The Last Leaves Falling Read Online Free PDF Page A

along; she does not like it in here any more than I do. I wish that I could make it to the hospital alone so that she did not have to come.
    Downstairs, it’s quiet, full of people waiting in nervous silence, shifting in their seats uncomfortably every time a name is called out by a nurse. But when the elevator doors swing open at our floor, the gentle squeak of wheels on polished linoleum is lost to other noises, people talking and the clattering of bowls and cutlery.
    Lunch time? Yes. An overcooked-rice aroma greets us halfway down the hall; starchy and sour.
    “Hey, Mama,” I say quietly, so that she has to lean over to hear me. “I’m glad you know how to cook.”
    “Hush,” she whispers, but she sounds as though she’s smiling.
    Nobody else seems to mind the smell, though. In every room people are eating happily, although one woman is shouting at the top of her lungs that her Jell-O isn’t right. “It doesn’t wobble! How on earth can that be right?”
    I peer into the ward as we pass, and there are three nurses around her bed, trying to calm her down.
    Halfway down the last corridor before you round the corner into the bright, muraled Pediatrics, there’s a ward I’ve never seen into before. The doors are always locked, with frosted glass instead of clear. But today, the doors are open.
    It’s quiet though, none of the everyday noise of the other wards.
    My stomach knots as we approach, but I cannot help but look.
    It only takes a second to go past the doorway, but I still see them. Three elderly gentlemen surrounded by wires and monitors, each as thin as paper-covered skeletons. The man in the nearest bed lay with his neck at an unnatural angle, his mouth open a little. And his glassy eyes stared right past me.
    It’s like they are all already dead, hanging around the hospital so they can feed, turn unsuspecting victims into one of them. I shudder. I can’t help it. And then I realize something even worse.
    I just saw my future.
    I won’t be white-haired like those men, but I’ll be just as frail, just as stuck as they are. Just as creepy.
    Will anybody visit me, or will I scare them all away?
    As we wait in the hallway for Doctor Kobayashi, I wonder about the old man. Who was he? Does he have kids or grandkids who care for him? Who visit him at weekends? Or is he all alone?
    Perhaps he was a businessman with no time to start a family. Or maybe he has children who spend every evening telling him the latest stories from the office. Perhaps he survived Hiroshima. Or maybe he flew to America on business and fell in love with a beautiful film star.
    Yes. He fell in love with a Hollywood actress and she moved back to Japan. They had three beautiful babies, and every weekend they would all go out to the lake to fish. And his children went to university, and had families of their own; grandchildren who paint pictures to pin up by his bedside. Yes.
    Except the walls around his bed were bare.
    •  •  •  •
    “It must be tough for you.”
    I wonder how the bonsai tree can stand it in here, in this heat, this airless room.
    Doctor Kobayashi tries again. “It must be hard, knowing your peers will be cramming for exams. I know you . . . would have liked to—”
    I shrug, and try not to think about the classrooms I once thought were home.
    •  •  •  •
    Soon after the consultant had said those two awful words, “no cure,” my mother and I sat in another too-small room, on the wrong side of the desk, and my school principal frowned down at us over steepled fingers.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re simply not equipped to deal with it.”
    “But Kouchou-sensai, he’s a bright boy. And he studies hard. It would be such a waste.”
    His frown deepened, and he studied my face before he spoke. I wondered whether he was counting the days I had left, calculating the value of high school if it does not lead to university, and what I could possibly offer now.
    I raised my eyes to meet