The Kimi Look
When searching for a lost or misplaced item, it is imperative one masters what my mom coined as “The Kimi Look,” aptly named after my inability to look for something for longer than thirty seconds, accompanied by a shuffling of surface items and no real sleuthing. Is Barbie missing a shoe that could easily be swallowed by a cat? Move a few unrelated items around, do a slow 360 degree scan of the area, accept defeat, and ask your mom where Barbie’s hot pink rubber pump went. Your mom will always find it because she, unlike you who just did “The Kimi Look,” will pick up the scattered articles of clothing covering Barbie’s two-toned mansion and find the shoe wedged into the fibers of the carpet.
The ER nurse removed my mom’s necklace — the diamond swaying from its sturdy, elegant gold chain — and handed it to me for safe-keeping while they took her upstairs for a CT scan. My mom hadn’t removed her necklace in the twenty years since my dad bought it for her; she somehow looked incomplete without it perched atop her defined collarbone — she looked unarmed, vulnerable.
“Mommy, I’m going to put your necklace inside your wallet. It’s in the change compartment. Remember that, okay?” I said to her as I zipped her wallet shut.
“Okay, baby,” she responded dazedly as they wheeled her out of the room. “Thank you. I love you.”
A month after she passed, I opened her wallet, desperate to hold this necklace that seemed almost like an appendage of her body, desperate to hold anything that felt like her. I opened the change compartment, shook it around, and didn’t see her necklace. Strange, I thought. I know for a fact I put it in here.
I zipped up her wallet and almost accepted that I must have been mistaken; in my exhaustion from our seven-hour ER visit that turned into an admission to the ICU, I must have mistaken where I put the necklace. It must have gone away with her.
But I knew I wasn’t mistaken. There, in that subzero ER room, I know my shivering hands zipped her necklace into her wallet. I remember thinking how badly she needed a new wallet and, knowing she wouldn’t treat herself, made a mental note to myself to buy her a new one.
“Mommy,” I said to the empty room after my failed search. “If you want me to have your necklace, I need you to help me find it.”
My sister and I met at my grandma’s a month after I put my mom’s wallet away for the last time, a long two months after she passed. The inevitable had come: our mom’s stuff needed to be sorted through and done away with in some way or another. There wasn’t much of hers that I wanted. My mom was so far from being materialistic that few physical objects carry any sentimentality. The only thing I wanted was her diamond necklace.
We got through the boxes of miscellaneous things she had gathered and decided, for whatever reason, to look through her wallet. We looked at her driver’s license and noted her beauty, then moved to the loose pieces of paper in the folds of the wallet — her coveted Utah Jazz players cards and pictures of ten-year-old me and my then-seventeen-year-old sister among the stack.
“Still no necklace?” my grandma asked.
We shook our heads, our mouths in a disappointed grimace. My sister went to zip the wallet back up, and the loop of a gold chain spilled out of the card pocket at the top.
****
I’m wearing my mom’s diamond necklace as I write this, laughing to myself with her voice in my ears. Did you do “The Kimi Look?”
