Barn Cat Read online

  Kyoko Mori

  * * *

  BARN CAT

  Kyoko Mori’s award-winning first novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, was hailed by The New York Times as “a jewel of a book, one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation.” Her many critically acclaimed books include Yarn, Polite Lies, The Dream of Water, and the novels Stone Field, True Arrow, and One Bird. Kyoko Mori lives in Washington, D.C., with her cats, Miles and Jackson, and teaches at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University.

  First published by GemmaMedia in 2013.

  GemmaMedia

  230 Commercial Street

  Boston, MA 02109 USA

  www.gemmamedia.com

  © 2013 by Kyoko Mori

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

  978-1-936846-40-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mori, Kyoko.

  Barn cat / Kyoko Mori.

  pages cm. — (Gemma Open Door)

  ISBN 978-1-936846-40-5

  I. Title.

  PS3563.O871627B37 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  013012892

  Cover by Night & Day Design

  Inspired by the Irish series of books designed for adult literacy, Gemma Open Door Foundation provides fresh stories, new ideas, and essential resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.

  Brian Bouldrey

  North American Series Editor

  Open Door

  For Ernest and Algernon,

  beloved feline companions,

  in memory.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ONE

  The afternoon we left Tokyo in 1979, my mother dragged her powder-blue suitcase down the hallway of our building. She only gave me a pink patent leather clutch that a grown woman might use to carry her lipstick. I was eight. She was twenty-seven. Until we arrived at the airport, I believed we were going on a beach vacation instead of moving to Wisconsin.

  My mother married a dairy farmer in a small town called Denmark. Our neighbors thought my name, Yuri, sounded Russian, like Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, or Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut to orbit the earth. “In Japanese, Yuri is a flower,” my mother explained. We were the only people for miles whose ancestors didn’t hail from Scandinavia or Ireland. My mother had my name changed from Yuri to Lily.

  Thirty-three years later, when I heard about my mother’s disappearance, I remembered how eager she once was to become Mrs. Donald Larson. She is a widow now. Two years ago, Don sold the farm to his niece, Debbie, and her husband, built a house nearby, and retired. He was seventy. My stepsister, Jill, and I were shocked when he died of a heart attack a month later. I meant to spend more time with my mother, but I live in Boston. Jill is in Green Bay, fifteen miles north of Denmark, so she visited whenever she could. My mother occasionally helped Debbie with her three kids. This afternoon, Debbie drove to my mother’s house and discovered her belongings packed into boxes, her furniture draped in white sheets. There was no note.

  “Debbie’s not sure how long Kumiko’s been gone,” Jill says over the phone. Jill went to church with my mother on Memorial Day weekend when her son, Josh, was home. Jill dropped out of college when he was born. My mother helped her raise him. Now Josh is studying engineering in Madison. If there’s anyone my mother is proud of, it’s Josh.

  “I should have known something was wrong,” Jill continues, “when Kumiko wanted to go home instead of having brunch with Josh and me.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. You went to church with her.” Jill and I were raised Lutheran, but neither of us belongs to a church anymore.

  “I telephoned Pastor Sorenson. He said Kumiko doesn’t participate in Sunday school or visit the fellowship hall for coffee, so it’s hard for him to remember when he last saw her.”

  My mother doesn’t have a cell phone. She seldom uses a credit card. The roads around her house have no toll booths or surveillance cameras. Still, there must be ways to track her down.

  “Should we call the police?”

  “I already have,” Jill answers. “The officer said Kumiko must have left the house by her own choice. There was no sign of forced entry. He told me to call back if I don’t hear from her in a few days.”

  A few days after leaving Tokyo, my mother and I were settled on the farm with our new names. If anyone had been after us, they wouldn’t have known where to look. My mother met Don during the single week he was in Tokyo visiting a friend from his church. Instead of going sightseeing alone on his first day, Don accompanied his friend to English class. My mother was one of the students. If he hadn’t been so intimidated by the subway map printed in ten colors, Don later joked, he would have stayed a divorced single father forever.

  Now, all kinds of people can meet each other. At sixty, my mother is still beautiful. If she were a flower, she would be a solitary orchid in a rock garden. The police officer told Jill that his own mother, a widow in her seventies, had signed up for online dating.

  “He was implying Kumiko could have gone to meet a man. He has no idea what she’s like.”

  Jill was thirteen when my mother and I came to live on her father’s farm. I haven’t told her everything I remember from Tokyo.

  “I’m at my wit’s end,” Jill says. “Even if Kumiko comes back, I don’t know what to say to her.”

  “I’ll come home,” I tell her.

  It’s the second Monday in July. The small college where I work in the dean’s office is on summer break. I quit my high school teaching job in Wisconsin in 1996, moved to Boston to study multicultural education, and got a job as a curriculum specialist to promote cultural diversity. Then the economy changed. Now, I spend most of my time going over enrollment statistics and telling faculty members that their classes will have to be canceled.

  There are affordable flights starting the day after tomorrow. Before calling Jill back, I dial the only other number I know by heart. My husband is the reason I stayed in Boston instead of returning to Wisconsin, where advocating for diversity would have made a difference. He is also the reason I’ve been avoiding my mother. I didn’t know how to tell her that I don’t live with him anymore.

  TWO

  Sam and I met on a winter evening after a snowstorm. Dressed in a light jacket and carrying a violin in a leather case, he looked stylish and jaunty. His red hair stuck out from under his grey beret. I was wearing my army surplus down parka and wielding an orange snow shovel. Although I’m only five feet one and barely a hundred pounds, that parka made me feel invincible. I had just dug out the back end of my car, a maroon Ford Escort Jill took to college and later passed on to me.

  “I’ve been wondering whose car this was,” Sam said. “I live in this building.” He pointed to the brownstone in front of us.

  “Me, too,” I told him. “I drove this car twelve hundred miles from Wisconsin to move here.”

  He stuck out his hand. “I’m Sam. Glad to meet another Midwesterner.”

  “I’m Lily.” Our handshake was muffled by his leather glove and my wool mitten.

  “I grew up in Minnesota, and my car is almost as old as yours.” He point
ed two parking spaces ahead, but all I could see was a snow mound. “The Toyota MR2 with the rust spots.”

  I had noticed the sports car. Its dashboard displayed a card from the City of Cambridge Vehicle Inspection Office: a red letter R for “Rejected.”

  “The one with the failed inspection notice?”

  Sam tipped his head back and laughed. “So you saw the scarlet R. I have to get the rust spots treated before I can drive the car again.”

  “Why?”

  “The inspector said the sharp edges left by the rust could hurt a pedestrian who brushed against the car in a parking lot.”

  “That’s ridiculous. What if a drunk pedestrian walks into your car and breaks his nose?”

  “I’m sure the City of Cambridge would give us each a ticket.”

  Sam played fiddle in an Irish folk band and shared a large apartment in our building with his bandmates. I told him I was renting an efficiency studio, going to graduate school, and waitressing at an organic restaurant.

  A cell phone started ringing in his jacket pocket. “Nice meeting you,” I said and went back to shoveling.

  When I finished mine, I dug out his car as well. A week later, I found a bouquet of tulips on my doorstep and a thank-you note signed, “Sam, the Minnesotan.” There were forty apartments in our building, and the mailboxes only listed our last names and initials. The following evening, though, Sam knocked on my door carrying a bottle of wine.

  “How did you know which apartment was mine?” I asked.

  “I asked the super where the efficiencies were by pretending to be interested in renting one,” he answered. “On the mailboxes, yours was the only initial L. I figured you were divorced or else you’re a secret agent with a Nordic alias.”

  “Larson is my stepfather’s name. Is that weird?”

  “No. I’m German and Dutch. My last name is Schmidt. Everyone assumes I’m Irish because of the music and the hair.”

  As I stepped back to let Sam in, my cat leapt onto my shoulder. “This is Ozzie. He was born on a dairy farm in Denmark, Wisconsin.”

  “A Holstein cat,” Sam laughed. Ozzie was white with black splotches, though that’s not why I’d picked him out. Among the kittens in the barn, he was the one who purred the loudest. My mother had never allowed a cat inside our house, but I was twenty-two and leaving home. I wanted to save at least one kitten from being crushed by the hay baler or trampled by a cow. Ozzie and I lived with Jill and Josh in Green Bay while I finished my last semester of college and taught high school English. Then the two of us moved east.

  “Like you, Ozzie is a musician,” I told Sam. “He sang nonstop on our car trip across the country. The state of Ohio was an entire cat opera.”

  Ozzie died two months ago at nineteen. Sam still occupies the co-op apartment his parents helped us buy in 1998 when we got married. Since last August, I’ve been living in an attic above a secondhand furniture store. The space has no kitchen, but toward the end of his life, Ozzie could only eat boiled chicken. I bought a two-burner hot plate at a hardware store and put it next to the bathroom sink, where I can cook a meal for one. I haven’t decided if I will ever go back to our old apartment.

  Things started going wrong with Sam and me when his band, the Bog Queen, broke up. Like us, his bandmates were approaching forty. They were tired of being on the road for days playing the bars and Irish festivals. Unable to put together another band, Sam tried and quit several day jobs. Our birthdays are just thirteen days apart. We went camping in the White Mountains last August to celebrate our fortieth. He stopped in the middle of a day hike and asked me if it was too late for us to have a child. “It’s the only meaningful thing I can think of to do,” he said.

  When Josh was a baby and I was a teenager, I often wished a tornado would hit the barn and sweep the whole family out of our misery. Whenever I heard about mothers and fathers who forgot their babies in the backseat of a freezing car, or worse, who shook their infants until they were brain-damaged, I didn’t think, as most people seem to, How can they do such a thing? I learned to love Josh only after living with him when he was no longer a baby and he and Jill had their own place in Green Bay. Before we were married, I told Sam how babies scared and repelled me, and he said, “That’s okay. I’d rather be a musician than a father.” Now he was changing his mind to give himself something to do.

  “That is the most selfish thing you’ve ever said,” I blurted out. A week later, Ozzie and I moved out. Since then, Sam has said he doesn’t want a child after all. I picture him sitting in our old apartment unable to decide what to do with his life after music. I can’t bear to go back there, but I’m not ready to say goodbye. When I tell him on the phone that my mother has disappeared, Sam doesn’t give me advice or pep talk. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You must be so worried.”

  “I’m leaving for Wisconsin the day after tomorrow.”

  “I’ll drive you to the airport,” he offers.

  THREE

  Sam is waiting outside in the VW beetle he bought when the MR2 died. He steps out of the car and puts my suitcase in the back.

  “I appreciate your doing this,” I tell him. It’s six in the morning. Sam rarely gets up before noon.

  “No problem,” he answers.

  “Jill and Debbie still haven’t heard from my mother.” I don’t have to explain why my stepsister and her cousin are more likely to hear from my mother than I am. When Sam and I got married, Sam’s parents and sister, and Jill and Josh attended our civil ceremony and potluck picnic. My mother sent seven hundred dollars, the cost of two airfares, from herself and Don. It would have been nice to celebrate with us, she said, but she was sure we needed the money more.

  Sam gives me news from our building, a century-old house divided into six odd-sized apartments. The two women on the third floor are at war over the pot of basil one of them put in the hallway between their apartments.

  “The seedlings are coming up crooked. I cannot bear it,” he mimics the flinty voice of the painter, who went from door to door trying to enlist the other residents in her anti-herb campaign. “Neatness is everything. In my paintings, all the grids are perfectly aligned.”

  I laugh, as though nothing is at stake between us. Years from now, if we got divorced and stayed friends, this would be a good conversation for us to have.

  “We should talk soon,” I manage to say.

  “You should take care of your mom first.”

  He pulls the car into the drop-off area, opens the door, and gets out, so I follow.

  “Safe travels,” he says, pulling my suitcase out and pushing it toward me.

  He puts his arms around me and pats my back. We stopped kissing when I moved out.

  FOUR

  The bumper stickers on Jill’s truck spell out a mini-homily: “Love Animals, Don’t Eat Them,” “Share the Road with Cyclists,” “Support the Timber Wolf Reintroduction Program,” “Straight but Not Narrow.” I drop my suitcase into the flatbed among the pet carriers and humane traps she keeps. Jill runs the wildlife rehabilitation program at the nature center in Green Bay.

  “Perfect timing!” she says from behind the wheel. Her engine is running and the air conditioner is on.

  On my seat is a shoebox-sized Rubbermaid container with holes punched in the lid. What’s inside—an eastern box turtle—is the reason Jill asked me to fly to Milwaukee, ninety miles south of Denmark, instead of Green Bay. A couple vacationing in Ohio picked up the turtle on a bike path outside Columbus. The turtle languished in their aquarium, so they surrendered it to the nature center. Eastern box turtles are not native to Wisconsin, and in most states, it’s illegal to capture them. After nursing this one back to health, Jill got the radio stations across the state to run its story. A woman who’s moving from Milwaukee to Columbus volunteered to drive the turtle back to its habitat. We’re supposed to meet her at a rest stop.

  I climb into the truck, lift the Rubbermaid box from the seat, and put it on my lap. It feels solid, like a book.r />
  Jill leans across the seat to hug me. In her green tank top and jeans, she looks tan and fit. She has always been pretty in a friendly, no-nonsense way. Her light brown hair, slowly going white, has turned pale gold, and her face is scattered with freckles. My hair was halfway down my back like Jill’s until Ozzie died and I chopped it off. I used to wear it in a braid for Ozzie to swat. Now it scarcely covers my earlobes. Jill and I haven’t seen each other since shortly after Don’s funeral, when she visited me in Boston.

  “You have no idea how relieved I am to see you,” she says in a stifled voice. We hug hard, and when we let go, she wipes her eyes.

  “I missed you, too. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here before.”

  Before could mean yesterday, earlier this summer, since Don’s death, or the entire time I’ve been living in Boston. Jill was the one who convinced me to move. The students I taught were worse off than she and I had been. Jill went to a private college with a scholarship. Though she dropped out for Josh, she finished her bachelor’s degree at the local state school. My students considered themselves lucky to graduate high school and find work at fast food restaurants, grocery chains, or discount stores.

  I worried about the ones who got fired up about reading and writing. I meant to talk to their parents about helping them pursue their education, but the few mothers who showed up at our conferences were astonished to discover that I was Ms. Larson. “Where are you from?” they asked. “You speak English so well.” I blushed and stammered, came home, and cried. Jill said that I should do what I advised my students to do when they were stuck on their homework. I needed to go away and come back with a clear head.

  Only, I didn’t come back. Now, my mother has run away and I’m only here for two weeks.

  At the rest stop, two women climb out of the moving truck, both of them dressed in baggy jeans and T-shirts. They look to be my mother’s age.

  We sit down at a picnic table. Jill shows the women the wire probe thermometer attached to the box.