All the Ways Home

by Elsie Chapman

  It’s not like you disappearing didn’t get easier, though. It did. You being Dad faded until you became more like the idea of Dad. I got older and new memories got made, and Mom always did her best to be more than enough. Most of the time she was. She kept life busy so I wouldn’t have time to peek into that small box of tough questions.

  Now that she’s gone, that box has been blown wide open. And there are sharp rocks everywhere I turn, ready to cut me.

  I’m kind of tired of being surrounded by all of that, Dad. I don’t really want to carry that small box around anymore, either, talking to me when I’m most lonely and able to catch me off guard.

  But I might need some help packing up those sharp rocks and sending them away for good. Which means alongside the ones about our family tree, I’ve got some other questions I need to finally ask you.

  Like was it really me and Mom not being enough and that’s why you stopped bothering to try? Or was it just that Shoma by himself already was? Or that it was work you chose to let fill your head and heart instead?

  I think being able to hear you say it in person will do the trick. I’ll be able to take that small box full of those freshly packed-up rocks, and I’ll imagine dropping the whole thing into the ocean on my way back home. I want to head into those waters on a sure and steady boat and let all those questions slip to the bottom and out of sight for good.

  And then I’ll know I’ll be okay that you’re gone.

  Even when you’re not.

  5

  One of the customs agents at Haneda Airport flips open my passport and asks me a question.

  I stare at her, and my mind goes completely blank—I’m not used to anyone other than my mom speaking Japanese to me, with her own personal quirks and twists of the language. Even my grandpa speaks only English with me.

  “Sorry?” I stammer out. My Japanese comes out creaky and full of cracks. It’s been months since I’ve used it.

  She smiles. “For how long are you staying in Japan?”

  “Oh. Just three weeks.” She starts to stamp pages inside my passport, and I glance at the fingerprint machine that’s on the counter in front of me, at the digital eye scanner. The sign on the wall says they need to be used for visitors over the age of sixteen, how it’s just a routine procedure in order to enter the country. But it doesn’t keep my heart from starting to hammer, from my feeling like a criminal all over again the way I did that night.

  The inside of the police car hadn’t smelled like doughnuts or coffee, something I’d expected from movies. And there was no wire grate to protect the front seat from the back (I guess the cops saved the cars that had them for criminals older than twelve). But the police radio crackled with bursts of static just like it did in cop shows, and there were no door handles on the inside. And as the cops drove me away from Mr. Ames’s house, I could still smell the smoke from the fire I’d set. Could still see the orange of the flames against my eyelids whenever I blinked. The sleeping streets were gray as they rolled by, and the moon shining over them was like an eye watching me. I had a stomachache the entire way home.

  The customs agent hands me back my passport. She’s still smiling because she doesn’t know what I’ve done. She looks down at what I’d scrawled on the landing card—my dad’s name and his address in the Nakano area in Tokyo. “And you have someone meeting you at the arrivals gate?”

  “Um, yeah, him.” I point to my printing on the card. “My dad.”

  “Well, welcome back to Japan, and enjoy your stay.”

  The welcome back part throws me for a second. “Thanks, I will,” I finally manage. My voice goes up at the end, as though I’m asking a question instead of answering one. She calls for the next person in line, and I move away, wondering.

  Vacations are meant to be escapes, but some must end up feeling more like traps. Because I’m supposed to end up saved by the time this trip is done, yet I already feel too lost to get there. How do you navigate through waters when you don’t even know how to swim? What if you can swim, but something happens that you can’t ever prepare for? Gemma has a friend whose older sister drowned, swimming her regular morning swim out at one of the beaches. She’d gotten hit by a cramp. It came out of the blue. She’d been alone. She’d left home thinking she’d get to go back again.

  I shove my passport into my backpack. I get a glimpse of my journal that’s inside, the still-new-looking cover. Only one entry so far about home, and it’s a letter to my dad of all people.

  Not what I expected.

  I decide that to be fair, I’ll wait until he’s used to my being around again, when he sees how I’m not really in the way, before I ask him about being a ghost in my life.

  I follow the arrows that point me toward the exit. Baggage pickup comes up, and since I only have my backpack that I carried on, I break off from the crowd and head toward arrivals. Vancouver and Canada begin to slip away, and Tokyo and Japan come to greet me.

  Like the drink vending machines that line the walls. I’ll have to tell my anime- and manga-obsessed friend Roan that they really do have a lot of them here, just like he said. I don’t remember living here, but he asks me about Japan all the time anyway, as though my being Japanese means the answer’s built into my blood, knowledge that somehow comes naturally. When instead, most of the time I think that part of me is almost like a mask, which slips on and off whenever it feels like it, whether I want it to or not.

  The escalators are different in Japan. Using them is an organized thing, the left side for standing and the right for walking. No one butts in. No one seems impatient. The custom is weirdly calming, almost too simple to believe it actually works as smoothly as it does.

  There are ads for food everywhere, and restaurants. But instead of Tim Hortons selling the Timbits and Honey Crullers I grew up with, it’s Mister Donut with Pon de Rings and Frank Pies. And most sushi seems to be just the raw kind, with nothing close to B.C. or California rolls.

  Ten times more people live in Tokyo than Vancouver, in about a fifth of the space—this means I’m surrounded by noise. Bunches of voices going up and down and sideways like amusement park rides. I make out the sharper, more pointed sounds of Chinese because of the Vancouver that’s still in my ears, hear how they clash and ring against the milder swooshes of Japanese.

  Gemma is Chinese, and she compares the language to Pop Rocks candy on her tongue, all little bangs and fizzles. Whenever her parents argue, those fizzles turn into explosions, full of color and noise. But she says me and my mom speaking Japanese makes her think of saltwater taffy melting in the sun, all smooth and liquid and even. Both are so different, Kaede, it’d be hard to pick one forever. Who would want to pick between candy?

  Signs in both Japanese and English are everywhere, and there are ones in Chinese and Korean, too. There are also signs in languages I don’t know. It’s the airport, and airports are, I think, like slices of the world.

  I filter out everything but the Japanese characters.

  My mom’s language, and what she made sure I learned, too.

  Train.

  Taxi.

  Exit.

  Entrance.

  East, west, south, north.

  In my head I’m little again and at the kitchen table, my mom’s radio playing low on the counter as always. Over the noise of it she corrected the order of my strokes, the deliberate placement of them. She told me how adding or taking away just one or two can change a character’s entire meaning. How on paper not much separates rain from cloud from snow, even though to me one means west coast wet, and one is puffs of white, and one makes me think of hot chocolate. Sometimes one of her favorite songs would come on the radio and she’d turn it up, singing along really badly so we’d both laugh. But once it was over she’d turn the radio low again, and it was back to work.

  I used to like learning kanji from my mom, until I didn’t. No one else I knew had to study more after school was done for the day, even when it was sunny and everyone was outside. No one els
e had to learn to write three new alphabets for a single language. No one else had a mom who printed out actual worksheets from the workbooks she brought home from the bookstore, telling her kid she was worried he would forget a part of himself.

  After I got into hockey with Jory a couple of years ago and most of my spare time got sucked up with practice, Mom finally gave up. I didn’t tell her I didn’t love hockey as much as she thought I did. How it was Jory who’d discovered he could live at the rink and be perfectly happy, and how I was still there waiting to feel that, too. She recycled the worksheets, packed away the workbooks in a banker’s box in her closet, and said it was okay as long as I never forgot the basics, at the very least. Did you know language shapes your brain, Kaede, and not the other way around? That culture shapes it, too? They are like hands in dough, kneading away, building and creating something. Never forget this other half of you, which seems far away but isn’t, not really.

  And I haven’t.

  Mountain.

  Sun.

  Month.

  Money.

  Kanji come at me from all directions, both super-basic ones I learned a long time ago and more complex ones that are newer, and I soak them up. My brain feels like it’s stretching, like it’s thirstier than it’s ever been now that there’s finally water in sight.

  But there are also characters that take me longer to place, that I need to think about to recall. I picture that banker’s box at home full of the Japanese I’d mostly turned away, how I told my mom I probably wouldn’t ever need it because I knew English and lived in Canada. And as I make my way through an airport full of people I don’t know, I’m struck by a sudden blast of loneliness, of just how alone I am now.

  Mom, you and me, that was the plan. You were always supposed to be there. I’m just a kid, and it’s not fair that you’re gone when there was never anyone else.

  My eyes sting, and all the signs blur so they become meaningless. I could be anywhere, anyone, set adrift at sea like one of those mysterious trees sometimes found bobbing around in the water, and no one can figure out what shore it’d been uprooted from.

  South Korea’s only two hours away. Hong Kong, less than five. I could use my grandpa’s emergency cash card and buy a ticket to anywhere where I don’t have to be Kaede Hirano, grand mess-up at twelve years old.

  But I’m here. For the next three weeks I’m kind of home again, and it’s the strangest feeling in the world.

  I sweep my arm across my eyes until I can see again. I take a deep breath, tighten the straps of my backpack around my shoulders, and walk through the arrivals gate.

  To introduce myself to my dad.

  6

  Right away I realize I should have gotten a picture of him or something.

  How else am I going to find my dad in a crowd of people who are all looking to meet someone? I haven’t seen him since I was three—all I have to go by now are what images I might be able to find online by using the airport’s free Wi-Fi.

  Then I think about how he didn’t ask for a new photo of me to make sure we didn’t miss each other, and my chest gets tight.

  Mom stopped sending him school photos of me when I was six and the envelope came back marked as “Moved” with no known forwarding address. I remember how her face had gone stiff, her eyes tight at the corners as she said that maybe next time we should wait for him to ask for pictures first.

  As far as I know, he never did.

  And kids—especially little ones—are formless, faceless blobs, like amoebas in petri dishes, floating around all happy and rounded and clueless. But once they get to twelve, time’s gotten there, too, and they don’t look the same anymore.

  Dad should know this, too.

  My insides clench as the room starts to empty and no one’s eyes land on me, filled with relief and excitement. I send a text to his number—Hi, where are you? I’m at arrivals—and walk over to the wall of vending machines to wait for a text back. The idea of the room emptying all the way so I’m the only one left leaves me cold and dizzy.

  I’d been locked out of the house once, coming back from getting a slushie from Mac’s with Jory. I’d forgotten my key, and Mom had run out to the store, not knowing I was headed home already. I’d been eight. The sky had gotten darker and the shadows deeper; nothing looked safe. I’d sat frozen on the porch, root beer slushie melting in the cup in my hands, too scared to go anywhere else. It was the first time I felt what it might be like to have nowhere to go.

  What if Dad forgot when he was supposed to come get me?

  What if he forgot I was coming at all?

  What if he keeps on forgetting forever?

  I scan the rows of drinks in the machines, not thirsty at all, and realize I don’t have any yen yet—my money’s still in Canadian dollars. I pat my pockets stupidly anyway before bending down to poke my fingers into the return slot of one of the machines. I do it without thinking, all automatic. I hear in my head my mom saying I used to do it all the time as a little kid, before she broke me of the habit.

  I don’t remember always doing it. I also don’t know why I just did it right now.

  Who knew a vending machine could turn time backward, could bring me closer to being three again, to a land I’ve long forgotten?

  A hand comes from over my shoulder to hold something in front of my face. It’s a large gold coin, about the size of a Canadian loonie.

  Five hundred Japanese yen.

  “Need some change for a drink?”

  I look up at the voice and turn around to see a guy standing there.

  Thin and tall, his arms lanky, all wrists and elbows and knuckles too big for their fingers. Tattoos snake out from beneath the sleeves of his white T-shirt. Earrings, little silver square studs. Skinny-ish black jeans, even though it’s summer and hot enough for shorts. A worn-out messenger bag lies slung across his side. His black hair is streaked shades of blue, worn short in the back and along the sides but long enough in the front to lie messily over his forehead and get into his eyes.

  His face is mine, except thirteen years older.

  My brother grins.

  “Hey, Kaede,” Shoma says. “So how was the flight?”

  7

  His Japanese is slower than the customs agent’s.

  More chill, as Gemma would say.

  Or maybe I’m already getting used to hearing it from different people. But as my brain tries to accept that he’s actually here, it’s what’s missing that’s making me stumble.

  I stand up and look over his shoulder. He’s taller than I thought he would be. “Hi, Shoma. Where’s Dad?”

  My brother shoves his hair off his forehead, and his grin turns hesitant. “He’s sorry he couldn’t come. He signed on for another photo shoot out of town, so it’s just me.”

  I stare at Shoma, my stomach slowly curling up.

  I’d imagined so many different ways of meeting my dad, and in each of them he’s required to actually be present.

  “He’s not in Tokyo?” I hope I don’t sound as stupid as I feel. Because I do feel that way, seeing as I’m here, just like he’d asked, which is what he said he was looking forward to. How he’d be right here, too, waiting to meet me again.

  But all of that had come through Shoma, who’d passed on the invite on our dad’s behalf after telling him about Mr. Ames and Jory and how I was messing up in school.

  Between me and Dad and Shoma, talking to each other is more complicated than it’s supposed to be.

  And somewhere in all that broken communication, my dad decided I could wait a little longer.

  “No, he had to go to Hokkaido.” Shoma slips the five-hundred-yen coin he’s been holding into the nearest vending machine and punches the button for a green tea. “Kind of near Sapporo, but more up in the mountains.”

  Sapporo is hours away by plane, more than a day’s travel if you stick to trains. It’s like northern B.C. to Vancouver, a place with its own feel and smells and things that make it different from the Lower Mai
nland. Winter snow sticks more often than not, and people have to plug in their cars at night so their engines don’t freeze. People talk about hunting instead of being vegan. You can drive for twenty minutes and officially be beyond town limits.

  Sapporo is so far from Tokyo.

  “When is he supposed to get back?” I ask.

  “Well, you’re here for three weeks, so definitely before that. But I don’t know when exactly, and reception’s bad up there—I can’t get through on his cell.”

  I glance down at mine and notice how my text to my dad hasn’t been answered. Gone into the void of no response.

  “Is he staying at a hotel?” Does my dad like staying in hotels? Does he feel as at home in them as he might in his apartment in Nakano? More at home, even? Everything is only a guess. That’s what you have to do with strangers. You guess.

  “Something like that.” Shoma takes out the change from the return slot and slips some of it back through and presses the button for another green tea. “Maybe it’s a bed-and-breakfast? Remind me to look it up later.”

  I peer over my brother’s shoulder again, like he might be joking, like our dad really just wants to surprise me by pretending to be late. I wait for a second for Shoma to suddenly remember that Dad just got his dates mixed up because of course he’d be here otherwise. But I know there aren’t any jokes, and there are no mix-ups, and reality is the hollowness that’s filled my throat.

  Shoma passes me one of the green teas, and I take it so I can look at it instead of him. But then I think of something, so I have to meet his eyes anyway.

  “So I’m going to be staying with you, then?” I’ve always lumped my brother and dad together—they’re a team, just like me and my mom used to be a team. Coming here, I never thought about having to be with Shoma on my own. On his own, he somehow seems even more of a stranger. Someone completely new.

  “Yeah, if that’s okay with you.” My brother gives me another smile, and it looks real enough, and I tell myself he’s not already tired of me. How it won’t matter because I’ll be tired of him first. His blue hair glows and his black jeans are ripped just so, and I tell myself it won’t bother me if he gets bored. “I have to work, but you can still hang out with me. And I have an extra room in my apartment, so you’ll be fine until Dad gets back. Sound good?”