How High We Go in the Dark(78)

Upstairs, I found Tamami’s orange tabby cat, Chibi, curled on top of my suitcase and an old-model VR visor with two data chips. The closet drawers were still filled with Baba’s belongings. I had to transfer a small pile to a chair to make room. Nearly everything was as I remembered it—a decade-old calendar of London that a friend had given Baba still tacked to the wall, a stack of travel brochures on the dresser for all the cities she’d dreamed of visiting. A bright pink lopsided umbrella for her neighborhood strolls. Everything as it was except for the menagerie of pill bottles on the end table. At the bottom of a drawer, I found a plastic bag containing a collection of paper envelopes no larger than a thumbnail, each containing a few grains of rice. Magic rice, I used to think when Baba explained that they were blessed by a priest and had the power to heal, to make one feel whole with the spirit of God. No one in the family really bought into the religion Baba had grown up with, but Tamami and I would sometimes sneak a grain or two. We thought it might give us superpowers, the ability to become invisible when we were in trouble. The night before I left for America, I remember tiptoeing into Baba’s room and taking one last grain, imagining it growing inside me, a new me that would shed the shell of all I had been.

“Sometimes I feel like I see her in here. Not to creep you out or anything,” Tamami said, standing in the doorway. “You should put that on at some point.” She pointed to the visor. “It’s not all guilt trip and grave friends propaganda.”

“I can still smell Baba,” I said. I pictured her pumping her arms and legs in the air like she was on an exercise bike before getting out of bed. I remembered her telling us magical stories about how she had a recurring dream of being a baby and someone raising her tiny body into a dark sky and letting her float away into space. Or how she had to crawl through thousands of feet and legs in the dark like an ever-shifting maze. Baba, for as long as anybody could remember, was afraid of the dark and always kept a flashlight next to her bed in case she needed to go to the bathroom.

Tamami sat cross-legged on the bed, coaxed Chibi onto her lap.

“Look, I’m not mad anymore. I get why you left. But you’ll never know how tough it got here. Mom thought I might leave, too, and basically put me on lockdown. If I so much as frowned, she’d scream at me and call me ungrateful. Baba getting sick pushed her over the edge. I barely left the house.”

“You could have come to see me,” I said.

“Could I have, though? Anyway, I’m not like you, Rina.”

I wondered what she really meant by that. I wanted her to be straight with me: Not adventurous? Not a fuckup? Not a traitor?

“And even if I wanted to,” Tamami continued. She told me that the tranquilizers weren’t solely so Baba could sleep or have a break from the pain. Our grandmother had become violent in her final months—a glass thrown at Chibi, records shattered on the floor, a bite out of my father’s hand so hard he’d needed stitches, too many cruel things that became harder to brush off as the ravings of a sick woman.

I held Tamami’s hands and noticed that there wasn’t a single rice packet among all the pill bottles. As her mind failed her, did Baba simply forget? Wasn’t her daily ritual a part of her spirituality, or had she merely been holding the broken parts of herself together—all the painful moments we never talked about, like how she lost my mother’s sister in childbirth. “Everything I need is here,” she would say. My mother believed this, too, but Baba had also fallen asleep each night staring at London Bridge, surrounded by decades-old articles about restaurants in Paris that probably didn’t exist anymore and safaris in Kenya, even if many of the animals were long since extinct. I stroked Chibi on Tamami’s lap and debated whether to tell her everything.

“What are you going to do now that you’re back?” Tamami asked.

“I mean, I’m not really back,” I said. I reached into my purse and pulled out the ultrasound photo—a heartbeat growing stronger inside of me.

My sister absorbed the photo and pulled me in for a hug.

“Rina, that’s wonderful,” she said. But I could tell from the tears, the somewhat stiff expression on her face that the news meant more. The grain of rice I took when I left had given me the strength to leave and become. This child gave me a reason.

“Don’t tell them,” I said. “I need to find my own way.”

She hugged me again.

“I guess I get to be an aunt,” she said.

After Tamami left, I lay in bed, slipped on the old holo-visor, and suddenly found myself there beside Baba. Her labored breathing punctuated the sound of Mrs. Kishimoto’s koto and the rhythmic clapping of friends and family who filled the room. A minister in black robes pushed grains of rice between Baba’s cracked lips, helped prop her up to drink a glass of water. I remained next to her long after everyone else left for lunch in the yard. I heard my name, people saying I should be there. I remained until the recording reached its end and looped it back, populating the bedroom with everyone once again. If the purpose of this virtuo-chip was to fill me with guilt, then my mother had succeeded beautifully.

Later that day, after I unpacked, my mother called us all outside for some predinner neighborhood exercise. Our family plus a few of the grave friends congregated in our front yard and began the loop from cemetery skyscraper 18 back to the house, a two-kilometer path with stops for refreshments. The group paraded along the sidewalk following a strict hierarchy determined by age, the eldest members leading the way, swinging their arms with power walking enthusiasm. Shopkeepers and police officers waved to us as if we were celebrities.