Kira-Kira (14 page)

“It’s time for your pills!”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

She groaned softly as I propped her up. I never even asked her why she groaned, never asked her what exactly hurt when I did that. I didn’t even know what made her hurt and
what, if anything, made her feel good. All I knew was that my parents were at work, and it was my job to give her some pills.

I waited until she swallowed her water. Then I gently laid her back down. I got Sammy ready for school and called Mrs. Kanagawa, who sat with Lynnie during the days. As I was leaving she’d turned her head a bit and was admiring her pretty nails. I was in a good mood all day and was even able to answer a question during history.

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

B
ECAUSE OF
L
YNN’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.