Shard of Glass | Page 9

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. I bought a gun on the Ceylon black market and
kept it in my pocket next to the book. I was careful when I looked
through the glass now, and eventually I realized that I could change the
way I waded through the sand. I discovered that if I moved silently
enough, I could spy on my uncle, and sometimes my father, as they
looked though their own glass. Whatever they were using, it was far
inferior to mine--most memories stayed hidden from them, and they
could not find me very easily. We stayed a half step ahead of them--as
soon as I learned that they had found us, we would move. We never
stayed anywhere longer than six months, though, and for that I was
grateful. I missed our island and Koichi so much sometimes--I didn't
want to come to love any other place that much and then lose it in
another afternoon. My mother grew old on those trips; gray hair began
to pepper the brown, and worry lines seemed as though they had been
etched into her face with a chisel.
And then, when we were walking through a crowded market in New
Delhi, they shot my mother. It hit her in the shoulder, and she went

down amid sudden pandemonium. It was a stupid place to shoot us--I
hauled her up and dragged her out of the plaza, hiding within the
milling crowd. I didn't dare take her to a hospital in the city--my uncle's
men would surely be watching every one. So I bound her shoulder as
best I could and we took the next train out of the country. We traveled
all night and part of the next day until we crossed the border to Nepal.
There, I felt safe enough to take her to a hospital. The bullet had
apparently passed through cleanly, but the doctor gave us some
penicillin to ward off infection. We found a small room in a back alley
tenement in Katmandu. She slept there for practically three days
straight while I went out to find work. I was eventually hired as a
dishwasher in the kitchens of one of the western hotels. It paid barely
enough for the rent, but my mother was too weak to get a job herself.
Sometimes I wonder why I didn't notice how tired she seemed, how
just getting out of bed in the morning was becoming a daily struggle for
her. Why did I just assume it was exhaustion, and not something more
serious? But my mother was a woman in her forties who had spent the
last five years in nearly constant terror. The grueling pace of our lives
would exhaust anyone, I thought.
I began to wear a plain orange sari and cover my hair--my lips and nose
were a little large, but my skin color was perfect, and in the right
clothes I looked like a local. No one would associate my schoolgirl
picture with the Nepalese kitchen worker I had become.
And then one day, a few months after we arrived, I saw my father. I
was in the market, haggling over a fish for dinner (the one thing I could
convince my mother to eat, these days), when I heard his voice.
"She should be about this tall," he said, "brown skin. Living with her
mother. Their names are Leah and Carol."
The man he was talking to snorted. "You're just looking for a teenage
girl living with her mother. Oh, well, there's only one of those in this
city. But perhaps you can buy this vase--very cheap, only thirty
American dollars and I'll see what I can do."

I snorted--the vase vendor was robbing my father blind. I looked at him
surreptitiously from under my scarf.