Glass Hearts Rekindled

The bathroom door said MEN in letters big enough for a blind woman to read, but I was moving too fast to read anything. I hit the door with both hands, shoulder first, the way I used to burst through the curtains on opening night, and I was inside before my brain caught up with my feet.

Wrong room. Definitely wrong room.

Too late. The rip in my shirt had traveled from armpit to ribs, a long grinning tear in pale pink silk, and the dressing room was three floors up and my understudy's cousin's wedding was in forty minutes and I did not have forty minutes. I had a ripped shirt and a glass of champagne I'd set down somewhere and a producer waiting at table nine who wanted an answer by midnight.

I ducked into the first stall and locked it and stood there breathing like I'd run a marathon instead of walked across a hotel lobby.

"Rough night?"

The voice came from the sinks. Low. Amused. Familiar in a way that made my stomach drop before my mind could place it.

I froze with my hands on the torn silk. Through the gap in the stall door I could see a man's back, broad shoulders in a charcoal suit jacket, one hand braced on the marble counter. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at himself in the mirror, and he was smiling.

"This is the men's room," I said, stupidly, as if he might not have noticed.

"I know." He turned the tap on, washed his hands with the unhurried patience of someone who had nowhere to be. "You're the one who came in like the building was on fire."

"I, there was a, my shirt ripped and I panicked and I thought, " I stopped. I pressed the silk together over my chest and took a breath and tried to sound like a professional adult woman. "I'm sorry. I'll leave as soon as I fix this."

"Take your time." He dried his hands. "I'm not in a hurry."

Something about the way he said it made me look again. The suit was expensive, the kind of expensive that didn't announce itself, just fit perfectly and cost more than my first apartment. Dark hair with a little gray at the temples. The profile, the jaw, the way he held his shoulders like he was used to rooms being smaller than him.

No. It couldn't be.

I pushed the stall door open a few inches. Just enough to see his face in the mirror, and he saw me seeing him, and he turned around.

Masumi Hayami looked exactly the same and completely different. Same sharp eyes, same mouth that always seemed one second away from a joke at your expense. But the face was leaner now, harder, and the eyes had something in them I hadn't seen before. Or maybe I had. Maybe I'd just been too young to recognize it.

"Kitajima," he said. "Maya Kitajima."

"You remember me."

"I remember everything." He said it lightly, like a joke, but his eyes didn't laugh. "You're taller."

"I'm wearing heels."

"So you are." His gaze dropped to my feet and came back up, slow, and I felt it travel the whole way like a hand. "Congratulations on the Emperor's Prize. I read about it."

"That was two years ago."

"I know. I meant to send a card."

I laughed. It came out before I could stop it, a real laugh, the kind I hadn't made in months. "A card. From Masumi Hayami."

"I'm told I'm hard to shop for."

"You're told a lot of things."

He smiled then, a real smile, and it changed his whole face. For a second he looked like the man I used to know, the one who'd shown up in my life like a storm and left it like one too. The one who'd sent me a hundred purple roses and never explained why.

The stall door swung open the rest of the way. I stepped out still holding my shirt together, and I must have looked ridiculous, standing in the men's room of the Imperial Hotel with my hands crossed over my chest like a bad statue.

"Here." He shrugged off his jacket and held it out. "It's not a card, but it'll do."

"I can't take your jacket."

"You can. You're going to walk back out there and someone's going to take a photo and tomorrow the papers will say Maya Kitajima showed up to the Fujiwara gala with her shirt ripped open. Take the jacket."

I took the jacket. It was warm from his body and it smelled like cedar and something sharper underneath, and when I pulled it around my shoulders it swallowed me whole. The sleeves hung past my fingertips.

"Now you look like a child playing dress-up," he said.

"Now I look like a woman who made a bad decision in a hurry."

"Same thing, most nights."

I should have left. That was the smart thing, the sensible thing, the thing my manager would have told me to do if she'd been there. Thank him, give the jacket back at the door, get upstairs, fix the shirt, go back to the party, answer the producer, go home, sleep, forget.

Instead I said, "What are you doing here? The gala's for the theater foundation. You don't do theater."

"I own the theater foundation."

"You what?"

"The Imperial. The foundation that runs it. I bought it three years ago." He said it the way other people said they'd picked up milk on the way home. "I don't usually come to these things. I came tonight because the chairman asked me to make an appearance."

"And you're hiding in the bathroom."

"I'm not hiding. I was washing my hands."

"You've been washing your hands for a very long time."

He looked at his hands, then at me, and something flickered across his face. "Maybe I was hiding."

"From what?"

"From people who want things." He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms. "You want something too. Everyone does. But you haven't asked yet."

"I don't want anything from you."

"Then you're the first person in this building who doesn't."

I should have been offended. I should have walked out. But I was standing in a men's room wearing his jacket and I could still feel the heat of his body in the fabric, and I was thirty-two years old and suddenly I felt seventeen again, standing in the rain outside a theater, watching his car pull away.

"Why did you send me the roses?" I asked.

He blinked. "What roses?"

"Don't. Don't do that. You know what roses."

"I sent a lot of roses. I was a different person then."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." He pushed off the counter and walked toward me, and I didn't step back, and he stopped close enough that I could see the tiny scar above his eyebrow that hadn't been there before. "You want the truth, Kitajima? I sent the roses because I was in love with you and I didn't know how to say it and I was married and it was wrong and I did it anyway."

The room went very quiet. I could hear the muffled thump of music from the ballroom through the wall, and the drip of a faucet, and my own heart, which was doing something complicated in my chest.

"You were married," I said.

"I was."

"And now?"

"Now I'm not." He said it flatly, no self-pity, just fact. "Divorced. Two years ago. She's remarried. She's happy. I'm "

He stopped.

"You're what?"

"I'm standing in a bathroom with a woman I haven't seen in ten years and I'm trying to figure out if I'm allowed to say what I want to say."

"Say it."

"I don't know if I should."

"Masumi." I said his name and it felt strange in my mouth, like a word I'd forgotten I knew. "You owe me an explanation. Not for the roses. For everything. For the way you left. For the way you just, disappeared. I looked for you. I asked people. Nobody would tell me anything."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I made sure nobody would tell you anything." He reached out and touched the collar of his jacket where it sat on my shoulder, just the tips of his fingers against the fabric. "I was going through something. A divorce. A merger. A lot of things I'm not proud of. And I didn't want you to see me like that."

"So you decided for me."

"Yes."

"That's not fair."

"No. It wasn't." His fingers curled around the lapel and he tugged it, just slightly, just enough to pull me half a step closer. "I'm not the same man, Maya. I'm trying to be better. But I'm still the kind of man who makes decisions for other people. It's a flaw. I'm working on it."

"Are you?"

"Not very hard."

I laughed again. I couldn't help it. And when I laughed, he smiled, and the smile reached his eyes this time, and I forgot for a second that I was standing in a men's room with my shirt torn and a producer waiting for an answer and a life that was finally, finally going the way I'd always wanted it to go.

"I should go," I said.

"You should."

"I should give you back your jacket."

"You should."

Neither of us moved.

"Maya." His voice was lower now, almost a whisper. "I'm going to say something and I want you to hear it and then I want you to leave, because if you don't leave I'm going to do something I shouldn't."

"I'm listening."

"I've thought about you every day for ten years. Every day. I've watched every play you've been in. I have the programs. All of them. I've read every interview. I know you like your coffee black and you can't sleep the night before an opening and you still bite your nails when you're nervous, you're doing it right now."

I looked down. My thumb was at my mouth. I dropped my hand.

"That's not, that's not fair," I said.

"I know. I told you. I'm not fair." He let go of the lapel and stepped back, and the space between us felt like a loss. "Go. Go back to your party. Fix your shirt. Answer your producer. Forget you saw me."

"I can't do that."

"Try."

"I've tried before. It doesn't work."

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were darker, and I recognized the look on his face because I'd seen it in the mirror a hundred times, the look of someone who wanted something they'd already decided they couldn't have.

"Then don't forget," he said. "But leave anyway."

I left. I walked out of the men's room wearing his jacket and I found the nearest women's room and I fixed my shirt with safety pins from my purse and I went back to the gala and I smiled at the producer and I said yes to the project and I drank two glasses of champagne and I didn't think about Masumi Hayami once.

That's a lie.

I thought about him the whole night. I thought about him when I got in the taxi. I thought about him when I got home and hung his jacket on the back of a chair. I thought about him when I lay in bed staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, and I thought about him when I finally fell asleep and dreamed about a bathroom with marble counters and a man who said he'd loved me for ten years.

The jacket was still on the chair when I woke up. I picked it up and held it to my face and breathed in, and it still smelled like cedar and something sharper underneath.

I should have given it back.

I didn't.

That was the first mistake.