Picking Bones from Ash (24 page)

My father would launch into one of his characteristically enigmatic speeches. “You know the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu? She was born out of her father’s eye. Sort of like the Greek goddess Athena, except
she
was born out of her father’s head. Goddesses who don’t have mothers end up becoming warriors. They are very cunning and smart. Like Brünnhilde in Nordic mythology.”

“And this has exactly
what
to do with me?”

“If you are a goddess and you are only going to have one parent, it’s best to have a father. All the goddesses who only have a mother end up silly. I’ve done you a favor.”

“You’ve done me a
favor
?”

“Well, the fates have,” he interjected quickly, “in giving you a father who dotes on you and appeals to your intelligence instead of teaching you the insipid hobbies that most of your female schoolmates have learned from their socialite mothers. If it weren’t for me, who knows what would have become of you? Playing tennis and tanning, or screaming ‘Woo-hoo!’ over absolutely nothing of importance. By growing up with me, you’ve learned to do something useful with your life. And that’s far better than turning you into a woman every man will idolize, isn’t it?”

Now I heard voices: François, Snowden-roshi, and others. They were climbing up the staircase from the shop and into the house. After our last dinner together when I had not helped entertain our guests at all, I knew I would be expected to help prepare a meal, to sit with them while we ate. Somewhat still in a daze, I hastily repacked the secret room, shut the door, and replaced the tiger painting.

François was waiting for me when I turned around. “Oh, good,” he whispered. “I don’t want that open when guests are here.”

“I heard you coming.”

“And how’s the inventory?”

“Messy.”

He was going to ask me questions, but Snowden-roshi appeared just
then with a bouquet of red and yellow roses for me. Behind him someone turned on the hallway and dining room lights, and abruptly the house was flooded with gold light.

“A young woman can never have too many flowers,” he said, and I thought to myself how easy it seemed to be for men to have ideas as to what a young woman should or should not have.

Though I had intended to be a better hostess this time around, I ended up keeping mostly to myself that evening, making a large pasta dish and salad, while François found a couple of bottles of wine that had been languishing above the refrigerator. I was rattled from my experiences in the secret room, but my job as host precluded any self-indulgent panic attack. There were ten of us that night, including Dr. and Mrs. Lorenzi, who had come looking for a Zen ink painting to put in their living room. François had managed to talk them into buying the black-and-white screen, which he’d repaired just a few weeks earlier. I could tell that the extra cash had made François ecstatic. He was gallant and funny all evening, punctuating Snowden-roshi’s stories with tales of his own. The priest told us how he’d gone for a pilgrimage like Bashō, walking from Solvang to Santa Barbara, and François recounted a time he’d escaped from China with a dozen pieces of jade sewn in his pants. Snowden-roshi had slept under oak trees, met with gentle Mexican farmers who had recognized him as a kind of monk, and given impromptu lectures about Buddhism to tourists gathered at wineries. François had been tested by an old antique dealer in Xian, who had placed three dishes on a table and been delighted when my father had chosen the “correct” one.

Later, we drifted off to separate conversations and Mrs. Lorenzi pulled me aside to chat. “You two are so cute,” Mrs. Lorenzi cooed. “He’s never brought
me
flowers.”

I kept my voice cool, but amused. “You misunderstand.”

“My dear, these things are never a secret. People always know.”

When the evening was nearly over and the guests mostly departed, I wrapped myself up in an old horsehair blanket we kept folded over a corner of the sofa and stepped out onto the deck, which was through the kitchen. From here I had a view of a small garden and the backs of other similarly shaped houses. A black cat with a white bib paused under a lamp and looked at me before flying into a genesta bush. Off in the distance, I
could see Coit Tower winking at me, and beyond this the glittering lights of the East Bay. I shivered, then turned around and looked into the sky. The cauldron of the ocean had whipped up a fierce plume of gray fog, and the moisture was now bearing down upon the city. Soon the contours of buildings and trees would be lost in the mist.

“You’re not cold?”

“A little.”

Snowden-roshi came to stand beside me. “Did you have a good evening?”

I drew the blanket more closely around me. “Do you remember when you asked me where my mother was buried?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you want to know?”

“I told you. I thought it would be nice to take her some incense.”

“I want the real reason.”

He leaned against the deck railing. “Your father has a difficult time discussing what happened to her. What happened to her remains. Where she is buried. What he did with her things.”

“Supposedly it’s too painful.”

He cleared his throat. “You know him best, Rumi. You know if there is something he is hiding.” He moved very close to me now. I smelled something sweet and musty, like fruit and wine and smoke all at once. “You’ve remembered something, haven’t you?”

“It’s not a memory exactly.”

“Then what?”

“It’s like something stepped out of a nightmare.”

“Something terrible.”

“Something frightening, anyway.”

“A feeling?”

“A person. In pain.”

“Who?”

“A woman.”

“Who?”

“I think it’s my mother. And I’m supposed to help her. And I don’t know how! I don’t know how!” To my horror, I was crying. He drew me closer to him and held me, but only a part of me was able to calm down. Now everything smelled like incense.

“You must remember, Rumi,” he said softly. “You must remember everything. Then I will help you.”

Late at night, when everyone was asleep, I went back into the secret room by myself with a flashlight. I aimed this at the seams in the walls, searching for a crack. I tapped the walls, listening for a change in depth where a second secret room might be located. I’d seen plenty of puzzle boxes. I knew how my father thought, and I ought to be able to find whatever was hidden in this room. Try as I might, though, the walls yielded nothing.

In frustration I paced the floor, and the boards heaved and groaned. Heaved and groaned. I stopped and pointed the flashlight at the floor. One of the boards didn’t match the others. I hadn’t noticed it before; the floor had never been all that interesting to me compared to the objects in this room. Now it occurred to me that the grain of wood on one of the panels had a different rhythm than all the others. I knelt down and tapped one end of the board, and then the other. Abruptly it flipped up, forming a kind of handle. I pulled this up, and a portion of the floor came free. Underneath was a compartment several feet long, occupied by a wooden box. A secret room within a secret room. I took off the lid, removed a thin layer of tissue, and looked inside.

She was a thousand-armed
kannon
, a Buddhist goddess so named not because she actually had a thousand arms (she only had about forty), but because each arm was said to reach the beings of twenty-five worlds. Multiply the number of arms times the number of worlds, and the
kannon
had the power of a thousand hands. Each of her hands carried a different object: a tower, a mirror, a rope. All were instruments that she, the goddess of mercy, would use to rescue beings in pain.

I pulled her out of the box and set her on the floor. Then I focused on her movements and her voice. The room took on the smell of wood and rain. I tried to listen to her, the way I had always listened to antiques. I waited to hear how her robes moved, or how her hair fell across her shoulders. But she was still.

I examined her face. Her broad, intelligent forehead bore a crown of eleven smaller heads on top of her hair. Her eyes were squinting as eyes do when you smile, but her mouth was only slightly puckered. Her head was bent at the neck, as though she were about to add her comments to a conversation while preparing to shift her weight and stand up. She was
small, perhaps only two feet high, so beautiful I sensed at once that she must have been carved by a master—maybe even the Kamakura genius Unkei.

As I was thinking this to myself, the shadows of the
kannon
’s face abruptly deepened. The corners of her mouth drew up, and her lips lengthened. “I’ve never seen anything like you before,” I said.

“I would like to go home,” she said politely.

“Well.” I smiled. “You live here now.”

Her eyes crinkled again. “I want to go home.”

“
This
is your home,” I said.

“No it’s not,” she insisted. “I want you to take me home.”

A light shone in her eyes and she smiled. Then a white shadow gathered around her body, drew up into a muscular fist, and, like a bird taking flight, flew up and away.

I sat there for a long time, thinking over what I had seen. Though I tried to talk to the statue, she would not speak to me again.

In the morning, I took the statue downstairs into the shop. François was already there alone, dusting the shelves and the glass countertops. He gave a start when he saw me holding the
kannon
. It took him a moment to recover his composure. Then he asked, “What do you have there?”

“Something is wrong with this statue.”

“Another copy?” he asked glibly.

“Not that kind of problem.” I set the
kannon
down on a cabinet. “She was under the floorboards of the secret room.”

I watched him pour himself a cup of coffee. His hands did not tremble. “What an odd hiding place.”

“Where did she come from?”

“Some junk sale, I think. I don’t remember.” He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. “However did you find her?”

“I heard her. The way I hear everything.”

He gave me a rueful look. “Now, really, Rumi.”

“It’s the truth. I heard her and found her last night.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’s time to put her up for sale then. It’s been long enough.” He took a sip of his coffee, watching me carefully to see what I would do next.

“You said that you don’t remember exactly where she came from. But you remember
when
you bought her?”

“Not exactly. I just assume I hid her to let enough time pass. You know we do that with other pieces.”

“Why isn’t she in the catalog?”

He shrugged. “I’d forgotten about her.”

“But you think she came from a junk sale.”

“I assume.”

“You don’t remember?”

“You know that sometimes I have to keep things hidden from public view.”

“But why would you hide something from
me
?”

“For the simple fact,” he said smoothly, “that I’d forgotten all about it.”

“But you remember how long you’ve had her.”

He exhaled, long and deep. “Rumi. What is this all about?”

I felt that anything I said now might lead me into a trap. But I couldn’t stop myself from talking. “I don’t understand why you never told me about the statue. I think you’ve been lying to me. We both know you can be a very good liar.”

Now he was angry. At last I felt the full brunt of his self-righteousness. “You!” He pointed at me. “I have given you more than most parents give their children. You will never know what it is to not have a job or a skill! And you act as though I have done all these things for you out of some secret plan to lie to you!”

“You just did.”

“This isn’t you, Rumi. Who put these ideas in your head? Tell me. What is going on! Who has spoken to you?”

I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I began to cry. “It’s not … I don’t …”

“You knew when you told me that you wanted to do inventory that you were looking for something, didn’t you? How did you know you were looking for something? Who told you to look for this?” His rage was a physical thing, his voice thrusting across the table. I shook, as if an earthquake had gripped the floor beneath my feet.

I told him everything that I could remember, starting with the party in Napa Valley, my strange dream, the voices, the ghost. Everything. I felt agitated when I was done talking, but he looked surprisingly at ease.

In an increasingly calm voice, he asked me questions, which I answered, often repeating parts he claimed not to undestand.

“What did Snowden-roshi say to you about your mother?”

“That he loved her.”

“And tell me again about the Nō play.”

“The woman was a ghost with a broken heart.”

“And that night you had a bad dream in which you saw a ghost.”

“Yes.”

“My dear, you know how high-strung you are.” Now he smiled at me and drummed a countertop lightly with his fingertips. “Don’t you see,” he said, “what has happened?”

I did not.

“Snowden-roshi is a very charismatic man, Rumi. He’s very, very good at getting people to see what he wants them to. How else does a man convert so many people to Buddhism?”

“He was so nice to me, François. But it made me nervous.”

He sighed. “It was wrong of me to send you off to the party. I can see now that this was a mistake. I am very sorry to have put you in such a vulnerable situation. I know how sensitive and imaginative you are.”

Because he’d known the priest before he’d become such a fixture among the wealthy and powerful, François was immune to Snowden-roshi’s charisma and could therefore help me recognize what had happened. I with my tendency to befriend objects and imbue them with a story had simply let the power of suggestion carry me away. The drama at the vineyard had planted the idea of a ghostly woman, my mother, in my mind, and I’d gone about conjuring her up. Could I see that now?

“But I found this statue.”

“So? You may well have seen me hide it when you were a child.” He went on to say that I should not be ashamed of a weak moment. Plenty of people would allow someone else to think for them. He would take care of me now as he always had. The statue would be sold, and my contact with Snowden-roshi limited. Our days would once again be calm and ordered.