After my little brother’s funeral my dad bought us plane tickets for a multi-city trip to Asia. We needed to get away, we needed to be near relatives and old friends, kind souls who could nourish us and help tend to my frail mother. Still young, she had come unraveled in a matter of weeks. Her formerly full cheeks had become hollow, her eyes dull.

On the morning we left I fought incessantly with my sister at breakfast, in the car on the way to the airport, and in the waiting area. We bickered about who got more jam on her toast (So unfair.) Or whose pencil was shorter. (Did we get them mixed up, was the other one mine?) Our weary parents separated us a few times and eventually just ignored us.

As our jet moved down the runway at SFO I watched my mother drift off to sleep. The scraggly ends of her black hair splayed out on the pillow.

In flight, we rock-paper-scissored, fought for, and eventually squashed our small bodies together in the window seat, our arms around each other. I pressed my face to the window. I examined the plane’s shadowy wing and the flaps that swung up and flattened like a bird’s feathers. We squinted when the jet headed towards bright sunlight. We squealed when our ears popped. I admired the fluffy clouds stretching across the bright, early summer sky. I wanted to feel them. To disappear into them. I was sure this was where the plump cherubs I’d seen in pictures lived. I thought if I strained and held my breath I could make out my brother’s striped t-shirt and his soft black hair. Maybe he was up there now, with us again. Up high, playing.

The sun followed us during that entire daytime flight. As if time held still. Or as if nothing had changed. Yet I felt time expanding. I saw it in my parents’ eyes, in the changed set of their mouths. Thirteen hours later, I woke to the rattling of cutlery and the smell of steamed porridge. The plane’s engines whirred, the wing flaps pushed up, and we descended over the hazy skies of Tokyo.

***

Back at home our lives took on a somber new normal. I started third grade; my sister was in fifth. We went to bed without being told. Packed our own lunches. And made weekly visits to the crematorium to see my brother.

That first afternoon, my parents led us into a gray stone building. Inside, I remember feeling immediately wrapped in coolness and sorrow. We moved up a staircase, winding beneath stone-carved archways, and reached a sizeable, light-filled room in which every wall was filled with rows of windows, something like a library. Rectangles of glass occupied every wall, from floor to tall ceiling. But rather than books there were bronze urns of varying shapes and sizes, sitting in compartmented niches behind glass. Niches extended everywhere except above our heads. Up there, beyond the high walls, the ceiling was mostly an open glass skylight and a big square of pale sky.

My parents stopped at the largest niche in the room. My brother’s. His name was there, in fresh, brightly engraved letters on an urn no bigger than my father’s outstretched hand. I did not breathe. I squeezed my sister’s thin arm with both hands. No. How could he really be here, in this cold, dank room?

We stood in complete silence for several minutes, our heads tilted upward, taking in his urn and eight or nine other tiny urns in that case, each set on a small shelf around a ceramic angel with gilt-edged wings. My mother was the first to move. She sighed and her skirt rustled as she dropped down on a chair.

I stood with my hands glued to my sides. I traced a mosaic floor tile with the toe of my oxford. After a while my dad turned to us, all eyebrows, and urged us to say something to our brother. Where are you? I wanted to ask. Here, or playing in the clouds? But all I could whisper, while my dad hovered and my mom sat, crumpled, was, “I’m sorry.”

When my dad finally guided us out that first day, the sky had hazed over and the room was filled with a pale silvery light.

On future visits this is how I found my brother: climb the stairs, up two turns, enter the Garden of Worship, pause, look up through the skylight, take a breath of cool air, turn to the children’s niche, on the right side of the fountain, find the angel. My brother’s urn was just to the left.

Weekly, I witnessed my mother’s eyes turn trance-like when she saw his urn. My father would stand behind her, hands on her shoulders. But my sister and I were overwhelmed, restless kids. I slipped away to the rectangular plot of green in the middle of the room. I balanced myself on the raised ledge and circled around grasses, day lilies, and the marble fountain from which the finest, thinnest streams of water tinkled barely audibly. We tightrope-walked , arms straight, along the ledge. We chased each other around and around. And then

one of us would suddenly reverse and hiss “Chicken!” In that room where hundreds of people had been laid to rest one of us would be forced off the ledge, stifling squeals.

***

The summer before, as we approached Hong Kong our plane descended quickly into a dense urban airport. The sky was dark and droplets of mist sprayed the windows. Skyscrapers flew by on both sides of the plane. I remember seeing workers in offices and families at their dinner tables.

At my aunt and uncle’s flat, the adults talked into the night, often in the dining room while noodles and fish soup went cold on the table. On these evenings we played rough with our cousins. We jumped on the couch. We threw spit wads out the 16^th story window. We fought over comic books and barrettes—anything. We fell asleep watching the British television station.

***

I practiced my math at the crematorium. I marveled that Marian Hubert was born in 1866 and died in 1968. One-hundred-and-two years. Easy subtraction, no borrowing or carrying necessary. But there was also Joseph Burton, who died in 1943 at only twenty-two.

“Why do some people live that long?” I would ask my sister.

“Maybe they were vegetarians? Exercise nuts?” My sister would reply. “But what about the ones who died in their twenties?”

“Hmm. War? Diseases?” I’d say. “Or just bad luck.”

We explored all the rooms of the maze-like building. The soles of our oxfords slapped against marble stairs when we ran up to the larger Court of the Everlasting. I liked looking skyward. I preferred air and sky over dead and motionless. Even while in motion my gaze would follow the niches all around, up and up. Then there would be glass and sky. Always different—hazy or cloudy or bright. I remember seeing birds. I remember airplanes. I remember rainclouds.

We roamed. We touched the petals of freesia and irises and the curved wings of ceramic angels. We kneeled to smell delicate pink rosebuds.

***

As we de-planed in Honolulu, women draped fragrant hibiscus around our necks. The scent of flowers was everywhere in Hawaii, where we stayed with old friends of my dad, whose thirteen-year-old son played games (Truth or Dare) and bantered (“So this nun walks into a bar—“) with my sister during long afternoons at the swimming pool of their high-rise apartment complex. Left out, I spent hours floating on a raft, feeling the sun warm my face. I gazed at palm trees and at the rich blue, cloudless sky.  

***

Every week, once we entered the crematorium my parents let us take a bundle of mums or carnations or dahlias to the flower fountain. We trimmed the stems and put them in water. Dim bulbs threw down watery light in these alcoves with concrete and tile walls, making strange long shadows out of shears, water spigots, and stacks of vases.

It was always whisper-quiet there. In my memory we rarely saw other people bringing flowers to their loved ones. It felt like we had the crematorium to ourselves. I became an expert at running quietly and for long stretches from room to room, deftly making turns, watching ahead while keeping my gaze above. And up through the skylights the birds were most vivid. I tried to find them, soaring, wings outstretched.

Once, somewhere on the other end of the crematorium, I slipped into a bathroom to pee. It was windowless and so small I could hardly turn around without my skirt brushing against the toilet or the concrete wall. Inside, the sound of dripping water produced an unsettling echo. My sister waited for me out in the corridor, reading names on some plaques out loud. I washed my hands and turned the latch. But the door would not open.

“The door’s stuck!” I called out, panic starting to rise  in my throat.

I felt my sister’s body pressing on the other side of the door. “Turn the handle right!” she called.

“I did! It won’t turn!” I banged on the lock. I rattled the knob.

“Then turn it left!” she shouted.

“It won’t work!” I said.

My hands shook and I pushed and pulled the stuck latch. I struck it repeatedly, reddening my fingers, hurting my palms. I was crying insanely.

“Oh my God!” my sister shrieked.

“Help me!” I pleaded. It was all my fault. For running around wildly. For locking myself into this scary room. For not saving my brother for my family.

“Just wait. I’ll be back,” Her voice trailed off.

Minutes passed. Goosebumps erupted on my arms and legs. Would I ever see sky and clouds again? I was desperate, miserable. I slid to the floor of that tiny silent vestibule and dropped my head in my hands.

She was gone a long time. After my tears stopped coming, I stood up. I used my elbow to hammer down on the latch, hard. I used everything I had, as if it were my only chance. Then I decided to kick.

I only kicked a few times. The lock popped loose, the door swung open. And there stood my family—my mom, dad and my sister, their eyes boring into me. No one said a word as I stepped out, breathless. My mother reached for me. She pulled me close, into the warmth of her body.

We had all survived a terrible thing. There was nothing in the world that could change that. In years to come, we would continue to save each other, in ways large and small, from the far depths of grief. This time was the first.

I held my mother’s hand. I did not let it go. Together the four of us walked down the stairs, out of the building, and into the afternoon sunlight.