When you die, will you be all alone? That was Missy’s first question to you all those years ago. Being alone was her greatest fear, which she reminded you of at Mama and Arnie’s funeral. You hadn’t seen her more than a couple of times since Hana’s “accident” in the cave, when you and Arnie went to confront your friends together, and Missy cried and denied it all. What she offered you at Mama and Arnie’s funeral was the greatest comfort she could muster: At least they weren’t alone.
Those words bothered you then, and they kept bothering you.
Mama was in Arnie’s arms, that’s how they found her. That was what the coroner said; maybe what he says to all the sobbing children. He told you she probably went first, frail as she was, so Arnie might still have been whispering in her ear when she passed. You like to imagine Arnie conscious, but then he could have gotten up, too. He could have stayed with you awhile longer. He could even have been the one to travel to New York to bring your sister home. But that’s not why you keep dreaming of Mama and Arnie, lying together in the snow. Mama always warned you that people would disappear but, in Arnie, she had finally found someone who wouldn’t. She found a man who would keep the promise that Lillie’s stranger made to her mother:
He said he’d take care of her forever, Mama used to tell you.
Only then did Lillie’s mother finally let her go.
Gutsy Little Keiko, that’s always been Eddie’s name for you. And it’s true, you’re not afraid to jump.
They pick you up after school: no warning. The gang of four, as the boys like to call themselves, has found a new spot. This time, it’s a pond on a river just out of town, past the main swimming hole where the little kids hang out. Missy comes with you today, which, since she doesn’t dive and has never been interested in watching, is your first tip-off. She hops the guardrail with the rest of you and climbs down to a waterfall. It plunges straight down, higher than anything you’ve ever tried, into a dark green, oddly round pond. There’s one small platform notched into the top of the cliff about four feet down, but that barely shortens the distance.
Other people have jumped this one, or so they told you in the car.
You will, as always, do this right. Start with a jump, feet first, screaming, arms flailing, loose cannonballs of delight. From the top, the pond is a shifting blue-green; the sound of the falls rises up from the plunge and wraps you. You are a goddess on top of the world: the clouds, the sky, even the weather at your command.
You jump.
You can feel the sleeve of air. You have just enough time to point your feet straight down like an arrow and then ball up at the last minute into the safest, cannonball position. Style counts, and you have it. The boys are just goofy blobs of energy.
Clyde goes after you, then Billy, then Eddie and Damon.
For the boys, it’s about twitching and flexing before the jump, and then whooping and hand slapping afterward. You’ve caught your breath by the time they’re all in, so you lead the scramble back up to where Missy is still watching. Most of the way, the guys crow over how brave they are. When you get to the top, Eddie turns to Clyde, who is one of the school’s top divers, and challenges him to dive.
“Nah.”
“You can do it.”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No. Just chicken.”
“Kei would do it.”
The guys are just pushing each other like guys do. It’s Eddie who throws your name in. You have the record: all the highest jumps, the best ones with the spins and somersaults. You are fearless, just like Arnie said once. It fascinates Eddie.
But this is a big drop. Maybe two seconds, maybe fifty feet.
He’s not looking at you when he says again, “You guys are more chicken than a little girl.” If he had given you that sunny smile that once won you over, that said your success is his own and would save him, maybe you wouldn’t have hesitated. But he’s not the same guy you started going steady with months ago. Once, Eddie and Missy both looked into you like you were exciting, but now, Eddie seems more excited about what he can do to you.
“Nah,” Billy says. “Clyde should do it. He’s the star.”
Clyde looks at you. He isn’t happy with the challenge, either.
Then Eddie says, “Kei goes. Right, Missy? Kei goes first.”
And that’s it. That’s the deal for Hana’s sketchbook. She looks at you, hopeful, uncertain, and a chill rushes through you.
Eddie’s looking between you and Missy as if he can’t decide whether you will dive or chicken out. He can’t decide which one he’d rather. That’s his expression. Like he’s the puppeteer.
You want to take that power back.
The pool is blue-green. Fringed with rocks, and overhung with trees. It’s like looking into an eye. You are standing on the edge, knees bending, wondering whether to push off, run, and then try to dive, or to trust your legs to take you all the way out and into the center where it’s deepest. You are always the first, because you are the lightest and bravest.
You are Kei.
You launch yourself, flat out to get as far from the cliff as you can, and dive.
Thirty feet is one second of falling. Thoughts are even faster. As your toes leave the ground and your body is light, midair, only then do you remember Damon, the biggest and heaviest of the guys, whooping out of the pond, almost shooting out of it, screaming, “I touched!” as he high-fives all around.
The pond is too shallow. And you are in the air.
1946
Their hostess slid the screen open, her face appearing first, bent and bowing, her eyes flickering over them even as her gaze swept quickly down to the floor. Behind the woman, Miya could see the small, spare tatami waiting room, and the tall green vase placed on a pedestal that resembled a cloth-covered book in the corner. Proud, but empty of flowers.
—Ohio! the sergeant greeted the hostess cheerfully as he kicked his shoes off and onto the stone floor of the genkan, then stood there in his socks.
He was delighted that he knew this place; that it belonged to him by the virtue of his knowing. He took Miya’s arm as she navigated out of her shoes, trying to step up so her feet landed, not on the ground in the stone entrance as his did, but on the worn but glowing wood floor. She could see the displeasure in their hostess’s face and knew it was not his shoes, which were still hanging from his fingers, or even his dirty feet that made her frown; it was that Miya herself was not the person the hostess expected to see. Or perhaps it was the Western blouse and skirt she’d bought at the PX, which would not have seemed so indecent if she were Caucasian. She was indecent. She was desperate; that was why she was here.
Their hostess’s kimono was not as muted or as worn as she might have expected. It was a deep indigo blue with a thin tracing of red cranes near the hem, and an immaculate white silk undercollar. She wondered if the colors were intentional, and if they were the only guests. The woman was alone, and old enough to be her mother. Her face was carefully prepared: powder filling in the lines she had earned; charcoal drawing the ones she wanted.
—Irrashaimase, Tai-la-sama, the woman said as she fussed over the sergeant.
Miya had always known there were places like this: establishments that catered to GIs who wanted more than sukiyaki parties and bingo nights; they wanted a taste of real Japan. That he frequented this one, knew it well enough to arrange this dinner on no notice, meant there was some truth in the jokes and comments about the certain bar girl he was often seen with, in a disreputable section of town. The girls at the clinic in Tsukiji where Miya worked, and her dorm mates who stumbled in from their own adventures long after she had gone to bed, all teased her for losing her chance with “her sergeant” because she didn’t understand the currency.
—Don’t you know what those Jap girls will do for silk stockings and cigarettes? they asked. “You can’t afford to be such a prude.”
He used to stop by the radiologists’ clinic to bring her Reader’s Digests and Ellery Queen’
s Mystery Magazines. She wouldn’t go out with him, not even when he begged—on mock bended knee with his eyes twinkling—for an “innocent lunch.” It was only once she had read every English language magazine and article he’d ever given her through twice that she realized her dorm mates were right. Miya couldn’t remember the last time he’d stopped by.
She thought she didn’t care, at first. She had lived through much more than any of the silly Red Cross girls who’d come here to play the victors. Girls not much younger than she was in years, but so far behind in suffering. Miya was weary, and ruined in a way that she tried to keep secret, a way she knew none of them could ever understand.
But now, the city was emptying out. August 15 was V-J Day, when the Allied victory would be celebrated. The sixth was nothing. A lonely day in Tokyo. If there were survivors of the pikadon here, they were in hiding. Even those who had an interest in Hiroshima had moved on. At the one-year mark, the Occupation was scaling back and spreading across the country, and there was a new commission established in the two bombed cities to study the damage. She knew of several girls from the clinic who’d gone there to help collect the data on radiation poisoning in the victims of the bomb.
Less than half the girls in her dorm were still in Tokyo. The rest were traveling, doing a little sightseeing before they went home.
Miya had never imagined she could end up here, living in Japan. Each time she applied for repatriation to America, they told her there was no way, not ever, not with her records or the lack of them. She might as well give up trying to get home.
Home. Where was that anyway? America didn’t want her. Where did she belong? One country was no better than the other, but she didn’t relish the options in this one: waiting to find a new set of in-laws who would consider her lucky to have caught even the disdain of their son. Working in a bar.
Her future had not changed; it had just caught up with her. And with the truth of it right in front of her, she made it a point to discover where her sergeant could be found. She was relieved that he still recognized her, that he seemed happy to see her when she “just happened” to run into him on the street not too far from a strip they called Hooker’s Alley. She was just glad she had found him alone. That day, her biggest criticism—that he was so simple in such a complex world—seemed like an asset. She remembered what she had liked about him. That he had never killed anyone.
She was used to forcing a smile, but once they were settled at the table in their private room and the food began to come, happiness was easier. Their hostess shuttled it in in courses, small to be sure, but the flavors were delicate and the service so prompt the woman might have been hovering outside the sliding door. The main course was a small gray fish, and whole—the meat was wet and sweet; she could see that before she tasted it—and their hostess seemed touched by Miya’s barely stifled squeak of pleasure. Miya felt the earth slide under her as the heady smell of sake and shoyu reached her; she should be ashamed of being so easy on their first date, she thought, but she didn’t care. She had been so many things for so many people that she no longer knew how to recognize herself. Not a mother any longer. Not a wife, not even a daughter. What did it matter, really, that the man she was sitting with had been in Japan almost a year and still used the bastardized, GI form of “good morning” every time he tried to say hello? She could endure much more than that if he could get her home.
She hated the GIs for how privileged they all were. They had their pick of everything, even the teenaged girls. If you were white, and American, the grand PX had anything you could wish for, while entire Japanese families stood in line for beans because the rice rations had run out and there was nothing else to eat. She hated the Japanese soldiers, too, hated everything she’d heard about the human shields and the young boy pilots committing suicide by smashing their little planes into aircraft carriers. But she also hated to see the veterans shining shoes, or selling old metal in the black markets, or begging in the streets with their missing limbs wrapped in old cloth because the people they were once ready to die for now actively shunned them.
These were the thoughts she walked with, slept with; they held her together. But tonight, on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, with a real meal in front of her, she was tired of being so angry.
—It’s not our place to hate, her father used to tell her. It’s not our place to judge, or to forgive. God is the only one who can stand in judgment.
Back then, she hadn’t yet seen enough of the world to understand him. Now, though she could no longer believe in her father’s God, letting go of judgment was a huge relief.
Her sergeant was going home soon. He didn’t have his orders yet, but they both knew it was a matter of time. She thought of his happy future: his return to South Dakota and the welcoming arms of some blond fiancée whom he insisted did not exist. But what if he was lying? She wouldn’t be the first girl in her dorm to be seduced by a soldier who had no intention of keeping his promises. If she gave in to him and he left her? It was more than she could bear.
She let him sing his little song of the name he gave her, “Miya, Miya, Miya.” She let him tease her when she couldn’t finish her food. He bumped her toes with his own under the table, where any touch could be an accident, and she did not pull away. His hand would be next, grazing her thigh. She was not a stupid girl.
It was then that she brought up the subject of Hiroshima. And though he knew almost nothing about it, still he was well versed in how excellent it was that a single bomb could stop a war cold and save all the lives that would have been lost had America had to invade by land. Miya could say nothing to this. It was not just that she’d never told him she had been there, nor that it was beyond her to stand up for either side. On that night, on that anniversary, Hanako was all she could think of: her charred face; the raw, red, puffy swathes on her body where there had once been skin.
She had mentioned the bomb to him so that she could force a real connection, but suddenly, she was exhausted. The pikadon was still exploding in her mind, and in her body, too. She could feel it deep in her bowels, a heat that still broke into a cold sweat when she least expected it. Whatever poison the bomb had left inside her, it had not gone away. It burrowed deep; she imagined it like a snake, curled around her spine. Sinking its fangs into her, a hot, icy poison, whenever she thought she might at last be healed. She could feel her belly clenching, and imagined, almost idly, that her insides might come pouring out, draining her in front of him, leaving her a shell. She was already empty. Already erased. What bothered Miya the most, though, even as she struggled to stay attentive, was that she could no longer hear the sound of Hanako’s voice in those moments when she tossed and turned and lost consciousness. That Hawaiian lilt that she had come to rely on had been overwhelmed by all the accents of the Occupation.
She missed her voice so fiercely. Missed her companionship. Missed Hanako almost as much as she missed Toshi, who she could still feel with her every day.
Her sergeant was still talking, though he had moved on to the war in Europe and what they had found in those German camps. A buddy of his from high school had been there and they had been exchanging photographs. Now that the fighting was over, the censors had gotten lax, or they were too busy checking the outgoing mail to search the lining of a care package. Her sergeant had sent him copies of some pictures from Hiroshima that he’d gotten. Some artsy ones of shadows from the blast. But his buddy’s pictures, well, the people they liberated in those camps were so skinny, he told her, it seemed impossible that they were still living. He tried to describe the dents in their bodies where the skin wrapped around knobs of bone.
He wasn’t saying it right, but did she understand what he was getting at? Even though they were technically still living, with everything that happened to them, how could they really be alive?
Was it possible to survive the death of the spirit? she wondered. Was it possible that a man she’d thought too simple-minded and innocent could think about such
things? She found herself wondering what he would look like when his hair grew out, in civilian clothes. It was time to tell him the truth if she wanted more than one night with him, but where should she begin?
—I had a…she began, then she started to cry. There were too many possible endings to hang on such a simple beginning. Son. Friend, family, life…Son. Those words, even if he could hear them, could never carry everything she had lost.
—Oh, Miya, Miya. And then his body was against hers, his arms around her, and she realized she couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched her. The name he had given her rocked her gently. Truth could come later. So could food. First she would shut out the world for one night, she thought. One night was all she needed to find out if the dead could be revived.
Kei
By the time you get home that night after cliff jumping, Mama’s hand is on the doorknob. You are cold and wind whipped, and Mama is on you immediately, your crazy mother of old. What happened? Oh my God…She is fingering you, pulling at your hair, your clothes, turning you around to see the worst, to see the damage.
How is it possible you are standing here alive? How is it possible you’re unhurt? In her tears, in her pacing—she can’t stop that flight from the window to you and back again, as if she’s still waiting for a different you to fly in between the louvered glass. Or perhaps she’s pacing because Arnie has gone out to look for you, is still out there, searching in circles. How to find him? How to call him back?
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