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CHAPTER SEVEN: DECEMBER (FAMILY AND FUSHIMI INARI TAISHA)

“Na-chan…” 

Ranma savoured the sight of her beautiful smiling face looking back at him. He reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers against the delicate, porcelain-smooth skin of her cheek.

They were lying together on a towel laid out over the warm sand. The sky above was clear and blue. The fresh salty scent of a gentle ocean breeze filled the air around them. The depth of his feelings seeing her then in that moment, knowing that she was his wife, was more than he could express with words.

“I love you, Ranma,” she whispered as tears suddenly appeared in her eyes. 

“Na-chan?  What’s wrong?” he asked, worriedly reaching for her hand.

She laughed as she drew his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers. “Nothing, Ranma. Nothing at all. You still haven’t learned. For a woman, just because there are tears in her eyes doesn’t automatically mean that something is wrong. For the first time in my life, I think I’m truly happy….”

# # # # #

Ranma awoke to the scents of baking dough and roasted coffee.

He had been dreaming again of the short road trip that they had taken to the ocean at the end of the summer. It was the best that they could come up with for some sort of a honeymoon given the circumstances. He didn’t mind though. He loved that memory and would not have traded it for anything in the world. 

Reaching to his right in the darkness, his suspicions were confirmed by the empty bed space next to him. He grabbed his phone off the wireless charging pad on the nightstand and read the time: 0614. 

Still groggy but curious enough to get himself to move, he stumbled out of the bedroom and slowly made his way toward the kitchen. As he passed through the den, he noted that the lights on the fiber optic mini tree were on and that the shades over the windows were already drawn. The harbor outside was still calm and silent under a blanket of predawn darkness. In the faint glow given off by street and waterfront lights, he could see that the rooftops and the ground outside were covered with a light dusting of fresh overnight snow.

Na-chan was standing at work behind the island bar in her blue cotton pyjamas and satin pink robe. Two mugs were set out on the stone countertop in front of her. Her brows were knit in concentration as she carefully poured steamed milk into one of the mugs.

Social distancing and the onset of cooler weather had inspired Nabiki to try her hand as an amateur home barista lately. Ranma, being the beneficiary of her experiments, was more than willing to indulge his wife and offer constructive criticism. She had remarked at the outset of her endeavour that she was giving her husband an excellent opportunity to practice not putting his foot in his mouth.   

“Merry Christmas, Ranma,” she said with a bright smile once she was done. She slid the mug she had just finished working on toward him.

“Merry Christmas, Na-chan,” he answered as he admired her latte art. She had become quite good. He was impressed by the intricate details of the snowflake staring back at him. “Flat white?” he asked.

She rewarded him with one of her trademark smirks for even bothering to ask. His drink would have the usual 2 shots of dark roast espresso. She used to laugh at him for being so indelicate and undiscerning in his tastes for coffee. Her drinks, however, were made from a decaf roast these days, leaving her little latitude to jibe at him.   

“I know it’s good, and you’re welcome,” she said as she turned toward the oven without bothering to finish watching him take up his cup. She donned a pair of oven mitts and drew out a baking sheet on which sat what appeared to be an intricately braided loaf of bread. He had not seen anything quite like it before.

“The real question that will determine how the rest of your day unfolds, Doctor Saotome, is what you think and say about this.” She placed the baking sheet on a waiting titanium ribbed trivet in front of him.

Ranma dropped to eye level with the counter to study her creation. The smell of it was fantastic. He tried to count how many strands of dough she must have braided to come up with the final ornate-looking product, but could not come to a definite conclusion. “What is it?” he eventually asked. 

“A six-braid challah,” she said evenly. Her characteristically soul-piercing eyes were studying him now. 

He was even more intrigued by her pronouncement. He knew about challah rolls, which he actually recalled liking for their rich, yeasty flavour and texture. He did not know though that they could also be presented as braided loaves.  And six braids…?!  “Wow!  How long have ya been up working on this?”

“Long enough. Do you plan on trying it or not?” she groused impatiently.  

The texture and taste of the fresh baked bread in his mouth were incredible. Her creation was soft with a delicate hint of sweetness at the end. He felt he was rolling the very essence of their happiness in his mouth.

A little over half the loaf had already gone down his throat when he finally realised that he still owed her a critique. As he glanced up, though, he was relieved to see Nabiki again smiling back at him.

Her eyes, however, seemed to be focused on something elsewhere. He had seen that look before. 

“Na-chan?”   

She sighed wistfully as his voice seemed to draw her back to the present. “I was just remembering the first time I asked if you would be my friend.”

He also remembered. It had been exactly a year ago. That was the day after he had been extubated and downgraded out of the Unit to Nelson 6, one of the general medicine wards. The rooftops and the ground outside had been covered with a light dusting of fresh overnight snow then too.
 
# # # # #

Ranma was surprised to see Nabiki there too when he woke up that morning. He fumbled around for the bed remote, used it to tilt himself upright and looked around. He was still too weak to sit himself up on his own.

She was huddled in a chair tucked into the shadows in the far corner by the window. A hospital-issue blanket was draped over the white coat hanging off her shoulders. Underneath, she had on a navy cardigan with gold buttons over a two-part fit-and-flare midi dress. Hints of a crème-colored top peaked out between the undone buttons of her sweater. The bottom of the dress was a heavy heather-grey A-line skirt. Black tights and a pair of black leather heels completed her ensemble.

He recalled how unexpectedly beautiful she had seemed in the early winter morning light to his tired eyes. She appeared ethereal like an angel staring back at him from the shadows. He was not even sure at first if she was really there.  

“Hello…?” he rasped uncertainly as his eyes worked to adjust to the light. His voice was still weak and hoarse from the tube that had been in his throat until just a few days ago.

“Merry Christmas, Saotome,” she answered him warmly, proving that she really was there. Her face was alight with a kind-appearing smile. 

“Oh. Good morning. Rounding early today?” he asked, eyeing her coat.

“I’m not on,” she replied in Japanese.

He remembered now. She had told him also the day before that her rotation month was over and that she was signing off the Service. Telling the days apart in a place like the hospital was difficult though. That and he had quite a bit to process still on his very heavy plate.

Her heels clicked against the engineered wood floor as she approached him. She picked up the navy-blue hospital issue carafe off of the overbed table, shaking the vessel gently to confirm that it still contained water before handing it to him.

He tried to take the carafe from her, but even with two hands, it was still heavy for him.  His grip was unsteady, and his hands began to shake from the strain.

“Here,” she said as she wrapped her own hands around his to steady them. She helped him to raise the carafe and position the plastic straw tip in his mouth.

He drank eagerly and mumbled his appreciation after he had finished. He had not known that it was possible to be so thirsty. He was, however, unable to look up and meet her eyes.

“Don’t be upset,” she said, reading his thoughts. “It’s par for the course after all you’ve been through. This is not something you should be ashamed of.”

“Ya look nice today,” he said, aiming his gaze down at her dress. He was trying to change the subject. He still believed back then that he had to do that kind of thing around her.

“And it’s good to hear your voice again,” she said kindly.

An awkward, expectant silence fell over the room after. He understood. They were each waiting for the other person to make the next move.  “If you’re not here to round, then what brings ya by?” he asked.

Her eyes suddenly seemed to focus on something elsewhere and far away. He was surprised by how small, shy, and vulnerable — how human — she seemed. “Nabiki…?”

“It’s Christmas, Ranma,” she eventually said. “I know we have a pretty complex history. Frankly it’s really f-#ked up, but I just thought that, well, maybe we could be friends – actual friends.”

# # # # #

“We were always friends, Na-chan.” 

Images of their childhood flashed in his mind. The final one, of course, was that of her in her royal blue kimono and red obi as she folded her arms around him and wept with him that final night in the dojo. He kissed the top of his wife’s head and inhaled the reassuring peach blossom scent of her hair.

“I’m sorry there was a time when ya weren’t sure if we were friends. Even when ya used to tease me and sell pictures of Ranko to all the boys, I still always thought we were.” He deliberately punctuated his words with a kind smile to let her know he meant what he said. 

“I didn’t know,” she admitted quietly. “But I was so happy when you said this to me too last Christmas. I know I told you once before that I used to not be interested in being a likeable person. That’s not true. I just got tired of being hurt by people not liking me, and I was still afraid back then that you’d change your mind too as you came to know me. Believing that people can find something in me to like has always been hard for me.”

“Why do ya say that, Na-chan? People do like you. Alot of people in fact.”

She shook her head and regarded him with a wry smile.“Not me. Not Nabiki. They like Kiki. Everyone loves Kiki. Even I do. The truth though is that Kiki is just a beautiful, elegant illusion that I created to bury all of my loneliness and my old wish that I told you about.”

He remembered. She was referring again to the memory she described as where her innocence had ended. She had shared it with him on the cool, wet Spring night when she said for the first time that she loved him too.

“I used to hate Christmas because I would always just end up being reminded of how lonely I was. I was always alone until you came back into my life. Very few people really know me or see me for who I am. Maybe it’s my fault — I don’t know anymore — but I really don’t have a good track record of being liked by people who actually know me.”

“Na-chan….” he whispered soothingly as he coaxed her to lean back against him. “I like you. I like you very much,” he assured her.

“You’re the only one left who calls me ‘Nabiki’ and still likes me,” she told him as she rubbed in annoyance at her eyes. “That’s why I’m so happy that you’re here. Even though the world around us is so crazy and f-#ked up – even though we’ve had our fair share of hurt and heartache together –  the year that you’ve just given me has been the most full and happy one of my entire life. So seeing you here now in this kitchen eating my bread and drinking my flat white, I find myself thinking for the first time that maybe I don’t need to go back to that moment at Fushimi Inari Taisha. Not anymore.”

Ranma again could see the now familiar shadows of old ghosts in Nabiki’s haunted eyes. He wondered sadly and not for the first time about what exactly had happened to her that motivated such convictions. He had not pushed her for an answer. Instead, he was waiting respectfully for the day when she felt ready to open this part of herself up to him.

Today seemed like it would be that day. In his now familiar way between them when they were alone, he reached up and brushed her cheek with his fingers, trying to both reassure and encourage her. She answered by taking his hand in her own and sliding her cheek down his fingers into the cup of his palm.  

After a long moment, she said “Other than you, Mum and Akane are the only ones I think who ever liked me for who I really am. You already know about Daddy.”

The question his wife now led him to ask shocked him. Strange possibilities suddenly swirled in his mind around his sister-in-law’s usual visage of serene aloofness. “Kasumi…?” he ventured.

Nabiki’s frame shuddered in his arms, confirming for him that he had asked the right question. A sad, weary sigh escaped from her as she searched for words. “It’s complex, but it’s probably time I told you anyway. We love each other as sisters of course. We really don’t have much of achoice being as we are all that’s left of this Tendou family. Beyond that though, well, she and Daddy are fundamentally the same in their values, and we really live in very different worlds.”

Nabiki had the misfortune of being born as Malcolm in the middle. She was naughty if she was being playful, a nuisance if she had needs, ungrateful and selfish when she finally concluded that being her own person had been the only way for her to survive.

“I was made to feel like an inconvenient circumstance, a blight in a larger picture of otherwise spotlessly clean perfection,” Nabiki told him. “Growing up, I was never entitled to any say about my role in that picture. Kasumi was always obsessed with her own definitions of order, neatness, and cleanliness.”

The worst part though was that Kasumi’s disapproval of Nabiki was forever unspoken, though it was always there lurking just under the surface of her angelic façade. Kasumi got away with so much because of how convincing her disarming mask of innocence was. She was too skilled for even Nabiki to draw out into the open. Even Nabiki at times was compelled to doubt what she alone knew she felt and saw.

The secret, Nabiki was sure, was that Kasumi quietly felt that they all owed her for all that she had sacrificed in dedicating what remained of her childhood to try and fill the role vacated by their mother’s passing. Humility and gratitude – even to the point of unjustified bowing and grovelling at times – were always the highest virtues in Kasumi’s worldview. Guilt, shame, and the power of suggestion were her weapons of choice, and she was an unequalled master in the art of wielding them to devastating effect. 

“What a bad person Nabiki is sometimes,” Kasumi would often say to their father when no one thought Nabiki was around. Kasumi was referring to how Nabiki used to love teasing Akane when they were growing up. Borrowing her clothes without asking and provoking a reaction out of Akane whenever the opportunity arose had been some of Nabiki’s most beloved pastimes back then.

“Warui hito,” were Kasumi's exact words. They were so openly ugly and spiteful, acondemnation out of proportion to the crime of merely just wanting to be a girl who played with her younger sister from time to time. Nabiki had not been surprised, but she was still very much hurt all the same. Both Daddy and Kasumi always assumed that Nabiki was in the wrong and that Akane, being the victimised baby, had to be protected at all costs.

For Nabiki though, what had been even more painful about their views of her was the fact that nothing could have been farther from the truth about the relationship she had with Akane.  Away from the assuming ears and prejudging eyes, they were not just sisters, but also truly the very best of friends.

In the days before Ranma came into their lives, she and Akane were closeted addicts together of shoujo manga romance novels, sappy pop songs about all flavors and forms of love, and the sweetness of ice cream, cookies, and chocolate. They happily chattered and tittered between themselves with excessive effeminate embellishments of "atashi"s and"chodai"s and sentences punctuated with "wa yo"s and"kashira"s.

In the summers, they would sit together in her room for hours listening to the latest J-Pop hits while reading and dreaming secretly of princely boys who would one day come and sweep each of them off their feet. They would be whisked away together to far off places that were bigger, brighter, and better than anything they had ever known.

In that other world, the cold, impersonal gray steel and concrete and the stifling summer heat of Tokyo would be replaced by gardens, palatial mansions, and manors rendered in bold hues of bright colors illuminated by brilliant sunlight under cool, endless blue skies. There would be no immature, misogynistic daydreamers like Tatewaki Kunou and Hikaru Gosunkugi to harass them or dismiss them as "just some girls". There the boys would cherish them as if they were each princesses in their own right. They each could be truly, inside and out. the most beautiful and precious people on the entire Earth.

In that other world, they would still have been three daughters who had their mother. Their father would have been able to still smile, joke, laugh, and play with them and would not have become such a pitiable, helpless, heartbroken middle-aged invalid of a widower. Kasumi could have been a girl just like them with whom they would be able to go shopping, have ice cream, and pine for unattainable romantic ideals.

Most of all, Nabiki cherished Akane for being the one person in the world who had ever cared enough to seek out and touch the secret behind the frigid Ice Queen mask that she had worn back then. Akane was the only one who could know how hot and full of feelings she actually was and always had been on the inside, how complete of a lie the entire frosty, apathetic persona that her angry and confused teenage self had displayed to the rest of the world had been. Nabiki truly had no ill will toward anyone or anything, but she had needed to create that persona to hide how much she had despised herself for being so little, weak, and unhelpful – how inconsequential she had been– when their mother left.

Sifting through these tortured memories etched terrible lines of anguish on his wife’s beautiful face. The sight made his chest ache. “Na-Chan, we can stop — “

“No, Ranma,” she said quietly. Her voice though was edged with an unmistakably hard and steely finality as she cut him off. She embraced him and placed her head against his chest. “Please let me tell you my story. I’d like you to do this because you love me. I need you. I don’t think I could make peace with my past without you. You’re the only person in the world who I think can understand, and it’s only because you’re here now that I finally can believe that I may even find that peace.”

“Okay,” he said. He kissed her on the forehead and gave her hand areassuring squeeze.

Nabiki answered him with a teary-eyed smile filled with her unspoken appreciation before continuing. She had been desperate to do something –anything – to preserve her crumbling sanity. “I was the one with Mum when she died,” she confessed. “I think that was the secret root of all of the unspoken resentment she had for me.”

Nabiki had been home alone with her mother when it happened. Her mother had been tired that day. There were more and more of those days toward the end. Nabiki had offered to stay home with her mother while their father had taken Kasumi and Akane out to the grocery store. 

“We were in my room talking, and she was doing my hair,” Nabiki remembered. “You may not know, but there was a time when I had hair that was even longer than Akane’s when you first came.”

Ranma smiled as he tried to imagine Na-chan like that. He laughed at the image that came to his mind’s eye.

Na-chan laughed too despite herself. “It’s true.”

“I’d like to see a picture of that one day.”

She suddenly grew quiet and still. “You can’t,” she mumbled after amoment. “I… I destroyed them all.”

“Na-chan…?”   

“I can still feel the touch of her hands running through my hair and pulling at it.  I remember her laughing at something that I said one moment, and then, just like that, the next moment was just… just silence.”

Her eyes were wide and haunted as she told Ranma about how she could never have imagined that such a terrible, deafening silence could exist. It was the worst sound that Nabiki had ever known. When Nabiki turned to look behind her, she found her mother lying absolutely still on the bed, her eyes wide open, but empty and unseeing.

“Kaachan….  Kaachan!” she remembered herself helplessly crying over and over as she desperately climbed up on the bed and tried to shake her mother back to life. Bright red blood suddenly filled in the whites of her mother’s eyes. Then the body began to turn cool and rigid. 

“That was the first time I ever saw Death,” she told her husband in the present. “It was also the first time I felt what loneliness truly was, when Idiscovered what it was like to know that I was inconsequential. When Kasumi and the rest of them came home, she…. She looked at me and asked why I hadn’t done anything, why I hadn’t even called 1-1-9. I was so hurt and angry. Daddy had to remind Kasumi that calling 1-1-9 would’ve been against Mum’s wishes, that this was what that word ‘hospice’ meant.”

Nabiki was cold and shaking now as Ranma folded her tightly in his arms. He imagined himself thawing her with the warmth of his good intentions and loving wishes for her. She didn’t deserve what happened. He suddenly understood. “That’s why you cut your hair, isn’t it. It’s why you’ve always kept it short.”

The memory of his mother’s kanzashi in Na-chan’s hair as she said her wedding vows came rushing up now before his mind’s eye. It came with the terrible weight of an awesome revelation that shook him to the very essence of his bones. With that one simple gesture, Na-chan had been signalling how completely she was giving over her whole heart and being to him, expressing her complete devotion and her faith in their marriage. He was incredibly humbled. He was also, irrational as the feeling was, ashamed that he had not truly understood until now.

What it must have taken for Na-chan to even say that she would grow her hair out long enough to wear my mother’s kanzashi at our wedding….

Nabiki nodded her head against his chest, confirming everything.

Years later when she had already been in medical school, Nabiki had obtained her mother’s medical records to try to understand what had happened. Kimiko Tendou had died from a spontaneous and catastrophic intracranial hemorrhage. In short, Nabiki’s mother had spontaneously bled to death within her own skull. Everything had been over within seconds. There truly had been nothing that anyone could have done.

The event had almost certainly been precipitated by critical thrombocytopenia in the setting of a blast crisis from transformed chronic myelogenous leukemia. Tragically, this had been almost 10 years before rationally designed small molecule miracles like imatinib mesylate had been available. Her mother’s road then had truly been one leading to nowhere from the very beginning. Nowadays people lived for decades with this cancer in virtually indefinite remission. 

“It still hurts, doesn’t it,” he said as he gently stroked her hair. He wished that there was more that he could do to soothe her, even to take away what he could of her pain. “Kasumi never told ya that she was sorry either, right? She just did that thing instead where she tries to be extra nice to ya for a while, didn’t she.” 

Nabiki nodded. “Kasumi never apologises.”

“Ya hate her, but ya also feel guilty about that, don’t you. She put that guilt in your head as she raised ya and Akane. It kept ya in line.”

Na-Chan smiled despite herself as a sudden knowing look passed silently between them. She had been right about him. He understood. That had been the way that he too had been raised by the abusive old man. Aside from Martial Arts and the obsession with ridding himself of his curse, guilt and obedience had been the pillars that had underpinned his entire upbringing too. 

“I was angry with her for a very, very long time, yes,” she admitted.

“Not anymore?” He was surprised. 

She shook her head. “That ended a long time ago.”

“When was that?”

Nabiki lifted her head up and fixed his eyes with her own, hesitating as if searching for something. After a moment, he realised too what it was, the only thing that it could have been. She was asking him for his permission.

“It’s okay, Na-chan. You can say it,” he said. The irony was not lost on him that Na-chan herself and her presence in his life now was the very reason that it was okay for him to hear it said.

She nodded and kissed him gently on the cheek before saying softly in his ear, “It was when we both realised that Akane was also gone and that there were just the two of us left.”

Again, he remembered his mother’s kanzashi, but now with it also how Kasumi’s intervention had been what had drawn Nabiki to come back to Japan to meet his mother that night in Aichi-ken. It was like that moment with puzzles when all of the pieces suddenly make sense and satisfyingly click into place.“She understood in her own way why ya had to leave, didn’t she. Ya knew when she tried to mediate between ya and your father. Because of that, ya even kinda forgave her, didn’t ya.”

“Yes,” Nabiki admitted. “I know that deep down I’m still selfish and ungrateful somehow in her eyes, but the anger between us suddenly just felt like such a pointless waste. After that, well, I was just very lonely. Ithought my anger – with her, with Daddy, with myself –  was what was driving me to want to go back to that moment at Fushimi Inari Taisha, but it wasn’t. It was the loneliness. That’s what it was really all about in the end – what it had always been about – that kept me wanting to go back, because that was the last time when I truly felt like we were all with one another and that I was an unreservedly welcome part of a family.”

“I see,” Ranma said after a moment, and he truly did see for the very first time as he studied his wife. Her hands were folded delicately over her midsection now as she looked up at him. Soon she would be truly showing.“That’s why ya don’t have to go back any more to Fushimi Inari Taisha. You’ve already found your way back.”

She nodded through tears that were now clearly ones of joy. “I love you, Ranma….”

You’re the only person in the world who I think can understand, and it’s only because you’re here now that I finally can believe that I may even find that peace….

“I love you too, Na-chan.” 

More than I can ever tell you with words….

“Merry Christmas,” he whispered as he drew in to place a kiss on her lips. By now, it was mid-morning. Her beautiful face was delicately framed yet again in the glow of sunlight.

Her hand was suddenly between them though, stopping him midway.

“Uh, Ranma….”

“Yes, Na-chan?”

“Can you brush your teeth first? Your breath stinks of coffee.”