by John Shors
The wrapping paper resisted him. The paper was like a flag draped over a coffin, and he treated it with respect. Kate had been careful with it, and he needed to be as well. “What’s in here, my luv?” he asked softly, his thick Australian accent at odds with the sounds of Manhattan seeping through a nearby window.
A box was soon revealed—a red shoe box that he had seen her use on other occasions. He removed the lid, moving faster, and saw an envelope first. Below it were about a dozen black film canisters. Ian pursed his lips, opening the envelope, which contained a letter. The sight of her elegant handwriting made him cry. She had always written in cursive, and even facing death, and in substantial pain, her hand had been steady and unrushed.
Ian,
Did you know that you take your love with you, when you die? I am so certain of this, because during the last few months, as I’ve lain here and deteriorated, my love for you and Mattie has been growing. Nothing, these days, grows within me except my love for you two. And that love rises like a tropical grass, overshadowing everything beneath it, reaching for light and warmth. A year ago I didn’t think that I could love either of you more. But I was wrong. I was looking at a tree in front of me, a gorgeous tree for sure, but not as lovely as the forest that surrounded it. I love you. I love you. I love you.
I feel so blessed to have stumbled upon you, though surely fate brought us together. Why else would we have both decided to teach English in Japan? Me, a girl from Manhattan. You, a boy from rural Australia. The heavens must have conspired for us to meet. That was the beginning of our story. The end will never be written. The middle saw us travel the world together, create a loving daughter together.
Do you recall when we were at the Taj Mahal and our guide told us about the emperor and his wife? He loved her so much. And as she lay dying, he wondered if she needed anything. She asked him for one wish—to build her something beautiful and to visit that place on their anniversary and light a candle. That dying woman’s wish became the Taj Mahal.
Well, I have a last request, too. It may be simpler than what she asked for, but it won’t necessarily be easier. You see, I want you and Mattie to be happy. That is my last wish. I want you both to be happy after you’ve mourned me. I can’t rest in peace if either of you is miserable, so please do this for me. Be happy. Learn to laugh again. To joke. To wrestle together like you once did. Learn to be free again.
Remember how, before I got sick, we were planning to retrace our steps around Asia? To celebrate our fifteenth anniversary? Only this time, Mattie would be by our side. We were all so excited, so full of life, of joy.
I want you, my love, to take her on that same trip. See what we were all so eager to see, feel what we wanted to feel. Will you do that for me? Please? Please visit the places you and I so adored, walk the paths that we planned to walk again. Let me hear you laugh. Let me see you smile. Teach each other how to experience joy once more. Please go sometime soon, and open these film canisters when you arrive in the country that I’ve marked on the front of each canister. There are six canisters for you and six for Mattie, representing the countries on our original itinerary. Please don’t open any of them until you arrive at the proper destination.
Take my life insurance money and use it for this trip. You’ve already sold your company, and I hope that you haven’t started another one yet. There will always be time for work.
Please go on this journey. Please. I wish I could travel with you. I’m sorry I had to leave. I tried so hard to stay. I fought until I began to become a different person, until rage tainted my thoughts. Only then did I give up the fight.
Do you remember, my love, how we used to write each other poems? When you’re overseas, step outside, look at the stars, and think about those poems. I was bound to you when you wrote your first poem for me. You didn’t know it then, but you bound me to you and we can never be unbound.
Please grant me my final wish. It won’t be easy, I know. But take this trip for me, for Mattie, for yourself. Leave your footprints in foreign lands, and cherish each other along the way. You both used to joke and laugh and smile so much. One of the greatest joys of my life was watching you two laugh together. And you need to laugh again. You will laugh again.
I love you, Ian. Remember what I wrote—that we are bound together and nothing can unbind us. Not time. Not distance. Not physical separation. The love I feel for you both can’t be pulled apart, because that love is like an ocean, and you’re both the salt and the water of that ocean.
I will love you and Mattie forever.
Your Kate
Ian put his head in his hands and began to weep.
Only much later was he able to trace her words with his forefinger and think about them. He didn’t want to travel to Asia without Kate. In so many respects, such a journey would be hollow, bereft of color. And yet their little girl seemed so lost, such a shadow of her former self. He’d tried in countless ways in countless moments to shine a light on her, to purge her of this shadow. And though sometimes his light settled on her face, these moments were as fleeting as the flight of falling leaves.
Ian reread the letter again and again until exhaustion rendered him nearly incapable of thought or emotion. Lying down beside Mattie, he pulled her close, kissing her, closing his eyes, letting darkness come to his rescue.
JAPAN
Memories Awoken
“ONE KIND WORD CAN WARM THREE WINTER MONTHS.”
—JAPANESE SAYING
“It’s not so bloody bonkers in here, is it?” Ian asked, helping Mattie to her seat, relieved to be free from the press of bodies on Tokyo’s sidewalks.
Mattie studied the mini conveyor belt in front of her, which carried servings of sushi to customers lining a long table. Different-colored plates held the sushi, and Mattie glanced from one to another. “Why are there so many colors?” she asked, exhausted from the lengthy flight, her voice slow and steady—so different from her father’s, with its Australian accent and his tendency to run words together.
Ian nodded to a passing waitress. “Well, each plate represents a different amount of money, my little ankle biter. The green plates hold the cheapest sushi, I reckon. The blues ones might be in the middle, the red ones the most expensive, and so on. That’s how they do it over here—keeps things moving fast and efficient.”
“Oh.”
“Care to have a go at it?”
“Sure.”
The waitress, dressed in a black T-shirt and skirt, asked if they wanted something to drink. Ian tried to remember Japanese, pulling a few phrases from his past life. After the waitress had taken his order and left, he put his arm around Mattie, who was rubbing the end of one of her long braids against her chin. “She must think I’ve got kangaroos loose in the top paddock,” he said, seeking to put a smile on Mattie’s face, a task that had become an obsession of his. “I don’t know if I ordered us water or told her we fancied a swim.”
Mattie kept watching the plates, thinking that she might like to sketch them. “Did you ever come here with Mommy?”
“No, luv, I reckon not. Tokyo has something like thirty million people. It’s a heap bigger than even New York. And restaurants like this one are on about every corner, so stumbling upon the same place twice would be like finding your favorite needle in a mountain of needles. Plus, we lived in Kyoto and didn’t come to Tokyo but two or three times.”
Nodding absently, Mattie studied the various offerings of sushi. Rectangular cuts of pink, red, white, and orange fish occupied most plates, though piles of roe, octopus tentacles, slices of shrimp, and bottles of beer and sake were also moving from her right to her left. She was surprised to see that a man two chairs down from her had a stack of almost a dozen plates in front of him. How could someone so small eat so much? she wondered.
As Mattie studied the man, Ian watched her. Since Kate had died, Mattie didn’t talk as much as she used to. She still asked lots of questions but seemed more interested in answers than conversations. Once Mat
tie had been nine going on nineteen, so eager to tell her parents how the world worked. But now, a year and a half after her mother’s death, she seemed to have lost interest in sharing her knowledge.
“I reckon it’s no help being an octopus in these parts,” Ian said as a nearby customer devoured some tentacles. “Having eight arms didn’t do him much good.”
A smile spread across Mattie’s face. Her smile was like a sunrise, warming him. “Don’t be silly, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll embarrass me.”
“Embarrass you? The lass who used to run around naked on our deck?”
“Daddy!”
He leaned over to kiss the side of her head. “Ah, you’re best off to ignore my yammering.”
The waitress brought them water and Ian thanked her. Mattie continued to watch the food flow past. She picked up her chopsticks, remembering when her mother had tried to teach her how to use them. Her mother had taught her so many things—how to ride a bike, how to plant tulip bulbs, and, most important, how to draw. They had often gone to Central Park and sketched together. Sometimes her mother read her a story and Mattie drew what was happening in it. At first her sketches weren’t more than simplistic collections of uneven lines and colors. But as the seasons played hopscotch, Mattie’s creations became more complex and refined. With her mother’s encouragement, she learned to draw with emotion, to put her hopes and loves and happiness into whatever she was trying to bring to life.
Mattie glanced out a window into the chaos called Tokyo. The city was an infinite assortment of moving parts. She saw elevated trains, thousands of people moving like rivers, and lights of every color that blinked, pulsated, and seemed to be alive. Suddenly Mattie missed her room. She was disoriented in Japan, and even with her father beside her, she felt alone.
“Daddy?” she asked.
“Yeah, luv?”
“Do you think Mommy really sees us? Even with all these people around?”
Ian pursed his lips, her words echoing his own thoughts. “Your mum always saw you, Roo. She always watched over you.” He sipped his water, trying to keep his voice steady as memories of Kate flooded into him. “One night, only a few months after you were born, I came home, quite late, from work. You were in your crib, and she was asleep on the floor, still reaching through the crib’s rails to hold your hand. You two looked like a couple of angels.”
“We did?”
“You were a couple of angels.”
“Did you take a picture?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been a dimwit a thousand nights of my life and that was one of them.” Seeing that Mattie was huddled low, as if cold, he moved his chair closer to hers until their legs touched. She was wearing a T-shirt with one of her earliest sketches on it—a shirt that Kate had ordered—and it was wonderful, but hardly warm. “I’m dead cert that your mum’s watching you now,” Ian said, putting his arm around her.
“I miss her so much.”
“I know. So do I.”
Mattie reached for his free hand, a tear tumbling from her eye. “Daddy, will . . . will I always be sad?”
He brushed away the tear. “No, luv. You won’t. That’s why your mum asked us to go on this walkabout. She wants us to laugh like we used to. You remember laughing, don’t you? We used to laugh so bloody hard.”
“I remember.”
Ian leaned toward her, kissing a freckle near her nose, seeing pieces of his wife within his daughter. “Will you try to laugh with me? Like your mum wanted you to?”
“She really said that? She wanted me to laugh?”
“That’s what she wrote. In her letter to me.”
Mattie tried to remember her mother’s smile. “Aye, aye, Captain, I’ll laugh.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “That’s my first mate. That’s the spirit. Let’s have heaps of fun together, like we used to, like we always will.”
She reached for a plate that held thin slices of cucumbers. “Can you tell me a story? About you and Mommy in Japan?”
“Something to tickle your funny bone?”
“No. Tell me about something good she did. How she helped someone.”
Ian nodded, walking through memories. He picked up a plate of tuna but didn’t touch the perfectly cut fish. “One day, luv, your mum and I were outside, eating our lunch, taking a break from teaching. We were in downtown Kyoto, near the train station.”
“And what happened?”
“I’ll tell you in a tick, Roo. But have a go at those cucumbers first.”
“Tell me.”
He used his chopsticks to place a slice of cucumber in her mouth, thinking that her lips had grown fuller in recent months. “As you know, luv, your mum fancied helping people,” he said, dipping a piece of his tuna in soy sauce. “People who couldn’t help themselves. And we were out there, on that lovely day, and there was a homeless man, and he was drunk, so legless that he couldn’t stand. Well, a heap of people had gathered around him, and these three businessmen came up and started to pester the bloke. The dimwits were laughing at him, mucking around, knocking over his bag. And then they began to kick him. And soon more people came to watch the spectacle—a bunch of bloody cowards if you ask me, because no one did a thing to stop it, even when those three mongrels started kicking him.”
“Did you stand there?”
Ian smiled, remembering how Kate had stepped forward. “Your mum, she dropped her food and ran right up to them. And I had no choice but to do the same. By the time I got there, she was already yelling at the businessmen. She had two of them on their heels. I reckon she had them beat, but one of those mongrels stood his ground. At least until I showed up. At that point he scampered off like his backside had been set afire.”
Mattie picked up another cucumber. “And what did Mommy do?”
“Your mum bent down and helped that homeless chap to his feet. And then she gave him some money. A proper sum of money, if I remember right.”
“Wasn’t she afraid?”
“I don’t know. I was. If something had happened, we might have been deported. And I’d only been in the country for a few months. I didn’t have anyplace to go.”
Mattie nodded, not surprised by the story. “I want to be like Mommy. I want to help people.”
“And you will, luv. You will. Just don’t be in a rush to grow up. You can still help people when you’re young.”
She finished her cucumbers and picked up a pink plate that held thin slices of shrimp. “Daddy, should we open our messages from Mommy tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?”
“I think we should.”
Ian added wasabi to his soy sauce, giving himself more time to think. He didn’t know if he was ready to read Kate’s words again. He was afraid she might ask him to do more than he was capable of. Already she had pushed him to his limits, pressuring him to return to Japan, to the place where he had fallen in love with her. A part of him hadn’t wanted to come back to Kyoto, as sometimes it was best not to stir up the repertoire of his memories. Such memories weakened rather than strengthened him, and he needed to be strong for Mattie’s sake. He couldn’t let her know about his demons, about the sorrow that threatened to suffocate him. He had to be an actor, convincing her that he wanted to go on this trip when he sometimes resented Kate for begging him to do so. She had asked too much. How could he walk through memories that would never be relived? How could he make Mattie laugh and smile when so many joys had been stolen from him? He would try, of course, but feared that he would fail. He’d never been as strong as Kate, and she should have thought about that before asking the impossible.
“Can we wait, Roo, until after tomorrow?” he finally answered. “How about that? You and I will do a Captain Cook tomorrow, and the next day we’ll open the canisters.”
“A real Captain Cook?”
“Sure, luv. A real look around. Let’s explore Tokyo. Let’s have some fun. And then we’ll read your mum’s notes.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Mattie replied, trying to sm
ile, aware that her father was worried about the canisters. She knew that he thought he could hide his feelings from her, but she’d seen too much of his suffering. She’d pretended not to, but he couldn’t fool her. Not when she watched him stare at her mother’s photo, not when he paused in midsentence as a smell or sight reminded him of his loss. And especially not at night, when he went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and cried.
Mattie understood her father. She understood him because she’d seen his face in happier times. She knew how he liked to laugh, to tickle her, to play jokes. Now he rarely did such things and didn’t do them nearly as well as he once had. On occasion she’d glimpse his old self, but these glimpses were as infrequent as her own feelings of happiness.
“I love you, Daddy,” Mattie said, placing another plate of tuna in front of him.
Ian managed to push his thoughts of Kate aside, at least for the moment. “I love you too, Roo. I love you so bloody much, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
THE MATTRESS FELT LIKE A BOARD BENEATH Mattie. She stirred, turning away from her father, who was wearing his plaid pajamas and had finally fallen asleep. Their first full night in Japan hadn’t been a restful experience, especially for Mattie, who had never been overseas and who wasn’t used to such a drastic time change. She felt physically exhausted, yet her mind raced, churning with a speed that she couldn’t control, try as she might.
Even though the hotel room didn’t appear much different from what might be found back home, the small space made Mattie anxious. The writing on the door was strange—ancient and unknown. The toilet, she’d discovered in the middle of the night, had a heated seat. A sliding, frosted-glass door separated the bathroom from the sleeping area. Two steel stools sat in the corner. Mattie thought that the entire room, except for the toilet, couldn’t have been more uncomfortable.
