Chapter 507 | Verse Two

Chapter 507: 507 | Verse Two

Kumiko had gotten exactly one line into the forest spirit song when the wall started knocking.

Thunk.

She was sitting on the floor of the sewing room in Unit 403 with the flight case open in front of her like a treasure chest, the microphone nested inside in grey foam, and her phone propped against a spool of pink thread with the lyrics she didn’t need pulled up anyway. Her voice wobbled. The wall went thunk again, and then again, in a rhythm Kumiko knew better than any song.

"Oh no," she said out loud, to the microphone.

Then she sang louder, because that was what she always did. Page twelve of the notebook, Wall Thinness: Coping Strategies, item one: be louder than the wall. She sang the first verse at a volume usually reserved for karaoke and fire drills, and she got all the way to the lantern before she noticed something strange.

It didn’t hurt.

She stopped singing. She sat very still on the floor and checked, the way she checked a seam after a long run on the machine, running her thumb along it to feel for the place where the thread had pulled. Chloe-chan was next door. Jordan-kun was next door. Chloe-chan was making the noise she made when she stopped being a spreadsheet, and the headboard was making the noise it made when Jordan-kun stopped being a gentleman, and Kumiko was in here alone with a microphone.

The seam held.

There was a little ache, maybe, like a bruise you pressed on purpose. But underneath it was something warm and stupid that felt almost like pride. Good, she thought, before she could stop herself. She needed it. She’s been holding her back weird since Friday.

Kumiko put both hands over her face and laughed into them.

The wall went quiet a few minutes later. She sang on into the second verse, softer, just to keep her voice warm, and then she opened her laptop because it was 10:58 and Dr. Nakamura had said yes.

She had emailed at 10:02. I know it’s late and I know Tuesday isn’t my day but I have a dumpling situation. Dr. Nakamura had written back I have a cancellation at 11. Bring the dumpling. Kumiko had brought the notebook instead, because the dumpling was at the Ritz.

Dr. Nakamura’s face appeared in a little square, grey cardigan, the plant behind her that Kumiko had once spent a whole session trying to identify.

"Kumiko. You look awake."

"I am extremely awake. I’m awake in a way that’s medically interesting." Kumiko took a breath. "Okay. Numbered list. One. I gave Alexis-chan the dumpling pillow. On Sunday. Because guests get the dumpling, that’s international law. Two. On Monday morning I said ’she slept on the dumpling’ at breakfast, and Chloe-chan put the spatula down very carefully, like it might break, and didn’t say anything. Chloe-chan not saying anything is the loudest thing in the building. Three." She stopped.

"Three?"

"Three is that Chloe-chan slept over in November. And I gave her the regular pillow." Kumiko looked at the notebook on her knee. "I didn’t even think about it. Alexis-chan looked sad, so I gave her the dumpling in four seconds. Chloe-chan didn’t look sad. Chloe-chan never looks sad. She looked like a girl who would fold it." Her voice went thin. "So the person I love most got the regular pillow, and I just give everything to whoever looks saddest, and then everybody has to carry all of me. Am I a lot? Is that what I am? Am I just a lot?"

Dr. Nakamura didn’t answer right away. She never did. She let things sit on the table between them like a cup of tea cooling.

"Does Chloe know why she got the regular pillow?"

"No. I only just knew."

"Then she’s been guessing. People who never let themselves look sad tend to guess the worst version." Dr. Nakamura leaned closer to her camera. "You’re not a lot, Kumiko. You’re enough for the size of your heart. The size is just bigger than the room usually expects. That isn’t something to fix. It might be something to tell Chloe, though. In words. Not in pillows."

Kumiko wrote IN WORDS NOT IN PILLOWS on the page in capitals and underlined it, and then underlined it again, the way Chloe-chan did.

At 11:51 she carried the flight case into the bathroom.

The tiles really did make everything sound like a concert hall. She set the microphone up on its stand on the closed toilet lid, in the little silver shock mount that looked like a spiderweb, and sat on the edge of the tub with her knees together. Jordan-kun had said eBay. Kumiko had looked it up afterward, a 1958 tube condenser, and found exactly one for sale in the whole world, in Germany, for a number with too many zeros. Then she had decided Jordan-kun was a genius at eBay, because that was the nicest version, and she was allowed to pick the nicest version.

Take one, her voice cracked on the second line. Take two, she cried. Take four, she cried and then laughed at herself for crying, and the laugh was the only good part. Take seven, the upstairs neighbor flushed.

Take eleven was at 2:38.

She didn’t sing it to the microphone. She sang it to a girl in a hotel bed that was too big, with her hair still damp and a frayed black cuff at her wrist, a girl who had never once been sung to by somebody who didn’t want something back. The verse was about the forest spirit staying awake so the child didn’t have to. Kumiko didn’t know if that was what the words meant, exactly. That was what they meant tonight.

She finished at 2:40. She listened to it once, with her eyes closed, and didn’t hate it.

2:41. Send.

Kumiko: verse two!!! for sleeping. you don’t have to listen. (you should listen) ????

Read.

Then nothing. She watched the word sit there for a minute. Two. Five. She tied tomorrow’s ribbons on in the dark while she waited, because if she turned the lamp back on she would start sewing something, and she did it by feel and got them a little wrong.

2:50. A heart.

2:50. That was a typo.

Kumiko lay down on the bathroom floor on the bath mat and held the phone against her chest and made a sound that was not words in any language.

Then she got up and turned on the laminator.

It took four minutes to warm up, which was enough time to find the pink tote with the cartoon cat and put in a toothbrush, a pair of leggings, a hair tie, and two strawberry Pocky packs, because Alexis-chan had eaten three sticks and said it didn’t count. On the back of a pattern envelope, in her best capitals, she wrote YOU ARE ALLOWED TO EAT BREAKFAST, then fed it through. The laminator hummed and pushed the card out the other side warm, like toast.

She put it in the tote on top.

Then she opened the pink notebook to the back, where she kept the page she copied the rules onto from Chloe-chan’s document, all nineteen of them with Chloe-chan’s footnotes in tiny letters underneath. Under nineteen, in pencil, so it could be erased if it wasn’t allowed, she wrote:

20. (proposed) Nobody gets left in a hotel alone.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she went over it in pen.

Alarm: 7:00.