Kira-Kira

  Even after my parents arrived, Hank still didn’t leave. He waited until Sam was released. We all went up to Sam’s room to get him. The doctor had said we were lucky the trap hadn’t broken any bones. My father’s face contorted when he saw Sam’s bandaged leg. My mother kept asking the doctor what she could do, and the doctor kept saying, “It’s all under control now.”

  We took Sam into the lobby, where my parents thanked Hank profusely. I found myself embarrassed at the smells emanating from my mother. Back in Sam’s room the doctor had sniffed once at the air and looked around for the source of the smell. What the doctor smelled was my mother’s pad that she hadn’t had time to change. But if Hank noticed, he didn’t let on. He didn’t sniff the air or anything. He showed Sam a disappearing coin trick, and then he left.

  Sam and Lynn rode with my father, and I rode with my mother. I knew I would be in trouble for the way the picnic had gone. I was afraid to mention our bicycles, still lying in the grass. Lynn wouldn’t be in trouble because she was sick, and Sam wouldn’t be in trouble because he was hurt. I waited to hear how I would be punished. Instead, my mother did not speak a word. She looked terrible. The whole car smelled from her pad, but I didn’t open the window because she might be insulted.

  At home later my mother gave my father and me sardines and rice. Even though Lynn was sick tonight, Sam was allowed in the bedroom. He and Lynn went to sleep. I was tired of sardines and rice and just picked at my food. My father was silent, not the normal type of quietness that I expected from him, but a dark, smoky, angry silence that I had never seen before.

  “You’ve got a long day tomorrow,” said my mother.

  All my father’s days were long. He worked seven days a week, every week. He hadn’t taken a vacation the whole time we’d lived in Georgia. My father seemed to remember about his hard day tomorrow, and his smoky anger faded. My mother looked at me. “Clean up and get to bed. Tomorrow I want you girls to see how much money you’ve saved. We have to get something for that Ginger and especially that Hank Garvin.”

  “We hardly have any money saved.”

  My mother’s face darkened, and my father stepped forward. “We’ll get ’em something good.”

  “Dad?” I said. “Our bicycles are still out there. I’m sorry.”

  There was a long pause. I saw how exhausted my father was. “I’ll go get them,” he finally said.

  I lay awake on my cot for a long time. I wanted to hear when my father got home. When he returned, my mother met him at the door. “They’re gone,” he said tiredly.

  “Well, we can’t afford new ones.”

  Their voices moved farther away. Late into the night I could hear my parents sitting in the kitchen talking, on and on, and I knew they were talking about us kids, in the way they could talk about us endlessly and never get bored. Sometimes it seemed that one way or another, no matter what my father was saying, he was talking about us. He was talking about all the things he could do for us—and, more often, all the things he could not.

  chapter 12

  LYNN DIDN’T RETURN to school in the fall. My parents told me it was her anemia, but when I looked up “anemia” in our new dictionary, this is what I found: a condition in which the level of hemoglobin in the blood is below the normal range and there is a decrease in the production of red blood cells, often causing pallor and fatigue. Pallor and fatigue didn’t seem bad enough to make someone miss so much school.

  Then Lynn was hospitalized in a nearby, bigger town for part of October. Some days, when my mother spent the day and night at the hospital, my father brought Sammy and me to the hatchery with him. A few times we slept overnight at the hatchery. There was a TV in a back room, so we watched that and read our books all day. We didn’t even go to school some days. We didn’t take as many baths. My parents could have arranged for us to stay at our aunt and uncle’s house and go to school, but they didn’t. It was as if my father didn’t even want us to attend classes, because he wanted us there with him, where he knew we were safe.

  The hatchery was a big, concrete, windowless building in the middle of a beautiful field. Unlike at the poultry factory, we could come and go freely at the hatchery. All we had to do was wash the bottoms of our shoes in soapy water each time we went inside. The sexers wore surgical masks so they wouldn’t inhale the dusty down from the baby chicks.

  I’d been excited to see all the baby chicks. The workers tolerated me and Sammy as we walked through the sexers’ workroom. We got to touch the males, because nobody cared about them. Each one looked different: skinny, fat, all yellow, yellow and brown, big, small.

  During the breaks we would sit outside with the sexers. Most of them smoked, and they all seemed tired all the time. Even my father seemed tired, too tired even for me and Sammy. One break we sat next to a young sexer blowing smoke rings. When he finished one cigarette, he would light another. He looked at me and Sammy.

  “How’d you kids like to make yourselves helpful?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Billy has a guy who comes around just to get his coffee and bring him refreshments. You know who Billy is?”

  “No.”

  “He’s the best sexer in Georgia. He won the national competition in Japan before he moved to the States. He can sex twelve hundred chicks an hour with one hundred percent accuracy.”

  I guessed that was really good. One of the other sexers said, “Billy Morita.” He shook his head admiringly.

  “How many can you do an hour?”

  “A thousand, ninety-eight percent accuracy.”

  Another sexer said, “Hey, yeah, you kids could light our cigarettes and bring us coffee.”

  I looked to my father to see what he thought, but he was staring into space, in another world. “Okay,” I said.

  So when they started working again, Sammy and I kept busy bringing them coffee, scratching their backs, lighting their cigarettes in the break room, and so on. Our father saw we were having fun. I could tell once that under his mask he was smiling. Our father was the only one who didn’t ask us for anything, but we brought him things anyway. We always brought him coffee when it was the freshest and hottest, and when one of the hatchery assistants bought doughnuts, we saved our father a jelly one, because we knew that was his favorite.

  There were several incubators and hatchers where the eggs stayed warm until the chicks were born. When they opened the incubators, we got to look in and see hundreds of thousands of white eggs. The warm air rushed out—the temperature had to stay at around ninety-nine degrees. On another day we got to look into the hatchers and see hundreds of thousands of yellow chicks. As soon as the chicks were born, the sexers hurried to separate the males from the females. The sexers worked for twelve hours in a row, and then they slept while a new batch of eggs warmed. They would wake up a few hours later, when the new batch was born.

  The sexers got paid half a penny for each chick. Most of them had gone to school in Chicago or Japan to get this job. Chicken sexing was invented in Japan. Then a Japanese man came to Chicago and started a school to teach Japanese Americans how to sex chickens. That’s where my father had learned, before he and my mother opened their store. He’d worked at a hatchery before I was born, but the work at the hatchery was seasonal, and once I was born, he needed to make more money.

  The inoculators were all white women. They stuck needles full of medicine into the female chickens, so the females wouldn’t get sick and die. Angel was kind of the inoculators’ boss. Angel was a big burly woman with bandages around her ankles because she said standing all day hurt her legs.

  The first day we visited, Sammy and I shyly watched her work. Finally, I had to ask her something.

  “Does the needle hurt them?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Does it hurt the chicks when you stick the needle into them?”

  “Honey, do I look like I can talk to chickens?” I didn’t know how to answer that. She softened. “I don’t think it hurts them
unless you accidentally break their neck. That happens sometimes.”

  I looked into a garbage can and saw a couple of limp chicks inside. Sammy started to look inside too, but I pulled him away. I couldn’t do anything about the chicks, but at least I could protect Sammy from seeing them.

  I took him into the back room. Even in there, we could hear the racket from hundreds of thousands of chicks chirping. We watched TV until my eyes hurt. Then I dressed Sammy in his soldier pajamas, and I put on my pajamas with the lace collar that my mother had made for me.

  When all the sexers came in to sleep, most of them looked at Sammy and me and smiled the way Lynn smiled at us when she thought we were being delightfully immature and young. One gray-faced old sexer said to me, “Good night, Miss Lacy.” He laughed as if he were quite funny. I smiled politely. The grown-ups didn’t even change clothes. They just got in their sleeping bags and fell asleep. All of us slept in the same room together. Except for the gray-faced old sexer, no one even said good night to anyone else. I think they were too tired.

  My father got to sleep for only four hours before it was time to go back to work. When I saw him getting ready for work, I said, “How come you have to get up now?”

  “Because the chickens are ready now,” he said.

  I went back to sleep. It was storming outside; the hatchery manager had told the sexers that there was a tornado warning. I liked being in a warm room, any warm room, when it stormed. I wished Lynn could be with us. Maybe I would not like the storm so much if I had to lie in a hospital room, even if I was warm and my mother was with me. Just as I was drifting off I heard shouting from the main part of the hatchery. I searched the wall for the light switch but couldn’t find it. I couldn’t even find the crack from under the door. In a minute, though, I found the door and opened it. Outside was completely dark, but several people were shouting.

  “Get a flashlight!” yelled one man.

  “Why didn’t the backup go on?” said another.

  A flashlight came on, and I followed its light to the incubator room. The hatchery manager’s face screwed up into one big scrunched-up frown. I saw my father in the dim light and walked over to him. He and the other sexers had taken down their masks. Their room was dark. My father put an arm around me.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “The power’s out, and the backup generator’s not working. If the incubators cool off for too long, they may lose part of the hatch.”

  “You mean the baby chicks will die?”

  “Or come out deformed.”

  “Should I call Mr. Lyndon?” called out a man.

  Everyone fell silent.

  Finally, the hatchery manager said grimly, “Not yet.”

  “Who’re we going to get to fix the generator at this hour?”

  Another silence.

  The hatchery manager went to a phone, and we could hear him talking softly. After awhile all he was saying was “Yes, sir,” over and over. We all sat in the incubator room so our heat would keep the room warm. Before long we heard a siren in the distance. Then a sheriff entered with the man to fix the backup generator.

  “Power’s out all over the county,” said the sheriff.

  My father sent me to bed. I lay next to Sammy in the total darkness. Mr. Lyndon must have been a pretty powerful person to get a man to fix his generator and get a sheriff’s escort in the middle of the night. That’s what I was thinking about as I fell asleep.

  In the morning the storm had ended. I lay in bed until Sammy woke up. That took several hours. I just lay there and thought about every single thing I could think of that had ever happened to me. It was the longest I ever stayed still in my life. I thought about the Chinese lady in Iowa who could take her teeth out, about driving to Georgia, about a boy at school who was kind of cute. I thought about Lynn being sick. For everything in my life, I would ask, Why? Why didn’t the Chinese lady have teeth? Probably it was because she didn’t brush them enough. I asked myself why we had to move to Georgia. It was because my father needed to work at this hatchery so he could support us better. Why did I kind of like that boy? Because he was kind of cute. And why was Lynnie sick? Why? There was no answer to that.

  Later that day I stole a couple of male chickens and set them down in the field. “Be free!” I said. Sammy and I walked across the street, to a pecan grove, and picked up nuts from the ground. Sammy had crazy bizarre teeth like rocks, and he would crack the nutshells so we could eat the insides. I remembered when we first arrived in Georgia and I saw all the mansions and all the fruit and nut trees. I thought almost everything would look beautiful like this pecan grove. I thought that there would be mansions and orchards everywhere and that nuts and fruit would fall down and roll through the streets whenever the wind blew the trees. I thought that maybe at first nobody would like Lynn but that once everybody got to know her, she would be the most popular girl in her class and be homecoming queen someday in high school. And I still thought this might be possible for her.

  On Halloween night my parents brought my brother and me to visit her in the hospital. I was dressed as a fairy godmother. I pulled glitter off my dress and threw it over Lynnie and said, “Kira-kira!” She was thin and pale, with circles under her eyes. The glitter fell in a sparkly rain all around her. She smiled.

  My parents smiled, but weakly. They were tired. To pay Lynn’s medical bills and our new mortgage, my father worked almost constantly. When he was home, all he thought about was Lynn. Our whole lives revolved around what Lynn wanted, what was good for Lynn, and what more we could do for Lynn.

  Lynn came home the first week of November, on a rainy Saturday. We had decorated her room and put up a streamer that said WELCOME HOME. We’d bought the streamer at a store. It was the same color as Christmas tinsel. In the store it had seemed beautiful, but with Lynn lying in bed so pale and sick, the streamer seemed all wrong. My father took it down silently.

  We quickly formed a ritual. Every night after my mother washed Lynn down, the whole family sat in our bedroom while I read to Lynn from the encyclopedia set my father had bought her for her birthday in September. It was used and it wasn’t Encyclopœdia Britannica—we couldn’t afford that—but Lynn loved it anyway. As she always had been, Lynn was obsessed with the ocean, especially the ocean by California. I read anything in the encyclopedia set we could think of that concerned the ocean. She liked to know about everything, from the most peaceful tiny fish to the hungriest shark. Lynn thought it was all fascinating, and so did I. Some nights after I read, she wanted my parents to leave, and she and I talked about the houses we would live in someday by the sea. Our houses would boast huge picture windows, and palm trees would grow in our front yards. Then I would go into the living room and sleep on my cot next to the couch.

  Sometimes I played hooky to be with Lynn. I wrote fake excuse letters from my mother to show the teacher, and sometimes when the teacher asked me directly what was wrong with me, I lied and said I’d had a fever the previous day. At home I read the encyclopedia to Lynn or combed her hair or painted her nails. One day she looked very sad and told me she wished she had some glittery pink polish. I didn’t have any money, but I walked down to the five-and-ten store. I’d decided to steal Lynn some polish. I’d never stolen anything before, but it couldn’t be hard.

  When I arrived at the store, nobody was there except a lady at the front cash register. She was reading a magazine.

  First I looked around the aisle where they kept bandages and antiseptic. Then I pretended to be interested in tennis shoes a couple of aisles down. Finally, I approached the nail polish. Nobody was in that aisle. This was too easy! I stuck some beautiful pink polish in my pocket and walked calmly out. I smiled as I walked through the door. It had been raining earlier, and a rainbow filled the sky. The sky was beautiful! Suddenly, I felt a hand grab my upper arm. I didn’t even turn to look—I wrested my arm away and ran and ran. I kept waiting for someone to catch up with me, but no one ever did. I never looked back.
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  At home I painted Lynn’s nails shimmery pink. She seemed so pleased, I didn’t regret what I’d done. But before I got in bed later that night, I hung out the alcove window and looked up and down the street for the sheriff. The street was empty, so I slept peacefully.

  The next morning before I left for school, I checked on Lynn. She was sound asleep, but her arms hung outside the blanket. Her nails looked pretty, and she was smiling slightly.

  I hated to wake her up, but I had to, to give her her medicine. Eventually, when she got better, maybe some days I would let her slide and not force her to take her medicine. A part of me regretted making her miserable in this way—I think some of her pills made her feel even more awful than she already felt. Some days I think she was really miserable, because she cried a lot. In a way, I’d had to steel my heart to her crying. You need to steel yourself to a lot of things when someone in your family is really sick. I was going to give Lynn every chance to get better no matter how miserable it made her. I shook her awake.

  “It’s time for your pills!”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.”

  She groaned softly as I propped her up. I never even asked her why she groaned, never asked her what exactly hurt when I did that. I didn’t even know what made her hurt and what, if anything, made her feel good. All I knew was that my parents were at work, and it was my job to give her some pills.

  I waited until she swallowed her water. Then I gently laid her back down. I got Sammy ready for school and called Mrs. Kanagawa, who sat with Lynnie during the days. As I was leaving she’d turned her head a bit and was admiring her pretty nails. I was in a good mood all day and was even able to answer a question during history.