off his bloody T-shirt, they said, and put it in the laundry. He must have calmly changed his clothes and then gone out. I can’t believe it—a wimpy little boy like that.”
“Boys are strong,” Dad said. “He might be skinny, but boys that age are stronger than you’d imagine. And they don’t know how to control themselves. I’m sure glad we had a girl.”
“What a terrible thing to say. That’s kind of self-centered, don’t you think?”
Chastened, my father said, “Guess you’re right. Sorry.”
I sat down on my bed and called my cell phone from my room phone. “Hi,” a young guy answered. Damn, I thought. In the background I could hear the roar of trains going by. He was outside.
“You’re the person who found my cell phone.”
“I’m not sure if ‘found’ is the right word,” he said.
The guy seemed hesitant. His voice sounded similar to the one that had said, “Sure is hot.”
“Where did you find it?” I asked.
“In the bike basket.”
Was this the person who stole my bike? My blood began to boil.
“Did you steal my bike?”
“Stole, or borrowed—I’m not sure how to put it.”
“That’s my phone and I want it back. If you don’t return it you won’t be able to use it anyway ’cause I’ll stop the service. And I want you to give my bike back. I need it.”
“I’m sorry,” the guy apologized.
“One other thing. Are you the boy next door?”
All of a sudden the phone clicked off. I hit redial but he didn’t pick up. I kept on calling, my knees shaking. I was starting to suspect that the guy who stole my cell phone and bicycle was Worm. Finally I left a message.
“This is Toshiko Yamanaka. I want you to return my cell phone and bike. My home phone number is under Home on the cell, so call me there. Between nine a.m. and noon I’m home alone, don’t worry. Please call me. I’ll tell you something else, ’cause I think you’re the boy next door. The police are looking for you. I think you know why. It has nothing to do with me, but it was a shock to hear about your mother. I feel sorry for her. I probably won’t say anything to them, but I don’t really know what I should do.”
I left this message on the phone, and felt depressed afterward.
* * *
That night I couldn’t sleep well. I dozed off and had some weird dreams. The one I remember the most is this:
The woman next door was in my house, cooking dinner. Worm and I were in the living room, watching TV and laughing till tears were streaming down our faces.
Worm and I were brother and sister, apparently, and the woman next door was our mother. Far away a smog alert siren sounded. Worm said, “It’s hot, so let’s have fried rice…. Fried rice sounds good.” I went to the kitchen to wheedle the woman into making it for us. Mom, I said, make some fried rice for us, okay? The woman stared at me from behind her silver-framed glasses, then took out a wok and pointed at the bathroom. He pushed me against the door over there, she said, so I’m not going to cook for you. But Mom, the door to the bathroom isn’t glass, so it’s okay. There must be some mistake. It seemed to be a dream where I knew what Worm had done, but I was doing my best to calm her down anyway.
I woke up all sweaty and looked around my room trying to figure out where I was. It had been light out for some time, apparently. The sun had come up as always and a new day was beginning. It looked like it was going to be another hot one. Another day like all the others, but since yesterday morning my world had imploded. That crashing sound I heard when the smog alert sounded echoed over and over in my mind. I hadn’t seen the bloody face of the woman next door, but I could imagine how awful it must have looked, her glasses flung aside. The dream I had must have been suggestive—telling me that I was knowingly aiding and abetting Worm after his “matricide.” Maybe I’d be seen as an actual accomplice in the murder. The fact scared me silly. If Worm was caught, wouldn’t they think that I’d lent him my phone and bike to help him get away? I suddenly felt like Worm had forced some awful thing into my hands. Now it had liquefied and was dripping down between my fingers. I was terrified—of the police, and the adult world. The warmth of the female detective’s hand on my knee came back to me, and I shuddered.
I should have told my parents everything, before this got completely out of hand. I’d just about made up my mind when I heard Mom downstairs getting breakfast ready. She was grinding coffee beans. The same old world as always. Relieved, I got out of bed. My mom might have a different take on things than me, but at least she was a buffer between me and the police and the adult world. I was happy I had a mom and dad like that. Just then I heard voices outside, so I opened the window and peeked out. The narrow street outside our house was packed with people. People lugging TV cameras, newspaper reporters, a woman who looked like a reporter, and police. The reporter was from one of those TV tabloid shows. I ran downstairs.
“Good morning. You’re up early.” My mom, her face gaunt, was stirring eggs.
“Mom, did you see all those people outside?”
“They’re from a tabloid show,” my mother said, her face dark. “I hate having all these people crawling about. They must be hoping the son will come back home. How vulgar. I mean, they don’t even know yet if he’s the one who did it. And besides, he’s a juvenile. All this racket’s driving me crazy. Sorry, but could you go out and get the paper?”
I didn’t have a bra on and was wearing a T-shirt and shorts I used for pajamas, but I said okay. I was curious to see how the papers were covering the incident and to see what the people from the TV tabloid show were like. As soon as I stepped outside, the hum of the people talking stopped cold. I was walking over to the newspaper box next to the front door when a woman reporter thrust a microphone in my face.
“Excuse me, I just have a couple of questions about the people next door. What sort of family were they?”
So this is a reporter? The other people stood there, holding their breath, waiting for my reply. Here I was, dressed like this, on national TV. I got all jittery and started inching backward, newspaper in hand. As soon as I reached the door I leaped inside. The tabloid show was on TV in our living room. Dad was sitting in front of the TV, his face swollen, chuckling to himself.
“Hey, you were just on TV.”
The screen showed the road in front of our house with the caption “Live from the Scene” in white. You could see our house and the one next door, lit by the morning sun. It looked cramped yet showy at the same time. Ah, I thought, stunned, too late now. Now that it was such big news, I had to keep quiet about what I knew. That ominous sound, meeting Worm right afterward, the contented look on his face, the fact that he stole my bike and cell phone. I didn’t think I’d be telling anybody about any of these things. The word accomplice ran through my mind again.
My dad folded up the newspaper and said, “I wonder why it happened. When I was young there were times I wanted to kill my old man and some of my teachers—but I never thought of killing my mom. It was like she was part of a totally different world from me. I never thought my mom was controlling my life or anything. Have you ever thought that?”
“Never.”
Which was a lie. I think about it every time I fight with my mom, and there are tons of people I hate so much that I wouldn’t mind taking them out. Even Terauchi and Yuzan—sometimes I hate them and want to kill them. But killing them wouldn’t get me anywhere—that’s the conclusion I always come to. If I’m going to have to pay for it in the end, I might as well let them live.
“The man next door apparently worked at the Kanto Fukagawa Hospital,” Dad said. “In internal medicine. The poor guy. What was the son’s name, anyway? It’s not in the paper.”
“Of course not. He’s a juvenile,” I said, depressed. Dad gulped down his coffee and exhaled, spewing coffee breath all over the place.
“I guess it’ll be a big story for a while.”
Mom called out from the kitchen: “Those people will be out there until the boy comes home. What should we do?”
“Just carry on as always,” Dad said.
“If we could do that, there wouldn’t be a problem.”
“We’ll just have to work around it. We’re not involved.”
But your daughter is! I wondered how astonished my dad would be if he knew that.
* * *
After my parents went to work I watched some of the tabloid shows on TV. They were all the same. Is he involved in his mother’s murder? The high school son vanished. Midsummer madness—what happened with this seventeen-year-old? While I was watching TV we had two sets of visitors. The first was this middle-aged couple who said they were the older brother and sister-in-law of the man next door. We’re so sorry to cause you all this trouble, they said, bowing and scraping like crazy, and handed me a heavy box of sweets. I opened it and found thirty mizuyokan sweets inside.
The second set of visitors were the detectives from the day before. The old detective, wiping the sweat off with an oversize handkerchief, asked, “About the boy next door…we have a witness who saw him walking on the road to the station around noon yesterday. You told us you went to the station at about the same time. Didn’t you see him?”
“I was riding my bike.”
Damn! As soon as I said this I realized I shouldn’t have. They’ll find out my bike isn’t there. Unconsciously I looked down.
“Didn’t you overtake him on your bike?”
The female detective asked this. This day she had on a white blouse and a heavy cloisonné brooch near her collar. Like yesterday, her hair was loosely done up. The color of her face and the skin of her neck were five degrees off. I shook my head.
“I didn’t notice him,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to cram school today?”
“Yeah, I am.”
The phone rang. The two detectives motioned for me to get it. Heart slamming in my chest, I went to answer it. For all I knew it might be Worm. Whoever was on the other end didn’t respond.
“Hello? Hello?”
The two detectives, standing at the entrance, looked at me suspiciously. I looked away and just started talking.
“Oh, Terauchi? Did you see the TV show? Sorry to have worried you. We have some guests now so I’ll call you back.”
The person on the other end finally spoke.
“The cops are there, aren’t they. I’ll call back later.”
It was Worm. I hung up like nothing was going on. This was like something out of a movie.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.”
/> I went back to the two detectives. The man, apparently farsighted, was squinting at his notebook. “The person who saw the young man stated that he was wearing a navy blue T-shirt and jeans,” he said, “and was carrying a black backpack. The person who saw him was a housewife who lives behind your house. She was pushing her baby in a stroller to a park nearby. She said she passes in front of the boy’s house every time she goes to the station, so she’s seen him a number of times. This housewife also said that she saw someone who looked like you pass her by on a bike. Are you positive you didn’t see him?”