Evan didn’t like the girl he shared the hospital room with. She was pretty, but annoying, demanding in a way other girls at school normally weren’t.
“Nana will wake up,” she insisted vehemently, saying those words so intensely that her cherry earrings shook with every syllable. Sometimes, she said it so loudly that he was convinced that she was trying to scream her back into the world.
At first, he believed it. He remembered the first day he came, the way her fingers twitched and her eyes cracked open to two white slits. He swore that she could hear his voice, that even in the depths of her coma she recognized him. They both believed that it was a matter of days before she would return to them.
Chiyo was the nicest she had ever been to him then. Her hazel eyes were warm, lighting up every time he came to the room to speak to Nana. They asked about each other’s lives and made plans for their friend’s awakening. He even thought of moving to Japan, or at least arranging yearly visits to see her.
But a month passed. Summer break was ending in a matter of days. His senior year of high school was starting and soon he would be submitting his college applications and preparing for a new life.
He just didn’t think that Nana wouldn’t be in it.
When she moved into another town, they still texted. He offered to drive to meet her, hardly balking at the one hour he would have to spend on the highway for a chance to see one of his closest friends. She would agree but forget their entire conversation the next day or after a few minutes. Sometimes, it felt like he was talking to a different person, someone who was only wearing her skin and pretending to be her. It scared him how much she changed.
One day, he decided to see her unannounced. He packed a bag of her favorite pastries and wrapped the coffee he knew she loved in an insulated bag so it would still be warm when he got there.
Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he arrived.
It wasn’t that she was a different person. What disturbed him the most was that to her, time had stopped.
“Where’s Elle? We were supposed to go to school together this morning.”
He stared at her blankly for a few minutes, unsure of what to say. Didn’t she know what had happened that fateful night? Surely she remembered what he saved her from. He couldn’t forget how she looked when he found her on the shore, cold and still as a corpse. Even thinking about the trail of white feathers leading to her sent shivers down his spine.
“Elle is missing,” he managed to say, opting for the truth. “The town is searching for her.”
“Really?” She took a long gulp of the coffee. “No one here knows who she is. It’s like they forgot all about her.”
Because you’re in a different town, he thought, scared of what else she might have conveniently forgotten. Talking to her was disorienting. She hadn’t remembered all the times she tried to drown herself after or the nights he spent in her room making sure she was asleep. Every good thing he did for her was erased.
Maybe it was for the best. She wasn’t in shambles knowing what truly happened to her girlfriend. But that hollow look in her eyes said otherwise.
“They’ll find her,” he said, not believing his own words. Nana blinked and something about the way her face changed told him that she was already forgetting their conversation as they were having it.
What happened to the girl who saved him? In his darkest hour, she was the star in his night. When no one cared that he wasn’t going to school, she was the one who showed up to make sure that he was OK even knowing what his mother did to him.
Who could have done this to her? He left that question unanswered, promising to come back to Nana.
But when he returned, she was gone. He assumed she moved to another town but found out months later that she left the country. No one in that town knew her. He had a feeling that her family deliberately isolated her since the few people who did recognize her picture remembered her as the girl who had a habit of speaking to herself. Without the person she loved, Nana had gone crazy.
That didn’t stop him from searching for her. He questioned everyone he could, looking nearly as insane as she did pestering a bunch of strangers. He almost lost hope before he found an old woman who remembered Nana’s mother. It made sense that the townspeople would know her. She was one of those people who were so beautiful that they hurt to look at.
The old woman was eager to talk to him. She told him about how Nana’s family moved to Japan, gossiping gleefully about his friend’s deteriorating mental state.
“They think it’ll help their daughter, but I’ve seen people like that, those who’ve gone off the deep end. There’s no recovering from whatever she has.”
Her words made him sick to his stomach. He left the town for the last time, afraid of what he’d do if he had to breathe the same air as that woman for a second longer.
He found out that Nana was in Tokyo after painstakingly combing through translated Japanese news articles. Again, it was a photo of her mother that led him to her, this time resplendent in a wedding gown. From then on, he saved up for a trip to visit her, pulling as many hours as he could working part-time at a fast food drive-through. All for a chance to see her.
He just didn’t think she’d put herself in the hospital before he got there.
She doesn’t want to wake up. Elle only lives inside her head. What would be the point of her opening her eyes ever again?
And yet he stayed by her side, even when he heard that they found her lying in a pool of blood with a baseball bat beside her. That broke something inside him.
They were alone, him and her. She rested peacefully on the bed, her black hair splayed out on the pillow like a pair of crow’s wings. The steady cadence of her breathing reminded him of the ebb and flow of the sea. Every time she inhaled, he imagined the tide coming in, eating up the sand in a frothy reckless dribble.
It was his last day in Japan. He wanted to cancel the flight back home and stay for a few more days, but his father wouldn’t hear of it. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Life was forcing him to move on.
He held her hand like he had seen Chiyo do countless times. Her skin was warm and he could easily imagine her waking up and seizing his fingers, the roaring tide of the sea returning full force. Alas, she remained maddeningly still.
He knew he would never be enough for her. He could never replace Elle, not even when they were back in school together sipping coffee on lonesome gray mornings. Her eyes never failed to search for her. Elle was where all of Nana’s love went.
That didn’t mean she never cared about him. They took care of each other in their own way. But he was always second to Elle, even when she broke Nana by abandoning her.
He gazed at her face, memorizing the shape of her nose and lips. He hoped that she would wake up and grow old with some pretty girl, that the next time he saw her she would have smile lines and wrinkles. Was it too much to ask that his dear friend be freed from the darkness of her past?
Somehow, he got the feeling that his dream to see her live a happy life would never come true. He knew Chiyo would hate to hear it, but Nana was his friend first. He would know.
“I love you,” he said. “Just … whatever’s going on in there, don’t hurt yourself, OK?”
The monitor beside the bed beeped, tracking her pulse. For a moment, it spiked, beating faster than normal. He allowed himself to hope that she would come back again.
Then, her pulse steadied and he hung his head. Of course she wouldn’t wake up. Not for him.
She would come back in her own time, he reasoned.
He walked out of the room, tears falling from his eyes. He cried on the way to the airport, weeping quietly in his seat. But even in his sleep, the tears didn’t stop. Not until he made it back to California.
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The End.
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