“Are you sure you want to quit piano lessons?” my mom asks Emerald.
            Emerald turns away and stares through a window on her left, her eyes as empty as the road ahead of us. She finally responds after four minutes, “Yes, I want to quit.”
            “But why? You’ve already come so far! You’ll be graduating high school next year. Just continue until then,” my mom argues.
            “No! It won’t do me any good. I haven’t learned anything, and I’ve been taking lessons for nine years!” Emerald responds.
            “Don’t say that! You are wonderful on the piano. And if you have a problem with the teacher, just know that some teachers are like that. They’re scared. They don’t want to lose students by being too strict,” my mom says.
            “Ha! In piano, the stricter the teacher the better!” my sister argues. “It means they care more. Sarah’s been playing only for three years, and she’s ten times better than I am. You should see how strict her teacher is. It’s the same case with Roberta.”
            “I don’t care. Stop comparing yourself to others. Your teacher is a very good person, and his prices are very reasonable. Sarah’s mom has to pay sixty dollars per hour, $240 per month. I pay half that for you and your sister,” says my mom. Once my mom brings up money, you know right away that this argument is going nowhere.
            “Mom, you don’t get it!” Emerald shouts.
            “What’s there to get? Lena auntie says you can give auditions and tests with piano. Julia does them. Colleges will like that,” my mom puts in.
            “You’re such a hypocrite! You just told me not compare myself to other people, and then you go ahead and compare me to Julia. You just say one thing that makes no sense and then add ‘colleges will like that’ at the end. You don’t know anything about colleges in America. You don’t even know what auditions are!” my sister rants.
            “I think she meant recitals,” I add quietly.
            Emerald whips her neck around to face me with her eyes narrowed into a glare. “You stay out of this, Pearl.”
            “Auditions are where you try out for something, and Pearl’s right. I meant recitals. Sometimes, I can’t get the right English word fast enough,” my mom says.
            Emerald lets out an exaggerated sigh and sinks lower into her seat. Another silence falls over our dismal car as Emerald resumes staring out the window.
            I gaze at my sister. Even with her head turned sideways, I can see her chestnut brown eyes are brimming with tears. Tears from what, I don’t know. She’s been like that a lot lately. Emotional, moody, tired, reserved, and energetic all at once. My mom says it’s because she’s a teenager. If that’s the case, I am not looking forward to my teenage years.
*                      *                      *
            Our visit to the music studio–one lone piano lesson for me– has not done any justice to my sister’s somber attitude. She’s grown quite and receded into some kind of shell by the time we return home around six in the evening. She won’t speak to anyone.
            “What do you guys want to eat for dinner?” mom asks.
            Being the youngest child of a Japanese family, I wait for my sister to speak first. Then I remember that my sister is not like other people, so I exclaim, “Pizza, pizza, and more pizza!”
            “Keep quite, Pearl. Go finish your math! You have four pending pages to do,” my mom says.
            I let out an exaggerated sigh, like the one Emerald did in the car, and whine, “Can’t I have pizza first?”
            “No! Get out of the kitchen!” my mom exclaims. “I never have to tell Emerald to study. She always does it on her own.”
            “Big whoop! You never yell at Emerald either. Once you stop yelling at me, I’ll gladly do my math,” I say. It’s a big lie. I know and she knows that I’ll never do math voluntarily.
            “Hey! Watch your language, young lady! Don’t make me call Mrs. Settler,” my mom threatens.
            Hearing Mrs. Settler’s name is enough to make me grudgingly take out my algebra workbook and toil my way through something called simultaneous equations. 
*                      *                      *
            My mom decided to make sushi tacos –my sister’s favorite– for dinner. As usual, my mom and I took turns calling my sister to come down to eat, and Emerald, as usual, didn’t bother to respond. I even had to go upstairs to her room and threaten to eat all of her tacos. That’s when my sister replied that she was studying for a history test and would be downstairs soon. I let her be and ate without her. My mom and I knew she would probably make her way downstairs an hour later to eat the tacos, once they were all cold and mushy.
              That night, however, she never came downstairs.   
            I had just finished eating my dinner and needed to wash my hands, but my mom had occupied the bathroom near the kitchen. The only other bathroom we had was on the second floor of our house. Its door was tightly closed when I got there, so I knocked to check if Emerald was inside. I didn’t think she was because I saw her light was still on behind her closed bedroom door, and when I heard no answer from the bathroom, I presumed that the door was just stuck; all the wooden doors in our old house seemed to expand and compress on their own with each transition from hot weather to cold weather.
            I rammed my body against the wooden door in an attempt to loosen it, but it did not give. I then realized that it really was locked, so I went to my room to fish for a pair of scissors. Jamming the scissors into the keyhole and using a system of trial and error to find the right way to turn the scissors finally allowed me to open the door.
            My heart nearly stopped as soon as I swung the door open. There she was, my sister Emerald, lying lifelessly in the bathtub with a pocketknife resting near the soap dish. A thick, dark red liquid blanketed the space around her. Emerald’s blood was the only thing moving in there, gushing from her body, soaking the sides of her pajamas, and emptying into the drain. My head was spinning as I tried to take in the scene.
            Even her choice of dress that night seemed to emphasize her refusal to be happy. She was wearing a t-shirt she had received for free for running in a marathon last June and a pair of my mom’s old tattered college-days pajamas. They were an ugly combination that made her look, even in her gruesome state, five years older than she really was.
            “Emmy! Emmy! Get up! Get up! What are you doing?” I shrieked. I frantically shook her shoulders, but there was no response. Her face, wet with tears, was crumpled into her usual frown. As I took her bloody hand, my heart skipped another beat when I realized that it was barely connected to her arm.
            I dropped her hand and my chest started to heave with sobs. “Mom, mom! Emmy’s gone! Emmy’s dead!” I screamed from the top of her lungs. I heard my mother rush up the stairs and felt her push me aside when she entered the bathroom.
            “Oh my god, Emerald! Don’t tell me, don’t tell me–” my mom cried shakily. I left my mom in the bathroom as I got up and wiped my hands –red from Emerald– on my jeans. I could hear my mom wailing with agony as I rushed downstairs to call 9-1-1.
            “9-1-1.What’s your emergency?” said the female voice at the other end of the line.
            “Please, someone’s killed- my sister killed- she’s dead! She’s dead!”  I said between sobs. I couldn’t come to terms of what my sister did to herself.
            “Please ma’am, could you please repeat that? Your sister killed someone?” the lady asked.
            I started crying harder as I said again, “No, my sister is dead! She killed herself!” My last words tasted like a bitter acid in my mouth.
            The lady’s tone of voice immediately lost its professional coolness as she tried to comfort me from the other end. I gave her our house’s address, hung up, and ran upstairs to the bathroom again. My mom was curled into a ball as if her soul had receded from her body.
            I plopped down beside my mother and let a new wave of tears take over my body. The police found me wheezing as they wheeled my sister’s and my mother’s bodies away. Though my mom had regained consciousness in the ambulance, I could already see a new woman in her place.
*                      *                      *
Dear Dr. Chara,
            As Emerald’s loving sister, I have watched Emerald grow and wither from a front row seat. Therefore, I feel that it is my responsibility to inform you that while you were correct in your conclusion that depression was the largest contributing factor to my sister’s suicide, your assumption of what caused my sister’s depression is not unknown, as you have declared.
            Once when I was five, my sister Emerald had returned home from school with this clay mug she had made in art class. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and even my forever-critical mom was impressed, too, even placing place it in the center of the mantel as a sign of honor.
            Later that evening, my mom said something about how the mug looked like a primitive version of an expensive wine goblet she saw while shopping downtown. She meant it as a compliment, of course, but Emerald didn’t seem to take it that way. When nobody was looking, she snatched her mug away and ran to her bedroom where she smashed it to pieces. She didn’t stop there. She opened up her art portfolio, took out the very best pieces, and tore them to shreds.
            I found her leaning against a wall, silently crying into a towel and surrounded by ceramic shards and scraps of watercolor paper. When I saw the blue shards, I had assumed that Emerald was upset that she had accidentally dropped her mug. I was about to offer to help her make a new mug but stopped when I saw the shreds of paper. She seemed to sense my confusion and fear and made me swear that I wouldn’t tell my mom, and though I was honestly confused by my sister’s actions, I didn’t tell my mom. Instead, I helped Emerald clean up the shards.
            Though my sister was only in fourth grade at that time, my remembrance of her self-destruction of her carefully produced art –her expression of herself– was one of the first memories I have of her inflicting self-punishment.
            Back then, the rate at which those mysterious fits of destruction occurred were around two per year. As she grew older, Emerald began to place unrealistic expectations on herself to such a great extent that my mom was convinced she no longer needed to parent her. But Emerald went further than a parent; she was her own guard and prisoner at the same time, convinced that her inadequacy to meet her own high standards was a sign of failure. It was a sign she lived with for her entire sixteen years spent on earth.
            Emerald’s system of self-restriction made her highly sensitive to criticism from anyone other than herself. It gave her an unusual amount of stress, for she had to worry not only about her own demands, but also the demands of others. Hence, it wasn’t Emerald’s failure of her expectations or her being too hard on herself that led to her downfall; it was her failure to deal with the stress.
Sincerely,
Pearl Ando
*                      *                      *
            Throughout the whole ordeal –hospital, funeral, the move back to Japan– my mom had not uttered a single word to anyone. She remains mute to this day. No more math, no more piano music, no more anything. All of that is gone. Gone because of you Emerald. Wherever you are now, Emmy, just know that you were always perfect to me.