Shard of Glass | Page 7

look through it?"
My mom was silent for so long that I nearly fell asleep again.
"Memories," she said finally. "I asked Charles once, and that's what he said. 'There's nothing more powerful than a memory,' he said. But there you go, that's the Richardses for you. There's no such thing as beauty without power."
"You don't have any power and Dad thinks you're beautiful," I said.
My mom laughed. "But he had power over me. That was almost as good. Then I took all that away, and now I'm just a fly for him to crush. Flies aren't beautiful, Leah."
The next day Koichi apologized to me awkwardly over breakfast. I accepted it solemnly, and I never asked him what he had meant when he said they were my bones. I had looked at the memory and I knew--I just wished I didn't feel guilty every time I thought of it.
That weekend Sato-san took us with him to Naha, the major city in Okinawa. The inn needed certain supplies and Sato-san decided to take the two of us along as a treat. My mother begged me with her eyes not to go, but I ignored her and boarded the ferry with Koichi while Yuki stayed behind with his mother. At first talking to Koichi felt horribly awkward, but by the time the ferry landed we were friends again. We wandered around the arcaded shops while his father haggled over a crate of dried bonito and some Satsuma miso paste, which was the kind his wife liked the most. We passed a bank, where someone had left an American newspaper on a bench by the door. I picked it up and flipped through the headlines. There were stories of demonstrations and police violence, school segregation and??growing??American concerns about??Vietnam. I was a little shocked--it had been over a year since I had heard anything about my home country. Koichi wandered away from me while I scoured the rest of the paper. An item towards the bottom of the second-to-last page caught my attention:
Three weeks away from the election, popular Florida senatorial candidate Charles Richards (brother of staunch anti-integration Virginia senator Henry Richards) and his wife, Linda, have suffered the tragic death of their premature child, Mary. The infant died of respiratory failure last night following a series of unsuccessful surgeries. Richards says that he will be back on the campaign trail next week, but that he must "have some time to grieve for the loss of my child." Analysts wonder if his week-long leave of absence will give Dale Hearn, the Democratic contender, a chance to pick up more votes.
His wife, it said. My hands were shaking so badly I could hear the paper rattling. Why was I so surprised, anyway? He might have paid for our apartment and my school, but all the time he and my mom had been together, he had never offered to marry her. When I was younger, I had always wondered why. Now, I realized, I knew. His brother, the "staunch anti-integration Virginia senator," would hardly have approved, let alone the rest of his political family.
Should I tell my mother how enormously the man she loved had betrayed her?
And then, the strangest thought occurred to me: did she already know?
Could that possibly be why we left?
We stayed there for another year. Koichi never tried to kiss me again, even though there were some days when I wished he would, when I wished that we had never fallen into that stupid cave. One evening, I sat with my legs dangling over the harbor wall, thinking about how nice it would be just to live on this island forever. I liked it better than America--here I was foreign before I was black, and even before that I was part of the Satos' family. I pulled the shard from my pocket--it was too hot in the summer to lug around the book, even though my mom got angry when I left it at home.
There were many memories on this island, I had learned, some much older than others. Sometimes they noticed me, and sometimes they seemed oblivious--but I never told anyone what I learned from them. I felt like a voyeur whenever I looked through the glass; I was spying on the innermost thoughts of people long dead.
The shard's beveled surface drank in even today's bright noon sun, remaining opaque until I held it in front of my eyes. Down below me, on one of the algae-slicked rocks, I saw a woman, her belly swollen with pregnancy, laughing as her little son struggled to catch the crabs that were scuttling away from him.
"Don't run so fast," she said. "You might slip and hurt yourself."
Surprise nearly made me put down the glass. I knew that voice. When I looked closer, I recognized her face,