The Memory Between Us

Chapter 4: The Name Nobody Uses

Neither of them moved for a while.

The wind kept coming off the water in slow, even pushes, and below them the tide kept climbing the old aquarium's foundation stone by stone, and Airi found that she didn't actually mind the silence. It wasn't the awkward kind. It was the kind that happened when two people were both looking at the same thing and didn't need to narrate it to each other.

Eventually Haruto sat down on the low wooden railing that marked the edge of the lookout, elbows on his knees, and Airi sat down beside him, leaving a careful, deliberate gap between them that felt less like distance and more like punctuation.

"Can I ask about Yuki now," she said. "Or is that also a sit-down, take-your-time kind of answer?"

"That one I can actually answer. Some of it,

anyway." He picked at a splinter of wood on the railing, not quite meeting her eyes. "She was a few years older than us. Lived a couple streets over from the house you were staying in. I don't think you two were close, exactly. You were eleven, she was like fourteen, that's a big gap at that age. But she used to look out for us sometimes. Neighborhood-older-kid stuff. Make sure we didn't do anything too stupid."

"Did it work?"

"Not really." A ghost of a smile. "We did plenty of stupid stuff. She just yelled at us afterward instead of before."

Airi almost laughed, and then thought about the photograph again: Yuki standing near the chained doorway, not looking at the camera, her expression caught in something that didn't look like ordinary teenage boredom.

"Why was she at the aquarium in that photo?"

The almost-smile faded. Haruto was quiet long enough that Airi started to think she'd asked the wrong question again, the kind that made him retreat back behind that's a longer story.

But he surprised her.

"Because we used to go there," he said. "Not inside. The doors have been chained since before we were born, there's no getting in, believe me, we tried. But there was this spot around the side, where the fence had rusted through, and you could sit right up against the building and watch the water. It felt like being somewhere you weren't supposed to be, which when you're eleven is basically the whole appeal."

"So it was just a hangout spot."

"Mostly. Yuki would come find us there sometimes, when we didn't come home for dinner on time. She knew that's where we'd be." He turned the splinter of wood over in his fingers. "The building has a reputation, if you ask people our parents' age. Some story about it closing suddenly, decades ago, before either of our families were even here. Kids used to tell each other it was haunted. Sota still won't go near it after dark, and he'll deny that if you ask him."

"Is it?"

"Haunted? No." He said it plainly, without performance, which Airi appreciated. "It's just old and falling apart and closed for boring reasons, probably insurance or money, like most abandoned buildings. But it's the kind of place that gets a story attached to it because nobody bothered to explain the real one, and an empty explanation makes people invent a better one."

Airi turned that thought over for a second, aware it applied to more than the building.

"That's kind of what happened with me too, isn't it," she said. "Nobody explained the real reason I left. So you spent six years inventing one."

Haruto didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost some of its ease.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess it is."

They walked back down the path as the light started going gold and low, the way it did in the late photographs from her mother's box, and Airi found herself watching the angle of it against the pine trunks and thinking, unbidden, I know this light. Not the memory of a specific day. Just the light itself, familiar in a way she had no right to feel familiar with anything in this town.

"You okay?" Haruto asked. He'd noticed her go quiet.

"Yeah. Just... this is going to sound strange."

"Try me. I've had a strange week.

"

"The light right now. Coming through the trees like this. It feels like something I've seen before. Not just generally, specifically. Like there's a memory attached to it, except when I try to actually look at the memory, there's nothing there. Just the feeling."

Haruto stopped walking.

"What?" Airi said, stopping too.

"Nothing bad." He was watching her carefully, in a way that made her feel less like a math problem this time and more like something he was trying not to disturb. "It's just, we used to walk down this exact path around this time of day. After the aquarium, before dinner. I didn't think you'd... I didn't expect that to still be in there. Even a little.

"

"So it's real? The memory, or whatever it is?"

"I don't know if it's a real memory or your brain filling in a gap because I told you about the aquarium ten minutes ago," he said honestly. "I'm not going to pretend I know how memory works. But for what it's worth, the light does look like this most evenings. It's not nothing that it stuck with you."

Airi wanted it to be more than that. She wanted the feeling in her chest to resolve into something specific, a sentence, an image, anything with edges, but it stayed exactly what it was: an ache, gold-colored, with no shape.

"Can I ask you something else," she said, as they started walking again. "Off the aquarium topic."

"Sure."

"What was I actually like? Not the tomato thing. I mean, what kind of eleven-year-old was I?"

Haruto seemed to genuinely think about it, which she appreciated more than an easy answer would have.

"Loud, actually," he said. "Which is going to sound wrong, because you're pretty quiet now. But you used to talk constantly. You had this thing where you'd narrate whatever you were doing, like a running commentary, mostly to yourself. And you were fearless about weird stuff. You'd pick up bugs other kids screamed about, you'd walk out further into the water than I would, but you were terrified of really ordinary things. Thunderstorms. The dark hallway in your house. Being embarrassed in front of adults."

"That's oddly specific for something that happened six years ago."

"I told you. Oddly specific memory." He glanced at her sideways. "You want to know the honest thing?"

"Go on."

"Some of it matches you now. The bug thing, probably not, sorry, but the talking-to-yourself thing, kind of, except now you do it in your head instead of out loud, I think. I can tell because sometimes you get this look, mid-conversation, like you're having a whole separate argument that nobody else is invited to."

Airi felt her face warm, caught out by something she hadn't realized was visible.

"That's alarmingly accurate," she admitted.

"Some of it doesn't match at all, though," Haruto went on, "and that's, that part's been weird for me. Figuring out that you're not just eleven-year-old Airi with six extra years added on. You're an actual different person now. Which sounds obvious when I say it out loud, but it's taken me literally this whole week to actually get it."

"Is that bad? That I'm different?"

"No." He said it fast enough that it sounded true rather than polite. "It's just, I think I spent six years missing a version of you that doesn't exist anymore, instead of ever getting the chance to meet the version that does. I'm trying to catch up."

Airi didn't have a response for that. It sat in her chest, warm and slightly too large, next to the unresolved ache from the light in the trees, and for once she didn't feel the need to fill the silence with a joke.

Mei caught her at the school gate the next morning, immediately suspicious.

"You look different," Mei said, squinting at her like she was reading fine print.

"I look exactly the same."

"No, you've got a face. The thinking-about-a-boy face. I know this face, I invented this face."

"I do not have a face."

"You have the face." Mei fell into step beside her, entirely unbothered by Airi's denial. "Did something happen with Haruto? Please say something happened. My life is boring and I need content."

"Nothing happened," Airi said, which was mostly true, depending on how narrowly you defined happened. "We talked. About the old aquarium. And someone named Yuki."

"Moriyama Yuki?" Mei's eyebrows went up. "Wait, you know Yuki?"

Airi stopped walking. "You know her?"

"Everyone kind of knows her, she's a legend around here. She went to Kaifu High a few years ahead of us, super smart, got some scholarship and moved for university. My cousin was in her class, said she was intense but nice." Mei shrugged. "Why, is she connected to the whole mystery thing?"

"Maybe. I don't actually know yet." Airi hesitated, then added, mostly to herself: "She's in a photo from when I was a kid. Standing near the old aquarium."

Mei's teasing expression shifted, just slightly, into something more genuinely curious. "Huh. Small town, I guess. Everyone's tangled up in everyone else's stuff eventually."

They kept walking. Airi thought about a fourteen-year-old girl who'd apparently been smart enough to leave this town behind entirely, and wondered what she'd been doing standing near a locked door with a strange, unreadable expression on her face, in a photograph nobody in Airi's family had ever wanted to talk about.

She almost didn't check the box again that night. She told herself she'd gotten what she needed from it: the photograph, Yuki's name, the aquarium. But something about Mei's offhand comment kept nagging at her, and after dinner, with Kaito's music leaking faintly through the wall and her mother still not home from her shift, Airi pulled the box back out and went through it more carefully this time. Not just glancing. Reading the backs. Checking the edges. Looking for anything she'd skimmed past the first time.

She found it near the very bottom, beneath a stack of photos from a New Year's trip she did remember: a single folded piece of notebook paper, soft at the creases from being folded and unfolded many times, tucked between two photographs like a bookmark someone had forgotten to remove.

She unfolded it carefully

.

It wasn't a letter, exactly. No greeting, no signature, just a few lines of round, childish handwriting that she recognized, with a small jolt, as unmistakably her own.

if we ever have to leave I want you to have this so you don't forget me even if I forget you first

Below it, in different handwriting, smaller, neater, a boy's careful print, someone had written a single line back:

you wont forget. I wont let you.

Airi sat very still, the paper trembling slightly in her hands, not from the evening breeze coming through her half-open window but from something else entirely: the strange, vertiginous feeling of holding proof that some younger version of herself had already known, somehow, exactly what was coming.

I want you to have this so you don't forget me even if I forget you first.

She hadn't just forgotten. Some part of her, six years ago, had been afraid this would happen.

She read the two lines again, and then a third time, and somewhere underneath the fear was a colder, sharper question that she couldn't shake loose:

If Haruto had written you won't forget, I won't let you, if he'd promised her that, meant it enough to write it down,

then why had he let her forget anyway?