Life at the Light House was monotonous. After the rains set in, mold began to grow down in the kitchen and dining room: a lovely shade of green on a leftover roll and a snow-white variety on the apple pie one of the nurses had baked three days before. The sight of a garbage pail full of this decay aroused my cruel streak again, and I found myself imagining how Rie would scream if I sealed her inside. She would cry until she was covered with tears and sweat and snot; then a coating of mold, like colorful fuzz, would spread over her silky little thighs. Whenever I saw the pail, I imagined the mold on Rie's thighs.
One Sunday afternoon, I was in the playroom. Three of the youngest children, still too young for kindergarten, were playing together in a sea of toys. Rie was among them.
An early typhoon had passed to the west. The rain had stopped for the moment, and I was sitting near the window, listening to the wind.
A fight broke out over one of the toys, and Rie began to cry. I went over to pick her up. As she sobbed, she wriggled her fingers between the buttons on my blouse, searching for the comfort of a breast.
"You can't go outside to play," I told the other children. "The wind would blow you away." Then I took Rie to my room.
Reiko had gone to see her parents at the hospital and wouldn't be back for hours. Rie cheered up almost immediately and began to paw at the things Reiko had piled under her desk-cassette tapes for practicing English conversation, pennants she had collected on school trips, a flashlight with dead batteries. As I watched her, I wondered whether she had forgotten that I had shut her up in the urn and let her cry.
The wind shook the trees around the Light House. The roar seemed to wash over the building, amplified by the dense mass of leaves.
Under the desk, Rie was sorting through her discoveries, bringing each object to her mouth before moving on to the next. Her legs were stuck fast to the floor. Little children are like a different species, and I watched Rie the way another person might watch a rare specimen in a zoo. I wanted to pet her, to spoil her, but I didn't know how to do it.
I noticed a box wrapped in white paper that was peeking out of the open drawer of my desk. In it was a cream puff I had brought home four or five days earlier.
A fine rain had been falling on that day, too. The line of poplar trees around the sports center was veiled in mist. As I walked, I thought about the dives that Jun had been practicing and their degrees of difficulty. The soccer field and baseball diamond were deserted and silent, the only sound coming from the cars on the road beyond the trees.
A new pastry shop had just opened outside the center. The building was made entirely of glass, more like a greenhouse than a shop, and every detail of the kitchen-the knobs on the oven, the frosting bags, the knives and spatulas-was clearly visible. Large bouquets of flowers lined the doorway to celebrate the opening.
I'm not sure why I went in. I hadn't been particularly hungry. But the afternoon was dark and gray, and the rain hung over everything like a thick cloud of smoke. The shop, by contrast, was bright and cheerful, reminding me of the glittering diving pool; it was almost too bright. There were no other customers, and the display case was nearly empty. Like everything else in the shop, it was immaculate.
The cakes were like exquisite lacework. I bent over to examine them while a young woman in a frilly apron waited to take my order. I pointed at the last three cream puffs, lined up modestly in one corner of the case.
"I'd like those," I said.
The frilly young woman carefully transferred the cream puffs to a box, wrapped it in paper, affixed the shop seal, and then tied the whole thing with ribbon.
Carrying the cake box along with my schoolbag was somewhat difficult, and the safety of my new package obsessed me until I reached home. I ate one cream puff and gave one to Reiko, who, after thanking me with her usual exaggerated politeness, retreated to the top bunk to devour it. The third one I left in the box, which I put in the bottom drawer of the desk. Every time I opened the drawer, the white box seemed out of place, there among the ruler, the stapler, and a stack of photocopies; but I had almost forgotten about the cream puff inside.
I carefully removed the box from the drawer, as if I were handling something fragile. I expected it to be heavier, yet the box was as light as… a cream puff. I also expected to find a mass of brightly colored mold inside; however, the pastry looked almost as it had in the store-puffy and golden.
"Rie, come here. I have a treat for you."
She turned to look, and when she realized what was in the box, she came running happily to jump into my lap.
It wasn't until I cut the cream puff in half that I realized that the sweet smell of eggs and sugar and milk had been replaced by an acrid stench, like that of an unripe grapefruit. As Rie's lips sank into the cream, the smell filled the room. It nearly made me sick, but Rie devoured the pastry. Her eagerness was almost painfully sweet to see.
"Is it good?" I asked, but the wind drowned out the question.
I put the uneaten half of the cream puff back in the box and took it down to the garbage pail in the kitchen.
The wind continued to blow as the night wore on. The heat and humidity made sleep difficult. Every time I started to doze off, the sweltering air would drag me back from my dreams. Reiko had returned from visiting her parents, eaten a few pieces of chocolate, and gone to sleep without even brushing her teeth. As I listened to her sugary breathing, I could feel any chance of sleep slipping away.
I was about to check the clock to see how much time had passed when I suddenly heard footsteps in the hall. A door opened somewhere and then closed again, and I could hear anxious whispering. I kicked off my damp quilt and unfastened another button on my pajamas. Staring at the slats of the bed above me, I tried to make out what the voices were saying. I was wide awake now, my nerves jangling.
After a few minutes, I could distinguish my mother's voice over the rest. The others were muffled and subdued, but she sounded as agitated and sharp and somehow self-satisfied as ever. Even Reiko was roused from her deep sleep and leaned over to look down at me.
"What's happening?" she said.
I got out of bed, ignoring her question. My body felt strangely stiff, and I realized that I was exhausted from so many hours of trying to get to sleep. I opened the door and stood for a moment with my eyes closed, waiting to adjust to the light.
"Aya!" my mother called, pressing her hand to the front of her worn nightgown. "Rie's sick. She has a fever and terrible diarrhea, and she's been vomiting all night. Her lips are dry, and she has a strange rash. I don't know what's wrong with her. I wanted to call an ambulance, but your father said we should get that Dr. Nishizaki, the one with the clinic near the station. He says Nishizaki's a member of the church, so God will look after her. They're calling him now, but it's terrible, and in the middle of the night-all we can do is pray. Oh, Aya!"
The words came spilling out in one breath. The night nurse and the other employees who lived at the Light House stood around her, their faces drawn with fatigue and anxiety. There was something in my mother's tone hinting that she found the emergency almost thrilling.
I pressed my hands over my aching eyes, wondering why she insisted on chattering like that, why she had to explain everything when I already knew what had happened.
At that moment, Jun came up the stairs.
"I got through to Dr. Nishizaki. He said to bring her right away." He went into the children's dormitory and came out holding Rie. She lay like a limp rag in his arms. Her cheeks and hands and thighs were covered with pale pink spots, as if her body had rotted with the cream puff and was growing pink mold.