South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,12

the kitchen to make sure she got out the front gate okay. A second later, my aunt came out of the bathroom. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Five minutes afterward, Izumi called me. Telling my aunt I’d be back in fifteen minutes, I went out. Izumi was standing in front of the pay phone.

“I hate this,” she said before I could get out a word. “I don’t ever want to do this again.”

I couldn’t blame her for being angry and upset. I led her to the park near the station and sat her down on a bench. And gently held her hand. Over her red sweater she had on a beige coat. I fondly recalled what lay beneath.

“But today was beautiful. I mean until my aunt showed up. Don’t you think so?” I asked.

“Of course I enjoyed it. Every time I’m with you I have a wonderful time. But every time, afterward, I get confused.”

“About what?”

“The future. After I graduate from high school you’ll go to college in Tokyo, and I’ll stay here. What’s going to happen to us?”

I’d already decided to go to a college in Tokyo after I left high school. I was dying to get out of my hometown, to live on my own away from my parents. My GPA wasn’t that great, but in the subjects I did like I made pretty good grades without cracking a book, so getting into a private college would be no big deal, seeing as how their exams covered only a couple of subjects. But there was no way Izumi would be joining me in Tokyo. Her parents wanted to keep her close at hand, and she wasn’t exactly the rebellious type. So she wanted me to stay put. We have a good college here, she argued. Why do you have to go all the way to Tokyo? If I promised not to go to Tokyo, I’m sure she would have slept with me.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going off to a foreign country. It’s only three hours away. And college vacations are long, so three or four months of the year I’ll be here.” I’d explained it to her a dozen times.

“But if you leave here you’ll forget all about me. And you’ll find another girlfriend,” she said. I’d heard these lines at least a dozen times too.

I told her that wouldn’t happen. I like you a lot, I said, so how can I forget you that easily? But I wasn’t so sure. A simple change of scenery can bring about powerful shifts in the flow of time and emotions: exactly what had happened to Shimamoto and me. We might have been very close, but moving down the road a couple of miles was all it took for us to go our separate ways. I liked her a lot and she told me to come see her. But in the end I stopped going.

“There’s one thing I just can’t understand,” Izumi said. “You say you like me. And you want to take care of me. But sometimes I can’t figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

Izumi took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and wiped away her tears. With a start, I realized she’d been crying for some time. I had no idea what to say, so I sat waiting for her to continue.

“You prefer to think things over all by yourself, and you don’t like people peeking inside your head. Maybe that’s because you’re an only child. You’re used to thinking and acting alone. You figure that as long as you understand something, that’s enough.” She shook her head. “And that makes me afraid. I feel abandoned.”

Only child. I hadn’t heard those words in a long while. In elementary school the words had hurt me. But Izumi was using them in a different sense. Her “only child” didn’t mean a pampered, spoiled kid but spoke to my isolated ego, which kept the world at arm’s length. She wasn’t blaming me. The situation just made her very sad.

“I can’t tell you how happy I was when we held each other. It gave me hope, and I thought, who knows, maybe everything will work out,” she said as we bade each other goodbye. “But life isn’t that easy, is it.”

On the way back from the station, I mulled over what she’d said. It made sense. I wasn’t used to opening up to others. She was opening up to me, but I couldn’t do the same. I