Shard of Glass | Page 4

I don't know why I took it out--I hadn't dared look
through the glass since that near-disaster on the highway. But curiosity
gripped me. Why did my uncle care so much about this glass? What
would it show me if I used it to look at him?
"They can't have left yet," my uncle was saying as I pulled out the glass,
hands shaking with every heartbeat. "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