wall, and watched the gardener watering the flowers by the pool. She could take a swim. But she had done that so many times recently that she no longer cared to. After a while she crept back to her mother, who was still lying motionless in the dark.
“Yumiko could take me to the museum,” she suggested warily.
Mother sat up, startled. “What? Mon Dieu ! You and your museums all the time! What kind of child are you? No normal child volunteers to go to a museum.”
She hadn’t actually said no, Charlotte realized. If there was any chance at all of making the day worthwhile, this was it. “But Yumiko could take me, couldn’t she? She knows Tokyo. She can look after me.”
Silence. Sour, suffering silence.
“It was a mistake to employ a Japanese nanny,” Mother murmured bitterly.
“Yumiko is very nice,” Charlotte retorted. That wasn’t completely true, but most of the time she was easy to get along with.
“She’s a silly cow!” Mother screamed all of a sudden and threw a cushion across the room, then another right behind it. “Can’t you see I’m not well? Can’t you just leave me alone? Don’t you have homework to do? Don’t you have lessons, damn it all?”
No, there was no saving the day now. Charlotte fled without another word.
After one more walk through the vast, dark apartment, she crept off to her room. Homework? She didn’t have any homework. It was the holidays, even for children like her who had a private tutor. That was the whole problem. She picked up a doll from the end of her bed, where she kept all the things she didn’t have a proper place for. It was a doll Papa had given her as a present when they had to move from Delhi to Tokyo. Charlotte didn’t even know what to call it. When she got the doll, it had been wearing its long blond hair in a hair band with the name Denisewritten across it, but Charlotte thought that was a stupid name for a doll.
“Well then, what do you want to do?” asked Charlotte, looking curiously at the doll. She pressed the button on its back that made it talk.
“I want to go dancing,” the blond doll declared.
“Dancing? We’re not even allowed out of the house, so put that idea out of your head.”
“Come on, let’s have a party,” the doll demanded.
“A party?” Charlotte shook the doll, frustrated. What a stupid squeaky voice it had. “Are you crazy? We have to be quiet, because Mother’s got a headache. We can’t even go to the museum.”
“Isn’t life wonderful?”
That was the moment when all of Charlotte’s anger and disappointment popped inside her like a bubble. Screaming with rage, she hurled the doll across the room. “You’re a silly cow!” she yelled after it. “You don’t understand a thing!”
The very next moment she was sorry, but the harm was done: its head hung down, snapped off, with a tangle of wires sticking out. The hair had come off, along with one arm.
“It serves you right,” Charlotte declared. “A child should not contradict her mother.”
There was nothing she could do about it; the doll with no name was a wreck. Charlotte looked around, helpless. What should she do with the broken bits? It would be a bad idea to leave them lying around; her mother would see the damage this evening when she kissed her good-night and tell her off. But if the doll wasn’t even there, then she wouldn’t even notice, what with all the other dolls Charlotte had. She fetched a plastic bag, stuffed the bits into it, and hurried out of the room and down the stairs to the side door where she knew the housekeepers put out the trash.
There was the girl. Hiroshi held his breath.
She emerged from the same door she had vanished into that night. She was holding something in her hand, an orange plastic bag from the Daiei supermarket. And she seemed to be feeling guilty about something, the way she peered around to all sides, listening, lurking. She didn’t look in his direction. Hiroshi stared at her. How pale her skin