by Susan Choi
WHEN HE stepped down from the bus to the shoulder on the far side of the highway, his gut heavy with dread, the bus driver having done him a favor and dropped him off here instead of making him ride all the way into town, the dim highway light showed him only the lopsided form of his house—yet he somehow could tell that the house had survived unmolested. Perhaps just because he’d been gone, he thought then, as he crossed the quiet highway in darkness, his backpack on his shoulder. Perhaps they were waiting for him to unlock his screen door, step inside, feel his way to his lamp. Then they’d home in on him.
Or would they? Jenny was so overshadowed, he thought the next several days, with mingled relief and annoyance, as he read the newspapers. Column after page after section detailed Pauline’s condition in the words of her lawyers and doctors and brainwashing experts and family spokespeople, while Jenny was never mentioned. Pauline’s doctors were there to explain that Pauline was severely malnourished, hallucinated as if experiencing flashbacks from drugs, spoke in flat tones “like a zombie,” and initially failed to recognize her own family members. Pauline’s brainwashing experts were there to assert that like the prisoners of war of Red China, she had been brainwashed by her captors through deprivation and violence, and had committed no criminal acts willfully. Pauline’s lawyers were there to detail her pathetic condition in a motion for bail, although the judge, just like Jim and the rest of the world, had seen the tanned Pauline yell “Venceremos!” at the TV cameras. The judge denied Pauline bail.
It was just after this that Jim had his first glimpse of his daughter. Not a glimpse that would tell him whether she was in any way malnourished, or drugged, or brainwashed. Not a glimpse of her hair—short or long? he wondered. He’d forgotten to ask the lawyer that. Not a glimpse of her dark severe eyebrows, the same eyebrows as his, like a double-dash chunk of Morse code. But a glimpse nonetheless. Two days after the judge had denied Pauline bail, Pauline’s lawyers filed a second motion for bail, this one containing the testimony of an “unnamed person” said to be uniquely qualified to comment on Pauline’s situation in the months leading up to her capture. This person had known Pauline during what was now being called “the lost year,” and this person affirmed that Pauline was malnourished, drugged, brainwashed, an unwilling prisoner, never a willing participant in any criminal act. This person—this mysterious defender of Pauline—went not just unnamed but also uncommented-on in the paper. No one seemed to wonder who this person was, but Jim knew—”That’s you, Jenny!” he said. He jerked forward over the paper, and his loose glasses fell down his nose—broken temple, reattached with a paper clip, he couldn’t remember to go to a jeweler. “Goddammit, what the hell are you doing?” But he was strangely glad to see her surface amid the newsprint, above the rough waves of the other girl’s story. Because it was her story, too—that was what moved him now, that in this carnival of news and headlines and nightly TV updates and interviews and op-eds she was forgotten, discarded. It was also a blessing, of course. It meant this time his windows might stay unbroken. Meant she might have some life to return to when she got out of there—it was the first time he’d let himself think about this.
That afternoon he was in the greenhouse, moving slowly down the rows with his watering can, when he heard a car slow on the road. His heart, like a warm ember beneath wind, grew immediately cold. He peered out between leaves and saw the car roll away, almost reluctantly, as if the driver for some reason had to defer, stay his hand, leave the brick on the passenger seat—but just for the moment. Jim couldn’t see the driver, but he knew the slowness was no accident. This was someone for him. It was a car he’d never seen, he was sure, although there was nothing distinct about it. It was a four-door, bland beige, recent model, the kind taxi companies buy or rental agencies rent.
He was standing in the open doorway, half-full watering can at his feet, a good two thirds of his plants still unwatered—waiting—when the beige car returned. He’d known that it would. He stood his ground, although belatedly remembering he didn’t have a pencil and paper for the license plate number. It was too late now. The car was bearing down as if it too had strengthened its resolve. They were finally confronting each other, Jim and this car, this car driven by some racist bastard, some hater of him and his daughter—two Shimadas, one brick. He tried to ready himself to do battle, though he was not even holding a weapon, just his battered sun-bleached baseball cap, which he’d taken off to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The day was suddenly hot, very still—so that he was squinting as the car swung decisively into his lot across the oncoming lane.
It wasn’t a brick-wielding kid or a cop who got out but a woman, petite and blond, in her mid-thirties or perhaps slightly younger—she had a plain face that made it hard to judge age. Shutting her door she glanced quickly at him before she opened a rear door to bring out a large shrouded form, which she carefully set on the hood of the car. Approaching her, Jim was considering what a sorry state his business must be in, that it hadn’t even crossed his mind in the preceding tense moments the car might hold a customer. Then the woman said, “I’m a reporter.” He stopped short. “But this is my day off,” she added. “I just want to buy a tree for my bird.”
“And maybe talk a little, too?” he said, sharply. He didn’t want to seem unkind, just undeceived. A light jangling noise came from under the shroud, and the woman broke away from his hard gaze and uncovered the cage. The bird, unsedated by the blaze of daylight, gave an interested squawk. The bird was small, an iridescent bright green. When Jim touched a fingertip to the bars the bird lunged eagerly, beak open.
“He’s just playing,” the woman said, in apology.
“I know. The bird’s got moxie. That’s good.”
He pulled on his cap and turned away toward the greenhouse, and after a moment he heard her pick up the birdcage and follow. When they were standing together in his small indoor forest he thought he saw her trying to avoid looking at the black patch of plastic. “I keep meaning to fix it, but somehow the day never comes,” he said.
“It’s been broken a while?”
“Years. Someone put a brick through it, when my daughter was first in the news.”
At that she set down the birdcage. The bird began whistling provocatively. “He knows when he’s been used as an icebreaker,” she said. She was taking an envelope out of her purse. “It’s true that I didn’t just come for a tree, but I’m not here to pump you. If you want to talk to me, today or someday, I would be very glad, but that’s not why I came.”
“Go on,” he said after a minute.
The envelope was unsealed and unaddressed. “A few months ago, I was contacted by someone who I think was a friend of your daughter’s,” she said. She told Jim about her encounter with the man called “Joe Smith.” “I couldn’t find substantiation for any part of his story. I couldn’t do what he asked, and get it printed somewhere. I don’t know why, but I wanted to tell you. I thought you should know there was someone out there who tried to help Jenny, though he didn’t succeed.”
After a long time, he didn’t know how long, Jim said, “What’s in the envelope?”
It was just a strange little detail she had found while reporting the story; he could have it, she said. It was a mimeographed, smeary newsletter, two sheets stapled together, small typed announcements and badly reproduced ads ranged in teetering columns. Jim stared at the earnestly drawn masthead: Historical Society of Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, New York. On the second page someone, this reporter, he guessed, had loosely circled a short entry under “Restorative Tidbits.”
Those of you who have followed the restoration at Wildmoor chronicled in these pages will be as reassured as we were to learn what a boon to the effort has arrived in the person of Iris Wong, of San Francisco. This quiet young visitor from the West Coast has made an impression on all who have met her with her patience and fine workmanship. The RRHS invites all to take a Wildmoor house tour to view Iris’s magic.—Louise Fowler
He didn�
��t need to ask, but he said, “This was her?”
“This was her,” she told him.
THAT EVENING, after the reporter was gone, Jim unfolded the newsletter again, and thought of the shock of excitement he’d felt, not just on realizing the note concerned Jenny, but on seeing the two words New York. Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, New York, wherever those places were. Still the Empire State: close enough. Jenny didn’t know this, but when she was a little girl he’d dreamed of moving with her to New York. He’d thought it was the place he could teach her to be a citizen of the world, a Universal Human. Neither American nor Japanese, but New Yorker—it was a romantic idea, he knew. Being San Franciscan or Los Angelean never held the same promise for him. Perhaps all California was too tainted with old disappointments. He knew he was ignoring the idea of New York as the immigrants’ city, Ellis Island and the Statue and the masses and their Babel of tongues. But he was a Westerner, born with his back to the Pacific. He’d always associated the journey East with the final achievement of American belonging, sheared free of ethnicity. He saw it as something to be sheared free of, yes. Yet they never did make the trip East, or rather, they went backwards, to the wrong East, Japan. Jim remembered the day he’d come home from prison—the world, well into its postwar good times, must have flinched at the sight of him. The boys who’d left camp for the war had returned as heroes, while Jim had been the reminder that nobody wanted. And then to have been left alone with a child. He supposed he had never, through Jenny’s childhood, thought of her quite as much as he had of himself. Dragging her to Japan, the captive of his anger, was an example of that. Although in spite of his failures he still thought she’d turned out very well.
The reporter hadn’t been all that bad. She’d only asked him the questions he’d known he’d be asked. And she’d made it clear to him, somehow, that she was on Jenny’s side. After they had talked a while longer, not even about Jenny so much as the world in general, the news, their opinions of things, the little bird making a worse and worse racket the more they ignored it, she’d said she really did want a tree for the bird, if she could find one it liked. She’d spent a small fortune on bird toys already, but the bird still preferred to shred the spines of her books, and yank the ribbon out of the typewriter while she was writing.
“Kids,” Jim said jokingly.
He’d latched his flimsy screen door and then shaken it a little, to confirm that it wouldn’t drift open, and then he’d given the black plastic patch a hard push with the heel of his hand. He’d done a bad job, he was forced to admit. He’d used prodigious amounts of duct tape in a haphazard way that spoke volumes, he supposed, about his mind’s angry turmoil at the time that he’d made the repair, but the seam seemed secure. “The bird flies, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I saw he’s got the primaries. You didn’t clip them.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Sentimental.”
She laughed, embarrassed.
“It should be all right,” he added. “If he tries to eat his way out through the plastic, we’ll stop him.”
When he’d lifted the cage door the bird had stepped onto his hand and looked at him expectantly. It hadn’t surprised him, but the reporter had been thunderstruck. Whenever she let the bird out she had to wear a tube sock like a mitten, she said, because the bird sparred savagely with her hand.
“Do you have birds?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He’d unfurled his arm in a slow, graceful arc, like a dancer, and they watched her bird launch himself into the air.
3.
They’d made the trip by brand-new DC-8 jet, not by ship, her father spending most of their savings on the two one-way tickets. San Francisco to Honolulu for new passengers and fuel, and then from Honolulu to Tokyo. But the purchase of the tickets seemed to absorb all her father’s bravado as well as his money, and once they were at the airport apprehension disabled him. They somehow lost their pair of seats together and were told that they would have to sit apart. Her father had probably felt people knew he was a novice with airplanes and were taking advantage of him. She remembered a terrible scene, of the sort that featured a blond, silk-scarf-wearing woman repeating, “I’m going to call the police.” Somehow the crisis had ended with the two of them reseated in First Class. This should have been a triumph, but her father’s shrillness in the fight for the seats, and the defiant way he led them onto the plane afterward, had mortified her. As soon as the plane was airborne, she left her seat. Her father, white-knuckled and stiffly erect, was too frightened to stop her; and she was too young to see any reason to be afraid.
At the rear of the First Class cabin, just before the opaque curtain that hid Coach from view, she had found a metal spiral staircase, tightly twisting upward. As she started to climb a stewardess appeared and said, “Little girl! You can’t go up there. Where are you sitting?”Without speaking, she pointed—forward, toward the other First Class seats. The stewardess hesitated, and she was later aware, reexamining the memory, of frustrated scorn. “Go on then,” the stewardess finally said.
The spiral staircase came up into a bright, bubblelike lounge, with curved walls and ceiling and seats arrayed casually in two facing half-circles instead of lined up severely in rows. From the seats, and from the carpeted floor, a dozen or so faces looked at her with pleasant surprise. Most of the faces were children’s, and most of the children were sprawled on the floor, with quantities of beautiful toys. There were also adults, at least a few, and it was one of these who said, “Come on up! What’s your name, dear? Are you going to Hawaii? Are you Hawaiian, yourself? Are your mum and dad traveling with you?”
It was one of those immediate, effortless intimacies that seem only to happen in childhood, if they happen at all. And perhaps it had happened to her just this once. She remembered little else of her initiation into the world of these people; she seemed to have arrived, and then been among them. There had been girls, and boys, in what number and of what ages she had no idea. There were games and more toys and overhead a reassuring babble of cheerful adults and the sound of ice moving in glasses. Stewardesses had risen from and sunk back into the stairwell, and a meal had come, and extra sweets, and particular confidences shared between Jenny and one little girl, with a vow they would write to each other . . . At some point there was turbulence. A stewardess, pale and with hair coming loose from her bobby pins, clanked swiftly up the stairs to ask them all to please put on their seat belts. There were seats enough for everyone and, strapped in, they faced each other across the brightly colored carpet, and Jenny noticed for the first time the painfully blue ethersphere outside the round little windows. The plane bucked hard, like a horse, and one of the grown-ups—the father?—said “Oops-a-daisy!” and winked at the children, and all of them laughed. And then were quiet, but smiling and calm, as the plane joked several more times through invisible, powerful currents. She remembered that even then she hadn’t been at all frightened.
It was after the turbulence—probably shortly after, although, with the temporal dilations of childhood, it seemed like a very long time—that her father found her. His head and shoulders rose uncertainly and so strangely slowly into view, as hers must have, hours before. Hours really had passed. Soon they would land in Hawaii.
“Oh, dear,” said the same mellifluous, wonderful voice that had first addressed her. “Your dad must have been worried about you. I’m sorry, we should have sent her down to make sure you knew where she was. Even if it’s an airplane, it’s still very large. Won’t you join us for a drink, Mr.—?”
“No, thank you,” her father said coldly. “Come, Jenny.”
“She’s such a lovely playmate, she’s been a dream come true for the children, they were sure they’d be bored—”
She remembered saying good-bye, and then crossing silently to her father. As she took his hand and started down the stairs, stooping awkwardly after him because the stairs were so narrow, she
heard one of the girls, the one she’d vowed penpalship with, start to cry. They hadn’t traded addresses.
After the plane landed she felt sure she’d see them again, but, whether because she and her father were among the first to get off, or because there was some secret separate exit from the lounge, she did not. The plane was cleaned and refueled and reboarded, and they returned to their fraudulent seats. Her father finally managed to sleep. When she stole back to the staircase, another stewardess, from the new crew, stopped her.
“My friends—” she began.
“There’s no friends up there, honey. There’s businessmen up there. A meeting. You leave them alone.”
And later still, she remembered having the idea that the people had been some kind of royal family. She didn’t know where this idea came from. They had certainly been beautiful—incandescently gold-skinned and gold-haired. And they must have been rich. But when she tried to trace the origin of the impression, she only saw her father’s head and shoulders, awfully emerging from the stairs. And the look on his face that had not been concern, as the other adults might have realized, but wounded and rewounded, vengefully bandaged-up pride.
It was a durable memory, as vivid as her most vivid memories of the five years they spent in Japan. But it tended to lie fathoms deep in her mind, untouched by consciousness, for years at a time. When she did think of it she had the sense of discovering a book, with a bookmark stuck in it, she hadn’t realized she owned. There was the incident itself, the marked page, but there was also the unexplored volume of her own character. She had thought of it when William was arrested: Hadn’t she found herself, without quite knowing how, among the self-confident children of the white upper class? With whom she had fought for the rights of the colored and poor. And she had thought of it again that last winter she’d been at Wildmoor, when front pages and national newscasts were carrying the story of the nineteen-year-old kidnapped heiress who’d renounced wealth and joined with her captors. Everything about that unknown girl had interested Jenny: her ancestors’ legends and ancestral homes and her alleged boarding-school rebellions. The inexhaustible store of her portraits: in tennis whites and first communion whites and giggling on the beach in a T-shirt, and unsmiling in formation with her parents. Her two-seater car and her desire “to be normal,” as described by her boarding-school friends. Her labyrinthine relationship to her own money. Her towering American pedigree.