Harrison’s mother remembers the night I was born.
The only other person alive who can tell me about that night is Father. And although I’ve asked him about it a hundred times, all he’s ever said was, “You were a keeper.” Which has never brought me much comfort, because, I mean, what does it mean? Had I not been a keeper, would he have tossed me back into the ocean like a fisherman whose line has caught something too small to eat? “Let’s throw her over the edge, boys. She’s not a keeper!” I imagine a whole deck of fishermen in yellow rain gear each taking a look my way and nodding in agreement. “Oh yeah, too small to keep.” And then after dumping me back into the rugged sea, heading into the cabin of the boat to share laughs and a few drinks.
An American woman, probably in her late fifties, a person I do not know, remembers. And she is not afraid, like Father is, to recall the night I arrived in the world.
I stare at the boundless sky as my eyes grow moist. The stars melt together, blurry, forming one large star.
“I will not cry,” I say, blinking rapidly. “No, not tonight.”
But it’s too late. Tears are cruising down my cheeks.
Chapter Thirteen
Over the next two days, I compose a few messages to Harrison but send nothing. I eat toast without butter and drink water and no tea. Even God’s creation of hot grits does not appeal to me. If I put on a black shawl, I could be the poster woman for mourners.
I don’t own a black shawl.
Principal Vickers asks if I’m sick. He tells me he read on the Internet that orange juice mixed with fig skins is a great vitamin drink. I try to smile, nod, and thank him.
Kristine describes riding to the Blue Ridge Mountains on Salvador’s Harley. She exclaims it was the trip of a lifetime. She still wants to know what to tell Eduardo. I tell her I have sworn off men for Lent. Surprising me, she says, “Yeah, I should try that sometime.”
I sit in Lucy’s chair after waking early one morning from a dream where Harrison, still in carp form, swims toward me, greets me, and takes me to an underwater pagoda with golden doors. My muscles ache; my eyes are puffy from tears. I rub the fabric of the chair and somehow, it calms me. I do my breathing. In, out, steady.
I think of the proverb about the person of integrity walking securely, but the one taking the crooked path being found out.
Just like me. Busted.
And that’s when I decide to be honest.
Moving to the computer chair, I fluff the pillow on the seat, but when I sit down, the chair is still lopsided and uncomfortable.
It’s four in the afternoon in Kyoto now. Harrison is probably on his way home from the university, riding the crowded city bus. Soon he’ll enter his house, take off his shoes, put on a pair of slippers, and heat the water for a bath. He says an ofuro—a Japanese bath—is the best way to end a day.
Dear God, I pray, let the words come. Please give me the strength to be honest.
I click on Harrison’s photo, see his smiling eyes. I listen to my breathing as I rub the scar in the middle of my forehead.
And then I begin. My fingers are stiff at first, but by the second sentence I am on a roll. I don’t stop.
Harrison,
I’d like to blame my own father for my deceitfulness. He is the king of deceit. If the trait can be inherited, I’ve got it. However many times as a child I asked what killed Mama or how did she really die, he never once replied. He’d change the subject by asking if I had homework to do or if I’d brushed my teeth. I always thought that was peculiar. Why couldn’t he tell me the truth? He didn’t lie; he just kept the truth from me.
I’d like to think I haven’t lied to you, Harrison. I have just chosen not to expose all there is about me. But now what else can I say? For if your mother remembers the night I was born, then she already knows more about my early life in Japan than I do.
I recall nothing about those years. Mama died when I was two. I try to recall some memory of her, but nothing is ever there. I don’t talk about it much anymore, but it is always with me, gnawing at me. I have so many questions about my past. If I were to draw a picture of my mind, it would be in the shape of a question mark.
Nicole
I crawl into bed, clutch Sazae. It’s now three fifty-one. I wait for sleep and am relieved when its soft tendrils caress my face.
———
I have often daydreamed that one day, out of the blue on a frosty winter afternoon, while I’m cleaning my fish tank, I will hear a tap at my front door. With net in hand, and the smell of algae in the air, I’ll answer to see an elderly woman, a little stooped over. She’ll be a long-lost relative, one I’ve never met before because she’s never attended a family reunion. I will know her, though, because her name will be one that Ducee’s mentioned.
When she takes off her heavy coat, there will be a faint odor of mothballs. I’ll fold her coat on the sofa and ask if she’d like a cup of Earl Grey.
Seated in the living room by the window, she will start to tell me everything I’ve wanted to know about Mama: how the fire started, why I was rescued from the burning house and Mama wasn’t, and who got me out in time. This relative will know why one of Sazae’s sleeves is shorter than the other, and when Mama purchased this cotton doll for me. And my scar, set in the middle of my forehead—she will know how I got this tiny wound.
The sun will set and the tea will be consumed, and then this relative will stand to leave. She’ll button her coat and open the front door. And in some sort of Mary Poppins fashion, she will be carried off by the cool eastern wind.
I will then sit in Aunt Lucy’s chair and cry a little, but above all I will be relieved that all my questions about my past have been answered in one simple afternoon.
Instead, my puzzle-solver, the one with the answers, is not at my doorstep but ten thousand miles away. And in order to learn about the past, I have to rely on my computer.
Oh, Mr. Vickers, it turns out you are right. Computers do enhance our lives. Sure as the sun.
Chapter Fourteen
Iva calls to tell me about a convict who escaped from a prison in Wake County. “Be sure to lock your doors, Nicki,” she advises over the phone.
“I thought you said he was last seen in Birmingham. So we should be safe, right?” I am half teasing.
But Iva sees no room for jokes. “Nicki,” she says through her cigarette, “he could easily turn around and come back here. He’s a convicted killer. He’s driving a blue Saab.”
I wonder what Iva wants me to do besides lock my doors, which I do already anyway.
“Nicki?”
“Yes.”
“Ducee’s not going to live that much longer.”
Here she goes again. “Iva, she’s doing fine. Preparing for the reunion might make her a little tired, but she’s happy.”
“I wonder if I am.”
“Tired or happy?”
“I know I don’t need another man in my life, that’s for sure.”
Especially not one like Harlowe, I think. I can understand why Iva is repulsed by pork and beans. To this day she won’t look at a can of Bush’s or Van Camp’s when she goes down the canned vegetable aisle of the grocery store.
“Nicki?”
I look up at my ceiling fan, still covered in dust. One day I will clean it. “Yes?”
“Do you think Dennis is having an affair?”
I nearly drop the phone. Gulping, I count to ten.
“Nicki? He’s never home. I just wondered.”
“Iva, we don’t know.”
She coughs. “No, we don’t, do we?” After a moment she asks, “What would you do?”
“About what?”
“If you found out that your husband was having an affair.”
I haven’t a clue. For one thing, I’ve never had a husband. My aunt knows that. I’m not even sure why she wants to know what I would do. I feel disappointed and frustrated with Dennis now. “I’d be angry,” I finally say.
She clears her
throat. “Harlowe was a rotten man. But he never cheated on me.”
I want to go to bed. I’ve been tired lately. I didn’t know that learning about your past could be so exhausting. “Good night, Iva.”
But she has another question for me. “Why did God make Monet the way she is?”
I chew on a thumbnail and then say, “Well, if I knew the answer, I’d be God, wouldn’t I?”
Iva finds this amusing and laughs. “You’re so right, Nicki.” Then she quickly adds, “Grable says they’ve got another appointment next week. The audio doctor.”
“The what kind of doctor?”
“Audio is hearing, right? That kind of doctor.”
I want to laugh. I’m sure this doctor didn’t go to medical school to be called an audio doctor by an elderly woman with platinum-dyed hair.
Grable did tell me the last time she stopped by on her way to Lady Claws that she had an appointment to check Monet’s hearing. But if I let Iva know that as of late I’ve had more contact with Grable and Monet than I’ve had in months, she may try to pry information out of me. I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t right now. Besides, if I think Dennis is having an affair, Grable must be the first one I tell. Of course, the only evidence I have is what Mr. McGuire saw.
“Do you think,” my aunt says after exhaling, “that Monet really has beauty within?”
“I think she does,” I hear myself saying. “Iva, we all do.”
A small pause and then, “Well, I don’t know. I can’t say Harlowe does.”
“Some people keep it more concealed than others.”
“Oh.” She clears her throat. “Like having to dig for it to see it. Like remember the time we went to the coast and dug for clams?”
It was a scorcher of a day, and I got so badly sunburned that all I could do later while Ducee, Iva, and Great-Uncle Clive baked the clams was to sit in a tub of Aveeno and moan. Yeah, I remember that day like a bad dream.
“That was a pretty good day,” Iva muses. “The lemonade we made was perfect.”
I’d forgotten about the lemonade. Ducee had squeezed the juice of a dozen lemons into a large glass jug, added sugar, a little hot water to dissolve the sugar, cold water, and plenty of ice. That drink, served to me in a wide mason jar, had cooled my insides as my skin burned. And for a moment my mind took a break from thinking about my pain and thanked God for Ducee and her lemonade.
Iva says good night and hangs up.
I hold the receiver for a moment longer and think how quickly we forget, even those things we think we will always remember.
———
Harrison tells me, as my students would say, how it went down. In an email message that takes three pages to print, he explains how he found me out.
When his parents came to visit recently, they helped him put the underwater fence in his outdoor pond to separate the lilies from the plant-eating carp. As they worked, he told them a woman in Mount Olive named Nicole gave him the suggestion of the fence. His mother said, “Mount Olive? Emma was from Mount Olive. Remember my friend? I was thinking about her the other day. All these years gone, and I still miss her so much.”
Suddenly something clicked in Harrison’s mind and he had to stop working and sit down on the stone bench by the pond. “Mom,” he said, “wasn’t Emma’s mom from Mount Olive, too?”
“Why, yes, she was.”
“And what was her name?”
“Ducee,” Harrison’s mother said after a brief pause. “It’s a name you don’t forget.”
“Emma made that pineapple stuff,” Harrison recalled.
“Chutney.”
Harrison was on to something. “Emma’s daughter was Nicole, right?”
“Yes, she was just four years younger than you. A cute kid with the prettiest red hair. I remember the night she was born.”
And then Harrison knew that I had to be that same Nicole, Emma’s daughter. He showed his parents the color photo of me on the Pretty Fishy Web site, expecting his mother to say, “Yes, that looks like it could be her.”
Instead, she said, “Michelin,” as she read my last name printed under my picture. “That was Emma’s last name, too.”
Harrison wrote,
I didn’t know what to do then. So I just pretended I didn’t know a thing, until as time went on, I couldn’t keep pretending. I waited to write. I wanted to let you know that I knew. Keeping things hidden isn’t real. I am sorry about your mother, Nicole. I am sorry that you remember nothing.
I carry the three sheets around with me while I do laundry and feed my fish. When I go to bed, I place them on my bedside table. These pages are the connection to my past.
And I think, so it is true, the story that Ducee has told me. “Yes,” Ducee has said many times, “your mother brought pineapple chutney and God’s Word to Japan.”
When I was young, I thought she meant Mama had actually carried a jar of chutney with her on the ship that took her and Father to the port of Yokohama the first time they sailed to Asia. Later when I heard the story, I realized she’d just brought the recipe. She made the chutney for her missionary friends, explaining it was an old family tradition. Ducee says Mama even wore her Mount Olive apron as she stood in the kitchen, bent over a saucepan of sugar, spices, and pineapple. Apparently, the pineapples were flown in from the tropical island of Okinawa. Ducee always concluded the story with, “And so that is how my Emma brought chutney from Mount Olive to Japan. A real East meets West adventure.” And then, with an air of pride and accomplishment, Ducee would nod her head, smile at all present, and fold her hands as though about to pray.
Sometimes, if I looked closely, I could see something in her eyes. They were soft and held a faraway look. Like she was almost there, in the past, with her beloved daughter, wearing her own green apron. Together they were stirring up a spicy batch of family tradition. And the kitchen’s aroma was pineapple mixed with the perfect ingredient—love.
Sometimes, I had to purposely look away from Ducee’s eyes. The feeling that my own heart was going to break was too heavy to carry.
Chapter Fifteen
Harrison writes to say he knew me as a child. Truth is stranger than fiction. Yes, that’s it, yes.
Now, I figured that if his mother, Rita, was friends with Mama and was there the night I was born, then it would be probable that Harrison might have seen me, too. But remember me? No, I never would have guessed that.
He claims he remembers eating pineapple chutney on rice crackers with me at my house when I was two years old. It happened, he claims. He wore leather cowboy boots a relative in Texas sent him, and I wore a pink kimono with sakura blossoms. I draped a green feather boa around my neck. The tip of the boa often dangled in my plastic cup of Milo.
“What’s Milo?” I wrote.
“A chocolate-flavored powder that comes in a can and mixed with milk makes pretty good chocolate milk” was the response.
I write to him that my mind is on overload, that reading the words on my computer screen is becoming harder and harder. And because I do not want him to think that he can quit writing to me or that I will stop corresponding with him, I type, “I’ll continue in the morning.”
His response, just three hours later, is, “Want to talk by phone?”
———
When asked what I do for exercise, I can’t say I jog or play tennis. But I once read an article in a magazine in the teachers’ lounge that said cleaning is physical exercise. Now my reply to those who ask what I do for exercise is, “I clean.” They usually look at me as if I am the sinking Titanic, in need of more help than they can give. But like washing dishes by hand, doing chores around the house is good therapy. Cheap, too.
Tonight, dressed in my oldest and most comfortable pair of Wrangler’s and a UNC-Greensboro T-shirt, I start with my ceiling fan in the kitchen. Standing on a chair, I reach the long blades and, using a wet paper towel, slowly remove the dust. As I wipe, some of the dust sticks to the towel, but most of it drifts o
nto the floor. I wonder if dust looks the same all over the world. Is Japanese dust identical to American dust?
When I step down off the chair to get another paper towel, there’s a knock on the front door.
There, in the brisk April night, stands Richard. He has one long-stemmed red rose in his hand. He smells of cologne. Yes, I recognize it—Brut.
“I don’t have your Michael Bolton CD.”
He laughs. “Oh, Nicole, I’m not here for my CD.”
Goodness, what are you here for, then? I run a damp and dusty hand over the hem of my T-shirt.
“How have you been?” he asks.
Do I detect sincerity in his tenor voice? I hope my eyes don’t look as if I’ve been crying. “Fine.” I let politeness step up to my side and ask, “And how are you?”
“Great!” His eyes hold mine. He smiles as I think how broad his shoulders look in the moonlight. I didn’t recall them being so wide. “Would you like to go with me to the Pickle Festival?”
If my heart were a bullet, it would be shooting out of my chest now. Clear to New Bern. “What?!”
He rests a hand, the one not holding the rose, against my shoulder. “In three weeks.”
I know when the festival is; it’s always the last weekend of April.
He wants to come in. I block the door. “Richard, what are you doing?”
His eyes twinkle, bright and full. Why did God waste such long eyelashes on a guy? “Nicole, I thought we could just spend some time together.”
“Why?” I feel like my students, like Clay asking why Shakespeare used such weird language in his plays.
“Oh, Nicole.” He displays his handsomest smile. “I’ve missed you.” Softly, “Us.”
I remember falling snow and hot chocolate and the coziness of sharing an afternoon with him. I remember how he grew bored with me. How he wanted to rush me into marriage. How he crushed my heart by breaking up. I shake my head.
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