With tears in their eyes, my brothers scolded and cajoled my mother. But no matter what we said to soothe her, she continued to berate us for sending her daughter away. Unable to control my temper, I yelled:
—Why do you only think of her? Always her, and never us! What more do you want us to do? You can barely even walk and can’t even take care of yourself! When there’s trouble, it always falls on us! Who do you think will look after her when you die? Don’t you appreciate anything we’ve done? Have you ever considered us at all? We’re your children, too, you know!
When I’d finished shouting, I broke down in tears.
The bus passed through the gently undulating hills. Beyond the sugarcane fields, I could see the green woods, a few houses, and the ocean. I remembered hearing that sixty years ago the ocean was black from all the US warships and that this area now covered with sugarcane and houses had been scattered with the dead. That meant that beneath these green leaves fluttering in the breeze were piles of bodies. I could sense the foul odors and groans oozing from the decaying corpses and leaking out between the stalks. The smells and sounds reminded me of my sister’s body odor and mutterings as she cowered in the back room.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Sayoko had been talking to her baby. I first realized that about a month after giving birth to my first child. One night, my baby wouldn’t stop crying, so I pressed my breast to her mouth to soothe her. What if she were taken away from me? I thought. For the first time in my life, I could imagine the extent of my sister’s pain. And then I suddenly knew what sort of things she’d been muttering.
Tears flowed from my eyes. I took a handkerchief from my purse and wiped my cheeks. The kindergarten-aged girl leaning over the seat in front of me was staring in wonder. When I smiled at her, she whispered to her mother, sitting at her side. The mother looked over the seat, nodded in apology, and then corrected her daughter. That brought back the memories, as I used to do the same thing. The bus entered a commercial district, and the girl and her mother got off. I got off two stops later, at the bottom of a small hill.
At the top of the hill was the nursing home where my sister lived. Climbing the three-hundred-meter incline wasn’t easy for an old lady like me, but the distance was too short for a taxi, so I always walked. This was my sister’s third institution. She spent over ten years in the first one, a care facility for psychiatric patients. After that, she moved to an institution for the elderly. The staff wasn’t very attentive, so she moved here about two years ago. There were many applicants, but my brother knew one of the administrators. Without that connection, our sister would’ve had a long wait. This facility provided around-the-clock nursing care and had ties with the nearby hospital, so we could leave Sayoko in their hands without worry.
Before her death, my mother had burned up most of her savings caring for my sister. After another several years, her money was completely gone. The construction company where my brother had worked for many years went bankrupt, and he now struggled to make a living as a security guard. My other brother owned some restaurants, so he provided the funds for our sister. After graduating from high school, he had started off as a dishwasher, but now he had three of his own restaurants in Naha. The financial burden of my sister must’ve been heavy, but he never once complained. Though my brothers never said anything, I knew they agonized over what to do for my sister.
Climbing the hill took about fifteen minutes, with two breaks to rest my aching knees. I entered the front gate and passed through the garden, abloom with well-pruned weeping forsythias. The entranceway was lined with planters overflowing with red, orange, and purple flowers. When I got there, I took another break. Then I passed through the automatic doors and entered the vestibule. The air conditioning felt nice, but the peculiar smell bothered me. It wasn’t an offensive odor; it was that overly sanitary smell you find in hospitals. No matter how many times I came here, I could never get used to it.
I wrote my name in the visitor’s registry and headed up to the second floor room that my sister shared with three other women. My sister’s bed was under the window at the back. Today, rather unusually, she was nowhere to be seen. An old woman was sleeping in the bed on the opposite side, but the other two women were out. I went to the head of my sister’s bed and looked at the three pictures taped on the wall. Shortly after moving here, she had started drawing at the suggestion of one of her caregivers. All three pictures were drawn in crayon with dark, somber colors. Dark green, blue, and purple had been layered to create the impression of being deep in the woods. The pictures were similar but had some subtle differences.
The top right picture was the cheeriest of the three. Bright green and yellow were scattered here and there, but a section stretching from the middle to the right had been colored over in black, forming what looked like a hole. As I stared at the tenaciously scribbled over area, I got the creepy feeling that it really was a hole, sucking up everything that drew near. It occurred to me that a similar hole was in my sister’s heart—and in mine, too—always making