Author’s notes
This one is distinctly less disturbing than the rest. I hope you guys weren’t too attached to a vision of Sachiko as the world’s biggest mental case, because, in spite of how frightening I think her head is, she’s not all-gone.
Let me be the fire in your head.
Beyond the sun
In an ideal relationship between a petite soeur and her grande soeur, awkward silences were what you shared when you were both in the lavatory, unable to make conversation. Few relationships were so ideal; even Rei and Yoshino, as comfortable as they had been as very small children, back before it became really important to fill every gap in conversation with inane, meaningless words, shared the occasional awkward space; sometimes over the phone, sometimes walking to school on a bad day.
The same held true for Yumi and Sachiko. And though neither would have admitted it in a court of law, they spent their first minute together, alone, in over three months in mildly uncomfortable silence. It was, at least, uncomfortable on Sachiko’s end; later, for a while, they would both attribute it to the bad taste left in their mouths by Sei’s tasteless exit, or to Sachiko’s embarrassment about what had happened, or…
Or really, anything except for what it was.
Sachiko, not entirely sure what to say in the wake of…everything, really, stared intently at the hem of Yumi’s jeans, willing herself not to think about what was happening so hard; trained social butterfly or not, anybody who worried themselves excessively froze up eventually,
and lost
and that wasn’t Sachiko. She hadn’t even frozen up when
not thinking about that
her stomach hurt.
In fact, it hurt quite a bit. She put a hand protectively over her stomach, clutching it in just that little bit further, as though if she huddled herself up as tight as she could, maybe her pain would vanish completely.
Yumi’s eyes widened and she gave a little gasp; Sachiko imagined it was, for her, a bit like watching an epileptic wince in pain; unsure as to whether or not they were about to have an attack, and then what do you do?
What would Yumi do? If Sachiko were to have some inexplicable attack right here?
Would she get fed up? If you’re not going to make an effort to heal, I’m not going to stick around while you mope around. Is that what she would say?
The pain lanced up through Sachiko’s torso again, and then turned to something worse, something queasy and sickening. She gasped, clamped a hand to her mouth as her eyes widened in the kind of terror only visible on a sober person’s face just before they vomited.
“Onee-sama!” Yumi cried, and, in a single fearless, graceful motion befitting of some of the nun-nurses at Lillian, grabbed the (currently empty) vomit-pan from the table by Sachiko’s bed, stood up, and brought it underneath Sachiko’s mouth. With her other hand, cool and dry, she pulled Sachiko’s hair back gently from where it had been clustering about her cheeks. A second later, Sachiko lost the battle with her gorge, moved her hand, and threw up into the pan, giving a small, frightened retch with each heave of her stomach.
When she was empty, (when did I have food in the first place?) she looked back up at Yumi, slowly, her mind swimming with fear and shame. It took her a second to fully comprehend the look on the girl’s face, but she needn’t have feared; Yumi was looking down at her, her expression equal parts concern and
love
affection, and smiling, her open face hiding nothing. Her face couldn’t hide anything. Yumi’s face, Sachiko felt, could not have been anything but the most honest thing on the planet.
Her petite soeur didn’t say anything. How could she? She couldn’t ask if Sachiko was okay, because it was obvious she wasn’t, head hovering not a foot above a pan full of her own vomit, still occasionally spilling forth a wet hiccup. She couldn’t ask if she could do anything to help, because she knew that Sachiko couldn’t ask for anything better than this. She couldn’t talk about something off-topic, to try and get Sachiko’s mind off of it, because…
Because it wouldn’t have been honest. It wouldn’t have been Yumi.
So she stood there, her hand on Sachiko’s forehead, cooling it and holding her long, dark hair back, her other hand holding the vomit-pan under Sachiko’s head until it was clear that Sachiko was done with everything but the hiccups. Those battles, Sachiko thought, she would win. Before had been…
What had it been?
Setting the pan down carefully—a lot of what was inside was liquid, which meant that there hadn’t really been that much in her stomach after all—Yumi sat down next to Sachiko and put an arm around her a little protectively.
Look how easily she fills the role you can’t, that small, bitter thing inside of her pointed out. What kind of mother will you be if you can’t even act like a decent onee-sama
What kind of wife will you be…
She pushed the thought out of her mouth, about half a second before Yumi pulled Sachiko’s head to her shoulder, and for a moment, she felt her stomach vanish and her head begin a steady ascent towards the clouds. A smile drifted vaguely onto her face, and her lips parted slightly as she let out her breath in a small sigh…
And then, as the air rose from her mouth and passed her nose, the thought hit her like an alarm, an agonizing, painful sound that gave her the impression that maybe her brain was a bell, and her skull the little red casing that made the sound really echo in a person’s ear, gifting them with that lasting headache that reminds them, hey, just so you don’t forget, you stood a little too close to that alarm today. She jerked upwards, away from Yumi, her hand going to her mouth for the second time.
It wasn’t a bell in her head, though. Her brain vibrated against her skull and the sound it made was BREATH. Breath. Her breath, sour with the odor and taste of vomit, still fresh in her mouth.
BREATHBREATHBREATHBREATHBREATHBREATH
Her breath. She had just vomited twice; as her lips parted, this became fairly apparent from the sour, pungent odor emanating from between her teeth. This wasn’t just a little error in etiquette, one which might cause her mother or old etiquette coach to snap at her harshly; it was an outrage, like wearing a high-cut skirt to a formal occasion, or breaking wind at the dinner table. It wasn’t just breaching manners; it was taking a shit on them. As far as that bell
BREATH YOU DISGUSTING BITCH
was concerned, she may as well have not brushed her teeth that morning, or any morning for the past week before an important event. She may as well have vomited on Yumi. It was the absolute epitome of
yumi must think im
how could anyone
BREATH how can she stand to be anywhere near me when im this disgusting
Sachiko felt her gorge rise again, for the second time in less than ten minutes.
Stress? Maybe that was what brought that attack on… he said. But peptic ulcers are caused by a disease. Did that mean that her stomach just rose and fell at intervals, or was there something to that stress thing?
Something was gently prompting her head down, back towards where Yumi’s shoulder
couldn’t be
was. It was soft and warm, and it seemed to possess a queer cooling ability as well—the burn in her stomach faded nearly as soon as she touched it, Yumi’s hand still gently cupping her jaw.
“Does it hurt very much?” Yumi said quietly, her voice laden with sympathy, but underneath it, Sachiko saw something most
disgusting
ladylike: It was Sachiko’s out. All she had to do was lie and say no, and Yumi would let her go, and that would be the end of it.
But it wasn’t, that was the unfathomable thing. It wasn’t, because Yumi, for her training from Sachiko and the whole of Lillian, for all of her faking it in front of everybody from Sachiko’s parents to the teachers, wasn’t. She could be ladylike, but deep down, she wasn’t; and Sachiko knew, somehow, that that was what she was seeing right now, was deep-down.
Deep down, Yumi was just caring. More like one of the older nuns, with their sly winks and their oddly practical, if oft-outdated, (if a boy keeps adjusting his jinbei around you, watch out, he’s down a well without a rope for you) advice, than the Ladies (with a capital ‘L’) that seemed to spread themselves across Japan, produced at a steady rate of a few hundred a year by that school; the ones with perfect posture, cool, calculating speech, and reserved smiles that never seemed to reach their eyes.
Sachiko had an out, provided free of charge, if unwittingly, by Yumi. All she had to do was take it, and Yumi would leave her to tend to her unkempt appearance; and unkempt it was, she knew, with a kind of preternatural sense that she could never properly explain: Her hair was tousled, as though she’d just woken from a long sleep, (which she had) and if she were to look in a mirror, she was almost certain she would find dark rings about her eyes from where her makeup had rubbed in. She looked like something her mother would have actually deemed to describe with a dirty word, and even thinking about it brought that familiar queasy bubble back into her stomach. She looked awful, and she knew it, and she thought that Yumi knew it too. Of course she would have wanted Yumi gone—everyone gone.
The trick to it, though, was that she didn’t want to. That wasn’t to say that she wasn’t tempted, even pulled to by her mother’s voice, still ringing in her head like a fire alarm. Only that another part of her—a part fundamentally imbued with what some might have called a deep courage—refused, flat out. It was a part of her that Sachiko had rarely seen, and knew almost nothing about. Courage was something that Ladies needed, her mother had said, but only later; for now, she was best to bury that part of her and do what needed to be done.
And yet, here it was.
And here was Yumi. Maybe Sachiko did look awful; maybe her hair was tousled and unkempt, maybe flecked with the bits of vomit that Sei wasn’t able to get out, and yet, Yumi still ran her fingers through it gently. Maybe her face did look as though it hadn’t been made up in weeks, pale and distraught; and yet, Yumi still cupped it gently in her small, soft hands.
“No,” Sachiko murmured, and the alarms only blew stronger in her head, but this time, somebody was shielding her from them: That somebody that she had always known, but had forgotten existed; the part which her family had so unmercifully crushed every time it had poked its head out and stood up to their conditioning.
When Sachiko’s grandmother died, it had fought tooth and nail with the side of her that refused to be seen crying in public. It had fought with every ounce of its courage to do the thing which required the most bravery of all, and let her guard down around Yumi; it had almost succeeded, many times, and so Sachiko had called it cowardice, and had called her cowardice bravery.
True strength, it said, its voice clear and true, poking its head out from its grave for the first time in many months, comes from trusting others.
And Sachiko knew it was right.
So she let herself be held. And after a while, she took Yumi in her arms and held her close as well, and then her petite soeur did what she had been desperately needing to do for so long: She began to cry softly, and the pressure about Sachiko’s breasts increased as Yumi pulled her onee-sama close.
“I missed you, Yumi,” Sachiko whispered, speaking with honesty so pure it was relieving. “I missed you so much. I…” didn’t know what to do with myself without you, and all those things that you taught me—how to be honest, with others and with myself; how to let my guard down and vent all of the pressure that never stops building inside of me…I forgot all of them.
Her mother’s voice went silent. Of course it did: It wasn’t really her mother. It was her; it was her own cowardice, taught to her by somebody who was afraid of her daughter’s strength, afraid of her daughter becoming independent of her, of not needing her anymore; by somebody, maybe, who was just afraid of being truly alone.
“I know, onee-sama,”Yumi whispered, her hands trembling on Sachiko’s jaw.
She didn’t miss you; that voice, that horrible, terrible voice, seemed to have redoubled itself. She doesn’t need you. You’re the one so dependant on
Shut up. Shut up, you horrible, horrible woman, and get the hell away from me.
And the voice fell silent again, and this time, Sachiko thought, it was gone for good. It was a mistake that would, eventually, nearly cost her everything she held dearly to herself, but perhaps, for now, it was necessary.
After all, if she didn’t relieve her stress, how would she be able to leave the hospital bed?
Not that, right now, she had any intention of moving anywhere.
--
Yumi tracked their doctor down about half an hour later, after she and Sachiko had stopped crying, and spoken a few choice words to each other. Most of them had been words of endearment, but not all—some had been about more present things. She was only gone for perhaps ten minutes, but they were not easy minutes for Sachiko, who felt a little niggle at the back of her head almost as soon as the girl left: A children’s tune, familiar in the way that a man you saw every day but never spoke to might have been familiar:
All-gone all-gone cattail fish is all-gone, ne’er seen again
where to where to into the sea its so blue; now we start again
All-gone all-gone its all-gone.
It gnawed at the back of her sanity for reasons that she couldn’t explain, but she shut it out. It was easier this time.
The doctor, who arrived alongside Yumi, gave Sachiko a final examination—her eyes, her mouth, her heartbeat, (a little weak, but that was to be expected, he said, just no more blood-thinners). He even gave a quick examination of the foul-smelling pan near Sachiko’s bed, and then asked Sachiko if she had been under a lot of stress lately.
Not knowing what else to say, Sachiko nodded, and he told her to keep away from whatever it was for a while—stress, he said, caused an influx of stomach acid, which was what caused that burning feeling people felt in their stomachs when they were nervous or anxious. He added, in the sort of undertone usually reserved for talking about private bodily functions, that if she was fond of the bottle or the pipe, now would be a good time to give those up as well. She told him that she did nothing of the sort, and he smiled jovially, as though he hadn’t said anything at all. “You’re excused,” he said. “Just get plenty of rest, take your medication—I gave you your prescription, didn’t I? Good—and make sure you take it easy for a while.” He flashed them an easy smile, and Sachiko immediately understood why Sei had trusted him. It was the kind of smile that said, just between us. All of this is just between us.
The doctor left, and Sachiko got dressed—Yumi had brought her fresh clothes when they’d left for the hospital—behind a curtain, since the glass windows into the hall were large enough that a nurse could see a patient if the door was closed and she was in trouble.
When they walked out of the hospital, it was hand-in-hand, Sachiko’s heart burning as it hadn’t in a long time; not since Lillian, and a sweeter time than this had been.
Yumi seemed a little distant, but she had told Sachiko about that well in advance: She was thinking. About what, Sachiko didn’t know, but she allowed herself to be content in waiting. Yumi would speak when she was good and ready.
She always did.
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