Joan Kilby - To Be a Family

Someone doused the bull with petrol and set it alight. Flames shot skyward. Heat pushed the crowd back. Silently, John said a few words of remembrance. He hadn’t known Nena long but he’d cared about her. She was gone far too soon.

He glanced around for Tuti. She stood a little apart, on her tiptoes, trying to see through the crowd. Her headdress was askew, her pigtails sagging. Someone must have taken the toddler. In her hands she held an offering of woven palm frond containing boiled rice and marigold petals.

John nudged through the crowd to get to her. He touched her shoulder and mimed picking her up so she could see. She nodded shyly. He hoisted her onto his hip and carried her to the front where he lowered her briefly so she could place her offering by the fire. He didn’t know if he was breaking any customs or committing an impropriety but it felt like the right thing to do. Then her small arm circled his shoulders. He blinked and swallowed around a lump in his throat. Tuti was too young to be without her mother.

* * *

AFTER THE CEREMONY, the feasting began. John set Tuti on the ground and they made their way to a bale, a raised wooden platform where the women were laying out rice, fruits, vegetables and spicy grilled meats on banana leaves.

Wayan, Nena’s older brother, was seated cross-legged on the bale, his legs tucked beneath his brown-and-purple sarong. At his invitation John kicked off his sandals and climbed up, folding his legs into a cross-legged posture. Tuti brought him a glass of rice liquor.

From previous visits to Bali John knew the Balinese often spent their life savings on cremation ceremonies. He had ready an envelope containing several hundred dollars. This he passed to Wayan. “To help with the funeral.”

Wayan nodded his thanks and slipped the envelope into a fold of his sarong. Then he gestured at the array of food. “Please, have something to eat.”

John spent the hours until sundown among Nena’s family and friends. He spoke with the adults but his gaze frequently drifted to Tuti. Now that the formal ceremony was over she and the other children ran around and played. She was a tomboy, climbing barefoot up a palm tree with her sarong hiked up, revealing pink shorts underneath. He smiled to himself. As a boy he’d spent half his life up in trees. Somehow he’d always imagined his son—when he had one—would be a tree climber. He’d never thought of a daughter that way. Yet here was Tuti, just like him in that respect.

One of Tuti’s aunts spoke to her in Balinese with what sounded like a gentle reprimand. Tuti shook her head and giggled, showing her dimples. The aunt smiled and gestured for her to come down. Tuti just tilted her head and laughed again.

John blinked. Until this moment, he hadn’t thought Tuti bore any physical resemblance to him or his family. In appearance she looked much like her mother’s side—brown skin, dark hair, almond-shaped eyes. But the way she’d tilted her head just then…she reminded him of his mother.

The realization rocked him. All through Tuti’s short life he’d been able to hold himself apart from her. Yes, he’d had the DNA test to prove she was his and he did the right thing with support payments. But he’d done that as though sending money to a sponsor child, as if he had no personal ties to Tuti. Even when he’d first seen her it was easy to feel separate because superficially she looked nothing like him.

Witnessing their connection in the small mannerism was living proof they were connected, that Tuti wasn’t just a distant responsibility. She was his daughter. His parents’ granddaughter. His brother and sisters’ niece. It was a bizarre thing to realize here and now—surrounded by Nena’s family—but the foreignness just made the recognition sharper.

Tuti belonged to him. She was part of his family, too. He simply couldn’t walk away from that.

* * *

“THE CROWD IS BIG,” Katie said to Melissa, the woman running the mini writer’s festival at the Summerside Library. She peeked through the doorway at rows of chairs filled with children and their parents. “I thought I’d just be speaking to kids.”

“You’ll be fine.” Melissa touched her arm and smiled. “You’ve got a warm personality. Just be yourself. Let your positivity shine through.”

“But what can I talk about that will interest the adults?” Katie leafed through her notes. “I was planning on telling a story about an adventure Lizzy and Monkey had that didn’t make it into the book.”

“The children will love that. Most authors also talk about how they came to be a writer, what inspires them, their journey to publication, et cetera. The adults will feel they can connect with you as a person.”

“At least I won’t need notes for that.”

Katie followed Melissa into the room and waited to one side of the lectern while the librarian introduced her. A brief round of applause and then a sea of faces—fifty, sixty?—gazed up at her expectantly. She spotted some of her students. Paula Drummond and her son Jamie were also in the audience. Paula, a police detective who would soon be Katie’s sister-in-law, winked at her.

“Good morning, everyone.” Katie tilted her head, waiting.

Her students in the audience chanted, “Good morning, Miss Henning.” A ripple of laughter broke Katie’s tension.

“Thanks for coming. Shortly I’ll talk about how I came to be a writer but first…” She detached the microphone from the lectern, pinned it to the lapel of her blouse and walked onto the dais. “I want to tell you a story about the time Lizzy and Monkey were walking on the beach and found a pirate’s treasure chest....”

For fifteen minutes, the audience listened, rapt. At the end of her story, Katie concluded, “Monkey was sorry to see the pirate ship sail away, but Lizzy was ready to go home for supper. She knew there would be more adventures the next time she and Monkey went for a walk.”

Applause greeted the end of her story, allowing Katie time to take a drink of water. She was buzzing on the energy in the room and grinning inside at the response of the children to her storytelling. The reworked version of this particular adventure had gone down well. For her next book she might test the stories on her class, even pass out a simple questionnaire to better refine the story.

“I always wanted to be a writer, from the time I was a little girl,” Katie said to begin the second half of her talk. “But I didn’t think an author was something that ordinary people like myself became. So because I loved children, I went into teaching.” She paced the dais, thinking about her next words. “I would have been happy doing that for the rest of my life. Then when I was twenty-five I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Even though it’s so rare at that age, there I was, getting chemo and radiation treatments.” She stopped moving and gazed out at the rows of mostly women and children. “It was pretty bad. The doctors, my family, everyone—including me—thought I was going to die.”

There was a rustling in the audience, a few low murmurs. She hoped the parents wouldn’t think her subject matter was inappropriate for the kids. From her experience children were matter-of-fact about life and death. As long as you were honest and didn’t try to sugarcoat the facts, they could handle almost anything.

She glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows, past the street and the parked cars to a row of gum trees stretching silver limbs into a blue sky. She still recalled how she’d felt after enduring the long months of surgery and debilitating treatments and finding herself still alive.

“Life is a gift.” She returned her gaze to her audience, now utterly silent. She smiled, wanting them to see how well and happy she was. “A gift to be treasured more than a pirate’s chest of gold and jewels. I didn’t die. I got better. The sun seemed to shine more brightly, the colors of the flowers were more vivid. Friends and family were more precious. Even now, years later, every day I wake up is a blessing.”