The Premonition, page 2
It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old.
*
That Sunday, Mom had been outside all morning gardening. As I lay in bed, I heard Dad, who’d been roped in to help, talking loudly, complaining, laughing. Drowsily I thought, If I get up now, she’ll make me help with the garden, too, and then Dad will grab his chance to slip off …
Nearly a week had passed since we’d moved back into our freshly renovated house. I was still adjusting, waking with a start each morning to the unfamiliar ceiling. Smells of new paint and fresh timber permeated the rooms, giving them a standoffish air. And I’d felt out of sorts since our move. I couldn’t shake the sense that something in me was shifting—something was starting to open up in me.
For whatever reason, I had no memories from my childhood. Not in my mind, or in photos—nothing.
I knew it was weird. But it was the kind of weird that diffused into the day-to-day, and because like everyone I was always moving on into the future, at some point I’d stopped thinking about it.
Our family was me, Mom, Dad, and my brother, Tetsuo, who was barely a year younger than me. We were the picture of a happy middle-class family, like in that Spielberg movie. Dad was a doctor at a big corporation, where he’d met Mom, who was a nurse. Our home was always full of sensible exuberance, and never lacked for things like flowers on the table, homemade jams and pickles, crisply ironed outfits, sets of golf clubs, fine liquors. Mom bustled around the house joyfully, bringing up me and Tetsuo, and Dad protected us with a strong heart full of nothing but devotion. I couldn’t have been more fortunate; and yet, from time to time, I couldn’t help but think—
It’s not just my childhood memories. There’s something even more important I’m forgetting.
At dinnertime, with the TV on, my parents would often tell stories from when we were younger. Happy memories of me and Tetsuo: the first time we saw a lion at the zoo; the time I fell and split my lip open, and cried when I saw the blood; how I’d always pick on Tetsuo and make him cry … There was no hesitation in their words, not a hint of shadow in their smiles, and sitting there with Tetsuo I’d laugh just as heartily as him.
But in my mind, a light would go off. Something’s missing. There’s something else … It might have only been my imagination. Most people forgot their childhood memories. That was totally normal. Even so—when I was outdoors, on nights when the moon shone especially bright, things often felt unbearable. I’d look up to the distant sky and feel the air blowing past me, and sense that I was on the verge of recalling something overwhelmingly familiar. I knew it was there, but as soon as I tried to think about it, it would vanish. It had been like that for as long as I could remember. The doubt had come to weigh even more heavily on me since something that happened the premonition at the place we’d lived temporarily while our house was being renovated …
“Yayoi! Get up, it’s almost noon.”
I heard Dad call out, and so I reluctantly got up from my bed and headed downstairs. He was in the entryway changing his sandals for sneakers.
“I can’t believe you made me get up just so Mom could have someone else to order around!” I said.
“Hardly. It’s almost noon, and I’ve done my part. You hold the fort for a while,” he said, laughing. He always looked younger on Sundays, maybe because of the way he let his hair fall naturally over his forehead.
“Going for a walk?”
“Yep, just sneaking out,” he said. He’d gotten into taking walks recently, and we were supposed to be getting a puppy soon that he could take out with him. It was a foreign breed that would get huge when it was full-grown. The whole family was looking forward to it.
I opened the door to the living room and went over to the big window looking out on the garden. Through the glass, I could see Mom at the far end of it, in gardening gloves, transplanting a shrub.
I got the milk out of the refrigerator, microwaved a pastry, and started on a late breakfast. My head was groggy from sleeping too long. At the edge of the kitchen, Tetsuo was sawing at a piece of wood with a look of intense concentration.
“Do you have to make so much noise? What are you doing?” I said, going over to him with my mouth full. He had a stack of planks and a can of paint on top of some newspaper he had laid on the floor, and was loudly sawing away.
“I’m building a doghouse,” he said, and motioned at the sawdust-covered sheet of paper by his foot.
I picked up the plans. Surprised at the size of it, I said, “I thought we were getting a puppy!”
“That’s how big it’s going to get when it grows up,” he said, and went back to sawing.
“I guess that’s why they say great things come in little packages,” I said, laughing.
“You’re so smart, Yayoi!” he said, keeping his eyes on his saw, and laughed, too.
I crouched there and watched his hands for a while as they worked in the sunlight.
I really loved my brother. He was an easy person to love. That was just the kind of kid he was. Growing up, we were always incredibly close, and never fought, even though he was a boy and I was a girl. I took him for granted sometimes, but at heart I always admired his pure enthusiasm for the world. He met challenges head-on, fearlessly, and had a natural strength and positivity that stopped him from letting his doubts turn into problems for other people. Even now, in his senior year of high school, when he was preparing to take his college entrance exams, he didn’t give us any reason to worry about him. He’d cheerfully gone and bought a mountain of workbooks, and was working his way through them methodically, like he was trying to complete a video game—it seemed like a given that he’d get into a college that was the right match. I’d always envied how he could just go ahead and do things without getting stuck in indecision. He could be a little too naive sometimes, but he was pretty special. Our parents and relatives all said so—that if someone could be born with a beautiful soul, if nobility could be innate, then that was Tetsuo.
“Yayoi, pass me the tape measure?” he said.
“Here you are,” I said, unearthing it from a pile of newspaper and handing it to him.
“So are you still, like, heartbroken or what? How come you’re moping around at home on a Sunday?” he asked.
I’d almost forgotten, but I’d recently stopped seeing a boy, a friend of Tetsuo’s, who had taken a liking to me and asked me out.
“No way. I’m just having a lazy day. I’ve forgotten all about him,” I said, holding the end of the tape measure down for him.
“Huh,” Tetsuo said, marking the plank with a felt-tip pen. “Well, you can’t help it if he’s leaving, I guess. It’s too far.”
“Definitely! He’s moving to Kyushu,” I said. I hadn’t told Tetsuo the details, but I’d only gone out with his friend a couple of times, and it wasn’t like we’d been together, or like I’d been really into him, so I wasn’t that upset. But because he was the one who’d introduced us, Tetsuo felt bad that it hadn’t worked out, and there in the afternoon sunlight, hearing his care for me, I suddenly felt very happy. It was a funny kind of happiness, a little sly, and maybe the sweeter for it. I didn’t want to say anything so he’d never stop trying to make me feel better.
“You’re really good at this kind of thing, Tetsuo.”
“What thing?”
“Building a doghouse? I could never draw up a whole plan like that. Wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“It turns out I have a reason to do it now we have a puppy coming, you know? Wouldn’t dream of doing all this work otherwise,” he said, pointing at the wood he’d cut.
“True,” I said.
He took up the saw again, and our conversation faded into the noise of it. I got up, slipped my sandals on, and went into the garden.
“Yayoi, would you give me a hand?” Mom said as soon as she saw me. The neatly trimmed lawn was soaking up the sun that poured down on it. She was digging a hole in the ground for a shrub that had been growing in a large pot.
“Okay, okay,” I said, going over to her.
She wiped the sweat from her forehead and said, “He says he needs space for the kennel, so I’m rearranging the whole garden.” She laughed.
“Now that the house is different, the garden looks new, too,” I said.
The clear sunlight, not too strong, illuminated the freshly painted cream-colored walls of our new house. The plants in the garden also seemed to magically come alive as Mom gave them their new places, dirt streaking her hands and her face, her pale cheeks shining as she carefully brushed the soil from the roots of the bush she had taken out of its pot. I pulled some weeds while watching Tetsuo building the house for our new puppy beyond the glass. He’s taking it so seriously, I thought.
“He’s been working on it since seven o’clock,” Mom said, noticing me watching.
“The dog isn’t even here yet,” I laughed.
“That would be a little too late to start,” she said, and laughed, too.
Tetsuo went on sawing and hammering, unaware that he was being observed. Without the noise to bother us, the scene looked almost like a painting, and Mom and I stood still for a while on the fresh-smelling lawn, just watching.
“What an odd day it is. It can’t decide if it wants to be cloudy or clear,” Mom said, looking up at the sky.
The sky that afternoon was indeed a strange color. It was blanketed with layers of bright, shining clouds, and at moments the golden light pouring down from it would suddenly fade, shadowing the grass into a dull green.
“Rainy season, I guess,” I said, going back to weeding. An infinite number of weeds had appeared in the garden while we’d temporarily lived in the other house, and, being only human, I’d gotten totally absorbed in the simple repetition of the task. After a while, stray drops of rain started landing where I was working, though the air was still bright.
“Well, what do you know? Dad didn’t take an umbrella—I hope he isn’t getting rained on.”
Mom stood up where she was still transplanting several feet away. The large drops of rain falling through the sunlight gave an extra cast of concern to her expression.
“It’ll stop in a minute,” I said.
“Come here and get out of the rain,” she said, waving me over to where she was crouching under the low branches of a tree. “You don’t want to get wet.”
Sure enough, the rain was getting stronger, and a dull, dark grayness was swiftly taking over the sky. I ran over to her. We squatted together beneath the green leaves, hiding from the downpour that was now coloring in the ground around us. Inside the house, Tetsuo looked up at the sky in surprise, then waved in our direction.
“Ugh, my hair’s all wet,” I said.
“Yayoi.” She said my name firmly, still looking out at the garden. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you …”
I turned to look at her, wondering what it could be.
She met my gaze with a slight hesitation in her eyes. It was the look she had when she was worrying about something she wasn’t sharing. She’d called my name with the same expression on her face when Tetsuo got his first girlfriend, when I got my first period, when Dad had a breakdown from working too hard. Each time, I’d felt strangely exposed, like I had nowhere to hide. Waiting to find out what she was about to say, I felt like I was disappearing into the silent background of our family’s history.
“Yayoi, was there anything unusual while we were at the other house?” Mom asked.
“The other house? You mean the place we were renting up until last week? Nope. Nothing,” I said, flustered.
“I don’t think so. You seemed off and down the whole time, and you still aren’t yourself, even now we’re back. And that night … I heard you shouting in the bathroom.”
“Oh, that was just, a slug floating in the tub, and …” I tried to downplay it, but my explanation trailed off.
“Don’t lie. When were you ever afraid of a slug? You’ve been different ever since that night. Tell me what happened,” she said firmly.
The clouds filled the sky now, sending rain down from a strange mottled patchwork of light and gray. Under it, the lawn was gradually turning a deep green.
“Well, actually, I—” I said, deciding to go for it. “I saw a ghost.”
“A ghost?” Mom gave me a strange look.
“Or something like that,” I said.
… While our house was being renovated, the four of us had lived in a run-down place that was about to be pulled down on a street near the station in the next town over. My parents had started talking in the spring about how the leaky roof over Tetsuo’s room would be a problem while he was studying for his exams, so the original plan had been to fix the roof, but soon enough it had escalated into a full remodel, and by the time we started looking for a temporary home, that had been the only property available. It’s only for a couple of months, we said, and moved in immediately.
Even taking that into account, the house was quite something. It was a single-story house with just three rooms and a kitchen, and the bathroom right in the middle. Presumably, the rooms behind it had been added later, but it was an odd layout. From the rooms in the back, you had to go through the bathroom to get anywhere. The bathroom itself was a relic, its tiles all faded and chipped. It was drafty, and, worst of all, the tub leaked. The water level fell steadily so that unless the four of us bathed one right after the other, the tub would be empty by the time it was the last person’s turn. All in all, though, living with inconveniences like these made an interesting change, and our stay was shaping up to be a fun bonding experience we were going through together as a family.
*
That evening, I was soaking in the aforementioned leaky tub. It was a cool night in May.
I think it was just past nine o’clock. Night air was coming in through the window that I’d opened a crack. I was quietly sitting in the tub, thinking about nothing. Somewhere by my ear I could hear a clear trickling sound almost befitting a beautiful garden fountain. But it was only the sound of the hot water gradually escaping through the cracks in the tile. Even that sound was relaxing to me now that I was used to it.
The bathroom also seemed to have a drafty gap hidden somewhere in its walls, because we found too many ants and snails and other things crawling around or cooking in the bathwater. At first I was so disgusted I really could have screamed, but I got used to them, too.
I was gazing at the dull, discolored tile mosaic under the bare light bulb. There in the steam, I suddenly felt like I might be on the verge of remembering.
That feeling—I think it’s one everyone knows. It goes something like this.
A sudden rustling in your chest. A premonition of understanding. You feel you might be on the verge of uncovering something … You’re a little fearful, oddly excited, and somehow forlorn … Like there’s something coming around the next corner that’s going to turn everything you know about yourself on its head.
But why did this feeling always make me think I was going to discover something about my past? Did other people also feel like they might be able to recall something they’d forgotten? I was soaking in the tub, pondering this question, when I felt something tap me on the back. Something firm floating in the water—something big.
What?
I looked behind me, startled, but there was nothing there. Just ripples in the clear water. And, when I listened, the same quiet trickling sound.
What was that …? I thought, and when I turned back around, I was suddenly in a terrible mood. My body wanted to get out of there immediately, and my hair stood on end, breaking my skin out in goose bumps even though the water was hot. I was cornered and vulnerable, and my lizard brain was sounding a deep and terrified warning.
Just as I tried to get to my feet, I felt something bump up against my tensed back again. Slowly, I turned my head again, and this time, it was still there.
It was a rubber duck.
A toy duck made of rubbery red plastic with its beak painted on in yellow, the kind you play with in the bath, or in a paddling pool.
I doubted my own eyes. I was baffled that something could suddenly materialize that wasn’t there before, and the more I thought about it, the more spooked I started to feel, until I shrieked loudly, stood up with a surge of water, and rushed out of the tub. Everything moved at a strange speed, like I’d just been freed from a paralytic sleep.
Mom heard me and came rushing in from the kitchen, opening the door shouting, “What happened?”
I took a breath, looked into the bath again, and—
There was nothing there.
Just the tub with quiet waves rolling across its surface, and the murmur of the water slowly draining away.
“It’s nothing,” I said, and went to my room and went straight to bed. My heart was still beating wildly in my chest.
When I eventually reached fitful sleep, I had a bizarre dream that didn’t feel at all like a dream.
In it, I was someone else, killing a baby. Yes—the unpleasant sensation still comes back to me easily. Although it was only a flash, it had the whiff of truth.
I was standing in the bathroom, but it was full of the hot, bright sun of noon at the height of summer. The windowpanes and the tiles looked newer than I’d ever seen them. I was wearing slippers on my feet that I didn’t recognize at all. They had a garish plaid pattern, and the way their soles flapped under my feet on the wooden duckboard was spine-chillingly realistic. Cold sweat trickled down my neck, and my hair was in a short style I’d never worn. I watched helplessly as, with my own hands, I held a crying baby under the cold water that filled the tub.
