Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (6 page)

When it gets too late to have dinner, Felix texts me, Are you OK? I pick up
101 Japanese Phrases You’ll Never Use
, open it to a random page, and respond back with the first sentence I see:
Ebi wa dashi no nakade yuukan ni tatakaimasu!

It means: How valiantly the shrimp struggle in the broth!

THEY HELD MASS AT
my grandparents’ church. While the deacon said things like, “The Lord takes first whom he loves best” and “To die young is a blessing,” images of that day slideshowed through my mind—Rooey’s head, just above water, snapping back on his neck, Rooey’s eyes wide and black as he looked at me that last time, while I treaded water a few feet away. I wondered if he knew he was dying, that when he closed his eyes on the pain, they would never reopen. I thought of this as the deacon droned, as my mother’s pale jaw clenched and unclenched, her eyes like ice—she had not cried yet—and I stood up in the pew and whispered, “Bullshit.”

My voice carried through the church. I began to sob, and the sound echoed off the rafters and the stained glass window where Jesus hung on the cross with a trickle of blood on his palm and a serene smile on his face.

Him, not me, though I was just ten feet away. Him, not
me, though it had been my idea to swim out that far in a race we both knew I’d win. Not me, though I’d been on my period that day. It doesn’t take much blood to draw a shark.

I stood there, shaking, everything in slow motion, while the deacon wrapped up the homily in his calm, gravelly voice, and I only began to move when he descended from the podium. He never looked in our direction. When I sat down, my mother shed her first tear.

I’M STILL PLAYING THE GUITAR
when there’s a knock on the front door. I go to answer it: Felix. He looks worried.

“Hey,” he says. “What’s going on?”

I shrug.

“Can I come in?”

I let him in and lead him into Rooey’s room. We sit on the bed, and he looks around. His gaze stops on me. I don’t meet his eyes. It’s not a comfortable silence, but it’s not uncomfortable, either.

“I’ve never been in here before.”

“I like it here.”

“I realized that message was in Japanese, romanized, so I translated it, but I don’t know if I got the words all right because sometimes there are a few different meanings for the same word.”

“Good job,” I say, and pick up the guitar. I strum indiscriminately, and he starts rubbing my back. Then he gives me a series of small pats, like I’m a baby he’s burping.

Finally I say, “I saw Lily today.”

“Oh yeah? Where at?”

“Her house.”

“You went over there? That was nice. How is she?”

Cute, I want to say. Crazy cute and wonderful. Instead I say, “I can see the attraction.”

“That’s good, I guess. Did you talk much about Rooey?”

“A little.”

“She misses him too. It’s good to talk about it.”

He takes my hand, kisses it. Then I’m crying, sobbing into my palms. “She’s going to cut off all her hair.” I sniffle.

“Who is?”

“Lil-Lily.”

“I see.” He hugs me tighter. “Let it all out.”

“I don’t want to move in together.”

We sit in silence after that. After a while I notice he’s crying too.

“It’s not your fault,” I say.

“No, no. You’re confused right now,” he said. “This
is
my fault. I shouldn’t have tried to be so cheery. I’m going to find some help for you. A therapist, or a group or something.”

“I feel sick,” I say, and I do.

“Do you want something to drink?”

“I think I’ll just lie down. I’ll give you a call later on.”

“You want me to go?”

I nod. “I’ll call you.”

“If it’s what you really want. Is it?”

I nod, yes, yes. He’s barely out the door when I start
to gag. I run to the bathroom, where I empty my stomach of water and some half-chewed bread. It feels good to do that, to cleanse myself of the unnecessary. Afterward I call Lily, but there’s no answer. I leave a message: Thanks for today. If you ever need to talk, or want company, please give me a call. I really hope you will.

THE COTTON OF THIS SHIRT
is worn so thin it’s silky. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Lily was right. I do resemble him.

My hair has gotten lighter. From being out in the sun, Felix says. It’s also developed a wave for the first time in my life.

I remember something Felix told me, something out of his book: “Grieving and healing go hand-in-hand. Cut yourself a wide swath. Things
will
get better.”

“Fuck that,” I say to the mirror. “I don’t give a flying fuck if I get
better.”
I like that, “a flying fuck.” Rooey used to say that.

“Fuck
getting better. The sooner I get better, the sooner someone else is going to die.”

It could’ve been me, and maybe it should’ve. After all, it was my scent in the water. It was my idea to race. It was my graduation trip.

Could’ve been me, should’ve been me. Hell—maybe it
was
me. I look in the mirror. Are my eyes getting darker? I lean in close to the mirror. Brown speckles the blue.

I sink to the floor. The boards creak.

True: I have not had my period since the attack.

True: I haven’t slept in days.

True: I no longer desire anything. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. I am horny as hell.

From the floor I can see under the bed. There are so few things under there, I can count them. Seven—eight, if you count each hockey skate. Two shoeboxes, a sock, an orange peel, a measuring tape, an unopened bottle of Corona.

I reach my foot under the bed and nudge the big shoebox toward me, the one that originally housed the hockey skates. It’s heavy. Stuff clinks around inside. Tools, maybe.

I lift the lid, feeling ceremonious.

The box is filled to the brim with figurines. The ones Roger makes in the metal shop, little Buddhist statues about an inch tall—what are they called again?

(Jizo)

Juzu? Something like that?

(
Jizo
)

I close my eyes and the explanation comes:
They’re called jizo. Like a combination of Jesus and Bozo.

Jizo.

I pick one up and examine its face. Two crescents arch across the smooth metal face to form eyes. The ears are overlong; the earlobe grows out of the jaw.

I think they have something to do with Buddhism, but beyond that, I have no idea. I set the figurine down and fetch my laptop.

The online encyclopedia tells me that translated from Japanese,
jizo
means “earth treasury” or “earth womb.”
“Traditionally,” says the article, “jizo are seen as the guardians of travelers, firefighters, and children.”

Children.
I should bring one to Lily. Lily would like one.

I read on: “In particular, jizo are said to tend to the souls of miscarried or aborted fetuses, or any child who precedes his parents in death. It is said that children who die in this manner are not allowed to cross the sacred river to heaven as penance for the pain they have caused their parents.”

If I focus all my willpower, I can bring him back, I think, staring at the jizo’s sleepy face. I just have to want it enough.

I focus on the statue’s face so long it begins to move. It wriggles in my palm and the lips move to speak, but before I hear the words, Mom’s voice cuts in. She is standing in the doorway. What she says is, “Hi, sweetie.”

“Look,” I whisper, holding out the statue. “Did you know? He’s the guardian of children.”

Without a word she crosses the room, wraps her arms around me from behind, and begins sobbing into my hair. In the mirror I watch as she clutches at my hair, pulling and twisting, and each time she releases a handful, it is blonder and wavier than before.

I close my eyes. I’m kicking through clear, warm waves, my throat and nose stinging from salt water. I’m already a few lengths behind her. Then I feel a sudden, massive presence beneath me, its skin like sandpaper as it shoots past my leg. Dark stripes. The pain in my shoulder like a star exploding. I open my eyes, and my vision is
blurry, like that of a newborn. For a second I smell the hot wool of the old camper.

“Oh, Rooey,” she says. “What are we going to do without her?”

I hug her back without turning away from the mirror. I gaze at our reflection, her arms around the figure in the gray T-shirt.

“It’s OK,” I whisper. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to stay right here.”

YUMIKO JIGGLED THE HANDLE
and thought,
break, broke, broken
.

“Toilet’s broke,” she called, testing him. She waited, imagining the serrated tone he used to correct her English when he was upset.
BrokEN.

He poked his head into the tiny room.

“Why am I not surprised? What’s wrong with it?”

“The flusher. It’s not flushing.” She wiggled the handle. Water sighed somewhere inside a pipe. It was an old-style squat toilet, a green porcelain basin sunk into the floor. Lou called it “the trough.”

He scratched his beard. He’d stopped trimming it, and these days it resembled a storm cloud about to burst. When they’d moved into this place after getting married, he’d taken care to shave every day. He was still teaching kids then, and some found the beard scary. Yumiko didn’t care much for it either, but Lou only said, “When I’m around kids again, I’ll shave.”

She stood up and squeezed him arm, for the correction he had not made. “I’ll call Miura-san.”

In the kitchen she shuffled through the papers on the bulletin board, mostly take-out menus. Underneath the flier for Tan-tan Men noodle house was the traditional two-year calendar—a housewarming gift from her mother. It was more of an almanac, really, full of symbols Yumiko did not understand. A few dates stood out, printed in burgundy; these her mother had taken care to circle with her own thick red marker. Auspicious days, meant for the events that indicated progress: weddings, job interviews, moves. Even, according to her mother, conception. The calendar had not been turned from its second month.

She finally found the landlord’s number between pages of the CoCo Curry menu. Miura-san wasn’t phased by her complaint; the building was old, like all the others in Tainohama, and theirs wasn’t the first toilet problem.

“Thank you,” she said, bowing slightly as she hung up. Lou mimicked her high-pitched formal Japanese and bowed at her from across the room. She smiled, to encourage good humor on his part. But she kept the smile closelipped; she’d noticed lately that big smiles pulled at her
skin in such a way that her eyes almost disappeared. Her eyes were her best feature, the color of weak barley tea, and strikingly light for a Japanese. When they’d first met, Lou had asked if she could really see out of them.

“A worker can come tomorrow to fix it,” she said. “It might take a couple of days.”

“I hope it’s not longer than that. I can only piss out the window for so long.”

“If you did, Kobayashi-san probably won’t notice,” Yumiko said. No matter what the weather, the old woman who lived below them never stepped into her garden without the protection of an umbrella.

But Lou didn’t laugh. She saw him catch sight of the exposed calendar, its red circles like imploring eyes. She imagined its voice, a whisper:
Don’t you want to know what the lucky days are this month?
Yumiko looked out the window, where the sun was setting behind a network of rooftop antennas. She would not be the one to turn all those pages at once, pinching the months between her fingertips like food gone bad. She especially didn’t want to see this, the eighth month, charted out. It marked their two-year wedding anniversary, which they’d celebrated by working late, and the weeklong Obon holiday that began tomorrow, when dead family members were believed to visit the land of the living.

They both had the week off, she from classes at the ceramics studio and he from teaching English, and Yumiko wondered how they would fill the time. Lou had balked at visiting her mom and dad. “All they’ll talk about,” he’d said, “is when we’re going to wave the magic baby wand
and turn them into grandparents. Let’s focus on us—on
our
family—this year.”

She stared out the window into the mess of electrical wires that sliced up the horizon. There would be a baby soon, she reasoned. He or she was just waiting for the right time to come. Lou’s tests had come back showing no problems.

Lou whistled a depressing four-note melody.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said absently, gathering the scattered menus. He piled them all on top of the calendar, the tendon along his forearm popping out as he strained to pierce the clutter with a tack.

“I have to get to class,” he said.

“How does gyoza sound for dinner?” It was a joke; the fried dumplings were the only thing she ever cooked, and almost always in the middle of the night.

He smiled absently. “Do you think you’ll ever feel like learning to cook?”

She had never heard him say this. He knew she hated planning meals and grocery shopping, and he felt the same way. They got along fine on takeout. “I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s just that we can’t eat out forever, it’s not that healthy, and since you only work part-time... you know, Mrs. Yoshida teaches a free class in traditional Japanese cooking at the International Center on Sundays.”

“I—I’ll think about it.” How embarrassing, she thought. She would be the only Japanese student in the class!

He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “
Mata, ne.
Love you.”

“Say hi to the beer ladies.” Lou’s last class of the week, Saturday night, was with a group of older housewives whose interest in English was a shallow cover for their real purpose: socializing away from home, where their newly retired husbands lurked underfoot.

“Oh, by the way,” he called from the stairwell, “it’s brokEN. If the toilet were ‘
broke,’
that would mean it’s completely out of money. Not worth anything.”

His footsteps faded. She opened the refrigerator and stared in. She couldn’t remember what it was she’d wanted.