1001 Cranes Read online

  “Hi, Mrs. Inui. It’s so good to see you.” Rachel’s mother gets up from her seat. She’s tall and looks smart, like she could be a lawyer, like my mother, only one who works at it full-time.

  “My granddaughter, Angela.” Grandma, who’s still holding on to Rachel, nods toward me.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Rachel’s mother says.

  I know that might be a bad thing, so I murmur a hello and keep my head down.

  Keila comes to the side to get a towel from her athletic bag.

  “You should do judo with us,” she says to me.

  “It’s not for me.” I don’t like to do anything that requires me to wear a uniform. That was why I quit the Girl Scouts. Plus the fact that you have to sell stuff. I don’t like asking people to do things that they might not want to do. Mom says I shouldn’t take it personally when people reject me. But I do.

  “I’m busy, besides,” I tell Keila. “I have these one-thousand-and-one-cranes projects.” I like saying that now. I feel important. I have a job.

  We hear yelling on the mat, and it’s Nathan doing randori with another boy, who looks like he could be in high school or college. The tops of both boys’ gi are practically off their bodies as they struggle with each other.

  “That Nathan is really going at it,” says the man with the missing teeth.

  Keila nods. “He never kiais so much.”

  “Ki-yah?”

  “Ki-ai,” Keila repeats slowly. “It’s summoning energy from your insides.”

  It sounds like just yelling to me.

  “I think that he kind of likes you,” Keila observes, wiping her forehead with her towel.

  I blush, surprising myself. I feel kind of bad, because it should be only Tony who I think about.

  “Keila…,” Rachel’s father calls out again. I have a feeling that Keila gets in trouble for talking too much. I guess she isn’t as perfect as I think she is.

  “I hope to see you next Sunday,” Keila says. She gets up and joins the rest of the robed students, who have now formed four lines.

  “Kiritsu,” Nathan calls out. The students stand straight as boards and lift their arms forward, like in a Nazi salute, but not quite. “Rei.” All of them bow simultaneously.

  The session is officially over.

  First Fight

  Tonight Tony calls me. I love hearing his voice. It’s husky yet syrupy when he ends his sentences. When he speaks to me, I feel like he’s telling me secrets, even though it’s everyday talk about helping in his uncle Carlos’s store. He tells me about unloading pallets. “Do you know what a pallet is?” he asks me.

  “Isn’t that something to do with color?”

  “I thought you wanted to be a writer.” I know what he’s getting at. Just like Mom and Grandma, he thinks I’m stupid. I regret telling him that I like to write, although I haven’t written anything since my parents started having problems.

  “It’s not like I know every word in the universe,” I say.

  Tony senses that my feelings are hurt. “No, no, I’m just teasing. Really. Most people who aren’t truck drivers don’t know what a pallet is. It’s that wooden platform you put boxes of stuff on.”

  “Oh,” I say. I make up my mind not to stay mad at Tony. Did we just have our first fight? I don’t know what to do with a boyfriend.

  “When can we get together again?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Grandma Michi has told me that we are going to have to start gluing Kawaguchi’s cranes soon.

  While I’m talking to Tony, my mother calls. “I have to take this,” I tell him.

  “Call me back later.”

  I press the button to talk to my mother. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Well, you sound like you’re in a good mood.”

  “Not particularly,” I lie.

  “Well, I’m going to be out of town for a few days, so stay in touch on my cell, okay?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just taking care of some business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Have you spoken to your father?” My mother is good at changing the subject.

  “No,” I say. Actually, with church, Tony, 1001 cranes, and the judo dojo, I haven’t had much time to think about Mom and Dad. And it’s felt kind of good.

  “He needs to talk to you about something.”

  My heart starts to race. “About what?”

  “He’s the one who needs to tell you.”

  “You brought it up. You can tell me first.”

  “I’m sorry, Angie. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  I feel anger rise to my throat. I hate it when my mother does that. “Just tell me.”

  “No, I can’t. It has to come from your father.” I don’t like how Mom says “your father,” like he’s not her husband.

  “Are you getting divorced? Is Dad going away? Just tell me, Mom.”

  “Angie, stop whining. I can’t stand it when you whine.”

  “Well, I don’t like it when you don’t tell me anything!” I’m almost screaming, and I’m glad that Gramps and Grandma Michi can’t hear very well.

  “Angela. Stop it. I mean it. We will talk about this later.”

  The line goes dead, and I’m mad. I feel like tearing my room apart, but it’s all full of weird equipment. Other than my pillow, there’s nothing squishy or soft that I can crush easily. If I hit something, I’ll probably end up breaking my hand.

  So what’s going to happen now? I wonder. I don’t bother to change into my pajamas. I stay sitting on the bed in the dark. Tony tries to call me, but I turn my phone off. I want my mind to turn off, too. But it won’t.

  I sneak out of my bedroom, pass the demon and white-faced masks, and open the front door. The air is still warm; there’s a faint breeze and I hear a tinkle of wind chimes from Mr. and Mrs. O’s house.

  I walk onto the porch and jump down onto the grass. “Here, Nori,” I call out. “Tofu, Miso.” I kneel and reach for the pie tin. The cat food is all dried up. Aunt Janet, being so busy, must have forgotten to feed the cats.

  Kawaisoo Cranes

  The next morning I sit with Aunt Janet in the 1001-cranes room. I can’t believe it, but I’ve folded all the cranes for Kawaguchi’s display. All 1,000. The extra one will be in red origami paper. We’ll do it at the very end, says Aunt Janet.

  Now we are starting work on arranging the cranes on a black velvet cloth. I feel both excited and a little scared. What if I make a mistake? Before, I could just toss my D and F cranes away. But this is for real. No going back.

  Aunt Janet has drawn the design in white pencil. She explains that we have to use math to figure out how many layers of cranes to put in each area. One problem: I hate math. I don’t see how knowing what a polygon is is going to help me later in life. Or all that x, y, and z stuff.

  “You use math everywhere. Like when you leave a tip at a restaurant. Percentages—at least learn percentages,” Aunt Janet says.

  Yeah, then I can be like you and still live at home when I’m forty years old. I’m being mean and I know it. I’m starting to sound—well, think—like my mom, and I’ve been away from her for almost three weeks. I thought I would become less like her as we remained separated, but that’s not the case.

  Aunt Janet tells me to divide the design, the star, into four sections and then calculate how many cranes should go into each section. I can handle that part—two hundred and fifty. Then she tells me to arrange the cranes, without using glue, in one-fourth of the design.

  It sounds easy, but it’s not. At first I don’t use enough and I have at least fifty left over. I have to start over and pack the cranes more tightly in more layers. Aunt Janet reminds me to use the C cranes in the back. The different grades of cranes are all separated in plastic bags and labeled. At least Aunt Janet doesn’t yell at me, like my mother sometimes does. She does suck in her cheeks like Gramps at times, but he doesn’t have any real teeth, so he has an excuse. Aunt
Janet, on the other hand, doesn’t have one.

  I finally figure out how many cranes need to be in each row and the distance between each layer. Aunt Janet tells me to write it all down. I do. Next comes the gluing. The scary part. We use white glue that comes in a big bottle with a narrow tip.

  “Why does Grandma Michi like Rachel Joseph so much?” I ask while I start gluing the back row.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean”—I take a breath; sometimes Aunt Janet can be clueless—“why is Grandma so nice to her?” And not to me, I add in my mind.

  “I guess she feels sorry for her,” Aunt Janet says. “Have you ever heard of kawaisoo?” She stretches the last part of the word; her lips are a little puckered and her chin is wrinkled like a peach pit.

  “Kawaisoo. Nope.”

  “Kawaisoo means to feel sorry for someone. Like a homeless lady who smells bad.”

  So Grandma thinks Rachel smells bad? I think.

  “Mom just feels for people who have no families, I guess. Because family is so important to Mom.”

  “But Rachel has a family.”

  “Now. But not always. I think she was living with a lot of different foster families.”

  Now I start to feel bad. And here I told Rachel to go back to her own family. No wonder Grandma Michi got so mad at me.

  Later I watch television alone with Gramps (another cop show, but this time we are eating Cheetos). I mention Aunt Janet’s kawaisoo theory.

  “Your grandma seems all tough on the outside, but it’s only to protect herself,” Gramps says. His dentures are starting to make a clicking sound, so I know it’s getting close to his bedtime.

  “Protect herself from what?”

  “From you. Me. Your mother. People who could hurt her.”

  “Nobody could hurt Grandma.” Not with her wood-like marionette mouth.

  “If you only knew,” Gramps says, closing his eyes.

  Gramps goes to bed, and I finally do, too. I check my phone and nobody has called. I don’t even care that Mom and Dad haven’t called, but I wonder about Tony. It’s nothing, I tell myself. It’s nothing. And then I go to sleep.

  Runaway Randori

  The next day Grandma Michi and Janet are off to an anniversary party at a retirement home and Gramps is at the flower shop. I’m by myself in the 1001-cranes room, gluing rows of origami birds onto Kawaguchi’s star. I don’t mind being alone, because at least I can bring in Gramps’s old radio and listen to my music.

  About noon, somebody rings the doorbell. I at first don’t hear it because of the radio, but the person is insistent. The doorbell is super-loud: Gramps installed a special one that both he and Grandma Michi can hear from every part of the house. My grandmother has given me strict instructions not to open the door to anyone, but I can’t help at least looking through their dusty peephole. It’s Rachel Joseph’s mother, her forehead appearing swollen, like a balloon, through the magnifying glass.

  I keep the chain on the door but I do open it a crack.

  “Hello, Angela,” she says. “Is Rachel here?”

  I shake my head.

  “Is your grandmother here?”

  “She’s at an anniversary party. I can call her—”

  “No, no, I don’t want to bother her.”

  I see that Rachel’s mother is pretty agitated. Her forehead is all puckered and marked with worry lines. She doesn’t strike me as a woman who overreacts.

  “Wait a minute,” I say to her, and close the door so that I can undo the chain and open the door properly.

  “Rachel’s been missing for a couple of hours. It’s been very hard for her lately. Do you know where she could be?”

  “She might be at the shop.”

  “I already checked. No one was there. Just a sign that someone would be back soon.”

  Gramps must have had an emergency to tend to. Whenever he has to temporarily close the shop, he tapes up the same sign: BE BACK SOON. I tell him that he can order a plastic sign with a clock with hands that can be adjusted to the exact time he’ll be returning, but he says that would be too much trouble, messing with tiny plastic clock hands. Besides, he says, he doesn’t want to promise that he’ll be returning at a specific time.

  “She might be in the shed in the back. I think my grandmother said Rachel likes it there.”

  Rachel’s mother looks hopeful.

  “You want me to come with you?” I ask.

  Before I know it, I’m leaving a message on Aunt Janet’s cell phone (Grandma and Gramps never listen to their messages) and sitting in Rachel’s mother’s Honda Accord.

  “I don’t know how much your grandmother has told you about Rachel,” says Rachel’s mother. She’s a good driver who comes to a full stop way before crosswalks and intersections. “We were foster parents at first for several months. We obviously fell in love with Rachel. I mean, who wouldn’t?”

  I say nothing. I don’t know if I need to be older to really appreciate Rachel. My friends have cute brothers and sisters (and some bratty ones, as well), but I haven’t fallen in love with any of them.

  “The adoption was finalized recently. Your grandmother came to our adoption party.”

  Well, that figures.

  “And now I think that the shock of it has really hit Rachel. She realizes that she’s no longer legally her biological mother’s child. She’s ours.”

  I don’t know why Rachel’s mother is telling me all this. I don’t know if it’s something in my face, or some weird aura I have, but strangers are always revealing their secrets to me. Mrs. O and now Rachel’s mother.

  On the other hand, I know of only one person down here who I can tell secrets to: Tony. There’s Gramps, too, but I can’t talk to him about boy stuff. I don’t know what he’d do if he found out about Tony. I choose not to think about that.

  Rachel’s mother parks the car in the back lot and we both walk to the shed. It’s made of old wood that was once painted white, only most of the paint has peeled or worn off. It looks like it belongs in a movie about pioneering families moving west, not in the middle of Los Angeles. The combination lock, the round kind that you can find on lockers, is open. I pull the door’s green handle, and sure enough, Rachel is sitting on the ground between some plastic buckets and a shovel.

  “Rachel, I was so worried about you.” Rachel’s mother pushes me from behind and kneels down to hug her.

  “I was waiting for Auntie Michi.”

  “Auntie Michi’s not here, honey. You know you can tell me anything.”

  “Auntie Michi understands. She understands me more than anyone else.”

  Astronauts and Alstroemeria

  Before we climb into the Honda, Gramps shows up in his white van. I guess Aunt Janet was able to contact him, because he knows what’s going on.

  “We found her in the shed,” says Rachel’s mother.

  Gramps grunts. “You have to be careful,” he says to Rachel. He then notices her tearstained face. “A lot of sharp tools in there,” he says in a softer voice to Rachel’s mother.

  “Thank you so much, Angela,” Rachel’s mother says to me, and then turns back to Gramps. “Should I take Angela home?”

  “No. In fact, I may need her here.”

  Rachel’s mother waves goodbye while Rachel just stares at me from the passenger seat. What did she mean that only Grandma Michi understands her? I saw Rachel’s mother cringe a little when Rachel said that, and I cringed a little inside, as well.

  “There was a big mix-up,” Gramps then tells me. “I don’t know what Janet was thinking. She wrote that the Carrillo party was next week, when it’s actually today. I had to call in some favors to get these flowers.” Gramps unloads from the back of the van some carnations, daisies, roses, and other flowers I’ve seen but don’t know the names of. A few bunches are wilted around the edges, and Gramps tells me to peel off those petals.

  “You’re going to have to help me make some arrangements.”

  I’ve never done t
hat before, I think. But then, there are a lot of things I’d never done before coming to Gardena.

  Gramps takes me to the battered sink in the back room. Here he’s stacked green foam bricks.

  “This is called an oasis.” Gramps makes me pick one up, and they are as light as Styrofoam. “It’s called an oasis because it holds in water. I’ll cut them; you soak them.” He places a stopper in the sink and turns on the water full blast. He begins chopping each oasis brick in half, and I punch holes in them with a chopstick before dunking each one into the water until the air bubbles stop coming out. We work quickly, like an assembly line. Gramps then stuffs a wet oasis into a plastic-lined container. “I’m going to show you how to make an arrangement. Watch closely, An-jay, because you’ll be on your own for a while.”

  “Where will you be?” My voice takes on a high-pitched tone.

  “I have to pick up some more flowers from my friend in Montebello. I’ll be back in an hour and a half.”

  I’m feeling a little desperate again, but I think, Gambaru, gambaru. This is no big deal. I can do it. “Okay, Gramps,” I say.

  “Good girl,” he says, smiling. He takes out an old kitchen knife and slices the wet brick in half again. He puts the cubed oasis into a gold plastic bowl, taping it down with floral tape. I don’t see how this thing is going to look nice, but I keep quiet.

  There are rows of flowers and greens in front of him on the table, which is covered with newspaper.

  “These are alstroemeria.” He points to flowers that kind of remind me of baby tiger faces. The outside petals are orange, but a couple of the yellow inside ones look striped.

  “Astro-what?” The name of the flower sounds like “astronaut” or a word for something else that spins in space.

  “It’s also called a Peruvian lily.”

  They have superlong stems, and Gramps explains that when the flower growers pick them, they pull them out of the ground rather than cut them. The flowers last longer that way.