TWO
I AM FOUR, nearly five. I don’t remember time, how it stretches and moves, how moments are missed, how memories are distorted by the disarrangement of minutes, hours. But I remember hearing the voices. Strange words I don’t recognize, people that look nothing like me or anyone I have ever known, and the woman with the green eyes.
The woman that held me on her lap when we left the orphanage and the crying nurses who handed me over. The woman with the green eyes and the curly ginger hair gave me a paper swan, its wings pointed and sharp, and I held it in the car, through the airport and on the plane as we flew and flew over oceans, as the movies played on the screens in front of us, as the green-eyed woman sang to me so I would sleep. And I did. For days, for minutes, I don’t remember.
One minute I am in the village with the smell of fish hanging in the air and the clip of small boats knocking against the pier, the easy hum of music sounding beyond the orphanage walls, and the next I am with Mama and Papa, with all the people that look like them instead of me, and who call me “beautiful” and “precious.” They call me by my name, Sayo, they tell me they are my family now, but I don’t know what that means.
A year later two boys who looked exactly the same came to our home. Mama said they were my brothers, but their skin was brown and their hair was softer than mine, curly, thicker. How could they be my brothers? One of them, Mama called him Booker, cried the whole night. He cried the whole next day, too, and the other one, Carver, joined him, both of them keeping me from Barney and the fluffy waffles Mama made with lots of butter and thick maple syrup. But then they stopped crying when I gave them my waffles and held their hands while Barney sang on the television. Then my new brothers fell asleep next to me on the sofa, still holding my hands. They weren’t so bad when they slept. They didn’t cry at all then.
The next year a girl came to live with us. She looked even stranger than Booker and Carver and Mama called her Adriana and she sat in Papa’s lap because, I guessed, his eyes and hair were dark like hers, not light like Mama’s.
Months later another girl, my sister Alessandra, with lighter skin than Adriana’s and eyes that were small like mine. Then there were so many people in our house that Mama and Papa packed big boxes and hid away all my dollies and every one of Booker’s trucks even when he cried and cried for them. And then our new home got crowded with all the children, but every night before I said my prayers, after Mama would tuck me in and read me a story and tell me I was her sweet girl, Booker and Carver would come into my bed and hold my hand and then Adriana followed and Alessandra came too until Mama fussed, until she stopped fussing and we stayed with each other when the night came, when the house got quiet.
Until the memories of Shirakawa-go weren’t as strong. Until I didn’t smell the fish in the air or hear the murmur of music in the echo of the wind, until my only leftover memory was of that paper swan, and my little brothers who held my hands until they fell asleep and the little girls who looked nothing like me, nothing like anyone I knew, curled in ball at the foot of my bed and we slept, my siblings and I, we slept because that was where we felt safest.
Together.
“Sayo? You stopped reading.”
“Did I? I’m sorry, sweetie.”
I’d arrived this morning to find Rhea upset. Claire, her older sister was acting out. It happened now and again when she felt left out, when Aunt Carol spent too much time focusing on doctor’s appointments or how she’d cover the deductible on Rhea’s new meds. Uncle Clay hadn’t been around much lately, something I knew worried Carol, but still wouldn’t complain about. Claire, though, resented Rhea. It was understandable. She was ten and hadn’t yet grasped the concept that Rhea needed attention, sometimes all the attention.
“Okay, so,” I say, turning the page. “Where were we?”
“The Midnight Duel. Peeves is about to start screaming.”
A brief nod and I continue reading from the book, smiling when Rhea rests her head against my shoulder. We’d read Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone at least half a dozen times, but my little cousin never got bored with it, could likely repeat what I read verbatim.
“Draco’s a snot.”
“Duh. He’s supposed to be.”
She feels warm, like she is courting a fever and I tick off yet another note in my head to mention to Aunt Carol. Turning the page, I let myself travel with Rhea to Hogwarts, losing myself for a moment in the magic and mystery of those darkened, ancient halls and the threat that loomed at Harry’s every turn. From my peripheral I notice Rhea’s eyes are closed, but she mouths the words as I voice them, each syllable coming out with a reverence only cherished stories are treated to. She loves disappearing into her imagination as much as I do. It takes her away from the things that threaten her own narrow world.
After a moment, once Harry had met Fluffy, Rhea blinks, her eyes going glassy and I know her attention is no longer with me, that she feels distracted, irritated. I doubt it has anything to do with the fight she’d had with Claire. Those come often enough now that they rarely manage to upset her.
Without me uttering a sound Rhea glances up at me, points to the pencil and sketch pad on her bedside table. I know what she wants.
“I was thinking,” she says, nodding at the small doodles she’d already made in the book as I thumb through it to find an empty sheet. “Fairies have no colors. Not really.”
She does this often—lets her mind run around with random, unconnected thoughts, following her own internal timeline. I’d seen it with my grandfather when I was ten. He’d been diagnosed with lung cancer and after the doctor’s visit that had resulted in what was his death sentence, Gramps found it nearly impossible to keep his thoughts organized. He wanted to stroll down memory lane. He wanted to do things he’d never gotten around to. He wanted to read books, watch films that had once meant something to him. Rarely had he stayed focused enough to finish anything.
Rhea, I’d found, did similar things—attention distracted from whatever she was doing, pulled into an idea, an untethered opinion that then consumed her.
“What about Tinkerbell?”
“She wasn’t really like the cartoon. I’ve read Peter Pan.” Rhea took the pencil from my hand, scribbling without any concentration a form with wings but no flourish, nothing that made the fairy unique at all. It may have been a moth for all the detail she left out. “Even in my books and comics, the only colors the fairies have are on the dresses they wear, maybe in small splotches on their wings. And there are none that look like me.”
This was a travesty to her. She had voiced the desire to rectify many times before, on those low days when her mood is somber and her hope is almost nonexistent.
On those days, when her manner is particularly low, like it was now, Rhea stays quiet, still, and demands only one thing. “Paint me,” she says and though I can’t draw anything resembling a fairy, I can make Rhea smile with my artless, juvenile sketches. That’s what I do now, because the chemo is weighing her down, because she has endured so much in such a small lifetime that I would do anything she asks of me.
“Draw me happy.”
And I do, obliging, moving my pencil over the paper, arching loops, curling lines until wings have formed, until the flicker of light from her wand spreads over the page and coats the ground at her stick figure feet.
“That’s about as good as I can manage, kiddo.”
“It’s perfect.” And Rhea picks up the paper as though the compliment has not been a lie, as though the meager fairy I’d drawn for her is remarkable and not pathetic at all. “It’s perfect,” she says again and I catch myself trying to touch her, to hold her against my shoulder like I used to do when she was barely four and already sick. But eight, I knew, was far too old to let your big cousin hold you. And so I grab a new piece of paper and hand it and the pencil to Rhea.
“Draw me a hope.”
It was the same game we’d had for years. Draw me a dream that you dream for yourself I’d ask her and she would, imagining herself onto the page with no hospital beds, no tubes in her nose, no machines a reach away. She would draw herself healthy. She would draw herself strong. No matter how she drew herself, no matter what form those characters took, that Rhea was perfect.
Today she draws herself standing with her toes sunk into the white sand amidst the soft contours of a shoreline. Her skill is greater than mine, her talent raw and untrained but still immense. She draws an ocean laid out in front of that beach, and trees with fat coconuts between the fan branches On that beach she draws two figures, a man and a woman, hands clasped together, smiles wide. The woman has long hair flowing down her back, and in her free hand is a cane that she leans into as though the hunch of her frail back pains her.
“Who is that?” I ask, wondering who she wished she was today.
“It’s me. When I’m old. I’m so old that I need a cane.”
“And who is that with you? The faceless man?”
“My husband, but he’s very old too. We’re old together on that beach.” She pauses, smiling to herself about something she doesn’t share. “We’re retired.”
The scene makes her happy, and she focuses on adding a bird in the sky and fat, thick clouds. “Your hair is beautiful.” I point to the long, wavy hair down the woman’s back and the accented tendrils that Rhea lines over and over again.
“It’s gray.” She sits closer to the paper, concentrating on a second palm tree, making its limbs longer. “That… that’s the biggest dream I have,” she admits, now coloring in the space of white that makes up the old woman’s hair.
“To be on a beach?”
“No,” she says forgetting the drawing for a moment to stare at me, that mild grin completely vacant now. “To be gray-headed, Sayo. To… to be an old lady.”
I am not prepared for that revelation or how desperate I am to keep the tears from spilling from my eyes. I blink them away, not wanting Rhea to notice. She doesn’t want pity. She doesn’t want anyone upset because she is sick—she’s told me at least a dozen times. So again, I deflect.
“Maybe you should try dyeing you hair purple.” I tug on my pink hair, waving it a little. “Then we really would match.”
For a long time, Rhea watches me, eyes moving, scrutinizing my features, then dropping her gaze back down to the strands between my fingers.
“No,” she says, exhaling before she returns to the drawing. “I’d rather have gray hair.”
And because she’s not watching, I close my eyes because that’s what I want too—Rhea very old and very gray. I close my eyes and pray, right then, that God would grant her the time for her skin to wrinkle, to allow time to leave its traces in her forehead, for gravity to drag down breasts that had yet to even develop. I wanted that so desperately for her.
“Do you think it’s beautiful?” she asks and I’m not sure if she means the drawing.
“Yes, sweetie, it’s the most beautiful dream.”
And it is. Dreams are that way when they are heartfelt. When the significance behind them goes deeper than hope, further than a wish. Those are the dreams of the faithful. The ones who haven’t completely given up. Rhea dreams beautifully. She hopes fiercely and that night when I went to bed, it was that old lady I tried to see in my head. That gray haired woman and the faceless man who loved her. More than anything, I wanted that dream to come true.