Chapter 30
“How much is left, Naoyuki?” Taki fingers through his history book, looking for the answer to a question on one of his worksheets. “By now, you must be about caught up, right?” She restlessly swings her legs under her desk. She couldn’t find the answer, either; she considers throwing in the towel on this question. “Are you really that far behind?” Taki presses. “Or are you just not keeping up with your current work?”
Naoyuki ruffles his hair in frustration. “I can’t do it all,” he whines.
Taki steals a furtive glimpse at Naoyuki’s bandaged hands. His dad’s handiwork again? she wonders. Naoyuki still won’t talk to me about him, she thinks worriedly. Even if I hadn’t talked to Ikuo, I can tell just by the way his dad yelled at him about getting in the car that he’s not a nice guy. In fact, Naoyuki was running away from him. Until I stuck my nose into things.
Naoyuki folds over the desktop and lays his face flat on the desk. “I can’t do it,” he murmurs. “I give up.”
“Hey, you can’t just quit,” Taki reasons with him. “Here, let’s go to another question – ”
“No matter what I do, nothing ever goes right,” Naoyuki murmurs.
Startled, Taki draws back in her chair and stares at him. Naoyuki’s hands were bandaged. His face was bruised. His eyes were clouded. It wasn’t only his outsides that were scathed. Taki blinks at him, frightened. “Naoyuki...you – You told your folks that you were staying late to study, right?” she asks to change the subject. Stupid question. Nobody was waiting for him outside after school, so he must’ve gotten an okay. In fact, the last time he’d gotten in big trouble was when he hadn’t stayed and gotten his work done.
“Whether I did or didn’t probably doesn’t matter,” Naoyuki mutters in reply.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Mama’s not home. Papa’s gonna hit me.”
Taki freezes, startled again. “Your dad hits you whenever your mom isn’t home?” she asks. “Whether you did anything wrong or not?”
“I came all this way..and got my friends hurt for nothing. Papa hates me.”
“Naoyuki, I’m sure that isn’t true – !”
“He never yells at Ikuo. He doesn’t hit Ikuo. Ikuo gets good grades. Ikuo’s not a worthless failure son who will never get into a good school.” Naoyuki’s voice starts to crack, and his eyes start to water over. “He said I’d be better off retarded or mute. I hate those words; everyone makes fun of me with those words. Why would he say that to me if he doesn’t hate me? Why would he lock me up, or hit me, or scrape up my hands under his shoes if he doesn’t hate me? He doesn’t even like to call me by my name!” he cries.
“Naoyuki...” Taki reaches out and strokes her hand over his. “I..I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to hear that. I never knew...” She sees some of the healing skin on his little fingers. His father really had done a number on him. How cruel, she thinks. What parent could do something like this to their own kid – let alone someone as small and helpless as Naoyuki? It’s just wrong...
Suddenly, Taki feels as though she was betraying Naoyuki somehow. It was because his teacher, Mr. Ikeda, had talked to her earlier. He’d asked what she knew about Naoyuki. He’d asked her to tell him anything she heard from him from then on. She feels like a spy – a traitor – knowing that she would be giving away this personal information to a third party. But it had to be done. It sounded like Mr. Ikeda was trying to help Naoyuki, and Naoyuki needed that badly, especially after hearing this now. Naoyuki was ready to give up. He felt trapped with no way out. He was already hurting himself as it was, and now he had this to add to his list. There was nothing Taki could do for him, so going to Mr. Ikeda was the only option left. I wish there was something that I could do for you, Taki thinks sadly.
Taki realizes then that she still has her hand on him. I can’t believe he hasn’t started screaming at me yet, she thinks. This is the first time he’s let me touch him like this since... She starts to retract her hand, but Naoyuki reaches out and clutches on to it. Taki blinks at him in surprise. “Naoyuki...” She suddenly feels the overwhelming urge to do something, to say something to him, anything that would help. She blurts out, “When it gets too rough for you at home, come to my place! Me and my mom and dad will help you, Naoyuki!” There. He had another option laid out on the table. It was something that Taki could do for him.
Naoyuki nods, still holding Taki’s hand.
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Ikeda raps on his desktop, looks up from his notes to Taki, who was sitting at the desk closest to his. “That is rather disturbing,” he comments. “And the day after that conversation, Naoyuki doesn’t come to school. Do you know if his stepbrother showed up?”
“I did see Ikuo during lunch today, but he seemed a little off,” Taki replies, “and he wasn’t sitting with his crowd.”
“Also a worrisome sign,” Ikeda murmurs.
“I’m scared that Naoyuki might drop out of school or do something crazy,” Taki confides in him. “He said, ‘I give up.’ I’m not sure what that means. What is he giving up on?”
“But you provided him with an escape route, didn’t you?” Ikeda asks.
“Escape route? You mean, by telling him he could come to my house?”
Ikeda nods. “I doubt Naoyuki would do anything drastic if he wasn’t completely and thoroughly cornered. Or, at least, I wouldn’t expect that.” It doesn’t fit his pattern, Ikeda tries to reassure himself. Naoyuki is defensive. I assume his recent self-injury is a cry for help; he has no control over his circumstances, and he feels trapped. “Soejima, on another track,” Ikeda presses on, “has Naoyuki mentioned anything to you about a car accident? I do believe you told me that his friend was in the hospital, however...”
Taki’s eyes widen. “Well, I knew he was in some kind of accident, but he never actually said ‘car accident,’ even though I kind of got the idea that was it. So it’s true, huh? His friend got hurt in a car accident?”
“I understand that he and two other children were involved, and it happened on his way to town,” Ikeda replies. “But I don’t know any details. You don’t either, then?”
Taki shakes her head. “Now that you make me think of it, though,” she says warily, “I think you should know that Naoyuki’s blaming himself for his friends getting hurt.”
This was one of the missing links in the chain that Ikeda was looking for. He was mistaken; Naoyuki’s self-injury wasn’t just a cry for help. He was blaming himself. He held himself responsible for the injury of both his friends as well as the injury – and possibly, the death – of anyone else in the vehicle.
“Naoyuki said he brought his friends with him when he came here, even though their parents didn’t give the okay. Specifically, what he said was, ‘I was selfish,’ and ‘I almost killed my friends.’ That was right before he banged his head on the wall and I had to call you over for help that time,” Taki explains.
Ikeda jots down notes as if his life depended on it – in reality, now that he was starting to see the whole picture, Naoyuki’s life could depend on it. If Naoyuki was really accusing himself of almost killing his friends, then began to cause himself such severe bodily harm, then he could very well be considering the worst. Especially on account of his low self-esteem at this point, courtesy of his father’s verbal and physical abuse. Taki’s fears were not unfounded. “Tell me honestly, then, what you meant when you talked about your fear that Naoyuki would ‘do something crazy,’” he presses, knowing that since Taki was the closest to Naoyuki right now, her view was the most accurate.
Taki frowns. “When I see him hit his head against things like that,” she says uneasily, “part of me gets really scared. I keep thinking, ‘He’s trying to kill himself.’ I can’t help it, because I don’t understand why else anyone would do that.” Taki looks up at him earnestly and asks, “So what do you think? Am I being paranoid? Or is Naoyuki really in that much trouble?”
Ikeda puts down his pen after jotting down that final note and folds his hands over the desk. “Keeping in mind the information you just shared with me,” he says gently, “I would have to say, yes, I am concerned. I think Naoyuki really is in that much trouble.”
“You talked about me giving him an escape route,” Taki presses. “Will that help him?”
“I hope it will,” Ikeda replies.
After a moment or two of silence, Ikeda packs away his notes and pen and stands up from the desk. “I’m sorry I’ve kept you so long, Soejima,” he says. “It’s time to leave now. I’ll talk to you again soon.”
Taki nods, then sullenly gets up from the desk and trudges after Ikeda out of the room.
Ikeda watches her continue down the hallway and disappear around the corner. Ikeda walks back into his classroom and shuts the door. He strides over to his desk and pulls two sheets of paper from his briefcase. He examines the pencil drawings. “That explains it,” he thinks aloud. “Naoyuki’s drawings are a jumble, like he couldn’t decide what to draw, or how to draw it. This picture is...” He peers at the picture that Naoyuki had drawn of what looked like it might be himself and his two friends. It appeared to be a pleasant drawing on the surface – a boy, a girl, Naoyuki, next to each other holding hands. But the drawing was smeared, as if it had gotten wet. And the drawing of himself wasn’t much more than a few scribbles and marks in comparison to the other two drawings, as if, by the end, he couldn’t draw any more. He’d cried while he drew the picture.
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“You want to know about the two kids?” Kazunori watches questioningly as his professor hands him two pieces of paper with a child’s pencil drawings on them. Judging from where he was going with this conversation, these must have been Naoyuki’s drawings. The one on top had three figures – two boys and a girl; it was Kotaro, Haruko and Naoyuki. “I see. Naoyuki drew them. Did you ask him to?”
“I asked him for a few drawings,” his professor replies, “but I didn’t tell him what to draw. He did this on his own.”
Kazu heaves a sigh. “Kotaro and Haruko are the two kids I mentioned in my report who’d finally gotten close to Naoyuki at his old school. They were involved in the car accident.”
“Previous to meeting these two, his interactions with others were...?”
“Minimal,” Kazu replies. “Even his caretaker could never get close. Naoyuki wouldn’t allow anyone to touch him, and he would communicate nonverbally, usually by signs and gestures. He had many issues with physical bullying because of that, and even his teachers thought that he was some kind of special case.”
“So he was keeping people out in any way possible,” Ikeda surmises. “What made him break that pattern with the two children?”
Kazu thinks for a moment. “It’s not that Naoyuki necessarily wanted to be alone,” he says. “He longed for connections because he lost that intimacy with his folks; however, on the same token, losing that connection made it painful for him to forge new ties because it reminded him of what he’d lost. Am I making sense so far?”
Ikeda nods. “Go on.”
“So I think,” Kazunori continues, “that when those two finally showed enough interest in him to get past all his barriers, he finally allowed them in.”
“It’s as though he’s screening,” Ikeda muses.
Kazu nods. “But after all that, the shock of nearly losing those two in the car accident...”
“Do you have any details about the accident? For instance, about the driver and what happened to him or her?”
“There were three other people in that car,” Kazu replies. “They were strangers – a man, Taro Fubuki, and his two children. As far as how they wound up, Kotaro escaped with a broken arm, and the youngest of the Fubuki kids escaped without a scratch – because Naoyuki protected her; but Fubuki and Haruko were severely injured, and Fubuki’s son died shortly after the EMS arrived at the hospital.”
Ikeda stops scribbling on his clipboard. “This is the first I’ve heard of that.”
“My aunt and uncle don’t know about it,” Kazu replies, “unless Naoyuki’s told them. Which I doubt, because when I last talked to Aunt Aya, she said that Naoyuki’s very tight-lipped about the accident.”
“I can see why,” Ikeda comments.
“I think Naoyuki might have PTSD.”
“I think so, too.”
“Perhaps that’s what’s triggering his disturbing behavior as of late.”
“It’s more than that,” Ikeda says.
“I know; he’s under a lot of stress with school and the move, too. But I think the PTSD is the main cause.”
Ikeda frowns. “Kazunori,” he says, “I’ve learned from a student who’s close to Naoyuki that his father is abusing him.”
“What?!” Kazu cries, bolting up from his seat.
“Naoyuki comes to school with bruises all over,” Ikeda tells him. “His academic performance is suffering from apparent exhaustion. Now this student has told me that Naoyuki confided in her about what his father is doing to him, and it isn’t good. He’s apparently also abusing him verbally, attacking Naoyuki’s self-esteem – which, because of the accident, is already in tatters. Soejima told me that your cousin is blaming himself. Accusing himself for all the damage the accident caused.”
Kazu slowly sinks back into his seat. “I...I see...I guess I should’ve known. He blamed himself for his parents’ disappearance, too. He thought he’d done something wrong to warrant their leaving him behind. It figures that he’d go blaming himself for what happened to his friends, especially after Kotaro’s father scolded him for taking them along...”
“Why did Naoyuki go by himself? Why didn’t he ask his caretaker for transportation?”
Kazu frowns apprehensively. “My dad was putting pressure on her. Because his brother-in-law didn’t want to be bothered. My dad threatened that if Naoyuki didn’t surrender the paper that my sister and I had given him with his parents’ contact information,...he would take Naoyuki away from Ms. Matsuda. It became a legal battle...”
“So Naoyuki couldn’t involve her.”
Kazu nods in reply. “That must’ve been it. He felt he had to do it on his own.” Silence fills the wide-open, empty college classroom. “I feel so stupid. If only I’d put two and two together,” Kazu murmurs. “I could tell that Uncle Hiroto was trouble. We shouldn’t have left Naoyuki there. But he’d finally... We thought it was what Naoyuki wanted. He was happy. He was talking. Why would Uncle Hiroto destroy that...?”
“There must be something else we don’t know,” Ikeda surmises. “Another factor that needs consideration. I suspect that Naoyuki isn’t the only one I need to be seeing.”
Kazunori picks up the two drawings of Naoyuki’s that his professor laid on the table. He smiles a little at the picture of Naoyuki and his friends; at the same time, the drawing tugs tears from his eyes. He separates the two sheets of paper and looks at the second one. “Hey, this is...” He recognizes the two women in the drawing along with Naoyuki instantly. “It’s Ms. Matsuda and Aunt Aya.”
“That picture speaks volumes, too,” Ikeda comments. “Notice who’s missing?”
“Uncle Hiroto,” Kazu responds. Upon further examination of the drawing, he asks, “But who’s this fourth one? The one who looks younger?”
“That’s Soejima,” Ikeda replies.
