A Step from Heaven

by An Na

  Apa?

  What dreamers you two were! Pretending to be dolphins, then seals, then ships that could sail far across the sea. Uhmma suddenly turns away from me, looks out the window of our new home. After a moment she says quietly, He was a different man back then.

  I trace the faces in the picture with my fingertips. I can barely remember the feel of his arms as he held me tight and asked me to be brave. How scared I was of the waves, of what might be out there.

  You take that with you, Uhmma says, peering over my shoulder. Take it to college so you can remember how to be brave. She holds the corner of the picture for a second and then lets go. Uhmma turns her face to the window again. She gazes out and says quietly, And remember, Young Ju. You come from a family of dreamers.

  I hold the picture close to my heart.

  I am a sea bubble floating, floating in a dream. Bhop.

  Epilogue: Hands

  Uhmma’s hands are as old as sand. They have always been old, even when we were young. In the mornings, they would scratch across our sleeping faces as she smoothed our foreheads, our cheeks, and told us quietly, Wake up. Time for school.

  At work, her hands sewed hundreds of jeans before the lunch bell sounded and then boxed hundreds more before she left for her night job at Johnny’s Steak House. They knew how to make a medium-rare steak, baked potato on the side, in ten minutes flat for hungry customers always in a hurry.

  Uhmma’s hands washed our dinner dishes, cleaned the kitchen floor with a rag, folded load after load of laundry. They could raise hems of second-hand dresses with stitches so tiny there was barely a line. Even on Sunday they held a Bible and helped set out doughnuts and coffee after the service. Uhmma’s hands rarely rested.

  But sometimes, not often—and not when Uhmma was tired and wanted only to feel the cool underside of a pillow—but sometimes, her hands would open. Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, in a sunspot bright as the open sea, Uhmma unfurled her fingers. Palms up. A flower finally open to the bees.

  Joon and I would rush to sit on either side of her. Uhmma held our small hands in her own and said she could read stories in the lines of our palms.

  Look, Young Ju, Uhmma said. Your intelligence line is strong. Someday, maybe you will become a doctor. Uhmma traced the line with her cat-tongue finger, tickling my hand as it moved from the heel of my palm up to the base of my middle finger.

  Joon shoved away my hand and offered his for inspection. Look at my intelligence line, Uhmma.

  These baby hands have lines? Let me see, Uhmma said and brought his palm up close to her face. She studied it for a moment and then suddenly kissed the middle. Plop. A raindrop on water.

  Joon giggled, kicking out his feet. This one, Uhmma. Tell me about this one, Joon said and pointed to a line on his palm, the one that predicted he would live to be an old, successful man with many children.

  It did not matter that we had heard the stories before. Each telling was a lullaby of dreams we never wanted to wake from. We were reaching, always reaching, to touch Uhmma’s sandpaper palms.

  Uhmma said her hands were her life. But for us, she only wished to see our hands holding books. You must use this, she said and pointed to her mind. Uhmma’s hands worked hard to make sure our hands would not resemble hers.

  It takes only a glance at our nails, our knuckles, our palms to know Uhmma succeeded. Joon and I both possess Uhmma’s lean fingers, but without the hard, yellowed calluses formed by years of abuse from physical labor. Our hands turn pages of books, press fingertips to keyboard buttons, hold pencils and pens. They are lithe and tender. The hands of dreams come true.

  As I walk with Uhmma now, her hand grasped firmly in mine, I can feel the strength that was there in our childhood ebbing away. I cup her hand, unfurl her fingers, and let the lines of her palm speak to the sky. They are the marks of story and time. For some it might be hard to tell which lines were there from birth and which ones immigrated from countless jobs. But I can tell.

  I trace a set of tiny lines etched along her thumb. They speak of Uhmma’s early years gathering and drying fish along the Korean coastline. I follow another path and find a deep groove at the base of her pointer finger. Immediately I smell the smoky kitchen of the steak house crowded with visitors just pulling off the I-5 for dinner.

  Too busy, she had explained as she unwound the Reynolds plastic wrap and tried to peel away the blood-soaked napkin from the cut. The old scar, white and fleshy, still remembers the hard kiss of the dancing knife.

  I smooth the tips of her fingers. Tiny flecks of skin, parched from dry-cleaning clothes, ironing shirts, “heavy on the starch,” stand up searching for the moisture that was robbed day after day for eleven years.

  In the middle of her palm, the creases are still strong. Although the line of riches is cut short by a scar from an unseen hook caught in a fish’s mouth, her lifeline extends out full and long. The marriage line is faint, crisscrossed by tiny cracks in the skin starting and ending in a mystery. Uhmma’s hands have lived many lives, though her hair only recently has begun to gray.

  I study these lines of history and wish to erase them. Remove the scars, the cuts, fill in the cracks in the skin. I envelop Uhmma’s hands in my own tender palms. Close them together. Like a book. A Siamese prayer. I tell her, I wish I could erase these scars for you.

  Uhmma gently slips her hands from mine. She stares for a moment at her callused skin and then says firmly, These are my hands, Young Ju. Uhmma tucks a wisp of my long, straight black hair behind my ear and then puts her arm around my waist. We continue our walk along the beach.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest gratitude to the Mesa Refuge Foundation for the gift of time and space. To Jacqueline Woodson, Norma Fox Mazer, Sharon Darrow, and Brock Cole at the Vermont College MFA in Writing Children’s Literature Program, your knowledge and unwavering support brought this book into the light. To Jennifer Brown, James Nagle, Harriet Muir, Deborah Drickersen Cortez, and Ian Haney Lopez, those amazing dinners and fits of laughter were the best endings to my days. And to my editor, Stephen Roxburgh, thank you for rendering the words anew.

  An Na was born in South Korea and grew up in San Diego, California. A former middle school English and history teacher, she is the critically acclaimed author of the Printz Award–winning novel A Step from Heaven, as well as The Fold and Wait for Me. She lives in Vermont and teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program. You can visit her at anwriting.com.

  A CAITLYN DLOUHY BOOK

  Simon & Schuster | New York

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  Also by An Na

  The Fold

  Wait for Me

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2001 by An Na

  Jacket photograph of model copyright © 2016 by Jill Wachter

  Jacket pattern photographs (plants and birds) copyright © 2016 by Thinkstock

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Also available in an Atheneum paperback edition

  Jacket design and pattern by Sonia Chaghatzbanian; interior design by Mike Rosamilia

  The text for this book was set in Minion Pro.

  First Atheneum hardcover edition July 2016

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4814-4235-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-4236-7 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-4237-4 (eBook)