The Left Side of Memories
Chapter 3
One week later, Murakami Naoko thought she had a better idea of who her son's true friends were, and that was something Ryouta should have been learning himself, but he still hadn't woken up yet.
Tragedies or close calls had a way of doing such things. It was the same when her husband and older son had died. She was left with a one year old and her husband's friends were just…gone. Sympathetic one moment, moving on with their lives the next forgetting Murakami Ryou had left part of his family behind and they were still in that world.
Even her friends, once she'd lost the prestige her husband had given. Or maybe they'd always laughed at her, and at her brother: the genius who'd gone nowhere in life, they said. Naoko thought those whisperers to be the fools. Kogorou was a strong man to choose the path he had, and he had no family to support. But even when Naoko had no choice but to lean on him as she struggled to find a job that would support them and would watch her baby for her, Kogorou had proven himself to not be of want of anything –
Save maybe company. He did like Ryouta's company so very much and sometimes, Naoko confessed to herself, it displeased her. Because of the accident, she was unable to spend as much time with her remaining son as she would like, and more chores and responsibilities fell to him than should fall on someone that age. She wasn't the sort of person who could help him with his homework, the sort that could spend too much time chatting over the breakfast or dinner table or even over the stove. And usually it was Ryouta on the stove. He even scolded her about drinking too much coffee some mornings. That wasn't a son's job.
But Kogorou was a reliable uncle, even after all his eccentrics. He was willing to walk for an hour and a half to get to Ryouta's parent days because he understood the value of education and Naoko couldn't get time off. After a while, she let him go to the report days as well. Ryouta's education had quickly progressed beyond her reach and it was better for someone who intellectually inclined to follow his progress, to know where to push and where to pat on the head.
But those were all parent roles and Naoko had had to let go of them. This, at least, she could do. Fifteen years later, she had a well paying job and her son was in high school and at the age where he was physically, as opposed to just mentally, old enough to stay home alone while she worked into the early hours of the morning some nights. And he was at the age where her greatest worries about him was whether or not he'd discovered girls yet (sounded like he had with those new transfer students, but she was yet to meet.
And then, completely out of the blue, he's in the hospital with suspected brain damage from an aneurysm, and how did he wind up with an aneurysm in the first place?
The doctors had tried to explain. Their theories anyway, because the bottom line was they had no idea. 'We can see the ruptured vessel in the initial MRI scans,' they said, 'but it's healed up now and the blood that leaked has been drained and the EEG shows normal conductance through the hippocampus – ' Like the hippocampus actually meant anything to her. She'd stopped the doctor there and gone to call her brother. As a scientist, she figured, he'd understand far more of the medical mumbo jumbo than she would. And he was. But that was just another parental duty she couldn't fulfil.
So she spent every moment not at work at his bedside. She saved her time off. She never did get a lot of it and it'd be better spent when Ryouta was awake. Or so she reasoned with herself. The doctors said it could be days, or weeks, or months. Brain injuries were fickle things. Even when the organ was physically fine it didn't work the way it was supposed to. And a lot of other things they wouldn't even know until he woke up.
She got her shifts changed around, at least. More night shifts when visiting hours were over anyway (and Ryouta was too old for them to allow her to stay on motherly grounds when he wasn't kicking and screaming for her, and she doubted he'd do that if he was awake and lucid). So she sat and stared at Ryouta's pale face and thought of all the things she knew she'd missed, and all the other things she didn't know. Like if he'd been more stressed than usual about something. Like if he'd started to burn out. Or if he'd been worried for friends or had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd…
Few people came to visit Ryouta. His class came, once. The student representative came another day as well, but didn't stay very long. Kitsuka came almost every day. Naoko suspected it was more than her simply being grateful for all Ryouta's tutoring. Maybe it was pure friendship. Maybe it was a crush. But she was strong in coming back. Hospitals had that sort of oppressive atmosphere – or maybe it was only like that to people like her who'd lost people there.
And she'd almost lost Ryouta once there as well. A child with bandages wrapped around his head and his broken arm, waking up with someone else's name on his lips. One of the few things he'd ever managed to forget: the real name of that friend so precious to him back then.
Maybe, if she'd survived the fall, they'd be just as close now. She wondered if Kuroneko would be sitting beside her. Or she'd be drooling, having fallen asleep on the hard-backed chair. She'd be a mix of serious and cheerful. She'd probably have understood the doctor as well. She'd been a clever little girl, aside from her fascination with aliens. Naoko couldn't remember he real name either. There was no grave; the parents had taken everything, including that, and moved away. And she'd cursed fickle head injuries then because Kuroneko's loss had changed Ryouta into someone so entirely absorbed into one goal.
She knew the look well enough. Her brother had it when he was caught up in some research. Her husband had it as well. But Ryouta hadn't been like that initially. He'd been the sort to try and understand everything. Until it became just about those aliens Kuroneko had died trying to prove to him. A little girl like that, dying because of research.
But, lately, it seemed Ryouta's interests were starting to spread out. He'd go on picnics with his friends, even. Spent a lot of time with them, it seemed. And he'd been found near the Observatory. Surely that meant he'd been with his friends then as well. They were in the same club together.
But she hadn't seen them at all, and that made her both upset and angry. What sort of friends were they to not visit in the hospital? She could think of three reasons: they had their own emergencies (unlikely that all of them would disappear for that purpose), they felt guilty, or they'd been Ryouta's friend for ulterior motives.
As harsh as it was, she really hoped it was one of the former two. Ryouta would never forget them. He never forgot something he saw in passing, let alone the people he'd thought were his friends for months. He already had deep scars in his heart: from the accident that had claimed his father and brother, and from the fall that had taken Kuroneko. That was when she'd thought it would have been kinder if the bump had stolen those sad memories and the scabs on those scars as well. Maybe they would have been able to heal properly that way. Maybe they'd have been a little closer – because after clinging to her shirt and crying his eyes out, Ryouta had drifted away.
She'd cycled through all of those thoughts, and it was Ryouta's photographic memory she was thinking about when he opened his eyes.
They flickered slowly, almost languidly. She almost missed it except for the nose in the back of his throat. A sort of croak…and no wonder. He'd been getting nutrients and saline through an IV all week. His eyes were dull as well. They looked like hers after the accident, after the funeral. She sighed and shook her head, then looked at him again. 'Ryouta?'
He tilted his head towards her. ''kaa-san?' His voice was barely a whisper, and laced with confusion.
'Of course.' Her own speech was a bit rough. Unintentionally so, but she'd changed over time and that was the sort of woman she'd turned in to. One who did care, but often had to bury it away because of something else: because she had to support the family, because she had to support Ryouta, because Ryouta was growing too complex for her to understand… 'Water?' she asked.
Ryouta blinked, then blinked again and asked: ''kaa-san?'
Naoko blinked as well. 'Yes?'
There was silence for a moment, and then she asked again. 'Water?'
Ryouta's brow furrowed and a wince danced across his face. Then he blinked again and tilted his head a little more. ''kaa-san?'
Was Ryouta not hearing the question, Naoko wondered, or was it something else. Hearing "kaa-san" the first time was heart-warming. Hearing it the second time was odd. But hearing it the third time was a little frightening.
'I'll…go call a doctor.' And Kogorou. No doubt they'll talk about memories in words she wouldn't fully understand and she'd be thrown out of her depth again.
Well, she was already out of her depth.
The word echoed in her mind. Funny how Ryouta's first word, and no different to most children, was said so…differently now.
