when there are no second chances
6: Home
Home was the eye of a quickly passing typhoon but it's quiet now. People flocked outside but few ventured in. And that was fine. That suited the entirety of the Kobayashi family.
Reporters lingered for a bit before a new story swept their attention away. And people watched and offered gazes of scorn and pity and empty condolences. And then they grew bored and left, and the story of the Kobayashis aren't spontaneously raised anymore.
Naturally, no-one forget. No-one needed to forget; it went from something right in front of them to something printed in the newspapers some time ago. It may become one of the fables of their town or it may fade further until it's forgotten entirely. Perhaps the latter is better for the family. Perhaps they don't care either way.
They know their sins. They also know they'd been on an uphill climb before the carpet had been yanked out from under their feet. Makoto's mother had been so happy her family was eating at the table together. After the funeral, they barely eat at all, and when they do, it was courtesy dishes from friends or something easy to make. And it was sadly reminiscent to how Makoto had been those first few months: eating rice silently, vanishing before finishing the dishes and the oppressive quiet that hung over the household.
It takes some time before the silence cracks. It begins when Makoto's father runs out of leave, and Mitsuru's school rings to say he can't afford any more absence days. They go, reluctantly, and the eyes of their workmates and classmates are all too heavy, and Makoto's mother finds herself alone once more.
Last time, she'd gone out: socialised, made friends… and fell into an affair that almost destroyed her family. This time, she stays inside the house. Cleans it from top to bottom, except Makoto's room. She isn't ready for that yet. And once she's cleaned, she cooks.
They find their new equilibrium. Mitsuru defers his entrance exams a year after all, citing his reason as an uncertainty as to his future. Their father slips back into his work role, but made the effort to not allow his family time to suffer any more. Their mother cleans the house again and again, until she can brave Makoto's room… and, finally, all the things in there.
Makoto's room tells a tale about him, even unprepared and caught in the passage of a normal life as it was left. The coat hanging behind his chair. The messily made bed. The papers scattered across his desk and even more stuffed into his drawer. The sketchbooks in a row on his shelf. The canvases leaning against the wall.
She recognises the one in front. She wonderes who'd put it there: Mitsuru or her husband or that girl who'd brought it here. Makoto had given it to Hiroka with a fleeting comment, but Hiroka gave it to them. 'I would ruin it,' she said, eyes shining when she showed them the horse drowning in the water, and the angel beckoning to him. 'Makoto painted himself: the drowning soul who had found hope. You should keep it.'
But hope had been too bright then, too raw. So someone had put it into Makoto's room and they'd left it there.
That painting… and the sketchbook too.
She opens it now. There are some old sketches, and some newer ones. One of a love hotel that makes her gasp but she stares at it anyway. Sees how he'd accentuated it with shades. How she and the flamenco instructor are in one corner. How a young girl and a much older man are in another. Is that Hiroka? But she shouldn't ask. She is not that girl's mother and if Makoto had given Hiroka a painting that symbolised his finding hope and kept that photo of her on his phone, then she doesn't have the right to judge her.
She flips through the rest of the pages. There is some scenery. The shrine. Some trains. The river. The school. And, on the last page, Makoto and Mitsuru like the brothers they hadn't often been.
It's his last sketch: what he'd been drawing when he died. It is Mitsuru, with a tender concern they barely saw on him and a scene, though frank and swift, that meant the world to all of them.
The doctors and some god out there saved him when he'd swallowed those pills, but that was a long struggle and so abstract, when it looked like they'd all been too late. And then those neighbourhood boys had beaten him up and Mitsuru found him: too late again, but carrying him on his back like that bed vanishing into the resus bay…
Makoto hadn't drawn the hospital, but instead Mitsuru who'd gone to find him. And those scrawled words under the sketch. Why choose those?
And for the horse drowning in the sea, he hadn't drawn a blackness in the deep or even a sun overhead, but an angel.
It is about hope… but, she realised, borrowed time as well.
As if someone hadn't wanted Makoto to leave them on those terms. The message under the sketch of Mitsuru proves Makoto tried to change those terms.
She cries. She thought she'd be out of tears but she cries. He forgave her, for a sin that nearly ripped their family apart and killed him. And he dies after that forgiveness, and after finding friends and a place in the world and a future he wants to chase.
But the angel of death came back to him, this time with a different message.
She turns the painting around. It's no longer hope. That painting has taken on a double-meaning now and it's abstract, or the truth, but either way she can't quite bear it any longer.
She closes the sketchbook too. That message, as well, is both good and unbearable.