America, Present Day
Standing outside my father’s hospital room, I stared at my father’s letter—the kanji script, the smudged J of Japan and the envelope’s tattered edge. I considered opening it, but first pondered his words.
Mama was the love of my life, but before that life, I lived another. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you...
What “other life” and when did he try to tell me? During our road trip to the hospital? When we’d first arrived? I’d traced every step of our journey here and every word and story since they checked my father in.
It’d be easier if you just read my letter. I need you to do that now, okay, Tori? It’s time.
It’s time. He was dying. Tears slid down my cheeks with that truth. I could no longer ignore it or wish it away. I couldn’t fix things. There was nothing else to be done. I blinked and forced a full, slow breath, then brought the envelope close to lift the flap, but it was still sealed. He never opened it? Pops said he wanted me to read it, but why hadn’t he?
I studied the circled marks, the stylized symbols blurred within them, the strange assortment of English letters stamped at the top, the return address beside it.
There, the most noticeable clue stared me right in the eye. My father’s PO box. It’d been there all along. At once, I understood why the letter hadn’t been opened.
The letter wasn’t to my father. It was from him and had been returned. But who was Hajime?
“Pops?” I wiped at my cheeks and walked back into his room.
He blinked sleepy eyes.
“Pops, you wrote this letter?” I held it up, so the address faced him as I approached. “That’s your PO box but that’s not you.” I tapped the odd name above it with my index finger. “I don’t understand.”
Pops regarded the envelope, me, then his eyes drifted. “Did you...?” His breath caught under thick, stubborn phlegm. His exhale rattled, determined to break it free. “I wanted—” He attempted to clear it, held up a one-minute finger, then folded with the succession of coughs that followed. It didn’t let up.
“Should I call someone?” I placed my hand on his back as though it would calm the fit, make the cancer stop and leave my father alone. I scanned the bed and table for a towel or tissues, swiped the box from where it fell on the floor, then held out several. He convulsed into them.
They soaked in blood.
“Oh!” My heart lurched. I searched for the corded help button within the tangled sheet, found it and clicked. “Hang in there, Pops. They’re coming.”
More coughs. More blood. I panicked and ran to the door. “Somebody!”
My father was dying. And like everything else in his life, he chose to do it on his own terms.
Sedated, Pops drifted in and out of sleep. I sat beside him, listening to him breathe. A beautiful sound, even though it wasn’t. A beautiful man but with such an ugly disease.
My father had said that was what people would see at the funeral. At the time, I’d argued, told him what I saw. A man who had loved his wife and had lived for his family, but right then, I saw the disease just the same.
A monstrous serpent with morphine-filled fangs that pierced his arm. And like the snake who eats its own tail, it had begun the fatal cycle to devour him whole.
Pops twitched awake, studied the room into recognition.
I moved closer and leaned my head near his.
He blinked heavy-lidded eyes.
I blinked teary ones. “You okay?”
A nod. An eyebrow raised to ask the same.
“I’m okay, Pops.” I smiled through tears. “I’ll be okay.”
We looked at one another.
It was the conversation of our life.
It was our last conversation.
With sleep, my father slipped into a coma and from there struggled to breathe. As he requested, there would be no life support. And soon...no life.
I didn’t leave his side again.
I told him that I loved him.
I held his hand.
Hours later, he let go.
The night became a blur of doctors, staff, paperwork and condolences. One minute I’d been sitting with my father and the next he was gone. I didn’t remember the car ride back to the hotel, but there I was, alone in the dark. Alone in the world.
Before, the thought of my father’s letter frightened me. I couldn’t understand what it could mean, but hours after my father’s death, I was desperate for any meaning at all, because it was all I had left.
“Okay, Pops...” The words brought instant tears. “Okay, here goes...” I opened my eyes and, with trembling hands, opened the flap. There was a single folded sheet tucked inside and, inside that, a red piece of yarn. Yarn?
I looked to the paper, to my father’s familiar cramped handwriting, ran my hand over the ink, then read his words.
My Dearest Cricket,
I hope this letter somehow finds its way to you, and that it finds you in health and surrounded by loved ones and family. I pray that family also includes one of my own.
Please, without any expectations, I wish only to know our daughter is well and, if it’s within your heart, for our Little Bird to know she’s always been in mine. Even now.
I’m an old man, Cricket, at the end of my life when pain comes due. I need you to know, in loving you, I’ve never had a single regret. But in losing you? In the how and the why? So many.
Your Hajime
Daughter. It said daughter. My heart lodged high in my throat. I wish only to know our daughter is well... My vision blurred from flowing tears. I blinked and wiped them away, bringing the letter close as if I’d misread.
I hadn’t. I placed a hand to my forehead and left it there while I read it again in its entirety. I didn’t understand. That was what he wanted to tell me? How? Where is she? I stared at his words, then managed my own. “How do you have another...?” A hitched breath snagged the word. My heart hammered constricted ribs as I rocked forward to force it out. “Daughter?” I didn’t understand.
“Pops?” My voice cracked. The words mixed with tears, salting a freshly sliced wound. I looked around, searching for answers.
But my father was no longer there to give them.