FOUR YEARS LATER
AUGUST 29, 1997
Sukari died of liver cancer from the pesticide testing on August 29th. She was ten years old, less than a fifth of her way through her life span. During her last weeks, Joey, who’d taken time off from her biology studies at Gallaudet and preparations for applying to veterinary schools, moved her and Hidey into a small trailer that they’d rented and placed near the ficus tree. The trailer reminded her of life with her father, and she thought her own bad memories would meet her there but instead she felt cocooned. She read to Sukari and they talked about Turtle. Joey told her he’d been waiting and waiting for her and promised that she would see him soon.
WHERE TURTLE?
HIDING.
Sukari smiled.
On the last day of her life, she lay in bed and began to sign for things she wanted brought to her. It started with her stuffed turquoise Miami Dolphin, then her most recent issue of Esquire, then the doll Pam had given her—a Raggedy Ann with curly orange hair dyed auburn to match Joey’s. She shivered, so Joey covered her with a blanket. She slept then with Hidey beside her, his face buried against her neck.
Joey sat across the room watching Sukari’s thin chest rise and fall. “It’s time, Charlie,” she whispered up at the water-stained ceiling. “Come take your little girl.”
Later, when Hidey stood, stretched, and yawned, Joey got up to check on her. She was gone.
* * *
A few days later, they all flew back to California, Hidey in his carry-cage strapped into the seat next to Joey and Sukari’s ashes in a small oak box in Joey’s lap.
She sat by the window and stared out at the slow-moving landscape below. She had seen so much of it from buses, trains, and cars, where it looked either junky and littered, settled with neighborhoods, or wild and pristine. From the plane, she couldn’t see the trash, the community, or the beauty. Just squares of carved-up land, cities looking like bits of blown confetti, and highways, apparently empty, except for the occasional flash of light as if someone was signaling with a hand mirror to the sun.
Is this what God sees? she wondered. And if so, how will things ever change if what can be seen is either too much or too little?
She’d worn her new, small hearing aids to hear when her flight was called in the terminal and had numbly left them in, not sufficiently bothered by the discomfort of sound to seal herself back into a womb of silence. Throughout the flight, she was vaguely aware of the pilot’s announcements of points of interest as they flew over. Though, even with her hearing aids, she could catch only a word or two, she’d glance out anyway.
“Below ---------- left ----------,” the pilot said.
When she looked down, a chill swept over her, raising the hairs on her arms. Below them was the deceptively pure pallor of White Sands, New Mexico.
“---------- Home ---------- first ---------- bomb.”
The home of large- and small-scale destruction. Joey snatched her hearing aids out and jammed them into her pocket.
* * *
Roses were Sukari’s favorite flower, to smell and to eat, and red was her favorite color. Joey went to Heartwood Nursery and bought a red-rose bush. She planted it in the sunniest, warmest spot in the yard, and around the base she blended in half of Sukari’s ashes.
Her mother, Luke, and Ray came out for the planting. Ray had constructed a wire basket to surround the bush to keep the deer from eating the flowers, but Joey took it off. It looked too much like a cage. Besides, deer fascinated Sukari and the roses would lure them right to her.
A misty rain was falling the day Joey took the rest of her ashes down the back trail to the very largest, oldest, tallest redwood on their property. There was a bench nearby, built when the property was an old-folks home by someone who must have loved this ancient tree as much as she did. She sat there for a long time with the little box of ashes on her lap, watching the creek and remembering moments with Charlie and Sukari, sorting through them like snapshots.
After a while, when the rain became sincere, Joey got up and emptied the box at the base of the tree, then went back to sit on the bench. She watched as the ashes were washed from the surface and deeper into the duff. When they were gone, she lay back, looked up its two-hundred-foot height, and imagined Sukari being gathered by its roots. She watched her scamper to join the flow of water up the xylem, intent on going as high as she could go. Twice, from branches held out like arms, she turned and smiled down at Joey. I-SEE-YOU, J-Y.
“I see you, too, sugar-butt,” Joey whispered, then closed her eyes to watch the moment when Sukari’s spirit, in a molecule of oxygen, floated free at last.