A Thousand Stitches

by Constance O'Keefe

  Now, relaxed on the grass, they were looking at their childhood. “See, Gen, you’re standing behind me,” said Lynn.

  “I remember the day this was taken,” he said. “My dad had been called out to the hospital before dawn, and I gave my mom a really hard time about the shirt she wanted me to wear. But now, looking at the photo, I don’t know which of us won the argument. I don’t know if the shirt I’m wearing is the one I loved or the one she wanted me to wear. It was so important at the time, and now I can’t remember.”

  “And can you believe that one little girl could own as many purple and pink items of clothing? Look at how I had dressed myself. My mom was too lenient!”

  As he fingered the photo, Gen remembered more. How the photographer was pleased by the sunlight that had flooded the schoolyard when the clouds unexpectedly parted. “Now,” he had said, “we have our chance, even if just for a moment. Smile everyone.”

  The kids stood straight and smiled, and then laughed along with their teacher when the photographer added, “That means you too, Mrs. Arthurson.”

  Gen had been keenly aware that he had been standing behind Lynn, looking down at her blond hair spread out below him. He had even reached out quickly to touch the curls at the back of her head. Joey Trista standing beside him hadn’t noticed, and Lynn hadn’t felt it, but, both guilty and pleased with himself that he had been so bold, Gen had been delighted to know that her hair was as soft to the touch as it looked. His hand tingled as he looked at her now; the same soft curls shone around her, lit by the sun behind her.

  They spent the rest of their time that day sketching the basics of the missing years; they filled in the details slowly in the days that followed.

  Her brother Bobby had been driving on the bright, sunny winter afternoon of the accident and had escaped injury. “He says he doesn’t feel guilty, and it absolutely was the other driver’s fault,” said Lynn. “But he decided during the summer after the accident to go to Berkeley rather than Cornell. I think he’s still reassuring himself that I really am okay. He came to the hospital every day, helped Mom nurse me once I got home, and helped me get through the physio. But even with everything that happened, it really wasn’t a bad year. I learned a lot about how wonderful it is to be alive and to know that you’re really loved. And I don’t mind being a high school senior a year late. My friends didn’t know what to do with me last year.”

  Gen told her about the International School in Yokohama and how he had ended up there after a half year at his local school in Kamakura proved to everyone that he didn’t fit in after four years in San Francisco. And he explained the idea of ronin—masterless samurai—and how he was one because he had failed his entrance exams.

  “It happens all the time in Japan. And with my background it was no big surprise. The usual thing is to just postpone going to university for a year.”

  “Bobby says it’s called a gap year in England.”

  “I guess,” he said. “But ronin aren’t supposed to leave a gap. They’re supposed to spend the year cramming.”

  “Gen, do Berkeley High classes that are far too easy for you count?”

  “Probably not,” he laughed. “But coming back here was the best thing I’ve done this year.”

  After that second day, they sat outside every day, sharing their lunches. Lynn brought salads with ingredients from her mother’s garden and Gen brought rice balls. He and Yuko, his Japanese-American host mother, made them in the morning for Yuko’s husband, Dave, and for each of the three young kids, as well as for themselves. Yuko was determined to train him so he could astonish his own mother when he went home. Dave laughed the first morning he found his wife and Gen in the kitchen patting the balls into shape. “Now that I know you want to learn how to cook, Gen, I’ll get my mom to teach you how to make rugguleh when she comes to visit at Christmas.”

  Gen and Lynn made a game of guessing about the lunches every day. He was eager for figs, kiwi, and avocado, and she wanted rice balls with black sesame seeds or shiso leaves. She claimed she was conducting an experiment to determine if she preferred the shiso fresh or dried.

  One day when she teased him about his ronin status, he told her the story of the Forty-Seven Masterless Samurai, trying to explain that every school child in Japan knew the story. Lynn was lying on the grass and had started out laughing when he began the story but fell silent as he described the stalwart dedication of the samurai as they planned to avenge their lord and told of the snowy night, when, having waited patiently for more than a year, they were finally able to achieve their goal, and how, having finally done so, their own lives came to an end.

  “But your story will have a happy ending, Gen,” she said, rolling over and holding his gaze with her wide green eyes. “You will pass the exams, and after school in Japan you’ll come here, just as your dad did, and work at UCSF. It’s your fate. You have all of your dad’s connections, and mine. Remember, I know lots of doctors at the hospital too.”

  Sitting in the weak autumn sun and listening to Lynn, Gen decided that he wouldn’t go back to Japan at the end of the semester. He would stay the entire school year and then go back, take his time, cram as much as he had to, and take the exams again at the beginning of the year after next.

  Lynn started gathering their things. As he moved to help her, he said, “Yes, that’s what I’ll do.” She was kneeling on the grass, pushing lunch boxes into her knapsack. She turned and smiled at him, but didn’t say anything.

  He was surprised at how calm and confident he felt, happy that he was able, finally, to let the burden he had felt since he failed the exams just slide off him. Her smile invited a response, but he couldn’t summon any words, and as he stood with dirty napkins in his hand, Gen thought they would never be sufficient for the task of describing how he felt.

  Lynn started through the trees and across the school’s lawn. He trailed behind her. As the dappled sun fell on her, her light hair glowed and faded, glowed and faded.

  When she turned to see if he was still behind her, he shuddered. All he wanted to do was touch her. His second-grade longing for the girl with the beautiful hair was still there, but now desire was all through him, in his very marrow, and spreading up and over the surface of who he was. He wanted the young woman before him in a way he had never before wanted anyone or anything. This second revelation chilled him, sobered him, and brought him to a halt. Yes, he thought, words are far too small and shabby for this.

  “We’ll be late, Gen, if you don’t get a move on,” she said, her voice low. She turned away from him again and took a few more slow steps through the sun, the shade, the sun, the shade.

  When he fell into step beside her, she was no longer smiling. She looked at him fully, inviting and accepting what he felt as he looked at her. What she had to say was just a simple statement of fact. “Yes,” she said, “we do belong together.”

  At the end of September, Lynn proposed the trip to Point Reyes. “It’s the best time of the year. It’ll be sunny, not the usual fog.”

  Gen thought he remembered a trip to Point Reyes years before when one of his father’s colleagues from the hospital in Yokohama came for a visit, but Lynn told him they weren’t going to the beach with the lighthouse and promised him the hike she had in mind would be special. They chose the day, a weekday in mid-October when they would be free, thanks to a teachers’ conference.

  Gen awoke very early that Tuesday morning. He went down the dark stairs and headed to the back of the house. He had discovered the early morning magic of the kitchen his first week with Dave and Yuko, when he was still jet lagged. The day Yuko found him there they had agreed that the morning light was special, and their lunch-making ritual dated from that sunny morning.

  Gen didn’t know if Yuko also knew how special it was to watch the room fill up with light as the dark of the night and the ambiguous shadows of the early dawn receded. Once or twice he had wondered if she had left him alone with the growing light, waiting until the room was ne
w-day bright before she walked in. He loved being in the midst of the change; it was calm and dramatic all at once. Change that launched the day and promised the future. It began gently, with the faintest of light, and ended gleaming and glorious.

  He sat at the table, witnessing it again. The first light slanted across the room from the east window, catching the faucets and making them shine. It inched up and set aglow the flowerpot, the raku tea bowl, and the ceramic bird on the windowsill above the sink.

  By the time Yuko stepped into the kitchen, the sun had swept through the room. The light was on the edge of ordinary: the red bowl filled with shining green apples had just finished blazing and its radiance was slipping away into the unseen sheen of everyday.

  “Good morning, Gen. I think something special for today. You are here to help, aren’t you?”

  Lynn drove, navigating I-580 with confidence. After they crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, they passed the grim bulk of San Quentin, swung along leafy Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, and swept up and over the pass to the forests and hilly grasslands of West Marin. Gen read off the names, hesitating over some of them: Tocaloma, Olema, Bolinas. Lynn explained that the Miwok Indians had lived in the area, long before the Spanish arrived. The names were just about all that was left of the Miwok, layered in with all the saint names the Spanish left behind. “Actually,” Lynn said, “some of those Miwok names sound Japanese to me.”

  Gen rolled them around on his tongue and said, “Well, maybe Olema. It could be a Japanese name, but it would come out as O-ri-ma.” As they drove on and the deserted, narrow two-lane highway crossed wide pastures, he continued, “I like the idea of the Indians walking here. Now that we’re away from the city, you can begin to imagine it.”

  The road abruptly turned to gravel. A plume of dust trailed behind them as they arrived at the Palomarin Trail Head parking lot. Lynn chose a space in the shade at its edge. Gen got out, stretched, and breathed in the sharp, clean air and the tang of the ocean. He smiled at her across the top of the car. “I’m ready,” he said. “Bring on the adventure.”

  They walked across the parking lot. “Alamere Falls Trail,” Gen read on the sign. “Four miles. Shouldn’t be bad.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, as she climbed the steps up to the trail itself. “Bobby has brought me here before, but we’ve never gone all the way because of the fog. It should be good today, and most of the trail is not too hard.”

  At the top of the stairs, they started on the trail, through a fragrant grove of eucalyptus. Just past the trees, they brushed against bushes with perfect, waxy white berries. When Gen stopped to take a picture, Lynn laughed, and said that this was just the first of many beautiful things to photograph.

  In what seemed like just a few more steps, the trail emerged from the woods and they were on a ridge above cliffs; the ocean rose up to meet them.

  “Gen, look at this. The sun is shining for us, and so is the ocean,” she said, smiling. They stood next to each other, feeling the breeze on their faces, delighting in the sky and the ocean. The beautiful wide Pacific lay before them, its stripes of colors merging to the blue that met the ­horizon.

  Gen gazed at the shining expanse, aware that he was a tiny thing at the edge of great power. Vast, but not endless. Far away on its other side is the other half of my life. I will, I will make the two parts come together and stay together.

  The trail was easy going. When Gen said so, Lynn told him again, “We’ll see.” After about twenty minutes, two groups coming the other way passed them, everyone smiling with the shared pleasure of a perfect sunny day. Soon afterward, they reached a small, deep lake surrounded by high, forested banks, its ripples shining in the sunlight. Gen stopped and stood still. The blue waters are so inviting, he thought, drinking it in. He imagined the Miwok swimming here and wished he had brought a bathing suit.

  But Lynn had no interest in dawdling. “Let’s go,” she said. “We have a lot more to see.” They descended a bit from the dense green around the lake, and the trail again approached the coast. The day was so clear and bright that Gen could see the hook of Point Reyes extending into the ocean to the north and west, with the lighthouse at its tip. The trail slipped back into the woods. After about another half hour they came to Pelican Lake, where the ocean was again visible beyond the quiet blue waters.

  For the rest of the hike, the sound of the ocean accompanied them through the quiet of the woods. They inhaled the heady combination of the smells of the salt water and the Douglas firs. Lynn commented on the plants and flowers along the way; Gen snapped more photos. They found a perfect specimen of foxglove. Gen’s picture captured the dramatic contrast of the purple markings inside the delicate white of the bell-shaped flower.

  Gen put his camera away and grumbled good-naturedly as the incline of the trail increased, and Lynn once again said she thought great things were in store for them. “We’re now farther along than Bobby and I were ever able to go,” she said. “The best really should be ahead of us.”

  They found their reward for the climb when the trail turned and again emerged from the woods. They stood high on a cliff with the Pacific spread out before them and a series of falls cascading below them, the last ending on the beach far below that was dotted with tide pools. Once they caught their breath, they stood in silence and looked and looked.

  “Lynn, you were right,” was all Gen could manage.

  “Yes, it is special, isn’t it?” she replied, and stepped forward to stand beside him. She shook off the weight of the beauty before them, and laughed as she caught his eye. “And now the fun begins. We have to get ourselves down to the beach.”

  They began in good order, stepping carefully sideways down the steep trail. As the sandy soil gave way to loose gravel, they both began to slip. They paused when they reached the foot of the first falls and looked up at the flow of the water in the sunlight. They felt the drops blown into their faces by the ocean breeze and listened: the water fell straight and swift, and as it landed, splashed in a pool. Gathering itself for a brief, still moment, it rushed off to take the next fall.

  When they started off again, descending parallel to the second of the falls, Gen slipped and lost his footing. He picked himself up and started again, slowly, crabwise, making it about twenty feet before he fell again. He gave up after a few more unsuccessful tries, and bumped along scrabbling downward with his hands, bouncing his rear end on the path. He could hear Lynn behind him, laughing as she managed to stay upright for a bit longer, and then laughing even more as she joined him.

  “Gen, we may not be graceful, but we’re getting there,” she called. “And at least we’re closer to the falls. We’re no longer creatures of the high ground, looking down on them. We’re with them; we’re embracing them.”

  When they reached the beach, they staggered to their feet, squaring their knapsacks on their backs as they looked up at the last of the falls, and taking in the spectacle of the whole series stepping their way to the beach.

  “Amazing,” said Gen.

  “As I promised you,” she said.

  They moved across the beach, from wet to dry sand and then back to wet again as they skirted the tide pools. At one of the largest Lynn took his hand and walked him to the edge. She kept her hand in his even as they squatted to look more closely.

  “Look,” she said, “it’s a chiton,” and proceeded to point out the shapes of the mollusk’s eight shells hidden below its outer skin. She explained how the creature moves and told Gen that the ones along the Pacific coast, like this gumboot chiton, were the largest of all the chitons. “And the Miwok probably ate them too.”

  When Gen said he was impressed that she knew all of these details, she said, “Well, people think Bobby is just a computer geek, but he knows a lot about nature. He’s made sure I know at least a little about our flora and fauna. And you have to admit, Gen, that he was right about this hike. Even if the last bit was difficult, this is the most wonderful place. We have the beach entirel
y to ourselves.”

  “And, look,” she continued, her eyes fastened again on the tide pool, “there’s a little limpet just near the chiton.”

  As she leaned over and pointed, Gen lost his balance; their hands fell apart and he dropped to one of his knees to steady himself. When he got up, he took out his camera and snapped away, capturing the details of the intricate world in the tide pool.

  They retreated up the beach to where the sand was dry, spread out a faded Mexican tablecloth Lynn pulled from her knapsack, and got out their lunches.

  “What did you and Yuko come up with this morning, Gen-chan?” Lynn said, trying out the affectionate suffix she had heard Yuko use that morning when she walked Gen to the car and wished them both a good day.

  “You’ll have to see, but I think you’ll like it.”

  “You too,” she said. She pulled figs, carefully packed in a plastic lunch box, from her pack, and Gen unwrapped rice balls with centers of fresh chopped shiso and umeboshi, pickled plum paste.

  “And,” Lynn said triumphantly, “mint chocolate cookies along with oranges for desert. We’ll need the energy for the climb back up to the trail.”

  When they finally crested the slope and were within sight of the trail again, they met a group of six who were debating whether the trip to the beach could be done, and if it would be worth it. Lynn and Gen laughed as they assured them that it was worth it.

  “But,” she said, “you shouldn’t try it if your dignity is really important to you. We promise you you’ll be in awkward positions on the way down.”

  As Gen and Lynn tightened each other’s knapsacks, they witnessed the end of the debate and then the plunge of each member of the group, one after another, down the trail. It wasn’t long before the shouts and laughter from below floated back up to the trail. “We told them that dignity would go,” he said, as they turned and began the hike back.

  They didn’t stop until they had passed Pelican Lake and were again on the shore of the first lake they had encountered that morning. “Now you’ll see why I hustled you along,” Lynn said. “I wanted to get back here while it was still light.” She knelt down and pulled a towel out of her knapsack. She stood up quickly and had stepped out of her pants, pulled her shirt over her head, and dived into the lake before Gen had really registered that she was wearing a bathing suit under her clothes.