Barn Cat Page 2

  “This should always read between 68 and 75 degrees. Adjust your a/c accordingly.” She hands them the folder of information she prepared. “The ranger you’ll meet knows the park very well. He can let the turtle go in the same spot where those people picked him up. All you need to do is drive him to Ohio without getting too hot or cold. Just in case, I got you permits for transporting wildlife across state lines.”

  “We’re not planning on getting stopped,” the taller woman says.

  “Can we see?” the shorter woman points at the box.

  “The less we disturb him, the better,” Jill cautions, “but okay.” She pulls open the lid and tilts the box toward us. The turtle is about five inches long, with bright yellow markings across its dark shell. Sitting on dampened paper towels with his head tucked in, he resembles an expensive piece of pottery. “If his head were out,” Jill explains, “you’d see his reddish eyes. The females have yellow eyes.” The women and I lean in. A respectful hush falls over us. Jill closes the lid and says, “Let’s get him in your truck where it’s cool.”

  The taller woman climbs behind the wheel and the shorter one, holding the Rubbermaid box and the folder, sits on the passenger side.

  “I’m the one who’s moving,” the shorter woman says, “but my friend here flew out to help. We’ve known each other since kindergarten.” She says she recently retired from her job. Her children are grown so she’s moving back to Columbus, her hometown. “I have other friends and relatives in the area. I’ll also be closer to my son in Pennsylvania. My ex has a second family he started in California. He’s one of those guys with two sets of kids twenty years apart in age.”

  The driver honks as the truck pulls out of the rest stop ahead of us. Those women have known each other longer than Jill and I have been alive. If we had told them that we grew up as sisters, they wouldn’t have been incredulous the way people used to be. Families have changed. All kinds of people now have siblings who are young enough to be their children or parents who look nothing like them.

  A few miles past the city limits Jill asks, “Do you think Kumiko could have gone back to Japan, like that woman who is moving back to Ohio?”

  FIVE

  The courtyard of our apartment complex in Tokyo had a shallow pond with black stepping stones. My mother and I stood on the stones with bread crumbs in our cupped hands, calling, Koi, koi, koi. The ornamental carp rose to the surface in flashes of red, gold, pink, their mouths opening and closing. Koi means carp but also come here. I understood its third meaning, romantic love, during the Japanese class I drove to Milwaukee to take at sixteen. By then my mother must have stopped worrying that I would expose her secrets. She allowed me to re-learn the language I had almost forgotten. She had to agree: being bilingual was an advantage.

  In Japan, I had attended an international school with the children of American businessmen, and my mother was studying English long before she met Don. As a Nigo-san, Number Two Wife, she had to be more resourceful than the real wife.

  The man who paid for our apartment was my father, but I was taught to call him Ojisan, Uncle. My mother claimed she was once married to Ojisan’s brother, who died shortly before my birth. Only foreigners, like her English teacher, would be fooled by such a story. My mother hoped Ojisan would take us with him if ever he went to manage a foreign branch of the trading company his grandfather had started. Ojisan’s wife would have to remain in Japan with their children, who had to get into a good Japanese high school and university to continue the family tradition.

  Once or twice a week, Ojisan arrived at our apartment late at night and departed early, leaving a trail of clothing. My mother picked the black suit and silk tie off the floor and placed them on a cedar hanger. She laundered and ironed the white shirts. I don’t know how many children Ojisan had with his wife, but one of them must have been a son. He would have secured an heir before allowing his Nigo-san to have a child. My mother and I were his second family. Our existence depended entirely on his whim. Even the children in our building knew. If they found me alone in the courtyard, they threw stones to chase me away.

  My mother stopped speaking Japanese to me on the day we left Tokyo. I have no idea what she told Don about her life in Japan. By the time I was in high school, I could no longer sort out what I remembered and what I imagined. My confusion only began to clear when I started taking Japanese classes while my mother was busy with Josh.

  Unlike my mother, Jill didn’t keep secrets from anyone. After she broke up with her college boyfriend, she found out she was pregnant. She had nothing against other people getting abortions, but that wasn’t her choice. As for the boyfriend, she said, “If having a baby isn’t enough to make me want to marry him, we’re not meant to be together.” She said that my mother understood her situation because she’d raised me as a young widow with help from no one. I pictured my mother sitting at the glass-top table in the dining room of our Tokyo apartment in an evening dress, her face made up. I’d peek at her from my room and she’d tell me to go to sleep before Ojisan arrived tired from work.

  Don didn’t come to our apartment during his trip. I spent that week with the only friend my mother had in the building, a woman who lived alone in an apartment like ours. My mother introduced me to Don one night at a modest restaurant that catered to children. Three months later, we were in Wisconsin. Don’s first wife had moved to Chicago with a man Don had hired to help on the farm. After that, Don wouldn’t have knowingly married a woman who was helping someone cheat on his family, but I put those thoughts away till I moved east.

  In Cambridge, near the restaurant where I waitressed, I often heard bits of conversation on the sidewalk from the well-dressed Japanese women on their way to the movies or dinner. The pitch of their voices and snatches of their conversation brought me back to that courtyard in Tokyo. I pictured the black stepping stones across the pond. So far away from where my mother had made a safe home for herself, I felt free to tell my new acquaintances, “My parents weren’t legally married. I never saw my father after my mother and I left Japan.” The things I revealed were like the ornamental carp rising to the surface, glinting in the sun, opening their mouths and urging me to say more. Sam was quiet and respectful. I could tell him everything because he didn’t press and, unlike Jill, he wasn’t part of the story.

  Many times in the past, I thought of telling Jill and then chickened out. I was protecting my mother and not myself. I didn’t have all the facts. But those were just excuses. I was afraid Jill would be angry with me. What if she decided I’d betrayed her by taking part in my mother’s lies and refused to speak to me ever again? Still, my mother has no one to go back to in Japan. If she had parents, brothers, or sisters, none of them visited us in Tokyo. Jill, Josh, and I are the only family she has left. I don’t want to say that to Jill unless I can say it as the whole truth.

  SIX

  “What makes you think Kumiko was keeping a secret from Dad?” Jill asks. “Maybe she told him and he loved her anyway.”

  That possibility has never occurred to me.

  Jill turns to me, her neck and ears flushed red. “Honestly, Lily. You’re saying Kumiko is a scheming, conniving person who lied to my father and trapped him in a marriage. That’s insulting to his memory as well as to her.”

  “You don’t care if their marriage was based on lies and secrets?”

  “No,” she says. “Whatever was between Kumiko and my father is none of my business or yours.” She shakes her head. “Kumiko has done so much to help me when Josh was young. I could never judge her. If anything, I should have been more patient with her. After that Sunday when she didn’t even seem happy to see Josh, I should have called her and asked her what was wrong. I should have showed up at her door and made her dinner and gotten her to talk. But I preferred sitting at home feeling wounded. That’s what you’ve been doing all these years. We should both be ashamed of ourselves.”

  “I am,” I pipe up. “I’ve been ashamed of myself for so long.”


  “Not in a helpful way,” she says before turning away to stare at the road.

  Outside the window, the fields are different shades of green according to the crop: feed corn, sweet corn, alfalfa, wheat. People from outside the Midwest think all our terrain is flat, but the land undulates under the big open sky. In Massachusetts, the trees come up to the edge of the road. If Sam and I divorced, this wide open space might be enough to bring me back. I could teach high school again or continue with college administration.

  “I really miss all this space. Maybe I’ll come back here to live.”

  Jill doesn’t respond.

  “Are you ever going to forgive me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It would be hard for us to live in the same state again if you don’t want to talk to me.”

  “So stay out east.”

  “Come on, Jill. I can’t bear to go talk to Debbie with you so mad at me.”

  “Please. Not another word. I need to be quiet.”

  The cows are grazing in the field across the road. Debbie’s station wagon is on the gravel driveway between the house and the barn. Jill parks behind it and cuts the engine. We get out without speaking. Near the mulberry tree whose inky blackberries we baked into pies, five kittens are sitting in the sun. They scatter and run back to the barn, all except the black kitten with green eyes who comes trotting toward us. I reach down, palm up. He sniffs my fingers and then rears up. He can only reach my calf, his claws needle-sharp through my linen pants. Jill has stopped a few steps ahead.

  “Hey,” I say to the cat so I won’t have to speak to her. The cat nuzzles my palm and then flops down on the ground, belly up. His chest has a white marking, an upside-down triangle. He pumps his legs and wiggles his body.

  “A sweetie or a biter?” Jill surprises me by asking. It’s the guessing game we played with the kittens in the barn.

  “A sweetie,” I answer.

  “Want to bet?”

  “Okay, a dollar.” It’s been decades since the correct answer earned me a quarter. I kneel down and put my hand on the kitten’s soft belly. He arches his body and stretches his head back, exposing his throat. As I rub, up and down the length of his body, the kitten closes his eyes and purrs. His claws are completely retracted. “You owe me a dollar,” I say to Jill.

  “We’ll settle up later.”

  “Why am I always the one to touch the cat?” I ask as I stand up. Whenever one of the kittens went down on its back and Jill asked me the question, I reached down to touch its belly even if my answer was, “Biter.” I’d lift my hand with the kitten wrapped around my wrist like a furry steel trap.

  “Because I’m your big sister,” she answers.

  The black kitten is at my heels. As Jill and I open the screen door and step into the kitchen of our childhood house, I pick him up and gently toss him— “Sorry”—to keep him from following us in.

  Debbie’s alone in the house with her youngest, a baby girl. Her sons, she says, are taking care of their chickens in my mother’s old tool shed, now converted into a coop. The baby has Debbie’s wary-looking pale blue eyes. We go into the living room, where Debbie puts the baby on the blanket on the floor. Jill settles next to the baby while I sit down on the couch. Debbie takes the armchair.

  Debbie was in middle school when I moved east and we’ve only seen each other at large family functions since. The list she prepared, with people to contact about my mother, only has five names.

  “Your mother didn’t go out much,” she explains. “Those are the people who volunteered with her at our church. They did the flowers for the altar.”

  “We need your key to her house,” Jill tells Debbie. “We should check her mail and unpack some of the boxes, to see if there’s anything.”

  “Like a clue?” Debbie asks. “Isn’t it a federal offense to tamper with other people’s mail?”

  One night in high school, my friends and I drove around, knocking down the mailboxes along the county highways with a baseball bat. I surprised myself by loving the loud, clean bang they made going down, but I never did it again.

  “We’re Kumiko’s daughters,” Jill says. “That law doesn’t apply to us.”

  “I don’t want to get into trouble,” Debbie hesitates.

  “You won’t,” Jill assures her.

  Debbie puts her baby in a sling that hangs from around her neck and steps outside with us. The black kitten is waiting in the patch of mint next to the house. He gets up and saunters toward us. I’m reaching down to pet him when Debbie suddenly claps her hands, stamps her feet, and hisses.

  “Get away from our house,” she yells. “Go back to the barn!”

  The kitten leaps into the air and dashes down the driveway. The baby starts wailing.

  “Oh,” Debbie coos, steadying the sling. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry.”

  I want to tell her that she should apologize to the kitten, but Jill gives me a look.

  “Do I get points for exercising self-control?” I ask when we get back into the truck.

  “You’re on probation. I’ll forgive you after you talk to Kumiko. You should confess the grudge you held against her and apologize when she comes back.”

  If she comes back, I think but don’t say.

  SEVEN

  My mother’s house is on the smallest of the three lots Don parceled off to raise money for his retirement. The couples who bought the other lots and built their houses commute to Green Bay. “You can knock on their doors when they come home,” Debbie told us, “but I doubt they can tell you anything.” The lots are half a mile down the road from the farm.

  “These were sent last week,” Jill says, squinting at the mail she pulled out of the mailbox.

  I unlock the front door and we step into the foyer. Jill rips open an envelope and announces, “She still has her electric bill sent here.” She tosses the rest—ads and flyers—in the corner. The small table that used to be in the entrance is pushed against the living room wall with the rest of the furniture. My mother has put all the furniture in the living room and all the boxes in the dining room.

  In the kitchen, the cupboards have been cleaned out and the refrigerator unplugged. The stove is so spic-and-span it looks new. The bed in the master bedroom is stripped. The shelves have been removed from the smaller bedroom she used as a craft room. When I returned for Don’s funeral, my mother asked me to stay with Jill because there was no room for me in her new house. Her spare room was occupied by a work table covered with dried flowers and ribbons. She grew dozens of plants for fresh and dried flower arrangements, mostly as a hobby but sometimes for money.

  “What about her business?” I ask Jill. “Anyone who hired her to arrange flowers for a wedding would know how to contact her.”

  “Good idea.” Jill nods. “Maybe she kept her business records in one of those boxes.”

  We spend the afternoon going through the boxes. Jill drives to the general store in Denmark and comes back with bottled water, apples, crackers, cheese. We sit on the dining room floor and eat from paper plates. My mother’s paring knife, unpacked from one of the boxes, looks out of place. She didn’t leave any receipts or invoices for her business. All the people on Debbie’s list told us they hadn’t seen my mother in months.

  “I asked Mr. Waters if Kumiko’s been at his store lately and he said no,” Jill says.

  The only vaguely promising item is the engagement calendar I found, but when Jill and I open it, all we can see are the dates my mother had marked for when she started her flowers indoors and transplanted them outside, when she cut and dried them. In the winter, the pages are blank except for the records of snowfalls and low temperatures. In late February, she noted the return of the robins. The mornings she babysat for Debbie or the evenings Jill visited are unmarked. All she ever did, according to this calendar, is watch the yard. Outside the kitchen window, nothing is planted in her flower beds. She must have known that she wouldn’t be here. At least the grass i
sn’t overgrown yet.

  “I wonder who takes care of her lawn,” I say to Jill. Debbie’s sons are too young to operate a riding mower.

  “I have no idea. I can’t believe how little I know about what Kumiko’s been doing in the last two years.”

  Jill has a meeting in the morning. “Let’s drive back to my house,” she suggests. “We should call the police if we haven’t heard from her by tomorrow.”

  “I’ll stay here in case she comes back.”

  “If she found the mess we made and got mad at us,” Jill says, “I’d be relieved.”

  “I’ll be here to see her face if that happens.”

  I walk Jill to her truck. She gets the extra sleeping bag she keeps for emergencies and hands it to me along with my suitcase.

  I put the sleeping bag on the dining room floor. When I turn off the light, it’s pitch dark inside the house. I might as well be sleeping in the hayfield this used to be when I was a child.

  EIGHT

  A robin trills outside the window at dawn. I drift back to sleep listening to him. When a key clicks in the lock, I jump out of the sleeping bag and run to the living room in my pajamas. A woman opens the front door and steps in, carrying a large leather handbag. Her free hand flies up to her mouth.

  “Hi,” I say before she recovers her voice. “I’m Lily, Mrs. Larson’s daughter.”

  “Oh,” she says. She’s wearing a white cardigan over a pale blue dress, opaque nylons, and black Mary Janes. She could be someone from the church.

  “Are you a friend of my mother’s?” I ask.

  “I work at a realty office. Mrs. Larson gave us a key and asked us to take a look at her house. She didn’t say anyone would be staying here.”

  “I live in Boston.” I hold out my hand.

  The realtor walks into the living room. “How do you do,” she murmurs as we shake hands but forgets to say her name. “I can come back. Mrs. Larson said there was no hurry.”