When I got home, my mother was already there for some reason. She was talking to a white woman I had never seen. As soon as I walked through the doorway, the woman said, “That’s her.”
My mother bowed a slight bow to the woman and said, “I’m very sorry.” She reached into her wallet. “Let me pay for it.”
The woman took a dollar from her. “Will she be punished?”
“Yes, she certainly will.”
The woman nodded. She walked out, glaring at me along the way. Right before she walked out, she said, “Shame on you!”
As soon as the woman left, my mother burst into tears. “My family is falling apart,” she cried out. She ran out of the room.
I felt guilty then. I immediately went to my work area in the alcove and started to do my homework. When Silly’s mother or uncle could drive her, she would come over for a couple of hours in the afternoons and help me with my homework. Like my sister, Silly was a straight-A student. I was doing even worse than usual at school that semester, and they were already talking about holding me back if I didn’t improve.
Tonight I was supposed to write a book report on The Call of the Wild. It was my most favorite book I ever read, so I thought the report would be easy. The question we were supposed to answer in our report was: What is the theme of The Call of the Wild? What was the theme? I could never figure out exactly what “theme” meant. I wrote down that the theme was that dogs were loyal to good people. Furthermore, I wrote, dogs are good pets to own because of their loyalty. Loyalty is the theme. That is a fine theme. What else? In Alaska you need a dog to pull your sled. This proves that dogs and man were meant to be friends. This is another theme of The Call of the Wild.
Then I walked with Sam over to our former apartment to watch TV with Mrs. Muramoto. We watched until bedtime and returned home. When we came through the door, my mother was waiting. “Your father is in the kitchen. He wants to talk to you.”
This was a very bad sign. He had never given me a talk. Lynn, of course, used to give me big talks. And my mother had given me a talk earlier that year, about what would happen when I started menstruating. And the vice principal had recently given me a talk about how if you got on the wrong track in grade school, you might never get off and you would end up either in a terrible job or else married to someone with a terrible job.
I sat down at our table in the kitchen. My father, reading the newspaper, ignored me at first. I examined a chip on our yellow Formica table. Our chairs were green. A neighbor had given us the table, and our uncle had given us the chairs. Nothing in our house matched.
My father set his paper down and looked at me. “Lynn does have anemia,” he said. “But she also has lymphoma, and it’s very serious.” He seemed to be thinking hard. “Tomorrow I want you to go to the store and apologize for stealing that nail polish.”
“Okay.”
“I know you’re a good girl,” he said. “I’ve always known that. But sometimes I like to see it, just to remind me. You think you could remind me of that a little more often?”
“Yes. What’s lymphoma?”
“It’s a very bad disease. But your sister’s going to get better. Now that we have the house, she’s happier.”
I went to the bedroom. Lynn was sleeping, as usual. I looked up “lymphoma” in the dictionary. It took me fifteen minutes just to figure out how to spell it. The dictionary said: Any of the various malignant tumors that arise in the lymph nodes or in other lymphoid tissue. Then I looked up “malignant” in the dictionary. It said: Threatening to life; virulent: a malignant disease. Tending to metastasize; cancerous. Used of a tumor.
And that was how I found out Lynn might die.
I turned to her and stared. As she slept she looked a lot like she’d looked when she was well. I still thought she was beautiful, and so was her hair. But I couldn’t help noticing that her hair and skin were not as beautiful as they once had been, and she seemed thin.
The manager of the dime store was a small, balding man who gestured a lot with his hands. After I apologized to him, he lectured me about the black sheep of his family. I think I was just about the most lectured-to girl in Georgia at that point.
The black sheep in the manager’s family was named Oscar, and he had been in and out of reform school as a teenager and in and out of jail as a grown-up. The manager showed me a mug shot of Oscar. He said that Oscar had started out on his life of crime by going on a shoplifting spree when he was my age. This talk was kind of a surprise to me. I doubted I would ever go to jail, so that part of the lecture didn’t scare me. But I wondered whether I could end up the black sheep of my family. We didn’t really have a black sheep. In other words, the job was open.
Of course, I didn’t tell Lynn about stealing the nail polish. That night I got up in the middle of the night and took my blanket into the bedroom so that I could sleep on the floor next to Lynn’s bed. My mother still wanted Sammy and me to stay in the living room so that we wouldn’t bother Lynn. I didn’t think we were bothering her, but when my mother stepped on me in the middle of the night while checking on Lynn, she sent me back to my cot. I watched the dim motel light flashing on the living-room wall. When my mother went back to sleep, I returned to the floor next to Lynn’s bed. I decided I would sleep like that every night until . . . well, every night until she got better.
In fact, some days she was better. That is, she wasn’t well, but some days she got up and ate dinner with us. On those days we competed with one another to take care of her. If we even suspected she might want more water or milk or green beans or anything at all, we would run to the kitchen to get what she wanted.
When she wasn’t so well, my mother and I put her on a sheet. We would each take an end of the sheet and carry her outside, where she liked to lie on her very own grass on her very own yard and stare at the sky, day or night, it didn’t matter. She belonged to the sky, and the sky belonged to her. Then one day when we brought her out, I saw that her eyes were glazed as she stared at the bright blueness of the sky. On that day the sky seemed to mean nothing to her. The next day was the same.
chapter 13
BECAUSE OF LYNN’S medical bills, soon my parents were getting behind on the mortgage. All they did was work. My mother came home only to sleep, and my father did not come home at all. Auntie or Mrs. Kanagawa stayed with Lynn and Sammy during the day when I was at school. My parents were so exhausted, I wasn’t sure they even realized what arrangements we were making each day. Some days nobody stayed with us.
Most of the time Lynn slept, but anytime she was awake, she wanted attention. She wanted a bedpan, or food, or water, or sometimes just a little company. But sometimes she didn’t know what she wanted. In fact, it seemed that at least once a day she didn’t know what she wanted. That was the most exhausting thing. She would want me to read to her, and then she wouldn’t like the book and would want me to read something else. And then she still wouldn’t like the book and would want me to sing for her. But she wouldn’t like that, either. My teacher had commented on the black circles under my eyes. A couple of mornings I even made myself coffee.
Sammy and I slept in the room with her now, because somebody needed to be with her all the time. Once, Lynn woke up in the middle of the night, the way she often did.
“Katie?” she said.
I almost never slept deeply anymore—as soon as she said my name, I always sat up immediately, no matter how tired I was. But that night I was completely exhausted. I could barely pull myself up.
“Katie?” she said, more impatiently.
“Uh-huh.” I sat up. “Yeah, okay.”
“I want some milk.”
“Now? Are you sure?”
“What do you mean, am I sure? I want some milk.”
I got up and went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of milk. I pulled her up and picked up the bolster from the floor and used it to support her back. She took one sip of milk and made a face. “Can I have water instead?”
“
I thought you said you were sure!”
She looked as if she might cry. “I said I’m thirsty!” She dropped the cup to the floor. I just stood there a moment, watching her small rug soak up the milk.
I suddenly felt angry at her. “Dad had to buy you that rug, you know.”
“I want water!”
I went to the kitchen and came back with water, a soapy dishrag, and a towel. I handed her the water without comment. Sammy’s eyes were open wide, watching me. I cleaned up the rug.
Lynn cried out, “There’s soap on this water glass!” She flung it to the floor.
I stared at the cup for a moment. Then I whipped around. “You’re ruining everything!” I said. “We got a new house, and you’re ruining everything! Mom and Dad worked so hard to get this house. You’re ruining it!”
She looked really hurt for a moment, but then she got angry. She said, “I want milk.”
I said, “No.”
“I hate you.”
“I hate you!”
Sammy said, “Katie?”
“Shut up!” I snapped at him, and he was still.
I finished cleaning up and got in bed. Sammy was still awake, staring at me. I told him to go to sleep. Lynn started to cry, but only for about fifteen minutes.
Then she started to make a soft, mournful, squeaky noise, kind of like “heeah . . . heeah . . . heeah,” every time she exhaled. She didn’t sound like Lynn, she sounded like an animal. Since she never seemed to inhale deeply anymore, her breathing was quick and shallow. She made the noise on and on, weakly. She didn’t cry again, she just kept making the noise. It sounded really sad. Sammy’s face looked scared in the glow from the Rabbit on the Moon night-light Auntie Fumi had given Lynn.
I ignored my sister and brother, just lay there and listened to Lynnie in the dim light. Usually while I lay in bed, I liked to think of new things I could do for Lynnie. Maybe I could let her try my pillow to see if she liked it better. Or I could bring her a new cracker she’d never tried. Or maybe I could even find a new book that she’d never heard of and read it to her, even though she had heard of every book in the world. That night I knew that nothing I could do would make her feel better. So I lay in bed and listened to her mournful noise and didn’t feel love or hate or anger or anything at all except despair.
For Thanksgiving weekend my parents needed a break from me and Sammy, and we needed a break from them. No one felt like eating turkey. My parents arranged for Uncle to take us on a camping trip. He took his kids camping almost every weekend, even when it rained. He called every Friday night and asked whether we wanted to come. We always said no. I wanted to stay with Lynn. But this time my parents made me go.
We left early on a Saturday morning. My parents seemed relieved to see us go. It made me surprised and guilty to find how glad I felt to get out of the house where everything reminded me of my sister. I felt guilty whenever I left my sister’s side, but at the same time I could not be with her every moment. If I had been, I would have lost my mind. Maybe I was losing my mind. Sometimes, even just for three minutes, even when it was my turn to be with Lynnie, I had to step outside. I had to look at the sky. I had to be anywhere else but in that sad room with her.
In addition to Sammy and me, Uncle was bringing his family, my friend Silly, and his friend Jedda-Boy, a local land surveyor. Silly and I rode in the truck with Uncle. Amazingly, it was the same truck he had driven us to Georgia in years earlier. It didn’t go more than twenty-five miles an hour, so Jedda-Boy’s truck lost us in the first ten minutes. Unfortunately, Uncle had never been to our destination before. We were going to one of Jedda-Boy’s favorite campsites. Uncle got lost and refused to stop for directions because, he kept saying, he knew the way, which he obviously didn’t.
At one point we went down a small road that ended at a cliff. The truck got stuck and wouldn’t back up. I could literally see down into a canyon before us. If we went forward, we would fall to our deaths. Then Lynn would miss me and might get sicker. Uncle wanted Silly and me to sit in the truck bed to get better traction. So she and I got in back and prayed that my uncle wouldn’t go forward by accident.
The truck revved and revved and shook and shook, but it was still stuck. Then Uncle tried to explain to me how to use a clutch, so that I could back up the truck while he and Silly sat in the bed, since he was heavier than I was and would give us better traction. I couldn’t figure out the clutch. In fact, at one point while I was learning, the truck jolted forward several inches. Uncle screamed a scream as high-pitched as a girl’s and rammed his foot on top of mine on the brake. He taught Silly instead. She was like Lynn in that she could do anything, including crazy stuff like learning how to use a clutch.
Uncle and I climbed in back. Silly turned once to look at us. She crossed her fingers and then turned forward. The truck shook and rattled, and then we backed up.
Uncle was sweating. He seemed to think we would all be dead if he hadn’t slammed his foot on mine. My toes still hurt. He looked at me with new respect, I guess over just how much trouble I was capable of causing. He got in and started driving again. We pulled around a corner, and I felt myself totter uncertainly and then lean into the door. He’d told me the door came loose sometimes. I tried to stop myself, but the door fell open. The next thing I knew, my back was scraping along rocks on the roadside.
Unbelievably, no one noticed, not even Silly. They rolled merrily along while I lay on the road and watched the truck recede. I screamed, “Wait for me!” In a moment the truck came slowly down the road from the opposite direction. I saw Silly point at me excitedly, and the truck pulled over. I got in the truck and refused to talk to Uncle Katsuhisa. My shirt was torn in back. Basically, there were already about a thousand things I could snitch on Uncle for if I wanted.
He seemed to realize that, because he handed me a piece of rice candy and said, “I’d like to give you this.” I continued to shun him. “All right, then, here,” he said. He handed me the whole pack of rice candy plus a Hershey’s bar. I took the rice candy, handing the Hershey’s bar to Silly.
“Now, don’t you tell your parents you fell out of the truck.”
“I won’t.”
He shook his head. “I still remember when I could bribe you for half a stick of gum.”
At the campgrounds Jedda-Boy had already set up camp. When I started to tell the story of the cliff, Uncle frowned at me, so I didn’t say anything. He smiled innocently at Auntie Fumi.
David, Daniel, Silly, and I ran off to play a game we called Hunter and Hunted with water guns. At first I hadn’t felt like playing, but they begged me. Silly and I chose to be the deer first; David and Daniel would hunt us with their water guns. I found I loved pretending to be a deer, loping through the forest as the boys counted to one hundred. Silly and I moved as quickly and quietly as we could. We had to balance our movements between speed and noise. Silly was like an animal, with perfect animal instincts about where to go and how to move gracefully. We heard David and Daniel call out, “Here we come, deer!”
I thought I could feel the blood rushing through my body. For a moment I forgot I was human. We moved very quietly. Then we stopped moving and just listened. We couldn’t hear a thing. Suddenly, there was a huge crashing nearby, and we crashed away in the opposite direction. I found myself laughing crazily as I ran. I felt so free!
Silly and I split up in different directions. I heard Daniel yelling, “I’ll get Silly!” I ran desperately through the woods. There was a sudden open area, and I ran and ran across. I felt like a real deer, graceful and fast. I saw an arc of water by my side. It missed me! Then water splattered on my head. I collapsed to the ground and groaned the way I thought an animal might. David ran up and put his foot on my stomach and pounded his chest and said, “For I am the greatest hunter alive!”
We turned to watch Silly running into the woods chased by Daniel. In a minute he came out of the woods looking confused. He stood still to listen. David and I helped him look for Silly. Abou
t ten minutes later we still hadn’t found her. Daniel yelled, “Ollie, Ollie, ocean free!” Silly appeared right where we’d just come from. I was so proud of her.
Then it was the boys’ turn to be the deer. They went to hide. We didn’t chase them. Instead, we returned to camp to play cards in our tent. We were so funny! When the boys finally figured out where we were, they refused to speak to us. So we refused to speak to them.
David said, “How can you not speak to us when you’re the ones who played the trick?” But we didn’t answer because we weren’t speaking to them!
When night approached, Uncle made us a fire, and I lay near it and felt the heat on my body. I stared at the sky, as I had done so many times with my sister. I was surprised to realize that I hadn’t thought of my sister for nearly an hour—the whole time we were playing and about half an hour after. That was the longest I hadn’t thought about her for a while. I felt refreshed, as if I could now sit with her for ten years straight if necessary to help her get well.
Auntie and Sam sat next to me. David, Daniel, and Silly were playing some game. Uncle and Jedda-Boy took a couple of surveying instruments and discussed mud and sand and other important surveying matters. Jedda-Boy was talking about how once when he lived in Nevada, he got helicoptered to a secret location to measure some land. The land was in the desert near where nuclear bomb tests had been held. He finished the job even though the area was probably radioactive, because a self-respecting surveyor always finishes a job no matter what it involves, including, he said, wild dogs, gunshots from angry neighbors mixed up in a property dispute, snakes and alligators, and radioactivity.
I said quietly, “Auntie, when is Uncle Katsuhisa going to quit his job at the hatchery and become a land surveyor?”
She pushed back my hair and said sadly, “Sweetheart, nobody in Georgia is going to hire a Japanese man to be a land surveyor.”
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