Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
Kit
After the party, Kit didn’t see Amy and Ryo again for several days, but Kit was fixated on the Buchanan children.
Amy’s bedroom door remained closed until the afternoons, as she usually got home late and emerged even later in the day.
Ryo had set off right after the party on a hiking trip with a friend from California around the Nakasendo trail.
By the time Kit woke up each morning, Mr. Buchanan was either walking out the door or had already left for work in the embassy building on the compound.
Yuriko was usually in her office trilling down the phone in Japanese.
Kit didn’t understand a word of this melodic language, but she recognized the difference in tone and octaves when Yuriko was speaking into a handset and when she was addressing someone in person.
She hosted parties, flower arrangement classes, and coffee mornings for the American Japanese Society, and was always heading out to lunch.
The Buchanans were busy and lived very separate lives. They expected Kit to be the same way.
This was after all what she had wanted: to be independent and seek out this culture she was so convinced she was from.
Only none of it so far was how she imagined.
She didn’t look at the Japanese women walking past her on the streets and wonder if they were her birth mother.
She felt so dramatically different from them that there was no way that she could be theirs and they could be hers.
Sally and her freckled, pale complexion and strawberry-blond hair made far more sense to Kit than these raven-haired women she saw in this new city.
She found herself skipping the landmarks she wanted to see and instead found herself traipsing from store to store trying to dress how she imagined a girl who Ryo might date would dress.
One afternoon Kit was alone in the house.
Everyone was out: Ryo and Amy especially ran full social schedules, she realized.
Kit lost three hours scrolling through her Snapchat and Instagram, constantly refreshing to see if one of them had sent a request to follow her.
Kit longed to be around them again, to soak up their essence into her own.
She spoke to herself in the bathroom as she dressed in the late mornings, trying on Amy’s pronunciation of words like water and straw , elongating the a sound.
She suddenly wanted to be a part of what was proclaimed to be mixed something.
When Amy did send a request to follow her on Instagram, she felt the need to pull back on her posts and curate them better.
She had requested to follow Amy back, and lay on her bed, scrolling through Amy’s feed when a WhatsApp message appeared on her phone.
She sat up, worried for a moment that Amy would know she was looking at her whimsical posts.
AMY: Hey, you wanna come out tomorrow? Some of us are going out to Roppongi. Come along? xx
AMY: P.S. I’m not being ridiculously lazy, I’m just over at the American club meeting a friend. See you later X
She examined the kisses at the end of the messages.
She wanted to ask who “some of us” were, but she waited and continued to scroll through Amy’s feed.
She looked at a photo of Ryo, which Amy had captioned “My Rock.” She looked at photos of white sand beaches with sunsets hovering over the horizon, Amy’s caption reading “Golden Paths only” beneath, and a photo where she leapt in a star shape on a boat in the black string bikini she had lent Kit the day before, with a shooting star emoji.
Most of the time, Amy’s chin tilted up, a knowing edge to her smile.
The captions of some photos were in Japanese instead of English, with the same generous dose of emojis of shooting stars.
In some, she was strumming a guitar and singing in a voice that Kit found unremarkable.
She tried to find Ryo, but his account was private, with just the silhouette of his face against a sunset.
The next day, Kit wandered through the paths surrounding the Imperial Gardens in the morning.
She had planned to take a train to Hakone alone and try to catch a glimpse of Mount Fuji.
She had woken up in time, but something had welded her to her bed.
To catch the train up to Hakone in time, she would have had to get up at six, leave the Residence by seven.
But by eight, she was still lying in her bed staring at the ceiling and intermittently picking up her cell phone.
When evening arrived, Kit waited in the hallway for Amy.
She examined the family portrait on the wall.
It looked like it had been taken several years ago.
Yuriko stood upright, her smile stiff with eyes opened wide.
Rick had a hand on her shoulder, giving the portrait a formal feeling, and Ryo stood on her other side.
Amy was barely adolescent. She wore her hair in a long braid that hung over one shoulder, tied with a ribbon.
Her dress matched Yuriko’s navy wrap dress, and she sat with her feet to the side, ankles crossed, in ballet slippers.
Kit suddenly became aware of a presence and saw Amy watching her from around the corner. For a second, their eyes met before Amy jumped out, skipping to stand beside Kit.
“Hey! Sorry, did you wait long? I told Linda just to let you come on up,” she said and looped her arm through Kit’s and guided her to her bedroom.
Kit was suddenly aware that she was outside Ryo’s bedroom, the door ajar, the bottom of a neatly made bed visible from the hallway.
A bathroom connected Ryo’s and Amy’s bedrooms. The primary bedroom door was also open; there was a dressing table with expensive-looking bottles in a cluster on a marble tray.
“So tonight we are going to hang with some of my and Ryo’s friends, okay? Then I have go to meet a friend, so you can either join me or stay with Ryo and his gang. Up to you.”
“Oh, sure. Are you meeting up with your boyfriend? Do you have a boyfriend?” Kit asked, her mind on Ryo. She didn’t know that he had returned from his trip and that she would be seeing him.
Amy shrugged as she sat cross-legged on the floor on a yoga mat, the back of her black lace bra showing as she leaned forward in her cropped T-shirt. Kit tried to imagine being so nonchalant about a boy.
“How long have you lived here? It’s so organized in here.” Kit ran her hand over the shelf on the wall with books lined up carefully in height order.
“I can’t take credit for that. We have Linda. We move every four, five years so I never feel quite settled into my space. I guess your house is all homey. How long have you lived there for?”
“Oh, well, it’s the only house I’ve ever lived in.”
“Whoa!” Amy stopped to look up at her, taking this in. “I can’t imagine that.”
“Yep, since I first got to my parents’ house, I guess.”
“That’s a weird way of saying you were born there.” Amy laughed.
“Oh no,” Kit said, and then she realized that Amy was the first person in years who didn’t know that she was adopted. “I’m adopted, so I guess, when I got to my parents’ house from the orphanage or wherever.”
Amy stared at Kit, her mouth open. “ You’re adopted ,” she said slowly and sighed.
“So, your mom is what, Japanese, like my mom? No, she must be American, white American like my dad? Because our parents knew each other, right? Almost everyone my dad ever introduced me to from Philadelphia is white. And I mean, like, white-white. Whereas in college, he curated a more diverse friendship group, you know?”
“That’s right,” Kit replied. She had never heard anybody refer to friendships as something that were curated. She felt Amy’s eyes on her. Looking at her face, she could almost see Amy choosing which parts of Kit’s story she deemed important and which she could disregard.
“So you never met your real parents? You don’t know their story?” Amy finally asked.
Kit examined her nails as Amy spoke. Real parents .
Then she said, “No, but now that I’m eighteen I’m legally entitled to look into it.
But I think because they have never been part of my life, there has to be a reason for that.
It was a closed adoption. So they wanted to stay anonymous.
” She didn’t know yet why she wasn’t telling Amy what little she knew about her birth mother.
Kit’s palms started to sweat. Amy suddenly hopped up from the mat and turned toward her closet.
“I think that’s amazing, your self-control.
I mean, I couldn’t leave something like that alone.
It’s like too tempting. How can you not know?
If you want, I can help you look into that.
I mean, I’m sure my dad and his government stuff might be helpful there.
Maybe it can open some doors or something.
Think on it, honey,” she said and moved to the closet.
“Thanks, I mean, I think aside from finding out some parts of their appearance, education, family background, I’m not like, entitled to find out their names and stuff. Unless I hire some private intermediary, and I don’t have that kind of money…”
Amy stopped for a moment and took in a sharp breath. Kit watched her turn the words over in her mind. Waiting.
“So what do you know about your parents?”
“Not much. Only that I had an Asian mother. Most likely Japanese,” she quickly added.
“So you don’t know if, say, they put you up for adoption before or after you were born?”
“No.”
“Or if, like, your birth mom was in a really bad financial situation or not. Or if you have like a brother or sister?”
“No,” Kit replied, her voice almost a whisper.