LOST Chapter 22: The Sleepwalker's Mother

Read chapter 22 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

She made curry on Thursday. This is relevant because curry is the meal she makes when she is in a particular mood, which I would not be able to describe precisely except that it involves her being quieter than usual in the afternoon and moving through the kitchen with the deliberate attention of someone who is thinking about something while also making curry, and I have learned over seventeen years to read this mood as the mood that precedes her saying something she has been waiting to find the right moment for. I had been watching for the right moment for two weeks. Since the evening at the guesthouse, since the kitchen table and the tea and Sai explaining the shape of the thing I had been living inside without a framework for it, I had been looking at her across the dinner table and wondering when and how and whether and every time I got close to a formulation of how the conversation might begin I ran into the same problem, which was that the conversation I needed to have with her required her to already know certain things, and the things she needed to know were things I had agreed not to share without first talking to Sai and Hana, and that conversation had not yet happened. So I had been waiting. The curry was her timing, not mine. We ate for a while without talking, which was normal. Our dinners are often like this, comfortable in the silence, the television off because she likes the quiet of the end of the day, the particular sounds of the building around us and the harbor outside the window and the food, which was good, which is always good, she has been making this curry since before I was born and it has not changed. She said: I've been having a dream. I said: what kind of dream. She said: a recurring one. It keeps coming back. I've had it three or four times now, I've lost count. The same dream each time. I set my chopsticks down. Not deliberately, the way you set something down when you are preparing for something, but the chopsticks found the edge of the bowl and rested there and I left them. She was looking at the table, not at me, which is what she does when she is saying something she has been composing for a while and needs to say it in the right order. She said: I'm in Misakiura. This version of it, mostly. But some things are wrong. Small things. I said: what kind of small things. She said: the shop on the corner of the harbor road. The one that sells the fishing gear. In the dream it's a different shop. A stationery shop, I think, or something like that, I can't quite see it clearly. And the stone at the top of the shrine steps is different, there's something there that isn't here, a marker of some kind. The sound in the room was the curry cooling in the bowls and the harbor outside the window and the blood in my ears, which is not a sound you normally hear but sometimes becomes audible. I said: what else. She said: the light is slightly wrong. Not darker or lighter. Different. Like the sun is at a different angle than it should be. And the smell of the sea is almost right and not quite. She paused. The dreams feel like memories rather than dreams. I'm in them the way you're in a memory, not watching but there. I'm going about an ordinary day in almost the right Misakiura and everything is slightly different and I don't question it in the dream, it's just how it is. I said: when do the dreams happen. Are they at night or. She said: always at night. I wake up from them and for a moment I'm confused about where I am. Not frightened. Just. It takes a second to locate myself. I looked at my bowl. The curry. The table we had eaten at my whole life. The window behind her with the harbor in it, the lights of it in the evening, ordinary. I looked at all of this and I thought about what Sai had said in the kitchen at the guesthouse: the worlds are layered, sharing the same geography, recognizable and wrong in specific ways. I thought about Riku's mother crossing, which was a sentence I had not formed before now, not