Clark and Division

by Naomi Hirahara

  I read Douglas’s report at least seven times in one sitting. I despised that he referred to Rose as a “subject,” like she was a mouse in a scientific experiment. But I was also grateful that he provided a few glimpses into how she was really feeling. It made sense that she was still seeking ways to support Nisei men in uniform and advocating for equal pay for equal work; she had always been a champion for such issues. I choked back tears when I read that she missed us “more than she imagined.” Most devastating was to learn that she had lost hope in America. Rose, more than any of us Itos, had been the most optimistic about the future. Now I feared that hope for our family was gone forever.

  Chapter 15

  I loved to go to the beach at White Point when I was a young girl. A smell reminiscent of rotten eggs let us know that we were getting close, and then before we knew it, we were jumping into a pool next to the ocean. The sulfuric properties made us more buoyant, like fishing lures floating on the surface of the sea. Fathers and mothers, in straw hats and cotton clothing, leaned against the white wooden railing to watch. At White Point, which was owned by Issei brothers, we could freely swim with hakujin men, women and children. Afterward our family and friends would all go to the shore and sit on blankets on the white sands and fill ourselves with a picnic of onigiri, shoyu chicken, sliced watermelon and oden, a type of Japanese stew.

  I couldn’t imagine that a body of water near Chicago could compare, but I had to admit that I felt happy when my bare feet reached the sand along Lake Michigan. I had not seen anything like this for more than two years. “It really looks like a beach!” I exclaimed as I turned to the skyscrapers. “In the middle of the city.”

  The air was hot and still, not a breeze in sight, and as a result, the water in Lake Michigan didn’t move much either. Art maintained that sometimes there were waves, big ones fifteen feet in height. I had my doubts but I didn’t care. I was away from my parents, the empty spot in my family where my sister once existed, Clark and Division and the war. I was walking along the water with a boy I liked and that’s all I cared about.

  Art went in farther and kicked some water and sand toward me. I shrieked and retaliated by splashing water on his crisp white shirt and khaki pants, which he had rolled up to his knees.

  We finally called a truce and lay on a blanket on the sand, our shoes nearby. Art put on a pair of sunglasses while I lowered a bucket hat over my face to avoid getting sunburned.

  “What do you like to do?” he asked. I was confused by his question, so he rephrased it. “What makes you happy?”

  “I liked spending time with my dog.” That sounded so pitiful, but it was true.

  “You’ll have to come over to my house.”

  I pulled off the hat to listen more carefully.

  “We have two dogs, a cat and a parakeet. My mother is originally from a farm in Oregon.”

  I told Art about Rusty, how we got him as a puppy from a produce worker and how I had to bury him in our backyard a couple of months after Pearl Harbor. Surprisingly, I didn’t cry. It felt good to talk about him and tell Art how much Rusty meant to me, even though he was only a dog.

  “I’ve never met any girl like you, Aki.”

  I crinkled my forehead. “I’m an ordinary person.”

  “No, no you’re not.” He reached for my hand, and I felt an electric current go up my wrist and arm. He took off his sunglasses so he could look me straight in the eyes and then bent his face. His lips were soft and pillowy. I had never kissed a boy on the lips before. Kissing was wonderful. I felt that I could be kissing Art Nakasone for a very long time.

  On the ride home, Art steered mostly with his left hand, reaching for my hand with his right as he slowed and stopped at major intersections. Our fingers entwined, and I didn’t want to let go. When was I going to see Art next?

  Unfortunately, the same Nisei girls were sitting on the stoop when Art was dropping me off. We didn’t dare to kiss in front of them. Before I opened the passenger door, Art squeezed my hand. “I’ll call you,” he said, and I nodded.

  I stepped out of the car, my head held high like Katharine Hepburn’s. I carried my hat on the crook of my finger behind my back, and tossed my hair as I walked up the stairs. They gave me side-eyed glances but said nothing. I struggled a little with the front entrance door and then heard an explosion of comments about me and Art as the door closed behind me. Something had happened to me this afternoon. I had become the center of attention, the coveted one. I had taken Rose’s place.

  I tried to moderate my happiness when I walked into the apartment. My mother had returned from cleaning the Bello brothers’ barbershop and was at the sink washing dishes, while my father was reading Sunday’s issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune at our table. “Baka,” he cursed the Japanese military for what he viewed as foolishness. “How can they imagine that they can beat America?”

  While she was very opinionated about most other matters, my mother had nothing to say. Before the war, she had regularly sent letters to her parents and siblings in Kagoshima. That communication, of course, ceased as diplomatic relations between the US and Japan broke down. I sensed that she was worried about her relatives, but she never verbally expressed her concern. As I had never set foot in Japan and never met my grandparents on either my mother’s or father’s side, that world almost seemed imagined, like an old Japanese folktale.

  “Ah, yaketa!” my mother exclaimed, seeing my sunburned cheeks. “Where did you go?”

  I hadn’t mentioned anything about my outing with Art to my parents. I needed to feel that something was 100 percent mine, separate from the Ito family. I mumbled about taking a walk around the lake. My parents started discussing whether they would be able to attend Chicago’s first Buddhist service the next day at the South Parkway Community Hall on the South Side. I went into the bedroom and as I took off my old shoes, grains of sand fell onto the hardwood floor, filling my chest with a fleeting joy once again. I collected the sand and put it in one of my lockets, a reminder that no matter what happened in the future, I had had this perfect day.

  That night, as I heard Pop snoring and Mom grinding her teeth—making an odd sound like the popping of popcorn—I fingered the locket, which I had strung on a chain around my neck. I felt such guilt over my elation about Art, and even more guilt over not telling Art about my efforts to find out what happened to Rose. Before he came into my life, Rose was all that I could think about, but now my head was filled with thoughts of Art. Of how his cheek, all prickly with his afternoon shadow, felt next to mine. The smell of his aftershave. I felt that he and Rose were on different sides of a balanced scale, and I was running from one side to another to make it even. But that, of course, was impossible. I had to eventually choose one side.

  Two days later, I was in the stacks with Phillis retrieving some books on Celtic mythology and folklore. She had heard word that the surgery on Reggie’s leg had gone well in the jungle of Bougainville. I had looked up Bougainville, which apparently had been named after a French explorer, and saw that it was a part of the Territory of New Guinea, located above Australia. I couldn’t imagine a young man from the South Side of Chicago being relegated to such a place.

  Ever since receiving the updated status on her brother, Phillis seemed more relaxed. I had heard that her mother was a schoolteacher and her father an insurance adjuster. She, like me, only had an older sibling, and his absence seemed to be keenly felt in the Davis household.

  “Have you been seeing Art?” Phillis uncharacteristically asked me a personal question in the darkness of the stacks.

  “You like him!” I declared.

  She didn’t deny it. “Everyone likes Art. He got along with everyone in high school. I wrote to Reggie about seeing him at the Newberry.”

  Before I could reply, Nancy came into the stacks and announced, “There’s someone to see you, Aki. A woman.”

  I gently set down the Ce
ltic books and made my way to the front desk.

  It was strange to see Tomi here in the library, like a canary released from her Evanston cage. Little pink bumps had appeared along her hairline and she blinked rapidly. She was nervous about something.

  “I’m off in ten minutes,” I told her. “I can meet you in the park across the street.”

  Once I stepped into Bughouse Square, I couldn’t spot her skinny frame and feared that she had run off. My eyes quickly scanned the long row of benches. I saw the regulars—a homeless man with an eye patch, a sandy-haired man who always came with a sketchbook, some young mothers with baby carriages—and then, in between a nun and a boy in a baseball cap, I spotted a very pale Tomi Kawamura with a carpetbag on her lap. I plucked her from her tight spot, and we moved to the south side where there were fewer people but more direct sunlight. Her skin looked almost translucent, like an underwater pearl.

  She was struggling to speak. And even though we were sitting down, she was out of breath for a while. She used only words, not complete sentences. I could only make out, “The man. The knife. The man.”

  “Tomi, Tomi.” I gave her shoulders a gentle shake. “Slow down. And breathe. And then start from the beginning.”

  She did what I instructed her to do and then began talking. “I ran into Ike at the hospital. I was there with Mrs. Peterson, my employer, for a routine checkup, and while I was waiting, he told me about the girl who was attacked a few weeks ago. A man with a knife.”

  She clasped her hands together, as if it was cold and not eighty-five degrees with 100 percent humidity. “I’ve also seen a man with a knife.” Tears came to my eyes in anticipation of what she was going to share. “He was leaving our apartment.”

  Her whole delicate body rolled forward and she started crying so hard that she almost convulsed. I didn’t know what to do and finally gently rubbed her back. I could feel the knots of her spine through the thin fabric of her dress. An elderly woman who was sitting near us eyed us suspiciously and moved to a bench on the other side of the park.

  I let her cry like this for a good five minutes. I didn’t care if I was late returning from my break.

  When Tomi lifted her head, there were only two pink spots underneath her eyes. She looked even more beautiful than usual.

  “Tell me, Tomi,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  She had been coming home after a shift at the candy company, ready to put her key in the lock, but she didn’t have to. The unsecured apartment door should have been her first clue that something was wrong. As soon as she pushed it open, she was shoved to the wall and then the floor. She felt the force of someone heavy behind her, on top of her, whispering in her ear to count to one hundred and stay down. If she didn’t do what he told her, he’d find her. And kill her. To make his point he flashed the sharp blade of a knife in her face. Her whole body shook. She began counting out loud because she felt that was her only protection. The man got up but she didn’t know where he was. She kept counting. She reached one hundred once, then twice, then three times. Waited for a blow. A blade that would slice her ear off. But there was only an infinite hush. It had snowed that day and she was wearing gloves. The floor was wet underneath her. She thought it was melted snow, but she had soiled her pants.

  She slowly got up, furtively looking to her right and then her left, inside the room. That’s when she saw her. Rose on the floor, too. The bottom of her polka-dotted dress pulled up to her hips.

  “I cried and cried,” Tomi said. She had a hard time untying the bandanna around Rose’s mouth. “‘Undo my hands, Tomi,’ Rose said. She was so calm. She was comforting me, not the other way around.”

  I stared at Tomi, noticing the faint bags underneath her eyes. In a split second, she looked so much older.

  “He was waiting for her in our apartment when she was coming back from the ladies’ room. We were all so careful about locking the door, even when we were going to the toilet, and Rose swore that she had done so. We don’t know how he got in. Must have picked the lock. He was wearing a mask but Rose saw the hair on his arms. And the way he talked, he sounded like a Nisei.”

  I felt like vomiting right then and there. I had pictured a hakujin man, much like the one who had pinned me to the wall of Aloha. But a fellow Nisei? Had the world gone mad?

  “Did she have any ideas of who it could be?”

  Tomi shook her head. “The only thing he left behind was some scrap of paper. It looked like a movie ticket. It didn’t mean anything. She told me not to tell anyone, not even Louise. She was working to get you all here, to Chicago. She didn’t want anything to get in the way of that.”

  That’s why this thing had been a secret. It finally made sense to me. Ordinarily Rose would not have hesitated to go straight to the police, no matter the shame or cost to her reputation. But if being a victim of such a sordid crime would jeopardize our arrival, Rose would have kept silent.

  “Would it have been so easy for him to pick the lock?”

  Tomi rubbed the knuckles on her left hand. “The lock was so old and decrepit, like one from the thirties that you open with a skeleton key. Rose got another lock, one that slides from the inside. Louise at first didn’t understand why, but we told her that other places were experiencing break-ins.”

  As Tomi was telling me all of this, it seemed like the world was slowing down. I noticed every minor thing in the background, from a leaf falling from a eucalyptus tree to an old man adjusting his straw hat. I asked her for all the details that she could remember.

  “Even though Rose had a new lock installed, I still didn’t feel safe. I couldn’t keep staying in that apartment. I couldn’t sleep.” Tears again. Tomi’s hands were shaking. I sensed that something like this had happened to her before. She opened her bag to reveal a package in a pink furoshiki, the Japanese fabric wrap used for bentos. “Rose knew I was having a hard time. She told me that if we stuck together, we’d be okay. I told her that I couldn’t stay there in the same apartment. We’d be sitting ducks; didn’t she understand? We had an awful argument and I moved out. She came to Evanston to give this to me. She actually wanted it back in May. But I had refused to see her.” She gestured that I take it. The package was rectangular and light.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Don’t look at it now. Take it home and look.”

  I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. “You need to go to the police, Tomi.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.” Tomi truly looked miserable. “Do you know that some of them are in cahoots with the mob?”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “Yes, it’s true. Things are different here in Chicago. You don’t know who to trust.”

  “What if the—” I couldn’t bear to say the actual word, “it had something to do with Rose’s death?”

  Tomi gazed down at her emptied bag. “I wish I was a different kind of person. Strong, like you and Rose. Truly I do.”

  I felt like it would be useless and cruel to push her further. Already, Tomi seemed to have reached her breaking point. I glanced at my watch. I had stayed much too long. “I have to go, but we’ll keep in touch.”

  Tomi nodded.

  Placing the pink-wrapped bundle underneath my arm, I headed back to work.

  “I thought that you may have been kidnapped,” Nancy commented, eyeing my parcel. “Went shopping, huh?”

  About an hour later, I couldn’t stand it anymore and made some excuse about having to go into the stacks. I snuck Tomi’s bundle in with me and as soon as I was shielded by two high shelves, I stuffed it in an open space between two books and began to loosen the knot of the furoshiki to reveal a metal bento box, the kind that I used to see produce workers bring to work. I pulled off the lid. Nestled on balled-up pages of the Chicago Daily Tribune was a small gun.

  When I returned to the front desk, my shock must have been
written on my face because Phillis asked if I was feeling okay. I almost dropped the bento box, and imagined the gun going off and me ending up in jail. What was Tomi thinking, bringing that to me? And where did Rose get it in the first place?

  I didn’t know what to do with it. If I brought it home, my parents might discover it. There weren’t that many hiding places in our bare apartment, and I wasn’t about to stick it underneath my mattress. And then I remembered the mezzanine in the Clark and Division subway station. There was a row of lockers there. I left work without saying goodbye to anyone. The security guard with the snow-white hair and mustache called out, “Have a good night, Miss Ito.” Usually I would reply, “Yes, I will, Mr. Fulgoni.” But today I only nodded.

  I walked down the stairs of the subway station, my whole body trembling as I clutched my pink package. I felt that everyone was staring at me, seeing through the furoshiki and bento box. Most of the lockers were full, except for one on the top. I slid the box in there and went through my purse for a coin—darn it, I couldn’t find the right one at first. With much scrambling, I finally did. I attempted to slide the coin in the slot, but it fell to the ground, skipped, and then rolled in a circle to end up at the foot of a uniformed subway employee.

  He bent over and handed me my coin. “You need some help, miss?” he asked.

  I thanked him but told him I was quite all right, even though my hands were shaking. The coin went into the slot, the door secured and I was up the stairs and back on Clark Street again.

  That evening, I couldn’t eat dinner. Mom kept touching my forehead and cheeks to check if I had a fever. I told her that I was tired and went to bed early. I could hear the ringing of the hallway pay phone, but I didn’t have the energy to get up and answer.

  Chapter 16