TWO CHILDREN

Taichi's mother Reiko treated him kindly during the week after the meijin tournament, not so much offering him comfort as letting him live and breathe without her input in general. Something had shaken him deeply in the loss, not mortally but critically. She knew in her core that nothing good could possibly come of adding to that pain by reminding him of expectations still alive and unmet, her reflexive behavior in almost any situation. She was rarely forthcoming with verbal support in the best of times. At present, Taichi thought that aspect of his mother was a good thing. He wasn't in the mood for explicit kindness after the complex and shocking damage he took during the confrontation with Arata. But he knew how much it meant when his mother abstained from comment. Somehow, without knowing why, he felt that something essential had changed for the better between them, and he felt grateful for that, though he didn't know what the change might be.

Taichi turned off his phone as he walked up the stairway to his room, having answered his mother's demand that he call her. He didn't want to hear from anyone. He had rigorously enforced four days of solitude for himself, except for his family's routine comings and goings. Everyone from Mizusawa had been trying to reach him, including Chihaya, but the Mizusawa world had ended a while ago, when he started studying at cram school and withdrew from the club, and had now ended a second time with his peers and juniors witnessing his defeat. Taichi was tired of his Mizusawa friends, not because he didn't like them but because he was exhausted from watching them watch him. He knew very well that he would miss them all someday, someday very soon. But now he had to let them go again, and then again, in order to shed an old self and emerge as a new person at the end of this mysterious tunnel.

The day before, peeking out the curtains of his bedroom at dusk, he saw Chihaya storm up to the front door, ring the bell, and confront his mother, who had always terrified her. That was how strange the situation was. But Chihaya was one of the chosen, with Arata. Taichi had taken a big gamble in joining them at the meijin/queen competition, and he had lost it all; as before, he couldn't deal with Chihaya until he was safely in a world of his own. He was purposefully and systematically leaving behind the world he had first and truly lost when Arata came to town and won Chihaya's heart and mind, back when they were all children on paths of confused and glorious wonder.

The next day, miserably working his way through a college biochemistry textbook, Taichi was not remotely surprised to hear Chihaya yelling outside right before dark, "Taichi, you come down right now! Don't act like a jerk!"

It was hard to resist that appeal. Taichi crossed to the window and opened it. Cool, crisp breeze blew in.

He leaned down through it at his old friend's upturned, unhappy face, the beautiful face he could spend the rest of his life looking at.

"It's alright, Chihaya," he said. "I'm studying. There's nothing to go back to now with karuta and I need a break from everyone. You know where I'm am. I'm just studying. If you want to help me with biochem, that's a different story. You have some things to study, don't you?"

Chihaya stared up at him silently.

They took each other's measure for a couple of minutes. At first, it was the old fifth-grade face-off, "who blinks first buys the juice". Then, their mutual gaze smoothly became the world of two old friends in their own world, captured in a time of day and whim of weather they had shared together many times. Then, it became a mutual attempt to work out some kind of problem, an intimate cooperative attempt to figure something out that could not otherwise be addressed. The last was the hardest part, because they had no common problem to solve. They only had a problem they could not solve. There was no way to square the circle when it came to his world and hers. When they were arguing in the halls of elementary school, they at least had ground to contest. Now there was nothing but a former rapport torn like someone who tried to straddle a ship and a dock.

Then, their mutual assessment ended, leaving behind two teenagers unable to know what to do with each other or themselves. The past had shattered around them into invisible pieces, so long ago that there was nothing sharp left that could inflict injury. But their hearts still jumped and their heads still turned when they heard each other's name. Both of them felt their shared childhood loom and diminish in pulses disappearing in the dusk, awkwardly calculating how to call the conversation to a halt.

Chihaya turned her head down and looked at the ground, then looked back up and said before walking away, "I've done a lot of bad things not understanding your feelings and making you sad, but you leave me all the time. Leaving me all the time is just as bad as anything I ever did to you. You jerk."

Taichi watched her sad figure recede and vanish at the end of the street, becoming part of the shadow as night fell. He went back to his desk, leaving the window open so the rapidly cooling air could keep filling the room. He sat down, trying to focus on catabolism and the body's production of energy. This was actually something that interested him. But he kept hearing the girl he loved calling him a jerk, which he knew he really was, and biochemistry was moving away from first priority in his mind.

A sudden sharp crack came from the window glass, and Taichi looked around to see a series of pebbles bouncing away. "Hey!" he shouted down at the street. "What the hell? You're going to break my window."

"Oh," a soft voice said. "I had never done that, you see. I always wanted to throw pebbles at someone's window to get their attention."

Taichi leaned out to look at Suou, who stood looking upward at him from the near range of the streetlight. "What are you doing?" Taichi asked. "You and Chihaya are lucky that my mother isn't home. There'd be blood in the street."

Suou looked down at the pavement and ground it with the tip of one of his shoes. "Your mother is a good woman. I had a conversation with her when you were playing Arata."

"Yes," Taichi said, "I heard. You seem to have told her I couldn't beat Arata."

Suou nodded, still staring down. "I did. Then she went to support you after telling me to shut up." He looked up at Taichi. "It's not that I didn't think you were as good as he is in any particular way, it's that you're not as spiritually blank and vicious as Arata can be. What makes him a less admirable human being than you are is what makes him stronger at karuta and keeps him that way. The better at karuta he becomes, the more he will approach being the least worthwhile person he can be. So it was no kind of insult to you."

Taichi nodded. "So being a bastard is why you're the meijin."

Suou grinned at him, looking up. "Yes, I put every bit of ugliness I have into it. I know you want to think you're an ugly person, but you're just not. I should have taught you more. But how could I teach you to channel your skill where it needed to go, when it doesn't naturally belong? I'm sorry for not teaching you more, Taichi."

Taichi leaned forward some more at his sad friend and sensei. Damn it, he thought, how am I supposed to hate him after that? "How about Shinobu?" he asked. "Is she becoming a worse person as she gets better at karuta?"

"She's stopped degrading her heart by blocking it out," Suou said, almost inaudibly. "She's in danger for that reason. She holds Chihaya very dear, but I think that makes her a better person, and maybe softer than she needs to be. Which puts her in a bad position with Chihaya. Ironic, eh?"

Taichi nodded. "So Chihaya has to become a worse person."

"She has to become a worse person when it comes to herself. She's all ego and adrenaline and speed, an incredible force. But those things will eat her alive and she will fall away too, the higher she moves in the game, unless her nature changes in time. Very talented, Chihaya. She's not as talented as Arata, though, or Shinobu at her best. There's a childishness in her that makes her radiate joy and makes people watch her when she plays. It's the opposite of being a killer, which is what Arata aspires to and Shinobu secretly wants to leave behind."

Taichi smiled to himself. "Do you really believe that?" he asked.

"I could be wrong about all of it," Suou said. "That's not beyond the realm of possibility. Would you like to come over and play cards sometime soon?"

Taichi nodded. "I would."

"Tuesday evening, eight o'clock? No one else will be there. We'll have the game floor to ourselves."
Taichi nodded again. "That would be perfect."

Suou scratched the top of his head and put his hands in his jacket pockets. "Okay, good," he said. "I'll see you then, okay?"

Taichi nodded, for what seemed to be the hundredth time. "I'll be there."

Suou turned and walked in the other direction from the one where Chihaya had disappeared, turning a corner at the end of the block.

Taichi was actively seeking comfort in the biochemistry of catabolism when the inevitable occurred, a full ten minutes after Suou left. Someone was yelling his name and sneering at the same time, a difficult feat. Only one person could do that. But why Sudou would be down in the street, he did not know. Oh, well. Taichi wandered over to the window and leaned out. "Wow," Taichi said, "I wondered what was missing this week, and here it is."

"What a pansy," Sudou said. "I'm a bigger one, though. I'm the pansy who got beat by the pansy who got beat by eighteen cards by the west meijin contender. So why did we send you there? I don't know. We should be ashamed of ourselves."

Taichi laughed, oddly happy that this sneering piece of garbage had dropped by.

"That's how it goes," Taichi said. "Accidents happen."

Sudou fell silent, trying to find something sufficiently unpleasant to say, then gave up.
"I have to tell you," he said, "the love of your life has been coming by our club to play. She's pretty damned confused, and it's stinking up the place. She keeps worrying about people, I think."

"Chihaya doesn't know exactly how to love most of the people she loves," Taichi said. "So she spends a lot of her time trying to figure out where to start."

"I know," Sudou said. "That's why I don't mock her now; it's no fun. She doesn't function well without you. She's always looking over her shoulder to see if you're there. How could anyone who doesn't love someone love them so much?"

"I don't know, and it sucks," Taichi said. "Not being loved like that is quite a ride."

Sudou nodded. "Listen, Mashima, I understand if you feel like garbage right now after you got destroyed and shown to be a limp-dick pansy the other day. But a lot of people depend on you. Not me, but a lot of people. And you're cursed to play competitive karuta forever, remember. I owe you an ass-kicking."

Taichi nodded silently. He looked at Sudou's eyes, which shone in the light. Sudou nodded and headed off down the block in the direction where Sudou had gone. Taichi wearily turned back to catabolism, which of course he was able to do for maybe three minutes.

"Eyelashes!" a voice boomed outside. "Eyelashes! Show yourself!"

Damn it, Taichi said to himself, it's Dr. Harada and I'm going to have to let him in. I can't have someone yelling "Eyelashes!" out in the street.

Taichi walked back to the window and looked out. Sure enough, there was Harada in the street, in western dress clothes this time, hair neatly cut. He looked like he'd been to a dinner party. Maybe he had.

"If you're here to help me study catabolism, I'll let you," Taihi shouted down to him. "Trying to get people to help me with that is how I've been driving them away, but you could actually help."

Harada looked up at him thoughtfully. "I will come back and help you, if you need it."

Taichi shook his head. "Thank you, sir, it's actually been a peace-of-mind activity for me, the past few days."

Harada nodded, still looking up. "Everyone is worried about you."

Taichi shook his head and spoke loudly. "No need. The tournament messed me up for a while, but I'm not messed up now. I just got thrown out of the karuta world, kicked out the back door onto my butt, so that was rough. But I'm okay. I'm having to give karuta some serious thought. Not the game itself, since I play with Suou, but 'Wait to say that until you've spent your youth' business."

Taichi bit his tongue and shut up.

Harada quietly said, "You have every right and reason to feel that way. Arata fought dirty karuta and you played it brilliantly but straight, and he succeeded from raw force and you had trouble coming back at him because you didn't expect that kind of attack. Then people were muttering things like 'I thought that east contender was strong at first, but I guess not,' and 'what flawless karuta Arata plays, how did the other boy ever think he could win.' Then your own friends and allies didn't get to you fast enough afterward and it seemed like they didn't care much anymore, except for the love of your life and she was sobbing without making anything clear, and you were relieved that your mother was being good to you, so you went home and wound up here. You have every right and reason to want to leave it behind."

Taichi stared down at him.

"But you see," Harada said, "you do have to choose whether to play karuta as it is. Karuta, at heart, is a dirty business. It is based upon war and subterfuge; the songs and cards are just packaging. In war you go out with your sword and you fight dirty. Katanas weren't meant for elegant swordplay and bushido wasn't cute; katanas were meant to lop off heads and arms and strike big gashes through the heart and bushido was an attempt to put some kind of civilized shape to it. The elegance is in the entire field of force a warrior generates in battle. It's the elegance of the way you fight dirty, the theory that Arata seems to follow, based upon his worship of his grandfather, who was a cold and remorseless son of a bitch in karuta and out of it. You, on the other hand, have never known how to keep your heart off the field. No one is stopping you from quitting competitive karuta, and I wouldn't blame you if you did. But I wish you wouldn't, because you bring so much more to the mix. Otherwise, without people like you and the other kids I try to pull in, the field will just become defined with more cold-hearted bastards like Arata's grandfather and maybe Arata himself, someday."

Harada stopped speaking, then started again. "I told you once to give karuta your youth before you decided you weren't good enough," he said, "and that's not helpful at this point. I have a photographically clear memory of you, Chihaya, and Arata taking the society headquarters by storm. You laid out the best you will ever have to offer in those times, and maybe I should have told you that the best you can offer is a precious thing but not necessarily a good burden to carry into karuta. Well now I'm tempted to give you some other kind of encouragement, but I can't. What I can tell you is that everyone misses you right now and thinks they're to blame for you hiding out."

"Well they can get over that," Taichi said. "They know me better than that. I have a lot of better reasons not to like them." He grinned.

Harada laughed in his booming style. "Okay, I'll pass that word on."

Harada had actually come in a car parked about a half block down. When Harada climbed in on the driver's side, Taichi saw his wife lean over and peek in Taichi's direction before they drove off.

Was all of that true, Taichi wondered. I don't know. It seems a little different with the women than what Suou and Harada were saying. But it's a brawl one way or another.

Taichi closed the windows and pulled the curtains together. He had had enough. But he knew there was a decent chance that someone else was going to serenade him later. But maybe not.

Taichi started studying biochemistry again. This time, he found himself loving the subject matter, swimming like a dolphin through the information, putting together systems models in his head to encompass the various diagrams and clusters of information in the different sections of the book. When he finished the chapter, he closed his eyes and watched what he had studied snap together. Ghosts of math and experimental procedure drifted across his inner field of vision as constellated information about the body's workings turned in the distance like ferris wheels. It was at that moment that he realized he wanted to be a doctor, more than anything else, more than meijin or anything else. He wanted to take care of people, and he wanted to run the hospital if it came down to that. The vast wreckage of his karuta past, piled in sprawling trash heaps across the reaches of his spirit, dissolved and briefly hovered like the smoke of spent fireworks, then disappeared against a night sky.

"Taichi!" A voice from outside. Taichi resignedly crossed over to the window, opened it after pushing the curtains back, and leaned down on the sill. There, impossibly, was Reiko Mashimi, his mother. Her slim form was enveloped in a tailored business suit and she was holding her purse in front of her as she looked up at him.

"Mom?" Taichi asked, stunned. "What are you doing?"

"I've always wanted to stand under a window and yell at someone," Reiko said, and smiled at him. "I'm taking you to dinner, which is why I came back from that party at the hospital."

"I'm studying pretty hard right now," Taichi said.

She shook her head. "I'm sure you have been, but I'm taking you to dinner. I'll just wait out here."

Taichi had been thrown for a loop. This was something he would never have imagined, but the new time with his mother was a lot like this. Even in the maze of distrust and fear his mind held for his mother as a matter of survival, it seemed as though something good had happened, that the two of them might not always play the exclusive roles of disappointer and the disappointed.

Reiko drove them to a nice Italian restaurant that had just opened a mile away. She made sure to tell him that the shirt she had made him wear was meant to be buttoned all the way up, and he needed to comb his hair with the brush she gave him. He shook his head and followed her orders. Finally, Reiko parked the car in front of the restaurant and went in, with her son tagging along behind in some kind of vague embarrassment.

A surprise waited a few steps away.

Reiko and he approached a table toward the back, beautifully appointed in a kind of art deco black and white motif under soft indirect lighting. At the table sat Chihaya and her mother. Taichi involuntarily stopped in his tracks. His mom turned around, looked at him scornfully, and waited until he walked in front of her. He preceded her to the table, pulled his mother's chair back, waited until she was fully seated, and assisted her as she scooted under the table.

Chihaya had obviously not been expecting this. She turned pale when she saw him, clearly worried that he would get upset or flee or just make her feel that she didn't know what to do. No, Chihaya, Taichi thought to himself, I won't leave you tonight. I can't. The open chair was across from Chihaya. The mothers were happily engaging in conversation, sitting across from each other. Chihaya widened her eyes, grinned a little crooked grin, and darted her eyes over to where their mothers were. Taichi nodded and rolled his eyes.

"So," Mrs. Ayase said to the two children. "I'm sure you're wondering what is going on, here."

Reiko smiled. "Let them wonder."

Chihaya and Taichi both turned, looking curiously at their mothers.

Reiko said, "We got to know each other while watching you two compete, or in your case," she said severely to Taichi, "trying to get you to come back and be with your team. One or more of the Mizusawa mothers were always watching you."

Chihaya and Taichi gradually grew more and more bewildered.

"There were quite a few of us over time," Chihaya's mom said. "We feel that you owe us."

Chihaya and Taichi continued a slow descent into a strange space, jaws slightly hanging.

"So," Reiko said sweetly to her son and the other woman's daughter, "we wanted to celebrate the karuta accomplishments of our children, their building a club from the ground up and making it competitive within a short period of time, and finally reaching the heights of the meijin/queen finals, where my son did not move on past the matches and my son's dearest friend qualified to challenge the queen. I am very proud of my son. He was defeated by the other finalist but everyone watching where we were, those who knew what they were talking about and had spoken to others who knew, agreed that he played a fairer, more distinctive, more skillful game. And," Reiko said, looking Chihaya in the eye, "I know that the core of his courage and skill in the game emerged from his love for you, his best friend. When you were little and first knew him, I didn't know what kind of energy you brought to his life, and it worried me because we are miserly with applied energy in our family. But all you have done in the end is make him shine…make him shine even when his heart is on the verge of breaking."

"And I," Mrs. Ayase said, "am deeply proud of my daughter, not only because she has risen to her current height in karuta but also because she is more than fulfilling her promise to study for the entrance exams while she pursues her extraordinary endeavors in a complex and dynamic sport. She is a beautiful woman who is strong in all the ways I have hoped to see her strong in, and she surprises me by becoming something new and lovely every single day. Her best friend, this wonderful young man here, has been with her the whole time. I think, though, that I always took his support for granted, I imagined that his perfect constant strength sometimes redeemed the lapses of strength my daughter has undergone, always cradling her in his commitment. What I have come to know, watching my daughter and him evolve through karuta, is that his support for my daughter comes from the heart and soul of an admirable but very fallible human being. That makes his gift to her more precious."

The two mothers leaned over discreetly, embraced their children, and moved back smiling.

Chihaya and Taichi turned to look at each other and froze. They could not talk and could barely blink as they gazed into each other's eyes. This was an event that neither or both of them could possibly have imagined, a strobe-flash of with honor and love and respect from prior circumstance they had not even known was there. Eyes rapidly communicating, they decided together not to cry and to keep it cool, and their amused mothers watched them do so. After all, children shouldn't let themselves entirely respond to the love of their parents; that made it too hard to leave and be in a world where they would have to find and give solace on their own.

The two children, thinking about it later, remembered almost nothing about the dinner with each other and their mothers. What they were sure of was that they had received affirmation they never thought they would receive, affirmation that opened up gates of hope and energy. Chihaya had received a deep and sincere blessing from her dearest friend's mother, a terrifying figure in her childhood who had driven her away out of fear that she would distract Taichi from his family's plans and status. Most precious, of course, was the full expression of respect and love from her mother, whose love she had never doubted but at the same time had never comprehended. Taichi had been tenderly complimented by someone who had always been good to him, who had now thrown open a long-sought gate of freedom for his friend, who was reaffirming that he was family even when he fell short of helping her. And Reiko had finally said it, said it flat out in front of witnesses, had said clearly how much she loved him.

Barely registered but present everywhere in Taichi's and Chihaya's memories of that night, two women sat beside them, watching their children and healing them and encouraging them through the secret circuits of a mother's love.

END