He studied me.
“Hungry?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, I know you are.”
Our car suddenly filled with light, and then a sheriff’s car pulled in front of us. The sheriff got out and slowly walked over. He shone a flashlight at us. My father rolled down the window.
“Going for a ride?” said the sheriff.
My father hesitated. I saw that he suddenly couldn’t think. I felt a protective surge. I’d never felt before that I had to protect my father. But now I needed to protect him against this man. The only thing I could think to say was, “We’re on our way to eat tacos!”
“Tacos?” said the sheriff. He looked confused. “You mean at Pepe’s?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, though I had never heard of Pepe’s. As a matter of fact, I’d eaten tacos only once, years earlier in a restaurant in Illinois. I have no idea why I came up with tacos.
The sheriff studied my father. “We just had an incident at Mr. Lyndon’s house.”
“Oh?” said my father.
“Someone busted up his Caddy.”
“Oh.”
The sheriff shone the light on me. “They think the perpetrator drove a light blue Ford.” Our Oldsmobile was gray, light gray. The sheriff moved his light over the outside of our gray car. My father leaned out and said, “I’ve always been an Oldsmobile man.”
The sheriff leaned in with his light shining on me. I smiled, but he could tell I’d been crying. “Something the matter?” he said.
“My sister died,” I said. I let out a sob.
He turned off the light. He seemed to think. The night had grown cool, and when he breathed through his mouth, mist filled the air in front of his face. He switched on the flashlight again and pointed it at my father. He turned it off again. He straightened up and nodded at my father. “Better get her some tacos.”
We drove off in a new direction and stopped at a small Mexican restaurant called Pepe’s. I didn’t say anything, but I felt pretty surprised at this new turn of events. I had loved tacos the one time I ate them. But it was weird to eat them now, in my saddest moment.
The floor of the restaurant was made of brick-colored tiles, and all the tables were covered with pretty blue-and-white tile. Ponchos and sombreros hung on the walls. A singer crooned in Spanish from the record player. The atmosphere was festive. A waiter approached us and said, “Dinner for two, amigo?”
The night didn’t seem real. My sister was dead, and I was about to eat tacos. I ordered five of them. In Illinois, I had eaten one. Now I ate all five of my tacos while my father watched, impressed and then maybe a little worried. “You don’t want to get indigestion,” he said.
When we got home, my mother was sewing a hem in the kitchen. She was fixing my black dress that I knew I would be wearing to the funeral.
“I was worried,” she said.
“Katie ate five tacos,” said my dad. “That takes time.”
He and my mother both looked at my stomach as if expecting to see it explode. When it didn’t explode, my mother raised her eyes to my father. She said the thing she liked to say when she wanted to remind him that he could not afford any sort of unusual behavior. “You’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
He and my mother left the kitchen. She didn’t ask me to wash the dishes. And she didn’t do them herself. I had never known my mother to go to sleep with a sink full of dirty dishes. And I never washed them myself unless I’d been nagged. But that night I thought I should. I cleaned the counters and even took a mop to the floor. I wasn’t sure what sponge to use for the counters. It seemed to me that my mother used a different sponge depending on what she was doing. But there was only one sponge at the sink. An array of bottles and jars of cleaning fluids sat under the sink. But there were no more sponges. I could imagine my mother getting annoyed if I used the wrong sponge. If Lynn were here, she would have been able to tell me what sponge I should have used, she would have been able to tell me what I should do next. I did not know what to do without her to tell me. I lowered my head to the kitchen table and cried. Finally I wet a dishtowel and used that to clean the counters, the table, and even the chair seats. It was late when I finished. I sat at our table and did not know what to do next.
Later on I lay in bed and saw the happy little moth, still alive, flitting from the night-light up the wall and back to the night-light. And it occurred to me what I had seen in Lynn’s eyes the night before: She was wishing she were that moth. Maybe that was the last thing she ever wished.
chapter 15
WE WERE HOLDING the services at the funeral home. I was supposed to give one of the eulogies because everybody said Lynn loved me more than anything in the world. I thought every spare moment about my speech. I also needed to write an essay for school about a family subject or theme, so I decided to make my speech the same as my essay. But I couldn’t even think of the first sentence. I looked up “theme” in Lynn’s dictionary. It said: an implied idea in a work of art. I thought about that for a while, and then I gave up.
My parents were busy, and Sam was sleeping. When she was a girl, my mother had dreamed of owning a flower shop, so she drew dozens of diagrams of how she might organize and display the flowers for the funeral. My father took care of all the arrangements that required dealing with the outer world, all the arrangements with the funeral home, and so on.
It made me sad that the girls from Lynn’s class didn’t show up for the funeral. All thirty-two Japanese in town showed up, including a new baby. In addition, Lynn’s teacher from school attended. Silly, her mother, her uncle, and her brother also attended. So did Hank Garvin and his wife and kids. His wife wore a button on her lapel that said UNION, and I noticed Hank Garvin wore the inexpensive watch that was the best we could afford to give him for a thank-you. A couple of my mother’s co-workers also showed up. One of them had a black eye. I’d heard that there had been union trouble at the factory, but I didn’t know the details.
I couldn’t pay much attention to what was going on because I was so nervous about my speech. I was supposed to go up after Lynn’s teacher. I don’t even remember what she said. When it was my turn, I noticed that my shoes squeaked as I walked up the aisle. The pulpit seemed to be about a thousand miles away. Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. I wished the organ player would play music so nobody could hear my shoes.
Here is the speech I gave:
“My sister was my best friend. She was a genius. She helped me with my homework whenever I wanted. She was going to college and planned to live on the highest floor of a tall building, probably in Chicago. She was going to live in a house in California by the sea because she loved the sea, even though she never saw it. She was going to buy seven houses for my parents, if they wanted. She was going to be either a rocket scientist or a famous writer.
“She was going to be the best in the world and live at the top of everything, and she was going to bring her family with her. This was one of the themes of my sister’s life.”
My mother had told me to end with a special memory I had of my sister. But when I checked my index cards, I saw that I hadn’t brought the cards on which I’d written my memory. Where had I left those cards? At home? In the car? I couldn’t even recall what memory I’d planned to tell. I looked at everyone. Everyone looked at me. I cried out, “Thank you,” and ran to my seat. As soon as I sat down, every single person turned to look at me. Then every single person except Silly turned forward as someone else went up to speak. Silly leaned toward me and smiled and whispered, “You were great.”
Later, before they buried the urn, we were each supposed to throw a flower into the hole. Almost everybody chose red roses. Uncle chose a bright yellow daisy. I chose a cosmos because my uncle told me that a cosmos stands for “heart of a girl.” My father’s white rose missed the hole when he threw it. He’d chosen a rose because he thought that was the most royal flower and Lynn was his little empress, and he’d chosen white because it was angelic. The white rose ha
d landed on a mound of dirt. For a moment nobody moved. My father seemed paralyzed. Then Uncle Katsuhisa stepped forward and gently picked up the rose and threw it into the right place. He laid a hand on my father’s shoulder. My father began to cry. I’d never seen my father cry before. I hadn’t seen him cry the entire time since Lynn had died. Crying made his whole body shake wildly, as if he were possessed. The shaking scared me. I thought in a way that he was possessed and that maybe from then on he always would be.
Everybody came to our house to eat. I just sat in the bedroom by myself. My uncle opened the door and said, “You okay?”
I said, “I’m fine,” and then I burst into tears. He let himself in and listened to me cry. I told him my horrible secret that I had told myself I would never tell anyone and that I had made Sammy promise never to tell. But now I started to blabber. “Uncle, sometimes while Lynn was sick, I got angry at her. Usually I hid it from her, but one time I got mad out loud. It was the middle of the night, and she asked me for a glass of milk. I got up and got her the milk, but when she tasted it, she said she didn’t want it and dropped it on the floor. She got to acting like that when she didn’t feel well. Then I brought her water and started to clean up the milk. But she said the water glass had soap on it, so she threw it on the floor, too. Then she said she wanted milk again, and I wouldn’t get her any. She said she hated me, and I told her I hated her. I made her cry. Uncle, what’s wrong with me?” I sobbed some more. “How come I said I hated her?” I tried to inhale, but the air didn’t seem to go into my lungs. I struggled to breathe.
Uncle let me sob for a few minutes. Then he said, “Did anyone ever tell you that my first son died?”
I stopped crying for a moment. “Really? I didn’t know you had another son.”
“He was just a baby. You weren’t even born yet, and neither was Lynn.”
“Was that a baby from your first wife?”
“Oh, no, I was only married to her for a few months,” he said. “This was Fumi’s first baby. The baby was born very sick. Fumi or I sat with him every night. All he did night after night was cry, until the day he died. He was quiet that day.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Uncle.”
“I know you are. That’s not why I’m telling you. I just want you to know I understand. Lynnie didn’t hate you. You didn’t hate Lynnie. You were mad because she was so sick. There was one day when my son was so sick and in such pain, I thought I should just smother him with a pillow to take him out of his misery.”
“But that’s terrible!”
“Of course it is. I didn’t do it. I would never do it. When someone is dying, you have crazy thoughts. Don’t feel guilty, you’re too young for that.”
Then he told me that some Buddhists believe the spirit leaves the earth forty-nine days after the body dies. He said for the next forty-nine days I could stay busy by taking care of a box of Lynn’s things he would help me make. He said this box would be Lynn’s altar. He started to leave, but I called out, “Uncle Katsuhisa!”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“Are you happy now? I don’t mean today, I mean in general.”
He paused, and I could see he was really thinking. He turned both of his ears inside out at the same time. Pop! Pop! “Yes, I would say that, all in all, today I’m a happy man. It’s not always easy, but, yes, I am.”
A week after the funeral I turned in my new essay at school. This is what I wrote:
Here is a special memory about my sister, Lynn. One day in Iowa there was a strong wind, the kind of wind that seems to go up and down and back and forth. I could hardly see because my hair was blowing around my face. Some of the corn blew almost flat. Lynn and I climbed on a ladder to the top of the roof with two boxes of Kleenex. She said to take the Kleenex out one at a time and let the wind catch it. In a few minutes hundreds of tissues sailed over the cornfield. I held the hair out of my eyes to watch. The tissues looked like giant butterflies.
Later we got in trouble, and our allowance was docked for the price of the Kleenex. We had to go and pick up every single piece. It was worth it to see the butterflies flying over the corn.
Lynn could take a simple, everyday object like a box of Kleenex and use it to prove how amazing the world is. She could prove this in many different ways, with Kleenex or soap bubbles or maybe even a blade of grass. This is the main theme of my sister’s life.
chapter 16
WE MADE LYNN’S altar on her desk, facing the big magnolia, which kept its leaves all winter. Uncle made me a beautiful wooden box in which I placed her chewed-up pencil, a lock of her hair my mother had cut, her toenail clippings, and other really sacred items like that. He’d even inserted a piece of removable glass in the wood under which I could place a picture of Lynn. I started to make our daily rice instead of my mother, and I put a bowl of fresh rice out every day for Lynn. I also kept her favorite water glass full. Sometimes I gave her milk and treats. Other times I would have a feeling that she might want fresh air, so I would open the window over her desk.
My mother and father became like zombies. They ate but didn’t seem to taste their food. They slept but never deeply—I often heard them get up in the middle of the night. During the days we talked to one another but without joy. Sometimes I felt they were even disappointed in me because I wasn’t Lynn. Other times they got the “We should haves”: “We should have fed her liver from when she was younger”; “We should have taken her to that doctor in Chicago”; “We should have tried to buy a house sooner.”
Every day for dinner my mother fed us either SPAM and rice or sardines and rice. The dishes piled up. It looked as if we might lose the house because my parents still owed money on Lynn’s medical bills and my mother wouldn’t work as many hours any longer. I think she felt there was no reason to work hard anymore.
I got so sick of sardines and SPAM that I started to make dinner for the family. The first five nights I made my favorite dinner: ramen noodles with fish cakes and green onion. The sixth through tenth nights I made my second favorite dinner: pizza. Ramen and pizza were the end of my repertoire. Every night after dinner I washed the dishes and cleaned the counters with a new sponge my father had bought me. I did all this so that my mother wouldn’t go insane over how messy the kitchen was getting.
My mother, already thin, still cried all the time and lost weight. My father grew thin, and his skin became waxy and pale. I needed to fatten them up. I borrowed a cookbook from Mrs. Kanagawa and made a different dinner every night.
On the forty-ninth day after Lynn’s death I opened all the windows in the alcove, even though it was raining. I closed my eyes and tried to feel Lynn’s spirit. A leaf suddenly fell off the magnolia tree and flew in the wind and hit the screen right in front of me. I believed that leaf was a sign from Lynn.
When she first died, I felt sorry about all the pills I’d given her that made her feel so miserable. But now I didn’t feel so many regrets. Lynn wanted her life. I thought she was willing to suffer if she could still taste her food, if she could still talk about the sea, if she could still feel a breeze across her face, and even if she could still argue with her crazy sister!
I cried and cried. But then I had to stop. One thing about me was that when I was having a serious wish session, I tried never to wish impossible wishes. I might have wished for sixteen crayons instead of eight, but even when I was little, I never wished for a thousand crayons, because I knew a thousand different crayons did not exist. So on that forty-ninth day I did not wish that Lynn could be alive again, because I knew she was gone. I was worried that her spirit was watching me every time I cried. I was worried that if she saw me crying, she would be very unhappy and maybe she wouldn’t be able to leave the earth the way she was supposed to. So even though I wanted her to keep watching me, I wished she would forget about me and never see me crying and never worry about me anymore, even if that meant I was now alone.
I worked harder at school, because that was one of Lynn’s last w
ishes. It was pretty boring. I hoped Lynn wasn’t watching me, but just in case she was, I spent a lot of time on my homework. The first time I got an A on a math test, my parents were so surprised and proud, they found a frame and hung up the test in their bedroom. That A actually brought a bit of life into their eyes. They mentioned it to everyone they talked to. It was strange to see them so excited about one A, since Lynnie had gotten a zillion of them.
Sometimes, no matter how hard I tried, I got a C. That happened a lot. But when I worked hard, I got better grades. This surprised me. I guess because Lynn was so smart and it had seemed easy for her to get good grades, I never noticed how hard she worked. I thought getting an A was something that happened to you, not something you made happen. But after Lynn had died and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about her, I remembered how often I’d seen her sitting at her desk, chewing her pencil as she worked for hours on her homework.
When summer came, I turned twelve. For my birthday my father took Silly and me down to Lynnie’s grave. We cleaned the grave and planted some flowers. Then we did a dance in our persona as the Shirondas. We’d been practicing almost every day in preparation for performing for Lynn. Silly was Wanda Shironda, and I was Rhonda Shironda. We knew all the words to quite a few songs, and we had worked out some special dance steps just for today. My father watched proudly while we performed “Hit the Road, Jack,” “Where the Boys Are,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and “Twisting the Night Away.” He even laughed a little. That little bit of laughing changed him. He seemed surprised that he could still laugh.
When we got home, he walked into my bedroom and just stared at Lynn’s bed. Then he said, “I guess you and Sammy need more room in here. Why don’t you help me?” My father’s eyes filled with tears as he and I lifted Lynn’s mattress and bedspring out of the room. We didn’t throw them away, though. We called Uncle to ask him to store her bed in his attic.