Chapter 184: The Island

Chapter 184: Chapter 184: The Island

The ferry to the lighthouse island left the harbour at nine in the morning. By ten, Haruki had filled four pages of the pocket notebook, and Yui had fallen asleep against his shoulder on the wooden bench at the stern.

It was the sixth day. They had spent the first five walking the city, drawing crosses and eating too much rye bread. He had spent three mornings on the children’s floor with Eetu, who had now read eleven pages of the Finnish lighthouse novel by himself and corrected every monster Haruki drew. Yui had shown him everything: the market and the cathedral, the café with the bench, the swans, and the library’s rooftop terrace, where students sat in the white night light reading until midnight.

The island had been Eetu’s idea.

"Majakka," the boy had said on the fifth morning, stabbing his finger at a picture in his reading book of a small red-and-white lighthouse on a rocky island in the sea. "Se on oikea. Mene sinne."

"He says it’s real," Yui had translated. "He says you should go there."

So they had gone.

The archipelago spread out around the ferry in every direction: hundreds of small grey granite islands, some bare, some with a few pine trees, some with a single red summer cottage and a wooden jetty. The sea was very flat and very blue under a high, pale sky. Gulls followed the boat. An old woman on the bench opposite was knitting and didn’t look up once in an hour.

Haruki drew all of it. He drew the islands, the gulls, the knitting woman’s hands, and the wake spreading out behind the stern. He drew Yui asleep against his shoulder with her hair blowing across her face. He didn’t wake her, because she hadn’t slept properly in six days. He had worked out, somewhere around the fourth morning, that she had been staying up after he fell asleep to finish the research notes she’d put aside so she could walk the city with him.

At 10:40, the lighthouse appeared.

It stood on a low, rocky island at the edge of the archipelago, where the islands ran out and the open sea began. It was red and white, taller than he’d expected, with a small keeper’s cottage beside it painted the same red. A wooden jetty ran out into the water, and a flagpole flew a white flag with a blue cross.

Yui woke as the ferry slowed. She looked at the lighthouse over the rail for a long moment, still half asleep.

"It looks like Tsubasa-kun drew it," she said.

It did. He had been thinking the same thing for five minutes.

The keeper’s cottage was a small museum now, run by a retired couple who lived on the island through the summer. The keeper had been the last on the island, and had left in the 1980s when the light became automatic. His wife showed them the tiny kitchen, the logbooks, and the spiral stairs up to the lamp. There were eighty-seven steps. Yui counted them out loud all the way up, the way Haruki counted the stairs to Hikari.

At the top, the lamp room was round and glass-walled, with the great lens in the centre. Beyond it, in every direction, lay the open sea, and far behind them the scattered grey islands and the faint line of the city.

Yui stood at the glass and looked out at the water for a long time.

"Glass Harbor," she said quietly. "Sakaki-kun’s lighthouse. The keeper who climbs the stairs every night and nobody notices." She touched the glass with one finger. "Kaho-san’s lantern-maker. Minami-kun’s boy on the hill. Tsubasa-kun’s lighthouse on the horizon, two Chapters early." She turned to look at him. "Why is it always lighthouses? Everyone you know draws lighthouses."

He thought about it.

"Because the light’s for someone who isn’t there yet," he said slowly. "You keep it on for somebody you can’t see, who might never come. You do it anyway, every night." He looked out at the empty sea. "Everyone I know has been waiting for someone they couldn’t see."

Yui didn’t say anything for a long time.

"Me too," she said finally. "For fourteen years. On the stairs."

He opened the pocket notebook to the Helsinki page and drew the lamp room: the lens, the glass walls, and the sea beyond, with a girl standing at the window with one finger on the glass.

He made a third cross.

"Three," Yui said.

They took the last ferry back at six, and the evening light turned the whole archipelago gold. They sat at the stern again, and this time neither of them slept.

At 7:20, Haruki’s phone buzzed. It was a message from Minase. It was 1:20 in the morning in Mitaka, which meant she was still at her desk by the window, as she always was.

It had two attachments.

The first was an image, a single key frame from episode one. It showed the stone arch at the top of the hill at dawn, with the valley spread out below in soft pencil tones, barely coloured. The Gate stood against a sky just beginning to go pale, as though it had been waiting there for a thousand years for someone to walk through it. The lines were patient, precise, and very slightly crooked in one place, at the left edge of the arch, where a hand had trembled and the artist had chosen to leave it.

Minase’s message said only: Ichinose drew the Gate. Her first key frame. She cried when she finished it and asked me to send it to you before anyone else.

The second attachment was a sound file, three minutes and forty seconds long.

Chen Wei recorded the final theme yesterday in Shanghai, with a real string section, Minase had written. Twenty-four players. He says it’s done. I’ve listened to it eleven times.

Haruki didn’t play it on the ferry. He waited until they were back in the city, on the bench by the canal, with the swans on the water and the sky still bright at ten o’clock. He gave Yui one side of his earphones and kept the other.

It began with a single violin note, held almost below hearing. Then another joined it, and another, until twenty-four strings were humming together softly, the sound of threads. A piano came in, walking uphill. At one minute and twelve seconds, everything stopped. There were twelve seconds of nothing. Then the music came back in a different key, and the silence wasn’t a gap anymore. It was a rest.

Yui listened with her eyes closed and didn’t move once.

When it ended, she took out the earphone and sat very still on the bench, holding it in her hand.

"That’s the white," she said. "Isn’t it."

"That’s the white."

She didn’t say anything else for a long time.

His phone buzzed once more. It was Minase again.

One more thing. The broadcaster confirmed the premiere date this afternoon.

Saturday, April 12th. Six o’clock.

Tachibana-san says to tell the girl in Helsinki first. He says it’s number five on a list he isn’t supposed to know about.

Haruki read it twice. Then he held the phone out to Yui.

She read it in the bright evening light, and he watched her face as she did the arithmetic. She did it faster than he did. She always had.

"April twelfth," she said slowly. "My fieldwork in Tokyo ends on March thirty-first."

"Yes."

"Twelve days after I’m supposed to fly back to Helsinki."

Haruki didn’t say anything. He had known this might happen since the Sunday in February when he read five lines to her from a crate. He had asked for one date, and he had never known what it would be.

"You don’t have to—" he began.

"Stop," Yui said.

He stopped.

"Number four," she said. She was still holding the phone, looking at the date. "You asked me to tell you what I need, every time, even when I think it’ll cost you something." She looked up at him. "I need to be there. On the twelfth of April. In the seat next to you. Not in Helsinki watching a recording on a laptop."

"Your fieldwork—"

"Ends on the thirty-first," Yui said. "And my flight’s on the first. And I’ve got twelve days of data to write up for Halonen-sensei, who’s been waiting eleven years for a student who does something she hadn’t thought of first." She took a breath. "I’m telling you now, while it’s happening, the way number one says. I don’t know how to fix it yet."

He looked at her for a long moment on the bench by the canal. The swans were drifting on the bright water, and a sea serpent drawn by an eight-year-old was folded in the bag between them.

"Then we’ll find out together," he said. "Not tonight."

"Not tonight," Yui agreed. She gave him back the phone and put the earphone in again. "Play it once more. The white. I want to hear it on this bench before I have to think about anything."

He played it again. At one minute and twelve seconds, everything stopped, and for twelve seconds on a bench in Helsinki, neither of them had to think about anything at all.

[Helsinki map: Crosses 3.]

[Studio Hikari — Episode 1 key frame (the Gate): Ichinose Mao. Theme: Recorded (Chen Wei, 24 strings).]

[Premiere: Saturday, April 12th, 18:00. Host’s need #5: "In the seat next to me." Conflict: Yui’s return to Helsinki (April 1st).]