Stone Field, True Arrow: A Novel

by Kyoko Mori

  “I’m not interested,” he mimics, in a thin, nasal voice.

  Maya gets up from the couch. “I’ll get some information from Yuko about the mediator she and Dan used. I’ll get our papers done. I don’t want anything that’s yours. It should be very simple.”

  “You are so businesslike.”

  Maya shrugs. “It’s the only way to be at this point.”

  “It’s the only way you ever are.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.” She walks back to the foyer, where the boxes are. They are so big. She won’t be able to carry them both at the same time. Jeff hasn’t moved from his chair. Maya considers leaving without the boxes, but then she’ll have to come back another time. Till then, they will be here, reminders of how she stormed off in anger. She picks up the first box, pushes the screen door open with her foot, and walks to the car. When she returns, Jeff is standing in the foyer. His face is pale and drawn-looking, except his eyes, which are red.

  “Look, I’m sorry about everything,” Maya says, stopping a few steps away from him. “I really am.” Her hands dangle uselessly at her sides.

  “I know you won’t believe it, but I wanted you to stay. I was shocked when you called and said you weren’t coming back. You know what I was doing when you called?”

  She says nothing.

  He goes on. “I was writing Nancy a letter, begging her to leave me alone. Seeing her wasn’t working out. You were right about that. Every time we got together, it was a little worse for me. She looked familiar but different, like someone I should never have let go of in the first place. She was so happy to be with me. I couldn’t help wanting to spend time with her and her daughter, but I knew it was wrong. I wanted to put a stop to my feelings for them and be with you. The first year we were together, I loved being here with you. I think it was the happiest time of my life.”

  “Please. I don’t mind that you went back to Nancy. You don’t have to explain.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  Jeff’s eyes are shiny with the tears he must be holding back. Maya looks away. They won’t stand this close to each other again. In five years, maybe even less, she may not know where he is. She wishes he were her childhood friend or her cousin, someone she would know, at least vaguely, for the rest of her life.

  “Some days,” he says, “I’m convinced that I went back to Nancy in a state of shock. As soon as you were off the phone, I ripped up the letter I was writing and called her. She came over and watched me cry. She was so compassionate.”

  “Stop. It only hurts to talk like this.”

  “When you changed the locks, I should have told you that you were doing the right thing. I should have been happy that you did something to show me you wanted to hold on to me. Instead, I got all upset because you hadn’t told me you were going to do it. I acted like you shouldn’t do anything without my permission. No wonder you left me. I’m so sorry.”

  “I didn’t leave because of that.”

  Jeff shakes his head. “Nancy knew you had doubts about me. That’s why she was so persistent. The night after she saw us at the tennis courts, she drove by and saw your car wasn’t there. She came in at six in the morning and confronted me. I told her you were staying with a friend but it wasn’t a big deal. She didn’t believe me. We talked for hours; she tried to get me to leave you right then and be with her. I wouldn’t do it then, but I started feeling confused.”

  “Listen to me, Jeff. You have to believe that you did the right thing,” Maya tells him. “I don’t want you to have any regrets. I’m sure you’re meant to be with Nancy and not with me.”

  “That makes one of us. You never realized how much I loved you.”

  You just told me I was the most selfish person on the face of the earth, she could remind him, but it would do no good. The day Dan told her about Meredith, Yuko wished him dead. “I had a vision of him clutching his chest and keeling over,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to see more than anything. But I couldn’t stop the words I was saying, begging him to stay and work things out because I loved him. My head and my mouth were playing two different kinds of music. I was a one-woman broken jukebox.” Jeff is caught in the same confusion, and there isn’t a thing Maya can do to stop him.

  “When you first came to this house,” he says, “you used to take a bath late at night after I was in bed. You’d sit in the tub with the door ajar because I warned you that the steam would make the wallpaper peel unless you used the fan or left the door open.”

  Maya nods in spite of herself, thinking of the dimly lit room full of steam. For a moment, she too longs for that time. She was alone and yet with him—safe and comforted in this house. She had loved sitting in the warm water and thinking of the things she was weaving at the loft. All that time, Jeff was lying in his bed across the hallway. He had been a protector of her solitude, a witness to her peace.

  “You sang so softly you didn’t think I could hear you. Maybe you thought I was sleeping. The songs sounded so mournful. I didn’t realize till then that you had such a pretty voice, because you never sang, not even when a song you knew came on the radio in the car. I loved your voice. Lying in bed and listening, I thought I had never loved anyone as much as I loved you then.” Jeff blinks, and a few teardrops roll down his face.

  She had learned those songs in kindergarten and grade school in Osaka. She could only recall them in fragments, mixing up the verses and the refrains. It made little difference because they were simple songs about the rain or the snow, the waves rising in the sea and the moon setting over the horizon. You could take all those songs together, mix up the words, and they would make as much or as little sense as they always did.

  “I only wish,” he continues, rubbing his eyes, “that I had told you how much I loved you then. I joked around and hoped you would see how happy you were making me. It wasn’t enough. I understand that now, when it’s too late.”

  She wouldn’t have been happier if he had told her his feelings. If he had said he loved her voice, she would have stopped singing. Always, Maya had wanted to keep something to herself, something important that was hers alone. She sang late at night in the dim bathroom when she thought Jeff was sleeping. She drove up to the barn to weave by herself and was glad that he never came to the store or to the loft—that he was so unfamiliar with her work as to confuse her handwoven jacket with another woman’s department-store coat. Nancy had left her best pictures for him, with light falling on her long hair and white blouse, the loving smile on her face as she looked at her baby. She had wanted to give him the most beautiful things about herself. Maya had chosen the exact opposite: to keep some form of beauty known only to her. Until she met Eric, she didn’t understand the desire to let go of beauty instead of hoarding it. When she told him about her father lighting the bottle rockets, about the black cat they saw in the weavers’ cottage all those years ago, about the hooded red jacket with her name embroidered in purple thread, her words felt like the webs of light spreading from her hands toward him on the sparklers they lit on summer solstice. She had offered him the pictures of her past so he could keep them in his memory even if they never met again. Jeff has no idea how miserably she failed to love him.

  “I know I hurt you because I wasn’t assertive enough with Nancy,” he goes on. “Maybe you stopped loving me because I seemed too helpless. I was still attracted to her after all these years, but it didn’t have to turn out this way. I was determined to get over how I felt about her and be with you.”

  “But things turned out the way they did. We have to accept that and go on.”

  “I wake up some mornings thinking I’ve made a terrible mistake. My life’s too weird. I’m like one of those amnesia victims. I wake up, it’s six years later, my wife is still here, and we now have a daughter. Only I can remember what I was doing before I woke up. I have such strong memories about being with you. I don’t feel right about anything.”

  He talks on, but she has stopped listening. Instea
d, she’s thinking about the morning last fall when she went birdwatching in a state park north of the city. Shortly after dawn near one of the ponds, among some low bushes, she found a Canada goose someone had shot with an arrow. The bird was still alive, with the feathered end of the arrow sticking out of its back, the pointed end breaking through between its legs. The goose kept circling the bushes, bobbing its head, taking tiny frenzied steps. Maya ran to the house on the other side of the park where the ranger lived. When they returned in the ranger’s truck, the goose was still in the same spot. The ranger approached with his leather gloves. What he did was quick and decisive. Maya looked away, and the next moment, the bird was under the ranger’s arm, limp and out of misery. The ranger thanked her, told her about the poachers he’d been trying to arrest, and drove away. Maya had known all along that the bird would die; the arrow could not be pulled out without tearing its insides. She only regretted that she wasn’t able to step up to the bird immediately and put an end to its suffering. A snap of her wrist was all it would have taken.

  Jeff has finished talking and is waiting for her to say something. She looks away from him, at the remaining box of sweaters. Whoever packed the box has used the thickest masking tape, overlapped double. Maya thinks of the lips of prisoners or torture victims sealed shut with tape. It is a kind of torture to live the rest of your life wondering whether you’ve made the right choice or not. If his relationship to Nancy sours, Jeff will think of the years he imagines he could have spent with Maya. Late at night, he will stand alone at the window peering at the darkness, longing for Maya and the peaceful, loving marriage he thinks they had in their first year. He’ll regret everything he believes he did wrong. Maya will be a ghost in his life—a figment of imagination that keeps him from living with the choice he has made. That may be the unkindest interpretation of what her father has been. His silence turned him into a ghost who kept Maya wandering all these years, floating a few inches above the ground, unable to rise up or come down. It’s too late for her to stop that aimless journey. But she doesn’t have to be a ghost in someone else’s life. What she is about to do is the only act of mercy possible.

  “I want to tell you something,” she begins.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t leave because of Nancy. I couldn’t come back and stay here another night because I was with someone else.”

  Jeff narrows his eyes. “You’re just telling me that.”

  “I wish I were.”

  For a long time, they say nothing. He won’t believe her unless she can tell him more.

  “It was someone who kept coming to the store—I met him at Peg’s.” Maya pauses, surprised at how much it hurts to give away even that small detail. It’s as if she were betraying Eric by reducing him to a shady character in Jeff’s mind. She remembers him putting down his camera and kissing her. He might be looking at those pictures right now. “He’s gone now,” she says to Jeff. “But that makes no difference, I know. I should have told you when I left. I’m sorry.”

  “You should have,” Jeff mutters. “I feel like an idiot now. The whole time I was tormenting myself because I felt attracted to Nancy and I was being so careful, you were doing this. Nancy tried to seduce me that morning you were gone. I wouldn’t go along with it, even though it made her cry. I would never have slept with her while you were here, living in my house.”

  “I wasn’t with him the whole time. I left the afternoon he and I became lovers.”

  “Still, that changes everything. You didn’t leave because of Nancy. You didn’t even leave because of me.”

  “That’s true. I left because I did something I shouldn’t have done. Now you can stop blaming yourself.” Maya picks up the box and steps toward the door. “I’m sorry,” she says as he leans back to let her pass.

  Just as she pushes open the door, he says, “For a second, I thought you were going to mention Yuko. I thought you were going to tell me that she was the one you slept with. You were always sneaking around to see her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you told me that she and you had been lovers all along.”

  “You don’t have to say things to hurt me now.”

  “No, really,” he insists. “Maybe you could never love me, because all along, you were in love with her.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “How do I know you didn’t sleep with all kinds of people, men and women, those nights you said you were staying at the studio? I had no way of checking up on you. I couldn’t even call.”

  “I didn’t have an affair with anyone else. You just have to take my word for it.”

  “Yeah, but your word is no good. You’re a liar, Maya, that’s what you are. A cheater.” Jeff leans forward toward her, his shoulders hunched and his lips twisted. Maya has the urge to put down the box and hit him in the face. She can imagine how satisfying it would be to leave a red imprint of her fingers on his pale cheek. “You and Yuko. When you guys were growing up, maybe you kissed and touched each other, doing a little exploration of each other’s bodies. I’m not naive. I haven’t been working with high school kids all these years for nothing. I know what some girls do—especially shy and awkward ones like the two of you must have been.”

  Maya thinks of herself and Yuko baking cakes in Mrs. Nakashima’s bright, clean kitchen. It’s as if Jeff were spitting on the only good parts of her past. “I know you’re angry at me,” she says, as quietly as she can. “But leave Yuko out of it. She’s the only friend from my childhood. She’s almost my sister.”

  “Can I tell you something?” Jeff’s voice sounds terrible and thin. “That’s just a pitiful fantasy. You’re not related to Yuko. You look nothing like her. You only want her to be your sister because all you’ve got, besides her, is your dingbat mother.”

  Maya leans hard into the door and strides out, almost tumbling onto the porch. Regaining her balance, she keeps walking, cutting across the front lawn. She hurls the box in the backseat, slams the door, and slides in behind the wheel. In five seconds, she is peeling out into the street with her tires screeching. Only then does she let herself think of the words she wanted to say: Just like you’re not related to that little girl you’re going to raise. She looks nothing like you either. I hope you remember that when you’re alone with her.

  Those words would have poured out of her mouth like gasoline on fire, igniting everything in its path. Words her mother said to her in her anger, screaming and sobbing on those basement steps, have burned holes in her heart. You have no choice. You have no one but me. No one else loves you. Even the things Kay said more recently—about how Maya’s father did not love her enough to give up his art—have turned into a noxious fire smoldering somewhere, never entirely going out. In her anger, Kay must have believed she was only speaking the truth, but the line between wanting to tell the truth and wanting to inflict pain is infinitesimal. It’s smaller than the tiniest sliver of fingernail used to cast a killing spell. Maya pictures Nancy standing on the side of the road, waving a black flag of distress; this time, she’s holding the little girl’s hand with her free hand and both faces are covered with soot—the substance painted on the mouths of female infants in remote parts of the world to stop their hunger forever. Maya’s words, undetectable as that, could have ended all their hope for a loving father.

  Maya drives on, her eyes steady on the familiar roads of the city. She has avoided the harm her parents did, her father with his long silence and her mother with her bitter words—both of them consumed by one kind of despair or another. She pictures a large globe spinning, her hand reaching toward it to calm its motion. This is the one thing Maya hopes to stop: not the debt Nate believes to be carried from one lifetime to another but the restless circles of loneliness spreading from one person to another within this life.

  21

  Going down the last hill near the lake, Maya shifts her bicycle into the highest gear. The wind rises and hums around her. Yuko is close behind her when they start, but halfway down Maya is alone, her le
gs pumping and her hands gripping the handlebar. She hits the dip at the bottom and keeps going, gliding up the hill without having to down-shift until the last stretch. The momentum that pulled her down is carrying her up, but now she has to work harder to keep pedaling. Her throat and lungs ache to turn the air into speed. Cycling is the simplest translation of breath into motion.

  At the top, she pulls over on the gravel shoulder to wait. Ahead, the lake glitters between the trees on the bluff. Behind her, Yuko is struggling up the hill. She’s beginning to wobble, but she’s halfway up. If she can keep going, slow but steady, she won’t have to get off and walk her bike as she did yesterday. Yuko has quit smoking. She called the night she returned from Asheville and said, “I want to go bike riding with you tomorrow before work. The earlier the better. I’ll meet you at the barn.”

  Yuko makes it all the way up and stops next to Maya. Sweat is pouring down her forehead; her hair is matted under the helmet. Maya holds out her water bottle. Yuko’s is empty. “Drink up. We can get some more water in the park.”

  Yuko tilts the bottle over her upturned face and gulps the water. Handing the bottle back to Maya, she wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m in sorry shape. My lungs are shot. My legs feel like rubber. All that time in the gym hasn’t done a thing for me.”

  “This is only your third time out. Don’t hold back so much going downhill, though. You have to give it everything you’ve got on the way down, so you can come right back up.”

  Yuko shakes her head. “Maybe you don’t care about breaking your neck, but I do.”

  “You’re not going to fall down. Even if you did, you’d be all right. That’s what helmets are for.” Maya taps the side of hers and hears a dull thunk, as though her head had turned into a watermelon or pumpkin. Kabocha-atama, pumpkin head, kids used to call each other in Osaka. It means thick-skulled, stupid. Maya taught that word to Yuko and her brothers during their first week together. But the bad words she’d learned in Osaka were nothing like the ones they knew but didn’t say in English. Nakimushi, crybaby, baka, fool, manuke, slow-witted—none of them had the angry sting of the names the rougher kids in Minneapolis called each other. Kay used to scream at Maya, “You have no backbone. You’re so Japanese! Why can’t you speak?” Maya has carried her silence with her all the way from Osaka. Her father taught her to say nothing when there was no consolation in words, while her mother spat out all her venom as if being honest and hurting people were the same virtue. Like the fairies at christenings in her father’s stories, they offered her gifts that canceled each other out and left her with nothing.