Ink and Ashes (3 page)

The unknown made me most uneasy. If I had never found the letter, would they ever have said anything?

“Mom’s obviously not going to tell us anything,” I said, “but I have this.” I reached into my pocket and retrieved the letter. “And these.” I tapped my phone and held it up.

“What are those?” Parker asked.

“Pictures from the funeral,” I said, “and the letter, but it’s in Japanese. If we can get it translated, it might give us more information.”

“How’d you get that?” Parker asked.

“Stole it while she wasn’t looking.”

“Parker!” Mom yelled from downstairs. “Get down here right now!” She must have realized the note was missing from her jacket.

Parker climbed to his feet. “Why am I getting blamed?” he mumbled. “You’re the one who took them.”

“It’s not my fault you’re the eldest son,” I said.

Avery huffed and stayed on the floor. “Hide it!”

I scanned the room for a good hiding place. “Stall her as long as possible,” I said to Parker.

“Now!” Mom screamed. Only on rare occasions did her voice ever reach such decibels.

“Dude, you gotta stop her from coming up here,” Avery said in a quiet, rough voice.

Parker tore out of the room just as I heard her footsteps coming up the stairs. “Yes?” he sang as if innocent.

I heard Mom questioning Parker, and then their footsteps began to climb the stairs. My thoughts whirled all over the place, contemplating the places where Mom wouldn’t think to look.

Forrest opened a copy of Taming of the Shrew. “How about in here?”

And then it occurred to me: All we needed was a copy of the letter. As far as she knew, we didn’t have anything else. “Duh.” I laid the letter on the desk next to Forrest and snapped a picture with my phone. I yanked the note off my desk, folded it, and threw the paper like a live grenade at the floor in front of Avery. He whipped his hands behind his back.

Mom crossed through the doorframe. The paper fluttered to the floor like an autumn leaf.

AVERY GLANCED UP
at Mom, lunged for the paper, stuffed it in his mouth, and started to chew.

My heart skipped around my chest. What was Avery thinking? Next to me, Forrest’s jaw fell. Parker leaned against the doorframe for support, his face strained from trying to hold in laughter.

Mom stalked over until she towered in front of Avery. “Spit.” It was only one word, but her voice crackled and sizzled in the air.

Avery pushed himself up on his elbows. “Spit what?” Drool spilled from the corner of his mouth. He wiped at it with his sleeve.

She placed her hands on her hips. “The letter.”

He swallowed with a loud gulp. “What letter?”

Mom drew in a deep breath and held it for what seemed an eternity before exhaling. She turned around to burn a scowl into me, then Avery, and finally Parker. “We’ll talk about the consequences when your dad gets home.” Her voice trembled with irritation.

We all nodded, trying to look properly chastised.

On her way out, she bumped into Parker in the doorframe. I couldn’t tell if the nudge was on purpose, but she was mad enough that Avery didn’t take the opportunity to make a joke about it.

I let out the breath I’d been holding.

“Oh man, that was too close,” Forrest said, relaxing his broad shoulders.

Avery rolled over and sat up straight. “You. Are. Such. A. Loser,” he said to me in a low gravelly voice. “That was nasty.”

“No one said you had to
eat
it,” I said.

“That’s how you get rid of evidence. Don’t you learn anything from watching all those detective movies?” He whipped his long hair behind him. “Most people would have just said thank you.”

I ignored Avery and made Forrest get off the desk so I could work at my laptop comfortably. Once the computer came to life, I downloaded the letter and the pictures. “Let’s take a look at the pictures first.”

Parker and Forrest positioned themselves, one on each side. Once they were in place, Avery finally lifted himself from the floor and joined them at my back.

I pulled up the images in extra-large thumbnails on my desktop so everyone could see. I pointed to the first picture. “I think this was the first day of the funeral. The incense made me really sick, and I almost threw up.”

“Oooh.” Avery shuddered. He pointed to a picture on the bottom row. “This one’s creepy. Someone actually took a picture of him in the coffin. Probably the first day of the service, before they cremated him.”

My mind went to other memories of him before he died. I remembered the University of Hawaii sweatshirt he liked to wear and how his mouthwash smelled like black licorice.

A new anguish settled inside me. I tried to shake it off and gestured to the picture in the bottom corner. “I can’t believe how young we look.”

Three pictures in the second row had us surrounded by other Japanese people. “I have no idea who these people are,” I said.

Forrest’s face twisted into a sour expression. “Hey, there’s one of your dad. Not your dead one. Your dad now.”

“Maybe it just looks like him,” Parker said, squinting at the image.

“It can’t be.” I opened the picture in a viewer so we could see it in more detail. “Mom just said we didn’t meet Dad until after the funeral, so there’s no way he could have been—” I stopped. It
was
my dad, standing next to the younger versions of us.

“Why don’t I remember him being there?” I whispered.

Had my mom lied, or had she just forgotten Dad was at the funeral? There
were
a lot of people there.

“I don’t remember anyone either,” Parker said. “But maybe it’s because our father was a judge. A lot of people knew him, and I remember there were so many people at his funeral that not everyone fit in the temple.”

“This one on the far right doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Avery and I are passing something to each other with our chopsticks.”

“Mom always gets mad at us when we do that,” Avery said. He studied it closer. “Says it’s bad manners. Kinda looks like we’re passing a . . . a bone.”

I pointed to the next picture. “And in this one, Dad’s putting a bone into the urn with chopsticks. Look who’s behind him.”

Grandpa, Dad’s father. And Mom off to the side.

Mom hadn’t forgotten. She had just lied to us downstairs.

My parents might be unwilling to give me answers, but I knew someone who could. I took out my phone and dialed.

“Who are you calling?” Parker asked.

“Grandpa,” I said. “Since he’s a Buddhist priest, he should be able to tell us what’s going on in those pictures.”

“Hey, it’s Claire,” I said when my grandfather answered. Technically he was my step-grandfather, but I loved him as much as I loved my stepdad. “How are you?”

His voice sounded groggy. I had forgotten it was four hours earlier in Hawaii, so I apologized when I realized it. He told me he was happy to talk to me at any hour, and I assured him I was fine.

“Parker and Avery are here with me, so I’m going to put you on speaker.” I placed the phone on the desk and motioned for them to gather closer.

“Uh, I’m here too,” Forrest muttered.

I gave him a look. “Forrest’s here too.”

“Hi, Grandpa,” Forrest said with enthusiasm.

“Hi, Forrest,” Grandpa said.

“I was going through some family photos,” I said, “and I saw you next to Dad in one of the group pictures at my father’s funeral. But . . . how did you even know my father?”

“Ahh, Henry.” Grandpa sighed. “I loved him like a son. But the answer to that question is a little complicated. You’ll have to ask your dad to explain everything to you.”

Maybe Grandpa wouldn’t be giving me answers like I had thought.

“If you loved him like a son,” I said, “why didn’t we know you before Dad married our mom?”

Grandpa chuckled. “You did,” he said. “You just don’t remember. Parker, ho, he was so
kolohe
, always getting into trouble. But you don’t remember because I left to spend a few years at a monastery in Tibet right after Avery was born. All of you were just babies.”

“I see,” I said.

“Grandpa, why are there pictures of us passing bones to each other with chopsticks?” Parker asked. “Mom always tells us it’s bad manners to do that.”

“Mmmm. That I
can
tell you. It’s bad manners because the tradition is associated with death. You see, in Japan, bodies are usually cremated. And then the family picks the bones out of the ashes and passes them to one another with chopsticks to put them in the urn. We start with the feet bones and then work up to the head bones so that the dead can be upright.”

“Only family do that?” Parker asked.

“Or people considered family,” he said.

Grandpa talked a little more about the funeral, and I made some mental notes, quiet rage simmering beneath the surface. I thanked him and promised I would call again soon. But before I ended the conversation, he cleared his throat. “Kids,” he said, “can I offer you some advice?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Before your father died, everything he did was for you. He loved all of you very much. And your dad now, he loves you as his own. Everything my son and your mother have done has been in your best interest.” He cleared his throat again. “Claire, you have always been my little elephant. You are courageous and strong, but sometimes you charge into things too quickly. All of you need to make sure you are prepared to hear the answers before you ask the questions.” Then he hung up.

I didn’t know what my grandfather meant by that, but the lies my parents were telling were only getting bigger.

“So what now?” Forrest asked.

“Grandpa just called her an elephant,” Avery said.

I swatted at him, but he dodged just in time.

“I guess we know Mom was lying,” Parker said.

I swiveled my chair around to face all of them. “I think we’ve got to try to translate this letter and see if it tells us anything,”

“We could find someone who teaches Japanese, or there has to be someone around here who served a mission there,” Parker suggested.

Avery punched Parker in the arm. “You’re so stupid,” he said. “If Mom and Dad weren’t willing to tell us that Dad knew our father, there might be other secrets in that letter. Did you not see how mad Mom was a few minutes ago when she realized we—I mean
Claire
—had taken it? Do we really want someone else to see our family’s dirty laundry?”

“Why don’t we try to use one of those online translation sites?” I suggested. I turned around and opened my Internet browser. After typing in the address for the translating website I sometimes used for my German class, I realized how flawed my thinking was.

“What are you waiting for?” Avery asked.

“I have no idea how to type Japanese characters with this keyboard,” I said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Do you need a special keyboard?” Forrest asked.

I shrugged. I did a search for “Japanese keyboard” and there were multiple sites that sold them. But we needed a credit card to pay for it.

“Use the prepaid card Grandpa sent you last Christmas,” Parker said.

Parker and Avery had both spent theirs the next day on after-Christmas sales. I had saved my card for emergencies. This seemed to qualify, but I had to try other options first. I didn’t want to wait for a keyboard to be shipped.

“I wonder if there’s software or something we can download,” I said and did another online search.

“
Free
software,” Avery said.

I amended my search.

The computer screen filled with enough results that we were able to sort through and pick the one that seemed the easiest to use. Once we had downloaded the program, it automatically opened, and a table with Japanese characters appeared.

I clicked on the table and moved it to the right side of the screen, then placed the image of the letter on the left so we could see both at the same time. “All we have to do now is look at the picture of the letter, find the character that matches in the table, and when we click on it, the program will type out the character. We can cut and paste that into the translation site, and then when we have all the words together, we can have it translate the sentence.”

Avery grunted. “Yeah, I just realized I don’t care about this that much.”

I turned around and found Forrest shaking his head. Avery had already irritated me enough today that I wanted to smack him. He started to leave, but Parker grabbed his arm.

“Are you saying you don’t care our parents might be keeping other secrets from us,” Parker asked, “or are you saying you’re lazy?”

“Aw, you know I hate multiple choice,” Avery said. “Okay, eeny meeny, miney . . . let’s go with option B.”

Parker and Forrest both struggled to maintain a straight face. I think they normally wouldn’t have held back if I weren’t already annoyed.

“Get out of my room,” I said to Avery.

Avery skipped out of the room, arms swinging like a five-year-old. A few moments later, the sound of the Xbox booting up in the family room floated up through the vents.

Parker let a laugh slip. He glanced at my rigid expression, cleared his throat, then said, “I’ll be right back.”

He returned with a couple of folding chairs from the linen closet, which he set up on either side of me. They both sat down, then Forrest said, “Claire, why don’t you take the first character, Parker you take the second, and I’ll take the third. That way we can work as fast as possible.”

I found mine and clicked on it, and then Forrest and Parker pointed to their characters on the table. We continued this way until we had formed a word and then a couple of sentences, but the process was slow and about as fun as cleaning toilets.

In the middle of the third sentence, Parker stood up. “How about we continue this tomorrow?”

“That’s fine,” I said. We had been working for two hours, but it felt like days had passed. The sun was high in the sky, and my stomach was starting to growl.

I watched Parker leave and then turned to the screen again. The two sentences we’d completed told me nothing:
Thank you for your answer. It seems old to communicate this way.