Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail (4 page)

One night only, for sale at cost, everything you’ve ever lost!

On the first table stood a stuffed horse I’d won in a coloring contest, long before I heard the word
expatriate
, long before I knew the Japanese slang for
foreigner
was
outsider.
I’d named the horse after its color: Gravel. Days later, Gravel fell from the back of my mother’s bike. No more than three years old, I’d made her retrace the route at least ten times. How could something just disappear?

The pony’s price tag said, “¥350, OBO.” I plunked a bill on the table and looked around. No one was there to make change, and that was fine by me. I scooped up Gravel and brought him to my face. His mushy little body smelled of salt and oil. The blue-gray fur on his back was
matted where he must have landed on the winter road. I pressed him to my cheek.

I picked up object after object: pens of blue, black, red, one of lavender, tops chewed. Hair ties, single socks. A pile of teeth like corn kernels. I dropped coins as I moved, a small one for the 110-speed camera I’d dropped from a roller coaster, a larger one for the gold locket, big enough to derail a train, a gift from my high school boyfriend. My arms and pockets were loaded, my waistband holding in a few of the bigger items, the Nintendo console I’d thought stolen, a pink leather boot whose mate still sat in my closet in the infested apartment. I would leave it there to serve as a beetle dwelling, or grave. That boot was the first thing from him I’d lost.

The last table held just one thing, a fist-sized, crimson lump that shivered and thrashed like a fish out of water. I stared until it became a red blur. No price tag. My wallet was empty anyway. I turned away, my arms full and an empty feeling in my chest, a feeling like three shells and a realization—no ball, there never was a ball—and listened for a voice, any voice, to bring me back.

SINCE ROOEY DIED, I’M NO LONGER MYSELF.
Foods I’ve hated my entire life, I crave. Different things are funny. I’ve stopped wearing a bra. I bet they’re thinking about firing me here at work, but they must feel bad, my brother so recently dead and all. Plus, I’m cheap labor, fresh out of college. And let’s face it, the
Sweetwater Weekly
doesn’t have the most demanding readership or publishing standards.

You can tell they’re trying to be sensitive: along with the police blotter and wedding announcements, I’d covered obituaries; afterward they gave the obituaries to Ryan the intern so I wouldn’t have to think about death
all day. I do anyway. Bloody, violent death, wakes and funerals and the way a person’s eyes look right before they die, how when you try to close them they don’t stay closed like in the movies—they pop back open.

I’ve started adding things to the blotter, things that never happened but that he’d find funny, and the chimp wedding announcement I slipped in—photo included— didn’t get caught until right before press.

A few days ago I tried logging into Rooey’s email and got the password on the first guess. (It was “Miyazaki,” his favorite animator. Rooey was obsessed with Japan. When we tagged our suitcases for Hawaii, he’d spelled his name “Rui.” He’d even figured how to write his name in Japanese using the characters for “drifting” and “majesty.”) Now I check his email all the time. I’ve just logged in when Myra, the assistant editor, comes by my cubicle. She’s wearing the same man’s button-down shirt as always.

“Hi, hon.” Even when she smiles she keeps her lips pressed tightly together. I’ve never seen her teeth.

“Hi.”

She opens her mouth and closes it like she’s changed her mind about something. “Maxine, how are you
doing?”

“Oh, you know. It’s good to keep busy with real challenging tasks at work, like typing up wedding announcements.”

She sighs and looks at me pityingly. “I wanted to talk to you about that.”

I stare at the screen.

She lowers her voice. “I got your point with the
monkey thing, OK? I thought it would be best to lighten your workload, but obviously that’s not working. So, Maxine, how about a cover story?”

“Great.” I empty Rooey’s spam folder. The screen looks clean and expectant.

“Really?”

“Sure.” My phone chimes, announcing the arrival of a text message.

She nods harder than necessary and says, “Well, great then! Why don’t you think it over this week and we can chat about it on Friday? I’m sure you’re full of ideas. Sound good?”

“Sounds great, thank you,” I say, because that’s what the old Maxine would’ve said. But now I guess I’ve just lost interest.

Here’s a story: two people are in trouble and the wrong one dies. There’s been a cosmic mix-up, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, and they all live sadly ever after. The end.

I snap open my phone and read Felix’s message. It says: “Uijoljoh pg zpv.”

He’s used this code before. The trick is that each letter is really the one before it. It says, “Thinking of you.”

I write back “V 3” for “U 2,” close the phone, and go back to my email.

I WALK TO FELIX’S AFTER WORK.
He rents a garden apartment, which means he lives half-underground and there’s not much light, but it’s cheap. When we save
enough, we’re supposed to get a place together, somewhere up high.

Back before Rooey started high school, our family lived near here, across from the tracks on Burlington in a house with an aboveground pool and a pop-up camper that never moved from the backyard. Mom said she and Dad had used it all the time and that I’d taken a few trips in it too, but I don’t remember them, and by the time Rooey came along, Dad was gone and I didn’t remember him, either.

There was a small door we could use to squeeze into the camper even when it wasn’t popped up, and we’d take turns locking one another inside. The object was to see how long we could stay in before getting scared and knocking to come out. We called the game Coffin. It was pitch-black inside the camper, and the air was stuffy and smelled of hot wool.

I was five years older and generally humane, but once—I think I was mad because Mom had let Rooey get away with something, again—I didn’t let him out when he gave the triple-knock. He tried again. There was a moment of silence that I took to be him getting pissed, and I laughed.

Then he started pounding and, after a few seconds, screaming. I fumbled with the lock while the door shuddered.
“LEEEET MEEEE OOUUUUT
!”

“Hang on!”

When the door finally swung open, my little brother fell out onto his side, his face white save for two spots of color on his cheeks. He stared at me in disbelief, his brown eyes watery.

When he stood and came at me, I didn’t fight back. I let him flail his fists and scream himself hoarse. Eventually we played something else. He didn’t tell Mom—he never did. That was the last time we played Coffin.

There are six stairs leading down to Felix’s door. When I get to the bottom, I’m always aware of how much of me is below ground. It’s like a very wide grave, this apartment. Recently I’ve had to fight the urge to turn around and go back up.

Felix is cooking with his back to the door and doesn’t hear me come in. He’s got his khakis on from work and no shirt. He has what he calls a “techie tan,” which means he is white like recycled paper. He works at an Internet dating company, fixing the employees’ computers. He finds it exciting. He finds almost anything exciting. It’s probably why I like him.

I watch his papery back at the stove and think, he is biodegradable. Then I think that his body mirrors the apartment, the bottom buried and the top exposed to light.

He turns and sees me and sings, “Ma-a-a-axine! You don’t have to put on the red light!” He takes my face in his hands and kisses me loudly.

We have pesto for dinner, and he talks about how he managed to solve three people’s problems without even showing up at their cubicles.

“If people would just
troubleshoot
, it would save so much time. A simple logical process, that’s all it takes!”

Since Rooey died, Felix has become even more enthusiastic, maybe to make up for my silences.

I tell him about the cover story. He wants to celebrate
so we get in bed and drink a bottle of champagne under the covers.

“I’m feeling better.”

“Yeah?”

“About Rooey.”

“Good!”

“I think I’m getting over it. I think I’m done crying.”

“Wow! Well. You know. Take your time. There’s no time limit.” He looks at me solemnly and I notice his pores. When did they get so big? On his nightstand, turned upside down, is a book:
When a Loved One Grieves.

“Have you thought any more about trying therapy?” he asks.

“Mm. Not my thing.”

“I know you believe that, but how can you know if you don’t try?”

“I’d rather not talk about this stuff right now.” I slip my hand in his boxers. I could care less about sex with Felix lately and now is no different, but at least it will shut him up.

I wonder how he’ll react if I tell him to fuck me, so I whisper it—“I want you to fuck me”—and he blushes; we’ve never used this word before, and I realize he doesn’t necessarily know how it differs from what we usually do, what he always refers to as “making love.” But he gives it a shot. He gets on top of me, sticks it in, and buries his face in my neck, biting me, I think, though I can’t be sure.

“Harder,” I tell him, squirming a bit, and he tries to pin my arms over my head while holding himself up with one hand, but he loses balance and folds down on top of me.

His face finds my armpit for a second and his nose wrinkles up.

I sniff under my arm. “Whew. Kind of manly, I know.”

“No big deal.”

“I’ve been using Rooey’s deodorant.”

“Oh.” He pauses, traces my belly button with his middle finger. “Why?”

“Works better. And it doesn’t smell like flowers.”

“What’s wrong with flowers?”

I shrug. “They’re so
girly.”

We fall asleep. I dream I’m alone, bobbing in a black sea. I don’t know which way to swim, and the bottom’s miles below. A fin appears in the distance. I swim away from it, but it catches up, and as it gets closer I see it’s Rooey, and I see in his eyes that he hates me. I watch helplessly as he speeds closer, teeth and gums bared, and when he finally reaches me, there’s a flare of heat in my neck, and afterward a sensation like dissolving. Only when I give in, do I wake up. That giving in is a release so powerful I find myself sitting up in bed, heaving. That giving in is the saddest feeling in the world.

IT’S BEEN THREE MONTHS AND THREE DAYS.
Mom hasn’t touched up her strawberry blonde dye job since the attack, and the dark roots are like a measuring stick: her grief is lengthening. She sleeps all morning and spends her afternoons shopping and preparing elaborate dinners. She cooks things Rooey liked—curry pork, eggplant Parmesan. I’ve come to find comfort in this, and for once
in my life, I eat everything on my plate. Mom is the opposite. Once, after filling our plates with salmon ragout, she sat down and stared at the table’s empty seats, two of them now, as if she were expecting guests who were running late. I had no words to offer up; I shoveled down the over-salted food and sat there as long as I could stand it, then stood and cleared her untouched plate.

While Rooey looked just like Dad, I resemble no one. My face is a little of this, little of that, like a meal thrown together last-minute. When we ran into old friends of my parents’, they would make a fuss over Rooey. “A carbon copy of Dean,” Mom would say, mussing my brother’s blonde, moppy curls. Then they’d turn to me and joke about the milkman.

School was my redemption. In high school I was a member of the National Honor Society, vice-president of the Ecology Club, and a varsity swimmer. When Rooey and Mom came to my swim meets, they’d always sit in the same place, at the top of the bleachers, laughing and eating Reese’s Pieces. Tearing through the water on the final leg of a race, I would think of them watching me and swim harder, muscles screaming, knowing that if I won, I would for a moment be the focus; I would fill that tiny space between them.

At the wake, I talked about taking Rooey for driving practice last Christmas. For a kid who liked cars so much, he was a horrible driver. He made a joke out of it. Before leaving the house, he’d preface everything with, “Allah willing.” It was an expression he picked up from a movie. “When we come back from driving, Allah willing,
let’s get Mom to take us to Culver’s.” “Allah willing, I’m gonna parallel-park this baby,
hard
.” It was a testament to Rooey’s good nature that he was able to mock himself, I said; even more than that, though, he never seemed to get discouraged. He had confidence in life; he never whined. The part about “Allah willing” got a laugh.

What I didn’t talk about was how mad I’d been when Mom told me I’d have to give Rooey my car when I moved out. The Nissan had been a hand-me-down from my grandparents, and I’d had it less than a year. I never had a car when I was his age, I argued. It wasn’t
fair
.

But Rooey solved the problem—he didn’t want my car. He wanted an old Thunderbird, and he got a job helping Roger, a Buddhist hippie guy who lived down the block, in his metalwork shop to earn the money for it. He was a hard kid to resent, and for that, I have to admit, I resented him even more.

ROOEY’S DOOR HAS BEEN CLOSED
since I got back from Hawaii. Mom’s not ready to open it yet. “It’s too much of him at once,” she told me, crying at the mere mention of his name. But me, I can’t get enough. I’ve been coming in here every night. I lie in bed and wait until the sleeping pills I stole from Mom kick in, then creep over the cracked parquet to his room, my feet instinctively avoiding the creaky spots that, when we were little, would give us away as we snuck into the kitchen for a handful of Reese’s Pieces from the green jar.

The room is stuffy and smells vaguely of peanut butter.
When he was in grade school, Rooey insisted on painting his walls to look like outer space; I painted Jupiter and Neptune, and Rooey did the rest, except Earth, which Mom did, and after the paint dried Rooey etched our tiny trio in ballpoint pen where he approximated Indiana to be. There’s a tiny chip of paint missing where my head once was.