246 Tickets to Heaven

You came back on the first day of spring.

A single bud had suddenly pushed out from the azalea bush at the door of the funeral home, and the reflected water in the courtyard, struck by the afternoon sun, made the eyes ache. A spring that fine was not the right season for anyone to come back. It was even less the right season for the body of a seventeen-year-old to be wheeled in through the gate. And yet the name written there in black ink on the registry page was, of all names, Shindo Tan.

My hand would not stop trembling while I wrote the funeral couplets for him. One of the old craftsmen at the home said that at only seventeen, and such a good boy too, it was a pity an illness had dragged him away. I kept my head down and wrote those grand, solemn phrases about clear winds and bright moons, about noble verses and high feeling, and even to me they sounded unbearably affected. When the memorial was nearly over and no one was looking, I tucked the blanket around him more carefully and touched his hand very quickly.

It was cold as a piece of jade that had utterly lost all warmth.

The one who stopped me at the door afterward was his older sister. She handed me a pink heart-shaped chocolate tin and said, "This was the thing Tan treasured most. It ought to go to you." The box was very light, but when I shook it, something rattled inside. Foolishly, I asked whether it might be his hidden stash of money. She did not smile. She only said, "Open it yourself."

There was no money in the box. There were two hundred and forty-six bus tickets.

Every one of them was for Route 307, from the funeral home to the old residential district where I lived. Exactly the same as the total number of days he had worked part-time at the funeral home. At the very bottom was a slip of paper covered in the flamboyant handwriting that was so like him.

"I shall dwell poetically in heaven."

Only in that instant did I truly understand that some people do not leave by vanishing quietly. Instead, they break every word they wanted to say into pieces and hide them inside the things you will have no choice but to run into again and again afterward.

The first time I met Shindo Tan, he was not a body. He was the new part-timer at our funeral home.

My father was the director, and the place was always short-handed. That day, when I came home from school, the back courtyard was in an uproar. A group of employees were blocking the entrance with flower wreaths, vases, and funeral couplets, shouting that a thief had gotten into the building. I snuck in to watch the excitement, but the moment I passed the mortuary, someone grabbed the back of my collar and shoved me into a storage room. The voice outside the door laughed in a maddening way. "Stay in there a while. We'll let you out when the police come."

When I turned around, there was an actual thief crouching in the corner. He had gone pale and was pointing behind me at a bed covered with a white sheet, asking whether that was real. Kindly, I reminded him that this was a funeral home. The moment I said it, he fainted on the spot. When the door opened again, the person who had locked me in stood there smiling at the threshold and introduced himself without the slightest change in expression. "I'm Shindo Tan, the new part-timer."

He looked far too much like an honor student. Pale face, clean features, even a slightly bookish air when he smiled. But what kind of honor student locks a thief and a strange girl together in a room beside corpses?

I soon learned that he was not only bold. He had a vicious mouth, too.

By day, he was the transfer student in Class Seven. At night, he came to help at the funeral home. Before long, the question of why on earth Shindo Tan had chosen to work part-time at a funeral home became the hottest topic in the building. Auntie Xu even asked me in secret whether I thought there might be something wrong with him in the head. I nodded and said it was not just a little wrong, but probably pretty serious.

And yet for someone supposedly so sick in the head, he somehow remembered my affairs more clearly than I did myself.

In our second year of high school, I had a crush on Suo Tomoya from the class next door, the one who always wore thin metal-rimmed glasses. At lunch, I sneaked into their classroom to deliver a love letter, sliding my Japanese textbook with the note hidden inside into his desk drawer. That very evening, Shindo Tan came over and smacked me in the head with the same textbook. With a dark face, he asked whether, before delivering a love letter, I could at least figure out where I was putting it instead of stuffing it into someone else's desk. Only then did I learn that Suo Tomoya and he sat one behind the other, and I had clumsily shoved the book into Shindo Tan's seat.

He slapped the love letter back into my arms and scolded me with perfect righteousness. "What's so great about that Suo guy? If you dare start dating this early, I'll tell your dad."

Later, when the school split into arts and sciences, I really did end up in the same class as Suo Tomoya, seated right beside him. One day he suddenly found an old Japanese textbook and said, puzzled, "Wasn't this the one I lost last year?" That was when I finally pieced it together. Shindo Tan had not merely intercepted my letter back then. He had secretly switched textbooks with Suo Tomoya so the letter would never reach the person it was meant for.

I was so angry then that I refused to speak to him for days, and he did not feel a bit guilty. He even deliberately used a basketball to knock over my lunchbox from halfway across the court.

But what truly left me helpless with him was the way he could turn the most absurd days at the funeral home into farce.

Once, a fat man who had been struck unconscious by lightning was brought in. His family was crying so hard they could barely breathe and insisted that he be cremated at once. Shindo Tan and I were dragged in to help. But when we pushed the cart up to the furnace, that "body" suddenly opened his eyes and asked us, still looking dazed, where he was. I was so frightened I lost my voice. Shindo Tan went pale too and grabbed my hand and ran all the way outside, shouting that the dead had come back to life. Later the doctors arrived and discovered the man had never died at all. He had only been in shock. A television crew even caught footage that day of Shindo Tan and me fleeing hand in hand for our lives. After people at school saw the news, they gave us a nickname: the Funeral Home Fiends.

Then came Tanabata.

That day the rabbit I kept jumped off the rooftop and died on the spot. I carried it to Shindo Tan, crying until the tip of my nose turned red. He stared at the rabbit for three seconds, and the first thing he said was, "How about stew?" I twisted his ear in fury, and only then did he resign himself and help me secretly give the rabbit a "funeral." We set up a vase and candles in the little ceremonial hall, burned paper money with the utmost seriousness, and even wrote funeral couplets. Shindo Tan picked up the brush and wrote one that read, "Crimson blood stains its grace, immortal fame shall fill the annals." After reading it, I asked in perfect calm whether he was sure he was not making fun of a rabbit.

As it happened, everyone had started work early that day. The employees passed by one after another, and seeing the altar and the wreath, not one of them thought twice before bowing respectfully. It was only when someone finally noticed my rabbit's name written on the spirit tablet that the whole courtyard exploded. Shindo Tan was the first to betray an ally and run. As he fled, he shouted, "Xu Ling's rabbit has nothing to do with me!"

That evening I was still angry at him over what had happened in the daytime when a boy gave me a piece of Dove chocolate. I took it to Shindo Tan and deliberately showed it off. He took it from me and, right in front of my face, swallowed it in two or three bites, then solemnly remarked that it tasted pretty good. I chased him in tears from the back courtyard all the way into the front hall, where I crashed straight into a family holding a memorial service. They thought I was crying from overwhelming grief and hugged me while crying along with me. It was a truly ugly scene.

And yet later that night, he still came.

My parents were not home. Standing under the grape arbor with a tub of ice cream and a huge box of chocolates in his hands, Shindo Tan lifted them a little and said, "The director told me to come keep you company for Tanabata." We curled up in the living room watching a Korean drama boring enough to make us drowsy, and made a deal that every time there was a kissing scene, we would eat one chocolate. By the time we had finished the whole box, the television chose that moment to show a long kiss. Shindo Tan glanced at me and said quietly, "We're out of chocolate."

Then he leaned over and kissed me.

It was the first kiss of my life. It tasted faintly of milk chocolate, and of the disinfectant smell that always clung lightly to him.

September came very quickly.

That year Hengcheng was strangely hot, and the flowers and plants in the funeral home's courtyard were nearly dead from the sun. Shindo Tan stood there watering them with a hose, so pale in the sunlight he was almost transparent. It was only then that I finally looked at him properly. He was beautiful in that careful way, his eyes, his nose, his lips, every feature like something patiently carved. Yet if you looked closely enough, you could see beneath that face a pallor and fatigue that were not normal.

One afternoon, he suddenly said three things to me in a row.

He said, "Xu Ling, I'm incredibly handsome."

Then he said, "Xu Ling, I don't like you at all."

And the last thing was, "Xu Ling, I'm leaving."

He left at the beginning of September, after spending exactly two hundred and forty-six days at the funeral home. I remember that number with absolute clarity, and yet I never asked him where he was going, nor why he had to leave so suddenly. Because in truth I had long had a bad feeling in my heart. I was simply too afraid to touch it.

After he left, the place felt abruptly emptier. Even Auntie Xu, who loved gossip more than anyone, did not talk much anymore. While cleaning my room, I found an old picture from childhood. It was one a sickly little boy from next door had drawn for me years ago. He had loved to cry when he was little, and I used to scare him by saying that if he cried again, I would throw him into the funeral home. Then he would cry even harder, and I would go laugh and coax him. On the back of the picture, in wavering handwriting, were two characters.

Tan.

The truth was, I had always known.

From the very moment Shindo Tan came back to Hengcheng and smiled at me from the doorway of the mortuary, I had recognized him. The little sickly crybaby who used to hide behind me with wet eyes had grown into a boy who switched textbooks, stole my chocolates, and kissed me in the middle of the night. And still I said nothing. It was as if, so long as I did not say it aloud, then for those two hundred and forty-six days we could keep pretending fate had not caught up with us yet.

Only later did I learn from his sister that by the time he came back, his illness was already severe. The doctors had given him a poor outlook early on, so he left school in Tokyo and came running back to this small city, watching other people's partings and losses inside the funeral home and leaving traces of himself everywhere like a mischievous child. His sister told me that the man who carried his wife's ashes to the sea last September had frightened him all at once. He had become afraid that one day I might truly fall in love with him, and that he, of all people, would not be able to stay.

So he ran first, before I had time to admit anything.

I smoothed those two hundred and forty-six tickets one by one and pressed them into the pages of a thick dictionary. Outside, the rain was falling hard, drumming against the glass. The owner of the milk tea shop listened to my story, sat stunned for a long while, and said only one thing in the end: if you did not make this up, then in this life you have already met someone very moving.

Yes, Shindo Tan.

You were a schemer, really. You were afraid of being forgotten, so you deliberately kicked over so many things in my life, stole my love letter, ate my chocolate, tucked a kiss into my Tanabata night, and then left behind two hundred and forty-six bus tickets and a box of ashes so that every time I see a bus stop sign from now on, I can never pretend nothing ever happened.

But you guessed right.

In the end, when it rains, I still stubbornly think that Hengcheng only gets storms this heavy because you finally chose to run away after all.