Shard of Glass | Page 8

too, although terror had done much to hide her natural beauty. I began to push forward, struggling through the strange sand that separated us. It was easier this time than it had been in the cave, but I didn't stop to wonder why. I pushed until it seemed I was sitting next to her, even though I was still vaguely aware of my body perched on the wall.
She turned to me. "Hello," she said. "I've never had someone visit before."
Somehow I had expected more venom. "You don't recognize me?" I asked.
She looked at me more closely and then shook her head. "No, should I?"
Of course she didn't recognize me, I realized. This was a different memory.
"Do you know how you're going to die?" I asked.
She looked sad. "I'm dead, then? I thought I might be, but it's so happy here. . . ." She looked away. "My son," she said quietly, "is he . . . also. . ."
I put a phantom hand over hers and felt a jolt. "Not here," I said, "not for you."
She turned to smile at me, but as she did so her image wavered and I felt a sickening lurch. Suddenly, I was back in the sand again, but I had no orientation--where was that woman's memory? Where was the glass? I felt as though the sand was sucking me in one direction, and so I struggled the other way. Then, before me, I saw my uncle's thinning brown hair and wide-set brown eyes, indistinct and wavering like a television getting a bad signal. He smiled.
"What are you doing here, Leah?" he asked. His words sounded mangled and slurred, as though they had been repeated in a game of Telephone. "Have you mastered the glass already, then? Or are you just lost and unlucky?"
"Leave us alone!" I said in Japanese.
Then I realized my mistake.
Koichi pulled me off the ledge and I skinned my elbow on the road. I lay blinking uncomprehendingly at the sky for a few moments before I realized that I had escaped.
"Leah," Koichi said, kneeling beside me, "are you all right? What were you doing?"
"Talking to a memory," I said.
I didn't tell my mother. For months afterwards, I tried to convince myself that he wouldn't have recognized the Japanese, that there was no way I could have destroyed our perfect haven with a stupid slip of the tongue.
I should have known better.
They found us five months later, on a clear evening in what passed for autumn here. Koichi came running into the kitchen where I was helping his mother make dinner.
"Foreigners," he said, gasping, "they came in on the ferry. Said they were looking for a little black girl and her mother."
I dropped the knife I was using to gut a fish.
"What did you tell them, Koichi?" his mother asked.
"I told them to look on the other side of the island," he said. "They might just go away, right?"
Sato-san and I exchanged a glance. We both knew what this meant. "We have to leave, Koichi," I said. "Tonight we hide, and then when it's safe, we have to take the ferry."
My mother packed our meager belongings silently. She was ready for this, I realized as I watched her. I had relaxed and fooled myself into believing that we could live here forever, but wariness had never entirely left her. She had never forgotten we were fugitives. I said goodbye to the Sato-sans and Yuki, who cried even though we told him that we were only going on a short trip.
"Where are you going to hide?" Koichi asked, just before we left.
"The cave. The cave with my bones."
He looked down, embarrassed. "Before . . . I didn't mean that," he said softly.
"Yes, you did," I said.
Then I kissed him.
My mother and I huddled in the cave of bones that night, praying that my uncle's men would take the morning ferry back when they realized we weren't there. It was a chilly night, and my mother was so quiet that sometimes I thought the bones made for better company.
"When did he get married?" I asked, breaking hours of sleepless silence.
She didn't ask me who I meant. "Just after we left," she said. "Henry picked her. She's some kind of an heiress."
"Is that why we disappeared?" I asked.
"No." And then, more quietly, "Maybe that was part of it."
"Do you know whose bones these are?" I asked, minutes later.
My mother shook her head.
"That man," I said, pointing to the shapeless huddle of bones beside the entrance, "killed his whole family, and then himself. They were afraid of being captured alive by the Americans, and so they killed themselves."
"We won't get captured alive," my mother said.
Years passed, and countries turned into a blur: Korea, Thailand, Ceylon, Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia. Our pursuers started getting more persistent, deadlier.