I knew other parents didn’t say such things to their children. If I’m ruining her life, I thought, why does she often follow me around from room to room, as if we’re chained together?
I tiptoed quickly to the front of the house, went out the front door, down the steps, across the lawn, onto Rinconada toward Emerson.
Nobody was out in the quiet afternoon, the houses like blank faces, cars gone or in driveways. I walked quickly to the corner, self-conscious of how I was walking, wearing a skirt and flat shoes, looking back in case my mother was coming. She probably hadn’t left her room or even noticed I was gone.
I turned east, south, east, toward Embarcadero, toward Highway 101. Once past the corner, where I might have gone straight, or turned, where she would not have been able to find me easily, I began to breathe. I felt elation and freedom I hadn’t expected, an exciting shiver in my knees. More than escape: relief.
I was light, becoming myself again, feeling the lines around my body where it met the still air.
I looked at my palms. It was true: my left palm was like a thicket of sticks with no clear path. The lines on my right palm were not clearly defined either, but the lifeline was better. I knew the bubbles weren’t good, but how was it possible to tell when one would happen, how far along I was on the line? I kept her vision of my future, even as I cast her off.
At some point, I had to pee. There was a round front window as tall as a person, with rosebushes planted close together on the front lawn of a putty-colored Spanish-style house. I looked both ways—no one around—and peed quickly on the dirt underneath the rosebushes.
I walked around until dusk. I’d been gone for hours, it seemed; there was nothing to do now but go home.
A block away, I saw people on our lawn and heard a sound like insects: walkie-talkies, chattering and static. Lights in our front windows, the porch light, a police car.
A woman in uniform saw me half a block away and started walking toward me. My mother stood with her legs apart on the lawn, her arms crossed.
“You’re back,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She approached me cautiously.
The female officer spoke to my mother. A male officer, also buzzing with a walkie-talkie, stood farther off, talking into the handset, looking away.
“Thank you,” my mother said, nodding to the policewoman, who nodded back and walked toward the car.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, after the cops were gone. “You can’t just run away.”
“You shouldn’t have yelled at me.” I stood strong, with my legs apart, like her. Some new power I wouldn’t have guessed I had.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said.
That night, before I went to sleep, she came into my room. She’d washed her face, and when she leaned over me and said, “I’m sorry,” she smelled like soap. “Are you hungry?”
“A little,” I said.
She cut apples and cheese in the kitchen and brought them back to my bed on a plate and we ate them together propped up against pillows with our legs under the covers. “You’ll tell everyone,” she said. “You’ll make me out to be an ogre. You’ll tell Lee.”
“No I won’t,” I said emphatically.
The next morning, I found Lee. She was behind a partition in the big classroom.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a bruise on my upper arm like a smudge of dirt. “And she told me I shouldn’t have been born.”
“She shouldn’t have said that,” Lee said. “She doesn’t mean it.”
“The fights take hours,” I said. “By the time they’re finished it’s late and I can’t focus on homework. I ran away. But then I went back.”
Recently, my mother had started to have some wine with dinner.
“And she’s been drinking,” I said.
“Really? How much?”
“A glass of wine, some nights,” I said darkly.
Lee’s face changed; I understood this detail was not as compelling as the rest.
“That’s not a lot,” Lee said. “But we do want you to consider where you might stay during finals—the trip to Japan is right around the corner.” The next week, I stayed at Kate’s house in Burlingame. My mother drove me to school on Monday with an overnight bag, saying she also needed a break. Kate’s mother picked us up after school. She was large and tall; her glasses hung from a long beaded necklace that rustled pleasingly when she walked. “Good things come in small packages,” she said when we reached the house and she examined me, looking down at me in the white tiled kitchen.
“Thank you,” I said, all at once aware of how small I was compared with them.
We flew into Kyoto and stayed in rooms in a gated temple, the girls in one room, the boys in another, the teachers in a third. We slept on futons on tatami mats, folding the futons and storing them behind shoji-screen closets in the morning, and pulling them out again at night.
In the mornings we ate breakfast on our knees at a low table in the courtyard surrounded by trees. On the third day, we discovered microscopic silver fishes mixed in with the morning rice.
We were supposed to keep track of our spending in the same journals in which we wrote about our experiences. I wrote expenses scattered around the pages as they arose, in a disorganized way, including, on the first day, three hundred yen to make a wish at a temple at the top of Mount Hiei, so that toward the end of the trip, when it would have been useful to count up what I’d spent, it was difficult to find the numbers hidden around the pages.
At the temples, Japanese girls came up to us, giggled, asked to take photos with us. When they laughed, they covered their mouths. They held out bunny ears behind one another’s backs before the click. I paid to write wishes on slips of paper, pushed them through an opening in a granite stone to be burned later by praying monks.
We traveled to Ikeda, where we stayed for a week, and one evening we went to a bathhouse. We brought towels into the baths for modesty, but I found I wasn’t uncomfortable. It seemed like nothing to be naked here.
The room was large, with three different baths, a sauna in the back, a warm, hot smell of sandalwood and steam. There was a hot pool, a cold pool, a dark sauna that made a ringing sound from an electric grate. There were young women and thin old women, with skin dripping down, bones showing through. Women with towels around their chests leaned back in the hot pool with closed eyes.
A few hours later, when we left through the metal turnstile into the night, the heat of the pools clung to me, insulating me against the night air. We all gave off steam.
Toward the end of the trip, we arrived in Hiroshima.
Inside the dark hallway of the museum were lit cases containing fingernails, hair in boxes, burned pieces of kimonos, black-and-white photographs of children abandoned and crying. Some children had been vaporized immediately; others survived but then lost their hair in large tufts, lost their fingernails, even their fingers, in the following weeks. The bomb created tornado-like effects. Radiation was carried by the wind in irregular patterns.
For school, I’d read a book about a mother and daughter on a bridge. When the bomb hit, the daughter had become a soot smear on the ground, while the mother was left naked, her skin charred with the shapes of the dark flowers on her kimono. The image haunted me.