Close Enough to Touch
"More importantly, Jia—don't you have anything to change into?"
"Not really, no."
"You'll be uncomfortable if you sleep like that."
"I was going to sleep in one of your T-shirts. Like I used to."
"...You're grown now. I'll grant you the top, but what are you supposed to do about the bottom?"
"You have shorts, don't you? Don't tell me you were planning to dress me in just the shirt and send me to bed."
I remembered how, back around the time Jia was in elementary school, she used to throw on one of my T-shirts and sleep in it whenever she had nothing else. I'd been speaking with those days in mind, but the moment I thought it through, putting her to bed in nothing but a shirt was obviously absurd. Why hadn't it even occurred to me to give her something for her legs?
"No... it's just that the shorts are so big they won't stay on you."
"They cinch with a string, don't they? Pull it tight and I should manage while I'm asleep."
"I doubt it..."
I dug through the drawer for something she might actually be able to wear. Looking carefully, I found one pair—shorts I'd ordered by mistake, small enough to fit snug. Maybe she could manage these. I handed them over.
"Try these on."
"Okay."
Jia took the shorts I'd given her and undid the fastening of the long skirt she was wearing. As the skirt came down, the legs beneath it came into view, wrapped in thick black stockings—whether for warmth or not, it was plain there was still more she had to take off. For a moment I was looking at her without a single thought in my head when she suddenly glanced my way and spoke.
"Dad. Could you look somewhere else?"
"Huh?"
"I'm an adult now. It's embarrassing if you stare that openly."
I felt my own face go hot. There wasn't even time to recall what Jia herself had said a moment ago—that it didn't matter, they were family—before I turned straight around. A soft rustle, and then the sound of her changing. For some reason a tension hung in the room. Was it the feeling that I absolutely must not look back? Or had I fallen into self-loathing at the realization that I'd been about to watch my daughter change? The truth was I'd looked for no reason at all. Truly without a thought, the way I used to look at her and think nothing of it. Even so, it felt as if I'd made some enormous mistake.
"I'm changed, Dad."
Her hand touched my shoulder. I turned, wearing the blankest, most vacant face I could manage, and looked at my daughter again.
There was nothing particularly special about the sight. A T-shirt, when all was said and done, and shorts. Up through last year I would have seen her like this at home until I was sick of it. The one odd thing was the drawstring. When I wore them, the waist cord had stretched so far you could barely see the string; on Jia there was so much slack left that she had to tie it into a bow.
"They're still pretty big, though..."
"Of course they are. You're a man and I'm a woman."
"Well, that's true, but..."
"You know you can't treat me like a kid over something like this, right? I'm the same size as Mom now. I'm a centimeter taller, even. Mom's a B, and I'm a C."
"Why are we talking about chests."
"Because you treat me like a little kid every chance you get. What else am I supposed to do?"
At that, I looked at Jia's chest without meaning to. The shirt was so big I couldn't begin to guess how large she was. I tried to recall what her chest had looked like earlier, when she'd been in ordinary clothes, but nothing came to me—maybe because I had no memory of ever having looked on purpose.
Once Jia had changed, the two of us took turns washing up in the bathroom and came back out. While we were in there the heat had been running full blast, and the room was baked hot. Honestly it was warm enough to roll around and sleep without a blanket—warm enough that calling it hot wouldn't have been wrong. Live with it cranked like this all the time and I might not even notice winter had come. Then again, unless I meant to stay shut inside for the rest of my life, living that way would probably leave me unable to cope with winter weather at all. Blast the air conditioner too hard in summer and you can't wander around outside, either.
"I've heard so much about how miserable studio apartments are, but it's more livable than I expected."
"For a day, sure. People live here. But once you actually try to keep house, there's more that's inconvenient than you'd think. The space is so tight that the moment you start setting one thing down, there's no end to it."
"Even so, it's a private space where nobody can interfere. I'm kind of jealous."
"That part's true enough. Being alone is comfortable."
There had been some twists along the way, but in the end Jia was lying on the bed and I was lying on the floor. I glanced at the clock and saw it was already nearly ten. All I'd done, it seemed, was finish work, eat one meal, and come home—and already it was time to sleep, wake, and go back to the office. Weekdays really were profoundly unreasonable. I wasn't even working overtime, and it was already like this. I couldn't begin to imagine how I'd endured it day after day back when I was.
"Come to think of it, Jia, what time did you get to my place today?"
"Around six? I figured if you got off early, that'd be about when you'd show up."
"You should've called. I'd have come running."
"Oh, come on. I wanted to surprise you. If I'd called, the whole thing would've been pointless. And I didn't want to get in the way, either. You're a man too. I shouldn't just barge in while you're out drinking with a woman you're close to."
"Jia. When you put it like that, it sounds wrong. I told you it isn't that kind of relationship."
"Okay, okay. I was just teasing."
Jia started to giggle. Even lying on the bed, she had at some point turned her eyes down toward me on the floor. Being looked down on like that made me feel, somehow, like a young lady and her servant. It didn't seem entirely off, either. A father is supposed to sacrifice a certain amount for his daughter.
"Dad, wouldn't it be better if you came up on the bed after all?"
"How are the two of us supposed to sleep in a space that small?"
"If we hold each other and sleep, there should be plenty of room. I don't take up as much space as you'd think. If I stick right up against the wall, the two of us ought to fit just fine."
"Lying down is one thing. Wake up and one of us will have rolled off onto the floor."
"So what if someone rolls off? We've already laid a blanket down there. Whoever falls can just give up and sleep on the floor."
"Easy to say... Jia, are you sure you're all right with it? No matter what, having your dad sleeping right beside you has to be uncomfortable."
"We're family. What's the big deal? I'm pretty sure I slept next to you every night, at least up through elementary school."
She wasn't wrong, but elementary school and now felt completely different. She could say daughter, say family, all she liked—Jia was unmistakably an adult woman. Sleeping under a single blanket as if it were nothing could only feel a little strange. Separate from that, though, when she asked to this extent I found I wanted to sleep beside her too. I'd talked a bold game about being fine on the floor, but after decades of sleeping in a bed it had become second nature, and the floor was simply too hard to be comfortable.
"You're really sure it's all right, Jia?"
"Yes."
I felt a little guilty, but I also wanted to be at least somewhat fit for work tomorrow. Sleep wrong and pull a muscle somewhere, and I'd be in real trouble. Even I thought it was a ridiculous excuse... still, since Jia wanted to sleep together too, I felt a bit easier about it.
Once I'd managed to lie down on the bed, it seemed more manageable than I'd expected. I'd thought we would have to be pressed completely against each other, but there was more space left than I'd imagined. Sleep carefully, and we could probably manage at a distance where only our arms might brush, or might not.
"See? It's fine, isn't it? Better than you thought."
"You're really not uncomfortable, Jia?"
"Ugh, how many times are you going to ask, Dad? I'm fine, so I'm telling you I'm fine. I went to the trouble of coming all this way so you wouldn't be lonely. I'm not about to use that as an excuse to make you sleep on the floor."
Lonely.
So she really was worrying about that. Well, she had reason to, in her own way. Her father—a man pushing forty, for what it was worth—had been rolling around this tiny studio on his days off with nothing but a single computer for company. The moment I thought of it that way, Jia seemed all the more remarkable, and the guilt came back. The shock of learning I wasn't her biological father couldn't have been mine alone. Jia would have felt it just the same. And yet somehow, after that, she had never once let on that she disliked me. She had kept calling me Dad, faithfully, and come to me like this. My daughter had come all this way, and I'd been unable to offer her a single kind word, acting as if she were a bother.
…
Haah.
Every time I thought about things like this, my head got far too complicated. The notion would rise up before I could stop it—had I divorced for nothing? Then again, it seemed too large an event to dismiss as a divorce I'd gone through for no reason. Even if we hadn't divorced, forcing the marriage to go on after a fact like that had come to light would only have wounded us worse than we were wounded now. My head throbbed.
A man, once he's chosen, ought to push forward like a man. Somehow I'd never been able to fix this about myself, not since I was young. Every time, Yuna had been the one who kept me from regretting. But now... she was probably the one regretting more.
I was sunk in the thought when a view unlike the usual one suddenly registered, unbidden, as information in my mind. And there, in it, was a face identical to Yuna's when she was young.