On my fourteenth birthday, right before everything went to crap, I’d celebrated
the day by kicking Reggie’s ass in the 50M freestyle at our YMCA swim team practice,
beat- ing him by a solid 2.5 seconds.
He’d had a cold—it wasn’t his best practice—but still, I’d won! We had dinner at my house
after, devouring
special treat
steaks and mashed potatoes. Reg
and Mom sang “Happy Birthday”
to me over a cake from Safeway,
and my sweet cat, Hufflepuff, licked the icing off my finger.
It was probably my last per- fect day. One of the last decent days, period.
Ten months later, only a few hours after Huff had gone missing, our neighbor delivered his dead body back to me. Mom and the Beast had settled
into BFF status by then, and we were living in
the grungy apartment we had
to
move to after Mom sold our perfectly nice little house because she lost her job and needed time to “figure out the next thing.” The next thing had turned out to be selling
drugs on the Internet, which brought scary
strangers to our apartment on a daily basis. While I was at school one day, Mom—in a drug-hazed
stupor—left the apartment
door open after a sale. Hufflepuff wandered out and was hit by a car. I could barely grieve. By
that time, the
Beast was so thoroughly in control of Mom’s life—and
mine, by extension—that cry- ing and blaming wasn’t worth the effort.
It was amazing how life could go from good to fine to bad to miserable to unbearable so
quickly, each transi- tion seeming
so much like the obvious
next step for the circumstances that it
wasn’t until you
reached the end of the line that you could see how thoroughly brutal the downward
spiral had been. Could it get worse? Of course it could. It probably
would. But I had no way out until I turned eighteen, and that was a long two years away. For now, I could only keep my head down, and try to survive. Study hard. Work my way out, and up.
The bus came to
a stop. It was the best part of my day—when we reached Redmond’s stop. Usually I tried to scrunch into an even smaller,
unnoticeable form at the front of the bus. But today was
different. Suddenly, I’d had enough of
this particular devil I knew. I put my foot out into the aisle as Redmond
passed by me to exit. He tripped
hard, banging his head, fumbling to stand back up as the other kids on the bus howled with laughter. He was so mad that I imagined his head surrounded by fire- ball emojis. The slight grin I couldn’t tamp down probably incited him further.
Before stepping down the stairs to get off, Redmond glared at
me and announced,
“Go ahead and laugh, EZ. You’re trash. Nobody gives a s--- about you.”
My heart pounded with shame. His comment burned.
Still worth it. It felt incredibly satisfying to end this bus ride with a skunk’s bang. Hated, but legendary.
Sometimes when nobody gives you a birthday present, you have to give one to yourself.
Five minutes later, the bus turned
onto the street where Foster Home
#3 loomed.
The houses
here were small, single-story brick houses like the one I’d grown up in back in nearby Greenbelt,
Maryland, but the street in Greenbelt was a million times nicer, with kids playing on the side- walk, well-kept lawns, flower gardens,
white picket fences, and neighbors who looked out for one
another. This block felt like the horror movie version
of my old neighborhood, with houses in various states of disarray,
front yards filled with dirt and weeds, nasty neighbors
who kept big dogs barking
behind chain-link fences, and broken-down cars in the driveways. Foster Home #3’s neighborhood felt like Redmond’s swagger—angry and mean.
Which was probably
why the fancy car parked
in front of “my” house seemed like a mirage. It was a black Mercedes sedan with a white-gloved
chauffeur
stand- ing outside the passenger
door, seemingly waiting for someone to get out. Even weirder was the sight of Mabel Anderson, my social
worker, who usually
arrived for vis- its in a beat-up
old Toyota Corolla with screechy brakes and holes in the seat covers,
standing next to the chauf- feur. Friday was supposed
to be her visit day, not Tuesday. The kids on the bus moved to the side with the better view, pressing their faces against
the windows: Had someone won the lottery?
The bus came to a stop and the driver
opened
the door. I stepped down to the street, suspicious. The bus drove off. As I approached Mabel, the chauffeur opened the Mercedes’s back passenger door and Masashi Araki emerged from the car. My heart dropped. It was like see- ing a ghost from happier times.
Uncle Masa, as
I called him, had been a friend of Mom’s, before the Beast, when Mom worked at the restau- rant where Uncle Masa was a regular. He used to take me swimming or ice skating,
depending on the season,
and always threw
in a trip for pizza or ice cream after, with no worrying about how much it cost. One time I straight out asked Mom if he was my father. “Oh God, no” was all she said. A couple years ago, Uncle Masa got posted from the Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC, to Geneva, Switzerland. He sent me postcards regularly, but then Mom sold our house, leaving no forwarding address because of debt collectors, and I stopped hearing from him.
“What’s going on?” I asked Mabel.
“I’ve brought news for
you,” Mabel said. “This gentle- man would like to be the one to explain.”
Uncle Masa approached me and bowed. That’s how I knew he was real. He never hugged me when he saw me, like an American uncle would; he always bowed. “You’ve gotten tall!” he said, and grinned, like nothing terrible had happened
since I’d last seen him. “We’re the same height now.”
“What the h--- are you doing here?” I asked.
“There’s no
need to
curse,” said Mabel, who
didn’t take anyone’s
s---, especially mine.
F--- her.
From his suit jacket pocket,
Uncle Masa took out a blue United States of America
passport wrapped in a silky white ribbon and handed it to me. “I’m here to take you to live with your father. In Tokyo, Japan. Happy birthday!
chapter two
"You know
my father?”
I
asked quietly,
trying to hold back
the
rush
of emotions
swirling
in my
heart, my stomach, my brain, every cell in my body.
“I do,” said Uncle Masa. “And he would very much like to know you.”
“Is this a joke?”
“I wouldn’t joke about a matter this serious,”
said Uncle Masa.
“Well, maybe you should. Because the idea of even having a father is a joke to me. Where has
that guy been all my life and why the f--- would I go live with him?”
Mabel never smiled or frowned; it was like her face’s only mission was just to get through
the day without
emotional expression. Tersely, she said, “You know the rules, Elle. You’re free to vent your anger, but I will not tolerate impolite language.”
“I’m not going,” I said to Mabel. “You can’t make me.” “I have
no intention
of making you go.
It’s your choice," said Mabel.
I started to walk down the street, just to get away from this nonsense. Hadn’t I been through enough already? But Uncle Masa hurried after me. He made it past me, turned around, and bowed again, trying to block my way. “Listen to me, Elle.”
I saw the living
room window blind creep open at Foster Home #3’s no-hot-water-except-on-Wednesdays house. Foster Parent was clearly spying.
“Your father would be honored for you to come stay with him in Tokyo,” said Uncle Masa, sounding
very for- mal, like he was the butler for this “father” of mine.
“You’ve got
to be kidding me. I haven’t seen you since I was in middle school—and by the way, my life went to h--- in that time—and now you’re here with an invitation for me to live with my father,
when you never even told me you knew my father? No
way. Just, no. And . . . and . . .” I was starting
to sputter. There was too much to say, to ask, to know already. “And why is he suddenly ready to be in my life . . . but can’t even be bothered to show up in person?”
Reggie’s dad
was a military
hero killed in an ambush in the Middle East when Reggie
was only
five.
Reggie had his dad’s photos,
his medals, his letters. Reggie’s dad was real. He existed.
He loved his son, even though he left Reggie way too early. But Reggie had all the proof— and the memories. All I’d ever gotten was evasive
answers about “Mr. Tokyo” from my mother,
who shut down each conversation by saying the subject hurt her too much to talk about. I’d never thought
of myself as a person who had a father. Girls on TV had them, not people like me. Dads: just some fantasy
created by Hollywood.
Mabel caught up to
us. She said, “My understanding is your father wasn’t able to be part of your life in the past. Now he is.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
Mabel rifled through some papers in the notebook
she always carried. “Kenji Takahara.” After all these years of wondering
who my real father
was, I couldn’t
believe I was finding out from a social worker of all people. There was an actual name attached
to this fantasy.
“Why should I believe this Kenji
Takahara guy is my father?” I asked. “I mean, come on. Absent biological fathers don’t just drop out of
the sky.”
Uncle Masa looked up to the sky. I forgot how he took statements literally. His English was excellent, but it was not his native
language and he often didn’t get turns of phrase. “Come
with
me,” said
Uncle Masa.
“I’ll show you.”
I let him lead me back toward the fancy car. He opened the back door, retrieved
some documents from his brief- case, and handed one to me. “Here is your birth certificate. Your father’s name is right there. Kenji Takahara.”
There it
was, a birth certificate issued by the State of Maryland, with my name and date of birth on it. Mother: Brandy
Zoellner. Father: Kenji Takahara.
Uncle Masa held up more documents for me to inspect. “You see? This is your mother’s signed consent form authorizing you to go live with him. This is your plane ticket.”
“Wait. What? You saw my
mom? When?”
Uncle Masa said, “I haven’t seen her. I’ve been in touch with her through a lawyer.” He bowed to Mabel. “She saw your mother to get the form signed.”
Even I hadn’t seen my mom since she’d gone to Jessup Correctional Institute three months ago. Every week Mabel gave me the option
of going. Every week I declined. Not ready. Too mad. I was grateful Mom was alive, of course—but her addiction had ruined both our lives. I knew prison was difficult—how could it not be? But to see her face-to-face would require
too painful an acknowledgment of how difficult my own life in foster care, without her, had also become. All Mom’s fault.
I looked accusingly at Mabel. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
Mabel said, “I was
instructed
not to, in case it didn’t work out. We didn’t want to give you false hope.”
"I don’t believe you.” I wasn’t sure if I was addressing Mabel, or Uncle Masa, or the whole rotten universe.
“Then you can
verify it with your mother yourself,” said Mabel, looking at her watch. “She’s expecting you, and I assured her I would deliver
you to her this time. Visiting hours today end at four p.m. If we leave right now, we’ll get to Jessup in enough time.”
“What if I say no?” I asked Mabel.
Mabel looked toward #3’s house. The
blinds closed suddenly.
The chauffeur held open the passenger
door for us to get in.
Mabel confidently stepped into the car. Go directly to Jail, do not pass Go.
So Bright a Hope
A Pacific Northwest native, Amber Lynn Perry lives in Washington state with her husband and two daughters. She studied humanities at Portland State University and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree focused on art history. As a homeschooling mom, Amber spends much of her time teaching everything from Shakespeare to science.
