And Then the Sky Exploded Read online

  To Lee Spice — whose wisdom, insight, and compassion are an endless inspiration.

  This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the World.

  — Sadako Sasaki’s monument inscription, Hiroshima

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1.1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 3.1

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 7.1

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 8.1

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 13.1

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  August 6, 1945

  Yuko hated eight o’clock in the morning.

  Every day, whether there was school or not, Yuko’s mother shook her awake at exactly eight o’clock. This day was no different. Even though it was August 6th and even though August 6th was Yuko’s birthday.

  “Rise up, Yuko, and greet the morning sun. Bed is for lazy, flop-eared dogs. The world awaits those who leap from their beds and run to meet it.”

  Yuko’s mother said those words, or words very similar to those, every morning. Yuko didn’t bother to answer. Instead she rubbed her eyes, yawned, and pushed back the covers.

  Her mother stopped at the door, turned back to Yuko and smiled. “Happy birthday, Yuko.”

  Yuko smiled back at her mother, spun on her bed and dropped her feet into the slippers that were in the same place they always were, where she had left them the night before as she climbed into bed at the end of what had been a long, tiring day.

  Yuko’s smile disappeared and she groaned as she remembered that this day would be the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. She and all her friends from the Keiko Hiroshima Prefectural Girls’ School would be out in the streets helping to tear down buildings that could block the way of people needing to move about if American bombs were to rain down on the city.

  The work was back-breaking and never-ending. Every time one building was down and the cleanup completed there was another … and another. It wasn’t the way Yuko wanted to spend her eleventh birthday.

  Yuko was careful to wear the same clothes she had worn the day before, her summer school uniform. Even though her mother had washed it last night, it was far from clean. It would never be really clean again. But she would wear it again today. There was no point getting another of her summer school uniforms filthy. All of her classmates had taken to re-wearing the same clothes day after day for the same reason.

  The girls had sewn the uniforms themselves and had been very proud of them at the time. Now they were unpleasant reminders of a war that it seemed would go on forever. And of the bombs that everyone said would one day target Hiroshima just as they had so many other Japanese cities.

  Yuko washed her hands and face in the basin that sat next to her bed, then pulled on the uniform, the once new shimmer of the almond-brown fabric now the dullness of spring mud. She smoothed her hair with both hands and stared out of her room toward her brother Kiyoshi’s bedroom. It was much smaller than her own, Yuko had often thought with pride.

  Her waking of her brother was another of the things that happened every single morning at exactly the same time. Eight-fifteen. Yuko sometimes wondered unhappily about why her brother got to sleep a quarter of an hour longer than she did.

  But today she didn’t think about that. Or even about the work that was ahead of her. Instead she wondered if there would be a present waiting for her when she got to the kitchen. Even in these war years when things had been difficult for Yuko’s family, her mother had never failed to have something sitting on the table for her or her brother on birthday mornings.

  Would today be the same?

  As she moved down the narrow hall to her brother’s room, her slippers making a gentle swishing on the wooden floor, she happened to glance out the window that faced the west.

  At that exact instant a blinding flash — the light of a thousand thousand suns — tore apart the sky above the city.

  And Yuko’s world would never be the same.

  PART 1

  The Secret

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was hot in the church. Hot and sticky. Uncomfortable. I was wishing I were somewhere else.

  I guess I shouldn’t call it a church. It was a funeral home. The building looked sort of like a church on the outside but inside there were no church services — just funerals.

  I’d always figured funerals were all about sad — with mourners looking sad, and the minister looking sad, and the people who worked in the funeral home, all in dark suits and serious, sad faces.

  And, of course there’s the deceased. Which is why everybody is sad. Someone has died — the deceased. I had already learned it’s better to say “the deceased” than to use any phrase that has the word dead in it. People don’t like that, especially the mourners. At this funeral I was one of the mourners.

  It was my first funeral. I’d managed to get all the way to fourteen years old, well, almost fourteen, without having to watch someone I knew be buried. But that all came to an end on October 16, 2015. My great-grandfather had died five days before — October 11 — same day as my sister Carly’s birthday. She was fifteen — one year and twenty-two days older than me.

  But since my great-grandpa had died that morning we didn’t do much birthday celebrating, which Carly was totally bummed about. I was okay with the no-celebration part because it meant one less day of the year that I had to pretend to like my sister. The other ones were Christmas and Thanksgiving. Christmas makes sense, I guess — you’re supposed to be nice to everybody on Christmas Day.

  But I could never figure out Thanksgiving. Mom says it’s the day we’re supposed to be thankful for all of our blessings. And I don’t have a problem with that. It’s just that I don’t consider Carly a blessing. Actually the best year was the one when my sister’s birthday and Thanksgiving were the same day. Cut out exactly one third of the “be-nice-to-Sis” days.

  That was back when we lived in Canada, where Thanksgiving is a lot earlier than here in America.

  I was hoping that this year we’d just blow off Carly’s birthday altogether, but no luck. I mean even Carly could sort of understand that it wasn’t really appropriate to have a party with cake and candles and girls taking selfies on the day Great-Grandpa Will died. But Mom promised Carly that we’d celebrate her birthday a couple of weeks later.

  We called him GG Will which is a lot simpler than Great-Grandpa Will, especially if you had to say it a whole bunch of times in a row.

  William Deaver — that was his real name. He was my mom’s grandpa. He had been a scientist and a professor and was the smartest person I’d ever met. He was also the coolest ninety-six-year-old guy in the world. How many guys on their ninety-third birthday are out there playing street hockey with their great-grandkids? Of course, he mostly played goal and we all maybe took it a little easy when
we were shooting at his net. But he was out there laughing and having fun and even yelling at everybody on his team. He made a couple of pretty good saves, too.

  I was remembering that day playing street hockey and some other stuff about GG Will while I was sitting there in the funeral place. Since I didn’t have any actual experience with funerals, I didn’t really know how to act. Lots of people around me were crying. I didn’t cry. Not because I wasn’t sad, I was. Like I said I really liked GG Will and I knew I was going to miss his jokes and his grilled-cheese sandwiches, which were unbelievable. He cooked them in tinfoil with an iron. Seriously.

  And he could explain stuff that was totally complicated, but when he was done explaining, you understood it. I guess that was connected to how smart he was. Although I’ve known some pretty smart people who explain something and they finish and look at you like you get it now, right? And the whole thing is still a mystery. So I’ll miss that about my GG Will. And his goaltending, I’ll miss that, too.

  Mostly I tried not to move around a lot. I figured fidgeting and turning around to look at the people behind me would have my sister tapping my mom on the arm and pointing at me: Look at Christian, Mom. Can you make him stop acting like a child? Or something like that. And then Mom would tell Dad and there’d be the lecture when we got home and I hated the lecture almost as much as I hated zucchini.

  So I tried to look around without moving anything other than my head and eyes. I was sitting next to the window but when I tried to look out, the light was hitting the glass kind of funny and mostly what I saw was me … looking back at me.

  Looking at myself is not one of my favourite pastimes. I know kids are supposed to be all about themselves and I guess I’m like that sometimes, but I just don’t like looking at myself. In the morning, I try to get the face-washing, the teeth-brushing, and the hair-combing done with as little time as possible spent looking into the mirror.

  But there I was in the reflection in the window of the funeral home. All five-foot-seven (170 cm) one hundred and twenty-two pounds of me, the same brown hair and brown eyes that had been me for thirteen years and eleven-plus months. So how would I describe my looks? Well, the word handsome wouldn’t be part of the description, but I don’t think ugly would either. Somewhere in between, I guess.

  It wasn’t a friendly face looking back at me from that window glass. I looked like I did most of the time — sort of pissed off at the world. Which I wasn’t, not really, but some kids have happier looks on their faces, not that they’re grinning or even smiling all the time, they just look like they’re sort of okay with the way life is going.

  That’s not Christian Larkin. Even though my life is fine (if you don’t count Carly), my brain doesn’t seem to be able to convince my face of that. I try. Seriously, some mornings I tell myself okay, today I’m all about happy and I walk around smiling the whole time, but at the end of the day I feel like an idiot and my cheek muscles hurt. So I don’t do that very often. It’s easier to just be the guy the window glass said I was.

  GG Will was inside a casket that was sitting right at the front of the centre aisle of the funeral home. We were in the right-hand rows, also at the front. Which meant we were right next to the casket. That’s where the family sits at most funerals, which is one of the things I learned that day.

  There were a couple of songs — hymns I guess — and the minister talked about Jesus, the shepherd, and how every sheep in the flock mattered to the shepherd. There was more but I didn’t get all of it.

  Up to then I hadn’t been paying much attention to what was going on. I’d been watching this banner flutter high up on the wall at the front of the building, right over where the minister was standing. The banner had symbols on it and I’d been trying to figure out what the symbols meant and also why the banner was fluttering. It’s not like there was a wind inside the funeral home.

  I’d also been thinking about the smell, which was sort of strange, too. Actually a few smells together. Kind of a smell mix. There was the smell of coffee, which made sense since we’d all been in this waiting room until it was time to go into the main part of the building where the funeral was and there had been coffee in that room. And there was the smell of soap and hair stuff and new clothes — like everybody had tried to be really clean and smelling okay — I figured that made sense too.

  What didn’t make sense was the other smell. It was popcorn. Who brings popcorn to a funeral? The answer is nobody, so where did the smell come from? It’s not like there was a theatre next door. Actually there was a paint store on one side and a parking lot on the other. Neither of those is famous for popcorn.

  So that was it — coffee and soap and popcorn. Or something that wasn’t popcorn but smelled like popcorn. And there a couple of other smells that I didn’t recognize right off.

  Then my Uncle Eugene got up and talked about GG Will. I quit thinking about the banner and the smells and paid attention to Uncle Eugene. He was my mom’s brother and GG Will’s only grandson (there were a lot of girls in the family). The first couple of minutes he seemed to be having some trouble and was getting choked up, but then he got rolling and talked about GG Will’s life in Canada and his work in the field of materials physics.

  This part was hard to understand but mostly it sounded like GG Will was amazingly intelligent and his work in the field of nanostructures while he was teaching at McGill University in Montreal was groundbreaking. That’s what Uncle Eugene called it. He went into some detail but I didn’t understand a lot of it. Any of it, actually. See, that’s where we needed GG Will explaining nanostructures so people like me could understand it.

  Then Uncle Eugene got to the good part. He talked about how Great-Grandpa Will was more than just a brilliant scientist … how he loved to laugh and play tricks on people — like this one time at Halloween back when it sounded like Halloween was a lot more fun than it is now.

  GG Will built this coffin-looking thing and dressed up like Dracula and all that night he’d lie in the coffin and when kids came to the house trick-or-treating, my Great-Grandma Molly would bring them into the front hall where they could see the coffin. Then just as the kids were getting their treats, GG Will would sit up in the coffin and start looking around like he was deciding which neck to bite. He only did that one year because it scared the crap out of some of the littler kids. Some parents phoned and complained. One guy even said he’d go to the cops if they did again the next Halloween. Uncle Eugene said it was GG Molly who put a stop to it. GG Will would have had that coffin out there again, cops or no cops.

  I looked over at GG Will’s coffin — the one he was in now — and I was wishing he could sit up right then and scare the crap out of some people and then we’d go outside and play some ball hockey. I knew it wasn’t going to happen but it was sort of a cool thought.

  It seemed like a long funeral but since it was my first one I didn’t have a whole lot to compare it to. But finally two of the guys in dark suits came and wheeled the casket to the back of the place and we started getting up and following them outside. The family, we went first. A lady was playing the organ but I could still hear some people crying — just softly — here and there in the funeral home.

  Once we got outside I figured we’d all get in cars and head out to the cemetery where some more stuff would happen at the gravesite. I knew this because Carly — the world’s greatest expert on everything — had told me.

  And I guess that’s what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the people with the signs.

  I didn’t see them at first because coming out of the funeral home into the bright sunshine — I was sort of blinded and couldn’t really see much of anything. Actually I heard them before I saw them. You couldn’t really not hear them since they were yelling.

  One guy was hollering, “Murderer … mass murderer!” every few seconds. I didn’t get some of what they were yelling but I heard a girl screaming, “W
omen, old people, babies, you got them all … good riddance to the butcher.”

  At first I figured it was weird that there was some kind of protest going on across the street from the funeral home. Except that once my eyes got used to the bright sunshine I realized the protest wasn’t about some vet clinic that was doing medical experiments using white rats … or an army recruiting centre … or some political decision.

  No, the protest wasn’t about any of those things.

  It was about us.

  There were eight or maybe ten people, most of them looked about twenty or so — mostly guys but a couple of girls too.

  Even though they were on the opposite side of the street the signs were big enough that I could read them. One said, KILLER OF THOUSANDS and another one said AUGUST 6, 1945, DAY OF SLAUGHTER.

  A couple of people who worked at the funeral home were crossing the street to try to talk to the protesters. The rest of us just stood there, everybody kind of confused and not sure what to do next. That’s when the cops arrived, three car loads, lights flashing but no sirens. We watched for a couple of minutes as the cops gathered up the protesters and shoved them in the back of a van that arrived right after the squad cars.

  It was over pretty fast but the whole time the protestors were climbing in the van — they didn’t fight at all which was probably smart — they kept yelling.

  “Executioner,” “Deaver the Bomb Builder,” “Baby Killer,” and a bunch of other stuff. The one I remember most was “Rest in peace my ass.” I remembered it but I didn’t get it. None of it.

  The police van drove off followed by the police cars. Then the funeral home people eased GG Will’s casket into the back of the hearse and we climbed into cars and headed for the cemetery. I noticed my dad had been standing between GG Molly and the protesters, like he was trying to block her from seeing them.

  No one spoke all the way to the cemetery. Or even after we got there. While we were standing around the grave where GG Will would be placed after we were gone, I looked around at all the people who were standing there. Everyone had their heads down looking at the dirt or the grass that was just starting to turn brown after the long hot summer and fall.