a serialized online story
by Tommy Schmitz
Chapter 10 - Older sister younger brother.
Katie and Susan O'Brien paced in an anxious trance
around their bedroom
soon after returning from the jungle
and from the stranger, Satchitananda.
They heard the Government agents
talking between themselves
from their car in front of the house.
The news about their missing parents in Kashmir
was twenty-four hours in the past,
and what felt like a nightmare yesterday
was now feeling real,
with a life of its own.
They felt physically and emotionally disoriented,
anxious and afraid. Grief was setting in --
a new experience for them --
the feeling of an unbreakable loss,
nourished without pause
by an overwhelming loneliness
it carried on its back.
And new to the girls, too, a feeling of panic, tonight,
was knocking at their door.
Susan and Katie looked at each other
and nodded slightly
and stepped slowly from their bedroom
and down the hall
and into the living room
where Oba-chan was quietly sitting
on tatami flooring,
and slightly rocking her body
out of a similar sense of panic and despair.
She moved a cup of hot tea away from her
and looked up at the girls entering the room,
their faces blotched in places from crying,
pale in places from fear.
"What is the news about Mom and Dad?"
"How much danger are they in?"
"When will they come home?"
And for a moment, through the stress,
they failed to conceal,
with conditioned cultural reticence,
the lynch pin holding in place their pain:
"if indeed they ever do..." Katie murmured.
"...ever do come home." finished Susan.
"Why is all this happening at once." Susan said in tears.
"National Trials are next week;
training is not going well." she continued.
"This man in Hebi-yama - he says he is Japanese?" Katie added.
"With a foreign sounding name? from Kashmir?" Susan said.
"Perhaps he is the one responsible," Katie said, "for our parents missing."
"And how, Oba-chan, do you know him." she went on.
"When did you meet him and talk with him,
and how could he possibly help our Mother and Father --
or our brother Jack -- from a tiny bamboo national forest,
in Tokyo Japan!?" Katie said.
"And these government men," followed Susan, "I'm confused. You, Oba-chan,
are protecting Katie and me, and also a total stranger in the forest next door.
And from who, from what?
The Japanese government?"
And you, Oba-chan - our only connection to family in this house right now -
Oba-chan, you must be hurting so much right now. You are not yourself." Susan finished talking.
Oba-chan motioned with both hands
and pulled the girls up close to her.
"My dear Katie and Susan,
I wish I could explain this to you,
and everything else that has happened
the past couple days," she was moving her head in doubt,
"but Satchitananda - our new next door neighbor -
may be some hope
for saving your mother and father...
and your brother Jack." Oba-chan explained.
"We don't get it." said Katie and Susan together,
half angry and half crying.
"Listen to me, girls..." Oba-chan said quietly,
Oba-chan does not understand this either,
but the fact that Satchitananda is here at all,
is, in itself, a miracle,
and he is here with some purpose,
and we will understand these things in time,
and probably sooner than later."
Oba-chan continued,
"Promise me, Susan. Promise me, Katie... Three things:
you will go to school,
you will continue Shintaiso training daily and compete well next week,
and you will study hard.
"Satchitananda wants to see us tomorrow night after training." Katie added.
"Yes, I know." Oba-chan said.
"You trust him? You don't even know him! Katie said.
No one knows him! And he is... what... a homeless person!" Susan argued.
Oba-chan pulled her hair back
with her hands and looked at the girls,
"I do realize that your Oba-chan
should not be the one
receiving these wise words of caution."
She paused, "especially from her own
fourteen-year-old granddaughters," Oba-chan said.
"I trust him," Oba-chan said.
There was a dash of reverence in her voice.
"I am asking you to trust him, too." she added.
"Why Oba-chan?" Susan urged.
"Oba-chan, how can we." Katie cried.
And the three sat in silence
for two, three minutes
staring into hopelessness.
"I don't know." Oba-chan said.
But I do know this:
Already, out of this chaos and suffering,
some kind of miracle has been let loose."
"We're lost." the girls said.
Oba-chan took a deep breath,
"You are not lost, Katie and Susan,
and you will not be. This miracle, perhaps,
is headed your way. Come..." she said and held their hands again.
"Come... let's offer rice and sake to your great grandmother." Oba-chan said.
And they moved
to the Buddhist area of the living room
where a photo of Oba-chan's mother,
long passed away,
reminded them of her constant presence,
and soothing influence,
in the household.
"Give your undying strength, great grandmother,
to your grand daughter, Mieko, who is in danger.
To her husband Henry in danger too.
To your beautiful great grand daughters, Susan and Katie,
and to their older brother, Jack.
And to this man who lives in the jungle...
to this man.... give him strength.
She covered her face in her hands. As did the girls.
All weeping.
All consumed by the moment
and by grief,
and now all hugging tightly.
Earlier in the day,
shortly beyond noon,
Oba-chan cleaned off her desk,
filed her working folders,
shut off her workstation,
and told her assistant
she'd be gone the remainder of the day.
When she boarded the Yamanote Line at Tokyo Station
two blocks from her office
she was making
an unprecedented and unthinkable return home
while daylight of any sort still shone.
"This is impossible, under any circumstances,"
her assistant thought and stopped to think a moment:
"It has been twenty-five years, maybe thirty,
since she even ate lunch anywhere else
but at the table in the kitchen of her own law firm!
And now she's leaving the office?"
Yesterday morning, before this aweful news,
Oba-chan had caught a glimpse
of the stranger in Hebi-yama
from her dining room window
as he cut and gathered bamboo.
This glimpse of the stranger
invoked some feeling of peace and quiet inside of her.
Normally, she'd have dismissed the event.
Now, twenty-four hours later,
life completely changed.
She had to check this out.
As purely as she was dedicated to her work,
and the logic and discipline that drove her successes in the field of law,
she acted, too, on her intuitions,
not a knowledge born of study or experience,
but a knowingness born of her feelings,
of people, of place, of things.
This knowingness was of precious personal value
to Oba-chan over the years,
whenever it made its unexpected appearance,
and whenever it did not.
She arrived home from her usual walk from Fuda Station,
threw on a pair of baggy pants and athletic shoes,
walked out the front door and turned directly into the bamboo wall of Hebi-yama.
"This is a simple program," she thought,
"I am going to meet the stranger of Hebi-yama."
And she had not walked a dozen paces
when she heard the voice from somewhere
calling to her, "One'-san, One'-san. (what one calls one's older sister in Japan, without fail.)
She stopped and stood and she knew at once, unseeing,
for no good reason,
who was calling her name.
She fell to her knees sobbing deeply.
And felt a hand lay upon her shoulder
and she turned around.
"One'-san, I am your brother, Kenji," the man said.
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(end of chapter 10
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