Pretend It's A Movie
Title: Pretend It’s A Movie
Author: speaky_bean
Characters/Pairings: Matsuda, L, Ukita, mentions of the rest of the task force and Light, Matsuda’s family which is composed entirely of OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,480
Summary: Matsuda’s mother is diagnosed with lung cancer, and he must deal with the conflict between his job and his family obligations.
Warnings: None, other than that the subject is inherently depressing.
Written for week #48 at dn_contest, the prompt being cancer.
The honor bestowed upon you burns like a strobe light. You were a rookie cop, a kid out of college, you never thought that you’d be working a case like this. That you would meet the great and powerful L, that he would offer you a cookie because he thought you’d focus better with some sugar in your system. Perhaps that means you’re not focusing, that L thinks poorly of you, but those thoughts don’t dim the glow of the strobe light. You met a man who was a fairytale; a man who you thought might be a French supermodel because you weren’t sure at first if he was L or Elle.
For days it’s all you can talk about. You aren’t allowed to discuss details, say anything identifying about the great and powerful L. But you can tell people you met him-you made sure to get his permission for that. Because you can, you have a hard time containing yourself. You squawk to all and sundry, “I met L!” Your friends think this is excellent at first, but soon they grow tired of your bragging. Their careers aren’t nearly as exciting as yours is-they work at convenience stores, at dentist’s offices asking for insurance information, they’re still battling their way through graduate school. They don’t want to hear that you met L.
But your mother is thrilled to listen to your rambling. Lately, she hasn’t been very well, so she’s been sticking to the house, circling the bed but never quite settling. You’ve been to see her only once since you started working the Kira case, and you have no plans to see her until you’ve settled into a routine. But that doesn’t mean you can’t call her up and blather excitedly about how you were blessed enough to meet with L. “That’s my boy!” she croaks. Her voice has been strained for weeks now, and she blames it on a lingering cold. You don’t think anything of it; you’re too excited, squirming joyously over your good news.
“I’m going to be really busy for a while,” you say, leaning back in your wooden chair that isn’t built to be leaned back in. Wedging the white cordless phone between your ear and your neck. “I’ll still try and visit sometimes, but this case is going to be gobbling up most of my time. So don’t worry too much if I don’t call for a while, okay?”
“Oh, you never call me anyway,” she says with a breathless laugh and a flurry of coughs. “It’s fine honey, just make sure you do a good job, and when you guys catch Kira, you tell everyone you never would have been able to do it if you didn’t have such a fabulous mom.”
You feign fuming, say, “I do so call you!” but you aren’t good at anger, aren’t even good at faking it. In the end the two of you are laughing over nothing.
~`~`~
Your mother’s cold isn’t going away. It’s gotten worse, and it probably isn’t actually a cold. Colds involve a lot more snot than what she’s got, and since this started she hasn’t used a single tissue. (The ones she uses to remove her makeup don’t count.) This is coughing so long and hard it steals her breath, this is pain that makes her wonder if she’s broken a rib or on her way to a heart attack. She calls you late at night, pleading with your voicemail to pick up the phone, and you don’t hear her message until three days later. By that point she’s curled around a lumpy comforter on the floor, coughs tearing from her throat like rabid dogs. She stares up at you with half-closed eyes and mumbles something you must strain to understand. After several tries she croaks loudly, “Touta what the fuck are you doing here?”
“You called me!” you squeak, gnawing your lip nervously and hoping that you haven’t made a mistake somehow. You had worried about her for hours while on the job, you were distracted and you’d fiddled with your pen while L was talking to you, and he’d snapped and taken the pen in his spidery fingers. “You said your chest hurt and you couldn’t breathe, right? Maybe I misheard you, or maybe you’re okay now and I shouldn’t have…well look, are you okay? Mom?”
“I’m fine,” she rasps, flinging herself onto the bed with a heavy thump. Her hair is an oil slick down her forehead, her nostrils flared in a struggle for oxygen. She doesn’t look fine, but your mother isn’t the sort of woman who can be argued with, especially not when it comes to hers or anybody else’s health. (She’d told you before you ever noticed it that you’d twisted your ankle at age ten.) If she says she’s fine then she must be fine, and if she’s not then she doesn’t want to talk about it. “I just called because…I don’t know, it was hurting really badly and I thought maybe it was a heart attack, but it wasn’t. Wasn’t a big deal. And you didn’t pick up when I called you Touta, it’s been days.”
“I know,” you say, guilt making your stomach twist as you speak. “I’m sorry Mom, I’ve just been really busy lately, I didn’t have time to check my phone until this morning.”
She stares up at you with her tired eyes and accuses you, says, “then why the hell didn’t you come this morning?”
~`~`~
Sometimes, you think about your life like it’s a movie. As you leave your mother’s house (after making sure she’s tucked into bed and has a nearby supply of food and water so she will not have to venture forth for it) you think that if this were a movie, you would have insisted she see a doctor. You would have taken her a doctor and there would have been a big dramatic scene. Because she’d coughed into her comforter and the damp spot she’d left was tinged with pink. Pink means blood and blood means death. If this were a movie, you would have done something.
But you don’t do anything at all. You go home to your laptop (overburdened by illegally downloaded movies that you’ll never have the time to watch), and your Batman sheets (two decades old and full of holes). You assume that your mother is as fine as she says she is, and that if she’s not she will be soon. You don’t worry about (much) it as you surf the Internet for an hour before bed, and you don’t worry about it (much) as you drift off into (slightly troubled) sleep. In the morning chewing your cornflakes and blinking the sleep from your eyes, you don’t think of it at all.
Midway to your car (parked thirteen blocks from your apartment), Ayumi Hamasaki blares in your coat pocket. It’s your sister on the phone, breathing hard like she’s been crying. Your sister doesn’t cry often (her eyes water sometimes, but it’s from allergies, even when there’s nothing she’s allergic to within miles, it’s from allergies) and so, this is probably serious. Almost immediately you think that it’s about your mother, and then you think it’s about her husband Tadao. He’s a firefighter, and your travels through the Internet last night informed you of a fire.
“Mom’s in the hospital,” she says, voice low like a whimpering dog’s. “I’m sure you know she hasn’t been feeling well lately, she said that you stopped by. At least I think she did, she was gasping so much it was hard to understand her. She’s been having a lot of trouble breathing, and when she came to over to babysit for Seiha and Midori this morning, she passed out. They did a chest x-ray and there’s this…shadowy thing, I don’t know what it is, but they want to keep her for more tests. No one’s saying it’s cancer, but she always smoked a lot, so it’s not unlikely. They’re going to do a bronchoscopy and a biopsy today.” She stops talking, choked.
“S-sometimes, sometimes cancer isn’t a big deal!” you say, with no idea whether or not your statement is accurate. You have a friend whose small tumor had been easily removed, who had tolerated surgery so well that she went back to work two days later. You latch onto the idea like a bear trap, tell you sister that if it is cancer, which it probably isn’t, she’ll get over it with no trouble. “It’ll probably just take one surgery. After all, they caught it early, right?”
“They don’t know yet,” your sister says with an exasperated sigh. “If the shadows are tumors then the tumors are pretty extensive, and they’re not confined to the lungs. So if she does have cancer, then it’s probably fairly advanced by this point.” Another sigh, a pause to pinch the bridge of her nose. (You can’t see it but you know she always does this when she sighs.) “Touta, please try not to be so blindly optimistic. That just makes it harder to bear when things turn out badly. I don’t think she’s going to be okay.”
You do not let these words affect you. You stretch a smile across your face and tell your sister that really, you aren’t worried. “Don’t tell Mom about those thoughts,” you warn. “Nobody knows anything yet, and if she thinks she’s going to die then she’s going to get hopeless.”
“Right,” she says. In spite of attempts not to acknowledge it, a wall is erected between you. And it will get bigger, brick by brick.
If this were a movie, she would come to agree with you. If this were the sort of movie that you like (you love romance, laughter, happy endings), you would be right.
As it turns out, this so-called movie is more about compromise, and pain than anything else. As it turns out, your sister is right.
~`~`~
Miho Maeda, mother of Yukie and Touta Matsuda, ex-wife of Haruki Matsuda, daughter of Shizuka and Ryo Maeda, elder sister of Shinobu and Shusaku Maeda, girlfriend of Akiko Inamura, adoptive mother of Azami Inamura, and grandmother of Seiha and Midori Tanizaki, has been diagnosed with lung cancer. To be precise, she’s been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. Her particular sort is called large cell carcinoma, and you find the name offensively redundant. If it’s non-small than large goes without saying, unless it’s medium-sized, but even so. Wouldn’t it be better to be more precise in the first place, without silly names like non-small?
Miho Maeda’s cancer has spread rapidly. The doctors say it’s entered stage IIIB. You aren’t sure what this means except that it was probably at stage IIIA quite recently. One of the doctors, a surly woman with a badly-corrected harelip, makes remarks about how if they’d come in sooner, the tumors would not have entered her lymph nodes, her esophagus, her neck. You want to rip her badly-stitched face to shreds, because she’s right. If you had answered the phone when she called you, if you hadn’t stayed at work so long, then maybe they could have started treatment before she entered stage IIIB. You don’t think that maybe Akiko, who lives with her, should have done something. You don’t think that maybe your mother should have realized she had more than a cold and gone to the doctor. If you think these things you chase them like seagulls, tell yourself they’re miserable enough without blame.
Tonight, your mother will stay in the hospital. Tonight, you will go to L’s hotel and analyze tapes from the second Kira.
~`~`~
It takes longer than you thought it would. You had thought that in the morning you could visit your mother again, but you have to stay at the hotel room, pruning the tapes for clues that you can’t find and L can. You feel useless and squirmy, and you feign your excitement because you don’t feel it now. You’re obliged to stay for the airing of your fake tapes on Sakura TV, obliged to sit and wait and watch L be clever and Ukita smoke. You have worked with Ukita for nearly two years, and you never minded his habit before. But your mother has lung cancer. Your mother smoked all her life. After his fifth cigarette you can no longer sit there squirming. You are forced to speak, forced to say, “you know you really shouldn’t smoke like that. You’ll end up with lung cancer.”
“I’m a cop,” Ukita snarks, as if this protects his lungs from sprouting tumors, as if there’s no way to die besides guns and knives, as if they aren’t sitting safe in a hotel room while all hell breaks loose around them. “I’m not going to live long enough for cancer to be a concern.” He takes a noisy drag from his cigarette, blows smoke into the air. This makes you cough and for a minute you think you have cancer. “We all die sooner or later,” he says, voice raspy with nicotine, crinkled with tar. “Big fucking deal.”
Twenty minutes later, Ukita is dead. You are all strong men so you don’t mourn together, but Aizawa yells a lot and L is shaking, Mogi so quiet you think he’s dead too. Chief Yagami tears off like a maniac in an armored car, and you wonder what your reaction is. You want it to be grief, but you know if you cry it won’t be Ukita you’re crying for. Even though you’ve worked with him for two whole years. Drunkenly introduced him to a bartender you’d just met, whom he would later impregnate. Convinced him to not only pay for the abortion, but to accompany her to the appointment, too. You know that his favorite color was turquoise solely because his tongue could not pronounce the English word, and you knew that his short stature embarrassed him. You know that he liked German metal and America pop music, and that he didn’t risk his life out of duty, or bravery, or a need for recognition. You didn’t know why he did it. Why he ran to the Sakura TV office building when he was too smart not to know he’d be killed.
Alone in your car on the way to the hospital, you try your best to cry for Ukita.
You cry, but every tear you shed is for your mother, who will certainly be fine.
~`~`~
Your mother’s hospital room is draped in flowers, wrecked with paper cranes. You try your best to embrace the cheeriness, to laugh with bespectacled Azami about how a lot of people must really love their mother. Try too, not to tell Azami that it isn’t her mother lying shrunken and sick in a hospital bed, that her mother is the one fiddling with the thermostat and wondering aloud if Miho will have an easier time breathing cool air or warm. You know that your mother loves these people, that in her mind Azami is her child just like you, and you know that you love them, too. But you feel viciously territorial; you want to be the one to make things perfect for your mom. You even feel a slight twinge when a chubby doctor wanders in to draw her blood, but you say nothing. You slap on a big, happy smile and you say, “hi Mom!”
~`~`~
Despite your possessiveness, you are not the one who spends the most time caring for your mother. Akiko teaches at a nearby university, and if she budgets her time with any care, she has plenty leftover to care for her ailing lover. Yukie doesn’t see her in the hospital, as the flowers aggravate her allergies, but when she comes home with a treatment plan Yukie is the one who drives her to and from the doctor’s office for chemotherapy. While she’s doing that, Azami makes sure that Seiha gets his bottle and that Midori goes to bed on time. Even your father pitches in, taking the train all the way from Yokohama just to pick up her prescription. You find yourself totally out of the loop.
You try to help out. You buy groceries and you don’t have time to deliver them until the milk goes bad, you research large cell carcinoma until you think you might have it yourself, but you don’t do anything with the information. You’re busy, everybody understands. Nobody expects you to take care of her when you have such an important job to do.
But you don’t feel important at your job. You make mistakes constantly-you type in the wrong data and then proceed to misinterpret what you’ve typed, and you show up late and leave early. When you nearly make the grievous mistake of telling Light he’s in the clear (you didn’t think L would be cruel enough, manipulative enough, not to tell him!) L smacks the microphone out of your hand and stops you dead. Calls you useless, calls you stupid, and you hide your rage behind puppy dog eyes. You don’t say how much you’re sacrificing to be here, don’t tell anyone that your mother might, in spite of your optimisn, be dying. Her coughing fits leave her tinged as blue as L’s jeans, and she’s losing her mermaid hair clump by clump. She’s as skinny as Light in his prison cell, as exhausted and bedraggled as the chief. Akiko and Yukie expect nothing from you, but you want to be the hero. If you cannot make your mother well again, at least you should be there to support her. Instead you’re standing here being snarled at by a hunchbacked troll for doing what you thought was right.
You tell L that you’re taking tomorrow off, and when he asks why you mumble something about having to iron something for some reason, and the more times you use the word some the less convincing you sound. L does not grant you a day off. Instead he tells you that the two of you are overdue for discussion.
~`~`~
As L lacks an office in the traditional sense, he bids you to join him in an unoccupied room nearby. The room is unnerving in its lack of furnishing. The only chair belongs to L, and he towers over you as you sit cross-legged on the floor. You tap into your feelings of awe and of privilege, try to capture the joy that you felt when you first met the unquestionably magnificent L.
“Tell me, Matsuda,” he says, voice burdened by the large (cell carcinoma), blue (cyanosis, no more air) lollypop that is filling his mouth. “Are you perhaps becoming bored with this case?”
“No!” you yelp, arms waving wildling in protest. “No, absolutely not! It’s a really, really important case, Kira is one of the most serious threats in the world right now, and I mean, if you think it’s interesting then it must be, right?” Though you’re sincere your prattling rings hollow, you know that L will not believe you, that L will press you further, wrest from you the cause of your distraction. L nods in mock agreement, and then asks you calmly why you feel the need to try and sabotage it, if not out of boredom. Pointing the lollypop in your direction, he asks if you are, perhaps, on Kira’s side. “Of course not!” you insist, face as pink as blood coughed into a blanket. “I can’t believe you’d accuse me of something like that, Ryuzaki! I’m not on Kira’s side, I just made a mistake, it happens! I’ve been really distracted lately. Personal…issues…have come up, and I’m trying my best to balance everything, but it’s hard, you know? You must have a personal life to attend to too, you must understand…”
L cuts you off, says that with a job like his a personal life is impossible to maintain. “Matsuda, this is the Kira case. This is a big deal. Hundreds of people could die from your little mistakes, and I doubt that you want their blood on your hands. If you want to be a part of this, you can’t let your personal life interfere. Catching Kira must be your number one priority, otherwise you are useless as a member of the team.” His eyes are cold and flinty like a surgeon’s knife (though you only saw one out of the corner of your eye as you traipsed through the hospital, you could be wrong and L’s eyes could be nothing like a surgeon’s knife) and he shows no sign of being willing to compromise. You wonder if it would be more or less professional to explain yourself. You wonder if L would care, think that if you could talk to the Chief about it, he would.
“I understand,” you say. God, you don’t want to be useless. To your mother or to L. But as it stands, you’re useless to both of them. And you wonder if it’s worth it to keep trying to help.
~`~`~
Your next day off comes with surprising quickness. L gives out the schedules without a word, and you do not linger long on the silly notion that this was intentional. And so you relieve Yukie of her chauffeuring duties for the day, keep Azami from reading another chapter of a Chuck Palahniuk novel to an uncomprehending four-year-old girl. Your mother is pale and silent on the way to the hospital, dwarfed by a jacket that had once been tight across her chest. She breathes like a sea creature banished to the land, and since you haven’t seen her up close for a while, you’re scared. “Mom,” you say, nudging a plastic box full of CDs that you keep in your car for when you tire of the radio. “Should I put on some music? I think I might have one or two artists you actually like in here…I have Beat Crusaders, I remember you sort of liked one of their songs…”
“No baby, no music,” your mother rasps, forehead pressed against the dismal window of your car. “I have a headache, and there’s nothing I actually like that won’t make it worse. I should have gotten into some softer tunes, I guess.”
You nod in agreement, shrug off the fact that you had actually wanted to listen to Beat Crusaders yourself. After twelve minutes of silence (you’re watching the clock, simultaneously taking care not to be late and timing the awkwardness) she says with a hideous cough, “you know I really appreciate you taking the time off to do this. I’ve been watching the news a lot lately, and it seems like you guys have your hands full. Wasn’t Ukita a member of your team? So yeah…I know it’s probably hard on you to take time off. But it’s really sweet of you to...” She stops, searching for oxygen, pulling it in like she’s playing tug-of-war. Looking at her, you decide you hate the color blue.
“It’s okay,” you say, dodging cars on the highway like you used to dodge bullets back when you worked the field. “It’s not really as hard as you think, I do get breaks sometimes, and I want to spend time with you before…” You trail off, not wanting to say the word that’s on everyone’s lips, not wanting her to think that death is possible. “Look,” you say, edging towards what you hope is the right exit. “I can quit the case, if you want me to. That way I’ll be able to help out more. I mean, Yukie is really busy, she’s got two babies to look after, and I’m sure Akiko has a lot of stuff to prepare for the courses she’s teaching, and Azami’s too young to always be responsible for Seiha and Midori, so…I could quit the case. If I just worked as a regular cop, I’d have a lot more time off.” And oh, it kills you to suggest this. You had thought before that it would be okay, that you couldn’t work with the chief locked up like that anyway. You had thought that it would be too painful if L turned out to be right about Light, and that he was a jerk and you just plain didn’t need that job. But suggesting it makes your stomach squirm, and it makes your mother’s knit in annoyance.
“Well that would be stupid,” she says, sitting upright, coughs spilling out of her like water. “Akiko likes taking care of me. I don’t want to limit her opportunities to dress up like a sexy nurse. And we’re paying Azami, so this is a pretty sweet deal for her. As for Yukie, yes, maybe she could use a break once in a while. Which you’re giving her. There wouldn’t be enough for you to do around here if you quit the case, and quitting means going back to your old salary, right? I don’t want you losing your apartment and having to come live with me again, I have enough going on right now. I was actually going to ask you for some money to pay for my cable bill.”
And oh, you try not to look too upset by this. Knowing all you’re good for is your money stings, but you know your mother doesn’t mean to hurt you, that you shouldn’t let your childish feelings show. But she drags a hand through her nearly-gone hair, says, “oh for Christ’s sake Touta. Look, do you think I want to die knowing you quit the Kira case because of me? Do you think I don’t know what a fucking monster Kira is? My brother spent four years in juvenile hall if you remember, and the only reason he isn’t in jail right now is because he hasn’t been caught. I sure as hell don’t want Kira killing Shinobu, or anybody else for that matter. He’s the one who’s a cancer, even more so than my tumors. You know, I think I’m going to name my cancer Kira.” She stops, coughs again and says, “anyway, I’m not going to die. Not without a big fucking fight. I’m going to get better before you guys take Kira down, and then we’ll have a big fucking party in honor of both of us taking down our respective Kiras. We’ll have terrible techno music, and sake from a vending machine, and chips that taste like cardboard, and it’ll be…” She trails off. Too breathless to talk anymore.
You try to believe in your mother’s vision of the future. Park your car in near the hospital as yet another step towards achieving it. A movie would work this way, and dear God you hope your life will do the same.
Author: speaky_bean
Characters/Pairings: Matsuda, L, Ukita, mentions of the rest of the task force and Light, Matsuda’s family which is composed entirely of OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,480
Summary: Matsuda’s mother is diagnosed with lung cancer, and he must deal with the conflict between his job and his family obligations.
Warnings: None, other than that the subject is inherently depressing.
Written for week #48 at dn_contest, the prompt being cancer.
The honor bestowed upon you burns like a strobe light. You were a rookie cop, a kid out of college, you never thought that you’d be working a case like this. That you would meet the great and powerful L, that he would offer you a cookie because he thought you’d focus better with some sugar in your system. Perhaps that means you’re not focusing, that L thinks poorly of you, but those thoughts don’t dim the glow of the strobe light. You met a man who was a fairytale; a man who you thought might be a French supermodel because you weren’t sure at first if he was L or Elle.
For days it’s all you can talk about. You aren’t allowed to discuss details, say anything identifying about the great and powerful L. But you can tell people you met him-you made sure to get his permission for that. Because you can, you have a hard time containing yourself. You squawk to all and sundry, “I met L!” Your friends think this is excellent at first, but soon they grow tired of your bragging. Their careers aren’t nearly as exciting as yours is-they work at convenience stores, at dentist’s offices asking for insurance information, they’re still battling their way through graduate school. They don’t want to hear that you met L.
But your mother is thrilled to listen to your rambling. Lately, she hasn’t been very well, so she’s been sticking to the house, circling the bed but never quite settling. You’ve been to see her only once since you started working the Kira case, and you have no plans to see her until you’ve settled into a routine. But that doesn’t mean you can’t call her up and blather excitedly about how you were blessed enough to meet with L. “That’s my boy!” she croaks. Her voice has been strained for weeks now, and she blames it on a lingering cold. You don’t think anything of it; you’re too excited, squirming joyously over your good news.
“I’m going to be really busy for a while,” you say, leaning back in your wooden chair that isn’t built to be leaned back in. Wedging the white cordless phone between your ear and your neck. “I’ll still try and visit sometimes, but this case is going to be gobbling up most of my time. So don’t worry too much if I don’t call for a while, okay?”
“Oh, you never call me anyway,” she says with a breathless laugh and a flurry of coughs. “It’s fine honey, just make sure you do a good job, and when you guys catch Kira, you tell everyone you never would have been able to do it if you didn’t have such a fabulous mom.”
You feign fuming, say, “I do so call you!” but you aren’t good at anger, aren’t even good at faking it. In the end the two of you are laughing over nothing.
~`~`~
Your mother’s cold isn’t going away. It’s gotten worse, and it probably isn’t actually a cold. Colds involve a lot more snot than what she’s got, and since this started she hasn’t used a single tissue. (The ones she uses to remove her makeup don’t count.) This is coughing so long and hard it steals her breath, this is pain that makes her wonder if she’s broken a rib or on her way to a heart attack. She calls you late at night, pleading with your voicemail to pick up the phone, and you don’t hear her message until three days later. By that point she’s curled around a lumpy comforter on the floor, coughs tearing from her throat like rabid dogs. She stares up at you with half-closed eyes and mumbles something you must strain to understand. After several tries she croaks loudly, “Touta what the fuck are you doing here?”
“You called me!” you squeak, gnawing your lip nervously and hoping that you haven’t made a mistake somehow. You had worried about her for hours while on the job, you were distracted and you’d fiddled with your pen while L was talking to you, and he’d snapped and taken the pen in his spidery fingers. “You said your chest hurt and you couldn’t breathe, right? Maybe I misheard you, or maybe you’re okay now and I shouldn’t have…well look, are you okay? Mom?”
“I’m fine,” she rasps, flinging herself onto the bed with a heavy thump. Her hair is an oil slick down her forehead, her nostrils flared in a struggle for oxygen. She doesn’t look fine, but your mother isn’t the sort of woman who can be argued with, especially not when it comes to hers or anybody else’s health. (She’d told you before you ever noticed it that you’d twisted your ankle at age ten.) If she says she’s fine then she must be fine, and if she’s not then she doesn’t want to talk about it. “I just called because…I don’t know, it was hurting really badly and I thought maybe it was a heart attack, but it wasn’t. Wasn’t a big deal. And you didn’t pick up when I called you Touta, it’s been days.”
“I know,” you say, guilt making your stomach twist as you speak. “I’m sorry Mom, I’ve just been really busy lately, I didn’t have time to check my phone until this morning.”
She stares up at you with her tired eyes and accuses you, says, “then why the hell didn’t you come this morning?”
~`~`~
Sometimes, you think about your life like it’s a movie. As you leave your mother’s house (after making sure she’s tucked into bed and has a nearby supply of food and water so she will not have to venture forth for it) you think that if this were a movie, you would have insisted she see a doctor. You would have taken her a doctor and there would have been a big dramatic scene. Because she’d coughed into her comforter and the damp spot she’d left was tinged with pink. Pink means blood and blood means death. If this were a movie, you would have done something.
But you don’t do anything at all. You go home to your laptop (overburdened by illegally downloaded movies that you’ll never have the time to watch), and your Batman sheets (two decades old and full of holes). You assume that your mother is as fine as she says she is, and that if she’s not she will be soon. You don’t worry about (much) it as you surf the Internet for an hour before bed, and you don’t worry about it (much) as you drift off into (slightly troubled) sleep. In the morning chewing your cornflakes and blinking the sleep from your eyes, you don’t think of it at all.
Midway to your car (parked thirteen blocks from your apartment), Ayumi Hamasaki blares in your coat pocket. It’s your sister on the phone, breathing hard like she’s been crying. Your sister doesn’t cry often (her eyes water sometimes, but it’s from allergies, even when there’s nothing she’s allergic to within miles, it’s from allergies) and so, this is probably serious. Almost immediately you think that it’s about your mother, and then you think it’s about her husband Tadao. He’s a firefighter, and your travels through the Internet last night informed you of a fire.
“Mom’s in the hospital,” she says, voice low like a whimpering dog’s. “I’m sure you know she hasn’t been feeling well lately, she said that you stopped by. At least I think she did, she was gasping so much it was hard to understand her. She’s been having a lot of trouble breathing, and when she came to over to babysit for Seiha and Midori this morning, she passed out. They did a chest x-ray and there’s this…shadowy thing, I don’t know what it is, but they want to keep her for more tests. No one’s saying it’s cancer, but she always smoked a lot, so it’s not unlikely. They’re going to do a bronchoscopy and a biopsy today.” She stops talking, choked.
“S-sometimes, sometimes cancer isn’t a big deal!” you say, with no idea whether or not your statement is accurate. You have a friend whose small tumor had been easily removed, who had tolerated surgery so well that she went back to work two days later. You latch onto the idea like a bear trap, tell you sister that if it is cancer, which it probably isn’t, she’ll get over it with no trouble. “It’ll probably just take one surgery. After all, they caught it early, right?”
“They don’t know yet,” your sister says with an exasperated sigh. “If the shadows are tumors then the tumors are pretty extensive, and they’re not confined to the lungs. So if she does have cancer, then it’s probably fairly advanced by this point.” Another sigh, a pause to pinch the bridge of her nose. (You can’t see it but you know she always does this when she sighs.) “Touta, please try not to be so blindly optimistic. That just makes it harder to bear when things turn out badly. I don’t think she’s going to be okay.”
You do not let these words affect you. You stretch a smile across your face and tell your sister that really, you aren’t worried. “Don’t tell Mom about those thoughts,” you warn. “Nobody knows anything yet, and if she thinks she’s going to die then she’s going to get hopeless.”
“Right,” she says. In spite of attempts not to acknowledge it, a wall is erected between you. And it will get bigger, brick by brick.
If this were a movie, she would come to agree with you. If this were the sort of movie that you like (you love romance, laughter, happy endings), you would be right.
As it turns out, this so-called movie is more about compromise, and pain than anything else. As it turns out, your sister is right.
~`~`~
Miho Maeda, mother of Yukie and Touta Matsuda, ex-wife of Haruki Matsuda, daughter of Shizuka and Ryo Maeda, elder sister of Shinobu and Shusaku Maeda, girlfriend of Akiko Inamura, adoptive mother of Azami Inamura, and grandmother of Seiha and Midori Tanizaki, has been diagnosed with lung cancer. To be precise, she’s been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. Her particular sort is called large cell carcinoma, and you find the name offensively redundant. If it’s non-small than large goes without saying, unless it’s medium-sized, but even so. Wouldn’t it be better to be more precise in the first place, without silly names like non-small?
Miho Maeda’s cancer has spread rapidly. The doctors say it’s entered stage IIIB. You aren’t sure what this means except that it was probably at stage IIIA quite recently. One of the doctors, a surly woman with a badly-corrected harelip, makes remarks about how if they’d come in sooner, the tumors would not have entered her lymph nodes, her esophagus, her neck. You want to rip her badly-stitched face to shreds, because she’s right. If you had answered the phone when she called you, if you hadn’t stayed at work so long, then maybe they could have started treatment before she entered stage IIIB. You don’t think that maybe Akiko, who lives with her, should have done something. You don’t think that maybe your mother should have realized she had more than a cold and gone to the doctor. If you think these things you chase them like seagulls, tell yourself they’re miserable enough without blame.
Tonight, your mother will stay in the hospital. Tonight, you will go to L’s hotel and analyze tapes from the second Kira.
~`~`~
It takes longer than you thought it would. You had thought that in the morning you could visit your mother again, but you have to stay at the hotel room, pruning the tapes for clues that you can’t find and L can. You feel useless and squirmy, and you feign your excitement because you don’t feel it now. You’re obliged to stay for the airing of your fake tapes on Sakura TV, obliged to sit and wait and watch L be clever and Ukita smoke. You have worked with Ukita for nearly two years, and you never minded his habit before. But your mother has lung cancer. Your mother smoked all her life. After his fifth cigarette you can no longer sit there squirming. You are forced to speak, forced to say, “you know you really shouldn’t smoke like that. You’ll end up with lung cancer.”
“I’m a cop,” Ukita snarks, as if this protects his lungs from sprouting tumors, as if there’s no way to die besides guns and knives, as if they aren’t sitting safe in a hotel room while all hell breaks loose around them. “I’m not going to live long enough for cancer to be a concern.” He takes a noisy drag from his cigarette, blows smoke into the air. This makes you cough and for a minute you think you have cancer. “We all die sooner or later,” he says, voice raspy with nicotine, crinkled with tar. “Big fucking deal.”
Twenty minutes later, Ukita is dead. You are all strong men so you don’t mourn together, but Aizawa yells a lot and L is shaking, Mogi so quiet you think he’s dead too. Chief Yagami tears off like a maniac in an armored car, and you wonder what your reaction is. You want it to be grief, but you know if you cry it won’t be Ukita you’re crying for. Even though you’ve worked with him for two whole years. Drunkenly introduced him to a bartender you’d just met, whom he would later impregnate. Convinced him to not only pay for the abortion, but to accompany her to the appointment, too. You know that his favorite color was turquoise solely because his tongue could not pronounce the English word, and you knew that his short stature embarrassed him. You know that he liked German metal and America pop music, and that he didn’t risk his life out of duty, or bravery, or a need for recognition. You didn’t know why he did it. Why he ran to the Sakura TV office building when he was too smart not to know he’d be killed.
Alone in your car on the way to the hospital, you try your best to cry for Ukita.
You cry, but every tear you shed is for your mother, who will certainly be fine.
~`~`~
Your mother’s hospital room is draped in flowers, wrecked with paper cranes. You try your best to embrace the cheeriness, to laugh with bespectacled Azami about how a lot of people must really love their mother. Try too, not to tell Azami that it isn’t her mother lying shrunken and sick in a hospital bed, that her mother is the one fiddling with the thermostat and wondering aloud if Miho will have an easier time breathing cool air or warm. You know that your mother loves these people, that in her mind Azami is her child just like you, and you know that you love them, too. But you feel viciously territorial; you want to be the one to make things perfect for your mom. You even feel a slight twinge when a chubby doctor wanders in to draw her blood, but you say nothing. You slap on a big, happy smile and you say, “hi Mom!”
~`~`~
Despite your possessiveness, you are not the one who spends the most time caring for your mother. Akiko teaches at a nearby university, and if she budgets her time with any care, she has plenty leftover to care for her ailing lover. Yukie doesn’t see her in the hospital, as the flowers aggravate her allergies, but when she comes home with a treatment plan Yukie is the one who drives her to and from the doctor’s office for chemotherapy. While she’s doing that, Azami makes sure that Seiha gets his bottle and that Midori goes to bed on time. Even your father pitches in, taking the train all the way from Yokohama just to pick up her prescription. You find yourself totally out of the loop.
You try to help out. You buy groceries and you don’t have time to deliver them until the milk goes bad, you research large cell carcinoma until you think you might have it yourself, but you don’t do anything with the information. You’re busy, everybody understands. Nobody expects you to take care of her when you have such an important job to do.
But you don’t feel important at your job. You make mistakes constantly-you type in the wrong data and then proceed to misinterpret what you’ve typed, and you show up late and leave early. When you nearly make the grievous mistake of telling Light he’s in the clear (you didn’t think L would be cruel enough, manipulative enough, not to tell him!) L smacks the microphone out of your hand and stops you dead. Calls you useless, calls you stupid, and you hide your rage behind puppy dog eyes. You don’t say how much you’re sacrificing to be here, don’t tell anyone that your mother might, in spite of your optimisn, be dying. Her coughing fits leave her tinged as blue as L’s jeans, and she’s losing her mermaid hair clump by clump. She’s as skinny as Light in his prison cell, as exhausted and bedraggled as the chief. Akiko and Yukie expect nothing from you, but you want to be the hero. If you cannot make your mother well again, at least you should be there to support her. Instead you’re standing here being snarled at by a hunchbacked troll for doing what you thought was right.
You tell L that you’re taking tomorrow off, and when he asks why you mumble something about having to iron something for some reason, and the more times you use the word some the less convincing you sound. L does not grant you a day off. Instead he tells you that the two of you are overdue for discussion.
~`~`~
As L lacks an office in the traditional sense, he bids you to join him in an unoccupied room nearby. The room is unnerving in its lack of furnishing. The only chair belongs to L, and he towers over you as you sit cross-legged on the floor. You tap into your feelings of awe and of privilege, try to capture the joy that you felt when you first met the unquestionably magnificent L.
“Tell me, Matsuda,” he says, voice burdened by the large (cell carcinoma), blue (cyanosis, no more air) lollypop that is filling his mouth. “Are you perhaps becoming bored with this case?”
“No!” you yelp, arms waving wildling in protest. “No, absolutely not! It’s a really, really important case, Kira is one of the most serious threats in the world right now, and I mean, if you think it’s interesting then it must be, right?” Though you’re sincere your prattling rings hollow, you know that L will not believe you, that L will press you further, wrest from you the cause of your distraction. L nods in mock agreement, and then asks you calmly why you feel the need to try and sabotage it, if not out of boredom. Pointing the lollypop in your direction, he asks if you are, perhaps, on Kira’s side. “Of course not!” you insist, face as pink as blood coughed into a blanket. “I can’t believe you’d accuse me of something like that, Ryuzaki! I’m not on Kira’s side, I just made a mistake, it happens! I’ve been really distracted lately. Personal…issues…have come up, and I’m trying my best to balance everything, but it’s hard, you know? You must have a personal life to attend to too, you must understand…”
L cuts you off, says that with a job like his a personal life is impossible to maintain. “Matsuda, this is the Kira case. This is a big deal. Hundreds of people could die from your little mistakes, and I doubt that you want their blood on your hands. If you want to be a part of this, you can’t let your personal life interfere. Catching Kira must be your number one priority, otherwise you are useless as a member of the team.” His eyes are cold and flinty like a surgeon’s knife (though you only saw one out of the corner of your eye as you traipsed through the hospital, you could be wrong and L’s eyes could be nothing like a surgeon’s knife) and he shows no sign of being willing to compromise. You wonder if it would be more or less professional to explain yourself. You wonder if L would care, think that if you could talk to the Chief about it, he would.
“I understand,” you say. God, you don’t want to be useless. To your mother or to L. But as it stands, you’re useless to both of them. And you wonder if it’s worth it to keep trying to help.
~`~`~
Your next day off comes with surprising quickness. L gives out the schedules without a word, and you do not linger long on the silly notion that this was intentional. And so you relieve Yukie of her chauffeuring duties for the day, keep Azami from reading another chapter of a Chuck Palahniuk novel to an uncomprehending four-year-old girl. Your mother is pale and silent on the way to the hospital, dwarfed by a jacket that had once been tight across her chest. She breathes like a sea creature banished to the land, and since you haven’t seen her up close for a while, you’re scared. “Mom,” you say, nudging a plastic box full of CDs that you keep in your car for when you tire of the radio. “Should I put on some music? I think I might have one or two artists you actually like in here…I have Beat Crusaders, I remember you sort of liked one of their songs…”
“No baby, no music,” your mother rasps, forehead pressed against the dismal window of your car. “I have a headache, and there’s nothing I actually like that won’t make it worse. I should have gotten into some softer tunes, I guess.”
You nod in agreement, shrug off the fact that you had actually wanted to listen to Beat Crusaders yourself. After twelve minutes of silence (you’re watching the clock, simultaneously taking care not to be late and timing the awkwardness) she says with a hideous cough, “you know I really appreciate you taking the time off to do this. I’ve been watching the news a lot lately, and it seems like you guys have your hands full. Wasn’t Ukita a member of your team? So yeah…I know it’s probably hard on you to take time off. But it’s really sweet of you to...” She stops, searching for oxygen, pulling it in like she’s playing tug-of-war. Looking at her, you decide you hate the color blue.
“It’s okay,” you say, dodging cars on the highway like you used to dodge bullets back when you worked the field. “It’s not really as hard as you think, I do get breaks sometimes, and I want to spend time with you before…” You trail off, not wanting to say the word that’s on everyone’s lips, not wanting her to think that death is possible. “Look,” you say, edging towards what you hope is the right exit. “I can quit the case, if you want me to. That way I’ll be able to help out more. I mean, Yukie is really busy, she’s got two babies to look after, and I’m sure Akiko has a lot of stuff to prepare for the courses she’s teaching, and Azami’s too young to always be responsible for Seiha and Midori, so…I could quit the case. If I just worked as a regular cop, I’d have a lot more time off.” And oh, it kills you to suggest this. You had thought before that it would be okay, that you couldn’t work with the chief locked up like that anyway. You had thought that it would be too painful if L turned out to be right about Light, and that he was a jerk and you just plain didn’t need that job. But suggesting it makes your stomach squirm, and it makes your mother’s knit in annoyance.
“Well that would be stupid,” she says, sitting upright, coughs spilling out of her like water. “Akiko likes taking care of me. I don’t want to limit her opportunities to dress up like a sexy nurse. And we’re paying Azami, so this is a pretty sweet deal for her. As for Yukie, yes, maybe she could use a break once in a while. Which you’re giving her. There wouldn’t be enough for you to do around here if you quit the case, and quitting means going back to your old salary, right? I don’t want you losing your apartment and having to come live with me again, I have enough going on right now. I was actually going to ask you for some money to pay for my cable bill.”
And oh, you try not to look too upset by this. Knowing all you’re good for is your money stings, but you know your mother doesn’t mean to hurt you, that you shouldn’t let your childish feelings show. But she drags a hand through her nearly-gone hair, says, “oh for Christ’s sake Touta. Look, do you think I want to die knowing you quit the Kira case because of me? Do you think I don’t know what a fucking monster Kira is? My brother spent four years in juvenile hall if you remember, and the only reason he isn’t in jail right now is because he hasn’t been caught. I sure as hell don’t want Kira killing Shinobu, or anybody else for that matter. He’s the one who’s a cancer, even more so than my tumors. You know, I think I’m going to name my cancer Kira.” She stops, coughs again and says, “anyway, I’m not going to die. Not without a big fucking fight. I’m going to get better before you guys take Kira down, and then we’ll have a big fucking party in honor of both of us taking down our respective Kiras. We’ll have terrible techno music, and sake from a vending machine, and chips that taste like cardboard, and it’ll be…” She trails off. Too breathless to talk anymore.
You try to believe in your mother’s vision of the future. Park your car in near the hospital as yet another step towards achieving it. A movie would work this way, and dear God you hope your life will do the same.