Chapter 41

Blink, blink. When she opened her eyes again, she was riding a swing while looking at a peaceful rural landscape.

It was only for a moment that she felt flustered at the unfamiliar scenery. Seeing a signpost for Rayburn, North Yorkshire, beyond the house fence, she felt relieved and kicked her feet to swing.

Creeck, creeck. The rhythmic friction of the iron made her tension melt away. The fog that had heavily clogged her mind lifted, and the traces of her memory became vivid.

She suddenly looked back. Behind her was a mansion covered in bright yellow roses. At the front gate beside the low fence, a Siberian Husky was wagging its tail.

The moment she saw the grey wolf-like dog, she broke into a bright smile. Then, making and unmaking her little hands into fists, she greeted it.

The scenery seen through a child’s eyes was as leisurely as a painting. In the distance were fields, and on the hill beside them, dozens of sheep were grazing.

When she took a deep breath, the smell of the forest mixed in with the smell of fertilizer. It was a rustic fragrance unique to the countryside. She leisurely savored that scent, which felt fragrant rather than offensive.

Feeling nature beneath the clouds leisurely swimming across the sky, she had the delusion that she might even be a god.

Because she had neither anything particular she needed to do nor anything she wanted to do, she just admired the scenery. The pitch-black sedan parked in front of the house felt out of place, but she figured a guest had just come by for a moment.

At that moment, footsteps sounding from behind her held out a blanket. Behind her stood a white woman with an urban image.

Realizing that she was her stepmother, Eila smiled brightly.

“Mom!”

“Eila, Eila. Aren’t you cold?”

Eila asked, draping the blanket her mother gave her over her shoulders.

“I’m fine, but whose car is that?”

For some reason, her mother hesitated to answer for a moment. But true to her usual self, she kindly answered Eila, who was curious about everything.

“It’s a guest’s car from London. They’re a shy guest, so it’s best not to approach them, but since they must be watching us, shall we say hello?”

A guest from London. A shy guest….

Eila was quite curious about the identity of this special guest whom she couldn’t normally see, but obediently she just waved toward the car as her mother told her to.

“Hello….”

It was right after that when seven-year-old Eila showed her curiosity.

“But why is the guest shy?”

Her mother answered, gently pushing the swing Eila was riding on.

“Because it’s a guest who likes Eila.”

“……”

“Don’t you also get shy in front of someone you like?”

So her mother explained that because the guest inside the car liked Eila, they were too shy to get out. Tilting her head in confusion, Eila guessed the identity of the guest.

If the guest liked Eila, it would have something to do with Eila. Furthermore, if it was a guest who liked her so much they couldn’t appear before her, it might be the person who gave birth to Eila.

“A guest….”

Adopted by white parents, Eila grew up strictly while receiving a moderate amount of attention from them. Though she had a sibling, he was an older brother who was twenty years older, so she didn’t feel any sibling affection, nor did she feel any tender love from her parents.

When she was teased for being an adoptee by her friends or faced racism, Eila’s parents didn’t comfort her hurt feelings; instead, they explained the reasons why she was bound to experience racism. Wanting warm hugs and comfort from her parents, Eila’s heart was always impoverished.

To fill that impoverished heart, Eila thought her real mother had appeared. A mother with warm skin and a nice scent…. Eila pictured an Asian woman who looked just like her in her mind.

The car stopped in front of the house for a few hours once every weekend, then left. Watching the car every week, Eila drew pictures of a woman on the sand.

On weekdays, she wore whatever clothes she grabbed from the closet, but on weekends she put on her prettiest clothes. A yellow dress, a yellow t-shirt, and a denim skirt. They were all clothes Eila liked.

The weekends she spent like that numbered a whopping ten. The person she believed would someday step out of the car didn’t show their face no matter how much she waited. One day she walked up to the sedan and peeked inside, but only her own face was reflected pitch-black, yielding no results.

As the season entered late spring, rose petals dropped one by one. Liking yellow roses, she gathered every single corpse of the roses that had burned through their beauty and died, burying them in the sand. In other words, the front yard with the swing was both a playground and a rose graveyard.

Today, too, she put the roses covering the yard into her pockets and began digging the sand.

At that moment, something extraordinary happened. The door of the sedan, which had blended into the scenery, opened as if by magic.

Eila stared at the back door of the sedan, holding her breath. However, what stepped out of it was not a beautiful Asian woman.

It was a white boy who looked to be around her age.

“……”

The boy had his hair swept to one side and styled with gel like an adult. The color of his hair was a bright ash gray, and the color of his pupils was mysterious, just like the husky raised in the yard.

Soon, Eila scanned the boy’s attire.

The boy was wearing a white shirt and a black jacket like an adult. His bottoms were shorts made of the same material as the jacket, and it looked unusual with long socks pulled up below his knees.

Sometime before, she had learned through TV that noble or royal boys wear shorts. If so, was this boy a noble kid, too?

No matter what the boy’s identity was, she couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Apologizing to her adoptive white parents, Eila had had no doubt that an Asian person who looked like her would step out of the sedan….

With her head drooped low, Eila scooped up sand with only a plastic cup. The roses she had buried last year came out dried up and brown, but she didn’t have the leeway to bury them again.

At that instant, the boy walked over with heavy steps.

His legs were as skeletal as bare bones. Up close, his cheeks were hollow, too.

She looked straight into the face of the boy, who looked like a sensitive adult. The boy was as pale as if all the red color had been burned out of his body.

Anyway, you like me? To the extent that you couldn’t show your face for nearly three months because you were shy?

Eila, who was just scratching at the sand out of disappointment, greeted him bluntly.

“Hello.”

The boy flinched in his shoulders like someone who had never talked to anyone since birth. It was a very unusual reaction, but feeling freshness rather than unfamiliarity, Eila greeted him once more.

“Hello.”

The boy still kept his lips tightly pressed together. Yet, for someone dismissed as a weird kid, there was something about him that drew her attention.

Perhaps it was because of his aristocratic aura. More than that, she felt a strange pull of sympathy toward the desolate, sunken melancholy about him, like a withered lily.

Being a naturally patient person, Eila waited for an answer while shoveling sand into her plastic cup.

When a spring breeze blew from afar, the boy’s lips parted. What she heard after holding her breath in intense anticipation was not some trivial greeting.

“…Your voice is pretty.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

She had grown up hearing that her face was pretty often enough, but this was the first time someone told her voice was pretty. Feeling a greater surge of interest in the boy who had revealed a side of herself she hadn’t known, Eila replied.

“Your voice is cool, too, and… your intonation is unusual.”

The boy’s speech had pronunciation as clear as an announcer’s, but it carried a strong artificial vibe, like a medieval king. Was he really a noble? Tilting her head, she looked up at him.

For some reason, the boy was visibly nervous enough for it to show on the outside. Was he about to confess his feelings or something? She figured she could be friends with him, but anything beyond that seemed a bit much…

Eila cautiously opened her mouth.

“I heard the rumor that you like me. But since I don’t know who you are, I can’t accept your feelings.”

In truth, it wasn’t that she didn’t know who the boy was, but rather that he simply wasn’t her type. Eila preferred guys with a large build and a loud voice. That way, she could get help if she ever got picked on by mean kids.

Saying something like that out right would probably hurt the boy’s feelings. So she quietly watched his reaction instead, to which the boy hollowly replied.

“I didn’t come here to convey my feelings to you. I just came to see you. Before it becomes completely impossible.”

That implied that it would soon become impossible for the boy to come see Eila.

Eila tilted her head. Did that mean the boy was going to move somewhere very far away soon? Or did it mean he was going to get too sick to move?

When she stood up, the Husky in front of the wide-open gate spun its tail in circles. Yet the boy, who she expected would react in some way, just stood there calmly.

That felt a little strange. The boy, who had come to see Eila every week, wasn’t actually looking at Eila even when close up. He wasn’t even glancing at Eila’s hair fluttering in the breeze. It was as if he couldn’t see her in the first place.

It was very easy to study a boy like that to the point of being rude. Looking into the boy’s hazy pupils, as if she were facing a god from heaven, Eila examined his entire face.

The boy’s complexion was pale, and his appearance was as neat as a child with germaphobia, which brought a sense of incongruity. Beneath the corner of his left eye was a small brown mole, and perhaps because of that mole, he looked gloomy.

However, Eila had learned from her mother that one shouldn’t judge people solely by their looks.

“I’ve never seen anyone dressed like that before.”

So she simply expressed that he seemed unfamiliar to her. The boy glanced down at his own attire, then asked with concern.

“Is it weird?”

“No, I’ve just never seen it before.”

Conscious of her own canary-yellow clothes, she looked the boy over. It felt as if a child from a different dimension had flown into her peaceful world. Could he be a dangerous kid? She couldn’t entirely shake her wariness.

“Why do you come to my house every weekend?”

The boy replied, looking somewhere out into empty space yet seemingly seeing nothing at all.

“Like I said, I wanted to see you at least once.”

Eila wanted to ask him point-blank. So, had he seen her as much as he wanted, was his eyesight really bad, and was he never going to show up again…