A Tale for the Time Being (52 page)

Death came quickly. It was late at night and the nursing home was quiet. Ruth and Oliver were by her side, reading. Suddenly her mother’s eyes popped open, blind and unseeing, and she
struggled to sit up. Her breathing became shallow and jagged. Ruth held her mother’s small, rigid body in her arms. Oliver touched her forehead. She relaxed. Her eyelids fluttered as the
light drained from her face. For a while she hung there, subtle and liminal, and then she exhaled one last time and was gone.

They stayed with her for a while, keeping her company, in case her spirit was still lingering. They held her hands, and they talked to her until her body grew cold.

That was on a Tuesday night. The cremation took place on Friday. Several days had passed, and Ruth was nervous about how her mother might look, but when they were led into the small anteroom of
the crematorium where Masako’s body was laid out under a white sheet in a brown cardboard box, Ruth just felt happy to see her again. They’d brought some of her favorite things to send
with her: photographs and letters and cards from friends and family; a crocheted lap robe from the Free Store that she’d especially liked; her favorite sneakers and her mittens; a couple of
bars of chocolate. A calendar to help her remember dates. Emery boards. Scotch tape. A watercolor painting. Flowers. Oliver wanted to get tropical flowers, from Hawaii because she’d grown up
there, so he’d bought anthuriums from Hilo and ti leaves for good luck, ginger and a big gaudy bird of paradise. They filled up her cardboard coffin and sat with her for a little while
longer, and then not knowing what else to do, they kissed her goodbye. Ruth thought she looked nice in the box with all her things. Comfortable. The funeral director put the lid on the box and his
assistants wheeled it into the retort chamber, lining up the gurney with the mouth of the oven. The doors opened and the box slid in. Ruth turned the dial to start it up. Her mom was so tiny, the
director said, only seventy-four pounds. It wouldn’t take long. A couple of hours. They could pick up her ashes after two.

They took a walk around the memorial garden, which was next to the funeral home. It was a beautiful morning. The Pacific sky was streaked with clouds, but the sun was shining through, and
everything was wet and sparkling and golden. Big Douglas firs, the kind her mom used to love, surrounded the garden. All the deciduous trees had turned colors, and their yellow and orange foliage
looked brilliant against the darkness of the conifers. The grass was littered with bright fallen leaves. They walked around the pond, following the path until they could see the chimney of the
crematorium. They watched for a while. There was no smoke coming from it, but they could see a dense column of shimmering heat, which was all that was left of her mother’s body as she became
air. Oliver said that in this etheric form she could ride the trade winds back to Hilo and be there in no time. Ruth said her mom would like that.

They brought her ashes back to Whaletown, and Ruth talked to Dora, who, as secretary of the community club, was in charge of the cemetery as well.

“Anywhere’s fine,” Dora said. “Just choose a spot and dig a hole, but try not to dig anyone else up.”

“It’ll be small,” Ruth said. “It’s just for her ashes, and my dad’s. But I’d like to plant a tree, if I could. A Japanese dogwood. They both liked
Japanese dogwoods.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Dora said. “As long as you don’t shade out somebody else. Just don’t forget to water it.”

The crooked little dogwood hadn’t grown much in the years since her mother’s death, but it did manage to produce a few blossoms every spring, although few people were ever around to
notice. Ruth’s mother hadn’t wanted a funeral, and neither had her father. They’d outlived most of their friends, and the remote location of the island prevented any survivors
from ever visiting their graves. Sometimes, though, Ruth found a dead rose or a small stuffed animal by her mother’s stone, which meant somebody was dropping by. She guessed the roses were
from Dora, but the stuffed toys baffled her, although her mother would have liked them.

“I hope you guys aren’t too lonely,” Ruth said, giving her father’s stone a final brushing. She looked dubiously around at the other graves. Many of the oldest were just
sunken depressions, marked by small decaying wooden crosses. The graves with stones were easier to locate. One or two of the older headstones had maritime themes, honoring fishermen and boat
captains who’d died at sea. Some of the more recent graves were marked by rough stupas or wooden totem plaques carved by shamanistic hippies. A few of the graves showed signs of care, but
most were untended. Old offerings of shells and stones, guttered candles and macramé dream catchers, lay scattered about. A torn Tibetan prayer flag hung from the bough of a cedar. It was a
lonely place. Ruth’s mother, a solitary person, wouldn’t have minded, but her father had enjoyed company.

Ruth returned the whisk broom to her knapsack and took out a small hand scythe, which she used to cut back the dead grasses. She inspected the dogwood tree. It was still crooked, but it had put
on some more growth. Little leaf buds were forming on the ends of the twigs, and she vowed to come back later in the spring to see it blooming. She had bought some incense at the local health food
co-op, and now she took a stick from her backpack and lit it with a cigarette lighter. She pushed it into the soil, and then sat on the ground in front of the graves . . . to do what? She
didn’t know. The ground was still damp from all the rain. A thin curl of smoke rose from the tip of the incense into the air. Overhead, the sky was blue and streaked with high clouds. She
thought of Nao’s fake funeral and Jiko’s real one and wished she knew a chant she could sing. How did the words go? Gone, gone, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . .

Something like that.

2.

“The Japanese take funerals and memorials very seriously,” Ruth said.

“Your mother didn’t,” Oliver replied.

They were standing out on the deck with Muriel, testing out the birding lens mount that Oliver had ordered for his iPhone. Muriel was hoping for another look at the Jungle Crow, and Ruth wanted
Oliver to take a picture of it to send in, along with the GPS coordinates, to the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s Citizen Science database.

“Yeah, Mom was weird. She wasn’t very Japanese.”

“Neither are you.” He held up the long telephoto lens, onto which the iPhone was attached like an afterthought, and studied the little screen as he scanned the branches of a tall
Douglas fir. The trees were dark against the blue sky, and he was having trouble with the contrast.

“I know,” Ruth said. “But I try. It was nice being at the cemetery this morning. The dogwood tree is looking a little less lopsided.”

He panned over to a grove of cedars. “The roots should be well established by now. It should be able to survive a few more years of drought and neglect.”

He fiddled with the lens, trying to bring the image into focus. Muriel had brought her own high-powered binoculars. She’d been surveying the branches as she listened to their
conversation.

“I don’t think your mother was weird,” she said. “I really liked her. A lot of people on the island liked her. She had friends here, even if she couldn’t remember
who they were. It’s a shame you didn’t at least have a small memorial. If not for her, for everyone else.”

“I know, I know . . .”

“Did you know that Benoit visits her grave? He brings her little toys from the Free Store.”

Ruth fell silent. Benoit. Of course. Muriel was right, it was a shame. She changed the subject.

“Actually, my point was really about Nao and Jiko. The Japanese take these memorials really seriously. Old Jiko died in March, right? Nao promised to go back to Jiko’s temple in
March every year to help with the memorial. The temple was located north of Sendai, near the coast and the epicenter of the earthquake, and more or less in the path of the tsunami. So the question
is, was she there on March eleventh of 2011? I think the evidence is pretty strong. She was there, she knew the wave was coming, she grabbed some of Muji’s plastic bags and stuffed her most
precious things inside—her diary, Haruki’s letters and the watch . . .”

“What’s the point in speculating?” Oliver asked. “You haven’t even finished reading.”

Muriel lowered her binoculars and looked at Ruth, aghast. “You haven’t finished reading?”

“No,” Ruth said. “I’ve still got a few pages left to go.”

Muriel shook her head. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I would have sat down and read the damn thing from start to finish, and found out everything I could, before
looking for evidence to support my conclusions. Nothing would have stopped me from getting to the end.”

Ruth gazed up at the wispy clouds in the sky and thought about how best to answer this. “Well,” she said. “I know what you mean, but I was trying to pace myself. I felt I owed
it to Nao. I wanted to read at the same rate she’d lived. It seems silly now.” She paused, wondering whether or not to continue. “And then there’s the problem with the end .
. . ,” she said, finally.

“What’s wrong with the end?”

“Well, nothing. It’s just that it keeps . . . changing.”

“Changing?”

“Receding,” Ruth said.

“Interesting,” Muriel said. “Would you care to explain?”

So Ruth did. She explained how she had riffled through to the end of the book to ascertain that all the pages were filled, only to have those same pages suddenly go blank, just as she was about
to read them. She looked at Oliver for confirmation. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“Weird,” Muriel said. “Excuse me for asking, but have you guys been smoking a lot of pot?”

“Of course not,” Ruth said. “You know we don’t smoke pot.”

“Just checking,” Muriel said. She sat down on the splintery deck chair, which groaned ominously, causing Oliver to glance up nervously. The deck furniture, like the deck, and the
entire house for that matter, was in disrepair, and he was always waiting for the weather-worn planks to give way and for someone to fall through.

“What you’re describing is interesting,” Muriel said, twisting the end of her braid around her finger. “The reader confronting the blank page. It’s like
writer’s block, only in reverse.”

Ruth thought about this. “You mean, as her reader, I’m blocked, and so her words disappear? I don’t like that. Besides, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Hard to say. Agency is a tricky business. What was she writing about when the pages went blank?”

“She’d just caught up with herself. With the
now
of her story. She was sitting on a bench at the bus stop in Sendai, and her last words were ‘I guess this is what now
feels like.’ And then, nothing. Blank. She ran out of words, that is until . . .”

She hesitated. The part about her dream was even weirder, and she felt unsure as to whether she should tell Muriel about it or not, but Muriel was looking at her intently, so she described how
the Jungle Crow had led her to the park bench in Ueno where Nao’s father was waiting for his suicide hookup, and how they’d talked about Nao, and he’d gone off to Sendai to find
her.

“And then, the next morning, when I checked the diary, she’d written a whole new entry about old Jiko’s death and funeral, and her reconciliation with her father, and her
promise to Muji to return to the temple every March.”

“That sounds like a happy enough ending,” Muriel said.

“Well,” Ruth said. “It would be, except I
still
haven’t reached the end. Every time I open the diary, there are more pages. Like I said, the end keeps receding,
like an outgoing wave. Just out of reach. I can’t quite catch up.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Muriel said. “Okay, I have two more theories. In indigenous myth, crows are pretty powerful. So let’s assume this Jungle Crow is your familiar,
your totem animal, just like the cat was Oliver’s.” She broke off and turned to Oliver. “I was sorry to hear about Pesto,” she said. “You know Benoit lost his little
dog, too, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said, tersely, keeping his back turned. “It sucks.” He was still hoping that Pesto would return safely—his spine was rigid with hope—but as the
days passed, this outcome seemed less and less likely. Muriel, who had lost a favorite cat to a cougar, sighed deeply, and her whole body seemed to deflate into the rickety chair.

“It does suck,” she said. “I keep telling myself we’re lucky to live in an ecosystem that’s intact enough to support large predators, but I miss my Erwin.”
She stared at her lap, and then she took a deep breath and roused herself. “Anyway,” she continued, “my theory is that this crow from Nao’s world came here to lead you into
the dream so you could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and you intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. A new ‘now,’ as it were,
which Nao hasn’t quite caught up with.”

Muriel sat back in her chair, looking pleased with herself.

Ruth laughed. “And you call yourself an anthropologist?”

“I’m retired,” Muriel said.

“I see. So what’s your second theory?”

“You might not like this one.”

“Try me.”

“Well, it’s akin to my reader’s block theory. That it’s your doing. It’s not about Nao’s now. It’s about yours. You haven’t caught up with
yourself yet, the now of
your
story, and you can’t reach her ending until you do.”

Ruth thought about this. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t like it. I don’t like having that much agency over someone else’s narrative.”

Muriel laughed. “That’s a fine way for a novelist to talk!”

“I’m not a—” Ruth started to say, when Oliver interrupted.

“Look!” he said, aiming the lens at the maple tree. “Over there. In that low branch. Isn’t that your crow?”

Muriel leaned forward and held up her binoculars. “Looks like a Jungle Crow,” she said. “Handsome bird. What do you think?” She passed the binoculars to Ruth.

It took Ruth a moment to get her bearings amid the tangle of branches and pale hanging wisps of old men’s beard, but then she saw it, a glossy black wing against a bright green mat of
moss. She focused the binocular lenses. The crow was far away, but the image stabilization allowed her to get a good look. “Yes, that’s the one. I recognize the aquiline profile.
I’m almost sure.”