Shard of Glass | Page 7

remembered, but he had always smelled of
red wine and expensive cologne. Sato-san smelled like saltwater and
sweat and crabs, but it was still somehow reassuring.
"What . . . happened? She okay?" I heard my mother ask in her broken
Japanese.
"I'm fine," I said in English.
They helped me to our small room on the second floor. My mom had
rolled out my futon already and started undressing me like a baby. I
would have objected to the treatment if I hadn't already been shivering
uncontrollably. I couldn't tell if it was from residual fear or actual
illness.
"Ma," I said that night as I shivered under extra covers. "What is that

glass? What do I see when I 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