Summer Ghost, page 6
At this point in her explanation, Ayane walked over to her desk, crouched down, and crawled through the chair into the leg space beneath it. I couldn’t imagine why, but she was now peeking out at me from underneath her desk, sitting with her legs hugged tight to her chest.
“When I next awoke, I found myself trapped in a tiny little space like this. It was probably a big suitcase, or at least that’s my theory. Like one of those oversized ones designed for long vacations. I could tell from the composition and texture of the interior fabrics. It seemed like the driver curled me up into a ball and zipped me up inside—I couldn’t move an inch.”
“Jesus…” I muttered. “What kind of monster…”
“He probably mistook me for dead, I’m guessing. He thought he already killed me, so he threw me in his trunk and drove off to bury the evidence.”
“Wait… He buried you?”
“Oh, yeah. That part was pretty terrifying. I could hear him piling the dirt on top of me and everything. I tried pounding on the lid of the suitcase and calling out for help, but it didn’t do me any good. I was too weak to hit very hard, and could barely choke out anything more than a pathetic groan… Even so, I strained my ears and listened for any indication that he could hear me. All I could make out though was the sound of other cars passing by. I guess he must have buried me pretty close to the roadway or something. But anyway, yeah—it was just that and the sound of him shoveling dirt until eventually there wasn’t enough oxygen left for me to breathe. At that point, my consciousness started to fade…and that’s the last thing I can remember. And then I was dead. Just like that.”
Ayane rose to her feet once more, phasing right through the desk.
“The next thing I knew, I was drifting through the sky, looking down at the city below. To this day, my body still hasn’t been found. I know that from watching my mom go about her days. She’s still waiting for me to come home.”
She cast her gaze down to the ground, her expression despondent. When I imagined how it must feel, as a mother, to hold out hope that your daughter was still alive for years when you knew the odds were greatly stacked against you, I couldn’t help but empathize with her. A stabbing pang of sorrow shot through my chest.
“Do you know where you were buried?” I asked.
“I don’t, unfortunately,” replied Ayane. “I looked all over, but eventually gave up. It wasn’t like finding my body would change anything, after all. Can’t very well dig myself up or make a police report as a ghost, now, can I?”
She then slipped through the curtained window and back outside. I followed suit, and we now stood on the rooftop, with the starry night sky as our only backdrop.
“It’s pretty depressing sometimes, though,” she said. “I mean, I had so much left I wanted to do with my life…like go out and see the world, you know?”
“Isn’t traveling one of the few things you still can do? Heck, you don’t even have to pay for airfare anymore.”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” she said, narrowing her eyes in amusement—but the gesture belied the sorrow and resignation I could still sense deep within her. “Come on, Tomoya-kun. Let’s get you back in one piece.”
Upon our return to the abandoned airfield, we found my body right where we left it, sparkler still in hand. It still felt just as weird as it had a few hours prior, though, to see myself in the third person.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “didn’t you say there was some sort of time limit for how long we can interact? I feel like it was a lot shorter last time.”
“It’s because you were in soul form this time,” said Ayane.
My body was my vessel—it bound me to the world of the living, and through it I was able to interact with society and the world around me. But if your goal was to commune with the souls of the dead, it was apparently only a hindrance.
I walked over to my vacant vessel and pressed a weightless palm against its back—and an instant later, I was back in my own skin. As gravity once again took its hold over me, I very nearly fell to my knees. Almost immediately, an aching fatigue shot through my head. My only guess was that, as part of the body-soul reuniting process, my physical brain was overheating from being forced to process the past few hours of stimuli all at once. I lifted my weary head and saw that Ayane’s spectral form—that was so clear and vibrant to me just a moment ago—had grown hazy and indistinct. It was as though she could vanish into thin air at any moment.
“I had fun today,” she said. “Thanks for hearing me out, Tomoya-kun.”
And before I could even think of a suitable farewell, the wind picked up and took the Summer Ghost in its wake. As the tall grass once again began to sway and the insects resumed their songs, the sparkler fell from my fingertips onto the asphalt—and for a second time, I was left standing on the runway, alone with my thoughts once more.
Neither Aoi nor Ryo said a word as I recounted the events from the night before. By the time I finished, all of the ice in their glasses had melted from the white-hot rays of summer sun that poured in through the window.
Now that I was finally done speaking, Ryo reached into his bag and pulled out a handful of pill containers. He took one each of a variety of different capsules and tablets, downing them all in one go with a swig of water.
“So…they still haven’t found the culprit, then?” asked Aoi.
“Nope,” I said. “But Ayane-san says she doesn’t care all that much about bringing him to justice. She doesn’t really bear him any ill will, apparently. If anything, it seems like she mostly feels bad for leaving her mom behind with no real way of ever learning the truth. If you ask me, that might even be the main reason her soul can’t find closure.”
“So in other words,” said Ryo, “you think that’s why she’s still stuck in limbo, just floating around town as a wandering spirit?”
It seemed a likely enough explanation for why a deceased person’s soul might not be able to rest in peace—a lingering regret that kept them bound here to Earth. Ayane almost certainly regretted getting into an argument with her mother that night and running out of the house on a sour note that never she was never able to resolve. She hadn’t told me that herself in any explicit terms, but when I recalled the deep sorrow I sensed in her eyes last night, it was the only explanation that made sense.
“So what do you want to do about it, Tomoya?” asked Ryo.
“Sorry?” I replied. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I mean, why did you call us out here to tell us all of that? Sure, yeah, we know that the bit about the Summer Ghost being a woman who committed suicide was made up now, but what exactly does her being murdered have to do with us?”
“I mean, nothing, I guess. I just figured I’d debrief you guys on my encounter with her last night.”
“You sure that’s all this is about?”
I knew what Ryo was getting at. I hemmed and hawed for a moment.
“Well, to be completely honest, I guess I just wanted to hear your guys’ takes on the whole situation,” I admitted. “What do you two think? If we put our heads together, do you think we could find Ayane-san’s body?”
Ryo clearly assumed that the conversation would eventually take this turn, so he seemed unfazed by this question. Aoi, on the other hand, was downright flabbergasted.
“What? You want us to go dig up a body?!” she cried. Her voice was so loud that other customers at nearby tables started casting suspicious glances.
“Pipe down, you idiot,” Ryo whispered harshly, bonking her lightly on the head. “You’re gonna make a scene.”
“Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting that, okay?!”
“Anyway,” I said, pivoting, “the main reason Ayane-san gave up on finding her body is apparently because even if she found it, she wouldn’t be able to dig it up herself. But with our help, we could even find a way to get her remains back home to her mother.”
Ryo let out a heavy sigh and shook his head. “And why exactly would you wanna do that?” he asked. “It just seems like a huge pain in the ass to me.”
“I know, and believe me, part of me is right there with you. That’s why I’m so conflicted about the idea and wanted to get your opinions.”
After all, I had no obligation to go so far out of my way to try to do this for Ayane, especially when she neither asked nor expected me to.
“Well, I don’t have much longer to live, dude. And I’d really prefer to spend the time I have left doing stuff I wanna do, no offense. Sorry if that makes me selfish.”
And with that, Ryo stood up from the table and reached for his wallet.
“No, no, no,” I said, holding out my hand to stop him. “I’ve got it.”
Ryo gave a slight nod, then shambled his way back toward the entrance. Aoi and I just sat there and watched him go until the door closed behind him.
“Do you think maybe he resents us a little bit?” asked Aoi.
“Resents us?” I said. “Why would he?”
“I mean, you and I are making the choice to kill ourselves when we could just as easily go on living… But for Ryo, that’s not an option. He’s only doing this because the alternative will be more painful in the long run. He wants to go out on his own terms. …From his perspective, we must seem like a couple of ungrateful little brats.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that so much, honestly. He wouldn’t have joined the forums and started messaging with us if he really felt that way, I don’t think. Anyway, what do you think about the idea of trying to find Ayane-san’s body, Aoi?”
“I think it’s a nice idea, but I guess I’m just not sure how realistic it is. It feels like there’s no way we’ll actually find it,” she said doubtfully. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m still really grateful to have met her, and I’d love to help her out. But it’s not like she’s asking us to do it either, is she? I mean, did she even so much as insinuate that she wanted your help finding her body?”
“Nope. Not at all.”
“Yeah, then I think maybe we should just leave it be. It could be that she’d rather we not poke our noses into her business. Plus, it might even be kind of cruel, in a way.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I mean, imagine having your daughter’s corpse suddenly show up on your doorstep one day after three long years of holding out hope for a miracle. For all we know, it could totally destroy her mother’s will to live. At least with the way things are now, she still has a glimmer of hope to cling on to, even if she’ll never find closure. Who are we to decide whether or not she’ll be happier knowing the truth, y’know?”
“So that’s your take, huh… Okay. Fair enough.”
My thoughts were sort of split down the middle in that regard too, admittedly. Would her mother appreciate finally having closure, no matter how painful it might be? Or would it be more merciful to let her go on living with the hope that her daughter might still come home one day?
“I take it though that you really want to go looking for her?” asked Aoi.
“I think I’m about fifty-fifty on it,” I said. “But I’d like to help her, if I can.”
“And where does that desire come from, do you think?”
I thought back to the previous night, to the way Ayane laid her hand on top of her mother’s as the older woman read.
“I’m not sure, honestly,” I said. “But I’m definitely not fishing for gratitude or anything like that.”
“I see, I see. Well, let Detective Aoi spell it out for you, because I think I’ve cracked the case,” said Aoi, with a giddiness in her eyes like a child who’d just been given a new toy. “I think someone’s got a little crush on Ayane-san and is just looking for excuses to keep going to the airfield and meeting up with her!”
“Yeah, maybe so,” I admitted.
“Wait… Seriously?!” Aoi recoiled.
I didn’t know much about love or what it felt like. All I knew was that I had the time of my life flying around hand in hand with her last night. Come to think of it, it was the first time I ever had the chance to take a girl on a “date” to my favorite museum too. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but maybe I really was starting to fall for her.
“You might be right, honestly,” I said. “Maybe I really am just looking for excuses to continue going to see her.”
“Man, this sucks…” Aoi huffed. “It’s no fun when you just admit it like that. At least let me tease you about it a little bit first! Sheesh.”
“Anyway, thanks for entertaining the idea, at least, Aoi. I really appreciate knowing where you guys stand.”
“Hey, don’t mention it.”
And with that, the two of us settled the bill and made our way out of the diner as well. The hot air rising up off the sun-beaten asphalt distorted the view so much that it made the buildings across the street look like wavering mirages.
“Man, what a scorcher,” I said. “You’d gotta have a death wish to willingly walk outside in this heat.”
“No kidding,” said Aoi. “We better make sure not to die of heat exhaustion before we even have the chance to commit suicide. That’d be a pretty lame way to go.”
Through squinting eyes, we waved each other goodbye and went our separate ways.
I spent the remaining half of the month of August doing little else but maintaining the status quo—going to and from cram school each day and buying practice workbooks for entrance exams I had no intention of taking. The Common Test for University Admissions was held in mid-January, after all—and I’d long since decided I wanted to be dead before then.
It wasn’t like I actually picked a date or anything, but the idea of killing myself sometime around the end of the year had been bouncing around in my head for a while now. I always liked the way the whole city transformed itself during Christmastime. It made everything feel a little bit warmer in spite of the cold. I figured killing myself on or slightly after Christmas itself would be most comfortable for me, so I let Ryo and Aoi know that I was tentatively planning to do it sometime during the week of the 24th through the 31st—right between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.
“Gotcha,” Ryo wrote back. “It obviously depends on my symptoms, but I’ll be sure to swing by your funeral if I can make it. I’ll bring a condolence offering and everything.”
“Yeah, I’ll come see you one last time too, assuming I’m still alive,” wrote Aoi.
To say that I wasn’t afraid of dying in the slightest would’ve been a lie. Why, just the other day when Ayane let go of my hand and let me fall down through the earth, I screamed at the top of my lungs in fear—in fear of death. Given that, I wasn’t entirely mentally prepared to take my own life just yet. I even asked myself if perhaps I was getting cold feet about the whole idea, but the answer there was a decisive no as well. In a sense, I was in my own state of limbo—stuck between not being ready to die and wanting nothing more.
While checking my smartphone during a break at cram school, I saw a news article about a high school girl who killed herself by jumping in front of a speeding train. For a moment, I wondered if perhaps Aoi had taken the initiative and was the first of us to actually follow through on our little pact, but upon reading the article more closely, I found that the story was apparently from a completely different part of the country, so it couldn’t have been her. There were a few other suicide-related articles that caught my eye, though—one about a struggling single mother in poverty who killed her two infant children and then slit her own throat rather than let them all starve to death. Another was about a middle-aged businessman who wrote a confession of guilt for embezzling company funds before drenching his entire body in gasoline and lighting himself on fire in a public park in broad daylight. Then, there was yet another about a town hall worker in her twenties who suffered ceaseless harassment from a superior. She drove to said superior’s house in the middle of the night, lit a large amount of charcoal in her car, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning while parked in their driveway. This was a sobering reminder of just how many people there were in the world who wanted to kill themselves and just how many different ways there were to do it.
Though I had to admit, the story of the single mother who took her children with her did make me unreasonably angry. While she was almost certainly suffering and wasn’t in a sound state of mind, you couldn’t just take innocent children with no agency along with you to the grave. If you wanted to commit suicide, you had to do it alone—while also making sure to cause as little trouble for those around you as possible. It was practically an unwritten rule.
There were studies that suggested a majority of people who committed (or at least considered) suicide were people who somehow fell into a one-track mindset where—be it due to depression or some other mental disorder—they ultimately became convinced that death was the only answer to their problems. I wondered if this was the case for me as well. I didn’t think it was, but then again, people with extremely narrow mindsets and cyclical thought processes didn’t tend to be the most self-aware.
As evening fell, I left my cram school and headed for home. On my way to the station, I passed by an art supply store I used to frequent quite a bit during my junior high days—virtually every day, in fact. A group of college-aged kids emerged from the store just as I walked past the entrance, and they started walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. I could tell from their clothing and general vibes that they were probably art school students. They seemed to be having an awful lot of fun chatting about whatever it was they were discussing. As I turned and watched them walk down the street for a moment, a twinge of pain shot through my chest.
