by Kyoko Mori
Maya watches the station wagon merge into the traffic. She remembers sitting behind Nate and Kay’s car at the hospital with a vision of them driving away to their next life without her. Everyone is traveling on to some future, whether it’s the next life or the rest of this one. Whoever that woman is, she belongs to a family moving on with a cargo of provisions and children. Maya pictures the station wagon lifting up into the sky. That’s how she would paint that woman if she were still a painter. She is airlifted into the next century through her daughter, who, in the mid-twenty-first century, will stand in another parking lot in another car with her own children or grandchildren. That is how most people move on through to the future, generation after generation.
Maya looks back at her own car, with its empty bike rack, the doors rusting, the back fender bent from someone hitting it a few years ago when she wasn’t even there. “Your car’s not going to make it all the way to Vermont,” Eric said on the morning he left. It isn’t much of a vehicle to carry her anywhere. All the same, she thinks of an invisible bicycle lifting off from the rack and tilting uphill into the sky, its silver spokes spinning like prayer wheels. She will never be able to carry her father’s spirit out of this century into the next by having her own children. In thirty, forty years, her life will stop, leaving no trace of her parents or the long line of men and women who came before them. All she can do for her father is grieve for him and set him free—to let him disappear into the nothingness that is as big as the sky, full of air.
Freedom is freedom no matter how you arrive at it. If her father had known he was dying, the moment of his death in the hospital or in that dark house in Osaka might still have brought him something better than the panic or fear she has been imagining. Maya pictures him walking up to the sky at night and disappearing among the stars whose stories he told her. Night after night, the stars come back in the same formations, though their light is already hundreds of years gone. Even in the universe, nothing remains the same: old stars burn out and die, some of them sending out sparks that people for centuries believed were divine heralds, harbingers of a new order. It isn’t so terrible to be nothing, finally, to climb up to the sky alone to be part of the elements.
For Maya, so much time is left before that final solitude. Across the street in the parking lot of the post office, several blue-and-white delivery vans are parked against the building. Out in rural Vermont, the car carrying her letter to Eric will be the mail carrier’s own—a vehicle as old and beat-up as hers. When that car comes to his house and drops off her envelope, Eric will recognize the store’s address printed on the top. He will open it and know the map of his childhood, see the uncertain alterations and migrations the future might hold for them. He will call her and say he is coming to get her.
Maya tries to envision him walking into the store or climbing the stairs to her loft. She imagines his voice, the way it always makes her feel—as though the air around them were full of dizzy light. Alone in a parking lot with cars coming and going, she lingers a little longer inside the solitude she has always felt even in the busiest places. Her scissors had cut out squares from her childhood jacket, making holes, letting the air in or out, leaving that jacket earth-bound forever. On the letter she turned upside down, words she meant to burn receded like faraway trees. This moment in Vermont, black crows may be landing in Eric’s yard, as welcome as the tide coming in. Out in the countryside of his childhood, sparrows are falling out of the sky toward the seeds, their aim as compelling as their hunger. Maya imagines herself up in the air, buoyed up by a sad, beautiful garment she has woven. With her eyes closed, she pictures the earth and the sky and reverses the axes of the universe; below her, the stars begin their slow rotation.
ALSO BY KYOKO MORI
Polite Lies
The Dream of Water: A Memoir
Fall Out (poetry)
One Bird
Shizuko’s Daughter
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
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Copyright © 2000 by Kyoko Mori
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Published in Canada by Fitzhenry and Whiteside Ltd., 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.
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First Edition 2000
eISBN 9781466876293
First eBook edition: June 2014
