“We’ll be eating dinner after our neighborhood walk,” my mother said. “I hope you’re fine with okonomiyaki. It’s your father’s new favorite.”
“What’s a neighborhood walk?”
“We take walks before dinner with some people in the neighborhood. You’re welcome to join us. Or, you know, you can stay in your room and rest. We made some VR recordings for you, things you missed.”
“Right,” I said. It was clear that the walk was definitely not optional. I ate my snack as quickly as I could, my mother studying me, each of us figuring out a game plan for how to deal with the other.
“You and your husband doing okay over there?” my father asked, trudging into the kitchen. “Sean, right?”
“Yes, we’re fine.”
“I’m not sure how much an English teacher’s salary covers in Chicago,” my mother said.
“He’s not an English teacher. He only did that here for a year after college. He just passed the bar exam.”
“Oh?” My parents looked at each other, unsure of what that meant.
“He’s going to be an environmental lawyer. A good one.” Of course, I couldn’t blame them for not knowing the details. All they knew about our relationship was that Sean had taught me business English and that I’d lied about a work trip to America. But the pull of my adolescent routines and attitudes called to me. Here, I wasn’t a newlywed or a dental hygiene student or even the woman who douses her pierogies in sriracha. I was a daughter who abandoned her family. “I should unpack.”
Upstairs, I found Tamami’s orange tabby cat, Chibi, curled on top of my suitcase and an old-model VR visor with two data chips. The closet drawers were still filled with Baba’s belongings. I had to transfer a small pile to a chair to make room. Nearly everything was as I remembered it—a decade-old calendar of London that a friend had given Baba still tacked to the wall, a stack of travel brochures on the dresser for all the cities she’d dreamed of visiting. A bright pink lopsided umbrella for her neighborhood strolls. Everything as it was except for the menagerie of pill bottles on the end table. At the bottom of a drawer, I found a plastic bag containing a collection of paper envelopes no larger than a thumbnail, each containing a few grains of rice. Magic rice, I used to think when Baba explained that they were blessed by a priest and had the power to heal, to make one feel whole with the spirit of God. No one in the family really bought into the religion Baba had grown up with, but Tamami and I would sometimes sneak a grain or two. We thought it might give us superpowers, the ability to become invisible when we were in trouble. The night before I left for America, I remember tiptoeing into Baba’s room and taking one last grain, imagining it growing inside me, a new me that would shed the shell of all I had been.
“Sometimes I feel like I see her in here. Not to creep you out or anything,” Tamami said, standing in the doorway. “You should put that on at some point.” She pointed to the visor. “It’s not all guilt trip and grave friends propaganda.”
“I can still smell Baba,” I said. I pictured her pumping her arms and legs in the air like she was on an exercise bike before getting out of bed. I remembered her telling us magical stories about how she had a recurring dream of being a baby and someone raising her tiny body into a dark sky and letting her float away into space. Or how she had to crawl through thousands of feet and legs in the dark like an ever-shifting maze. Baba, for as long as anybody could remember, was afraid of the dark and always kept a flashlight next to her bed in case she needed to go to the bathroom.
Tamami sat cross-legged on the bed, coaxed Chibi onto her lap.
“Look, I’m not mad anymore. I get why you left. But you’ll never know how tough it got here. Mom thought I might leave, too, and basically put me on lockdown. If I so much as frowned, she’d scream at me and call me ungrateful. Baba getting sick pushed her over the edge. I barely left the house.”
“You could have come to see me,” I said.
“Could I have, though? Anyway, I’m not like you, Rina.”
I wondered what she really meant by that. I wanted her to be straight with me: Not adventurous? Not a fuckup? Not a traitor?
“And even if I wanted to,” Tamami continued. She told me that the tranquilizers weren’t solely so Baba could sleep or have a break from the pain. Our grandmother had become violent in her final months—a glass thrown at Chibi, records shattered on the floor, a bite out of my father’s hand so hard he’d needed stitches, too many cruel things that became harder to brush off as the ravings of a sick woman.