Uncle came and sat down with us. I said, "Uncle, can't you become a land surveyor?"
He drank from his canteen and wiped his mouth. He didn't answer for a long time. Everyone was quiet. After a time he said, "I remember that when I was a boy, I thought I was going to grow up and map the world."
Auntie stroked his face.
Uncle saw Sammy gazing at the sky, and he looked at the sky too. "Would you look at those stars! I can really see how the ancient Egyptians or whoever the hell it was said, 'Goddamnit, let's name those goddamn stars and go down in history!'"
I didn't know what the ancient Egyptians had said, but I doubted they had said exactly that.
Uncle's face got wistful as he stared into the sky. Auntie kissed his face. He put his arm around her, and they leaned against each other. I saw in their faces how happy they were, and sad, too, because Uncle Katsuhisa would never be a land surveyor.
New Year's is the biggest holiday of the year for the Japanese. Every year since we'd lived in Georgia, Mrs. Muramoto held a big party. She served sake and mochi and a couple dozen different snacks. We would usually stay until about ten and then go home. Just before dawn I would get up and write down my hatsu-yume, first dream of the new year. Then we would meet the other families and go to the empty lot nearby with our lawn chairs to watch the sunrise. Watching the first sunrise is the traditional way to celebrate New Year's in Japan. The last few years, though, nobody had bothered getting up for the sunrise. The fathers were all too tired for such a celebration.
Mrs. Kanagawa stayed with Lynn and Sammy while I went to Mrs. Muramoto's for just half an hour before returning to sit with Lynn. Mrs. Kanagawa told me Lynn had been very peaceful. We made quiet small talk about the party, and then Mrs. Kanagawa left. Lynn continued to sleep, her breath catching heart-breakingly, as if breathing had become a hardship for her body. Her hair had grown stringy. I moved a strand of hair from her forehead, then pulled a chair to the window and spied on Mr. and Mrs. Miller's party next door. It was quite a bit noisier than the party at Mrs. Muramoto's. Everybody seemed drunk. All at once the men started to put bows on their foreheads and run out the front door. I had no idea what they were doing. I hurried into the alcove and peeked out our front window. The men ran down the street shouting "Happy New Year!" with the bows on their foreheads. Even though I was in a sad mood, I couldn't help smiling at these crazy white people.
I went into the kitchen and called my parents at the party and told them Lynn was sleeping peacefully. Someday when Lynn got better, we were going to get her a phone for the bedroom. Gregg and Amber both used to call all the time, so when she got better and made more friends, she would need a phone.
I put on my pajamas around 11:30 and lay on the floor next to Lynn's bed. The Rabbit on the Moon looked so pretty shining in the outlet.
"Katie?" Lynn said softly. She hadn't talked all day.
I sat up. "Yes?"
'You have to try to get better grades. Promise?"
"Okay."
"You should go to college. Promise?"
"I'll think about it."
"Promise?"
'Yes."
"Take care of Mom and Dad and Sammy."
"Okay, I promise." I hesitated. "When you get better, you can help me take care of them."
"Okay, I promise." She laughed very softly, almost soundlessly.
The phone rang, and she seemed to perk up a bit. But it stopped after just one ring, and she seemed to deflate. It was amazing that as sick as she was, she could still be interested in something as small as the ring of a phone.
She groaned suddenly. "Can we open the window?"
I jumped up to open the window. She closed her eyes, and I sat next to the bed and stared at her. Her skin looked almost purely white, like the white of the ghost of Brenda I'd seen at the swamp. She opened her eyes again.
"It's too dark in here," she said.
I turned on the light. A little brown moth flitted in. It wasn't big, not even an inch long. It landed on the ceiling. Lynn stared at it. Then it flitted toward the lamp and away again. Lynn kept watching. For a moment the party next door quieted down. Our room was so quiet, I could just make out the sound of the moth's wings. Lynn didn't move, except for her eyes. Her eyes moved this way and that as she watched the moth. It was strange because although her eyes showed no emotion or interest, she must have been interested in order to be watching the moth so closely. She couldn't take her eyes off that little bug as it sailed across the room and back again, across and back. And then I thought I saw something in her eyes, some emotion or interest, but I wasn't sure what it was.
The moth settled down, and she went to sleep. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep on the floor with the lights on. I didn't like to sleep in my bed because it was too far from Lynnie, several feet away.
For some reason my mother didn't make me go back to my cot that night. I couldn't sleep deeply, so I didn't have a hatsu-yume. When it was almost sunrise, I sat up and watched Lynn sleep for a few minutes. Then I took a lawn chair and a blanket down to the empty lot on the corner. I was alone. I thought about getting dressed, but I wasn't expecting to see anybody. I stared east, at the giant tire over the tire store across from the lot. The giant tire looked just like the giant doughnut over the doughnut store on Main Street, except that the tire was black and the doughnut was brown.
It was cold out. Here are the sounds I heard:
1. An old piece of newspaper fluttering in the breeze.
2. A mechanical whirring—I didn't know what was making that sound.
3. A bird chirping.
4. A quick click-clicking from a bug light at the tire store.
We lived below what Georgians called the gnat line, meaning all the gnats in the world lived in town with us. My uncle claimed that more bugs lived per square mile in southern Georgia than anywhere in the state. Even in winter, there were bugs.
Those were the only noises.
Here are the things I saw:
1. The tire store—through a window, I saw tires piled inside.
2. A lonely tree outside the store.
3. The gray sky.
4. A crow sitting on the giant tire.
I cried and cried. For a while as I cried I hated my parents, as if it were their fault that Lynn was sick. Then I cried because I loved my parents so much.
Then I didn't feel like crying anymore. I just felt barren, my eyes felt dry. The sky was still gray. Everything was gray, the sky and the store and even my hand when I held it out in front of myself. I wondered if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment. As soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was yes. The answer was that millions of people had been that sad. For instance, what about the people of the great Incan city of Cuzco, which was ransacked by foreigners in the sixteenth century? I wrote a paper about that for school. And then there were all the millions of people in all the many wars throughout history and throughout the world, and all the millions of people with loved ones killed by millions of other people.
A lot of people had been as sad as I was. Maybe a billion of them had been this sad. As soon as I realized this, I felt like I was no longer a little girl but had become a big girl. What being a big girl meant exactly, I wasn't sure.
I watched a swatch of the sky turn red. The red spread like blood in the sea: red, red, red, and then less and less red, until there was only blue left. I squinted as the sun rose. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, my father was carrying me into the house. Sam walked beside us carrying the lawn chair, which seemed almost as big as he was.