In spite of these ominous and necessary words, my hopes are high that you’ll never have to read this. I had actually written a final letter to you before, prior to my first deployment. I’ve asked Dewey to throw it away and keep this one in its place. What I thought was important back then has come to mean little. Proving myself a loyal American is nothing compared to proving myself a worthy man.
I had enlisted in the Army to do my bit, but also to show others that I wasn’t the “enemy.” In the end, I discovered that’s indeed what I was—an enemy to myself, I mean—and long before the war began. For so long I’ve been rejecting my heritage out of shame and fear of being different. What I didn’t realize was that I was only denying the person I really am, equally Japanese and American. I had such dreams of changing society’s views through votes and speeches, yet the one who needed to change first was me. Beyond any lesson I’ve gained during this crazy war, our “baby bird” has taught me that.
You see, Suzie is not just a gift to us, darling, but to the world. She is living proof of the beauty that two sides, even in the midst of warring, can create through love and peace, understanding and compassion, and, most of all, forgiveness. Please instill in her the deep pride that took me far too long to find. And whether I’m there or not, I ask that you tell her the truth about me. I want her to know that her daddy was a real person, both flawed and blessed, and not some fantasy of perfection. That’s the only way our dear Suzie will know that it’s okay to stumble as she finds her own path through life.
Heaven knows, I’ve stumbled plenty over the years. I would venture to guess no one knows that better than TJ. I hope he’ll be home safe and sound very soon, and eager to share some of those tales with her. Through good and bad, he never stopped being part of me, and despite my occasional doubts, I know in my heart it’s been the same for him. TJ is my brother, in every way that matters, and I’m so sorry that for a time I had forgotten that.
Please send my love to my parents and assure them that any strength I now rely upon, and good character I might possess, is because of them. I am truly honored to call myself their son. Also, please tell Emma it’s been a privilege watching her grow up into the beautiful young lady she has become. I have no doubt she will change the world for the better.
And finally, I ask that you forgive me for any hurt I have ever caused you. You are and will always be my greatest reason for living. Even if I am not at your side, know that I’m at peace and keeping watch over our family. Until we meet again, I wish you nothing but the happiness you have all given me.
My love for eternity,
Lane
The pages trembled in TJ’s hands. From one look at his sister’s moistened eyes, the tears he’d worked so hard to keep inside poured freely down his face. He tried to speak, but Lane had managed to say it all.
“We’re going to be okay,” Maddie told him, and assured him with an embrace. At that instant, TJ knew she was right, for he could feel with everything in him that Lane—forever his friend, his brother—was looking on with a smile.
70
“Bubba-skosh!” Suzie’s butchered version of the word helped relieve Maddie’s apprehension.
“It’s butterscotch,” Maddie corrected gently, yet the girl paid no mind. She just continued her hopping about on the nursing home’s checkered lobby floor.
“As a matter of fact,” Bea said, appearing before them, “we just so happen to have butterscotch and bubba-skosh pudding.” She extended her hand toward the toddler. “Shall we?”
Suzie latched onto Bea, and the two of them turned for the kitchen.
Maddie found herself wishing for an excuse to delay this visit. Really, after not seeing her father for so long, what difference would one more day make?
“Are you sure you’re not too busy to watch her?” she called out. “We could always come back tomorrow... .”
“Take all the time you need, sugar,” Bea replied pointedly. “Suzie Q and I are gonna have ourselves a feast.” She winked at the little girl. “Isn’t that right?”
Suzie nodded, and off they trotted around the corner, leaving Maddie alone.
Well, not completely alone. She peered down at the violin case in her hand. “Guess it’s just you and me again, huh?”
An elderly gal in a wheelchair cast Maddie a queer glance. No question, she wondered if Maddie was as senile as half of the residents here. Why else would a person be conversing with an instrument?
Maddie smiled tightly at the woman before gathering herself and forging down the hall. The place looked the same as she remembered, except smaller. There was a huge world outside these walls, this city, that she had now sampled. She wondered how much of it her father had ever experienced....
A thought occurred to her: Maybe his enthusiasm for Juilliard had been less about her music and more about life; for not even Mischakoff could have taught her the lessons she had gained.
It was certainly a pleasant theory.
At the door to her father’s new room, she announced her arrival with a knock. He sat by the window, staring out, just like before. He had a different colored chair now, upholstered in blue stripes rather than gray.
Maddie cleared her throat. “Hi, Dad.”
She considered giving an update, like she used to, but too much had happened. No summary seemed adequate. Instead she would gift him with a performance, asking nothing in return. Her only hope was that somewhere deep inside he would hear her.
“I thought I’d play one of your old favorites.” She offered a smile and walked to his bed. Setting down her case, she noted its grooves and scratches. Her fingers traced the marks, each one bearing a story.
From Lane’s letter to TJ’s talk, to supper with Mrs. Duchovny, the message had been clear. Life goes on, despite our misfortunes. The first challenge was to survive. The second, to keep from losing yourself. Conservatory-bound or not, Maddie would always be a violinist. Even Kumiko had tried to tell her so, through the painting of Benzaiten, the goddess of music—
Stop this, she told herself. Focus.
She hadn’t practiced enough to play decently without keeping her mind sharp. Case hinged open, she rosined her bow then pulled out her violin. She tested the strings, adjusted the tuning pegs. Though she missed her instrument’s original tones—the desert weather had affected them permanently—she was learning that “changed” wasn’t the same as “ruined.”
Maddie fanned out her music sheets. Bach’s Third Partita in E major. She settled the violin beneath her jaw. Her internal metronome ticked with the briskness of three-four time. The opening measures danced through her head, accompanied by a faint ringing. The bell of doubt. She muted the sound, her eyes on the notes, and began.
The prelude had returned to her remarkably well while rehearsing at home. Her muscles had weakened from time away, but they did their job, so long as she didn’t think. Such a task wasn’t the easiest with the ache in her shoulder, fingers sore at the tips. Runs of sixteenth notes were turning her hands cumbersome and stiff.
Keep up with me, she urged, and pushed them through the challenging phrases. Errors were accumulating as she trudged from one page to the next. Acutely aware of her father’s presence, she cringed at the lazy slur, the poor intonation.
She attempted to block these out and drift into the piece’s mathematical precision. For years, notes of the like were keys to a passageway, to a dimension of reprieve from all that overwhelmed her. But she had been gone too long, and the door had rusted. The lock wouldn’t turn.
Frustration mounted from her mistakes—a sharp not C-natural, forte not piano—until a failed roll produced a screech, and her bow, without planning, stopped. It hovered in mid-air, as though Bach, reaching from heaven, had grabbed the horsehairs to end the mutilation.
Out of habit, her gaze dropped to her case’s interior, to the home of Bach’s portrait, where she expected a look of disgust. But the composer wasn’t there. Nor was the rest of her critique panel. She had gradually repl
aced scrutinizing eyes and high collars for images of greater inspiration: her wedding photo in the minister’s house; a day at Manzanar spent with unexpected friends; her brother in his dress uniform; a family gathering at the farm before Thanksgiving dinner.
Although Ida and Mr. Garrett lived half a country away, and Emma and her parents would soon cross the Pacific, that family would remain in Maddie’s heart. The same place her parents and husband would always dwell. Music, she now realized, would keep them close. Songs evoked memories with each person in those photos. The practice pieces for TJ, the Irish jigs at the farm. Japanese folk tunes with her newfound family, and with Lane, it was the final movement of Bach’s Second Partita. The Chaconne.
Maddie lowered her violin, recalling Mr. Garrett’s tale—about the Chaconne being Bach’s expression of grief, a story of his wife’s death and the seven children left in his care. It was a testament to loss and survival and hope. Maddie’s ears had been deaf to the true beauty that had been there all along. She had toiled for hours upon hours, ignorantly plucking away at the technical masterpiece, attempting to mimic what she couldn’t possibly.
She suddenly looked at her violin as more than an instrument. With a body and neck, a rib and a waist, the wooden form represented the person who guided it to sing. To keep her loved ones alive, Maddie would tell their stories—and her own—with the voice inside and the strings in her hand.
And so, once again, she found a home in the chin rest. She studied her pictures a final time before closing her eyes. She didn’t need score sheets to guide her. No metronome dictated her pace. Faces rather than notes floated through her mind, and that’s when she plunged into the Chaconne. Not Bach’s version. Not that of Yehudi Menuhin, a virtuosic recording from Mr. Garrett.
This one belonged only to Maddie.
Fear and tragedy spilled from her fingers. Four years of injustice and disappointment, death and destruction, rode the bow’s jabbing movements. The stanzas descended into a headlong dive without a net.
But then, at last, darkness lifted. Light broke through a clearing in the storm. An opportunity for reflection, on herself and her journey. It was a season of change and redemption and, in the end, triumph.
Maddie barely felt her fingers graze the strings. There were no aches in her shoulder or tenderness of her skin, just a release of heaviness while she held the final note.
Exhausted yet satisfied, she opened her eyes. Moisture streaked her cheeks. She had finally discovered her voice. Never again, she vowed, would she silence the song within.
After gathering her belongings, Maddie stood beside her father. “See you Saturday, Dad.” Then she smiled and kissed him on the temple. She was heading for the door when Suzie burst into the room.
“Mama!” She hugged Maddie around the thighs, the best kind of hug.
“So how was your butterscotch?”
“Oishi,” she declared, a mumbled “yummy” in Japanese. Pudding tinted her cheeks. “Hoo dat?” She pointed to Maddie’s father, asking who he was.
Maddie squatted down and said, “That’s Grandpa Kern. Remember? He’s the one I talk about at bedtime. We should let him rest now, but we’ll come visit again in a few days. Okay?”
Bea arrived at the door, a bit out of breath. She held a crushed napkin in her hand. “Lord ’a’ mercy, that girl gets faster by the day. She shot out of there before I had a chance to clean her up.”
Maddie suppressed her laughter. As a mother, she had to be firm when needed, no matter how entertaining the circumstance. She faced her daughter. “Suzie, you have to listen to Aunt Bea, now.”
The toddler dashed off again. This time, over to Maddie’s father. “Bye-bye,” she exclaimed, and she wrapped her arms around his waist.
Maddie’s heart warmed and expanded, leaving no room for a lecture, although she soon remembered the girl’s cheeks. A nurse would have to launder his robe if Suzie nuzzled her face in the fabric.
“Hey there, peanut,” Maddie said, stepping closer—yet that’s as far as she got. Her father’s hand had moved onto Suzie’s shoulder. A random physical reaction, Maddie presumed, until he tenderly patted the girl’s back, not once but twice.
An instant quiver shook Maddie’s chin. “Daddy ...”
In slow motion, he turned his head. Tears glistened in his eyes as if he’d heard Maddie’s voice, and even her story. As if awakened by his granddaughter’s touch.
Regaining her bearings, Maddie walked over and knelt at his side. She held his hand for the first time in years. “Dad, can you hear me?”
He didn’t nod. He didn’t speak.
But when his lips curved up, just the slightest amount, the fog seemed to fade. The cobwebs began to clear.
71
After TJ left the rest home, where he’d reveled in his father’s progress as much as his sister’s joy, the first face that came to mind was Jo’s. He couldn’t wait to tell her the news. He nearly raced straight over, but a thought stopped him.
His father’s car.
TJ couldn’t move on with that rusted chunk of metal chaining him, and his family, to the past. So he returned home and phoned the local mechanic shop. He didn’t go into detail. Didn’t need to. The town’s memory was long and wide.
“Got an old car I need towed to the junkyard,” was all it took. Within hours, the grizzled guy in a jumpsuit came to his aid, and TJ watched the sedan roll down the street and out of sight.
The sole evidence left was a heap of tarp beside the house. He worried the vacant spot would feel empty. Instead it felt open. Like a window raised in a stuffy room. Finally he could breathe.
Nobody answered at the Allisters’.
TJ knocked louder. The lights were on inside, and he had no intention of leaving without seeing her.
Soon one of Jo’s older brothers swung open the door. “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Jo.”
“She ain’t here.”
“Know when she’ll be back?”
“Dunno.”
“Any clue where I can find her?”
The guy scratched his forehead. “Hard tellin’. She went on a walk.”
TJ wanted to probe more, but Jo’s granddad called out for some water, and it didn’t seem right to hold up his request. Besides, TJ could take a wild guess as to where she’d gone.
“Thanks,” TJ said, and the door closed.
Through the darkened streets, he strode toward the old sandlot, sorting out what he would say. Lately any plan he’d created ended up screwy. He was probably better off trusting his instincts. In baseball, at the peak of his career—through every no-hitter, every shutout—that’s what he’d done. It was time he applied the same theory to his heart.
From the edge of the park, he could see the shadowed outline of a person lying on the mound. Wearing a baseball cap. Staring up at the summer sky.
“That’s my Jo,” he said to himself, and smiled. As he quietly approached, certainty over his assumption wavered, until he was close enough to make out her features. Ah, yeah. He knew that face. The narrow chin, smart bronze eyes. He’d reviewed them in his mind so often, he could spot her in a crowd fifty years from now.
He was about to toss out a greeting, eager to surprise her, when she beat him to it.
“Take a wrong turn?” she asked dryly. She kept her gaze on the sky, fingers knotted behind her neck.
“Your brother told me you went walking.”
“And?”
“And ... I thought you might be here.”
“Yeah, well, you found me. I’ll put your prize in the mail.”
So much for not harboring a grudge.
“Listen, I can see you’re still sore at me. But give me a chance to explain, all right?”
She shot him a hard look. “You explained enough already.”
He’d prepared for irritated. He’d expected stubborn—it was one of the traits he loved about her. What he hadn’t anticipated was the arctic glare in her eyes. A dagger of a message that said it
was too late.
Maybe it was. Two whole years had passed. She too had done her share of living, according to Maddie, with plenty of hardships. Her granddad’s health, a dream career squashed. She hardly needed this curveball thrown at her.
Let him go. You just gotta let him go. Captain McDonough’s words repeated in his ears, and they related no less to Jo. Holding her close inside had kept TJ going. During moments when he’d otherwise have suffered alone, she had been there. She’d become the tune he’d lost, the hum that rose from deep down. She was the song that strengthened him.
How could he ask her for more?
She’d given him enough.
“I’m sorry I bothered you,” he said at last. “It won’t happen again.”
Although it pained him, he turned and started back. The fact she didn’t ask him to stay confirmed he was doing the right thing. She deserved someone who made her happy, a guy who had his stuff together. For the time being, that obviously wasn’t him.
Almost at the sidewalk, TJ glanced down at his shoes, among the many things he’d taken for granted before the war. They’d seemed unfamiliar when first reuniting with his feet. But a normal fit had since returned, and once again they were running away.
Was he still too chicken to take a risk? Lane would call him a chump for it. He’d tell him to go after the girl—just like Lane had persisted in the rescue. The guy could have given up, for lots of good reasons, and he didn’t.
Drawn by the thought, TJ gradually wheeled around. Every day he faced the harsh reality that Lane was gone. Nothing would change that. In the end, TJ had no choice but to let him go. When it came to Jo, though, he had a choice. Unless he wanted to rack up more regrets, he’d hang on to that girl. Or at least go out swinging.
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