The Light on the Ferris Wheel

I was seventeen when I learned to paint my nails. In the basement arcade not far from school, the salesgirl at the nail-polish counter kept egging me on. "Such pretty hands on a girl like you. What a waste not to paint them."

Girls really are easy to flatter. I picked up a bottle of deep rose polish and held it under the hard white lights. Pearly shimmer filtered through the glass and spilled a whole wash of neon into my eyes.

At the same time, I saw him.

He was at the other end of the shop, holding a bottle of perfume. The pink cap of an Anna Sui bottle hid half his face, but not the eyes, clear and limpid as water. His lashes were like two small fans, stirring the light where it touched the glass, until even the doll-faced bottle seemed to lower its gaze shyly.

All at once I thought of the lights on a ferris wheel at night, flickering and yet not especially warm. He was absurdly good-looking.

I put down the bottle of nail polish and drifted over as if by chance. I heard him ask the salesgirl, "Would a girl like this perfume?"

The salesgirl nodded at once. "Use this on your girlfriend and she'll love you even more."

The moment I heard that, my heart sank. I turned back to the nail-polish stand, grabbed a few bottles at random, and paid for them in a sulk.

I went to school with my nails painted a brilliant red. I had not even reached the gate before a teacher on inspection duty caught me. He grabbed my hand and said, "What class are you in? Name and homeroom." I immediately cried out, feigning outrage, "Indecency! A teacher is harassing a student!" My voice rang out so loudly I sounded like I belonged in the vocal department. The teacher was a recent university graduate, and boys like him had no defense against shameless students like me. I never blushed, but he did. At last he let go of my hand and said, "All right, all right. I give up. Go on." I chewed gum, wore an absurdly short skirt, laced my shoes with bright colored ribbons, and let my scarlet nails glow as if they were about to drip blood. Passersby gave me a wide berth. Teachers ground their teeth at the sight of me. Everyone else thought I was the stain on Seiran High School. I thought I was its most beautiful piece of scenery.

My deskmate, Ogawa Misaki, redrew the line down the middle of our shared desk every single day before I walked into class, as if one accidental brush of my elbow would make her drop dead. She always seemed to think sitting next to me was the great misfortune of her life. She was afraid I would corrupt her, hit her, curse her, poison her, or simply ruin her by existing. Time and again she asked our homeroom teacher to change her seat, and time and again he refused. She even suspected he must have some ulterior motive toward me, as if he were hoping to curry favor with my family. That was giving me too much credit. The rumors about me were mostly true. I was the rich girl whose family had donated computers and air conditioners to the school, the reason everyone could go online in comfort and sit through summer classes without sweating to death. They humored me because they benefited from me. But in their hearts they despised girls like me. I was only seventeen, yet I knew things no worse than people of twenty-seven. Everyone said kids born in the nineties grew up too fast, that we liked strange fashions, selfies, and making little V-signs at the camera with vacant eyes and pouting lips. I was part of that generation. But I was not one of those girls. I liked making scissor-hands only when I was mocking Kurosawa Masae. When it came to dealing with her, I preferred real scissors. Every jab landed true. I had chased her all over the apartment with them more than once.

I did not wake from my nap until class was over. The song still echoed in my ears. No time lag with anybody, I thought. Only with the classroom. Misaki was showing off her new phone to a cluster of girls, and I was still thinking about the dream I had just had: in a dim and indistinct carriage, the ferris wheel was lit by only a single lamp, and there was a beautiful face inside it.

It was him. That face half-hidden behind the Anna Sui bottle. Somehow he had slipped into my dreams. It was enough to kill me.

When I got home that evening, Kurosawa Masae had cooked a tableful of dishes, all of them my favorites. Suspicious, I sampled two bites. She smiled at me with false warmth and asked, "Momoko, is it good?" I could not stand that kindly, motherly smile of hers. It looked wrong above a fitted business suit. The first time she ever came home with Shiraishi Kensei, she had spoken to me in exactly that tone, bending her head to look at me, stroking my hair, saying, "So you're Momoko? Your father says you like dolls. Auntie bought you one."

The way she looked at Shiraishi Kensei told me at once that something was going on. And she was hardly the only woman ever to look at him that way. I had been precocious since I was small, and I could not bear being talked to as if I were a fool of a child. I took the doll she gave me up to my room and cut its little dress to ribbons. It was one of those dolls that could talk, the sort with a recorder inside. If you pressed its hand, it would record for a minute. So I leaned close to that naked doll and repeated over and over, "You want to be my stepmother? Dream on." For a long time after that, I hung it in the most conspicuous spot in the living room. Every now and then I would press its hand, and it would repeat in my own voice, "You want to be my stepmother? Dream on."

The first time Kurosawa pressed it, she nearly jumped out of her skin. The look on her face was so white and startled that I felt a rush of satisfaction. She had already lasted longer than any woman before her. Plenty of them had been scared off before they even crossed the threshold. Only Kurosawa Masae had proved stubborn enough to stay. I suspected that had something to do with her profession.

She was a lawyer with a modest name for herself, the kind who specialized in financial cases. There were not many women in that field, which only made her more prominent. Every week she appeared on television to answer legal questions, her makeup perfect, her diction crisp, her arguments neat and methodical. I was convinced she treated me as some especially troublesome case study. Whenever she tried to lecture me, she would lay things out in numbered points, like a legal brief. I always hated her most at those moments. "Why don't you handle divorce suits instead?" I once said. "I'd be your first client. If you want my mother's place, keep dreaming. And if you want to lecture somebody's daughter, go have one of your own."

That was when I invented what I thought was the first great aphorism of my life: if you want to be someone's stepmother and still expect the child to obey you, you are dreaming too beautifully. So I ignored her and went on picking at my dinner as if searching for a bone inside an egg. "This chicken is ancient," I said. "It tastes awful."

"Why are you always so hostile to me?" Kurosawa asked.

"You've got it wrong," I said. "I'm hostile to everybody."

"Including your father?"

"Don't try to stir things up between us."

She sighed. "Why must you always be like this? Can't we be friends?"

"I wouldn't dare aspire to be friends with Lawyer Kurosawa."

I wiped my hands, got up, and went upstairs.

Kurosawa Masae and I had been locked in that standoff for almost three years. Tirelessly, she spent her youth on Shiraishi Kensei. She seemed to believe that if she could win me over, she might turn him into a reformed man and reveal herself at last as proper wife and loving mother. But she could neither win me nor rein in him. My father still ran around outside with singers and models as if the world had been made for his amusement. Even so, she never stopped trying. As his girlfriend, she aimed sugar-coated shells at me again and again.

What she failed to understand was that I was Shiraishi Momoko, raised with a golden spoon in my mouth, the daughter of Shiraishi Kensei, one of the richest men in the city. Did she really think a bowl or two of expensive food and a handful of empty promises would buy me?

Not long after, Aunt Kazuko tapped on my door. "Miss, do you want some strawberries? Your favorite."

Kurosawa had left. At once my appetite came flooding back. I pulled the door open, took the plate, and began stuffing strawberries into my mouth. Every time I managed to drive Kurosawa Masae away, my spirits lifted as if I had won a battle.

The day of the lantern festival, I saw him again.

This time he was across the river, carrying an octagonal lantern painted with beauties. When he lifted it and smiled faintly, the orange glow caught the long shape of his eyes and made them even more enchanting.

At Yasaka Shrine everyone had a lantern in hand. Shiraishi Kensei stood beside me asking for my opinion. "Momoko, which one do you want?"

I did not answer. He glanced at his watch, already impatient. "Dad has somewhere to be tonight. I'll stay until you've sent yours off, then I have to go."

"In such a hurry?" I laughed at him, without taking my eyes off the boy across the river. "Rushing off to see some woman? Aren't you afraid Kurosawa Masae will make a scene?"

"You little brat. No respect at all." He poked me in the head, not at all gently. "What happens between adults is none of your business."

He was always like that, as restless as a monkey, forever unable to hold either a person or a heart. So what if he was my father? To him, lovers mattered more than daughters. This daughter of his was not sweet, not clinging, not innocent. I never cooed at him. I only jabbed him with words and showed him a cold face when the mood took me. If men were capable of bearing children, I sometimes thought, perhaps he would have left me begging in the street.

"Go on, then," I said at last, never taking my eyes off my prey. I waved him away.

Relieved, he kissed me hard on the cheek. "Dad will buy you new clothes tomorrow."

I watched him go and sighed. To meet a lover, he would have crossed the sky itself. Poor Kurosawa Masae. Yet when I turned back, the boy was gone again. My heart dropped. Was he some fox spirit escaped from an old tale, vanishing into thin smoke the moment he had lured someone into caring?

By the time people began releasing their lanterns, lovers stood in pairs and families leaned warmly together. The last time I had come to set a lantern afloat was when I was ten. My father, my mother, and I had sat together in a flower boat, and when the lantern rose into the night I saw my mother close her eyes to make a wish. Her reflection in the river had been unbearably beautiful: a lotus-colored qipao with a modern cut, red ruby earrings swinging by her ears, eyes like autumn water, a face soft and bright, even her figure graceful in the shifting light. My mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. That was not my judgment. It was what Shiraishi Kensei used to say. Otherwise he would never have given up truckloads of beauties to marry her. To prove his devotion he even got a vasectomy after she gave birth to me. And yet who could have guessed that a year after his wife died he would already know how to soothe his grief with one new lover after another?

Releasing a lantern alone was terribly dull, so I drifted about watching other people do it and letting my heart sink into useless melancholy. Then, in a shadowed corner, I saw a man crouched beside a basket of something. I went over and asked, "What's that?"

At the sight of a customer he brightened and pulled one out to show me. A white mouse. "Want ten of them?" he asked. "For experiments?"

I laughed. "For feeding, of course. People in the city keep pet snakes, don't they?"

The man grinned, showing a terrifying line of white teeth.

I pulled a few hundred yen from my purse and said, "I'll take the lot."

"You keep snakes too, little miss?" he asked.

I had no intention of telling him the truth, so I lied. "No. My grandfather is a professor. He uses white mice for his research."

He was delighted and threw in the entire basket. I carried it back to the river with me while everyone else carried lanterns. Above us the whole sky was full of floating lights. Looking at them, I thought spitefully that nobody seemed worried about them falling and starting a fire. A wicked impulse seized me. I overturned the basket. Instantly the white mice scattered in all directions, racing wildly over the ground.

At first people only felt something brush their ankles. Then they saw what it was, and screams broke out everywhere, especially from the women. The shrieks rolled over the Kamo River and echoed beneath the twisting galleries and bridges.

Chaos followed. The crowd shoved and surged. The staff had no idea what to do. Nobody had any attention left for the lanterns drifting overhead. I laughed so hard I bent double. Then a voice suddenly called out, "Don't panic. They're only ordinary white mice. There's nothing to be afraid of."

I had no idea who it was. His face lay hidden in shadow. But the crowd did calm down after that. Some boys began catching the mice, and the game was over. I wandered off to a pavilion to rest.

I had laughed too wildly and somehow worked up a sweat. I was fanning myself with a handkerchief when a boy sat down beside me and said, "Those white mice were yours, weren't they?"

This time I saw him clearly. I knew the voice at once. But when the voice finally matched the face, it still startled me. The boy who had appeared and disappeared like a fox spirit was watching me with those beautiful long eyes. I should not have lied. But I had been lying for years, and it came to me by reflex.

"No," I said. "I was a victim too."

He laughed. Even his laugh was beautiful. "You lie without blushing for someone so young. I saw you buying those mice."

So he had been watching me ever since then. I stopped pretending. Instead I decided to tease him. Leaning in close, I said, "How do you know I am not blushing? You have no idea how red my face is. The moment I see you, my heart starts pounding and my face goes hot. It was all because of you that I let the mice go."

He leaned back a little. "More nonsense. You only saw me after you let them loose. How is this my fault?"

I edged closer again. "Now you're wronging me too. Weren't you just over by the bridge buying one of those octagonal lanterns with the beauties painted on them?"

He stammered, "I... yes... I did buy one." He still looked very green. I patted him lightly on the shoulder and said with mock gravity, "Then today's whole disaster is your fault. To make it up to me, buy me a lantern too."

After that I could not hold back my laughter anymore. At last he realized I was making fun of him. He stood up and pointed at me. "You little devil. Not very old, but already too clever by half." I seized the chance to catch his arm and shake it, saying in a coaxing voice, "So will you buy it or not?"

Unable to help himself, he laughed too. "Fine, fine. I'll buy it."

I laughed with him. He was so obliging. By the time Kamiya Iori bought me the lantern, I was all but melting. As he paid, he asked, "Why aren't you ever afraid of strangers? What if I tricked you away and sold you?"

I said, "Do you think children now are that easy to fool? We are not afraid of strangers. We're afraid of loneliness."

Kamiya Iori said nothing for a moment. He only looked at me.

The lanterns that night were beautiful. I bought the biggest one. When the wind rose, it rocked slowly up into the sky. I closed my eyes and made a wish. What did I wish for? I wished Shiraishi Kensei would go on loving my mother. I wished he would go on loving me. I wished Kurosawa Masae would never appear in front of me again. I wished Ogawa Misaki would vanish from my life. Spit, spit, spit. I was wicked. The thought of Misaki made me laugh.

Iori asked, "What did you wish for? Why are you smiling like that?"

I laughed at myself. "I made too many wishes. I don't know which one will come true."

"Greedy," he said. "I only made one."

"What was it?" I asked at once.

"I'm not telling you."

He said it only to leave me hanging. Kamiya Iori, the boy I had first seen in the shopping arcade buying perfume, the boy who had appeared holding a lantern like a fox spirit out of an old story, the boy who had stepped into the carriage of my dreams beneath the ferris wheel. That was how I came to know him.

The lanterns and the white mice bore witness: I liked him very much. He was the first boy I had ever liked before I turned seventeen.

But I was never going to tell him that, because I knew he had a girlfriend. He had bought that perfume for someone, after all. I do not possess many virtues, but I do know how to behave with some sense. As Hachi once put it, I know when to act and when to step aside. I never make trouble for other people. Of course, that was only what he said about the way I treated my friends. He had also seen perfectly well how I treated Shiraishi Kensei and Kurosawa Masae.

Hachi once gave me a big thumbs-up and said, "You're my big sister. You're my idol." He was a student at a technical school nearby, two years older than me, with no father or mother and an uncle who had raised him. He studied mechanical and electrical repair. I met him in the summer vacation of my first year, when he was apprenticing in his uncle's secondhand goods shop and the first job he ever took was to come repair the air conditioner at our house.

Our new driver had probably only just come up from the countryside and did not know any proper repair companies, so he picked a place on the corner. When Hachi arrived, Shiraishi Kensei was gripping my hair and about to hit me. The reason was simple: I had cut the heel off one of Kurosawa Masae's shoes. She had taken a fall and fractured a bone in her foot. If she insisted on wearing eight-centimeter heels to pretend she had a better figure than she did, how was that my problem? When my father found out, he tried to force me to go to the hospital and apologize to her. I refused. He pulled at me, so I kicked him instead and ruined an Armani suit in the process. He flew into a rage, yanked me by the hair, and raised his hand to strike me.

I tipped my chin up and said, "Go ahead. Hit me as hard as you like. If you kill me, no one will be left to stand against you. No one will stop you remarrying. Wouldn't that suit you just fine?"

He looked at me, and the fury in his eyes suddenly softened. I shook off his hand, saw Hachi downstairs staring so hard his eyes were round, and called out, "You, are you here to fix the air conditioner? I'm freezing. Why are you still standing there?" I left my father where he was and took Hachi upstairs. Once inside my room I picked up a giant jar from the table and drank from it while he stood pasted to the door, too shocked to move.

I was delighted. Hachi was abysmal at repairs. He put who knew what into the unit and somehow turned it into an air conditioner that blew heat but no cold. Then he patted me on the shoulder as if nothing had happened and said, "Don't worry. By summer, I promise I'll make it blow cold and no heat."

It made me want to grab something and hit him with it. To apologize, he took me to watch his friends perform street dance, a whole flock of boys respectable people would call delinquents. Dyed hair, nose rings, heads spinning in circles on the floor without getting dizzy. Their nerves were excellent. It was thrilling and very funny. I liked being friends with Hachi. He was loyal and openhanded and never took advantage of anyone. Once he decided you were his person, he would be good to you with his whole heart. At first I had insisted, seriously and repeatedly, that he become my boyfriend. With great solemnity he told me, "Kid, romance is too expensive." The truth was, I knew I was only making trouble. What I felt for him was brotherhood, nothing more. So I accepted him as my big brother instead. It was not bad, having somewhere to go when life became unbearable.

Hachi was in his final year then. Not long before, someone at a nightclub had stabbed him so badly his intestines nearly spilled out, yet somehow he still had not died. After a month of groaning in the hospital, he was back to eating meat by the mouthful. I brought him a huge bouquet of carnations and found him sipping chicken soup with one leg crossed like some spoiled young master.

"I nearly swapped the carnations for chrysanthemums and brought them to your grave," I said.

"Is there any little sister who curses her big brother like that?"

I sat on the edge of his bed and peeled him an orange. "You won't die. You have nothing in this life except a very long fate."

He took another sip of soup. "My fate is tough. People have been saying since I was little that I killed my parents. Do you think kids like that die easily?"

He always said things like that with complete calm. I waved it away. "Enough with the tragic life story. Where did you get the money to stay in a hospital this nice?"

Hachi rolled his eyes proudly. "I saved our young master's life. Isn't it only right they give me something in return?"

"Since when do you have a young master?" I laughed. "What, do you think you're living in my house?"

"Young Master Hana from our Dragon-Tiger crowd," he said. "That night at the club someone was about to stab him. Luckily my eyes were sharp and my hands were quick. I won myself a glorious military merit."

"Please. Your little delinquent gang will get swept up by the police sooner or later."

"We changed careers ages ago. We do legitimate business now. Young Master Hana just got back from San Francisco. Overseas returnee, all right? Handsome enough to make you drool."

At that, Kamiya Iori's face flashed through my mind.

"You're no little maiden," Hachi said, taking the orange from me. "You're the big sister type."

I stood up and pulled the curtains wide open. I knew that hospital better than I wanted to. From the day my mother's cancer was discovered, I used to come there after school almost every day. I had looked at every patch of grass and every flower there with her. Every smell in that place had once followed me into sleep. Back then I thought it was only stomach bleeding, something that would soon get better. Every day I brought my homework for her to see, setting it on the bed with a little stool and writing by her side. I wanted to stay with her. I wanted to be the one holding her up.

But in the end she still died. On the day she died, there was still a little yellow flower clenched in her hand, one I had picked for her the day before. She died very peacefully, her face still beautiful. From that day on, the person I loved most in the world was gone. It felt as if time had stopped. Shiraishi Kensei changed. I changed too. Neither of us could find who we had once been. More than once I wanted to telephone Kamiya Iori, but each time I dialed the number I ended up giving up halfway. When we parted that night, he had told me he studied at Chizui Academy and that I should come find him if I ever needed anything.

But what need did I have? Whenever I was with him, I always felt he thought of me as nothing but a little sister. I was not like my father, changing lovers as casually as handkerchiefs. I was afraid that the more often I saw Iori, the less able I would be to leave him behind. I was afraid of that feeling, of a love that could be taken away from me all over again. It was terrifying. Fortunately, autumn brought the school sports festival. This year my classmates came up with a new plan. "When the festival's over," they said, "let's go to the amusement park after it's renovated. They say the ferris wheel has been repainted pale blue. It's beautiful."

I curled my lip. "I'm not going. Sounds boring."

The moment Misaki and the others heard I would not be there, their enthusiasm surged. "Then that's perfect. Let's all sign up."

They treated me like a plague. Still, I had no intention of becoming low-key just because they excluded me. During the sports festival I spent my afternoons at Hachi's school instead. Boys lined the corridors whistling at me. I walked through their technical classrooms in my Seiran High uniform and called out to him loudly from the doorway, "Big brother, can I come play at your place tonight?" Every boy in the mechanical class looked up from the machines and began hooting at Hachi. He knew perfectly well I was doing it on purpose. He strode over, brandishing a grease-smeared hand, and tried to grab me. I took off running down the corridor, shouting as I went, "Hachi, you irresponsible man! Are you trying to kill me to keep me quiet?"

He chased me all the way to the door before stopping with his hands on his hips. "I told you not to come looking for me at school. What are you doing? This place is full of wolves and tigers. Do you understand that or not?"

"I'm bored," I said. "Take me out tonight."

"Can't tonight. I've got to go see Young Master Hana. He's arranged something for me."

"What kind of something? Murder or arson?"

"How many times do I have to tell you? We left that life behind. It's honest work now." Then he softened. "All right, don't sulk. I'll keep you company this weekend, okay?"

My one and only friend in the whole city was abandoning me too. How was a person supposed to go on living? When I thought of Ogawa Misaki and the rest, with their eager little faces, another wicked plan took shape. Fine, then. I would go to the amusement park that night as well. I would meet them properly. I would scare them half to death.

At eight that evening the amusement park was almost sold out. Misaki and the others headed first for the haunted house. I followed them in at a distance. The ghosts inside were all actors in costume, but the timid girls still screamed nonstop, and Misaki was the loudest of them all. One ghost sprang out of a coffin, and in one swift movement I slammed the coffin lid onto his head. He shouted, which frightened the girls even worse. Another ghost stuck out a long tongue. I tore it off and held it in front of my own mouth, shining my phone's light up at my face, then tapped Misaki on the shoulder. She shrieked, her face went white, and tears sprang straight out of her eyes. By the time we reached the exit, I had yanked at every ghost prop in the whole place. I was in excellent spirits.

Only when they all ran outside did they realize I was there. "Shiraishi Momoko? What are you doing here?"

"You're allowed to come as a group and I can't come by myself? Does your family own the amusement park?"

"Who told you when we were coming?" one girl asked, still pale with fright.

I deliberately pointed at Misaki. "Little Misaki did. She's my good friend. You just didn't know it."

Thanks to me, Misaki instantly became everyone's target. In the end they all sneered at her, cursed her, and walked away without even taking her along.

Misaki crouched on the ground in tears and shouted at me, "It's all you. All of this is because of you." She did look pitiful, but I did not feel an ounce of guilt. I patted her on the head and said, "See? This is what your friendship amounts to. One lie, and not a single person trusts you. Learn your lesson. Next time, be smarter."

After delivering that grave little sermon, I stood up and stretched. The ferris wheel lights had started to come on. They were even more dazzling than they had been seven years earlier.

Near the ferris wheel, a man was looking my way. He wore a high-collared jacket, black trousers, a big checked scarf, something punkish and fashionable. His left hand kept stroking the ring on his right index finger. He looked at me with amused interest. There was something wicked in his eyes that gave his handsome face a strange, almost dangerous beauty.

He crooked his mouth at me in a slanting smile, as if he were the male lead of some tabloid scandal. He had obviously seen everything that had just happened. I ought to have charged him for the performance. But I was not short of money, and I had no spare energy to deal with him.

I ran for the ferris wheel. People were getting into the cars in pairs and threes. When my turn came, the attendant asked, "Are you by yourself?" I nodded. "Our cars need at least two riders," he said. Then he called to the line behind me, "Is there anyone here alone who would mind riding with this young lady?" No one stepped forward. The attendant turned back to me apologetically. "Could you wait for the next round, miss? Once someone else comes, you can get on then."

"Why should I?" I snapped. "I bought a ticket and stood in line. Why shouldn't I ride just because I'm alone?"

I have never been graceful once I know I am in the right, and the attendant was floundering when a low, captivating voice said, "There are two of us."

The man who had been watching me stepped up beside me. He had to be at least one meter eighty-five. There was stubble along his jaw, and in the darkness he gave off the kind of swaggering presence that made other people move aside. He slung an arm around my shoulder and said, "My baby was fighting with me just now. We're together."

The attendant let out a breath of relief. "No wonder the young lady seemed so cross. All right then, get on." He opened the door for us.

The man smiled at me. "Come on, baby."

I shot him a glare. Who was his baby? He was one of those men who mistook cheesiness for charm and stupidity for humor. But for the moment I needed him as a stepping stone, so I offered the gentlest smile I could manage and climbed into the car.

The moment the door closed behind us, I shoved him away and found a seat for myself. He sat opposite me and said, "You're awfully bold. Aren't you afraid of what I might do to you?"

"A person has to have some spirit of adventure," I said. "Otherwise life is no fun."

Then I turned my head and stopped looking at him. The ferris wheel rose inch by inch. Its lights clustered in the dark like handfuls of fireworks, like a lighthouse that would never go out. Reflected in the glass, my own eyes no longer held that hedgehog's spiky watchfulness. They were strangely soft, exactly like Shiraishi Kensei's whenever helplessness overtook him.

I remembered the days when the three of us rode the ferris wheel together. Back then my mother had said that the ferris wheel was a light that never went out, a light that illuminated the goodness in our hearts forever.

The man rose and came to stand beside me. In a low voice he asked, "Who are you missing?"

Tears began falling one by one. No one knew that today was actually the anniversary of my mother's death. This was the only place I could come to remember the days when she had still been with me.

The man gathered me gently into his arms. His voice had turned unexpectedly soft. "If you need to cry," he said, "then cry."

I held on to him with all my strength. In the arms of a stranger, I let myself weep out the grief I still carried for my mother, little by little.

The night dissolved the moon, and the lights gave brightness back to the dark. I was like a lost child, unable to find the road that led into the future.