Prologue

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Wind whipped down the country lane in short, violent bursts, driving the blinding rain ahead of it; it seemed to moan as it passed, a mournful noise that screamed so, so sadly in my ears. I turned up the collar of my raincoat, then clutched my umbrella as tightly as I could, staunchly determined. I pressed on.

Feet slipping and sliding on the slick pavement, I struggled to keep my balance; my destination was only a couple dozen meters ahead of me, but it was becoming quite the battle to reach it. Normally, this is the kind of weather that kept you inside, lying in the quiet dark of a power outage, alone with your thoughts: but not today, not for me.

I had been alone for too long already.

A dozen more steps, two dozen more, and I had reached my goal. It loomed over me, a rusted iron contraption of two long arches, with a grated floor that let you peek at the structure beneath, and the waters that flowed around and through it. It was named “Ōkawabashi” in jest ⸺ there was nothing particularly “big” about the creek that the bridge sat over. It existed more to cross a ravine than the water itself, but the route it took through the winding mountains had become obsolete; the village it serviced had been sucked dry by urban migration, the younger residents abandoning it for brighter, modern futures somewhere else. It creaked in the wind and the rain, like it could fall apart at any moment. You could practically smell the resigned depression of the bridge itself, lingering metallic notes in the petrichor.

That’s what made it perfect. It was a symbol for the ending of things, the casting off of something in regret or want of something better. It was where I needed to be.

I clambered over the warning signs and pushed past the yellow tape, markers meant to keep people out of harm’s way on the decrepit structure. It didn’t matter to me either way; a slip or a jump both met the same end.

Floodwaters had swelled the East River, and the torrent roared down the ravine, greedily swallowing up the banks of the tiny creek it had been before. A true river now, in this short and desperate time, it seemed to me like a carriage of impatient horses, ready to take me away. I could hardly wait any longer.

I stepped to the railing, peering down over the side and into the murky dark.

“You shouldn’t stand so close.”

Hearing his voice, I turned, stunned with the shock of hearing aloud a voice that I had only ever played and replayed again and again in my memories. What terrible coincidence.

“S-sensei?” I gasped, words lost in a mix of hope and denial.

Footsteps drowned out by the rain and rushing water, I hadn’t noticed him approach; we were almost yelling at each other, voices intermittently ripped away by the wind.

He spoke again, dispelling any illusions I might’ve harbored. “I said, ‘you shouldn’t stand so close.’ You could fall.”

It was like a ghost stood before me, or perhaps a memory ⸺ a memory of a person so dear to me that I had stubbornly kept it alive after our final parting, nurturing it in my chest for almost two decades.

He was older, now; grey streaked through his long, dark hair in thick waves, and his face seemed even more gaunt than before: eyes peering from dark circles of sleeplessness, cheeks sunken from want of sustenance. He seemed drained of life, a specter come to haunt my final moments.

That’s not how I remembered him. It’s not how I wanted to remember him.

We were close now, close enough to touch, an arm’s reach away. I’d cried for lack of this closeness many times in my youth, pressing my tears into my pillow while dreaming of sun-dappled romances and secret trysts.

The wind calmed, and the rain begrudgingly slowed its ascent. Time began to slow, as his hand reached out to grip my umbrella, holding it so, so steady, a grip I had longed for myself. There was space here, for us, a conversation so late that it was already slipping into twilight.

“What are you doing out here? This isn’t a place for a young woman to be, and definitely not the weather for it.” His tone was sharp, but I knew he wasn’t talking down to me: it was the concerned admonishment of an educator looking out for his student.

I couldn’t look him in the eyes, and so instead I looked at his feet; larger than mine, naturally, wearing mud-spotted boots that had seen better days. I choked on my feelings, and spat out a sharp tone of voice.

“What are you doing here?”

My eyes burned from the cold, and the stinging wet, and the threat of more tears, yet still I managed to turn them towards his face: he was smiling, a wry look that couldn’t reach his tired eyes.

“I’m just… ⸺ throwing out some trash. Some useless junk that’s no good to anyone.”

I couldn’t help myself. I pushed in next to him, releasing the umbrella so that I could hold his arm. It was something solid, something to cling to ⸺ I couldn’t tell if that’s what I wanted.

“…You shouldn’t litter. It’s bad.”

“Speak for yourself,” he replied with a wry laugh.

I wasn’t about to let him wriggle out of this with just a joke and smile, like he’d always done when I was younger.

“I’m serious. What is someone like you doing out here?”

His face grew more stern, his fake smile slowly fading. We stood together for a long moment, his broad back shielding me from the rain.

“There’s nothing left for me to do,” he said, finally. “My visa expired today. The school district won’t renew my contract, and my wife already left me ⸺ “

“You have a wife?” I blurted out incredulously, speaking my mind before my sense of politic could catch up.

He made a face like I’d just slapped him, which I guess was close enough to the truth.

“I mean ⸺ of course you have a wife. I just thought ….” I let myself trail off. I would’ve felt too foolish, telling him that I couldn’t think of him with a woman other than myself.

“Had … ⸺ I had a wife. I haven’t seen her for a couple years. So, y’know, without a legal marriage to a national, and no job prospects, there’s nothing keeping me here.” He gestured outward, indicating nothing in particular. “And there’s nothing waiting for me back across the sea, so.”

He shrugged, like he was acknowledging a natural inevitability. A doomed sailor counting his last moments before his ship went under the waves forever.

I couldn’t leave it alone, but there weren’t any words left in me to convince him otherwise; it would be selfish to demand he live, when I wasn’t willing to do the same.

Cowardly, my lips quivered as I made a different, more unreasonable demand.

“Who was she? What was she like?” I asked.

What did she have that I lacked?

“You already know her,” he said, giving an answer while avoiding it just the same. “You must’ve heard how you kids gossiped about us while you were in school.”

“The school nurse?!” I said, practically shouting the words at him. “You were dating Kuroyama-sensei behind my back?”

I blushed under the gaze of his calculating look. I’d said too much.

“I wouldn’t say ‘behind your back’.” He leaned on the railing, bringing us slightly closer. It creaked under his weight, heedless of his too-thin appearance. “Despite the rumors, we didn’t start dating until a year, maybe two years after you graduated. I was more or less a permanent fixture in her life, and she was persistent.”

It was easy enough to imagine: his nonchalant, go-with-the-flow personality would’ve eventually relented under pressure from the strong-willed nurse. They should have made the perfect match, complimenting each other’s defects.

“So … ⸺ what went wrong?” There wasn’t any malice in my voice, but it was still a mean question to ask.

An ancient sigh drug itself out of his core, like a jack-in-the-box struggling to make its ten-thousandth appearance.

“Fifteen years with no kids,” he said in a practiced way, having tread this story many times. “It was fine at first, but her parents kept putting more and more pressure on her, and I wouldn’t play along.” He sighed again. “I don’t know if it was their idea or hers, but I just came home one day and she was … gone. Packed all her things, left me nothing to remember her, save some memories and the divorce papers. Tied them all up with a little note telling that she ‘needed to move on to the next stage of her life’, whatever that meant.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, struggling to decide if I meant it or not.

“No need to be,” he assured me. “It happened a few years back ⸺ it’s all in the past.” He tried to smile again, that cold thing that couldn’t touch his eyes or even the barest corners of his lips. “Of all my regrets, she wasn’t one of them.”

I clutched his arm tighter, pulling it close against my chest. It was the kind of move a lovestruck highschool student would use on her handsome teacher, in an attempt to engender some inappropriate eros ⸺ though those days were long behind us both. I was thirty-seven now, today, and he was facing the last days of his forties. The time for romantic folly had passed.

Being with him, feeling the warmth of his body through his rain-slick coat, overwhelmed me with memories. The scent of his clothes was still true to my smushed-together mess of fantasies and memories, the hint of cigarette smoke that he clearly tried to hide. This small sense reminded me of everything I loved about him, a condensation of his ideals and character and my wild libido: a flawed man who did his best to help others avoid the pits he had already fallen into, a charitable and disreputable knight ⸺ the kind of darkhorse that would never receive the true affection of the story’s heroine, so you had to love him yourself out of admiration and pity.

If I had to enumerate the regrets of my own life, I could easily point to three major events: “turning points” where things had descended slowly into the muck I wallowed in now, instead of rising to the heights of success and family that my parents had wished for me ⸺ had demanded of me.

The first: slumming my way through highschool without ever confessing my love to the most beautiful man I had ever, or would ever, see: Courtney Desjardins, the foreigner who filled three years of my life as our class’s English teacher.

The second: caving to the demands of my parents to study something “practical” like business finance, arcing my college life off into a school of ruthless sharks with no room for anything more than a casual relationship or bitter rivalry.

The third: taking the job at UniCo Limited, a black company that worked me to the bone with nothing to show for it but a tiny apartment I could never find a break to go home to, and a tremendous amount of wrist pain.

If life is a series of ripples on the surface of the water, a person-sized pebble of a disturbance that extends outward along the vast pond of existence, then perhaps solving the first regret would have taken all the others along with it. I had thought about this many times: what if I had said something? What if he had said yes ⸺ even a tentative thing, like a “when you’re eighteen” noncommittal dismissal. Where would I be now? Could I have made him see me as a woman ⸺ made him love me, made him take me away on his jet-black steed?

But I couldn’t, and I hadn’t, and now here we were. Two people at the end of everything.

When I looked up again, his eyes were cast out over the water, perhaps out of deference to my tears.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said with the finality of a man who had already decided. “Live out another day. Another week.”

I wanted to laugh. “You didn’t have to stop me.” I chewed my lip. “You don’t have to stop me now. It’d be like ⸺”

“... A lovers suicide?”

“Something like that. Maybe.” My cheeks burned red.

“You always did like that style of cliche, Yoru. I remember how your eyes lit up when we started the unit on Romeo & Juliet. You had this look on your face like you’d finally gotten a pony for your birthday.”

A giggle escaped my lips, despite the melancholy. “I’ve never understood any of your ‘sayings’, Sensei. They’re all too obscure.” I smiled, a genuine thing that reached all the way to the tips of my ears. “And … aren’t you being a little too brash, using my given name?”

He grinned back. “Would you prefer ‘Hoshino-san’?”

“No,” I said, my chest gently warming. “It reminds me too much of you scolding me in class.”

“With good reason,” he continued. “You’d space out while staring at the chalkboard, and I’d have to drag you back to reality.”

“Is that what you thought I was doing?” Mischievousness danced on my lips.

He shrugged. “What else would it be? Daydreaming about boys or something? That athletic kid at the front of the room … ah, Kenichi maybe?”

I shook my head. “It saddens me to learn that even you can’t understand the heart of a maiden, Sensei.”

It was there for just a fraction of a second ⸺ a pain I couldn’t understand, reflected in the grimace of his beautiful mouth.

It was gone as quickly as it had appeared, replaced with his implacable smile. “A maiden? Surely you mean a spinstress, at your old age.”

It seemed the light only came to his eyes when he teased me. I longed for it.

“Maybe not a maiden ⸺ maybe just the dreams of one, I suppose.”

We both stared down at the deep waters below; they had risen quite far now, lapping at the bars beneath our feet. The bridge creaked in protest, bolted supports buckling under stress it was no longer fit to endure.

He lifted his gaze and smiled again at me, a thousand-watt light to split the darkness of the stormy night that had fallen around us. “Let’s stay dreaming for just one more day, alright?”

I could tell I was pouting like a petulant child, but I couldn’t stop myself. “You’d still say something like that to me, even though you came here yourself for the same purpose?”

“I did,” he admitted readily, “but seeing you has changed my mind. I’d hate to set a bad example for one of my students.”

I could accept that. I needed an end, wanted an end ⸺ but I could push it off for a day, a week, for as long as I could cling to his arm. After all, it had been what I always wanted.

“Now, why don’t we ⸺”

Metal screamed, sheering under the pressure of the raging river. The iron floor gave way, and before I could really understand what was happening, I was ripped out into that inky darkness.

Water pushed me down, down, down, chilling me to the bone, sweeping me along. I knew that this would be it, that there would be no escaping that icy grip. Its clawed hands held me firmly, choking my lungs until they burned: I gasped, bitter cold running into my throat, seizing my chest.

It was terrifying, but I felt detached from it, no longer part of the world: it was though I had stepped off stage to watch the performance of the dying woman in front of me. Distantly, I could feel his arms around me, holding me tightly, allowing me one final embrace. It felt better than I could have ever imagined, a strength that squeezed me tight like I was the most precious thing in the world, that he couldn’t bear to lose ⸺ I had finally become what I wanted to be: the sacred object of his attention.

Ah, but I had never called him by his name … maybe he would’ve liked that. My Romeo.

I smiled.

I would have my lovers suicide after all.