Summer Bird Blue

by Akemi Dawn Bowman

  Lea smiles at me. Her hair is swept to the side, her waves and tangles framing the left side of her face like a pillow. Her cheeks dimple because she had that cuteness about her that doesn’t exist with me, and God I miss her so much I want to throw myself at her and hold her and hold her until time takes her away from me again.

  But I keep playing. Because Lea is here, right now, for the music. She’s listening—I know she’s listening.

  A memory

  Lea’s face is so small. She’s still missing her front teeth, so when she smiles at me from the side of the piano, I can’t help but laugh.

  “That one was really good,” she says with the kind of enthusiasm that happens only when someone is too young to know what real talent sounds like.

  I nod, because I don’t know what real talent sounds like yet either. “It’s a pirate battle. I’m going to mail it to the people who make the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and see if they’ll use it.”

  “They will. You’re going to be famous probably,” Lea says, starry-eyed.

  I nod. “Probably. Hey, do you want me to teach you how to play it?”

  She’s sitting next to me before I finish my sentence.

  I show her the notes, again and again. She makes a lot of mistakes, but she’s so determined to learn them that I don’t give up on her.

  After a while she sighs. “I wish we had two pianos. Then we could play together.”

  I make a face. “I’ve never seen anyone on TV with two pianos before.”

  Her face falls, disappointed.

  I pause. “You could learn the guitar, though. Pianos and guitars go together.”

  Lea’s smile stretches so wide I can see all the teeth she still has left. “That would be amazing. We could write songs together.”

  I nod. “Yeah, until you get really good and then you won’t want to listen to me play anymore.”

  Lea shakes her head, her eyes so full of happiness. “No way. I’ll listen to you play even when you’re ninety and old like Babang.”

  “Babang isn’t ninety.”

  “Well, I’ll still listen to you when you’re older than Babang, then.”

  “Promise?” I ask.

  “I promise,” she answers.

  Lea never broke her promises, even when I broke so many to her. Because she was the best sister in the entire world. So much better than me.

  Guilt crawls up my throat. I don’t deserve to be here when Lea isn’t.

  I swallow hard, fighting the queasiness building in my stomach.

  I have to focus on the music—I have to focus on what Lea would’ve wanted; otherwise I’ll never finish our song. I’ll never be able to make amends for what I did.

  And maybe holding on to “Summer Bird Blue” is how I can hold on to her.

  When the song ends, I open my eyes and find everyone staring at me. Hannah looks impressed. Jerrod and Gareth look like they’re trying to comprehend something. Kai looks like he’s seen something wonderful, his brown eyes full of childlike joy. I don’t know why he looks at me that way—like I’m one of the great wonders of the world.

  Izzy motions her hands at me. “One moa, one moa.”

  And just like that, I’m playing the guitar again, singing along to the echo of the waves and the flutter of coconut trees behind me, searching for Lea in the poem of every broken chord and lyric, wishing for her to be real again.

  I’ve finally found her. The music is where she exists now. Not in the ocean, or the stars, or my dreams.

  My sister lives in the songs.

  And that’s when I know I have to keep playing. I have to keep writing.

  Because it turns out music isn’t just keeping me alive—it’s keeping Lea alive too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Mr. Watanabe stands in the doorway with two mugs of green tea. When I come to the end of my song, I take one of them from him, sipping carefully. He doesn’t move from his spot, but he doesn’t come inside the room, either. Maybe it’s too painful to be around the piano, or the photographs, or the music.

  He motions to the piano. “I neva hear dat one before.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s just something I made up a long time ago,” I admit. “Something I wrote with my sister. You know—before.” Before she died. Before the music left me. Before I forgot how to write.

  So much has happened before that sometimes I worry about what’s going to happen after.

  I wonder if some people spend their whole lives being scared of what’s to come. It’s the not knowing that’s always terrified me. I’m forever worried I’m going to make a mistake that’s going to set my life on a course I can’t change. And I spent so much time worrying about myself and whether I’d turn out like Dad that I never stopped to think about how Lea’s life might change.

  I never expected her to just die.

  She was on a path. The right path. A good path.

  I don’t know who makes the rules, but Lea definitely didn’t deserve to die. If it had to be one of us, it should’ve been me. Because Lea would’ve made the world better—I look at the world like I don’t want anything to do with it.

  I think it makes me ungrateful, but I don’t know how to change it.

  My sister fit in the world so perfectly. Whereas I’m the random, extra piece that you find inside a box after you’ve put everything else together. Everyone knows it probably belonged somewhere, but everything runs perfectly fine without it, so it gets tossed in the trash.

  That’s me—dispensable. Without a purpose.

  I feel my hands start to shake, so I tuck them beneath my legs and stare at the piano keys.

  Mr. Watanabe pretends he doesn’t notice, but he’s been quiet for so long that I know he must be noticing something. “Mmm,” he says eventually. It sounds like a grunt. “You pretty good, eh? Sound like one professional.”

  “Thanks,” I say, scratching my shoulder awkwardly. “It’s not really supposed to be for the piano, but I’m not ready to touch my sister’s guitar yet. It . . . it wouldn’t feel right, you know?”

  He thinks for a moment and then disappears. When he comes back, he’s holding a ukulele instead of his tea. “You can go borrow dis one.”

  “That’s not a guitar,” I say, even though my heart starts to beat faster.

  “Dis mo’ bettah,” he says. “Guitar take too much space.”

  I take it from him, feeling the strings beneath my fingers. And holding the instrument close to my chest, I strum to hear the pitch of the notes. It’s so different from a guitar—more of a wooden, gentle sound. Guitars sound metallic and firm, like the instrument has a sharpness, waiting to fight if it needs to.

  This ukulele doesn’t want to fight. It wants to lie on the beach and feel the sand in its fingers. It wants to float on a raft in the ocean, drifting off to sleep with the rise and fall of every wave. It wants to come alive at the warmest part of the day, when the sky is the most perfect blue and the sun makes the world feel like home.

  “Sound good, eh?” he says.

  I brush my fingers against the smooth wood. “Why do you keep all these instruments?” I look up at him like he’s holding a secret that I’m desperate for. “If you don’t play—if they were your wife’s—why do you keep them around? Don’t they haunt you?”

  Mr. Watanabe twists his mouth around, chewing a word or two before he speaks. “Ghosts no stay here.” He waves at the ukulele, then at the piano. “Dey stay here.” He presses a finger to his heart.

  I blink. “Do they ever leave?”

  He doesn’t hide the fact that his eyes fall to the old photographs of his wife and son. “Dey neva eva leave.” When his gaze finds mine again, he grunts. “But dat no mean you need fo’ give up living. You too much young fo’ be sad all da time.”

  “When I think about Lea, I don’t know how to not be sad,” I admit.

  “I’s li’dat fo’ long time, yeah. Maybe even fo’eva. But bumbai going start to hurt less.”

  “I don’t want to be
sad anymore. I don’t want to feel guilty forever.” I pin my lips together. I shouldn’t be saying all of this out loud. It makes it sound like I don’t care about my sister as much as I should.

  Mr. Watanabe nods like he understands, and maybe he does. “You know, my son, he used to love his music. He would sit on da stool next to his muddah. Den he would start fo’ play—all da wrong notes, da same time she stay playing all da right ones. An’ den, after when he pass away, all we know how fo’ do was fo’ feel sad. Wen’ take a real long time, but afterward, my wife, she said she like bring back da music to da house. But I tol’ her ‘No, I no like.’ Cuz our son, fo’ me, he still stay living inside da music, yeah? An’ it wen’ hurt me—every time when I hear her play. So den she neva eva play da piano again.

  “An’ den one day she got real sick too. When she wen’ pass away, I feel like I wen’ lose da two of dem both all ovah again. Dat’s because da music went die wit’ her, yeah? An’ da memories—da ones of our son, da ones of her—dey gone. Jus’ li’dat. An’ I regret dat. I regret neva letting her remembah our boy wit’ his music. I wish I wen’ spend less time being haunted and mo’ time facing my pain, so dat way—me an’ her—we could have been living wit’ his memories instead of hiding from dem.”

  My heart beats against the back of the ukulele. The quietest drum in the world.

  “No feel bad about living, eh? You never know how much time you have left.”

  I sit with the ukulele, learning its personality and toying with the familiar notes, and pretty soon Mr. Watanabe disappears again, but this time he doesn’t come back. He leaves me to hum along to the music erupting from my fingers, and I don’t know if I’m teaching the ukulele or the ukulele is teaching me, but it feels wonderful.

  And then I hear her voice, here in Hawaii.

  I hear Mom.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I leave the ukulele at Mr. Watanabe’s and rush next door.

  Mom is standing in the middle of the living room. I don’t know where Aunty Ani is—all I see is her, holding her hands up like she’s ready to grab hold of something if she falls over.

  She looks weak.

  She is weak.

  The volcanic rage inside my chest is practically ready to blow the whole house away. If I wanted to, Mom wouldn’t stand a chance.

  But I don’t need her to fall over. I need her to not be here at all.

  “Why are you here? Nobody wants you here. You left me. You left me.” I’m screaming the words over and over again. Aunty Ani appears from behind the corner, her hands raised to calm me down, but everything is starting to go so starry and muddled that I can’t figure out who is saying what.

  “Don’t shout, Rumi.”

  “You’re not being fair.”

  “Just let me explain.”

  “Stop.”

  “Slow down.”

  “You need to hear this.”

  “Please talk to me.”

  “Please listen.”

  “Rumi.”

  “Rumi!”

  “Rumi!”

  I don’t care what they have to say—either of them. I don’t want to see Mom, and Aunty Ani is Judas, as far as I’m concerned, for letting her into this house without warning me first.

  Mom raises her hands up to her mouth like she’s trying to pull her words out or stuff them back in. I can’t really decide. Her dark wavy hair is lifeless and flat, and I’m not sure if it’s mascara mixed with tears all over her eyes or if dark circles can actually get that dark, but she looks like a mess. She doesn’t look like Mom—the Mom I remember—and good, because all my good memories are with that mother. The woman in front of me is just a ghost.

  A memory

  “Happy birthday, baby!” Mom taps her finger against her phone. “Oh, wait. That one came out blurry—let me take another one. Okay, okay, happy birthday, baby!”

  I roll my eyes. “You don’t have to say ‘happy birthday’ twice, Mom. Just take the picture.”

  “You know what, this lighting is really bad. Could you stand on the other side of the table? No, not there—just—okay, that’s good, but I want to get the cake in there too.” Mom’s staring at her screen again.

  Lea giggles infectiously from the counter. I throw her a look, but it only makes her laugh harder.

  “Mom, seriously. Nobody is ever going to see this photo. Who cares what the lighting looks like?” It’s not really a question. I just want her to see my point.

  “You might want to put it on Instagram. Or the other one. The Snapgram,” Mom says innocently.

  Lea snorts. “It’s Snapchat, Mom.”

  “Okay, that one too,” Mom says.

  “There is zero chance I’m putting this picture on Snap-anything. Are we done yet?” I say, my fingers fidgeting near my sides.

  Mom looks at Lea and raises her eyebrows. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Lea shrugs like she’s clueless. She’s not. Even if I hadn’t told Lea what was wrong, she wouldn’t have ratted me out to Mom. We have an arrangement. It’s called the Circle of Silence, and only me and Lea are allowed to be a part of it.

  I pull off the pointy birthday hat Mom made me wear for the picture and toss it onto the table. “I’m fine, okay? I just don’t like birthdays.”

  Mom steps toward me and puts her phone on the kitchen table. She smells like shea butter lotion and coconut shampoo. When she reaches her arm up to rub my shoulder, I catch sight of her engagement ring hanging from a silver chain around her neck.

  After Dad left, things were hard for a while. But Mom is one of the hardest workers I know. She managed. She made sure we were okay, even if it didn’t always feel like it at the time. Even when almost everything we owned was sold in favor of food and school clothes.

  That’s how she found out her engagement ring was fake. She was going to sell a diamond ring without a second thought, but a cubic zirconia? She couldn’t part with it. She wanted a reminder of the lie.

  Now Mom never takes it off. She says it reminds her how grateful she is that she never got married and how her relationship with me and Lea is more sacred and forever than a man with a diamond—fake or otherwise.

  Mom is one of those people who say a loving family makes them richer than any billionaire. And she believes it too.

  Sometimes I worry Mom thinks I’m too much like Dad—distant and cold. A ghost. I might not kiss Mom on the cheek and wrap my arms around her like we’re best friends, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love her just as much as Lea does.

  But I don’t know how to explain that to her. I don’t know if it’s too late—if she already decided Lea is her favorite because I’m too much like the man who abandoned her.

  “Rumi.” I feel Mom’s fingernails trail along my sleeve. “Talk to me, honey. What’s bothering you?”

  I bite my lip. The sandwich method. “The cake looks great. Birthdays make me feel like the world is moving too fast and I’m running out of time. The balloons are nice.”

  Mom’s quiet for a while. “You don’t have to be scared about getting older. Everyone gets older—it’s the rules.”

  I look at Lea. She knows my fears—about vanishing the way Dad did. Here one moment and gone the next because I couldn’t figure out how to anchor myself. Because I couldn’t figure out how to be worthy of existing the way Lea and Mom do. They’re better than me. I need more time to figure it out.

  Otherwise I’ll become Dad. Everything will just be too much, and I’ll feel pressured and suffocated. I’ll disappear one day, exactly like he did.

  I don’t want to disappear.

  I want time to slow down. I want everything to slow down.

  “I’m not ready to grow up yet. And I don’t mean in a Peter Pan way. I mean I’m literally not ready. I don’t know the things other people know at my age. I haven’t made the choices other people have made. I’m . . . not ready.” I think of Dad, not ready to be a father. Not ready to give up his life.

  I’m too scared to start mi
ne, in case I make a mistake and change my mind and end up like him.

  Mom nods slowly and pulls me close so that her mouth is next to my ear. “It’s okay to not be ready. It’s okay to take your time. You don’t have to decide right this second who you are or what you want. There’s so much time for that, you know? I just want you to be happy. And, you know, I’ll always be here for you. For every decision you ever make, for as long as you need me, I’ll be here. Because I love you, and that’s what real parents do.” She cups her hand around my cheek and kisses the side of my head. “I’m here for you, always.”

  I wipe a tear away with my knuckle and suck my breath in.

  “But,” she says after a while, “we’re still singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ You don’t get out of ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

  Mom lights the candles and she and Lea sing as loud as they can, cheering at the end like there’s twenty of us in the room instead of three.

  I close my eyes, wish for more time, and take a breath.

  “You promised,” I say, my heart pounding wildly at the same time the memories of Mom shatter like a thousand broken mirrors. “You said you’d always be there for me. You said that’s what real parents do. But you’re as bad as Dad—worse even, because at least he admitted he couldn’t take care of his kids. You kept pretending until you couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Someone reaches for me—Mom or Aunty Ani—but I’m turning away so fast I don’t know who it is.

  “Don’t touch me,” I shout angrily. “Stay away from me. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  I retreat from the house and wander through the hills of the neighborhood until my feet blister. I’m practically near the water before I decide to turn back around, and thank God I was way too angry to walk in anything other than a straight line because I have no idea where I am. I just wanted to put distance between us, because I can’t be close to Mom right now. I’m not ready to forgive her, or hug her, or talk to her about Lea and what happened. She’s here to apologize. She’s had time to work things out in her head, and now she’s ready for things to go back to normal.