If You Follow Me

by Malena Watrous

  “I really don’t want to,” I said.

  “Please,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “We need to say good-bye.”

  As we entered the mortuary, I remembered being there a year before. In my memory the day stood out like a slide show, flashes of vivid illumination juxtaposed against deep pockets of darkness. I remembered being shown down the narrow hallway and into a small room where I was left alone with him. My father was the only thing in that room—his body laid out on a gurney—and it seemed impossible to take it all in at once. I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face, so I started with his feet. I stared at his black dress socks, his feet pointing stiffly upward, and I wondered why they’d bothered dressing him in socks but not shoes. I wondered if he hit the water feet first, if the bones of his feet were shattered, the skin bruised. Even his feet weren’t safe. As I walked around the gurney, I gave the body—his body—a wide berth, as if it were an artifact on display at a museum behind a security wire. But there was no security wire to trip, no glass case, nothing separating me from the deceptive stillness of his death, deceptive because he was already settling, sinking into it, I could tell. His skin looked waxy and porous like citrus rind, his lips thin and pale, parted slightly over his front teeth, which seemed translucent and dry. Of course they were dry. He wasn’t salivating. He was a husk. I wondered if the same person who’d applied the pancake makeup to his face had also massaged the emotion out of it. I imagined they wouldn’t want him to look pained, or worse—relieved. But this neutrality was the deadest thing about him. I had known him exuberant and grim, ecstatic and enraged, and desperately sad, but never blank. He didn’t live there anymore.

  Still, I wanted to touch him. I knew that this was the last time I’d be able to. I wanted to make a big messy display of it, to fling myself down on the gurney beside him, wrap my arms around him, pepper his face with kisses, and whisper into his ear that I loved him, my daddy, my daddy. But I knew that it was too late for these words I should have spoken much sooner, much more freely, and much more often. No one would hear them but me, and I didn’t want to perform for myself. I didn’t want to perform at all. And I was scared to touch him. I couldn’t bring myself to feel his waxy skin. But I had to touch him. It was the last time I’d be able to. I finally decided that I would touch his hair. His poor, butchered hair. It was so short. His scalp showed pink through the stubble. But he didn’t look like a marine. He didn’t look tough or aggressive. He looked like he’d been sick.

  Standing in the mortuary a year later, a place I thought I’d never have to return to, I suddenly heard my mother wail. “More? I don’t understand! How could you have made this mistake? How can there be more?”

  The woman behind the front reception desk was holding out a box. She was trying to get my mother to take it, and my mother was shaking her head and crying as the woman insisted that my mom’s instructions had been followed to the letter. She had them written down on a sheet of paper my mom had signed, clearly indicating that the ashes were to be divided into thirds, with a portion reserved for scattering. This was the final third. The receptionist offered to dispose of this last box for us, if we signed a release, and my mom sobbed, “No! You can’t just throw him away!”

  “It’s not her fault, Mom,” I said, and my mom turned to look at me like I was betraying her by taking the receptionist’s side. I was reminded of the time that we went to an appointment with a grief counselor, just a couple of days after the memorial ser vice, and on the way out we came upon a cop ticketing my mom’s car. She started to cry then too, explaining to the officer—a young guy on a bicycle with a leather fanny pack—exactly where we’d been and why, until he ended up not only canceling the ticket, but also giving her a big hug. In the car afterward, when I asked why she had to tell a perfect stranger what had happened, she said, “Should I be ashamed? Is it my fault?” Unlike my father and me, my mom has never had any trouble showing her emotions. Nothing used to scare me more than seeing her cry.

  Because someone had to, I reached out and took the box, which was terribly heavy, and not nearly heavy enough for what it contained: a third of my six foot two, two-hundred-pound father’s remains. I was afraid of dropping it. I wanted to drop it. The receptionist mouthed, “Thank you,” looking at my weeping mother like she was insane, and I wanted to throw it at her smug face. Instead, I shifted it to the crook of my arm and led my mom outside. We were almost to our car when the receptionist caught up with us, a plastic baggie dangling from her fingertips.

  “You asked for this,” she reminded us, her tone defensive. “For scattering.”

  “More,” my mom cried again. “There’s always more.”

  And whose fault is that? I thought.

  That evening, my mom and I buried the box in the backyard, which was in its late summer glory, the flower beds full of dahlias that looked like exploding red and purple firecrackers, the sunflowers that my father allegedly planted for me growing tall, their heads angling toward the apartment windows as if they were trying to see inside. As we lowered it into the ground and covered it with dirt, I felt like we were trying to dispose of evidence. I wondered if any of our neighbors were looking down on us. My mom said a prayer, asking for him to find peace and for us to find the strength to forgive him and ourselves for not having been able to save him. Then she looked at me, waiting for me to add something.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s it.”

  But of course that’s not it. There is always more. I’d forgotten all about the baggie until now, holding it in my hand, such a filmy, flimsy divider separating me from what remains of him. From his remains.

  “Honey? Is something wrong?” My mom’s voice is groggy, thick with sleep. I didn’t calculate the time difference before calling. I don’t apologize for waking her up.

  “What did you just send me?” As usual, the international connection is terrible, and I hear a click after I speak, followed by the echo of my own question.

  “You keep complaining about how cold it is in Japan,” she says. “I was cleaning out the apartment and I found Dad’s old jacket, the suede one you always like to wear when you come home, so I decided to send it to you, with a few other things of his that I thought you might like to have.”

  “Like his ashes?” I say. Like his ashes!

  “Only half of them,” she says. “I scattered most of them in the park, in front of the Conservatory of Flowers, where we used to go for picnics when you were a little girl. It helped me to say good-bye. I thought it might help you to do the same.”

  “I’ve said good-bye!” I explode. “I’m not going to scatter his ashes in Japan. This isn’t my home.”

  “It’s where you are,” she says.

  “Is this your way of getting even with me?” I hold the phone at a distance to avoid the echo. But when I return the receiver to my ear, she echoes the question instead.

  “Getting even with you? What do you mean?”

  “Because I left and you can’t.”

  “Sweetheart,” she says, “I am not mad at you for leaving. I want you to be happy. I want you to live your life as fully as possible. And I’m okay. This is my home. I don’t want to leave. I do want to move on with my life though, and that means forgiving him, and forgiving myself for not having been able to save him.” She pauses, waits for me to speak, but I don’t. I can’t. She sounds wide-awake now, resolute and maternal. She wants to be my mom. She wants me to let her. “Scattering the ashes helped me,” she says.

  “Stop saying that word!”

  “What word?”

  “Scatter,” I say. Scatterscatterscatter. It sounds like something to do with birdseed. Again I think of Hansel and Gretel, leaving crumbs to mark their trail out of the forest, a trail that vanished long before they could find their way home. After hanging up the phone I flip open my dad’s old dictionary.

  scatter: (VB.) 1. to fling away heedlessly 2. to separate and go in various directions 3. to fall irregularly or at random 4. t
o cause to vanish.

  All definitions apply.

  I put everything back in the box, bring the box into the storage area behind the kitchen, and shelve it among identical boxes of things belonging to people I’ve never met, former inhabitants of this house, people who are probably dead themselves by now, survived only by the junk they left behind.

  Later that day, when I return to the dentist to have my tooth filled, he barely examines my mouth before saying, “Your gum still mending. I think you mend slowly.”

  “I think you’re right,” I say.

  “How is the weather today?” he inquires.

  “The weather?” There is no window in his office. Maybe he has no idea what it’s like outside. “It’s sunny,” I say.

  “Sunny,” he echoes. “It is sunny today. Tomorrow it will be sunny again.” He removes his rubber gloves and drops them into a recycling bin, but he doesn’t take off his goggles or face mask. I have no idea what he looks like, couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. “I like sunny weather,” he says. “Sorry my English is so bad.”

  “Your English is fine,” I say, feeling the thump of my pulse. “You speak English very well.”

  “I am going to New York soon,” he says. “With my brother, Yuji.”

  “Keiko’s husband?” I ask, and he nods. “Are you all going to New York?”

  “You all?” he repeats.

  “Keiko told me that she was going too.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Well, Keiko wanted to go. Unfortunately, I think it’s not possible because of children. They are difficult boys. They need much supervision. Yuji will be too busy…So he invited me. Now I had better prepare for my trip, ne? My English is so bad. I’m afraid no one could understand me!” I nod, distracted, wondering if Keiko knows that she has been replaced on this trip, which she was so looking forward to. “You may go now,” he says, clicking off the light and elevating the chair beneath me.

  “But my tooth,” I say, probing the hole with my tongue. “You didn’t do anything. It’s still empty.”

  “If you are free, please return mo ichi do tomorrow,” he says. “Maybe we could practice asking the way.”

  “Asking the way?” I repeat.

  “You know,” he says, “Like when you are lost, and you need help to find your path. I think this happens so often in a new country.”

  Over dinner at 8-ban ramen, I let Carolyn in on my suspicion that the dentist is delaying filling my tooth because he wants free English conversation. “Not free,” she points out. “You’re actually paying him.” I admit that I haven’t been billed for any of his ser vices. “I guess it’s a fair trade,” she says. “Dental work for eikaiwa.”

  “Oh my God,” I say. “I just want him to fill my tooth!”

  “Then you’d better make that clear,” she says, “if you don’t want to spend the rest of the year sitting in a dentist’s chair.”

  After dinner we drive to hottorando, or “hot land,” a bathhouse near the nuclear power plant with dozens of hot tubs filled with brightly colored herbal infusions. There’s even a tub with an electric current running through it, like the grocery store shock booth. This seems like a bad idea to me, and I never see anyone soaking in it.

  The men who work at the plant come in their red jumpsuits, carrying plastic tubs holding soap and razors and folded pajamas, so that they can return to the dorm where they live and slip straight into bed. Grandparents come carrying toddlers, and teenaged girls come in pairs. Carolyn and I follow the example of the most self-conscious teenaged girls, covering our bodies with towels as we get into the hot water, tucking them under our armpits and between our legs. An old woman with a stooped spine tells us not to be shy, but when my towel floats free for a moment, she points at my breasts and says how “ookii,” or big they are. Carolyn and I exchange a glance. A young woman walks to the bath holding hands with a long-haired little girl. The woman slips into the tub, the child sits on its edge, her hair forming a shawl around her, the ends dangling in the water.

  “Hello, Miss Marina,” the woman says. I smile. I have no idea who she is. “I teach sixth grade,” she says in Japanese.

  “Of course,” I say. Once more I have failed to recognize this pretty young woman, although people do look different when they’re naked, and it’s not polite to stare. I allow myself the quickest of glances, which is all it takes to see that her body is as perfect as I would’ve guessed: perfect perky breasts, perfectly flat belly, thighs that don’t touch. No flaws or charm points here. “Hello,” I say.

  “Hello,” echoes the little girl seated next to her in a deep voice.

  “Kim-san?” I say, and the child looks up from under her curtain of hair and grins. “How are you?”

  “Mmm…,” she thinks for a moment and then replies, “hot.”

  I applaud, amazed that she remembered this word, which I only taught her class in passing. The sixth-grade teacher seems equally impressed. She grips the child’s foot and says something in Japanese. I catch the words “hajimete,” the first time, and “hanshimashita,” spoke. In Japanese, she tells me that Kim and her father rent the apartment next to hers, that she brings Kim with her to the baths once a week, but that the girl refuses to soak. She tugs on the girl’s foot, trying to coax her in, but Kim shakes her head and says “hot” again, clearly making her point.

  “She has no mother,” the teacher says. “Kawaisou no ko.” Poor child.

  “Kawaisou usagi,” Kim says. Poor rabbit.

  I remember Kim repeating this same phrase after Koji first said it, and I remember how he snapped at her, telling her not to copy him. Someone really needs to tell the little boy that she is not like his brother, that the way she imitates him is a sign not that something is wrong, but that something is right. She is already learning how to do more than just copy words. She’s learning how to combine them in new and interesting ways, to make her meaning clear, her self known.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  mukou: (N.) the other side; beyond; far away; the future (starting now)

  The sun is not just out this morning, it’s actually rather warm. Slush covers the elementary school parking lot, stained with rainbows of oil. The kids wear rubber boots as they wade into the school, the slush reaching up to the knees of the littlest ones. Jumping out of my car window, I soak my shoes and splatter my pants. I’m bending over, rolling up my cuff s, when I see the two children disappear around the corner.

  The top of the rabbit hutch is covered in planks of plywood but there are gaps between these planks and snow has drifted into the animals’ shelter, covering the hay and melting into an icy pool. The fat white rabbit is fine. The metal trough that holds their food has been overturned and the rabbit is reclining on this dry oasis, stretched in a strip of sunlight, hind legs extended. But the skinny gray rabbit is soaked to the bone, shaking in Kim’s arms as she attempts to dry it off with her uniform jacket. It looks truly monstrous with its wet fur plastered to its skeleton, teeth carving into its lower lip.

  “This rabbit will die soon,” Koji says, just as matter-of-factly as before.

  Kim clutches the animal closer to her chest and it scratches at her, kicking wildly until she’s forced to set it down next to the white rabbit on the overturned trough. She picks up a carrot, breaks off a piece and tries to push it into the rabbit’s mouth, but it turns its head away and slips off the edge of the trough, sinking into slush so deep that only its ears rise above the surface. Kim picks it up again, once more trying to dry its fur before setting it next to the other rabbit, but again it jumps off, this time swimming through the slush to get away from her. She looks like she might cry.

  “Mukoo e ikitai,” the boy says. It wants to get out.

  “Mukoo e ikitai,” Kim repeats after him.

  “Yamero,” he says, stop it, in the exact same tone he spoke to his brother.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” he asks me.

  “To school,” I say, and he tries to
jerk his hand free but I don’t let go this time, pulling him with me into the facility.

  During first period, yet another sixth-grade class draws my portrait. Again the kids all turn me into a cartoon version of myself, but this time Keiko doesn’t say to look at me more closely, to try and draw my eyes as they really are, to give me a mouth. Her own face is as inexpressive as the cartoon faces on the students’ drawings. The scratches on her throat are healing now, fainter than before. Fumiya must have lashed out against her attempts to calm him down, contain his wild energy. She leaves class in the break between periods, returning with a group of third-graders to stand at the back of the room.

  During recess she goes out onto the playground, where she sneaks puff s from Kobayashi-sensei’s cigarette, the two of them leaning against the swimming pool, passing the cigarette back and forth. As I look down from the second-story window, I wonder if she’s telling him about our disastrous dinner, how I refused to tutor her sons. I feel terrible when I think of how I behaved at her house. Maybe she was using me, but she obviously needs help. I don’t know what it’s like to have an autistic child, but I do know what it’s like to try to pretend that everything is normal when it isn’t.

  Today’s lunch is a tuna fish sandwich on white bread, which packs into my hollowed molar. I am trying to write an email to my mom. I want to apologize for calling her in the middle of the night, getting so upset. But thinking about that conversation, and what she sent in her latest care package, makes me upset all over again. I didn’t tell Carolyn about the package. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t want it around. A shadow falls across my blank page, and I look up to see snow falling outside the window.