Still Wearing the Ring
And then, at last, the blunt question left Jia's mouth. It drove straight through a conversation that had been circling and circling, and pinned it in place.
I pretended I hadn't heard. For several seconds I gave her nothing at all. Only afterward did it occur to me that, from where Jia sat, that silence would land even stranger than any answer. So I spoke as briefly as I could, with every trace of feeling scraped out of my voice.
"No."
What did that do to her? I couldn't bring myself to look at her face, so there was no way to know. Even so, I felt as if I could see the expression anyway.
"I see..."
Fortunately, she seemed to believe me. Though I'm not even sure believe is the right word. It was something I myself couldn't tell was a lie or the truth.
I was sorry toward her, but I couldn't bring myself to open the subject any further. I wanted to say something—anything—to change it, and nothing that sounded even halfway plausible would come.
I kept telling myself I couldn't just lie there like this, eyes on my phone, and then, before I knew it, it was time to sleep. Somewhere around then I must have drifted off, because the memory simply cuts out.
When I opened my eyes in the morning, Jia was asleep in the bed. My body was stiff from the narrow mattress, but even so I had the feeling I'd slept well enough. If anything, having lain in the dark doing nothing at all until sleep took me seemed to have left me in better shape than usual. On an ordinary night I would kill time on my phone and blow straight past my bedtime.
Either way, I had work again today, so I left her sleeping and started for the bathroom to wash up.
That was when it happened.
A ringtone cut through the quiet. Not mine. Jia's, most likely. I glanced over to see whose screen it was, and her phone was going off. She was asleep, so I meant to leave some pointless call alone—until I saw the name, and recognized it, and letting it pass felt wrong.
I looked at that name for a moment and turned it over. Come to think of it, had Jia even told Yuna last night that she was staying over? She'd said she would, but I'd never actually seen her step away to make the call. Yuna wouldn't say so, but if Jia had come without a word, she would be worrying harder than I might think. Leaving the call unanswered felt too cruel.
There was no need to feel anything I didn't have to. We'd spoken on the phone before, and this time I'd simply picked up on Jia's. The call had come while she was asleep, and ignoring it felt wrong, so I'd answered. That was all. I packed that thought away and kept the talk as plain as I could.
She seemed a little thrown, as if she hadn't expected me to be the one who answered.
I looked at Jia's face. She was sleeping so peacefully that I couldn't tell whether she was tired or not, and I didn't particularly want to force her awake.
Does anyone really tack two days of vacation onto the middle of the week? Something about it didn't sit right, but it wasn't important. Pressing her would only feel like an interrogation, which would be strange in its own way. Company business, or matching a friend's schedule. Something like that. If this was the situation, I ought to say what needed saying.
The call ended not long after. Maybe because we'd spoken once before, this time too we managed to talk without anything outwardly strange about it. Honestly, every conversation had more than one or two places where I went rigid with tension. Was I overreacting?
Thinking that, I hurried to wake Jia—and found her already awake, eyes open, looking at me.
"Are you done talking to Mom?"
"What. You were up?"
"Yes. I just woke up."
The way she said it, she might as well have been awake the whole time. I was curious how long she'd actually been lying there, but I went ahead with what she needed to hear.
"Get ready, quick. Mom says she's coming soon to pick you up."
"Already? Honestly. What was Mom going to do if I slept in..."
"She must've figured Dad would pick up. Still, looks like you did let her know properly before you went to sleep. That's a relief."
Saying it out loud, I realized ignoring that call would have been a disaster. It would have turned awkward with my wife, and one phone call I'd happened to answer had nearly eaten a huge piece of Jia's morning.
"Still, this works out. The subway home would've been rough on you."
"Haah... if she was coming anyway, she could've come a few hours later. Mornings are hard to move in..."
She looked thoroughly put out.
"She came all this way. You ought to be grateful—what kind of thing is that to say, Jia..."
Watching her, I felt it again, the old strangeness. From the very beginning Jia had been oddly, impeccably polite with me, and yet with her own mother she grumbled every single time. And it was never me who scolded her. That role had always belonged to my wife.
There was nothing to be done about it. No matter how many times I resolved to be the one to scold her—uneasy about always casting my wife as the villain—Jia never showed me a single rough edge. Well. By now I'd become the kind of father it would be ridiculous to scold anyone as. Turning that over left a bitter taste, and a tangle of feelings I couldn't sort.
"I'm kidding. Anyway, so what should we do? Don't you have to get to work too? Can I shower first?"
"Dad's quick in the shower, so you go ahead."
"Okay~"
There was still a little time to spare. It didn't seem as if it would matter.
One way or another I got Jia through her shower, and we headed out to the spot where I'd arranged to meet my wife. We were running late, so she was waiting with the car stopped, and I hurried Jia into it.
I thought they would leave just like that. Instead, once Jia was in the car, my wife said she had something to say to me and stepped outside. I hadn't expected it. Flustered, I kept my face in check and pretended I wasn't.
"You had a time of it, honey."
"Hardly. I was just seeing Jia."
"You said you have to get to work too. I showed up out of nowhere on a weekday. That is a burden, then."
"By that logic, you came all this way to pick her up too."
"Me, well... it's just everyday life now. Aigoo, who does that girl take after, not listening like that. She seems well-behaved, but she's quietly a handful, I'm telling you."
Yuna's face, as she said it, hadn't changed in the slightest. Of course it hadn't. Only a year had passed.
Everyday life, now. The word seemed to hold a great deal inside it.
"It feels a little wrong to say I had a hard time. I should've at least bought Jia something to eat. Of all days, I had dinner with someone from work and got back late, so I didn't even get a proper meal into her..."
"It's fine. She eats well and gets around fine every day. If she ran off on her own whim, she ought to go hungry once."
"You put it like that and it sounds like she ran away from home..."
"Aigoo. Running away would almost be better. At least then I could scold her outright. Last time, the moment I said anything, she kept coming at me—what's so wrong with a daughter going to see her dad—until I genuinely had nothing left to say."
Had Jia really gone that far? I could hardly picture her talking that way, so I wasn't sure. Still, if I'd heard it put that directly, I really did think I wouldn't have had a single word.
More than once, my wife tried to open her mouth, and the words wouldn't quite come. She stole a glance at my face, then at the ground, and did it again. Then she let out a sigh so small I almost couldn't hear it.
"Anyway, it was good to see your face after so long. I'll take Jia and head back."
"Yeah. I should get going too. I've got work."
I produced the answer almost on reflex. Somehow the whole moment felt unreal. I couldn't say when being with Yuna had stopped feeling familiar and started feeling like something that couldn't quite be real.
Even so, my wife was drawing away from me, one step at a time. Soon she would reach the driver's seat, get in, and go a long way off. This might be the last time I ever came face to face with her. Time alone in a lonely little studio. Growing old like that, until we faded out of each other's memory.
"Wait a second, honey."
I had no idea why the words burst out of me. She heard my voice, of course, and in that instant she turned. I froze, not knowing what I was supposed to say. Then I forced out the thing I shouldn't have said.
She faltered and looked down at her own ring finger. A moment later, a smile touched the corner of her mouth—not the performed expression from a moment ago, but a natural one.
"...Your lines are as bad as ever."
Not long after, she drove away.
What had I been thinking, letting those words out? What had my subconscious gone and said? My head was so full that I stood in a daze in the parking lot for a while. Then, remembering I had to get to work, I moved on.