“How do you know?”
“He’s been turned down for five jobs.”
“But he can be whatever he wants. Lynn is going to be either a rocket scientist or a famous writer.”
“It’s different for you children. You’re younger, the world is changing.”
Jedda-Boy was talking loudly. “The first time I got chased by an alligator, I was scared, I admit that. But I finished the job later.”
Sammy smiled serenely and looked at the beautiful sky. Lynn liked to say the stars were the ultimate thing you could describe as kirakira. The second most ultimate thing was the way the sun glittered off the ocean. Of course, she had never seen this, but she could imagine exactly how it would look.
Uncle came and sat down with us. I said, “Uncle, can’t you become a land surveyor?”
He drank from his canteen and wiped his mouth. He didn’t answer for a long time. Everyone was quiet. After a time he said, “I remember that when I was a boy, I thought I was going to grow up and map the world.”
Auntie stroked his face.
Uncle saw Sammy gazing at the sky, and he looked at the sky too. “Would you look at those stars! I can really see how the ancient Egyptians or whoever the hell it was said, ‘Goddamnit, let’s name those goddamn stars and go down in history!’ ”
I didn’t know what the ancient Egyptians had said, but I doubted they had said exactly that.
Uncle’s face got wistful as he stared into the sky. Auntie kissed his face. He put his arm around her, and they leaned against each other. I saw in their faces how happy they were, and sad, too, because Uncle Katsuhisa would never be a land surveyor.
New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese. Every year since we’d lived in Georgia, Mrs. Muramoto held a big party. She served sake and mochi and a couple dozen different snacks. We would usually stay until about ten and then go home. Just before dawn I would get up and write down my hatsuyume, first dream of the new year. Then we would meet the other families and go to the empty lot nearby with our lawn chairs to watch the sunrise. Watching the first sunrise is the traditional way to celebrate New Year’s in Japan. The last few years, though, nobody had bothered getting up for the sunrise. The fathers were all too tired for such a celebration.
Mrs. Kanagawa stayed with Lynn and Sammy while I went to Mrs. Muramoto’s for just half an hour before returning to sit with Lynn. Mrs. Kanagawa told me Lynn had been very peaceful. We made quiet small talk about the party, and then Mrs. Kanagawa left. Lynn continued to sleep, her breath catching heartbreakingly, as if breathing had become a hardship for her body. Her hair had grown stringy. I moved a strand of hair from her forehead, then pulled a chair to the window and spied on Mr. and Mrs. Miller’s party next door. It was quite a bit noisier than the party at Mrs. Muramoto’s. Everybody seemed drunk. All at once the men started to put bows on their foreheads and run out the front door. I had no idea what they were doing. I hurried into the alcove and peeked out our front window. The men ran down the street shouting “Happy New Year!” with the bows on their foreheads. Even though I was in a sad mood, I couldn’t help smiling at these crazy white people.
I went into the kitchen and called my parents at the party and told them Lynn was sleeping peacefully. Someday when Lynn got better, we were going to get her a phone for the bedroom. Gregg and Amber both used to call all the time, so when she got better and made more friends, she would need a phone.
I put on my pajamas around 11:30 and lay on the floor next to Lynn’s bed. The Rabbit on the Moon looked so pretty shining in the outlet.
“Katie?” Lynn said softly. She hadn’t talked all day.
I sat up. “Yes?”
“You have to try to get better grades. Promise?”
“Okay.”
“You should go to college. Promise?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Take care of Mom and Dad and Sammy.”
“Okay, I promise.” I hesitated. “When you get better, you can help me take care of them.”
“Okay, I promise.” She laughed very softly, almost soundlessly.
The phone rang, and she seemed to perk up a bit. But it stopped after just one ring, and she seemed to deflate. It was amazing that as sick as she was, she could still be interested in something as small as the ring of a phone.
She groaned suddenly. “Can we open the window?”
I jumped up to open the window. She closed her eyes, and I sat next to the bed and stared at her. Her skin looked almost purely white, like the white of the ghost of Brenda I’d seen at the swamp. She opened her eyes again.
“It’s too dark in here,” she said.
I turned on the light. A little brown moth flitted in. It wasn’t big, not even an inch long. It landed on the ceiling. Lynn stared at it. Then it flitted toward the lamp and away again. Lynn kept watching. For a moment the party next door quieted down. Our room was so quiet, I could just make out the sound of the moth’s wings. Lynn didn’t move, except for her eyes. Her eyes moved this way and that as she watched the moth. It was strange because although her eyes showed no emotion or interest, she must have been interested in order to be watching the moth so closely. She couldn’t take her eyes off that little bug as it sailed across the room and back again, across and back. And then I thought I saw something in her eyes, some emotion or interest, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
The moth settled down, and she went to sleep. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep on the floor with the lights on. I didn’t like to sleep in my bed because it was too far from Lynnie, several feet away.
For some reason my mother didn’t make me go back to my cot that night. I couldn’t sleep deeply, so I didn’t have a hatsu-yume. When it was almost sunrise, I sat up and watched Lynn sleep for a few minutes. Then I took a lawn chair and a blanket down to the empty lot on the corner. I was alone. I thought about getting dressed, but I wasn’t expecting to see anybody. I stared east, at the giant tire over the tire store across from the lot. The giant tire looked just like the giant doughnut over the doughnut store on Main Street, except that the tire was black and the doughnut was brown.
It was cold out. Here are the sounds I heard:
1. An old piece of newspaper fluttering in the breeze.
2. A mechanical whirring—I didn’t know what was making that sound.
3. A bird chirping.
4. A quick click-clicking from a bug light at the tire store.
We lived below what Georgians called the gnat line, meaning all the gnats in the world lived in town with us. My uncle claimed that more bugs lived per square mile in southern Georgia than anywhere in the state. Even in winter, there were bugs.
Those were the only noises.
Here are the things I saw:
1. The tire store—through a window, I saw tires piled inside.
2. A lonely tree outside the store.
3. The gray sky.
4. A crow sitting on the giant tire.
I cried and cried. For a while as I cried I hated my parents, as if it were their fault that Lynn was sick. Then I cried because I loved my parents so much.
Then I didn’t feel like crying anymore. I just felt barren, my eyes felt dry. The sky was still gray. Everything was gray, the sky and the store and even my hand when I held it out in front of myself. I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment. As soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was yes. The answer was that millions of people had been that sad. For instance, what about the people of the great Incan city of Cuzco, which was ransacked by foreigners in the sixteenth century? I wrote a paper about that for school. And then there were all the millions of people in all the many wars throughout history and throughout the world, and all the millions of people with loved ones killed by millions of other people.
A lot of people had been as sad as I was. Maybe a billion of them had been this sad. As soon as I realized this, I fel
t like I was no longer a little girl but had become a big girl. What being a big girl meant exactly, I wasn’t sure.
I watched a swatch of the sky turn red. The red spread like blood in the sea: red, red, red, and then less and less red, until there was only blue left. I squinted as the sun rose. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, my father was carrying me into the house. Sam walked beside us carrying the lawn chair, which seemed almost as big as he was.
Inside the living room my father laid me on my cot. “She’s gone,” he said.
chapter 14
I WATCHED MY father walk away. I got up and ran behind him to the doorway of the bedroom, then hesitated. My mother was weeping as she knelt by the side of the bed and leaned over my sister. My father knelt in front of the bed and enveloped Lynn’s head with his arms. It was light outside now, but nobody had bothered to turn off the lamp. I stared at the lamp. The lamp was on because Lynn had asked that I turn it on, but now she herself was gone. I couldn’t comprehend it. I walked in slowly. My parents scarcely noticed me. My father moved to my mother and put his arms around her.
Lynn looked peaceful, even beautiful, but slightly off. Her eyes were not quite closed all the way, and her mouth hung open a bit. My mother suddenly got up and held a mirror to Lynn’s nose, apparently hoping to see a fog of breath on the mirror. But the mirror stayed clear.
“Who was with her?” I said.
My father’s voice broke as he said, “Nobody.”
That cut hard into me. I wished so badly that I had not gone out. I should have known better. I should have! I could not imagine what dying must have felt like for her. I had no idea whether it mattered or not to her that she had been alone at the exact moment she died. But I thought maybe it did matter.
Then there was a frenzy of activity as my parents got ready for the funeral. Though I had hardly slept, I couldn’t sleep any more that day. The lack of sleep coupled with Lynnie’s death made the world surreal. All day people came and went, and I kept hearing some of them call Lynn “the body.” Finally, I shouted at one of them, “Stop calling her that!” After that everyone only whispered around me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
My mother didn’t want to throw away anything that had existed while Lynn was still alive. Before Lynn’s body was taken away, my mother had me cut my sister’s fingernails and even her toenails and place them in an envelope. She asked me to gather Lynn’s things that lay around the house. And she wanted me to make a pile of any newspapers I could find from before Lynn died, so she could always remember what was going on in the world when Lynn passed. In the afternoon I walked in the bathroom and found my mother examining hairs she found on the floor, so that she could save those hairs she determined to belong to Lynn. Finally, my mother had me go outside and search through our garbage. She wanted to make sure there was nothing regarding Lynn that she should save.
I went outside and took a bag out of our can. I poured the contents onto the driveway. I saw a neighbor watching, but I didn’t care. The sun was warm on my back. But instead of feeling like complaining, I felt my mother’s fervor. I felt it was very important to find Lynnie items. There were maggots in the bag. They didn’t bother me, because I had a mission. The first bag was full of treasures: a paper with a scribble I recognized as Lynn’s; a newspaper from a week ago; and a pencil Lynn had chewed. I searched through three bags, full of such precious items.
Before they came for Lynn, I cut off a lock of my hair and placed it in the pocket of her pajamas. But I remembered she would wear something different than her pajamas for the cremation. So I tied the lock of my hair around her neck. Then when Lynn was gone, I lay on her bed and cried. After I cried awhile, I started to feel angry. I didn’t understand why the doctor who came to make sure Lynn was dead was one of the same doctors who had been taking care of her. If he was such a good doctor, then why did she die? And I thought maybe the doctor was mistaken, my parents were mistaken, and now they had taken Lynn away when she still possessed a small spark of life in her. Miracles happen: Maybe she would open her eyes later! What if my mother had held the mirror wrong and had missed Lynn’s feeble breath?
And yet I knew Lynn was dead. I could feel the place inside of me where she had resided. This place was empty.
It was hard to stay angry when I felt so sad. I would rather have felt angry, but instead, all I could do was sob. Even though people had been coming over all day, the house seemed so lonely that I couldn’t stand it.
The room grew somewhat dimmer. I didn’t move as it grew dimmer still. Then, with a start, I hurried outside and ran to the alley in back of our house. Through a break between the buildings, I saw that the sun hung low over the horizon. I watched it until it started to hide between two trees in the distance. Then I climbed on a car and watched until only half of the sun was visible, and then a quarter, and then I felt a huge sickening panic inside of me and ran as hard as I could to a ladder I saw down the alley. I rushed up the ladder and climbed on the roof of somebody’s garage. I saw the sun again, a quarter of it, and then a slice, and then it disappeared, the last time ever that the sun would set on a day my sister had lived.
I stood on the roof and watched the darkening sky. I heard my father calling out, “Katie! Katie!” I didn’t answer; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. His voice grew closer and then farther away. For some reason I felt panicked again and screamed, “Dad! Daddy!” His voice grew closer: “Katie! Katie!” He sounded panicked too. I hurried down the ladder and fell into his arms. I cried and cried, and he did not cry at all.
We walked quietly inside for another meal of sardines and rice.
Sammy ate calmly. My mother ate doggedly. My father ate politely. I didn’t eat at all.
“Can I fill my water glass?” said Sammy.
“Yes,” said my mother.
He got up, pulled his chair over to the sink, and filled his glass. He limped a little as he walked to the sink. Usually his ankle was fine, but every so often since his accident his ankle hurt. That smoky anger I had seen once before filled my father’s face. He turned to me. I thought he was mad at me for some reason. Suddenly, he stood up. “That’s enough, Katie,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I jumped to my feet.
“You’re going to show me where you found the trap that hurt Sammy,” he said.
“Okay. Why?”
“Because if it’s still there, I want to throw it away.”
My mother stood up. “You want to what?”
“You heard me.”
“You are taking that girl out over my dead body.”
He seemed to consider this. Finally, he said, “No.”
So once again I sat in a passenger seat and bumped across the fields toward where we’d held our picnic months earlier. The last time I’d been here, Lynn and I had eaten rice balls together.
An animal, maybe a coyote, scrambled across the field as we drove. I directed my father to where I thought we’d held our picnic. My father told me to wait in the car.
“Be careful, Dad,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
I sat there as the sky turned black and the air grew brisk. I closed the windows and leaned against the glass, watching my dad, with a flashlight on now, searching through the trees and field, his face in the flashlight’s glow grim and determined and, maybe, a little crazy about this thing that had hurt his son, this thing owned by a mean rich man who owned his dream house. He left my sight for a long time, and I got nervous and even started to feel sick to my stomach, but then his light flashed somewhere different from where I’d thought he was. I didn’t know what good it would do if he did find the trap, but I felt glad anyway that he was looking. I liked being out here better than being at home. I felt scared to return to that house where Lynn no longer lived. I thought I would be so sad, I would die.
When he finally returned, he threw some things into the trunk and got in. If anything, he seemed angrier than before.
“What kind of man puts traps like that in a field? What is he trying to catch?”
“Squirrels?”
He looked at me. “Squirrels?!”
He started the car suddenly, and we lurched across the field toward Mr. Lyndon’s house. My heart pounded as we bumped across the grass. I thought maybe my father wanted to yell at Mr. Lyndon. This terrified me. First of all, it was as if my father had turned into a different person. Where was my real father, who always looked before he leapt? Second of all, Mr. Lyndon was, well, he was Mr. Lyndon. You couldn’t just go to his house to yell at him. And shouldn’t we go home to take care of my mother and Sammy?
We reached the private road in front of the mansion, and my father kept driving. He stopped not far from the house and opened up our trunk and pulled out a two-by-four. He walked up the driveway to a red Cadillac and crashed the wood into the front windshield.
Glass exploded outward and sprinkled to the ground. I thought I saw someone peek out the windows at this madman who was my father. My father got in and we roared away.
I looked at him, but his face held no expression. Lynn once said our father was the most determined man in the world. I remembered once how she and I had seen someone act rude to our father. Later I asked her why our father didn’t hit the rude man. Lynn said that he accepted rudeness and unfairness to himself, just as he accepted hard work. If he could have, he would have worked all the time and never slept. My father was the most generous man in the world. I knew that without Lynn telling me so. If Mr. Lyndon or any other man had come to our house feeling hungry, my father would have welcomed him and given him the best food in our kitchen—the freshest fish, the hottest rice, the sweetest pastries. He would have made us be polite. He would accept anything and anyone, so long as he could earn a living to help his family. But I saw that on this one day, for the first time since I’d known him, he could not accept the way his life was turning out.
I watched our small town pass by. We drove right past where we should have turned to go home. We didn’t stop until we were in the next town. Then my father pulled over and lay back against his car seat. I didn’t move. He was my father, but I was not sure whether he was sane. Since Lynn had been sick, he’d been grumpier, but I’d never seen anything like tonight.