I was reading a book, concentrating intently, so I didn't notice what was happening for quite some time. Then suddenly I glanced up, startled by the rapping I heard, and saw a white hand at the window, beating very precisely on the glass. The sight was so chilling it made the air in the room start to quake and quiver the way it does when you're listening to a ghost story. I was so shocked that I just sat there, not saying a word, staring at the window.

“Shibami! Hey!”

Mari's familiar voice and a string of giggles sounded faintly outside the window, muffled by the glass. I went over to the window and slid it open. Looking out, I saw a thoroughly snow-plastered Mari gazing up at me with a big smile on her face.

“God, you startled me,” I said.

But even as I spoke I was having trouble accepting that Mari was there, suddenly there in front of me—I felt like I was dreaming. She'd been living with us until about three months earlier.

“Well then, I'll startle you even more.”

She pointed to her feet. I focused my eyes on the dim rectangle of light that the window cast into the darkness, and realized that Mari wasn't wearing any shoes. I shrieked. All the time I was standing there gusts of snowy wind had been whirling around me into the room.

“Hurry inside. Go around to the front door,” I said.

Mari nodded and walked off toward the front garden.

“What on earth have you been doing?” I asked her as soon as I'd given her a towel, and was setting the heater in the room on high. She'd been drenched when she stepped through the door, and her hands were so cold they seemed like they might be turning into ice.

Mari didn't say a word about how cold it was outside or about how warm it was inside or anything like that. She just grinned with her brilliant red cheeks and said, “Oh, nothing much.”

She peeled off her wet socks and then sat down and put her bare feet up against the heater. Our cat slipped in through the crack between the door and the doorframe and came over and rubbed up against her. He'd always liked Mari. She started petting him, and I watched her, and gradually I began to understand. Mari was more or less a caged bird: she couldn't step out the front door of her house without first reporting to her parents. No doubt she'd been sitting by the window, gazing out at the snow, and suddenly she'd felt this urge to go outside, and since she didn't want to have to ask her parents for permission, she had just slipped out through the window. Luckily her room was on the first floor. . . .

Mari stood up. “You want some coffee?” she asked.

When I nodded she opened the door and strode off into the kitchen. The cat rolled himself up into a ball in the place Mari had been sitting, making it seem less and less obvious that she'd actually been there. As a matter of fact it had always been like that with Mari, even when she was living with us. She'd march through the house almost exactly the way a cat does, with that same air of belonging, and if you left her alone she'd just sit there staring off into space, not saying a word, or else go to sleep. You hardly even realized she was there. She seemed to be in the process of fading away.