Matt Mikalatos - Sky Lantern

Howard Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2015 by Matt Mikalatos

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Howard Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Howard Books hardcover edition November 2015

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The author is represented by Ambassador Literary Agency, Nashville, TN.

Jacket design by Bruce Gore

Front jacket images by Shutterstock

Author photograph Wendy Chen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mikalatos, Matt.

Sky lantern : the story of a fathers love for his children and the healing power of the smallest act of kindness / Matt Mikalatos. First Howard Books hardcover edition.

pagescm

Howard Books non fiction original hardcover Title page verso.

1. Mikalatos, Matt.2. Mikalatos, MattCorrespondence.3. Mikalatos, MattBlogs.4. Mikalatos, MattFamily.5. Father and child.6. Fathers and daughters.7. Paper lanterns.8. FathersDeath.9. Kindness.10. Mental healingI. Title.

HQ755.85.M5352015

306.874'2dc23

2015026477

ISBN 978-1-5011-2349-8

ISBN 978-1-5011-2350-4 (ebook)

B ROKEN THINGS GATHER IN MY front yard.

On Wednesdays the garbage truck lumbers through our neighborhood in Vancouver, Washington, squeezing between parked cars. By Saturday the missed bits of trash, blown by the wind, assemble on the last street of our neighborhood. Empty aluminum cans, scraps of pizza boxes, plastic forks, and crushed water bottles get caught in rose thorns or shoved into the grass, half clinging to the sidewalk, arranging themselves in a semicircle in front of my house.

Our houses pile up close to one another in suburban conformity. A plum tree stands guard at every corner. My house stands at the western edge of our cluster. A fence runs alongside the street. When my wife, Krista, and I first moved here, we had no money for landscaping, so I scoured the Internet for free plants. I drove twenty miles to collect what looked like a pile of dead branches. Dropping the brown, thorny canes into the narrow strip of dirt yielded a thriving forest of Old World roses called Chapeau de Napolon. Every spring, heavy pink blooms appear. They dont last long, but theyre intensely fragrant. Its amazing what a small bit of water, sun, and dirt can do.

I occasionally peel the jungle of roses away from the fence to clean out the trash wedged into the briars. Discolored aluminum cans with energy drink logos crowd alongside microwave burrito wrappers and yellowed single sheets from newspapers. Once I found an entire unopened can of cat food, a tiny gray and white tabby face staring at me from deep in the forest of thorns.

Its a maddening ritual, picking up the trash that skitters across our front lawn. So you can imagine why I thought the sky lantern was nothing more than a larger-than-usual piece of refuse at the end of my driveway.

The driveway isnt longabout the length of a car. From the front window of my house I could see what appeared to be a large, clear bag plastered half on the sidewalk, half on the driveway. I sighed when I saw it. It was a Saturday, and it had rained hard the night before, and I didnt want to trudge the twenty-five feet from my front door to the sidewalk to peel up someone elses trash, then hike it back to the garbage can.

Saturdays are rarely days of rest in our house in any case. Our fourteen-year-old daughter, Zoey, has tennis, and twelve-year-old Allie has ballet. Myca, our five-year-old, enjoys the constant shuttling and preparations, and will happily tag along in the car, watching the world through the rain-streaked windows. Like any household with five people, there is cleaning and bickering, the making of food and the grudging cleanup, the tinny sounds of screens singing in the background and the shouts when someone cant find something and the time to leave has arrived.

Picking up is a large part of our lives. Its a rare day not to find a lone sock on the couch. Never the same sock, of course, which is to be expected, because my kids dont wear matching socks. Matching socks is a quaint obsession of their elders. I pile wayward belongings at the bottom of the stairs, hoping the kids will carry them up to their rooms. Allie piles backpacks and ballet bags in the entryway to the house, which she insists on calling the closet even though its a roughly two-foot-square space that must be navigated by every person in the house.

By the time Saturday comes, Im tired of picking things up. My things, other peoples things, picking up the kids at their activities, from school, picking up the mail or the dry cleaning or the pace or whatever else has fallen and needs to be lifted again. So, I admit it, I didnt want to pick up the trash at the end of the driveway and hoped that Krista might do it.

But when Krista bustled Zoey into the car, both of them dangling tennis rackets, and backed into the street, driving over the deflated bag, I knew it would most likely be one of my chores for the day. I knew my wife had seen it, because she called me an hour later and said, Theres a bag or something at the end of our driveway. I ran over it this morning.

I was halfway through getting Mycas shoes on, her pitifully mismatched socks staring at me while she sang a song and kicked and laughed and Allie, upstairs, shouted, I cant find the bobby pins! I wedged the phone between my shoulder and ear, knowing the right response and finally bringing myself to say it.

Ill pick it up, I said. Later. Because right now I needed to get Allie out the door and on her way.

We swirled into the car, Allie and Myca singing a nonsense song together as we navigated northward and dropped Allie off for her days worth of dance. Myca and I pulled back into the driveway thirty minutes later. Krista and Zoey were home now. She had driven over the bag again, of course. I saw the tire marks as I pulled alongside it.

It had begun to rain again. Nothing like the previous night, which had been a rare storm of window-rattling fury, but it was wet nonetheless, and Myca ran to the porch, shouting and leaping before bursting into the house. I went to the porch, too, my hand on the doorknob, debating whether to pick up the trash and be done with it.

I did not want to pick up the garbage. It was such a little thing, but in my mind it had taken on unreasonable proportions. It wasnt my trash. I didnt throw it there. Why had it rained last night? If it had been dry, no doubt the bag would have scuttled to the end of the cul-de-sac, and one of my neighbors would be debating who should pick it up.

I sighed and walked down the drive, the rain plastering my hair to my scalp. I bent down and discovered it wasnt plastic. It wasnt a bag. It was translucent paper attached to a bent wire frame. This was not what I had expected, and all my cranky reluctance disappeared, replaced with mild curiosity.

I peeled the paper up from the sidewalk. A short note in Sharpie was scrawled on one corner: Love you, Dad. Miss you so much. Steph. The stark, unexpected statement of love startled me. How did this come here, to my house? There was another line of text, a short and innocuous bit of writing that didnt hold my attention. But those two sentences, followed by a hastily scribbled heart and her nameI couldnt stop staring at them.