by John Shors
I love you so much. I loved you from the moment I felt you growing inside me—a miracle that I held in my belly and then in my hands. I’ve always loved you, and I always will. Some things might have been stolen from me, but my love for you is not one of those. It is without end.
Would you do something for me, Mattie? There is a trail behind the apartment in Kyoto where your daddy and I lived. This trail was created by monks two thousand years ago. It’s beautiful and spiritual. We walked it almost every day we lived in Japan. I still walk it in my mind. Will you please take your daddy’s hand and walk it with me? I’ll be right beside you. You won’t see me or hear me, but I’ll be there.
And then, when you reach the top of the mountain and look down on Kyoto, will you do something else for me? The Japanese have an old tradition of writing their wishes on a piece of paper and tying that paper to a tree so that their wishes or prayers might come true. I remember seeing hundreds, maybe thousands, of white notes attached to sacred trees in Kyoto. The Japanese call these “wish trees,” and they are as lovely and powerful as anything you’ll see.
Please write down a wish, and tie it to a tree that overlooks Kyoto. I’ll read your wish and do my best to make it come true. Ask for something fun, for yourself. And maybe also leave a drawing for me to look at. That would be wonderful, Mattie. That would make me so happy. Wish for something beautiful and draw something beautiful, and know that I’ll read your words and see what you’ve created. I’ll be smiling, wherever I am. And I’ll love you as much as I always have.
Mommy
Mattie bit her lower lip, trying not to cry. She brought the paper to her face, holding it against her cheek. She shuddered, still remaining silent, but powerless to keep her tears at bay. Perhaps a time would come when she wasn’t so often on the verge of tears, but that time wasn’t now, not when, even with her father beside her, she felt so alone. She missed her mother so much that sometimes she felt as if she had died as well. Parts of her certainly had.
Her father kissed her on the forehead, drawing her tight against him. She could see that he was also crying, not because he’d opened his note, but because she had reacted to hers. He kissed her again and again, and she wrapped her arms around him and quietly wept. He whispered in her ear of his love for her. And his words helped. Sometimes he knew what to say. When she felt his scratchy face against hers and heard the sorrow in his whispers, she understood that he shared her feelings, and somehow this shared pain made her feel better. As the bullet train continued to dart to the east, her tears and shudders stopped.
“I love you, Daddy,” she whispered.
His fingers traced the contours of her jaw. “I’m so lucky to have you,” he replied, smiling, his eyes still red. “Do you know how lucky I am to have you?”
“No.”
“When we go to Oz, Roo, on our next walkabout, I’ll take you into the bush. And we’ll look up at night, and you’ll see so many stars. You’ll see an ocean of them. And I reckon you’ll want to reach up and touch that ocean. I know I did.” He tucked her unbraided hair behind her ears. “To me, you’re like all the stars that fill the sky. I’d be lost without you.”
She stopped his thumb from moving. “Do you want to know what Mommy said to me?”
“Only if you want me to. Maybe we shouldn’t . . . read each other’s notes. But you can tell me what she said.”
“Are you going to open yours?”
“Should I? Right now?”
“I think so.”
Ian nodded, suddenly needing to see his wife’s words. He opened the canister, which contained a note as well as a seashell that resembled a robin’s egg. The shell was speckled with bits of orange and amber and was as smooth as a newborn’s cheek. The note, written in her elegant hand, read:
Ian,
Thank you, my love, for going on this trip. I know that I’ve asked much of you, perhaps too much. And I’ll be honest—I’m not through asking. In the days ahead I’ll implore you to do more. And you may not like these requests or agree with them, but please think them through. I love you so much, and I’m trying to help you. The greatest regret of my life is not being there to make you and Mattie happy. That thought causes me so much sorrow. So, please do these things for me, because the thought of you doing them gives me some solace now, at the end, when I face the prospect of losing so much.
Will you please take Mattie and have a picnic along the Kamo River, like we used to? Knowing you, I’d guess that you’ve gone to Japan during the cherry blossom season. Maybe you can sit under a big tree beside the Kamo and watch the blossoms fall. Remember how we used to try and catch them on our tongues? I loved those days.
I’ve been thinking of you all night. I even wrote you a poem. I’ve got so many painkillers in me now that it’s hard to know if my poem is worthy of you, but here it is. Hold the shell in your hand, and think of me. I love you.
The Story of Me
Fifteen years ago,
I rested on a reef
In the South China Sea.
One perfect day—
When the sky was but
A continuation of the sea—
A Girl found me.
This Girl dove deep to grasp me,
As she always searched for beautiful things,
And when she saw me
I became the focus of her world.
I traveled with the Girl after this day.
We climbed mountains.
We slept in rain forests.
We listened to ancient cities.
Much later,
The Girl gave me to
A Boy she had discovered.
Like me,
He was beautiful and wise and good.
Like me,
She’d found him deep down,
Where she least expected to.
When she saw him
She wanted to place him
In her pocket—
As she had me.
And now that he holds me
I am his.
Ian studied the shell, envisioning Kate diving down, into the warm waters of the South China Sea. He imagined her spotting the shell, grasping it, bringing it into the light. She had always loved such discoveries, and when she made them, he’d been reminded of the child in her.
Thinking about her touching the shell, Ian brought it to his lips and held it against them. He knew then that he would carry her gift until he could walk no farther. And even then, the shell would stay with him, a treasure she had found and passed to him, another part of herself that she had shared.
AFTER IAN AND MATTIE HAD ARRIVED IN Kyoto, they checked into their hotel and spent the day visiting some of the city’s sights. Thinking of her mother’s wish, Mattie had sketched one of Kyoto’s most famous attractions—Kinkaku-ji, or the Golden Pavilion Temple. The top two levels of the three-story pavilion were covered in pure gold leaf. Two distinct rooflines separated the sections, curving upward at their ends. In front of the structure was a pond, which the Japanese called the Mirror Pond, because Kinkaku-ji’s reflection was as elegant as the pavilion itself. The grounds beside and behind Kinkaku-ji were dominated by a lush Japanese garden.
Mattie had been startled by Kinkaku-ji’s beauty. She thought that it resembled a painting, a wondrous image dreamed up by a mind long since gone. Two hours passed before Mattie finished her sketch. Beneath it, she wrote “I love you” and signed her name. As she’d worked on her sketch, Ian had sat nearby, watching her draw, knowing that Kate had asked her to create something beautiful.
They had been tired that night and had eaten dinner in their hotel, something Kate never would have done. Afterward, they went to the business center, and Mattie read while Ian checked his e-mails. Even though he had sold the company he founded, his former colleagues and customers occasionally had questions that he could best answer. And he often wondered whether his Realtor had anyone interested in their brownstone.
Sleep had come fast for Mattie, but not for Ian, who ha
d drifted between conscious and unconscious thought. He’d dreamed about Kate several times and, upon opening his eyes, had tried and failed to keep the vision of her within him.
Breakfast the next day had been a hurried affair. Both Ian and Mattie were eager to walk the trail behind the old apartment. Though Ian harbored reservations about seeing the place where he and Kate had spent so much time together, he hoped to sense her on the trail. She had loved hiking to the top of the mountain and watching the city below.
Mattie didn’t share his concerns about the day. She longed to see what her mother had seen. If her mother had loved the trail, Mattie knew that she would too. She was also impatient to leave her drawing and a wish in a tree. The night before, as she’d taken a bath, she had thought about her wish. Did her father even know that she still thought about having a little sister? Since her mother wasn’t able to undergo another delivery after the trauma of her birth, they had often spoken about adopting a girl. In fact, they’d even researched how they might adopt a girl from China or India. They had spent several months studying the process by the time her mother had gotten sick. Then conversations about adoption had ceased, though Mattie continued to want a sister. That desire had only strengthened when her mother died, when she felt the weight of loneliness almost suffocate her.
Now, as Mattie and her father rode a surface train toward Yamashina, the neighborhood in Kyoto where her parents had once lived, she thought about the sister she’d lost when her mother died. In all likelihood, if her mother hadn’t gotten sick, they would have adopted a little girl by now. They’d be a family of four. Instead she only had her father. And though she loved him as much as she could imagine loving anyone, she wished that she had a sister. With a sister at her side she would be so much less afraid of what might happen to her if her father became ill.
The train climbed, following the contours of a mountain. Mattie watched thousands of homes below, individual dwellings with blue tiled roofs and miniature gardens. Moving at the speed of a car on a highway, the train shifted from side to side on the curving tracks as Mattie studied people on the street below. Many children were present, clad in navy blue uniforms, moving together in packs. Mattie looked for a school, saw children filing into a large building next to a baseball field, and wondered what it would be like to be a child in Japan. Would she feel alone here too? Was there a girl in the city below who had also watched her mother die? Did that girl cry more days than not? Did she have a little sister?
Mattie glanced at her shoulder, aware of the weight of her backpack, thinking about the two pieces of paper inside. Would her mother really be able to see her drawing of the temple? Would her wish for a little sister somehow come true? Please, Mommy, she thought. Please let my wish come true, like you promised.
The train approached the station, slowing as an automated voice announced their arrival. Mattie tried to smile at her father but realized that his eyes weren’t on her. Instead he looked toward the mountains, his face as blank as paper awaiting her pencils. He took her hand and led her from the train, following hundreds of passengers into the station. A few minutes later they emerged into the suburb. Convenience stores, a bank, and restaurants flanked the train station. There was also a slender five- or six-story parking garage that contained a few dozen cars and thousands of bicycles. The cars could be lifted upward on a giant revolving belt that allowed vehicles to be practically stacked on top of one another.
“Which way, Daddy?” Mattie asked, eager to walk the trail.
To her surprise, he still didn’t look in her direction. “Straight ahead, luv,” he answered softly.
They walked on a narrow road leading toward the mountains. Businesspeople and schoolchildren approached them on bicycles, darting toward the train station. Mattie glanced at the children and then back at her father. He’d been uncommonly quiet all morning, and she felt his hand perspiring against hers.
She tugged on his fingers. “Are you okay?”
His gaze finally dropped to her. “I reckon so,” he said, his smile fake and forced.
They proceeded up the hill, passing women who swept doorsteps with old-fashioned straw brooms. No sidewalk existed, so they kept close to the edge of the street, aware of approaching cars. The street was too narrow for vehicles moving in opposite directions to pass one another, so one car would pull over to allow the other an opening. Drivers were efficient, maneuvering their vehicles within inches of concrete telephone poles, homes, and stone privacy walls.
The mountains above were lush, highlighted by blossoming cherry trees. Mattie saw that her father’s gaze was fixed on a three-story apartment building ahead. The white building was dominated by rows of balconies, on the railings of which futons and blankets were draped. She watched an old man emerge from the top level and beat a hanging futon with a wooden paddle.
“What’s he doing?” Mattie asked.
Ian didn’t seem to hear her. “That’s . . . that’s where we lived,” he said, his words almost obscured by a passing car.
“You did?”
“Your mum and me.”
Mattie scanned the building. “Where?”
He pointed toward the middle of the second level. “There. I moved in with her. She found the place first.”
“Can we go up?”
“No, luv. I reckon I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Ian felt his heartbeat quicken, a bead of sweat running down his chest. His thumb twisted and turned. His stomach ached. “Because that little room was our first home. And sometimes . . . sometimes there’s just no going back.”
“Oh.”
He wanted to say more, but the power of speech seemed to have abandoned him. And so he led Mattie forward, passing the building, treating it the way he might Kate’s tombstone. He remembered moving into her room, carrying his bags up the cement stairs. She’d met him halfway down and had kissed him, despite a Japanese taboo on such a public display of affection. They had entered her room, set down his bags, and made love as distant trains rumbled past.
Kate’s apartment had been about five paces across and ten paces down, but its limitations only served to bring them closer together. They had fallen in love in those cramped quarters, brought together by walls and want and a world that had somehow conspired to make their paths cross.
Ian increased his pace, leading Mattie toward a canal that ran along the base of a mountain. The canal was lined with blossoming trees, and he was reminded of walking alongside it, arm in arm with Kate. Instead of turning so that he and Mattie might retrace those steps, Ian kept on the street, soon veering down a paved walkway. In a few minutes the alley ended, leaving them at the bottom of a mountain, near a bamboo forest.
He pointed to a trail ahead. “This is it, Roo. This is where your mum and I went on our little walkabouts.”
“Let’s go.”
And so they went, following a trail that monks had hewn out of the mountain two thousand years earlier. The grove of bamboo soon disappeared, replaced by a combination of maple and evergreen trees. Rays of sunlight pierced the thick canopy above, revealing ferns, moss-covered logs, and a stream that the trail crossed over back and forth. Moisture hung in the air, as if they’d climbed into the belly of a storm-producing cloud.
Mattie followed her father, pausing suddenly when she saw how a shaft of light fell to illuminate a series of stone steps in front of her. Above the steps, the forest loomed, lush and almost luminous. “Wait, Daddy,” Mattie said, unzipping her backpack. “I have to draw this for Mommy.”
Ian looked around, nodding slowly, becoming aware of the beauty that surrounded him, a beauty that Kate would have pointed out, just as Mattie had done. “Good onya, Roo,” he answered, knowing that a part of his wife would always be in his daughter.
She looked at him, her brow furrowing. “Are you all right?”
“Let me see you draw.”
Sitting on the decaying trunk of a long-dead tree, Mattie opened her sketch pad. She used a gr
ay pencil to create the path, three different shades of green to fashion the forest, and a series of other colors to add the sunlight and the stream. Her skill as an artist was limited in that she accidentally exaggerated the contrasts of colors, as well as the features of her surroundings. A fern was too green. Tree trunks were too straight. But, still, a replication of the beauty in front of her began to emerge. And though the rays of her sunlight were too bold and bright, that boldness and brightness brought a sense of warmth to her drawing that might not otherwise have existed.
Ian watched his daughter’s small fingers guide and discard her colored pencils. He stepped closer to her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “That’s lovely,” he said, bending down to kiss the top of her head. “And she’s going to adore it.”
“You think?”
“Since when didn’t your mum love anything you did?”
“She’ll see it, won’t she?”
Ian glanced up through the treetops. “I don’t know, Roo. But your mum, she believed that she would. And she was closer . . . to something . . . to an end, to a beginning . . . than we are. So maybe she understood something that we don’t. And if she believed, well, then I reckon we should too.”
“I believe.”
“I know you do,” he said, sniffing, his eyes growing moist. “And I’m glad you do.”
Mattie finished her drawing, put her sketch pad in her backpack, and stood up. “Let’s go.”
The path led them upward. An hour passed before they reached the summit of the mountain, which offered an unobscured view of Kyoto. The city sat amid a lush valley, swaddled by mountains. Though much of modern-day Kyoto was uniform and ugly, other parts were dominated by ancient temples, shrines, and gardens. The Kamo River ran from north to south, spanned by a series of bridges that bore trains or cars. Even from a distance of several miles, the trains could be seen moving ahead, shimmering steel snakes that disappeared into tunnels or behind buildings.
