“You’re switching schools in September?” I ask.
“Not September,” he says. “Japanese school year starts in April.”
“But that’s this month!” I exclaim, and he nods. “Who will be my supervisor?”
“Her name is Takeuchi-sensei,” he says. “She is from Monzen, same town as rice farmers. She was transferred from Monzen agricultural high school. Probably Shika will seem huge to her, like Paris or Milano. She may be your supervisor, but you should be her guide.” The principal says something in Japanese and Miyoshi-sensei continues. “So how about contract renewal? Could you make a decision now, or do you need some time to think about what you want to do next?”
“I can’t believe you got transferred,” I say.
“Actually,” he says, “I requested this transfer. Nanao High School is high academic. It’s kind of a promotion for me. I won’t have to supervise foreign English teacher. Instead, I will run English literary journal. Can you imagine such a thing here?” He shakes his head and laughs. “It’s good thing I had so much practice writing letters to you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Good thing I was so difficult to supervise.”
“This is not what I meant,” he says quietly.
The ceiling in this office is low, pressing down on me, reminding me of the low ceilings in interstate motels, the kind of motel where you stay as you drive from one place to another, not bothering to note the name of the stopover town. Shika is a stopover town. Why would I stay here for another year, teaching English to students for whom it has no real use or purpose, only serving to remind them of how stuck they are?
“I can’t imagine being here without you,” I say, and when the principal asks for a translation, Miyoshi-sensei says, “She’s considering your offer.”
As usual, the technical boys are nearly naked. Fingerprints encircle Nakajima’s neck and he has a split lip in a shade of purple that matches Haruki’s bruised and swollen eye.
“Shitsureishimashita,” Haruki says, bowing deeply. I have committed a rude.
“In English,” Miyoshi-sensei says. “This is English class. And be direct!”
“I…” Haruki begins.
“Stole,” Miyoshi-sensei prompts him.
“I…stole…seifuku.”
“Uniforms,” Miyoshi-sensei translates. “You stole their uniforms.”
“Who cares?” lisps Nakajima in Japanese. “We don’t need them. We’re almost out of here.”
“Actually, I want mine,” says Sumio, looking down at his pierced nipple. “I’m cold.”
“I want mine too,” another boy chimes in. “It’s going to rain today, and I’m supposed to go to the city. I don’t want to wear my plant uniform. I look like a hick in that thing.”
“I’m supposed to give mine to my little brother,” says a third. “My mom’s been threatening to make me pay for the missing one. Those things are expensive.”
“Miss Marina,” Miyoshi-sensei says, turning to face me. “Could you please accompany Haruki to your house? I think there are too many uniforms for him to carry alone, and he should not enter without you.”
Haruki rushes out of the building ahead of me, and I’m glad that we don’t have to walk side by side, that I won’t have to try to talk to him. My skin still crawls when I think of him sneaking into my house over and over, trying to “sabotage” me by unplugging the refrigerator so that our groceries would go bad, following us to the beach and spying on us there. I know he saw us smoke the joint, but I wonder if he watched us kiss. I wonder how much he reported back to Miyoshi-sensei. Probably everything.
When I get home, Joe’s truck is parked in the driveway, windows rolled down. From the entryway, I hear a rhythmic thumping sound in the bedroom. I run upstairs and fling open the door, where I find Joe seated on the floor, drumming his fingers on the back of his guitar while Carolyn stuff s T-shirts into a duff el bag. She looks up and smiles.
“Hey M,” she says. “I’m happy to see you.”
“Sure,” I say. “That’s why you came over when you thought I’d be at work.”
“There was an assembly this morning so I got off early,” she says. “Joe was teaching in Hakui so he offered to help me move the rest of my stuff.”
“How sweet,” I say. “That Joe is a real gentleman. Just ask his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Ritsuko.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Joe says, towering over me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Does Carolyn?” I ask, trying to push him out of the way.
“No,” Carolyn says, calmly folding more T-shirts and putting them in her bag, “and I don’t care.”
“You don’t care that Joe fucked a student? That he took advantage of a freshman?”
“I lost my virginity when I was fifteen,” she says, “to a thirty-year-old guy who worked at the same firm as my father.”
“So that makes it okay?” I cut her off. “Because you were taken advantage of too?”
“I seduced him,” she says, zipping her bag shut. “He treated me like an adult, and he taught me a lot of things, and it wasn’t a bad choice.”
“But you were just a kid.” I say, “He had the power.”
“In a way,” she says, “but in a way I did. I could’ve told someone. And I wasn’t being held against my will. I’m the one who ended it.”
“Well, I don’t think Ritsuko had a lot of power,” I say, “and I think sixteen is pretty young.” I almost add, to have an abortion without any support, but I don’t know if she told Joe that she was pregnant, and it’s not my secret to divulge.
“I think I love her,” he says, standing with his back to us, looking out the window. “Not that it matters. She won’t even return my calls.”
“Really?” Carolyn says. “I thought you wanted a partner. Someone who can speak her mind.”
“I know she’s young,” he says without turning around, “but she’s amazing.”
“It’s true,” I say. “She can speak her mind.” I can’t even hate him anymore. Nothing is ever simple. “Why did you come back here?” I ask Carolyn.
“To get the stuff I left behind,” she says.
“That junk?” I laugh. “You never get rid of anything.”
She slings her bag over her shoulder. “I miss you,” she says.
“You didn’t even say good-bye.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
This line sounds oddly familiar, but I can’t remember when I heard it before. Then suddenly I do. It was in our dorm lounge, late at night, right after I told her that I was afraid that the wave of grief might wash me away. She held me while I sobbed, and I barely even knew her. She took me to her room. She took care of me. She got me out of there.
“Is someone downstairs?” Joe asks.
“Haruki,” I say.
“What the fuck is the cat killer doing here?” Carolyn says.
“I don’t know,” Joe says, “but I think he’s taking off with your things.”
Downstairs, the door to the storage area is still open and all of the boxes on the shelves are empty. I notice the address written on the side of one of these empty boxes, written in my mother’s handwriting. This is the box that used to contain my father’s things.
The box that held his remains.
I fly out the door, down the street, catching up with Haruki as he rounds the corner, carrying a bulging black garbage bag over one shoulder. I grab the garbage bag and dump it out on the street, but all I can see are uniforms.
“Where are the things that were in the boxes?” I ask in Japanese.
“Gomi ni narimashita,” he says. It became garbage.
“When did you throw it away?”
“Earlier this week,” he says.
“What day?” I ask. “What kind of garbage did it become?”
“Moeru gomi.”
Burnable garbage.
I know the rules. Burnable garbage gets collected only on Tuesdays in this neighborhood, from the bi
n in front of Mister Donuts. It must be thrown in clear plastic trash bags, so everyone can see what you’re throwing away. Today is Monday, and the bin in front of Mister Donuts is not just filled with plastic trash bags, it’s also surrounded by them, literally buried under them. It looks like a mountain of trash. Mount Garbage. Gomi-san.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” I say to Carolyn, who insisted on coming along after I told her what Haruki threw away. “I didn’t know what to do with his stuff. Now I guess I can just forget about it. Move on.” But she won’t accept my defeat. She never gets rid of anything, and she won’t let me either. I watch her scale the mountain of trash, stepping from bag to bag in her heavy combat boots. With her shredded tights and miniskirt, she looks like a superhero. Garbage Girl. She looks as fierce and androgynous and lovely as ever. Carolyn is not afraid of the ugly parts of life. She doesn’t look away, or even want to. Having reached the summit of Gomi-san, she calls down to me, asking me to tell her everything that was in the box. I close my eyes and try to remember. “A suede jacket,” I begin, “a camera and some lenses wrapped in tube socks, a dictionary and an orange velour sweatshirt…” The one he bought when I was a baby, because it was the softest thing he could find. My chest hurts like I’ve been breathing smog.
“Anything else?” she prompts me to go on.
“Just some ashes,” I say, sitting on the curb and burying my face in my hands.
“Ashes?”
“My mom thought I might want to scatter them here. To say good-bye. I couldn’t even bring myself to open the baggie. I guess Haruki scattered them for me.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get them back,” she says, picking up another bag, examining its contents and pitching it down the side of the mountain. “I’m looking for the orange velour sweatshirt. That should be bright enough to show through the plastic. I doubt the kid threw away a camera.”
“It was really old,” I say. “It probably didn’t even work anymore.”
“But it’s not burnable,” she says. “He probably put it in the bin by the river.”
“I’ll go look,” Joe offers.
“That’s a good idea,” Carolyn says to Joe, “but hurry back, so that you can help me look through all of these bags. This could take a while.”
A Mister Donuts employee stands in the open door to his shop, nervously fingering his visor while he watches Carolyn move the mountain. “Um, excuse me,” he calls out in Japanese, “but what are you doing in the trash?” Carolyn ignores him and continues tossing bags over the side of the bin, where they land with soft plops at my feet. He looks at me, the tears streaking my face, the tendrils of snot I keep wiping with my sleeve, and he goes back inside, no doubt to call the police about the crazy gaijin falling apart in front of his store. If throwing the wrong trash away is a minor violation, then this must be a major crime. With every bag that Carolyn discards, I find myself increasingly disappointed. And disappointed in my disappointment. My dad walked away from this junk. He had no more use for any of it. Why should I be its keeper and treasure what he trashed? Carolyn is so driven and efficient that it doesn’t take her long to empty the entire bin. She hoists herself out of the Dumpster like someone climbing out of a pool and tells me not to lose heart, that there are still tons of bags surrounding the bin. “Don’t worry,” she says, sitting beside me and taking my hand. “I won’t let your dad’s things get thrown away.”
“Burned,” I choke. “Can ashes burn? What do you think happens to them?”
“They probably disappear,” she says.
“Dust to dust,” I say. “The perfect ending.”
“No it’s not,” she says, squeezing my hand. “It’s a terrible ending.”
“What difference does it make?” I sob. “I had to do something with them.”
“But you didn’t,” she says. “Someone else did. If you want to throw them away or burn them, then fine. That’s your choice. But you have to make it.”
“My mom was right,” I cry. “There’s always more. It’s been almost two years since my dad killed himself, and we’re still dealing with the mess he left behind. It will never be over. There will always be something else to get rid of.”
“You’re wrong,” she says, standing up and looking down at me. “Someday you’ll go home and find that nothing belongs to him anymore. Mail with his name will stop coming. People will stop asking if you miss him. And maybe you won’t. Or you will, but only in an abstract way. You won’t be able to picture his face anymore. You won’t remember what his voice sounded like, or his laugh, and you’ll wish you had something to hold on to, to remind you of him. You’ll wish you had all of it, every single thing, because no matter what you held on to, it won’t be enough.” She is crying too now, and I wrap my arms around her and hug her close, the way she taught me.
“Now tell me everything that was in the box again,” she says, still holding me.
“I told you,” I say. “There was a suede jacket, a camera, a dictionary, an orange velour sweatshirt, a baggie of ashes. Oh, and a cell phone.”
“Your dad had some special cell phone?”
“No,” I say. “It was Ritsuko’s.”
Joe has returned victorious, camera slung around his neck.
“Call the bags,” I order him.
“What?” he says.
“Ritsuko’s cell phone is in there. It’s probably out of batteries, but you never know.”
While Joe dials, Carolyn and I circle the mountain of garbage, crouching low and pressing our ears to the plastic, listening to the trash. People walking toward the donut store stare at us and keep their distance. A woman carrying her own bag of trash turns around and walks away. Suddenly Carolyn dives into the pile, pulling out a ringing trash bag.
It’s all there.
Alone in the bedroom, I lay it on the tatami: jacket over shirt, dictionary where a hand would have been, camera for a missing face. As if I could build him from scraps. Fill in the blanks. Fill in my blanks.
Once, when I was in the second grade, my father pulled me out of school for a week and the two of us took a trip, driving from California to Arizona, to visit his younger brother who was working as an engineer in a copper mine. My dad had a week off before starting his residency. He’d entered medical school when I was in preschool, which meant that he came home after dinner most nights, was gone again before I woke up the next morning, and when he was around he was bone tired. On his rare days off, we’d go to the beach as a family. My mom and I would walk on the sandy path beside the road while he drove in the bike lane, keeping pace with us. He wanted to spend time as a family, but he was too tired to walk. More than once I saw him start to fall asleep standing up, sway, and then catch himself. The trip to Arizona was my mom’s idea. On one of those walks, she told me that my dad and I should spend more time together, just the two of us. She told me that we should make an effort to know each other, before I was grown up and we both regretted the time we’d missed.
I barely knew my uncle, who was shorter and more compactly muscled than my dad; he had less hair, a sharper nose, and thinner lips; yet they still looked so much alike that I was confused when I saw them together, standing side by side like a man and his funhouse mirror image. My uncle explained that children weren’t allowed down in the mine, where it got up to four hundred degrees. “You’d burn right up,” my father teased me, messing my hair, which was his way of showing affection. I believed him. I worried that after descending into the copper mine, my own father might end up shrunken. He took a tour while I waited in the car with the windows down. It was one hundred degrees out, and I had enough math in me to understand that it was four times hotter down there. The longer it took for my father to reappear, the more certain I became that he had burned up, that I’d never see him again. But he came out intact, bewildered to find me sobbing in the hot car.
“I’m fine,” he said, messing up my hair again. “I’m tougher than that, kiddo. You don’t have to worry about me.”
; I don’t remember many details from the rest of the trip, but the drive back home stands out clearly in my memory. As he drove, I lay on my side with my head on his lap, reading the stack of books I’d brought along. “You should look out the window,” he said. “You never know when you’ll be back in this part of the country. You might never get the chance to see this again.” But I didn’t care. I loved reading while the warm wind blew into the car; I loved the soft, grainy feel of his cut-off jeans under my cheek, and the way he kept a palm on my forehead to protect me from the steering wheel. Sometimes I read aloud to him. We took our time getting back. He turned off for every scenic vista, every state park. As usual, whenever a plant caught his eye, he’d pull over and have me stake a lookout while he dug it up and placed it in a bag to replant in our garden. His hatchback had no trunk, only a rear cavity with a sloped back window, and by the end of our road trip we’d filled it with so many liberated natives that the headlights of the cars behind us were softly filtered by their foliage.
The very last night of our trip was also the night that Halley’s Comet returned to earth. He must have been planning for us to pull into the observatory on the night it burned a path through the sky for the first time in seventy-five years, but the coincidence seemed miraculous at the time. As we drove up to the planetarium, he explained that a comet was really just a chunk of dust and ice left over from when the world was made. “Every seventy-five years,” he told me, “this particular chunk of ice and dust orbits close enough to the sun that the gasses catch on fire. What you see, the tail of the comet, is really just dust in flame. But what’s special about Halley’s Comet is that even though we can’t see it coming, we always know exactly when it will return.”
“But how do we know it’s the same chunk of ice and dust?” I asked. “What if it’s different? How do we know?” I was used to repeating myself over and over, asking questions he didn’t answer, not because he couldn’t answer them, but because he couldn’t hear me. When he got started talking about science, he lost all sense of his audience. He was fascinated by the way things worked. He had to take things apart in order to understand them. “How do we know?” he repeated my question. “Thanks to the astronomer who figured it out, the man it’s named for, Edmund Halley. The tragic part is, no one believed him at the time, and he didn’t live to see his prediction come true.”
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