Fic: Snowbound, Part 2B
*****
Hiding
It was 8am and Mori was on his fifth phone call of the day. He'd been trying to get a second cup of coffee since six, but the phone wouldn't stop ringing. Four calls about the aqueduct construction, and one from the contractor handling the pool house repairs. The new pool pump had just arrived, they could deliver it first thing Wednesday; what time would be convenient?
Mori entered the kitchen with his phone tucked under his ear, coffee cup cradled in his elbow, flipping through his appointment calendar. The quarry drillers were due Wednesday at eight, the flatbed hauler showed up at ten, Arai was in the pantry, ducking behind Sakura-san---
Wait.
He blinked at his tiny, elderly housekeeper, standing with her hands straight and prim down her apron. He blinked at the dark navy ball cap bobbing over her left shoulder. "I'm sorry, can I call you later with a time?" he said, and snapped the phone shut without waiting for an answer.
Sakura-san's expression was entirely too stoic for his comfort. It was that face she wore when his father had called, or when Mori came in long after dark from the orchards, too exhausted to even think about dinner....
"Bocchama." She bowed slightly, and the ball cap ducked lower to compensate. "Is there anything you need?"
"Coffee," he answered after a bit, having no idea what else to say, and half-curious whether she was actually making any effort to conceal Arai, or if he simply chose her as the nearest available place to hide. After sixty-five years of loyal service to his family, he seriously doubted it was the former, but still.
"Of course, Bocchama," she answered, coming to take his cup without an instant's hesitation, and shuffling off toward the sink, leaving a clear line of sight between him and Arai, edging backwards and fussing with his work gloves, while keeping a strangely avid eye on the pantry baseboards.
Still hiding, Mori thought.
"Is everything okay?" he asked, because that was safe enough, with his housekeeper across the kitchen, washing out the coffeepot. Safer than 'where have you been all week?' and 'why are you hiding in my pantry?' anyway. The ball cap tilted up enough for Mori to catch the tight edge of a forced smile.
"Yeah, it's fine. Sorry, I'm just running behind today. Got a slow start, and all these deliveries--." He was fumbling with the gloves still, and Mori read the truth in his nervous, distracted hands.
Things are not okay, they were telling him. And I'd rather be boiled in oil than talk about it.
"Naoki," he said, very softly, and the young man jerked up short, by pure reflex. Mori, watching closely, caught a glimpse of startled eyes, and....
And dear God.
His mobile clattered off the floor, calendar flapping down after, as Mori was hooked through the center of his chest and yanked to the pantry. Arai was backpedaling against the door, warding him off, still trying to keep his bruised face ducked under his cap brim, saying It's fine, and Please don't get worked up, and whatever else Mori didn't hear because his heart was thumping against his eardrums and all he could think was all week, you've been hiding for a week and I didn't know. I should've known this, that something happened to you again....
Arai crowded himself back against the corner shelves, gave up his protests, and let Mori tug his cap up to see the damage, with a fatalistic sort of surrender. He didn't look up from the floor, but that wasn't the greatest of Mori's concerns at the moment.
The bruising had faded to ugly greens and yellows, and years of contact sparring told Mori this was a nasty shiner several days ago. All down the left side of Arai's face, from his temple almost to his jaw; it would have been swollen and puffed, he would hardly have been able to talk.
"How did this happen?" Mori asked, and of course what he meant was, how did I let this happen? What was I doing that I couldn't have been there to stop this?
"Just a dumb accident," Arai muttered to the floor. "I was on a delivery, and just....kinda stumbled into something."
Mori chose to take this metaphorically, because otherwise it was a patent untruth. Unless he stumbled into a baseball bat, because only something striking with enough force to knock him over--possibly unconscious--would've left marks like that.
"Who--," Mori began, wondering who else had been there, if they'd given him proper care, but at that one word Arai flinched--a twitch of his shoulder under Mori's hand, and in his eyes a flicker of....guilt? Mori found himself unable to finish the question.
Somewhere off behind him, his mobile made its locust-rattle against the kitchen floor. He closed his eyes and sighed, prayed for patience. And in that moment, Arai slipped from his hands.
"I tripped and fell," he said, straightening his ball cap on his head. "It was--I was just clumsy. It was stupid."
Watching Arai tuck himself back into hiding, Mori was oddly reminded of another conversation, a year ago.
"...it's nothing! Could you please leave it?" At the time, Arai had lain fallen on the gravel, halfway down the hill from the tea house. Angry and ashamed, and tensed all over with pain. Mori had practically had to plead with him, to allow him to help.
And now Arai walked without a limp, he climbed hills without any worry, and even jogged. But somehow--somehow he felt they'd come back to the edge of that same impasse. For some reason, he was certain that if he pressed, he would be told to leave it. And this time, Arai could walk away.
Mori's arms ached. His phone clattered again. If he had just ten minutes of peace, maybe he could make sense of at least one thing. "Can I do anything for you?"
Arai stilled with his head down, and one glove on. "You know your phone is vibrating like crazy over there."
"It doesn't matter."
"I know how you worry about things. And you're really busy right now. I don't--I mean, you shouldn't worry over me."
Mori understood the spirit of the gesture. He knew the lengths Arai would go to, to stay unobtrusive and avoid inconveniencing anyone. It still stung, though. As if any of the thousand nagging tasks he pursued daily--until it sometimes felt he was chasing himself in circles--could even remotely compare in importance to Arai's well-being. His happiness.
Was he happy lately? Mori had a hard time pinning down the last time he was certain of that, and that's when he realized something.
I miss you. What have I been doing without you?
The answer was that he'd been working, feverishly trying to keep up with a flood of responsibility, so many new tasks and problems he'd never expected, every day. It was exhausting, and it was lonely, but this year was his test. The only chance his father would give him, to prove that he could run this estate. That it was worth everything Mori had given up.
But was it worth it, if he gave up his closest, dearest friendship in the bargain?
"Do you want to stay for coffee?" he asked abruptly. Refusing to think about the crew of men working down at the pool house, finishing the repairs to the rear wall. They had time for a cup of coffee, here in the kitchen. Like they used to do last winter, once it got too cold to walk the fields. He'd missed that, too.
He saw Arai waver briefly; the ball cap tilted up, revealing the faint edge of a smile. Wistful.
"Ah. Wish I could. But I really am running behind. Sorry," he sighed.
"Another time, then."
But how many times had they ended conversations with that promise, over the past few months, Mori thought? Too many.
"Yeah. I'll call you."
**
To be fair, he did call. When Mori was out at the quarry, unloading all the heavy granite blocks he and his laborers had spent the morning stacking up, so that the cracked axle on the flatbed hauler could be repaired. It was not a good day, but it was very long. And Sakura-san was still employing the subtle tactic of withholding his non-emergency phone messages until he'd eaten dinner at least, so with one thing and another, it was late the next afternoon before he could return the call. By which time, Arai was out.
What happened, Mori would later reflect, in a moment of uncomfortable honesty, was that it all got pushed to the back of his mind, where it simmered. This vague, nagging sense of something amiss. Something left unfinished. It wasn't that he forgot the incident, or the sight of Arai ducking to hide those ugly bruises. But he did forget to resolve it. He forgot to seek a way to repair the awkward, fractured communication between them that day.
Most importantly, he forgot to tell Arai that it was all right. That he had nothing to be ashamed of; that nothing he'd done could be so terrible that he needed to hide it from Mori. Perhaps because (and of everything, he is least proud of this) Mori forgot to be convinced of it, himself.
He simmered, he worried, he doubted, and he kept it all tucked away in the back of his thoughts. In the small, shadowy corners of his heart.
And so the season passed.
**
Sorry
Arai thinks that the next time he's packing up the truck's emergency kit, he's going to throw in a cheap paperback and one of those clip-on book lights from Masao Hardware. And some candy bars, too. He's starving.
He's got that achy ice-block feeling in his feet, stuck too long in his work boots, and his nose and cheeks are feeling the nippy air in the truck cab now. Earlier, he'd let the truck idle for a few minutes, to try and get some heat from the vents, but it was lukewarm air, at best. Seems the heater doesn't really warm up unless the truck is moving. And he's trying not to dwell on what that might mean for the rest of the night.
Stupid, stupid, I am the stupidest person ever born. In the absence of anything else to do, he's been working out the main points of the groveling apology he owes his uncle. Who has most likely been frantic for an hour, at least. It starts with, "I'm an idiot, and a gigantic troublemaker, I'm so sorry, " and carries on from there. I'm sorry I made you worry, I'm sorry I recklessly drove the grocery truck into a blizzard, and skidded off the road. I'm sorry I was too wrapped up in my little pity party to notice half the road was covered in ice.
His uncle would've called the lake cabins looking for him, so he'll have to apologize to those guys too. And Sakura-san, who most likely got the next call. Damn. Takashi would be climbing the walls by now. As if Arai didn't already owe a pile of apologies, right there.
At some point over the last hour, Arai realizes he's been getting philosophical. He's been thinking that all his problems before the truck ran off the road, those are pretty small potatoes compared to what he's facing now.
There's this Mylar bag he found in the emergency kit; you're supposed to unfold it and climb into it, when you're stuck in freezing conditions and trying to avoid hypothermia and frost bite. Eventually, Arai is aware that he's probably going to get that bag out, drag his boots off and curl up in it. He is probably not, as he'd earlier hoped, going to hop out of the truck with the shovel and dig the tires out of the snow. Getting his boots and legs wet would be suicide, if he ends up stuck again, half a kilometer down the road. And the way this snow has been going on and on, he will definitely end up stuck.
He doesn't want to get the bag out just yet, though. Because once he does, he'll have to face the likelihood that he'll be in it for a good long while. Overnight, through half of tomorrow, probably. Whenever the snow plows or Mountain Rescue can reach him. Maybe it's stupid, but he feels like getting in the hypothermia bag means he's waiting for the end to happen. Facing that he is in serious trouble. And he's not quite ready for that yet.
Instead, he's concentrating on this deep dread building up in him, like when he was a kid, and he'd been such a pain in the ass to his mom that she finally shook her finger at him. Just wait until your father gets home.... Which always meant Arai spent the rest of the day in a state of queasy fear. Knowing dad would come home and find the crayon on the walls (or the sink full of toothpaste, or Arai himself with a bald spot on the side of his head after that chewing gum incident), and he'd completely blow his cork. Yelling with that purple throbbing vein in his forehead, until the neighbors banged in the wall. Which they did pretty often, actually.
But his uncle isn't like his dad, and what Arai really dreads in this case (setting aside the threats of frostbite, hypothermia, and starvation), is that he won't yell. He'll shake his head, and frown, and maybe say something like, "I expected better from you, kid. I thought I could trust you to handle responsibility." And then remembering that whole mess with Masao-san's construction crew (what Arai secretly thinks of as the 'Plank-to-the-face Lesson'), his uncle will decide that after two strikes of serious, appalling stupidity, clearly Arai isn't so trustworthy after all.
And just maybe, Arai thinks, slumping further down the bench seat, until the passenger door handle digs into his back, his uncle would be right. Takashi hadn't chosen to trust him, after all, and his uncle could well decide he couldn't, either.
If that happens, Arai knows he's lost. Completely screwed. Where can he go, if the last of his family gives up on him? How will he get by with just a high school diploma, and two years' experience as a grocery delivery boy (an irresponsible one, at that)?
I'll scrub out the dumpster every day. I'll rebuild the storeroom shelves with my own money. I'll do all the cooking and chores, and never spend one more second feeling sorry for myself. You don't even have to pay me, just don't give up on me, please. It's the only thing I'll ever ask.
He has no problem with groveling. It's just whether that will be enough to save him. Because he's damn short on options, otherwise.
*****
On to Part 3A