by Jim Nelson
“Why do you think you have hemotrophism?” Hanna’s mother said.
“I know what it means,” Hanna said. “I’m not a little child.”
“It’s not menstruation,” Hanna’s mother said. “Where did you hear that term?”
Hanna, not accustomed to lying to her mother, bent her head and confessed everything: Mother & Baby, stealing the pregnancy test from Cullers’ Pharmacy, her queasiness and the salty-sticky taste in her mouth, the knots in her stomach. They got up from the bed and Hanna produced the contraband from under the mattress. She laid it all out across the spread: the book, the cardboard box, the instruction sheet, and the tube itself with its two purple lines. Hanna located the footnote on the instruction sheet and pointed it out to her mother. See? Viviparous hemotrophism. Vivid blood.
From outside came the squeaking of car brakes. Hanna’s father was home with the charcoal and lighter fluid.
Hanna’s mother considered the situation for a moment. Finally she said, “My first thought is to ask Ritchie and Azami to go home. I know they drove all the way out from the city, but I think we need to discuss this now rather than later.”
“And ruin the party?” Hanna said.
“What would you have me do?”
“I want to know what’s going on.” If her mother had explained all this long before, her party wouldn’t be in jeopardy. “Tell me and then we can have the party.”
“Hanna, I don’t think you’re going to want to have any party after we’ve talked.”
There was a knock on the bedroom door. Hanna’s mother called “Yes?” and the door opened. Aunt Azami was in the hall. Uncle Rick stood behind her, can of beer in hand, peering over Azami’s head with a concerned, quizzical expression.
“We’re going to go,” Aunt Azami said. “We can come back another time—“
“No!” Hanna said. “It’s my birthday.”
Down the hallway, the front door opened. Hanna’s father called out he was home, Let’s get the grill started, it’s party time! Uncle Rick hurried down the hall to intercept him.
Hanna realized her right cheek was wet with moisture. It was trailing down from the corner of her eye. She checked and felt moisture on her left cheek too. She wasn’t sad, she was scared. Aunt Azami would’ve told her a long time ago about pons viviparous hemotrophism. If Aunt Azami and Uncle Rick had raised her in the city, she would’ve learned the truth ages ago.
“Will you stay with me, Aunt Azami?” Her voice was as wet as her cheeks.
“I don’t think—“ she said. “You and your mother should talk.”
“Please?”
Hanna’s mother motioned her inside. “If you don’t mind,” Hanna’s mother said to Azami, as though embarrassed about putting her out. Aunt Azami carefully shut the door and came beside the bed.
“Hanna,” her mother said, “pons viviparous hemotrophism means you’re a bridge daughter.”
“No I’m not,” she said. On television, bridge daughters were mute and obedient. They prepared and served meals to their family. They answered the door and folded laundry. Bridge daughters sat off to the side, blank and expressionless, staring into the camera, while the rest of the family told jokes and the studio audience laughed on cue. Bridge daughters were like Erica across the street. Plain girls who wore old-fashioned, characterless dresses. Weird girls who rarely left the house.
“When women are pregnant,” Hanna’s mother said, “they give birth to bridge daughters.” She pushed a damp strand of Hanna’s bangs out of her eyes. “Little girls like you.”
“And little boys,” Hanna said.
“No, women only have bridge daughters,” her mother said.
“But where did dad come from? And Uncle Rick?”
Aunt Azami took the chair from Hanna’s writing desk and pulled it close to the bed. She placed a reassuring hand on Hanna’s leg.
Hanna’s mother said softly and firmly, “Grandma Driscoll had a bridge daughter, and that bridge daughter produced your father. I came from a bridge daughter too. Aunt Azami, Ritchie, all of us came from bridge daughters.”
Hanna stretched the cuff of her sweater sleeve over her fingers. She wiped the wetness off her face with the makeshift mitten. “You mean my grandmother is a bridge daughter?”
“No, Grandma Driscoll is your grandmother.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
Hanna’s mother leaned close. “You’re carrying my child right now, Hanna. Right here.” She touched Hanna’s belly, just below her navel. “You were born pregnant. The baby inside you has been growing for thirteen years. In about a year, you’ll give birth to her. Or him.”
Hanna looked back and forth at the women as though they were insane. “I’m having a baby?”
“My baby,” her mother said.
“You’re a bridge,” Aunt Azami said. “You carry your mother’s child until it’s born. Until you give birth.”
Hanna felt the room tilt, but differently than her recent queasy spells. “I’m going to have my own sister?”
“Not a sister,” Hanna’s mother said. “She will look exactly like you. She will be a perfect duplicate. A twin.”
“If it’s a girl,” Aunt Azami added. “If it’s a boy, it will look mostly like you.”
“A baby?” Hanna sputtered, still digesting everything being said. It was too much at once, brunt force pelting her from all sides. How did she not see this coming?
But, of course, she had seen this coming. On those family television shows, the bridge daughter would not return after a bridge party episode. The next week she was missing, her disappearance never explained. Usually the actress playing the bridge daughter would find a new role on a different television show. Maybe she’d appear on a celebrity game show stumping guests, or host an awards ceremony in a fabulous, stunning gown. But on the show, the plain-Jane bridge daughter simply vanished. The episode after the bridge party would open with the joyous family returning home from the hospital with an infant in swaddling. No one on the television show mentioned the bridge daughter again.
Hanna turned to Aunt Azami. “What happens to me after the baby?” She faced her mother. “What happens?”
Hanna’s mother chose her next words with care. “You’ll pass away.”
“Pass away?” Hanna felt her cheek growing hot again. “You mean I die?”
Aunt Azami squeezed Hanna’s leg. “The finality,” she said.
Four
Hanna got to choose what went on her hamburger: American cheese, ketchup, lettuce, no pickles, no mayonnaise. The birthday cake was her father’s favorite flavor, yellow vanilla cake with white vanilla frosting. The flowers on the birthday table were her mother’s greenhouse tulips orbited by hard nubs of baby’s breath, the “cheap gyp” her uncle had referred to in his industry lingo. It was Hanna’s birthday, but it wasn’t really her birthday party. It never was, not once in thirteen years. They sang the birthday song for Hanna, and it made her smile, but the smile caused the dried tears in the corners of her eyes to crack, reminding her of the hard truth she’d learned in her bedroom just two hours earlier.
Hanna had insisted the birthday party would continue. Her mother had finally conceded and instructed her to wash her face. She dared to ask if she could use some of her mother’s blush to hide her crying from Uncle Rick, but her mother would not permit such a thing.
After the cake, Hanna sat on the floor opening presents while the adults took their after-meal drinks on the couches. Her parents drank coffee with plenty of milk, while Aunt Azami drank her nourishing tea and Uncle Rick had another beer. Her parents’ present was a gift certificate for a florist shop, the one in the strip mall where her mother had purchased the tulips. The certificate was for ten dollars, more money than Hanna ever had at her disposal at any one time.
“I don’t know if that’s so useful now,” Hanna’s mother said, “considering all the flowers your uncle brought today.”
“I wish they were going to last longe
r,” Uncle Rick said. “Enjoy them while you can, squirt.”
Hanna considered the certificate for a moment. “I’ll use this to buy a new vase,” she declared. “I’m tired of my old one.”
Aunt Azami offered Hanna a gift wrapped in paper of colorful geometric patterns. It was a hardcover book bound in warm yellow cloth, The Symphony of Flowers by Charlotte Dunhill Woolsey. The book smelled musty and was cotton-dry to the touch. The spine was so well-worn, the book practically fell open in her hands. Carefully turning the desiccated pages, the typeface and language appeared antiquated. Hanna wondered if it was beyond her reading level, but told herself she would at least try. Then she reached the center of the book.
“Careful with those color plates,” Aunt Azami warned. “Some of them are loose.”
Although the rest of the book was faded black-and-white text, the center of the book featured a dozen hand-tinted illustrations of blooms in their habitat. Birds-of-paradise, chrysanthemums, four popular rose varieties, and tulips not grown in greenhouses. Each was illustrated with intense care and an eye for detail. So exquisite, they seemed to capture velvety folds of each blossom that even a modern camera would miss.
“That looks expensive,” Hanna’s mother said cautiously.
While turning pages, a flat wad of paper fell from the book and into Hanna’s lap. It had been tucked in between the last page and the marbled end paper. It was one of Aunt Azami’s origami, a crane folded from mauve paper. Hanna held it so her parents could see.
“What a considerate gift from Aunt Azami,” her mother said. “What do you say?”
“Thank you, Aunt Azami.”
Hanna’s mother went to the kitchen for more coffee. Her father sat forward and asked Hanna to show him the crane. “You really have a knack for these things,” he said to Azami. “You learn this in school?”
“My grandmother,” she said.
Azami was born in Sacramento and raised in Modesto, a farming town in California’s Central Valley. Azami’s parents grew cherry tomatoes and, later, wine grapes for E & J Gallo. Hanna met Azami’s father once, when they’d all gone to Modesto for Azami’s mother’s funeral. For the services, Azami’s father wore a crisp cowboy hat, pressed denim, and hand-tooled boots polished to a high sheen. He did not seem particularly Japanese to Hanna, but neither did Azami. At a young age Hanna learned to think of them not as Japanese but as family, even if Uncle Rick and Aunt Azami weren’t actually married.
“I want to learn how to make them,” Hanna said.
“I’ll teach you,” Aunt Azami said. “I even brought some origami paper with me.”
The men went out to the backyard to clean off the barbecue and talk about whatever men talk about when they’re alone. Hanna’s mother never returned with her coffee. The garbage disposal began grinding its teeth on scraps and the sink tap shushed on and off, meaning her mother was cleaning up.
Aunt Azami produced from her muslin tote a sheaf of origami paper, each sheet perfectly square, blank white on one side and varying bright colors on the other. Fanned, the ream made a paper rainbow. She joined Hanna on the floor, crossing her legs, and instructed Hanna to pick a color she liked. Hanna took a creamy chocolate-colored sheet. The colored side was treated, slick to the touch and shiny, while the blank white side felt like writing paper.
“With origami, it’s always important to keep in mind the shiny side of the paper,” Aunt Azami said. “If you do this upside-down, you won’t see the nice color when you’re finished.”
And they began, Aunt Azami making a fold on a sheet and Hanna mimicking the fold on her own. The first folds were big, sometimes folding the sheet in half. The later folds became more precise and detailed, creating sharp lines at exact angles. Hanna followed Aunt Azami’s instructions to the letter, but could not fathom how this mishmash of folds and creases were going to form a crane.
“In Japan, a crane is called a tsuru,” Aunt Azami said. She spelled the word for Hanna.
“Tsuru,” Hanna repeated and spelled it aloud.
“My grandmother taught me how to make tsuru when I was your age. I practiced them over and over again so I could get them just right. Now they’re easy.”
Aunt Azami corrected Hanna’s fold, showing her how to make the tip of the point sharp. Hanna watched Aunt Azami make the final three folds. Like a stage magician, the crane did not appear until the last moment. Then, even more magical, Aunt Azami took the paper crane by its wings and gently pulled. As the wings extended the neck and tail stretched out, as though the crane was preparing for flight. Hanna’s eyes lit up. She so wanted to make her tsuru come to life just as Aunt Azami’s had.
It did not happen. Her folds were not quite right and the neck and tail did not move when she pulled the wings. The beak was misshapen and the tail seemed to large for the rest of the body. Hanna said, “I’ll never get it right.”
“No, you will, you just have to practice. Here.” Aunt Azami took two more sheets of origami paper from the ream. “Let’s do it again.”
They made another tsuru together, Aunt Azami leading the way fold by fold. Hanna’s fingers felt fat and clumsy with the paper, and the second one came out worse than the first. Aunt Azami offered two more sheets and they went at it again. This time, Hanna’s third attempt, the neck and tail stretched for flight when she pulled, albeit not as majestically as Aunt Azami’s tsuru did every time.
“Take these.” Aunt Azami offered the remainder of the origami paper to Hanna. “Take them, take them,” she said over Hanna’s protests. “There’s an origami store in Japantown, they’re easy for me to get. I’ll bring more the next time we come out.”
Hanna, cross-legged on the floor with Aunt Azami, considered the half-dozen paper cranes around her. She felt she was a giant sitting in a pond among a flock of tiny cranes. Aunt Azami could make dozens of these in no time flat. Hanna wanted that skill too. She wanted to make tsuru as though she was folding a napkin for dinnertime. She could even incorporate them into her arrangements. With Uncle Rick’s blooms and Aunt Azami’s tsuru, she could arrange bouquets that would outshine any florist’s plasticky greenhouse flowers.
“Do you know about the thousand cranes?” Aunt Azami asked. Hanna shook her head. “There’s a legend,” Azami said, “if you make a thousand paper cranes in a year, you get one wish.”
“A thousand?” Just making three seemed like so much work. “What can you wish for?”
“Anything you want,” Aunt Azami said. “Do you know the story of Sadako Sasaki?”
“No,” Hanna said.
“Sadako was a bridge daughter.”
That’s why I never read about her, Hanna thought.
“Sadako was born in Hiroshima right before America dropped the atomic bomb,” Aunt Azami said softly. “She developed cancer when she was eleven. She wanted to reach her finality and give birth to her mother’s child. So, for a year, she folded tsuru.”
“And she lived?”
“No,” Aunt Azami said. “She died before she could finish the thousand cranes.”
“Do you think she would’ve lived if she did finish them?”
“Oh, Hanna—“
“Then how?” Hanna insisted under her breath.
Hanna’s mother entered the room, interrupting. “So, what are you two up to? Making origami?”
Aunt Azami rose from the floor. “Hanna picked up on it quickly. I suspect you’re going to have paper cranes all over your house soon enough.”
“As long as you pick them up and put them away,” her mother said. She smiled weakly. “I hope it was a good birthday, Hanna. I know it was a lot to take in today.”
“Did you make a wish when you blew out the candles?” Aunt Azami asked.
“Don’t tell us,” her mother said. “Otherwise it won’t come true.”
I wished I’d never have my finality, Hanna thought as she glared up from the floor, and she had no intention of telling her mother about it.
Five
Dr. Mayhew pre
ssed the stethoscope’s cold metal button against Hanna’s chest. “Deep breaths.”
Hanna performed the requested breathing while staring at her mother, who was sitting across the examination room in a padded chair. She watched on with what seemed to be distant interest, fingers drumming her purse now and then.
Dr. Mayhew pressed the metal button on several locations across Hanna’s back while she breathed. “Everything sounds fine.” She wrapped the blood pressure cuff about Hanna’s upper right arm and began pumping the bulb. “Any changes since I last saw you? Pain, pressure, discomfort?”
“Sometimes I feel sick. Especially when I wake up.”
“She fainted on her birthday,” Hanna’s mother said.
Dr. Mayhew quit pumping the bulb. “Bump yourself?” She felt around the back of Hanna’s head.
“My brother caught her in time,” Hanna’s mother said.
Dr. Mayhew listened with the stethoscope while letting the cuff’s pressure drop. She noted the result on Hanna’s chart. “When you say ‘sick,’ what do you mean?”
“Like I’m going to…” Uncomfortable with the word, Hanna waved her hand under her chin, illustrating her stomach expelling its contents.
“I see,” Dr. Mayhew said. “Go ahead and lay down.”
The paper on the examination table crunched as she reclined. Dr. Mayhew began probing Hanna’s midsection with three stiff fingers.
“Don’t let her lay down after meals,” she said to Hanna’s mother. “That makes the nausea worse. A vitamin B6 supplement can help if it’s particularly bad. I would just make sure she’s drinking enough water every day.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Hanna’s mother said.
At the moment, Hanna felt slightly nauseous from Dr. Mayhew’s iron fingers. They jabbed so deeply Hanna thought they might reach her spine.
“Hanna, we’re going to do something different today.” Dr. Mayhew went to the end of the table and retracted two metal arms from the underside of the table. She flipped pedals at their ends, creating stirrups. “Put your feet here and here,” meaning the stirrups. “I need to look inside you. There will be some discomfort.”