If You Follow Me (18 page)

After a year, my mom seemed sad but also resigned, already moving toward acceptance at a clip that made me feel scared and left behind. When my dad was alive, she often served as our go-between, telling the two of us what to say to each other, when we needed to say thank you or apologize for something. “Your dad planted those sunflowers for you,” she told me after I brought home a bad Van Gogh imitation from a college painting class and he planted a whole bed of sunflowers that grew tall against our apartment's back wall. “He's so proud of you. He's terrible at expressing his feelings, but he loves you so much. You need to know that.” With him gone, we were unsure what to talk about. Where there had always been a triangle, symmetrical and balanced, now there was just a line. She kept referring to him as “my husband,” which seemed strange and proprietary, like she was staking her personal claim. But of course he had been her husband. That's what she had lost, just as I had lost my father. We'd been a family once, but now that he was dead we couldn't share him anymore. We had each lost something very different, and we had no idea how to comfort each other.

My mom and I were like a new couple, awkward and shy, and so we did what all new couples do: We went on dates, seeking out distractions. We went to the museum and the movies and the mall, to the park and the aquarium. We were tourists in our own city. It
was almost fun. On my last day at home, we went to a miniature golf range, which was my idea. Everything that we did felt inappropriate and weird, so I figured we should take it to the limit. I thought that neither of us wanted to upset the delicate balance we were just starting to find, so I was confused that evening when she drove into the parking lot of a white building fronted with pillars and a mortuary sign.

“Where are we?” I asked, remembering the place in the vague way of a dream.

“We're here to pick up your father's ashes,” she said.

My father's suicide note made no mention of what he wanted us to do with his remains. By choosing to jump off the bridge, he had probably hoped to drift out to sea, to spare us a mess. But a coast guard witnessed his fall and brought his body in, and later that same evening my mom had to identify him by herself while I caught a red eye from New York. By the time I got home, she had made the necessary decisions without me. He was to be cremated, his ashes divided in half, so that part of him could be interred in his parents' plot, the other part buried in a cemetery close to the city where she could visit and bring flowers. She delayed the cremation until I got home, so that I could see him one last time. She also asked them to reserve a baggie of ashes for us to scatter on the one-year anniversary of his death, although this was the first I'd heard of it.

“I really don't want to,” I said.

“Please,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “We need to say good-bye.”

As we entered the mortuary, I remembered being there a year before. In my memory the day stood out like a slide show, flashes of vivid illumination juxtaposed against deep pockets of darkness. I remembered being shown down the narrow hallway and into a small room where I was left alone with him. My father was the only
thing in that room—his body laid out on a gurney—and it seemed impossible to take it all in at once. I couldn't bring myself to look at his face, so I started with his feet. I stared at his black dress socks, his feet pointing stiffly upward, and I wondered why they'd bothered dressing him in socks but not shoes. I wondered if he hit the water feet first, if the bones of his feet were shattered, the skin bruised. Even his feet weren't safe. As I walked around the gurney, I gave the body—his body—a wide berth, as if it were an artifact on display at a museum behind a security wire. But there was no security wire to trip, no glass case, nothing separating me from the deceptive stillness of his death, deceptive because he was already settling, sinking into it, I could tell. His skin looked waxy and porous like citrus rind, his lips thin and pale, parted slightly over his front teeth, which seemed translucent and dry. Of course they were dry. He wasn't salivating. He was a husk. I wondered if the same person who'd applied the pancake makeup to his face had also massaged the emotion out of it. I imagined they wouldn't want him to look pained, or worse—relieved. But this neutrality was the deadest thing about him. I had known him exuberant and grim, ecstatic and enraged, and desperately sad, but never blank. He didn't live there anymore.

Still, I wanted to touch him. I knew that this was the last time I'd be able to. I wanted to make a big messy display of it, to fling myself down on the gurney beside him, wrap my arms around him, pepper his face with kisses, and whisper into his ear that I loved him, my daddy, my daddy. But I knew that it was too late for these words I should have spoken much sooner, much more freely, and much more often. No one would hear them but me, and I didn't want to perform for myself. I didn't want to perform at all. And I was scared to touch him. I couldn't bring myself to feel his waxy skin. But I had to touch him. It was the last time I'd be able to. I finally decided that I would touch his hair. His poor, butchered hair. It was so short.
His scalp showed pink through the stubble. But he didn't look like a marine. He didn't look tough or aggressive. He looked like he'd been sick.

Standing in the mortuary a year later, a place I thought I'd never have to return to, I suddenly heard my mother wail. “More? I don't understand! How could you have made this mistake? How can there be more?”

The woman behind the front reception desk was holding out a box. She was trying to get my mother to take it, and my mother was shaking her head and crying as the woman insisted that my mom's instructions had been followed to the letter. She had them written down on a sheet of paper my mom had signed, clearly indicating that the ashes were to be divided into thirds, with a portion reserved for scattering. This was the final third. The receptionist offered to dispose of this last box for us, if we signed a release, and my mom sobbed, “No! You can't just throw him away!”

“It's not her fault, Mom,” I said, and my mom turned to look at me like I was betraying her by taking the receptionist's side. I was reminded of the time that we went to an appointment with a grief counselor, just a couple of days after the memorial ser vice, and on the way out we came upon a cop ticketing my mom's car. She started to cry then too, explaining to the officer—a young guy on a bicycle with a leather fanny pack—exactly where we'd been and why, until he ended up not only canceling the ticket, but also giving her a big hug. In the car afterward, when I asked why she had to tell a perfect stranger what had happened, she said, “Should I be ashamed? Is it my fault?” Unlike my father and me, my mom has never had any trouble showing her emotions. Nothing used to scare me more than seeing her cry.

Because someone had to, I reached out and took the box, which was terribly heavy, and not nearly heavy enough for what it contained: a third of my six foot two, two-hundred-pound father's
remains. I was afraid of dropping it. I wanted to drop it. The receptionist mouthed, “Thank you,” looking at my weeping mother like she was insane, and I wanted to throw it at her smug face. Instead, I shifted it to the crook of my arm and led my mom outside. We were almost to our car when the receptionist caught up with us, a plastic baggie dangling from her fingertips.

“You asked for this,” she reminded us, her tone defensive. “For scattering.”

“More,” my mom cried again. “There's always more.”

And whose fault is that
? I thought.

That evening, my mom and I buried the box in the backyard, which was in its late summer glory, the flower beds full of dahlias that looked like exploding red and purple firecrackers, the sunflowers that my father allegedly planted for me growing tall, their heads angling toward the apartment windows as if they were trying to see inside. As we lowered it into the ground and covered it with dirt, I felt like we were trying to dispose of evidence. I wondered if any of our neighbors were looking down on us. My mom said a prayer, asking for him to find peace and for us to find the strength to forgive him and ourselves for not having been able to save him. Then she looked at me, waiting for me to add something.

“Well,” I said, “I guess that's it.”

But of course that's not it. There is always more. I'd forgotten all about the baggie until now, holding it in my hand, such a filmy, flimsy divider separating me from what remains of him. From his remains.

 

“Honey? Is something wrong?” My mom's voice is groggy, thick with sleep. I didn't calculate the time difference before calling. I don't apologize for waking her up.

“What did you just send me?” As usual, the international connec
tion is terrible, and I hear a click after I speak, followed by the echo of my own question.

“You keep complaining about how cold it is in Japan,” she says. “I was cleaning out the apartment and I found Dad's old jacket, the suede one you always like to wear when you come home, so I decided to send it to you, with a few other things of his that I thought you might like to have.”

“Like his ashes?” I say.
Like his ashes!

“Only half of them,” she says. “I scattered most of them in the park, in front of the Conservatory of Flowers, where we used to go for picnics when you were a little girl. It helped me to say good-bye. I thought it might help you to do the same.”

“I've said good-bye!” I explode. “I'm not going to scatter his ashes in Japan. This isn't my home.”

“It's where you are,” she says.

“Is this your way of getting even with me?” I hold the phone at a distance to avoid the echo. But when I return the receiver to my ear, she echoes the question instead.

“Getting even with you? What do you mean?”

“Because I left and you can't.”

“Sweetheart,” she says, “I am not mad at you for leaving. I want you to be happy. I want you to live your life as fully as possible. And I'm okay. This is my home. I don't want to leave. I do want to move on with my life though, and that means forgiving him, and forgiving myself for not having been able to save him.” She pauses, waits for me to speak, but I don't. I can't. She sounds wide-awake now, resolute and maternal. She wants to be my mom. She wants me to let her. “Scattering the ashes helped me,” she says.

“Stop saying that word!”

“What word?”

“Scatter,” I say.
Scatterscatterscatter
. It sounds like something to do
with birdseed. Again I think of Hansel and Gretel, leaving crumbs to mark their trail out of the forest, a trail that vanished long before they could find their way home. After hanging up the phone I flip open my dad's old dictionary.

 

scatter:
(
VB
.) 1. to fling away heedlessly 2. to separate and go in various directions 3. to fall irregularly or at random 4. to cause to vanish.

 

All definitions apply.

I put everything back in the box, bring the box into the storage area behind the kitchen, and shelve it among identical boxes of things belonging to people I've never met, former inhabitants of this house, people who are probably dead themselves by now, survived only by the junk they left behind.

 

Later that day, when I return to the dentist to have my tooth filled, he barely examines my mouth before saying, “Your gum still mending. I think you mend slowly.”

“I think you're right,” I say.

“How is the weather today?” he inquires.

“The weather?” There is no window in his office. Maybe he has no idea what it's like outside. “It's sunny,” I say.

“Sunny,” he echoes. “It is sunny today. Tomorrow it will be sunny again.” He removes his rubber gloves and drops them into a recycling bin, but he doesn't take off his goggles or face mask. I have no idea what he looks like, couldn't pick him out of a lineup. “I like sunny weather,” he says. “Sorry my English is so bad.”

“Your English is fine,” I say, feeling the thump of my pulse. “You speak English very well.”

“I am going to New York soon,” he says. “With my brother, Yuji.”

“Keiko's husband?” I ask, and he nods. “Are you all going to New York?”

“You all?” he repeats.

“Keiko told me that she was going too.”

“Ah,” he says. “Well, Keiko wanted to go. Unfortunately, I think it's not possible because of children. They are difficult boys. They need much supervision. Yuji will be too busy…So he invited me. Now I had better prepare for my trip,
ne
? My English is so bad. I'm afraid no one could understand me!” I nod, distracted, wondering if Keiko knows that she has been replaced on this trip, which she was so looking forward to. “You may go now,” he says, clicking off the light and elevating the chair beneath me.

“But my tooth,” I say, probing the hole with my tongue. “You didn't do anything. It's still empty.”

“If you are free, please return
mo ichi do
tomorrow,” he says. “Maybe we could practice asking the way.”

“Asking the way?” I repeat.

“You know,” he says, “Like when you are lost, and you need help to find your path. I think this happens so often in a new country.”

 

Over dinner at 8-ban ramen, I let Carolyn in on my suspicion that the dentist is delaying filling my tooth because he wants free English conversation. “Not free,” she points out. “You're actually paying him.” I admit that I haven't been billed for any of his ser vices. “I guess it's a fair trade,” she says. “Dental work for
eikaiwa.
”

“Oh my God,” I say. “I just want him to fill my tooth!”

“Then you'd better make that clear,” she says, “if you don't want to spend the rest of the year sitting in a dentist's chair.”