Osaka is hours away by bullet train.
“What happens if Dad comes back while we’re gone?” Suddenly my tofu doesn’t taste so good anymore. I’d just been about to return my brother’s credit card, too, but now I stop. “If we’re not here and he gets offered another job, he might just leave again.”
Shoma picks up his chopsticks again, just as I put mine down. “I really don’t think he’d do that.”
“But you don’t know for sure.” My brother’s eating calmly, which only makes me feel more on edge, nearly panicky. Without the family tree I’d been counting on to make up what I can’t seem to write, my Summer Celebration Project isn’t going to be good enough. The coming school year looms in front of me again, a huge shadow of dread. “I really need his help with my project, Shoma.”
“I know you do, and I’m sorry I can’t help in his place. Is there another part I can help you with? Maybe we can think of some more places you want to visit? Tell me what you have so far, and we can finish it together.”
I shake my head. How can I show my brother how little I have? Letters to Mom, Dad, Jory, a band? A brochure from a temple? I don’t want to see his face when he realizes he’s been wasting his time with me. Talking about home with him, I think I say mostly the right things. But when it comes to writing them down, that’s where I’m worried my words don’t match what I’m feeling. “We need to keep calling him.”
“It still wouldn’t change the bad reception on his end. But if he comes back while we’re in Osaka, I bet he’ll call. He’ll probably even grab the shinkansen and meet us out there. You never know. Stranger things have happened.”
Shoma’s voice—there’s a bite to it. It catches me off guard, and I look more closely at my brother. He and my dad are supposed to be close. Both of them are artists, are the creative type, and Dad raised Shoma, too. It’s always been easy for me to imagine them being a team, the same way me and Mom had been. Us against them.
“You almost sound like you’re mad at him or something.” I don’t know why I’m defending my dad against Shoma. It confuses me. Shoma’s the one who’s actually here, letting me stay with him. “Dad can’t help it if he can’t call.”
My brother pokes at his fried rice. He’s back to looking younger than he is, as though he could still use a mom of his own. The lights of the restaurant flash off his earrings and his bright-blue hair. I count all the ways we still look alike—the shape of our faces, the shape of our hands. We have the same eyes and chin, too.
“I’m not mad at him, Kaede,” he finally says. “I got tired of being mad at him.”
“Do you hate him?” It’s a new thought—that I’m not the only one who used to wish for a different dad.
“I don’t hate him, either. He is who he is. Which is basically a lost cause. It’s just … sometimes I’m reminded all over again how not all dads take off the way he does, and I get frustrated.”
I guess I’m the one reminding him.
Shoma breaks an egg roll in two. His face gets this new determined look, like he’s convincing himself as much as he is me that we’re done talking about Dad.
“Anyway, we’ll go to Osaka and have an awesome time. I won’t have to work until the evening, so we’ll have most of the day to kick around, eating okonomiyaki and going to places that’ll help with your project.”
I don’t want to have an awesome time. I don’t want to hear about going to a live and eating food in Osaka when I’m supposed to be right here in Tokyo. I have three weeks to figure out how to be okay living in a house without my mom. Three weeks to learn how to be okay knowing I hurt my best friend and how that hurt might be for good. The summer is almost over, escaping from me no matter how hard I wish for it to stay.
But this is what I do.
I smile at Shoma and tell him I think it’ll be fun, too.
Because though he’s only making it harder, the way he keeps trying his best to understand me, I’ve realized something:
If he stops trying, it will feel even worse.
24
Dear Jory,
Nearly everyone has blood ties, right?
Just like nearly everyone has ties to the idea of home, too. And to the idea of roots.
All those ties are supposed to work together, I think. But sometimes, for some people, they just don’t. And instead they get caught between everything, not sure which way to turn.
That day on the rink, I think I was torn up like that, too. My head was full of anger, but my stomach hurt and was full only of missing my mom. Then when you said how I was just taking everything out on the team—it was like setting it all on fire, and I was suffocating beneath the smoke.
The morning had started out so normal. Your mom was at the door to pick me up for hockey camp five minutes early, like usual. You leaned forward from the back seat and honked the horn, and that was usual, too—not just the horn but the always racing to get back to the arena. You leave a part of yourself there, Jory, each time you have to go home. Like bees and their stingers—they also end up paying the cost for getting to fly around free.
I didn’t want to go to practice that day, but I went anyway. Pretending to be into the game was the easiest way to get people to stop asking me how I was doing, you know?
I never told you how sometimes, skating out there, instead of seeing ice through my visor it was a paved road through a windshield. Sticks slammed at pucks with a bang, and I heard screeching tires. Coach yelled during drills, and it was sirens.
It became easy to shove a bit too hard during scrums. To get in a last cheap shot between whistles.
It was one of those cheap shots that led to all this.
Perry was still adjusting his helmet that I’d knocked off his head when he gave me a look that said I was lower than any dog crap on a shoe. Kaede, dude, chill—this isn’t the freaking Olympics. He flipped me the finger as he skated away. He did it slow, too, so I couldn’t miss it.
And that was when you said it, Jory. I was already angry for such a long time that it was like tossing a match onto a grass field gone bone dry, desperate with thirst. I remember your face, how it was more confused than anything, and told myself I was just reading it wrong.
So Perry’s a jerk, but you’re going to hear it from Coach if you don’t quit it, Kaede.
Quit what?
Like you’re looking to start a fight. You’ve been doing it ever since camp started.
It’s called getting into the game, Jory.
No, it’s called looking to start a fight. Your voice dropped here. Like you were already feeling bad about what you were going to say, but you still had to say it—because I needed to hear it, if only to help me. Thing is, beating up any of us here isn’t going to bring back your mom, Kaede. I’m sorry.
And then you’d skated away, leaving your words to twist around in my brain, the same way your helmet was still hanging twisted from your hand.
Jory, this is what you said: No one on our team was the one who’d been driving Mr. Ames’s car, or the one who’d been trying to reach him on his cell.
But this is what I heard: You’re why your mom is dead, Kaede. I still have mine, though, and I don’t have to live with a stranger of a grandpa, and you have only yourself to blame. Your mom is dead because she went out for something for you, was trying to make you happy.
Ten seconds was all it took for me to skate and catch up to you.
For my stomach to turn into some elaborate pretzel.
To ignore the Stop sticker on the back of your jersey, which the league now makes mandatory after too many head injuries.
I lifted my hand and smashed your face directly into the glass above the sideboards.
Ten seconds, Jory.
And reality went from awful to terrifying.
Mr. Zaher says this project is about my chosen theme of home and my last chance to not fail this year. But my mom being gone isn’t the only reason why so much about Vancouver is hard now. That’s how I know my writing stuff for
this project also has to do with you, and how I need to figure out how I let that moment on the ice happen. It means I need to be so careful with my words. Like kotodama, using the right words for the right reasons. I don’t want to be like Light in Death Note who forgets that. It’s why he seems more like a monster than the hero he wants to be.
After Mom died, I started talking to God sometimes. Asking him to take it back, to tell me how to feel all right again. But you know how I’ve never been to church outside of stealing cookies. So how can I expect stuff from someone I don’t even believe in?
I went with my brother to visit a temple in Tokyo this morning. It’s not the God we know being worshipped there but Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy.
I’ve never heard of her before now. I didn’t know her legend or why she’s so special here in Japan.
But being there at the temple, she already felt less distant than God. As though she were actually real and right there beside everyone, listening to us pray for her to be kind.
I also told myself she felt that way because my praying for mercy meant I was praying for mercy for you.
25
Hi, Dad,
How’s it going in Sapporo?
Shoma says you might not be online up there in the mountains. Which means you might not even get this email until you’re already back in Tokyo.
But I’m thinking you’ll be home soon, so no big deal.
I hope you’re enjoying the location and how Sapporo and Hokkaido are much cooler than Tokyo in the summer. I wasn’t ready for the heat here. Shoma says I’ll eventually get used to it. He says that to me about a lot of Tokyo, actually.
I’m staying at his place in Shinjuku now. He’s been showing me around the area, even though we have to work around his schedule. Tomorrow we’re heading out to Osaka. We’re taking the shinkansen pretty early in the morning. His job is really cool. It’s like yours, since you’re both in art. I bet you guys always have lots to talk about when it comes to work.
The food here is awesome. We have some good Japanese restaurants in Vancouver, but nothing like this. Things taste less complicated, as though being close to home means they don’t have to keep trying so hard to be real.
If you come back to Tokyo for me while we’re still away, can you call? Maybe you can come out to Osaka to meet us, or I can leave early and come back with you and you can show me around Nakano. I also really need your help on my summer project for school. I don’t think Shoma would mind too much, getting his time back.
Love,
Kaede
26
As the bullet train blasts us from Tokyo toward Osaka, the land changes, going from concrete gray to blue and green and white.
I stare out the window. I hadn’t realized how little grass there is in Shinjuku, blinded by its huge cityness as soon as I arrived. It’s around, but in pieces so small and scattered they’re like leftovers, or secrets. But fields of it are now unrolling everywhere. Rivers rush into them and they poke up as mountains in the distance. The sky is a turquoise blanket over the world. Clouds dot it like cotton fluff.
More than Tokyo’s tall buildings or city lights or population makeup, it’s this bit of raw earth that suddenly strikes me as most like Vancouver. Most people think of snow when they think of Canada, and how it’s so cold. But the West Coast only gets snow once in a while, since the ocean likes to change it to rain. And rain is what keeps the area so green.
I miss it, and I don’t, and I long for Osaka to show itself through the window soon.
Even though it’ll mean we’re not where we’re supposed to be.
I called my dad’s cell again this morning, before me and Shoma left his place for Tokyo Station to grab the shinkansen. Nothing but that empty silence from his end, which now almost seems like a game. Hide-and-seek, or tag in the dark.
Still, when I packed for Osaka, I was careful to bring everything I own, just in case. My backpack sits at my feet now, smelling of guilt, heavy the way it is, too.
It’s still possible, I think, Dad meeting us out there, if he gets back to Tokyo before we do. And then I’ll be ready to leave with him instead of having to go back to Shoma’s again to get my stuff. One less interaction, one less memory made.
And soon my three weeks will be up, and saying good-bye might be hard, but not as hard as it could have been. Shoma will get back to his life, and I’ll be saved from knowing any more about a music-loving brother who will once more go quiet. Dad will disappear into some other mountain or forest or city, and maybe I’ll hear from him again one day (but probably not).
There’s another saying I’ve been thinking about, the one about blood being thicker than water.
It actually means the very opposite of what most people think it means.
Vincent had told me this as we’d TPed all the teachers’ cars in the school parking lot. He’d made the discovery while researching for a school assignment.
So instead of it meaning that family is more important than friendship, it didn’t start out that way. Originally, the blood they were talking about was what spilled during battles and wars, about soldiers dying for each other as they fought together. How by water they meant the kind that cushions a baby inside its mother, before it’s born, every single one.
The saying, then, is really about choosing friends over family.
That what you get to choose on your own is more important and more valuable than what you are born with, no matter what.
Someone, somewhere, decided this was wrong, and that families, after they make mistakes, always deserve a second chance.
But I can’t decide if that should include my brother and dad.
I also wonder if maybe the person who decided this just had really lousy friends.
Shoma’s working on his laptop in the seat next to me, earbuds in. He’s probably listening to the band he’s watching tonight, getting ready with questions. I can’t help but glance at his screen, curious if he writes with lots of notes or just by gut.
He pops out the earbuds. “Do you want to listen?”
“No, it’s okay.” Still curious. “Are they good live?”
“Well, it’ll be their home crowd tonight, and these guys are young, new. Which means they’ll either be amazing or fall flat. Pressure, you know? Home crowds are funny, the way they expect the best by demanding the most.”
“Home games are like that for hockey.”
“Yeah?”
I nod. “Because you know so many people in the crowd. And they’re all cheering for you. But sometimes it just makes you more nervous, and so you make more mistakes. Which only makes you even more nervous.” The worst was being scared when all that cheering might turn into booing, when home just becomes something chasing you. We would skate out onto the ice, tough and cool, hoping we wouldn’t let home down, not wanting it to turn on us.
My brother winces. “So you like away games more?”
“They’re just different. Home crowds, they love you until you mess up. Away crowds hate you from the start.”
Shoma laughs, and I do, too. “You know, you should write about home games for your project. I think it works.”
I hadn’t thought of that before, and I grin at him. “Maybe, yeah.”
But instead of really smiling back, he’s actually looking more closely at my backpack, the way I’ve tried to cover it up by pulling out my food tray over it.
I’d done my best to squish down everything this morning when I’d packed, to make the backpack as small as possible. And carrying it around, I’d been careful to keep it out of his way, so he wouldn’t notice how it was way too full for a two-day trip.
But now it’s all becoming puffy again, and even I can tell I’ve brought every single thing I own on this side of the ocean.
My brother’s smile falls away completely, and my stomach falls away with it.
“What, you figured an earthquake might hit while we’re gone and there goes my place?” Shoma’s look is very serious as he pushes my
tray back into place and lifts up my backpack to test its weight. “Wow. You really did bring everything.”
It’s not even a question, because he knows what it means and why I did it.
“Nakano is super close to Shinjuku, Kaede,” he says softly, setting my backpack back onto the floor of the train. “It would have been easy to come back for your things before you headed over to Dad’s.”
“It’s easier this way.”
“No, it’s not.”
There’s an awful awkwardness around us that makes that first meeting in the airport seem a party in comparison. Because we know each other even more now, and knowing can make a hurt go from bad to unrecoverable.
“I was supposed to be with Dad this whole time, remember?” I remind him. “You’re just babysitting. I’m doing you a favor by going back to Tokyo with him and letting you work in peace.”
“Why do you think you being around is hard for me?” Shoma’s confusion is complete, and I feel like I’ve kicked him. “I’ve never said that.”
My gut churns. I pluck at a loose thread hanging from the hem of my T-shirt. “No, you haven’t.” Can’t you see the more I get to know you, the more I want a brother, even after I’ve left? And how if you get bored now, then I’ll definitely never hear from you again later?
“So?”
My gut churns more. “I don’t know. I don’t want you to get tired of me, I guess.”
Shoma fidgets with his earbuds around his neck, as uncomfortable as I am. And his voice when he speaks again—it’s gone funny, the way it did when he was talking about Mom. I’ve figured out this means he feels as bad as I do whenever my stomach starts to hurt.
“I know you’re scared of being left out again, Kaede. I’m sorry that I sucked at keeping in touch with you. I should have tried harder.” My brother sighs. “Especially later, when I got older and knew it and still didn’t do anything. I am trying to make up for it now, even though I don’t really know how. All I know are music and writing, and neither really helps me with this. So I’m still trying to figure us out, too. Same way you’re still trying to figure out stuff for school, right?”
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