Chapter 182: Arrivals

Chapter 182: Chapter 182: Arrivals

At Helsinki-Vantaa airport, at 3:40 on a July afternoon, the arrivals hall had a small crowd waiting behind a metal barrier. At the very front stood a girl in a thin summer cardigan, holding a sheet of paper with a crooked sea serpent drawn on it.

Haruki saw her before she saw him.

He had been walking through the long, pale corridor from the gate with his bag over his shoulder for ten minutes. He had spent eleven hours on a plane, sleeping for none of them, and his legs didn’t feel like his own. The corridor had tall windows along one side. Through them he could see pine trees and a sky that was very high and very blue, and brighter than any sky he remembered in either life.

Then the doors slid open, and there she was.

Yui was standing right at the barrier, with her hair tied back and her face tired and bright at once. She held the sheet of paper up in both hands, the way people hold a name sign for a stranger. It wasn’t a name. It was a sea serpent with its teeth pointing backwards, drawn in pencil, with HELSINKI written across the top in large, uneven capitals.

He knew who had drawn it before he was close enough to see.

"Kenji sent it," Yui said, before he could say anything. Her voice was unsteady. "By post, through Tsubasa-kun. He said I had to hold it up at the airport, so you’d know you’d arrived at the right end of the sea serpent."

Haruki stopped on the other side of the barrier.

For ten months, he had heard her voice every Sunday at seven, and sometimes on Wednesdays and Thursdays when neither of them could help it. He had read her messages sitting on a crate in front of his desk. He had drawn her a map with eleven crosses and watched her walk through a security gate at Narita without looking back until she was past the X-ray machine.

He hadn’t seen her face since the second of September.

She had cut her hair. It was shorter, just above her shoulders. There was a new thin silver band on her right wrist he’d never seen, and she was a little thinner. She was standing very straight, the way she used to stand in the front row at school before an exam.

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t.

Yui lowered the sea serpent.

"You’re taller," she said.

"I’m not."

"You are. I checked." She was crying now, quite openly, in the middle of the arrivals hall, with a Finnish family waiting beside her for someone else. "I’ll check the doorframe in January to prove it."

He walked around the end of the barrier. She dropped the sea serpent, and neither of them noticed it fall.

It was light until almost eleven that night.

She had warned him on the phone, many times, and he had thought he understood. He didn’t, not until they were walking along the harbour at ten in the evening in bright, soft, golden light. It looked like five in the afternoon in Tokyo in April, with people still sitting outside cafés and children still playing on the rocks by the water. The sun hung low over the sea as though it had forgotten how to finish setting.

"It doesn’t get dark," Yui said. "Not really. Not until August. In June, it doesn’t get dark at all." She had her arm through his and was walking slowly, the way she never walked in Tokyo. "The first week I was here, I couldn’t sleep. I thought something was wrong with the sky."

"And in December?"

"Dark at three in the afternoon," Yui said. "I cried the first time. Then my supervisor took me to a sauna and made me jump in the sea through a hole in the ice." She laughed. "I screamed so loudly a man on the shore dropped his fish."

He laughed too. It surprised him how easily it came.

They walked past a market square with wooden stalls selling berries and fish, and past a white cathedral on a hill above steps that seemed to go on forever. They crossed a small bridge over a canal where two swans were asleep with their heads under their wings in the bright evening light.

She showed him the university library, closed for the night. Through the tall windows he could see one whole floor of children’s books in eleven languages. She showed him the café where she ate lunch every day, and the bench outside it where she sat on Sundays at one, Helsinki time, holding her phone.

"This is where I talk to you," she said. "Every Sunday. On this bench."

He looked at it. It was an ordinary wooden bench outside an ordinary café by a canal, with a view of the swans.

He took Yui’s pocket notebook out of his bag. He’d brought it on purpose. In the back were the Koenji map’s footnote and a list of five needs.

He turned to a clean page and drew a small, quick sketch of the bench, the canal, and the two sleeping swans. In the corner, he made a small pencil cross.

"One," he said.

Yui looked at the cross for a long moment.

"You’re really going to do it," she said. "A map of Helsinki."

"You asked. Number four on your list."

"I know I asked." Her voice was unsteady again. "I didn’t think you’d start on the first night."

"There will be more than you think," Haruki said. "I need to start early."

Her room was on the fourth floor of a student building on the edge of a park, with a lift that didn’t work. It was small, with a narrow bed, a desk by the window, and the radiator she still didn’t know how to turn off, although it was July and it wasn’t on. Every surface was covered in paper: research notes, children’s drawings from her placement school, and printouts of articles in Finnish and English.

On the wall above her desk, pinned with four drawing pins, was the map of Koenji.

He stopped in the doorway.

It had twelve crosses, eleven in his handwriting and one in hers, far out at the eastern edge. Narita. Gate 23. At the bottom was the footnote. There will be more than you think.

Beside it, pinned just as carefully, was a scrap of lined paper yellowed at the edges, in a seven-year-old’s oversized handwriting.

When I grow up I will teach every child in the world to read. Even the ones who hate books.

"You brought it," he said.

"I took it out of the box before I left," Yui said. "Mum didn’t notice. I wanted it where I’d see it every morning." She stood beside him in the doorway, looking at the wall. "I thought, if I’m going to keep my own promise, I should be able to read it."

He didn’t say anything. He stood looking at the two pieces of paper side by side on the wall of a small room in Helsinki: a map of a neighbourhood with twelve crosses, and a promise a girl had made at seven and kept at the bottom of a box for thirteen years.

Outside the window, at eleven at night, the sky was still light.

They talked until two in the morning, sitting on the narrow bed with their backs against the wall beneath the map, while the sky outside went from gold to grey-blue and back toward gold without ever quite becoming night.

At some point, she told him about December.

"Number one," she said. "On your list. Tell me when things are hard, while they’re happening." She was looking at her hands. "I didn’t. In December. When it was dark at three and my supervisor was away for a month and I didn’t know anyone. I sat on that bench every Sunday and talked to you for two hours and told you about the library." She was quiet for a moment. "I cried every Sunday night after we hung up. For four weeks."

He didn’t say anything. He put his hand over hers on the thin blanket.

"I’m telling you now," Yui said. "Late. I’m sorry."

"It still counts," he said. "Late still counts."

She leaned her head against his shoulder.

"Your turn," she said. "Something hard. That you didn’t tell me while it was happening."

He thought about it for a long time. Then he told her about a man in a grey coat who had stood at the shelf in Koenji for ten minutes in June. He had signed a name in red ink and left exact change in an envelope, and asked a seventeen-year-old whether a card about a bus stop was still up.

"I didn’t tell you," he said, "because I didn’t know what I felt. I still don’t."

Yui didn’t answer for a long time.

"That’s all right," she said finally. "You don’t have to know what you feel to tell me. That’s what number one means." She was quiet for a moment. "Did you pin the card?"

"Yes."

"Good," Yui said, and closed her eyes against his shoulder.

[Location: Helsinki, Finland. Duration: 10 days.]

[Map of Helsinki: Started. Crosses: 1 (bench, canal, swans).]

[Kobayashi Yui — Hair: Shorter. Wrist: New silver band (unexplained). Promise (age 7): Pinned above desk.]