41

“I am home.”

I stood just behind the doormat to greet U‘s return, rather than waiting in the closet where I had been held captive. Not because I didn’t have the time to get back in or replace the door. I could have done that with time to spare.

There was just no point in keeping up the kidnapping and confinement soap opera anymore. There was nothing left of it.

I might’ve wanted to go along with a little elementary schooler’s fake crime… But U wasn’t the one holding me captive. It was her parents and their rules. Their stupid rules. I wasn’t going to play along with that nonsense. I didn’t have time to waste being played around with by undeserving parents in a stranger’s house.

Our little kidnapping soap opera was over.

But I couldn’t leave the house without telling U. Pretending to be her captive or sneaking out while she was at school would just sink me to the level of her parents. I’d be deceiving her in the exact same way they were. So instead, I chose something different. Maybe I was a little too hunched over to be thought of as dignified, but I looked her square in the face and greeted her with, “Welcome home.”

“…”

When U saw me, the person who should’ve been her captive, standing there before her, she seemed to understand the situation right away. She didn’t ask any questions or make any comments.

U was very young, and her kidnapping attempt was very clumsy and half-baked, but she was a very smart girl given her status as a fourth-year elementary schooler. Smart enough not to need an explanation when she saw me standing there.

Not to say that it didn’t hurt her. How should I describe it? She looked like a kid who was mocked and derided for believing in Santa Claus, finding out he wasn’t real in the worst way possible.

I thought that I was taking care not to hurt U‘s feelings, to keep her pride intact, but ultimately I had still hurt her.

But that was probably unavoidable. I don’t think it could have ended any other way.

It would’ve been really cool if I could’ve swooped in to save U from her warped upbringing and parental abuse. It would’ve been amazing if I could turn U back into a normal person. But that wasn’t something an aspiring author could pull off… I didn’t have any specialized knowledge, and didn’t know anything about child counseling. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even give the poor girl a welcome home hug because I was afraid that I would hurt her even more by pressing on the wounds under her clothes.

I was no savior or hero. I was just an ordinary guy.

All I could do was show U the truth, just as it was.

“…” U wordlessly took off her shoes and walked into the house. The very moment her sock touched the doormat, she wavered one way, then the other, then fell towards me. She was like one of the students who would collapse from anemia during a principal’s long, rambling speech. She fell over, grabbing onto my body.

“I’m so tired,” I heard U mumble softly. Or maybe that was just my imagination. Either way, by the time I could put my arms around her small body, she had lost consciousness, falling into a kind of sleep.

She had stretched herself so very, very, very far. She was like a taut rubber band. Maybe her failure to imprison me had offered her just the slightest relief from that “restrictive use” notebook. Maybe she finally felt a little better.

I gently picked U up in my arms. She still had her backpack on, yet she felt so impossibly light. The same girl who had imprisoned me for six days was no heavier than a random case of luggage that I could have held in one hand… But she wasn’t luggage. She was a person.

She was still a human. A fact that the two dead individuals one floor above us had forgotten.

I walked towards the living room, cradling U in my arms. Opening the master bedroom door had filled the entire second floor with the stench of death, so it was no longer a restful place.

I laid U down on the living room sofa, leaving her backpack on the floor. U‘s body had no strength left. She was like a toy whose batteries had drained, so she couldn’t move, but still looked the part of an elementary schooler. But that little girl’s life had been ruined so thoroughly that it probably couldn’t be ruined any further. It had lost all structure to the point that it couldn’t be rebuilt.

I know some people will say that there is no such thing as irreversible damage, that there are countless others who have thrived despite similar circumstances. But would that apply to U? Could she just get her life back on track? Could she return to being a truly normal person?

I didn’t think so.

Sure, some people have come out of the same environment and done well. But not everyone. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that for the majority of people, falling off the right path is something that you don’t come back from.

Now, what I think doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Sure, anyone could become normal again. People can grow, change, and adapt if they so choose.

But that would take tremendous effort and practically endless time… which I didn’t have to offer. I was too busy with my own life to make those sacrifices for U.

One of the lines in the “restrictive use” notebook demanded, [ Always show kindness, even to strangers. ] But I couldn’t do that. I was better off leaving U there in the house and going my own way.

I couldn’t be expected to be involved in U‘s life, to become someone important to her. Not even God could possibly demand that from me. Surely I wasn’t put there out of some expectation to do something. I was just an ordinary guy, a college student, an aspiring author…

“…”

I don’t know how long it had been, but U’s eyelids flitted up. Her body was completely still, so it wasn’t that she had woken up, or even really opened her eyes. Her eyes were so hollow. Normally, you’d say she looked like a dead fish, but she honestly looked like a dead person.

I told U it’d be better to go back to sleep. She didn’t respond. I didn’t even know if she really heard me. She looked like she would drop off at any moment, but her eyes stayed open. She really did look dead. Not just in her eyes, but her whole body.

“What can…” I started saying, fumbling around. I didn’t know if she could hear me, but I asked anyway. “Is there anything I can do? Do you want anything?” I can’t really say it was altruistic of me. I just kinda felt like I had to say something in front of her, to prove my own goodness in a way. But I kept repeating my questions in an odd sort of fashion. If I was truly being selfish, just once would have covered it, but maybe it was my nervous, cautious self coming out in that kind of situation, as I kept asking if there was anything she wanted, if there was anything I could do.

“…Story.”

U finally responded.

“Tell me a story. Please. Then… I can sleep.”

U‘s voice was so faint and feeble that I could hardly call her sentences a reply. But she was really speaking.

“Mommy and Daddy… used to do it all the time, a long time ago. They’d sit next to me, and tell me stories… until I fell asleep.”

So there was a time before. A time when the same parents who would push unreasonable demands onto a little girl would sit beside their daughter and tell bedtime stories.

So… where did it all go wrong?

There was a time in that house where Momotarou, Cinderella, or Snow White would be read out loud by the bed in that immaculately clean second floor bedroom, or maybe even in the bed where two corpses now lay together. But that would never happen again. The parents who read those stories were dead, and the only daughter who was ever told them was, while alive, almost ready to join them.

…But then I found it.

The one thing I could do. The one thing that even I, no, only I could do. Of course. It was precisely I, the college student and aspiring author, who could do something for U in that moment.

I finally found it.

I finally found that one, singular thing.

And if anyone’s life was saved by that discovery, I think it was mine, first and foremost.