Read Online Sisters of Heart and Snow by Margaret Dilloway - Free Book Online

From the time he was born she was able to carry him and change his diapers. Drew and I were either best friends or bad rivals. Nothing in between.
    An aroma like a museum storeroom, musty and woodsy, wafts up. I take out a different box. This one has recipe clippings and citizenship awards from elementary school, fading Mother’s Day construction-paper flowers and other random bits. Swimming medals for me, fancy embossed certificates for Drew’s viola competitions. I hadn’t known Mom was so sentimental. I run my hand over it. “Drew. Did you know Mom saved all this?”
    Drew glances in. “Junk. Not important.”
    I put my hand around a heavy bronze medal. First place, CIF state champion, freestyle. The trophy for the team is still displayed in a glass case in the high school office. “Mine are.”
    â€œWell. I don’t need mine.” Drew turns away with a shrug.
    She’ll want them one day. Drew often talks first, thinks later. I dig into the bottom layer of the box. A sturdy but slightly crushed brown cardboard shipping box, about eleven by fourteen, held together by disintegrating brown packaging tape, emerges. It’s covered in stamps and postmarks with Japanese writing as the return address, and my mother’s name and address printed in careful English. I wish I could read the Japanese, but as I said, I’m Asian in heritage only.
    Who sent this to her? My mother kept in contact with nobody in Japan; as far as I knew, her whole family was gone. Her parents died when she was a young adult, in a train accident, I think. No siblings. Not even any cousins.
    The shipping box is postmarked June 20, 1972, the year my parents married. I open the side and slide out the contents. A book. Or a big antique photo album, brown leather softened by the touch of hundreds of hands, bound with delicate red silken thread. A book, I realize, turning it over. The back of the book to us is the beginning in Japan. I’d learned that from looking at Chase’s manga, Japanese comic books.
    â€œWhat is it?” Drew peers over my shoulder, her breath on my ear, loud and moist. I twitch in annoyance, the way I did when she used to read over my shoulder.
Whatcha reading, Rachel? You’re not really reading, because your mouth isn’t moving. You’re pretending. Stop ignoring me. Why won’t you read to me?
    â€œRecognize it?” I say.
    Drew opens the cover with an awful crackling sound. We freeze. “Let’s be careful.”
    We sit on the floor and hold the book between us, resting each side on one of our knees. The cover features an embossed horse with a samurai astride it, accented in gold leaf, no color. The samurai has long, flowing hair and waves a sword. A story about a warrior? A history book?
    â€œIt looks vaguely familiar,” Drew says. She twists her mouth into a pout and taps her chin with her left index finger, the Drew thinking pose she’s had ever since she was about two. She used to do it for the drama, and it stuck. Sometimes I do it, to imitate her.
    I open the album to the first page. It’s made of yellowed parchment, the edges rough, and smells of ink and old paper. The characters are handwritten, each symbol a work of art in and of itself. I, of course, have no idea what it says. I turn the page.
    On this one, all by itself, is a painting like an image out of an illuminated manuscript. A young Japanese girl holding a sword stands in front of a full-grown samurai, as if she’s fighting him. Two little boys are in the background, grinning. Farmland stretches behind them to a nearby mountain range.
    I turn the page. A beautiful Japanese woman in a red kimono rides a white horse wearing fancy crimson dress regalia. The woman holds a bow and arrow. Another arrow speeds toward a frightened monk in an orange robe. A whole crowd of monks stand before him, seemingly ready to turn on their heels and run. Behind the woman is a male samurai