DBW Ch 19

 I couldn’t tell if Pill was actually asleep or just lying there. She was curled up in the dog bed, her face covered with a blanket, and she was holding my wrist with her hot fingers. She twitched and squirmed and whimpered sometimes, but otherwise she was motionless in a way I’d never seen her. I kept asking Yukiko if we should take her to the hospital, but she insisted we wait until tomorrow. Going to a hospital might traumatize her all over again, and her neighbor, who was a doctor, said it was best to keep her where she was stable. 

But there was a gaping wound in her somewhere, bleeding out. I was sure of it. And I was doing nothing about it. Every now and then Yukiko appeared beside me to ask if I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten that day because it was impossible–even the smell of food turned my stomach. So I said no thanks, and she would frown, and then she’d bring me a glass of water and insist I drink it, and while I did, she would sit and talk to me, mostly about herself since I couldn’t say much. She used to be a professor at the University of Chicago, which was one of the schools Frankie wanted me to apply to. Being a professor was okay, she said, but after she got married she felt no desire to teach, and her husband made plenty of money—she didn’t say how—and so she just stopped working, though she kept reading. She was a classics professor, and she could read books in Latin and Greek and a few other languages.

Later in the evening, she stood before me holding a laundry basket full of clothes, mine and Pill’s. Vern had brought them over earlier, lugging them in an army duffle bag. She adjusted the basket on her hip, and it looked like it might pull her down, she was so tiny, so I got up and took it from her.  She led me to the dining room and together we folded clothes on a vast shiny table that seemed too nice for this. But it was good to do this chore—the rhythmic motion, the warm fabric, order out of the chaos. It fixed my brain the slightest bit. 

“So your parents passed away?” she said. Her eyes were dark and sweetly concerned, and her hair swung at the sides of her face, and for a moment it reminded me of a small intelligent dog, solicitous and delicate. I felt bad lying to her, but I didn’t see a way around it. If she knew Frankie was alive, she would insist on calling her, involving her, and I couldn’t let that happen. So I said yes, my parents were dead. And though I had always been terrible at lying, on that day, I managed to produce a rambling narrative of pure bullshit, taken in part from a children’s story I had read years ago, Mrs. Bittlecomb’s Apple Tree. I told her that my parents had died in a car accident and Pill and I had been put into foster care. Most of the homes were terrible, except for one place with a kind old woman who allowed us to pick the apples from her tree in the backyard and eat them on the spot, as many as we wanted. But then Mrs. Bittlecomb died, and we were back to bouncing from one home to another. When I came of age, I became Pill’s official guardian, and we left the state of Iowa. We were searching for a place where she could go to school and I could work toward my dream of becoming a Sumo wrestler.

Yukiko listened to all this with an expression of deep concern. But when I brought up Sumo, she looked panicked. “Sumo? Why did you want to do that?” 

“I don’t know. When I was ten I saw a tournament on TV and I fell in love with it instantly. Maybe that’s crazy.”

“No. But Sumo is not a good life. The wrestlers have no freedom. Usually they can’t even get married. They just live in the stables and train and eat too much, and their health is terrible, they die young.”

“You can’t get married? But Hakuho is married.”

“Sure, the big stars can get married. They can do whatever they want. But that’s only a few—the tip of the iceberg.” 

“So you used to follow it?”

“My father. He loved Sumo. I used to go to tournaments with him.”

“You did?”

“I grew up in Osaka. The tournaments were loud, and the cigarette smoke was so thick it stung your eyes. But I liked my father at those tournaments. He was different. He’d lean forward in his chair, his face all lit up like a child. It was a side of him I didn’t usually see.” 

“Does he still go?”

“He died when I was twenty-one, seven years after my mother died. So I know what it’s like to be an orphan.” I felt a stab of guilt for deceiving her. But in a day or two, none of it would matter. Once Pill was better, we would leave. We would slip out of this city before anyone knew our real story. 

We finished the laundry and Yukiko started stacking the clothes in the basket, neat towers of folded t-shirts and jeans. Then she fingered through the layers, searching. 

“I don’t see any pajamas for Priscilla,” she said. 

I looked through the clothes until I found The Force Awakens t-shirt, Pill’s favorite. It had a picture of Rey holding a glowing light saber saber. I handed it to her.

“She sleeps in this?” 

“That’s if I can get her to change—most of the time she crashes in her clothes.”

Yukiko stared at the shirt, displeased, but then she took it to Pill, who was lying with her head on Sophie’s rump, her eyes open and glassy.

“Miss Priscilla?” Yukiko said. “I need you to change into your pajamas and brush your teeth.”

Pill didn’t move. But then Sophie got up, stretching one leg at a time, and she sat in front of Yukiko and nosed the t-shirt and grunted. 

“You know what Sophie just said?” Yukiko asked. 

Pill reached toward the dog. “Mommy.” 

“Your mommy says if you get ready for bed, she will show you how to play fetch. Would you like that?”

I didn’t think this would work. But Pill jumped up and snatched the t-shirt from Yukiko and skittered across the kitchen and into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Yukiko followed, knocked lightly, and went in.  

For the first time since it all happened, I felt some relief. Pill was changing into PJ’s. She was functioning. Maybe I had overdramatized things in my mind—maybe it wasn’t that bad, whatever happened. My stomach rumbled painfully. I was suddenly starving. Yukiko had been spooning rice out of a rice cooker all day for herself and for Pill, who liked it the way Yukiko fixed it, with scrambled egg and soy sauce, served in a dish that resembled a dog bowl. She would set it on the floor and Pill would bend over it and eat it like a dog would. Then she’d try to stretch her tongue out to her cheeks and catch the grains of rice stuck there, though she couldn’t get much of anything without grabbing them with her fingers. Only real dogs could lick their chops clean, and I had a new appreciation of dogs for that reason. I opened the cooker and spooned some wedges of cold rice into a bowl and scarfed them down with nothing on them, just plain. I ate two or two more bowlfuls, until all the rice was gone, and then, overcome with exhaustion, I lowered my head to the table and closed my eyes. The bathroom door flew open and Pill skipped toward me, her knees springing up under the oversized t-shirt. She jumped and landed before me. Her hair was brushed, straight and glossy, and though the bruise over her eye was still painfully visible, her nose was shiny like it had been buffed. 

“Arf,” she said.

“Your hair—Wow.”

“Arf.”

“Pill, can you say something?”

“Yip, yip!”

“I mean with actual words?”

“Yip!” 

“At least she is up and moving,” Yukiko said. “That’s a good sign.” Which was true, but her refusal or inability to speak, whatever it was, freaked me out. Yukiko was holding the white dress, and she threw it in the trash and dusted off her hands. She led us to the family room, a big carpeted area with floor-to-ceiling windows, black with night. She sat on the floor with a basket of tennis balls, and Pill plunked down beside her. Sophie, as if on cue, slinked to the other end of the room and crouched behind a coffee table, so only her eyes could be seen above it. Yukiko tossed a ball across the room and Sophie jumped and snapped it out of the air.  

Pill shrieked and butt-bounced on her heels. 

Yukiko threw another ball, and another, until Sophie had caught and collected four balls. She hovered over them, and using her front foot, worked all of them into her mouth. Then she trotted back to us, the skin of her face stretched into a bulbous clown smile around the balls. She dropped them before Yukiko but Pill grabbed them and started hurling them across the room in different directions. Sophie tried to chase them down but they were pinging all over the room. One hit a lamp, making it rock back and forth and almost pitch over, and another hit a painting and knocked it sideways before it crashed into a vase, which fell forward, spilling a bundle of dried grasses that flowed across the floor like water. 

Yukiko would would want us gone, I thought. But she was not mad. She knelt on the carpet with monk-like peacefulness, watching the chaos unfold. What kind of rich person didn’t care about their expensive things getting trashed? Maybe something was wrong with her. Maybe she was a Miss Havisham, and somewhere in this huge house was a closed-off room with a banquet table, cobwebs stretching from glass to chandelier, a rotting wedding cake at the center. 

But Yukiko was not crazy. She had always treasured her art. It made her more human, she had said. But in the weeks after her husband’s death, beauty and ugliness collapsed into each other. A 600-year-old vase had no more worth than a roll of toilet paper. That was how she felt. Sophie was her only reason for getting out of bed in the morning, and before long that wasn’t enough. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t wash her clothes, couldn’t do much of anything but feed and walk Sophie. She thought one day she just wouldn’t wake up, her body would quit. But then Pill and I showed up, two broken birds who had crashed into her home, an event that spurred her into motion because here, at last, were two young people that mattered. Which sounded weird to me, considering she didn’t know us. Though of course we had always known each other, in a way. Our lives had been woven together long before we met.