Chapter 165: What I Would Need

Chapter 165: Chapter 165: What I Would Need

It took Haruki four days to write five lines under a single question. On Sunday, at seven exactly, he read them to Yui from the crate in front of his desk, and his voice shook on the second one.

The page had sat open on his desk since Wednesday night. Every evening he had come back to it after drawing Chapter fifty-nine. He had sat on the crate, looked at the question at the top in his own handwriting, and written nothing.

What would I need?

It was the hardest thing he had ever tried to write, harder than the afterword or a note left on a table for a boy who had never been forgiven. He had written lists of fears and lists of names, and three lines on index cards for strangers. He had never once in two lives written down what he himself needed from another person. In his first life, the question had never come up. There had been nobody to ask it of.

On Wednesday night, he wrote nothing under the question, looked at it for an hour, and crossed it out. It was a lie. Worse, it was the kind of lie Yui’s mother had described across a kitchen table: a way of never asking for anything.

On Thursday night he wrote I need you to be happy, and crossed that out too. It was true, but it wasn’t an answer. It was another way of saying it’s your decision.

On Friday, he didn’t write anything. He went to Mitaka and sat beside Minase at the storyboard table until midnight. At the end of the evening, as he was putting on his coat, he asked her the question. He didn’t explain why.

"What do you need?" he said. "From the people you love. When they’re far away."

Minase looked at him for a long moment over the lamp on her desk. She didn’t ask why he wanted to know.

"To be told when things are hard," she said finally. "Not after, when they’re fixed. While they’re happening." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "My mother was sick for a year before she told me. She said she didn’t want to worry me. I’d have given anything to have been worried for that year, instead of finding out at the end."

He wrote that down on the train home.

On Saturday, he wrote the other four.

At seven exactly on Sunday, he called Helsinki. It was noon there, a grey February noon, and she answered on the first ring.

"You’ve written something," she said, before he could say anything.

"How do you know?"

"Because you’re breathing like you did before the finalist interview." A pause. "Read it to me."

He took the notebook off the desk and opened it to the page. He sat on the crate with the phone against his ear and read her the five lines, slowly, in order, the way he had once read Hirose a list of eight names.

"One. To be told when things are hard. Not after. While they’re happening."

The line was very quiet.

"Two." His voice caught, and he stopped, and started again. "To see you. Not every week. Twice a year would be enough. Once in the summer, when I come to you. Once in the winter, when you come here."

He heard her breathe in sharply, eight thousand kilometres away.

"Three. To be allowed to miss you out loud, without it meaning you should come home."

"Four. For you to tell me what you need too. Every time. Even when you think it will cost me something."

He stopped. The fifth line was the one that had taken all of Saturday.

"Five," he said. "When Threadless Gate is an anime, and it’s shown for the first time, in a theatre or on television, I need you to be there. Not watching from Helsinki. There. In the seat next to me." He took a breath. "That’s the only date I’m asking for. I’ll tell you as soon as I know it. You can build everything else around it."

He stopped reading.

For a long time, Yui didn’t say anything at all. He could hear a tram bell somewhere outside her window, and the faint hum of the radiator she still hadn’t learned to turn off.

"That’s five things," she said at last. Her voice was very unsteady.

"I know. I tried to make it fewer."

"You’ve never asked me for anything," Yui said. "In fourteen years. Not once." She laughed, a small, wet sound. "You’ve asked me to read pages. You’ve asked me whether the hands have six fingers. You’ve never asked me for a single thing you needed."

"Your mother said I’d forgotten I was allowed."

"My mother," Yui said, "is going to be impossible about this for the rest of my life."

She didn’t say yes or no to the doctorate. He hadn’t asked her to. That had never been what the list was for.

But when she finally spoke again, she sounded different, the way she had sounded when she first described the library floor full of children’s books in eleven languages. She sounded like someone who had been handed a problem she knew how to solve.

"Number two," she said slowly. "Twice a year. Summer and winter."

"Yes."

"That’s not three years apart," Yui said. "That’s six visits. Six times I’d see you, and a hundred and fifty Sunday phone calls, and a date in a theatre." She was quiet for a moment. "When you said three years in my head on Friday, it sounded like forever. When you read it out loud as a list, it sounds like a calendar."

He didn’t say anything. He was holding the notebook very tightly.

"I have to tell you something," Yui said. "Before I decide. Not after. Number one." She took a breath. "I’m not only afraid of what it will cost you. I’m afraid of what it’ll cost me. I’ve been beside you my whole life. I don’t know how to be good at something by myself, eight thousand kilometres from the stairwell." Her voice cracked. "That’s what’s hard. That’s what’s happening. I didn’t tell you, because I thought it would make you tell me to come home."

"It doesn’t," Haruki said. "It makes me want to tell you that you already are good at it. By yourself. A tall woman with a bicycle said so, in a report she’s read eleven years of."

Yui laughed again, and this time it didn’t break.

"Number four," she said. "What I need."

"Tell me."

"I need you to come in the summer," she said. "In July. Not August. July, when it stays light until eleven at night, and you can see the whole city from the hill behind the library." A pause. "I want to show you the children’s floor. And the school where the boy draws monsters. And I want you to meet the woman with the bicycle, so she knows you’re real. She thinks I made you up."

"July," he said. "I’ll be there."

"And I need," Yui said, more quietly, "for you to draw something while you’re here. Anything. In Helsinki. So there’s a cross on a map somewhere that isn’t Koenji."

He looked at the shoebox on his desk with its faded ribbon, and the Koenji map somewhere in her room with twelve crosses on it.

"I’ll draw you a map," he said. "Of Helsinki. With crosses."

"You’ll need more than eleven," Yui said.

"There will be more than you think."

On the other end of the line, in the grey February noon, she started to laugh and cry at the same time. He sat on the crate in front of his desk and listened to her do both, and didn’t say anything at all, because nothing needed saying.

They talked for another hour about nothing important. There was the radiator, the colour of the Helsinki sky, and the way Kenji did a different voice for every character when he read to Tsubasa on Thursdays. When they finally hung up, it was eight in the evening in Tokyo, and dark outside.

Haruki sat on the crate with the notebook still open on his knee.

Under the five lines, in smaller writing, he added one more thing. It wasn’t a need. It was a note, the kind he left in the margins of storyboards for Minase.

Asked. She answered with two of her own.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he took out his phone and sent a message to Mitaka, where Minase would still be at her desk by the window with a pencil behind her ear, because she always was on Sunday nights.

Thank you for Friday. Number one was yours.

The reply came in four minutes.

I don’t know what number one is. I don’t need to. Episode one storyboards, pages 30 to 45, Wednesday. The white page is still too short. Nine seconds isn’t enough. Make it twelve.

He laughed out loud, alone in his apartment, and went to draw.

[Notebook: "What would I need?" — Answered (5 lines).]

[Kobayashi Yui — Needs stated (reciprocal): 2.]

[Planned: Host to Helsinki (July). Kobayashi Yui to Tokyo (winter). Premiere: Together (date TBD).]

[Yui’s doctorate decision: Pending (end of April). Tone: Changed.]