Kyoko Mori
BARN CAT
Kyoko Mori’s award-winning first novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, was hailed by The New York Times as “a jewel of a book, one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation.” Her many critically acclaimed books include Yarn, Polite Lies, The Dream of Water, and the novels Stone Field, True Arrow, and One Bird. Kyoko Mori lives in Washington, D.C., with her cats, Miles and Jackson, and teaches at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University.
First published by GemmaMedia in 2013.
GemmaMedia
230 Commercial Street
Boston, MA 02109 USA
© 2013 by Kyoko Mori
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
978-1-936846-40-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mori, Kyoko.
Barn cat / Kyoko Mori.
pages cm. — (Gemma Open Door)
ISBN 978-1-936846-40-5
I. Title.
PS3563.O871627B37 2013
813’.54—dc23
013012892
Cover by Night & Day Design
Inspired by the Irish series of books designed for adult literacy, Gemma Open Door Foundation provides fresh stories, new ideas, and essential resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.
Brian Bouldrey
North American Series Editor
Open Door
For Ernest and Algernon,
beloved feline companions,
in memory.
CONTENTS
ONE
The afternoon we left Tokyo in 1979, my mother dragged her powder-blue suitcase down the hallway of our building. She only gave me a pink patent leather clutch that a grown woman might use to carry her lipstick. I was eight. She was twenty-seven. Until we arrived at the airport, I believed we were going on a beach vacation instead of moving to Wisconsin.
My mother married a dairy farmer in a small town called Denmark. Our neighbors thought my name, Yuri, sounded Russian, like Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, or Yuri Gagarin, the first astronaut to orbit the earth. “In Japanese, Yuri is a flower,” my mother explained. We were the only people for miles whose ancestors didn’t hail from Scandinavia or Ireland. My mother had my name changed from Yuri to Lily.
Thirty-three years later, when I heard about my mother’s disappearance, I remembered how eager she once was to become Mrs. Donald Larson. She is a widow now. Two years ago, Don sold the farm to his niece, Debbie, and her husband, built a house nearby, and retired. He was seventy. My stepsister, Jill, and I were shocked when he died of a heart attack a month later. I meant to spend more time with my mother, but I live in Boston. Jill is in Green Bay, fifteen miles north of Denmark, so she visited whenever she could. My mother occasionally helped Debbie with her three kids. This afternoon, Debbie drove to my mother’s house and discovered her belongings packed into boxes, her furniture draped in white sheets. There was no note.
“Debbie’s not sure how long Kumiko’s been gone,” Jill says over the phone. Jill went to church with my mother on Memorial Day weekend when her son, Josh, was home. Jill dropped out of college when he was born. My mother helped her raise him. Now Josh is studying engineering in Madison. If there’s anyone my mother is proud of, it’s Josh.
“I should have known something was wrong,” Jill continues, “when Kumiko wanted to go home instead of having brunch with Josh and me.”
“Don’t blame yourself. You went to church with her.” Jill and I were raised Lutheran, but neither of us belongs to a church anymore.
“I telephoned Pastor Sorenson. He said Kumiko doesn’t participate in Sunday school or visit the fellowship hall for coffee, so it’s hard for him to remember when he last saw her.”
My mother doesn’t have a cell phone. She seldom uses a credit card. The roads around her house have no toll booths or surveillance cameras. Still, there must be ways to track her down.
“Should we call the police?”
“I already have,” Jill answers. “The officer said Kumiko must have left the house by her own choice. There was no sign of forced entry. He told me to call back if I don’t hear from her in a few days.”
A few days after leaving Tokyo, my mother and I were settled on the farm with our new names. If anyone had been after us, they wouldn’t have known where to look. My mother met Don during the single week he was in Tokyo visiting a friend from his church. Instead of going sightseeing alone on his first day, Don accompanied his friend to English class. My mother was one of the students. If he hadn’t been so intimidated by the subway map printed in ten colors, Don later joked, he would have stayed a divorced single father forever.
Now, all kinds of people can meet each other. At sixty, my mother is still beautiful. If she were a flower, she would be a solitary orchid in a rock garden. The police officer told Jill that his own mother, a widow in her seventies, had signed up for online dating.
“He was implying Kumiko could have gone to meet a man. He has no idea what she’s like.”
Jill was thirteen when my mother and I came to live on her father’s farm. I haven’t told her everything I remember from Tokyo.
“I’m at my wit’s end,” Jill says. “Even if Kumiko comes back, I don’t know what to say to her.”
“I’ll come home,” I tell her.
It’s the second Monday in July. The small college where I work in