Shard of Glass | Page 4

"I have to get back to Richmond for a fund-raiser, but I want you to stay here."
I held it up to my eye. My mom's face was drawn with panic, but she didn't tell me to stop. "Comb the whole damn country if you have to, but find them. And the glass."
Something seemed to shudder in the lamplight. A tall, thin white man wearing a bowler hat and a pea coat held the limp form of a little girl in his arms. My uncle was leaning against the side of a blue car, sweat running from his forehead into his eyes. He had hair, I realized after a moment, and his stomach didn't hang over the edge of his belt. This younger version of my uncle swayed unsteadily, but his face was a mask of contempt. The two men were yelling at each other, but I could only hear oddly warped snatches of sounds, as though they were at the other end of a long, twisted corridor. Suddenly, my uncle lurched from the car and shoved the other man backwards. He stumbled and dropped the girl. When she fell limply to the ground, I realized that she wasn't breathing. Rage flared in the other man's eyes and he leapt onto my uncle, wrestling him to the ground. Even drunk, my uncle was much stronger. He wrapped his hands around the other man's throat, his face contorted with fury.
I had the curious sensation of leaning closer, even though the glass was flush against my eye.
". . . money . . ." I heard the other man say, and then some more words that were too distant and garbled to make out. ". . . papers, you killed my daughter! Why . . . money . . . I swear . . ."
My uncle slammed the man's head viciously on the ground once, and stood up. "I'll give you . . ." He walked around the car while the man rolled on his side and retched in the grass on the edge of the road. The man gently wiped some of the vomit off the girl's arm, which was beginning to stiffen.
I glanced back at my uncle and bit back a gasp; he was holding a gun. The other man barely had time to bleat before the bullet caught him in the neck. Blood pulsed in a macabre spray as he convulsed. My uncle tossed the gun in the car and drove away. When I tried to turn and follow him, the scene dissolved into a thousand smaller images, so loud and clamoring that it hurt just to look at them. I put down the glass.
My uncle was looking into the alley. For a terrified second, I thought that he had found us, but he seemed to be staring out blindly, lost in thought.
"Um . . . Senator Richards? Are you okay?"
My uncle shuddered and began walking away. The two other men hurried to keep up with him.
My mother looked at me. "Where . . . do you want to go, Leah?"
I thought for a minute.
"Japan," I said, finally.
After of four months of grueling, terrifying overland travel, which nearly exhausted our modest supply of money, we took a ferry??to Osaka. On the way, my mother dared to purchase a small Japanese learner's dictionary, although she bought ones for German, Dutch, and Korean as well, just in case my father's family caught our trail. Once, on a crowded local train in northern China, I thoughtlessly opened my father's book. I was about to pull out the glass when my mom slapped my hand away. The look she gave me made me want to melt into the seat. It was hard to always remember who we were and what we were hiding from.
My mother and I had mastered some rudimentary Japanese phrases by the time we arrived, although we soon discovered that most of the locals were too busy staring at us to bother wading through our mangled Japanese. Mostly, we got by with hand signals. Once, I remember, young girls walking to the trains after school crowded around my mother, shyly asking if they could touch her hair. Even in that large city, we were anomalies, walking circus exhibits who couldn't even speak properly. My mother felt profoundly uncomfortable there, I think. We left after just a few weeks, traveling by ferry and local train to one of the most remote areas in Japan: the Kerama islands, just to the west of Okinawa's main island. The war had ravaged this place, you could see it in the faces of the women in hitched kimonos who hacked at the sugar cane or in the occasional mortar that washed up on the rocky beaches. My mom found a job as a housekeeper in the only