The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto Read Free Book Online Page B

any of it, I pushed to the back of my mind. I would not hold her responsible for things said in the heat of the moment. We rode in silence. I let her off at the corner, and when I reached home I collapsed on the chesterfield. The fresh air had taken my energy. I reached for Eiji’s picture on the end table beside me. His smooth-lidded eyes lifting, a question there, no answers. No sympathy, no solace.
    I was left alone with my shuddery thoughts of Chisako, reduced to a trace of red on the asphalt. The burst of her colourful presence I’d felt floating about my house, gone now, ground to dust.
    A loud moan came from upstairs and for once I was grateful. Slowly I made my way up. Papa’s lips had dried to a cracked purply brown. I held his head and made him drink water.
    “San kyu, san kyu,” he murmured, then sank into his pillow. He was frail, just bones under a veil of skin, but he’d survive for years like this, hardy and persistent. As the powder trace of Chisako’s blood was blown to the wind.
    I saw them stretch out, the years of my life. Alone. Notthat Chisako ever concerned herself with my loneliness. I’d learned to live with it, knowing that soon enough I’d be deserted by everyone around me; everyone except Papa.
    I was calm though. In the past I used to panic. The summer we brought Papa home from the hospital after his second stroke, Stum carried him up to the bedroom and a breeze was fluttering the curtains at the window, the air was warm, the afternoon felt so idyllic. I knew then he’d be perched up here for ever, and he’d never come down again.
    In the beginning I woke in the middle of the night and squatted outside his doorway, my nightgown pitched over me like a tent and, underneath, my knees hugged cool to my breasts. I was listening, afraid he’d leave me, wretched to hear him above my own breathing. I heard the gurgles his body made, the fervent protests. I crept in and put my ear to his throat, his clogged chest. The noise was muted but powerful—like a crowd roaring. Now it was that steady fragile hum.
    “Lunch, hoshii, Papa? You want?” I patted his hand and went downstairs. I’d left a trail of dirt on the cream carpet covering the steps and living-room, and once I’d fed Papa, I vacuumed, then wiped it clean.
    It was long past noon when I finally got to my morning paper. I turned to the local news section knowing what I’d find. There it was, at the bottom corner of the front page: a photograph of the Yano family sitting in a row on their chesterfield, Tam and Kimi flanked by Chisako and Yano.
Son, daughter of woman shot still missing; husband sought
, strung over their heads. Yano leaning as if he’d slid into the frame after setting the shutter timer, a lock of hair fallen in his face, shirt bunched at his armpits as always, his flitting eyes capturedfor once. I could imagine him as he rushed in front of the camera and glared into its single eye, impatient for the click. There was Tam, Sachi’s Tam, curved protectively around a sullen Kimi. His narrow shoulders, that ribbon of a body; I knew how it could move, glide through the high summer grasses of the electrical field, day or night, cross the marshy ground by the creek, the rough gravel leading up to the hill. Those tufts of hair jutting above his forehead, like crab grass; his eyes downcast as usual. Eyes that, when they looked up, hardly blinked, as if seeing in a gifted way.
    It was the old Chisako there, the ugly duck with her twin ducklings. Her eyes dull behind thick glasses. Her hair, too coarse and heavy, as Japanese hair could be, hiding part of Kimi’s face, straggling out like hardy roots that could grow anywhere. It was disappointing, really, for the world not to see Chisako as I had, as the woman she had become. As on one late afternoon in December, when I had stepped off the bus to find her sitting on the bench, unable, it seemed, to go home, despite the cold and the snow that had begun to fall. Waiting for I