If You Follow Me

by Malena Watrous

  In the planetarium parking lot, we sat on the hood of his car, our tailbones making two lasting dimples in the thin sheet metal. I saw the fuzzy tails of light arcing behind what looked like a falling star, but was really cosmic dust. It was cool out, a shock after the desert heat, and he took off his orange velour sweatshirt and gave it to me. I pulled the sleeves over my bare legs, wearing it like pants, and nestled against him, burrowing under his arm. “Keep your eyes open, kiddo,” he said, squeezing me gently. “This is one thing you won’t see again in your lifetime, guaranteed. At least not with me.” I looked at him, but he was staring up at the comet.

  The last summer I spent at home, when my mom went to work as a camp counselor, my dad and I were left alone together for the first time since that trip to Arizona. I was selling popcorn and candy at a movie theater, which earned me a free pair of tickets to any movie playing. Even at his most depressed, my dad still liked getting away with something, getting something for free, and on the nights I had off sometimes we’d go to the movies together, sitting through screwball comedies and summer action flicks with absurd chase scenes and explosions that lit up the screen like fireworks. It was a relief to sit in the darkness without having to talk. We’d stop at Burger King on the way and get 99-cent Whoppers—no drinks or fries because that’s where they ripped you off—and sneak them in.

  The last night we spent together was at the end of one of those Indian summer days when San Francisco almost stops functioning because of the heat. I was wearing a sundress, and the air-conditioned theater felt refreshingly cool when we first entered it, but quickly became too cold. I remember that he laid his suede jacket across my lap to keep me warm, just like he used to at night on our road trips. We ate our burgers and we both relaxed, laughing obligingly at the silly comedy on-screen. I don’t remember much about the movie, only that when it ended and the credits started rolling, we kept sitting there even after the lights in the theater came on and a team started cleaning the trash off the floor.

  “I’m really going to miss this, kiddo,” my dad said, putting his hand on the back of my hair and leaving it there. “I hope you know that.” The summer was almost over. My mom was coming back home and I was headed back to school. I was twenty-one, about to begin my adult life. I thought I knew what he was talking about. “I guess it’s time to go,” he said, but his hand was still on my hair and he made no move to get up, and neither did I.

  PART IV

  O-Bon

  SUMMER

  It’s not like anything

  they compare it to—

  the summer moon.

  EPILOGUE

  Although it must have been this hot when we first arrived in Shika, I feel unprepared for the humidity of July, assaulted by the sun that is up before Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons blasts from the loudspeakers. So every morning, before brushing my teeth, I put on my bathing suit, then the yukata I bought on a weekend trip to Kyoto—a last trip with Carolyn before she returned to New York to start culinary school—and walk the five blocks to the sea, a path I could follow with my eyes closed by now.

  No one else is ever at the beach this early. It’s all mine, as far as the eye can see. I slip out of my yukata and wade into the water, which gets warmer day by day. There’s no shock of entry. I swim out as far as I can, as far as I dare, until I am out of breath from swimming and from the awareness of myself as I would look from up above, a speck in the blue sea. Then I turn around, hold my knees in my arms to keep my feet out of the darker, colder water below, and look back at Shika.

  From the sea I can see it all: the scalloped coastline, the tire-tracks perforating the sand, the wind-bent pines that look like old people hunched over canes, the smokestacks of the nuclear power plant up on the hill, the school. From the sea, it looks like a postcard, if there were postcards of Shika. I roll over onto my back and let the current carry me where it wants to, where it will, closing my eyes, always surprised to find myself closer to the shore when I open them again.

  This daily ritual is something I keep private, so I am taken aback when, in the middle of July, Hiro says to me out of the blue, “You had better stop swimming in the sea, ne? Maybe it’s not such a good idea anymore.” Since he is no longer my supervisor, I call him by his first name and he no longer calls me “Miss” Marina. This took a little getting used to. But now, three months after his transfer to Nanao High School, I almost never slip up and call him “Miyoshi-sensei.”

  It’s after dark and we are sitting at a table at the local bar, a joint that caters mainly to plant workers, almost exclusively to men. This bar is the only place in town that serves food past nine, which is when Hiro gets back to Shika from Nanao most nights. The first time he asked me to meet him here, he wanted my help reading through the stack of submissions he’d received for the English literary journal. We disagreed on our favorites. He preferred the sentimental poems cluttered with strange metaphors. I liked the funny stories about daily life. The next time he didn’t bring any student writing. I was happy that he didn’t have to invent an excuse to hang out with me, but I sort of missed reading the submissions together.

  The mama-san at this bar has gotten used to our strange pairing and ways. Without needing to be asked, she brings us a large Sapporo to share and a dish of oden—tofu—two boiled eggs, and a hockey puck of simmered daikon radish for me; fish sausages and a skewer of chicken skins for Hiro.

  “Who told you that I’ve been swimming in the sea?” I ask, piercing an egg with the tip of a chopstick. The crumbly yolk turns the broth creamy.

  “No one,” he replies. “I can smell it on you.” He blushes.

  “The surf is very calm,” I say, struggling to stay calm myself. “And I’m a strong swimmer. I’ll be sure to wash off better, so I don’t smell so fishy.”

  “Smell isn’t problem,” he says, his eye twitching. “Smell is not unpleasant, only salty. Your swimming ability is not problem either.”

  “Then what is the problem? Are women not supposed to swim in the sea? Is that it? Or is it because I’m a teacher? Is there a rule against teachers swimming in the sea?”

  “Have you noticed anyone else swimming in the sea lately?” he asks, his fingertip tracing a path down the condensation of the beer bottle.

  “No,” I say, “but I thought that was because I go so early.”

  “It’s because it’s not safe.”

  “Oh my God.” My skin suddenly feels hot and itchy. I take a long swill of beer. “Is the water contaminated? Is it the nuclear power plant?”

  “Water is fine,” he says quickly, refilling my glass. “Problem is jellyfish.”

  “Jellyfish?” I repeat. “I haven’t seen any jellyfish.”

  “Not yet,” he says. “Maybe they will return on July twenty-eighth.”

  “Maybe?” I tease him.

  “Mmm,” he nods. “They will return on July twenty-eighth.”

  “Return from where?” I ask and he shrugs, picks up his bowl, and slurps the broth. “The jellyfish follow our calendar?” I press. “They’re punctual, Type-A jellyfish?”

  “Yeah,” he says. Lately he has begun using my expressions. No way. Oh please. Give me a break. I don’t know if he’s aware of this or not, and I don’t want to point it out because it’s so endearing that I don’t want to make him self-conscious and stop.

  “Do the jellyfish have a very important date to keep? An appointment with a squid perhaps?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, frowning. “I only know that’s when they will return.”

  “How convenient,” I say, borrowing one of his own favorite words.

  “I’m only trying to help you, Mari-chan,” he says, “so you won’t get hurt.”

  “You’re trying to supervise me.”

  “Yeah,” he says again. “Sorry. Old habits are difficult to shake.”

  Nakajima is also at the bar, sitting at a corner table under the big TV bolted to the ceiling, watching a sumo match. Next to him sits Ogawa-san: the gomi po
lice himself. Both men are wearing red power plant uniforms, and white hand towels tied around their foreheads, Rambo-style. According to Hiro, shortly after Haruki beat Nakajima up in front of the whole town, Nakajima was given a job at the plant, directly under Haruki’s grandfather. I don’t know if the old man had any say in this, but I assume it was a lucky break for Nakajima, who buzzed off his Afro-perm and stopped tinting his skin brown. He looks more vulnerable now that he’s not hiding behind a costume. I wonder if he knows that he actually fooled someone into thinking that his disguise was for real. I’m sure he’d be thrilled.

  As Hiro and I step up to the cash register, Nakajima looks back and forth between us. He wiggles one eyebrow suggestively and says, “Hello Miss Marina. Hello Miyoshi-sensei.”

  “Hello Nakajima,” I say. “How are you?”

  “You owe me,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I say hello. I get Marina dollar.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I do owe you.” When I tell the mama-san to add his drink to my tab, Nakajima seems flustered, but also pleased. He offers me an edamame from the dish on their table and I accept, popping the soybean into my mouth and thanking him.

  “Avoid risky behavior,” he says.

  “What does that mean?” Ogawa-san asks him in Japanese.

  “Have fun,” Nakajima translates. “At least I think that’s what it means.”

  “Avoid risky behavior,” Ogawa-san repeats after him slurrily, lifting his glass.

  Once we’re safely outside, Hiro and I both double over, laughing so hard that we can’t speak. We are still laughing even when he drops me off at home. I get out quickly, wave good-bye. He waits until I’m safely inside before driving off.

  With the landlord’s blessing, Hiro helped me to empty the rest of the boxes from the storage area, and then we took down the corrugated tin siding. Now the windows look out on the street. From the living room, I watch Mrs. Ogawa gardening by moonlight on this warm summer night, singing a lullabye to her fish as she feeds them.

  Every Saturday, Hiro drives down to Kanazawa City, to the convalescent hospital where his father is receiving an aggressive round of chemo therapy, which will probably be his last. One Saturday morning, he calls to ask if I’d like to keep him company on the trip. I am honored and touched, misunderstanding the invitation, which he means literally. He wants company for the two-hour drive, but has no intention of bringing me to the hospital to see his father. Instead he drops me off at the Daiwa department store, where I spend two hours working my way from the bottom up. I wander around the basement, filled with stalls of food almost too pretty to eat, then take the escalator up to each floor, where I covet women’s clothing and shoes I could never fit into and buy a few cards with funny English written on them. One says, “Let’s Trip!” over a picture of a plane; the other says, “Breast wishes.” At the planned time, I meet up with Hiro at an art gallery on the top floor.

  The exhibit on display is the work of a recently deceased outsider artist. Like seven-year-old Koji Ishii, this man liked to tear things apart, newspapers and photographs, money, stamps, ripping these images into snowflake-sized pieces, then reassembling them into pointillist collages of crowd scenes. Always crowd scenes. Hiro and I walk around the gallery, moving from picture to picture in silence. When I finally ask what he thinks of the art, he says, “Eh…I only came for you. I don’t really like art.”

  “What do you mean?” I say. “How can you not like art?”

  “I prefer music,” he says.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “You don’t have to pick. You can like both.”

  “You’re wrong. There is not enough time,” he says, taking off his glasses and cleaning them with his shirttail. “You do have to pick.”

  In his car, the stereo starts up when he turns the key in the ignition. He’s been listening to an English language tutorial, a chapter called, “at the hospital.” These words scroll across the digital display. “I am short of breath,” narrates a woman in a proper British accent. “I can’t sleep. My head aches. My heart is pounding. I am irregular.”

  Hiro stops in the middle of the parking lot off-ramp, gripping the steering wheel. “All of this applies to me,” he says. “I am irregular.”

  “How was your dad today?” I ask.

  “Same,” he says. “Not good. Lately I am always waiting for bad news. When my phone rings, I feel afraid to answer. But also I am tired of waiting. Sometimes I want the bad news to happen already.”

  “Your dad has cancer,” I say gently. “He’s been in a lot of pain for a long time, and you’ve had to watch him suffer. Of course you’re tired of waiting.”

  “What about you?” he says. “Did you feel the same way?”

  “It’s different,” I say. “My dad killed himself.” This is the first time I’ve spoken these words in a year. “Jisatsu,” I say, in case he didn’t get it.

  “I know,” he says.

  “You do?” I ask, and he nods. “How could you know? Who told you?”

  “No one had to tell me,” he says. “When you mention your father, you never say how he died.” Hands still on the steering wheel, he turns to look at me, ignoring the honking car behind us, even though we’re blocking the ramp out of the parking lot. “In Japan, we know well what this means.” I look down at my own hands, my big hands, which are so much like my father’s.

  “When my mom called to tell me that he killed himself,” I say, “I heard her crying and I knew what she was going to say before she said it. I knew, and I hadn’t done anything about it. I didn’t even tell him that I loved him the last time we spoke.”

  “I think he knew,” Hiro says.

  “He’d been depressed for so long,” I say. “By the end, I think I wanted something to happen too, even if it was something bad.”

  “Your father was also in pain,” Hiro says. “It’s not so different.”

  “But I didn’t help him,” I say. “He was depressed, I know, but he didn’t have to die. He could’ve gotten better. Maybe I could have stopped him.”

  “Maybe,” Hiro says, and for some reason this is what I need to hear. It doesn’t mean yes or no. It means maybe. It means we’ll never know. I curl up in my seat facing him, holding my knees, pressing my face to my arms, crying and crying and crying, and he comforts me in the same way he comforted Ritsuko, not by patting me or offering false promises that everything is going to be fine, simply by staying there, present, beside me, not turning away.

  The afternoon of Noriko’s wedding, he picks me up in an unfamiliar car. It’s some kind of Japanese sports car, platinum, tricked out with a neon-framed license plate, a fin that sticks up in the back, and rimmed hubcaps that are blindingly shiny. The bucket seat is so low to the ground that it feels like I’m sitting on the pavement. The car registers bumps that aren’t visible on the road.

  “Fancy new car,” I say.

  “It’s used,” he says, “but it’s in perfect condition.”

  “Pre-owned,” I tell him. “New-to-you.”

  “It’s not mine,” he says. I wait for him to elaborate, and when he doesn’t I assume that it must be—or must have been—his father’s. Maybe it’s an early inheritance. As we drive together to the Royal Hotel, I ask him to run through a brief list of what I should or shouldn’t do at a Japanese wedding. At first he says not to worry, just to enjoy myself, that no one expects me to know the rules.

  “Tell me anyway,” I say. “I don’t want to do anything rude.”

  “Okay. To begin, don’t seem too happy,” he gives in without further prodding.

  “Don’t be happy?”

  He nods. “Japanese wedding is a kind of serious and formal occasion. When we enter the hotel, say “omedeto gozaimasu” to the person at the front desk.”

  “I’m supposed to congratulate the receptionist?”

  He nods again. “Then you should present your gift money to the receptionist.”

  “Gift money?” I echo, my
throat tightening as I think of the wrapped book in my bag, a thesaurus I asked my mom to send for the occasion. Granted, it isn’t the most romantic wedding present, but I wanted to give Noriko something personal, something that she couldn’t get here, and she’s always asking for synonyms of the words she already knows. As Miyoshi-sensei brakes to a stop at a red light, he reaches across me, opens the glove compartment and pulls out a white envelope.

  “This is for you to present,” he says.

  “I can’t let you pay my gift money.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I knew you would not be prepared.”

  “I was prepared,” I say, pulling out the gift that I wrapped with pretty silver paper and a white satin bow. I tear this wrapping off, holding up the thesaurus. Hiro takes it from me, flipping through its pages.

  “How useful,” he says. “Probably this would come in handy at my new school, when I am helping students write poems and stories in English. Maybe I could purchase from you?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” I say.

  “Patronize…” he repeats, and before I can offer a definition he flips to the word in the thesaurus. “To treat like a child. To infantilize.” He looks up at me. “You are not a child, and I don’t want to treat you like this. You are strong woman. I know well.” He’s echoing the words of the gender lesson we taught together long ago, but he’s not making fun of me. His sincerity makes me blush. The sports car plunges into a pothole in the road, then launches for just a split second into the air. We both gasp, and then he grins. For the duration of the ride, he continues telling me what to do and not to do at a Japanese wedding, the list going on and on, even after we’re parked in the hotel parking lot. “There will be a gift for you too,” he says at last. “Don’t open it. Say thank you to bride and groom before you leave the reception. But don’t say sayonara.”