Somehow

Two days later, Shizuko calls our house. She says that Obaachan didn’t meet with her like they usually do. Then, when she was out, she thought she saw Obaachan at the flower market sipping a cup of coffee from Starbucks. Has she returned to Japan?

Mom looks startled, then gives Shizuko the sad news and hangs up. “Maybe she’s nuts,” she tells Dad.

In school, I have assignments due: a math sheet and a short story. Mom tells me that she will write a note to excuse me from my work and explain, but I don’t want her to explain. I don’t want anyone to say they are sorry or look at me sadly. So I sit down at the vanity in our bedroom, and somehow, I do the work.

The story I write is about a world made of ice. The houses, streets, schools, even the trees are cold and transparent. Icicles drip from every building and tree, dropping like knives, shattering. The people of my story travel on skates or sleds or skis. But at night they can’t sleep, because their beds are icy and their pillows hard.

Maybe I write it because I feel frozen inside, immovable as a glacier.

“Lin.” Dad carries my cello case. “We have to go.”

Somehow my legs walk to the car and I am taken to a service in a small Buddhist temple.

I am surprised how many people come: Mr. and Mrs. Caros, Ms. Nga and her parents, Keisha’s family, the Strausses, who had occasionally talked to me and Obaachan on our walks, Mom’s cooking friends, Betty, Clarabel, and Simone from Lutz Cutz, and Dad’s coworkers.

Dad talks about Obaachan arriving, how nervous she was, how she wouldn’t leave the house. Then slowly, she came out and enjoyed her life here. When he says that he secretly enjoyed Obaachan’s Japanese cooking, a couple of Mom’s friends chuckle.

Then Sally speaks to everyone in her clear bright voice, about Obaachan watching me, and teaching us to draw the Japanese characters, and I sit next to Mom, trying not to listen. Somehow, I pick up my cello and play Fauré’s Elégie, then feel sorry that everyone is crying.

Somehow food appears and people say things to me. Keisha holds my hand and answers for me. Nathan follows Sally around the room but never speaks to her.

Once we have said good-bye to our friends, we go home. Mom sets the urn on the kitchen table, where we have had our happiest times. Then Dad moves it to the living room.

Somehow, I go to my old bedroom, climb up on a chair, and take down the box that says HIROSHIMA. I carry it to the living room and open the box. Mom says a prayer in Japanese. Then I take the ashes from the urn and add them to the ashes in the box, sprinkling them like Mom does when she’s adding flour to a recipe.

As they say at church: ashes to ashes and dust to dust. What is there and then not: a city, a war, a mother’s dress floating away on a river, disintegrating back to its threads, its atoms.