Kira-Kira (17 page)

“Going for a ride?” said the sheriff.

My father hesitated. I saw that he suddenly couldn’t think. I felt a protective surge. I’d never felt before that I had to protect my father. But now I needed to protect him against this man. The only thing I could think to say was, “We’re on our way to eat tacos!”

“Tacos?” said the sheriff. He looked confused. “You mean at Pepe’s?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, though I had never heard of Pepe’s. As a matter of fact, I’d eaten tacos only
once, years earlier in a restaurant in Illinois. I have no idea why I came up with tacos.

The sheriff studied my father. “We just had an incident at Mr. Lyndon’s house.”

“Oh?” said my father.

“Someone busted up his Caddy.”

“Oh.”

The sheriff shone the light on me. “They think the perpetrator drove a light blue Ford.” Our Oldsmobile was gray, light gray. The sheriff moved his light over the outside of our gray car. My father leaned out and said, “I’ve always been an Oldsmobile man.”

The sheriff leaned in with his light shining on me. I smiled, but he could tell I’d been crying. “Something the matter?” he said.

“My sister died,” I said. I let out a sob.

He turned off the light. He seemed to think. The night had grown cool, and when he breathed through his mouth, mist filled the air in front of his face. He switched on the flashlight again and pointed it at my father. He turned it off again. He straightened up and nodded at my father. “Better get her some tacos.”

We drove off in a new direction and stopped at a small Mexican restaurant called Pepe’s. I didn’t say anything, but I felt pretty surprised at this new turn of events. I had loved tacos the one time I ate them. But it was weird to eat them now, in my saddest moment.

The floor of the restaurant was made of brick-colored tiles, and all the tables were covered with pretty blue-and-white tile. Ponchos and sombreros hung on the walls. A singer crooned in Spanish from the record player. The atmosphere was festive. A waiter approached us and said, “Dinner for two, amigo?”

The night didn’t seem real. My sister was dead, and I was about to eat tacos. I ordered five of them. In Illinois, I had eaten one. Now I ate all five of my tacos while my father watched, impressed and then maybe a little worried. “You don’t want to get indigestion,” he said.

When we got home, my mother was sewing a hem in the kitchen. She was fixing my black dress that I knew I would be wearing to the funeral.

“I was worried,” she said.

“Katie ate five tacos,” said my dad. “That takes time.”

He and my mother both looked at my stomach as if expecting to see it explode. When it didn’t explode, my mother raised her eyes to my father. She said the thing she liked to say when she wanted to remind him that he could not afford any sort of unusual behavior. “You’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

He and my mother left the kitchen. She didn’t ask me to wash the dishes. And she didn’t do them herself. I had never known my mother to go to sleep with a sink full of dirty dishes. And I never washed them myself unless I’d been nagged. But that night I thought I should. I cleaned the counters and even took a mop to the floor. I wasn’t sure what sponge to use for the counters. It seemed to me that my mother used a different sponge depending on what she was doing. But there was only one sponge at the sink. An array of bottles and jars of cleaning fluids sat under the sink. But there were no more sponges. I could imagine my mother getting annoyed if I used
the wrong sponge. If Lynn were here, she would have been able to tell me what sponge I should have used, she would have been able to tell me what I should do next. I did not know what to do without her to tell me. I lowered my head to the kitchen table and cried. Finally I wet a dishtowel and used that to clean the counters, the table, and even the chair seats. It was late when I finished. I sat at our table and did not know what to do next.

Later on I lay in bed and saw the happy little moth, still alive, flitting from the night-light up the wall and back to the night-light. And it occurred to me what I had seen in Lynn’s eyes the night before: She was wishing she were that moth. Maybe that was the last thing she ever wished.

chapter 15

W
E WERE HOLDING
the services at the funeral home. I was supposed to give one of the eulogies because everybody said Lynn loved me more than anything in the world. I thought every spare moment about my speech. I also needed to write an essay for school about a family subject or theme, so I decided to make my speech the same as my essay. But I couldn’t even think of the first sentence. I looked up “theme” in Lynn’s dictionary. It said:
an implied idea in a work of art.
I thought about that for a while, and then I gave up.

My parents were busy, and Sam was sleeping. When she was a girl, my mother had dreamed of owning a flower shop, so she drew dozens of diagrams of how she might organize and display the flowers for the funeral. My father took care of all the arrangements that required dealing with the outer world, all the arrangements with the funeral home, and so on.

It made me sad that the girls from Lynn’s class didn’t show up for the funeral. All thirty-two Japanese in town showed up, including a new baby. In addition, Lynn’s teacher from school attended. Silly, her mother, her uncle, and her brother also attended. So did Hank Garvin and his wife and kids. His wife wore a button on her lapel that said
UNION
, and I noticed Hank Garvin wore the inexpensive watch that was the best we could afford to give him for a thank-you. A couple of my mother’s co-workers also showed up. One of them had a black eye. I’d heard that there had been union trouble at the factory, but I didn’t know the details.

I couldn’t pay much attention to what was
going on because I was so nervous about my speech. I was supposed to go up after Lynn’s teacher. I don’t even remember what she said. When it was my turn, I noticed that my shoes squeaked as I walked up the aisle. The pulpit seemed to be about a thousand miles away.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
I wished the organ player would play music so nobody could hear my shoes.

Here is the speech I gave:

“My sister was my best friend. She was a genius. She helped me with my homework whenever I wanted. She was going to college and planned to live on the highest floor of a tall building, probably in Chicago. She was going to live in a house in California by the sea because she loved the sea, even though she never saw it. She was going to buy seven houses for my parents, if they wanted. She was going to be either a rocket scientist or a famous writer.

“She was going to be the best in the world and live at the top of everything, and she was going to bring her family with her. This was one of the themes of my sister’s life.”

My mother had told me to end with a special memory I had of my sister. But when I checked my index cards, I saw that I hadn’t brought the cards on which I’d written my memory. Where had I left those cards? At home? In the car? I couldn’t even recall what memory I’d planned to tell. I looked at everyone. Everyone looked at me. I cried out, “Thank you,” and ran to my seat. As soon as I sat down, every single person turned to look at me. Then every single person except Silly turned forward as someone else went up to speak. Silly leaned toward me and smiled and whispered, “You were
great.
”

Later, before they buried the urn, we were each supposed to throw a flower into the hole. Almost everybody chose red roses. Uncle chose a bright yellow daisy. I chose a cosmos because my uncle told me that a cosmos stands for “heart of a girl.” My father’s white rose missed the hole when he threw it. He’d chosen a rose because he thought that was the most royal flower and Lynn was his little empress, and he’d chosen white because it was angelic. The white rose had landed on a
mound of dirt. For a moment nobody moved. My father seemed paralyzed. Then Uncle Katsuhisa stepped forward and gently picked up the rose and threw it into the right place. He laid a hand on my father’s shoulder. My father began to cry. I’d never seen my father cry before. I hadn’t seen him cry the entire time since Lynn had died. Crying made his whole body shake wildly, as if he were possessed. The shaking scared me. I thought in a way that he was possessed and that maybe from then on he always would be.

Everybody came to our house to eat. I just sat in the bedroom by myself. My uncle opened the door and said, “You okay?”

I said, “I’m fine,” and then I burst into tears. He let himself in and listened to me cry. I told him my horrible secret that I had told myself I would never tell anyone and that I had made Sammy promise never to tell. But now I started to blabber. “Uncle, sometimes while Lynn was sick, I got angry at her. Usually I hid it from her, but one time I got mad out loud. It was the middle of the night,
and she asked me for a glass of milk. I got up and got her the milk, but when she tasted it, she said she didn’t want it and dropped it on the floor. She got to acting like that when she didn’t feel well. Then I brought her water and started to clean up the milk. But she said the water glass had soap on it, so she threw it on the floor, too. Then she said she wanted milk again, and I wouldn’t get her any. She said she hated me, and I told her I hated her. I made her cry. Uncle, what’s wrong with me?” I sobbed some more. “How come I said I hated her?” I tried to inhale, but the air didn’t seem to go into my lungs. I struggled to breathe.

Uncle let me sob for a few minutes. Then he said, “Did anyone ever tell you that my first son died?”

I stopped crying for a moment. “Really? I didn’t know you had another son.”

“He was just a baby. You weren’t even born yet, and neither was Lynn.”

“Was that a baby from your first wife?”

“Oh, no, I was only married to her for a few months,” he said. “This was Fumi’s first baby. The baby was born very sick. Fumi or I
sat with him every night. All he did night after night was cry, until the day he died. He was quiet that day.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Uncle.”

“I know you are. That’s not why I’m telling you. I just want you to know I understand. Lynnie didn’t hate you. You didn’t hate Lynnie. You were mad because she was so sick. There was one day when my son was so sick and in such pain, I thought I should just smother him with a pillow to take him out of his misery.”

“But that’s terrible!”

“Of course it is. I didn’t do it. I would never do it. When someone is dying, you have crazy thoughts. Don’t feel guilty, you’re too young for that.”

Then he told me that some Buddhists believe the spirit leaves the earth forty-nine days after the body dies. He said for the next forty-nine days I could stay busy by taking care of a box of Lynn’s things he would help me make. He said this box would be Lynn’s altar. He started to leave, but I called out, “Uncle Katsuhisa!”

“What is it, sweetheart?”

“Are you happy now? I don’t mean today, I mean in general.”

He paused, and I could see he was really thinking. He turned both of his ears inside out at the same time.
Pop! Pop!
“Yes, I would say that, all in all, today I’m a happy man. It’s not always easy, but, yes, I am.”

A week after the funeral I turned in my new essay at school. This is what I wrote: