The house whose address Gumi had given me was not a house at all. It was a building, one whose brick six floors was the tallest building in the city, save for the Kagamine's home. A place where people come to live but many leave dead. The hospital. I was wondering if Gumi had made a mistake, but if the years I had known her were a reliable testament, Gumi did not make mistakes. Never.
I watched the building from across the street. Hesitance. Foreboding. A cursive cyan five. A stray memory, floating in the wind, landing in my lap. I had been to this place one time before.
Eight years previous. A cold, cold night in one of the worst winters in Toragay history. A ten-year-old, knee-deep in snow, the night her golden eyes lost their shimmer. An older teenage boy beside her, purple hair glowing in the moonlight, one hand holding the child's, one still clutching the tarp he used to drag the girl's parent's dying bodies to the hospital doorstep. No beds were available, they said. Too many were dying from pneumonia. There was no time for the homeless, the leeches on society, the beggars.
The boy, battered and beaten himself, cried for the first and only time in the girl's presence. He promised to protect her and invited her into his home. Yes, it was only an abandoned tea garden, but it was a better home than she had ever remembered. He said he was so sorry for everything he did. She had only known him for one night, her parents were dead, but she forgave him anyway.
I shook it off. This past week had left me awfully nostalgic for too many inconceivable reasons. My clothes were cleaner than usual; I had gone out to a well outside the city for cleaning water that morning since the middle class shooed me away when I went to their urban ones. Gakupo told me I had gotten addicted to being clean, a dangerous addiction for those who live in the dirt.
The air inside the hospital was heavy with death. How men and women could work here, I had no idea. The woman at the front desk looked depressed and haggard, and seeing me strolling up to her did not improve her mood.
"Do you know where any Meiko staying here?" I asked, attempting to make forceful eye contact even when she looked me up and down.
"Do you have a last name?" she drawled.
"Um, no."
A sigh. "Well, I can't help you, then."
"Please, she's a friend."
Fierce grumbling followed by a shuffle of papers. She lifted her bifocals up to her eyes and searched.
"Room 7."
"Thank you so much."
I made my way down the lowly lit corridor. The hospital looked more like a hotel in here with hardwood flooring and paisley wallpaper. This would have been the nicest place I had ever step foot in if it wasn't for my invitation to the Kagamine residence. A lot of things would have been different if it wasn't for that night.
Room 7 stood before me like a portal to another dimension. A fleeting thought: What am I doing here? If I was Miku, I would not want to know. Since divorce was impossible for a woman to enforce, I would just stay silent, remain cold, and wait for my husband to screw the wrong married woman. Wait for her partner to strangle him to death. If that never came, I would do it myself. I knocked and, after hearing no response, opened the door anyway.
The space was eerily silent. A woman with shortly cropped auburn hair sat at the bed, staring out the row of windows that let the sun pour in streams across the dull room. I could not see any bandages or any other sign of injury on the woman, only the paleness of her skin that clung to the bone. There were no others visitors besides myself.
"Hello, sorry to disturb you," I said quieter than I meant to. She did not so much as flinch. I spoke louder. "Hello, sorry to disturb you."
"Who is it?" she asked.
"I'm a friend of a friend."
"I have no friends. Not anymore."
"I'm sorry to hear that, really…"
The woman finally turned to face me, and I had to disguise the astonishment on my face as pleasantness. Her face, I had seen it one time before. At the party that night, lying helpless on the floor in her red dress, wine glass in hand, on the edge of her life. I almost did not recognize her. Though her complexion was that of a ghost, her eyes burned with fire and strength.
"To tell you the truth, I'm really here to ask you about Kaito Taro," I said, keeping my revelation to myself. Though I cleaned up a bit, I looked like an artisan at best.
"Kaito Taro, huh?" Her frown deepened and that fire in her eyes flared.
"Y-Yeah, do you know him?"
"Of course I know him. How could I forget the man who brought scandal raining down on my head?"
"Scandal?"
"Yes, he painted me out to be a slut, and my entire reputation was ruined. One time, one time I succumbed to his advances. Next thing I know, a rumor was spreading that I lost my sanctity to a married man, but of course, the name 'Kaito Taro' never entered the picture."
"So, you did indeed…sleep with him?" I was unsure at that point how to put it lightly.
She huffed and straightened her back, still filled with the pride Kaito had shattered. "I do not know who you are. I am sorry that I spoke in such a way to you. If you are a reporter, leave at once. If you are anything else, I do not know what you want with me."
"I'm sorry to hear about your struggles, truly, Meiko. I'm here as a favor to a friend, but that's it. Kaito Taro is a sick man. One day he'll be punished for what he has done. In this world or the next or both, we'll see."
"I hope it's both. I hope he's murdered and damned to eternal hell." Tears fell onto the white blankets.
"Goodbye."
She did not respond, only stared out the window again. After a minute, I left, feeling the secretary's eyes bore into my back as I floated through the lobby and out the doors. At home that night, I pulled out a specific piece of paper, a candle, and my precious inkwell. In my hardly used scrawl, I wrote under the name, Miku Taro:
Meiko Sakine…Address Unknown.
I blew out the flame of the candle and sat, back pressed against the wall, listening to Gakupo's ragged breathing as he slept, wondering if I was doing the right thing.