A Year in June: Chapter 16

             The next morning June snoozed her phone twice until she finally woke up at 9:30 a.m. Despite going to bed early, frustrated by the mess she created and the unsettled feeling in her heart, she still woke up at her usual late time. With a small groan she threw off her blanket in an attempt to motivate herself awake. Today, however, waking up did not require the usual amount of effort.

To her left was a sight that startled her awake—a blanketed, breathing mound. This abnormality kicked her half-asleep brain into high gear. What was Mina doing asleep at this hour? Normally her sleeping pills wore off around 7 am and she had to get up and do things to occupy her restless mind. Perhaps her night out with Joseph had been so fulfilling that she did not need the aid of sleeping pills to rest?  Or maybe they had been out late into the night and things progressed until—June shivered despite the relatively warm May morning. Joseph is married, she reminded herself, and Mina is not someone who would insert herself into an equation where she did not belong.

But still, June sat up and stared through the cocoon of blankets surrounding Mina, though all of the exciting days and late nights the two of them had together in the last eleven months not once had Mina failed to wake up at 7 am the next morning. Comparing herself to others was a habit that June couldn’t kick despite knowing all the signs. Surrounded by ‘the best and the brightest’ during college June was often dragged into spurts of self-loathing. But this was different; there was no way she could even begin to compare to Joseph in Mina’s eyes. She looked out through the window at the foot of her bed and watched the giant crows hop around on the telephone wire.  

A Year in June: Chapter 15

             “There’s nothing to eat” June said to herself. She had opened the refrigerator door one more time to make sure. Now she was sure.

Resigned, she went to the pantry and picked out an onion, a potato, and a carrot. One good thing about Mina never being home the last few days was that June could finally make curry. Mina disliked the texture and taste of the Japanese brown, warm, slightly spicy dish adapted from the British during their governance of India. June adored it, plus it was so easy to make: dice vegetables, fry, add water, and sauce cubes and there you had it, piping hot delicious curry. There was only one problem; Mina was always the one who made the rice. In Japan, curry and rice went so hand in hand that on menus what you ordered was not ‘curry’ but ‘curry-rice’. Today, June decided, the menu would be ‘curry-bread’. She grabbed a piece of expired toast from the freezer and tossed it into the microwave to defrost.

            Meanwhile there were vegetables waiting to be sliced. She scrubbed the dirt-lined carrots and impatiently peeled the skin off of the potatoes.  She pulled back the paper-thin covering of the onion and started slicing, first vertical slices, and then horizontal. As she dug into the onion with her knife she thought about sad it was that after all these months of working in Minamisanriku she really only had one person to call a friend.

A sudden jolt of pain went up through her left hand. She looked down to see a deep cut on the tip of her ring finger. The immediate instant of pain was fast receding and she stood there for a minute staring at the blood welling up and trickling down her finger. At that moment, the visual receptors kicked in, augmenting the physical ones and she winced at the deepness of the cut. Where was the first aid kit? June realized she had no idea. If only Mina was home and not spending all of her free time with Joseph—but she wouldn’t think that way. She was happy that her friend was spending time with someone she truly cared about. Somehow that thought only made her feel worse.

Regardless, what was important now was dealing with her profusely bleeding cut. She didn’t know anything about first aid, but she knew she needed to disinfect and then alleviate pain. Running her left hand under the faucet with one hand she grabbed a cold beer from the refrigerator with the other. In the process she knocked over the roll of paper towels she was planning on using in place of bandages. Swearing, she grabbed a dish-drying towel off the dish-rack and re-appropriated it for staunching the flow of blood. Toweled up, with a beer can for an icepack and painkiller, June stood in the middle of the kitchen amidst blood, paper towel, and flyaway bits of onion. 

            Mina slid the front door open and silently walked into the genkan. Slowly she lifted her feet and curled her toes until her flats fell of, right and then left. The smell of curry, which she disliked, was still lingering in the air and a roll of paper towels had unraveled itself from the kitchen to the entrance to the living room. All of this would have troubled Mina, but she could see and smell none of it. Bleary eyed and runny nosed she walked to the bedroom, slid out of her red dress, and tossed it to the back of a heap in her closet. Once in bed she took her requisite pills and ensconced herself inside her blankets where she could finally feel safe. 

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A Year in June: Chapter 14

             It was a special night in March that Mina and June finally finished building the porch. They had been working on the project on and off since mid-January, but snowy days and busy days delayed them for months until they finally put in the finishing touches near the end of March. The temperature was also uncharacteristically warm; it was a balmy 18 degrees Celsius, and although June had yet to learn what that meant exactly in Fahrenheit she knew that it was a number higher than any she had seen in recent months.

            They inaugurated this momentous occasion by bringing out several canned beers chilled in a cooking pot full of ice. As the night wore on, the alcohol went more and more to June’s head until she nearly felt like it was someone else who asked, “Mina-chan, what do you want to grow up to be?” As soon as she said it she felt like it was a ridiculous question. Mina was already in her late 20s and had established herself as a talented carpenter. On the other hand, June, at 22, still had no idea what she wanted to do after her time in Japan. She had interests, hobbies, and talents, but no passions. Mina already was what she wanted to be. She started to retract her question when Mina answered along a different vein,

            “Stronger, I want to grow up to be stronger.” She took a sip of beer, “When I feel something is important and try to talk, my voice become weak and sometimes I want to cry. But I don’t want to cry anymore." A cat darted across the rock lot in front of them. “Calm, cool, not so emotional. I want to be stronger.”

            This must be a Japanese thing, June thought to herself, to associate strength with stoicism. “You’re the strongest person I know.” June said too quietly for Mina to hear.

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A Year in June: Chapter 13

             “So what’s the good news?” June asked.

            Mina dropped the slice of raw salmon she had snagged between her chopsticks. “How did you know?” she asked.

            “You’ve been smiling to yourself all day. Also you eat less when you are excited. Salmon sashimi is your favorite—you must have bought it for dinner because you wanted to celebrate, yet you’ve barely eaten any of it!”

            “Observant as always,” Mina beamed, “you should become a detective or something.”

            June laughed but pressed on, not wanting to lose her advantage over the direction of the conversation, “have you met the love of your life?” she joked.

            “Would you be jealous?” Mina teased back.

            “Mecha jealous. Who is this man? Where can I find him?” June stabbed a slice of salmon with her chopstick to communicate her intentions.

            “ Not love of my life, something better. Joseph is coming to visit Japan in May! I never thanked him before for what he did for me. Now I can finally tell him.”

            June strained a smile, “that’s awesome! How long will he be here for?”

            “About a week probably.”

            “What for?”

            “A medical conference in Sendai.”

            “Cool.” June replied, no longer interested in learning more. It wasn’t that she disliked Joseph. In fact, she felt partial to him for saving Mina’s life. Yet he represented a bond that she could never hope to replicate despite spending many months living with Mina. In a week, Joseph had left more of an impact on Mina than June would in a year. For the first time since she arrived in Japan, she felt something akin to loneliness.

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A Year in June: Chapter 12

            “My father found me on the ground and called 119—they pumped my stomach. I lived. This was my father’s last kindness for me. He never visited me at the hospital. Not once for two weeks. Instead, Joseph visited me every day.”

            Joseph was a medical student from San Francisco who was doing an internship in Japan. It was his second to last semester in medical school and he was gaining practical experience working with an emergency response team. Although his days were incredibly busy, he somehow always found time to stop by Minazuki’s room.

            “Those were some of my heaviest hours. Alone, I would have drowned in my own dark waters. But I was able to resurface because of those conversations, those short, daily conversations. Because of him, I am still alive.

Their communication had been stilted due to Joseph’s primarily medical Japanese and Mina’s grade-school textbook Japanese-English. But somehow, according to Mina, they managed to converse on subjects ranging from culture to music to religion.  

            “Religion was Joseph’s favorite topic. We spent a long time talking about Christianity. He grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. The Bible Belt was what he called it. I imagined a belt made of books and it made me think he came from a very interesting place. Joseph always told me that I was alive because God wanted me to be alive. And I should accept Jesus Christ as my savior to become closer to God and better understand His plan for my life. I listened politely, but in my heart I felt a different truth.

            On my last day in the hospital my stomach had finally settled and I was feeling brave so I asked him ‘why did you visit me every day?’ I was not sure I would like the answer.

He took pause, then answered, ‘as we took you into the ambulance, you struggled for a brief moment even though you were barely conscious. You reached out your hand to your father and asked him not to leave you. Only I noticed and only I saw his response, which was to turn his back and return to the house. I knew at that moment I would not leave you while you stayed at the hospital. No one should be alone, Minazuki.’

 He then told me that if I accepted Jesus I would never be alone. That Jesus would save me. But it was too late. I had already accepted another savior, and I would live on because of what he had done for me.”

June was losing feeling in her fingers and toes from the cold. Her mind sluggishly sorted through a few things to say to Mina, but coming up empty she said nothing and they continued building the porch in silence.

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