The house was dark when Hiroto got home, the kind of dark that meant no one had turned a single light on all evening. He toed off his shoes in the entryway and stood there for a moment, listening. No television. No footsteps upstairs. Nothing.
He found the note on the kitchen table, weighed down under the rice cooker so it wouldn't slide.
Hiroto,
You have to take care of yourself now. I am going on a long trip — maybe a few months, maybe longer, I don't know yet. I am trying to help myself. Maybe you can learn to do the same.
I am trying to walk again.
Goodbye.
— Dad
He read it twice. He waited for something to move in his chest — anger, maybe, or the collapse of some floor he hadn't known he was standing on. Nothing came. Just the note, and the hum of the refrigerator, and the rain starting up faintly against the kitchen window.
He set the paper down exactly where he'd found it, as if leaving it undisturbed might undo something. Then he opened the fridge.
There wasn't much — half a daikon, a carton of eggs, a single fillet of saba his father must have bought and never cooked. Hiroto took it out anyway. He scored the skin the way his mother used to, salted it, and set it under the grill while he washed rice and started the miso, dropping in the last of the tofu and a handful of wakame that had gone slightly soft in its packet. He worked without thinking about it, the way his hands remembered things his mind had stopped bothering to.
By the time the fish was done the rain outside had thickened into something steady and full, drumming against the glass in long unbroken lines. He liked the sound of it. He always had — even now, even after everything the rain had shown him, there was something in it that felt less like an intrusion and more like company. He set his plate down, then, without quite deciding to, went back and started the coffee too, just to have something to hold.
He sat by the window with the cup between both hands and watched the rain run down the glass in threads that split and rejoined and split again, and he thought about his father's handwriting — smaller than he remembered it, almost apologetic on the page — and about the word walk, and what it might mean for a man who had never once, in seventeen years, admitted to being anything other than fine.
I have lived seventeen years, he thought, and I can't remember most of the days.
Not because they were bad. Not because they were good. Just because they were nothing — a Tuesday, an afternoon spent eating lunch alone at his desk, hours that hadn't asked to be remembered and so hadn't been. Everything before was already fading the way steam fades off a cup left too long on a table. Everything after was the only part that stayed sharp: the platform, the yellow dress, the drop of rain that fell like punctuation.
He finished the coffee. He ate the rest of the fish slowly, alone at a table built for three, and did not turn on any lights beyond the one over the stove.
When he was done he washed his dish, turned off the burner light, and went to bed without checking his phone.
He slept without dreaming, or without remembering that he had.
—
He woke to grey morning light and, for once, no immediate weight sitting on his chest when he opened his eyes. He made breakfast — rice, an egg, the last of yesterday's miso reheated — and ate it standing at the counter, looking out at a sky that had, for the first time in what felt like weeks, stopped raining entirely.
I need to go somewhere, he thought. Somewhere that isn't this house. Somewhere that isn't this town.
He thought of a place he'd read about once, in a travel pamphlet left behind at the restaurant by a customer — a small mountain village a few hours north, known mostly for its hot springs and for snow that came early and stayed late. Shirotani. He didn't know anyone there. No one there would look at him and see a boy whose mother had died, or a boy whose father had just left a note under a rice cooker and disappeared.
He found a bike rental place open that morning, filled out the paperwork with a hand that felt steadier than it had in days, and by nine o'clock he was on the road north, his bag strapped behind him, the sky still holding its breath above him in a colorless, waiting grey.