do that for me? Please? Please visit the places you and I so adored, walk the paths that we planned to walk again. Let me hear you laugh. Let me see you smile. Teach each other how to experience joy once more. Please go sometime soon, and open these film canisters when you arrive in the country that I’ve marked on the front of each canister. There are six canisters for you and six for Mattie, representing the countries on our original itinerary. Please don’t open any of them until you arrive at the proper destination.
Take my life insurance money and use it for this trip. You’ve already sold your company, and I hope that you haven’t started another one yet. There will always be time for work.
Please go on this journey. Please. I wish I could travel with you. I’m sorry I had to leave. I tried so hard to stay. I fought until I began to become a different person, until rage tainted my thoughts. Only then did I give up the fight.
Do you remember, my love, how we used to write each other poems? When you’re overseas, step outside, look at the stars, and think about those poems. I was bound to you when you wrote your first poem for me. You didn’t know it then, but you bound me to you and we can never be unbound.
Please grant me my final wish. It won’t be easy, I know. But take this trip for me, for Mattie, for yourself. Leave your footprints in foreign lands, and cherish each other along the way. You both used to joke and laugh and smile so much. One of the greatest joys of my life was watching you two laugh together. And you need to laugh again. You will laugh again.
I love you, Ian. Remember what I wrote—that we are bound together and nothing can unbind us. Not time. Not distance. Not physical separation. The love I feel for you both can’t be pulled apart, because that love is like an ocean, and you’re both the salt and the water of that ocean.
I will love you and Mattie forever.
Your Kate
Ian put his head in his hands and began to weep.
Only much later was he able to trace her words with his forefinger and think about them. He didn’t want to travel to Asia without Kate. In so many respects, such a journey would be hollow, bereft of color. And yet their little girl seemed so lost, such a shadow of her former self. He’d tried in countless ways in countless moments to shine a light on her, to purge her of this shadow. And though sometimes his light settled on her face, these moments were as fleeting as the flight of falling leaves.
Ian reread the letter again and again until exhaustion rendered him nearly incapable of thought or emotion. Lying down beside Mattie, he pulled her close, kissing her, closing his eyes, letting darkness come to his rescue.
JAPAN
Memories Awoken
“ONE KIND WORD CAN WARM THREE WINTER MONTHS.”
—JAPANESE SAYING
“It’s not so bloody bonkers in here, is it?” Ian asked, helping Mattie to her seat, relieved to be free from the press of bodies on Tokyo’s sidewalks.
Mattie studied the mini conveyor belt in front of her, which carried servings of sushi to customers lining a long table. Different-colored plates held the sushi, and Mattie glanced from one to another. “Why are there so many colors?” she asked, exhausted from the lengthy flight, her voice slow and steady—so different from her father’s, with its Australian accent and his tendency to run words together.
Ian nodded to a passing waitress. “Well, each plate represents a different amount of money, my little ankle biter. The green plates hold the cheapest sushi, I reckon. The blues ones might be in the middle, the red ones the most expensive, and so on. That’s how they do it over here—keeps things moving fast and efficient.”
“Oh.”
“Care to have a go at it?”
“Sure.”
The waitress, dressed in a black T-shirt and skirt, asked if they wanted something to drink. Ian tried to remember Japanese, pulling a few phrases from his past life. After the waitress had taken his order and left, he put his arm around Mattie, who was rubbing the end of one of her long braids against her chin. “She must think I’ve got kangaroos loose in the top paddock,” he said, seeking to put a smile on Mattie’s face, a task that had become an obsession of his. “I don’t know