June snapped her head up from where
she was hammering in a particularly stubborn nail. “Hai!” Her head spun from the self-induced vertigo.
Mina raised both her eyebrows “Are
you trying to give yourself whipu—whipu—?”
“Whiplash” June finished for her, “No,
but I’ve done it before” she smiled apologetically while rubbing the memory out
of her neck. She bent back to pounding in the now slightly bent nail. The bend
was getting rather intense so she tried hitting the head of the nail from the
other direction to straighten it out. Instead, it bent again near the bottom. Totally beyond repair. Frustrated, June decided to tackle something else. She rolled
backwards from her squat into a sitting position and asked, “By the way, Mina-chan, where did you learn your
English?”
“You mean my perfect English?” she
joked, taking a nail out of her mouth and hammering it in with two deft
strokes. As she worked, her eyes glassed
over leaving June behind in the present.
After checking to make sure the
nail was secure, Mina put down her hammer and stared at June, lost in the past
and unblinking, trying to decide what to divulge. June looked uncomfortably
away, pretending to examine the wayward nail.
“My savior taught me.”
This took June by surprise. Up
until now there had been no third party to their private conversations, no
significant other person to disturb their private worlds. Who was someone so
formative to Mina’s world that she would call that person a “savior”?
As though reading June’s thoughts
Mina continued, “It was maybe seven years ago. Two years after my mother passed
away. My father remarried a woman with a four-year-old son—his bastard son. This
much he told me. He also told me in the same breath that this boy will take
over his company. The company I worked so long to prepare for or my mother’s
honor, I didn’t know what to be more upset about.
‘How could you cheat on mother while
she was ill? Why did you not take better care of her? Why this boy? Why now? I
hate you!’
Things like this, I said all of
them to make him angry. To hurt him. This is the nature of arguments.
Around that time, my father’s new
wife was with child. A new baby is precious and deserves a loving home. But I
knew that I could not live happily with them and with my father who had hurt my
mom and hurt me. I wanted to disappear. So I thought that I should die.
But it was not so easy. The suicide
rate is very high in Japan, so there are many efforts to stop more suicides.
Drugs you can buy from stores are weak, train station tracks have walls and
doors to stop people jumping, guns you cannot buy, and tall building has
fences. But how can anyone stop someone who wants die?
I found everything in the house
that I thought had poisonous chemicals: bleach, drain cleaner, car polish,
everything. It made quite a beautiful yellow color—like kono jacketo,” she said pointing at her golden ochre windbreaker.
She paused to think and added wryly, “It was my first and last cocktail.”
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