“In Japan, there are far fewer criminals. It’s easier to stop people and hold them for questioning, too.”
“I understand the Japanese police kicked you out of the country.”
I sputtered latte. “How did you hear that?”
“Well, I was a little curious about you when you started the decoration project. I wanted to see if you were really this high-powered decorator or not, so I did an Internet search. I came up with lots of links, most of which were in Japanese, so I couldn’t read them. But from what I’d gotten in the English-language papers they print out there, I learned plenty.”
“You told Marshall, I bet.”
Andrea shook her head. “No. Growing up in the homes I did, I learned early on not to rat on anyone. But knowledge is power, you know? And what I read about you online, and then what I saw last night, made me think you could be a professional investigator.”
I wondered what she meant about the homes she’d lived in, but I didn’t have the time to ask about it. “I appreciate the compliment, but I really can’t help you. You should contact the police or a PI.”
“I already did that. Ten years ago, when I started making money, the first thing I paid for was a PI. He got a copy of the old police report, my father’s statement, that kind of thing. Nothing of substance.”
Her father’s statement. I reflected on how odd it sounded, for a daughter to be cataloging a father’s statement rather than talking to him. “What’s the basic story of what happened?”
“Remember how I told you my father met my mother in Japan? Well, he was in the military. He was still in the Marines—he’d enlisted for a four-year term—when I was born in Virginia. He was based at the Pentagon at that point, but he was away on temporary additional duty when my mother vanished. The record states that she had left me with a next-door neighbor one morning and said she was going to a doctor’s appointment and would be back by lunchtime. Well, she didn’t come back that day or the next. The neighbor called the Pentagon and they sent word for my father to return. A day later a couple of tourists found her clothes and shoes at the edge of the Potomac River.”
“A suicide?”
“Nobody ever found a body. And what kind of woman would actually take off her clothes if she was intending to commit suicide? I mean, if you knew your body was going to be discovered eventually, wouldn’t you rather be clothed?”
“I guess I would.” Especially now, when I was starting to hate the way my body looked.
“Furthermore, I found out from the report that while she lived in Japan, she’d been a professional pearl diver. Women like her worked underwater, without oxygen tanks. Someone who was that skilled underwater couldn’t drown unless she was weighted down with something, and she had supposedly taken off all her clothes.”
“As far as I know, pearl divers only work on the Shima peninsula. Is that where your father met your mother?”
Andrea shook her head. “I never heard of Ise anything. My dad was working at a base called Sasebo, and he said they met nearby.”
“Really,” I said, thinking that I didn’t buy the pearl-diving story at all. In the nineteenth century, Japanese marine biologists had learned to culture pearls that were perfectly round and beautiful, far superior to the irregular natural pearls that women had dived for in centuries past. Given the time frame, Andrea’s mother couldn’t have been a pearl diver unless she was a tourism worker, and she was in the wrong geographic area to do that. Sasebo was on the Japanese island of Kysh. The pearl divers I’d heard about, the ones who put on a show for tourists, worked in Mie Prefecture, on the Shima peninsula, as I’d brought up already.
Andrea continued, “The Arlington, Virginia, police kept the case open for a few years but ultimately closed it. My mother’s missing, presumed dead. That’s not enough information for me.”
“Those must have been tough years for you and your dad to wait through,” I said.
“We weren’t together.” Andrea looked down. “He put me in foster care within a month of her disappearance. He couldn’t take care of me because the military required him to travel, he said.”
I was stunned by the mention of foster care. It reminded me of what Burns had said about social services for Kendall’s children. “Why didn’t you live with your American relatives?”
“He said he didn’t think I’d be treated well there, because they didn’t like my mom.” Andrea sighed. “So I went into care, and like I said, the police kept looking for a few years. Then she was declared dead and my dad almost immediately remarried.”
“Well, why didn’t you join him then?” I asked.
“You keep putting it as if I was the one who could make the decisions.” Andrea’s tone was angry. “The fact was, he didn’t want me. He hasn’t been outwardly nasty, but his wife, Lorraine, has been, ever since the beginning. She still tries to keep him from seeing me. Believe me, I don’t want to be close to him. All I want is to know what happened to my mother.”
“I’m so sorry, Andrea.” I didn’t know what else I could say.
“There was something you said at the restaurant last night. What kind of mother would leave her babies?”
“‘What kind of mother would leave her babies,’” I repeated. Last night, I’d said it out of desperation, the only thing I could think of to make people start to think it mattered that Kendall was missing.
“I think she was killed,” Andrea said. “She wouldn’t have run away without me. Even if she was so unhappy with Dad, she would not have left me there.”
“She didn’t take you in the water with her,” I said gently. “Some mothers in difficult situations have done that. Yours cared enough to keep you safe.”
“You know, I look at her face and try to tell. But I just can’t.” From her bag, Andrea withdrew a manila envelope. She pulled out old, faded color photographs, the type of photos that fill the 1970s section of my parents’ photo albums. But Andrea’s little three-by-three snaps weren’t in any kind of album; each was placed in an archival acid-free paper envelope. How precious they were; I could tell by the way she handed the first one to me. It was a wedding photograph, a smiling woman in a red bridal kimono, hair blowing across her face, standing next to a black man with a similarly pleased expression. He wore a green military uniform and had his hands at his sides, the “at-ease” military position. The woman had her hands clasped in front of her, and I noted that they looked big. She, too, was large, not heavy, but closer in height to the man than I expected, and with a broadness to her shoulders that reminded me of Kendall’s since she had taken up strength training. The sea lay behind them.
“Too bad the wind’s got the hair going across her face. I really can’t see it,” I said.
“Look at this one, then.” Andrea handed me a picture of her mother holding a baby. Andrea, at about two, looked a lot like she did now. She was a thin baby, unsmiling. Her hair had been tugged up into two pigtails and she wore a frilly pink-and-white dress with coordinating ankle socks and white lace-up shoes. Her mother, on the other hand, was quite natural. Her straight black hair hung to her shoulders without the benefit of any special styling, and it didn’t look like she wore any makeup except for a faint gloss on her lips.
“What was your mother’s name?” I asked.
“Sadako.” Andrea pronounced it carefully. “My father called her Sadie. He thought her other name was too—”
“Difficult?” I had a grudge against people who invented new names for foreigners to help them integrate.
“No, he told me he thought her name was too sad. Her last name, I’m afraid I don’t really know how to pronounce it. I think Dad was saying it wrong.” Andrea handed me a copy of a marriage license that had been filed in San Diego in 1972. Here, her mother’s name was listed as Sadako Tsuchiya.
“Tsoo-chee-yah,” I pronounced for Andrea. “I’ve heard that name before. Where does her family live?”
“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “All I know is that way back when, the
police did try to contact her family, but they didn’t respond.”
“Well, that’s—ridiculous,” I said. “They could have asked a Japanese police officer to call on the household.”
“Dad said that she was written out of the register, whatever that means.”
“There’s a register kept in every town in Japan, with all the names of the families living there,” I said. “When a woman marries, her name is crossed off and is entered in her husband’s family register. What town did she live in?”
“Sasebo is all that I know,” Andrea said. “Tell me more about family registers. Did they take her name off because she wasn’t going to marry a Japanese guy?”
Andrea was coming uncomfortably close to a truth that I didn’t like to think about. “Perhaps. If children make their parents upset, the parents might remove them from the register.”
Andrea kept her eyes on me. “Because she married someone black?”
“Just marrying an American is a massive crime of dishonor, in many eyes. My grandparents wrote out my father because he married an American woman. Eventually, they changed their minds, and reinstated him.” It was because I’d been born, everyone said. Babies made hard hearts soften.
Andrea pressed her lips together. “I doubt that would happen for me.”
“I don’t know.” I decided to change the subject. “Tell me more about your mother’s friends in the U.S., what they thought about her disappearance.”
“The neighbor she left me with—Joanne Bridges—was supposed to be her best American friend. And she really didn’t know anything at all about her. I talked to her in person once. She was nice, but not really helpful.”
“Does your father still live close to D.C.?”
Andrea shook her head. “He left the Pentagon at the end of his enlistment, when I was four. He moved back to Orange, where he and Lorraine both came from. They were high school sweethearts. His thing with my mom was, as Lorraine puts it, the overseas fling.”
I heard the pain in Andrea’s voice, but I didn’t want to get distracted from the facts I was trying to establish. “Orange County, near Los Angeles?”
“No, it’s in Virginia. Charlottesville is the biggest town near it.”
“Great wineries nearby,” I said, then chided myself for my insensitivity.
“Restaurants, too,” Andrea said. “If I was closer to my father, I might have looked for work around there.”
“You say the relationship is bad. You could try to change it by going to see him,” I suggested.
“It’s not going to change. There’s no point.”
“You must press your father on some things.” I picked up the detective’s report. “I notice that the birth year for your mother on the detective’s report is different from the one on the marriage license. Someone didn’t do a very thorough job.”
“You saw it. I knew you were the right one to help!” Andrea sounded happier than I’d ever imagined she could be.
“I think you should go back to your father. Ten years have passed since your last meeting, you said. Maybe he’s mellowed. At the very least, he probably has a few more pictures or papers relating to your mother, which he could give to you.”
“Every time I’ve called, there’s some excuse for why they can’t see me. It’s not like a normal family. And besides, I don’t have a car, and the train doesn’t go out to those rural byways.”
I felt terrible for Andrea: the loss of her mother, the betrayal of her father, the loneliness of her adult life. No wonder she spoke to everyone as if she had a chip on her shoulder. The chip was a mountain the size of Fuji. “Andrea, I can’t help you with much. But I can give you a ride down there.”
“You would? I didn’t know you had a car.”
“It’s my boyfriend’s car. I’m sure he’d think it was a good reason for a trip to Virginia. Especially if I swing by a vineyard to pick up wine on the way back.” I gave her a serious look, the one I used to use on my students in Japan when I knew they were going to skip doing their homework. “I want this trip to be fruitful. I suggest you call your father to make sure he’s there.”
“If I call, Lorraine will answer the phone. And if say I’m coming, she’ll tell me that they’re going out of town. That’s what happened the last couple of times I tried.”
“Then don’t give him a warning,” I said. “And can you be more specific about the last contact you had? Surely it wasn’t just that meeting ten years ago. Any phone calls, birthday cards in the meantime?”
“Zip,” Andrea said. “I’d think he was dead if I didn’t keep checking the Internet. I also put in a request to Veteran’s Affairs for his military-service record. That was three months ago. I’m still waiting.”
“Call the VA again to remind them. And what did you dig up on your father on the Internet?” I was still flustered that she’d found out so much about me.
“There was an updated alumni directory for his high school, a mention of his restaurant in a community newspaper—that kind of thing.”
“A restaurant!” I wondered, instantly, if this was why she’d become a hostess.
“Well, it’s actually a diner. You know, pancakes and burgers and all that. He owns the place, but he cooks.”
“Can you look up the address for his diner?” I asked. “We might need to go there, instead of the house, if he’s working.”
“It’s on Route 47, just outside Orange,” Andrea said. “I know how to get there.”
Since Bento was closed on Mondays, that was our obvious choice of a travel date. I agreed to pick her up at seven the next morning. I also made Andrea promise to photocopy all the photographs and reports so that nothing precious would be lost.
As I parted from Andrea, I thought about how strangely things were turning out. Hugh had said I had no women friends; now I was helping two women about my age with serious problems. Both of them were “pieces of work,” to borrow one of Grand’s favorite expressions.
The image came to me then, of Win and Jacquie playing desolately on the Persian carpet in the large playroom where the TV blared footage of Kendall. I had only to close my eyes to imagine Andrea, a small girl of the same age, sitting by herself in front of another bright television screen, in a house that was not her own.
I couldn’t remake the lives of my nephew and niece, who were considered privileged, anyway. Andrea, on the other hand, had been alone as a child and still had nobody to call her own. And she was reaching out. I couldn’t turn away from her now.
10
Hugh was coming out of customs, the zone in Dulles airport that was always the most jammed and chaotic. He often took a taxi home, even though it was about forty minutes from where we lived; but there had been a garbled message from the night before, of which I’d caught only the tail end, a warning to make sure the Lexus’s trunk—” boot” in Hugh’s Britspeak—was completely empty.
He must have gone on a shopping binge, I thought as I parked in the open lot across from the curved glass-and-steel terminal that looked like a cross between a space colony and a mid-twentieth-century high school. Hugh was the only man I knew who truly enjoyed shopping. What had he brought me? I began to fantasize pleasantly about objects that came in large boxes. I hoped he hadn’t gone for something electronic; usually the newest and neatest things for sale in Akihabara weren’t adaptable for U.S. electric voltage. Hugh had brought home from his last trip a Toto electric toilet seat with a built-in bidet. Unfortunately, it was sized incorrectly for our vintage toilet bowl.
Hugh’s flight from Tokyo had landed ten minutes earlier, the arrivals board said by the time I’d walked in. Normally, he was off the plane pretty fast, thanks to business-class privilege, but luggage collection would take time. I pulled from my bag the mail I hadn’t had time to read, given the last few days’ excitement. The Washington-Japan Friendship League had sent me a quarterly newsletter. There’d be a potluck dinner on Children’s Day in a few months, and volunteers were needed to help with decoration.
I had some carp kites that I could lend them; it would mean a long Metro ride, but it would be worth going in early, especially if I could ask them about Andrea’s mother. The WJFL’s stated mission was to help Japanese immigrants, and it had been around forever. Maybe they would remember a Sadako Tsuchiya Norton…
“Darling!”
Hugh’s shout broke through my meditation. I searched the crowd and spotted his red-blond head bobbing in a sea of dark ones. I’d missed him. I couldn’t wait for the skin-to-skin reunion, but experience had taught me that it would probably come the next night, when he wasn’t so tired. In any case, we’d have a wonderful dinner. The trout was clean and resting on ice in the fridge, the asparagus was done to Jiro’s specifications, and a crisp baguette and a bottle of pinot noir were waiting on the counter. For dessert I would cut up strawberries and serve them with clotted cream.
I couldn’t wait to hug Hugh, but there was a woman just in front of him, hampering his progress: a small, Japanese-looking woman with the perfect unlined face of Asian middle age, a face that looked almost like my aunt Norie’s. I looked again. It was Norie.
I gasped aloud as Norie caught sight of me, too, and charged forward, rolling her suitcase over another traveler’s feet.
“Obasan,” I said, falling into the Japanese honorific for aunts, the term I always used to address her. While locked in an embrace with my aunt, I gazed over her shiny black hair at Hugh, trying to communicate my shock. “This is a wonderful surprise!”
“You heard my message about it, didn’t you?” Hugh asked as he came up. “I asked you to leave plenty of room in the boot for her luggage because she’s packed enough to stay for a year.”
“Oh, my goodness,” I said.
“I hope you have room for me in your apartment,” Norie said, sounding shy. “I didn’t ask you myself, but Hugh-san said you had agreed that it was a fine idea.”
I smiled, searching my memory for what I might have said to Hugh. I’d been so distracted when we’d spoken. Well, it didn’t matter now. I had a more pressing problem. My aunt didn’t know that Hugh and I were living together, and I couldn’t imagine that she’d feel comfortable staying with us sharing a bedroom in an unmarried state. It wasn’t proper by Japanese standards; even my father, who’d been in the U.S. for over thirty years, wouldn’t tolerate Hugh in my room until after we’d become engaged.
The Pearl Diver Page 10