Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  The answer was very. It was a miracle; it was fantastic and weird and too good to be true. But because it was possible it became necessary as well.

  And then, too, there was the fact that Henry wanted children. Indeed, he had wanted them long before she did; whereas he had always been sure he would have a family, she had reached that state of clarity only after meeting him.

  The problem was that becoming pregnant turned out to be a long-term project, and an all-consuming one at that. For the first time in her life, she found that she did not want only to wrestle with numbers during the day.

  In those early years, Rosie thought that she wanted above all to make her husband happy. And perhaps she did. Still, when Henry, after the second year of trying, ever so gently suggested that perhaps they weren't meant to have children—being with her was enough, and would be for the rest of his life—Rosie told him that it wouldn't be enough for her. And that sweet as he was being, he couldn't fool her: she knew when he was lying.

  Even she could tell, though, that when sex becomes a means to an end and not an end in itself, and then a means that doesn't get you to that desired end, it takes the joy out of the act, to say the least.

  The day that Henry came home and said, white-faced and stammering but more resolute than she had ever seen him before, that he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce, Rosie had gone into shock, overwhelmed at how quickly the life she had loved could change. But she would later come to see that it had been stupid of her not to see what was coming. Even though it had seemed as if her life had been turned upside down in the time that it took the asparagus on the stove to overboil, that particular half-revolution must have actually taken far longer, which also and even more unpleasantly meant that perhaps it could have been prevented. A more clever woman than she would have noted the signs long ago; a shrewder wife would not have neglected the marriage as she had. She was still furious at Henry, of course, and deeply hurt by him too, yet now she was able to accept that she had made his decision to leave her for another woman far less agonizing than it might have been.

  Was it the schedule of their sexual activity that she mapped for them and taped on their bedroom wall in their third year of trying that did it; was that when she lost him? Since she had been pretty much oblivious at the time to everything except for what her fertility books were saying (although she was of course doing it for him, for them; after all, he had wanted children long before she did), she couldn't be sure.

  So chances were she had lost him long before then.

  ROSIE BECAME PREGNANT after seven long years of trying, when even she was just about ready to give up. She was intermittently euphoric for the next thirty-eight weeks, and unremittingly nauseous. Her research into imaginary numbers suffered, not because she was too excited to think about numbers, not because she had to stay in bed—prone was how she solved problems, in the best of times—but because the nausea made her mind too blurry. She missed her work more than she would have thought possible.

  So on November 9th, a cold and blustery day, she was feeling more than ready for the baby to come out. And while the labor hurt terribly, much, much worse than anything she had ever felt, it was mercifully short, a mere four hours of pushing and pain—for an overweight woman such as herself, not at all in shape, Rosie knew she'd gotten off easy. It was also mercifully hard to recall; that was the effect of the drugs, no doubt, or of the pain.

  What Rosie did remember about that day was what one of the nurses had told her afterward: that after three hours and fifty minutes of labor, a tiny, chubby fist had reached out from the womb, and then was withdrawn. After that, everything happened astonishingly quickly, with the top of Claudia's round head and then the rest of her almost slipping out.

  She was probably stretching, the nurse said. It looked very graceful too—maybe your daughter will be a ballerina.

  Your daughter. No one had ever used that term to Rosie before. Exhausted, overwhelmed with the responsibility of holding the minute, squirming red thing that had just come out of her body, Rosie had burst into tears. It was a mistake; she realized now that she wasn't quite ready yet for a daughter, or for any child for that matter; couldn't she just take it—her—back inside her body for a while? The nurse clucked, brought her a box of tissues, and soon took away the baby, saying Rosie needed to sleep.

  So consuming of both time and energy were the responsibilities of early motherhood that Rosie did not bother for a long time, even years, to think through what the nurse had said. Perhaps Claudia had been stretching. But Rosie thought it more likely that her daughter (a term that rolled off her tongue now, as smoothly as butter) had been testing the temperature of the room, if not of the world, in which she was about to emerge. Rosie knew her child's character, her watchfulness and her caution, how slow she was to take action but how, once she'd made up her mind, how decisive she was, and how efficient. She had seen how Claudia, on even the hottest days, dipped her foot into a pool to test the water, while her stepsister, who ran into the water as soon as she could rip off her clothes, splashed about, calling for Claudia to hurry.

  Slow but steady, and reliable as not just a rock but a mountain, that was her daughter. In that respect, at least, she took after her father.

  The day that Rosie was first introduced to Henry, outside the door of their advanced-chemistry class in their senior year of college, she had made a wish that all of their children would grow up tall like him. He was such a skinny young man! With his shirtsleeves and his pants a little too short, so that the knobs on his ankles and wrists were all too noticeable, as if, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, he was still outgrowing his clothes. Toweringly tall, he seemed to her, even more than most people did. Funny-looking, maybe, but if you really looked, beautiful too (she thought then, and thought so now, despite everything that had happened), with his dark hair and grave eyes, the brows like accents over them.

  The wishes Rosie made the day that she met Henry, implicit and otherwise, all came true. He came to love her, they married, and all of their children grew to be tall. The problem was that she had not been specific enough in her wishes that day. She should have stipulated that she wanted three or four children, and not just one; she should have said that they should take after Henry in many ways, and not just in terms of his height. She should have specified—of all the stupid oversights to make!—that she did not want him to leave her for another woman.

  Still, her fairy godmother or whoever it was who'd heard her did come through on the issue of height. It's Rosie's good fortune that she has to crane her neck far back to talk to her only daughter.

  Claudia has Rosie's rounded face, her slightly wavy hair, and her eyes, large and deep-set. While her height guarantees that she is not as thickset as her mother is, she, too, is solidly built (somehow, ballerina is not what springs to mind), with nary a trace of Henry's lankiness in her frame.

  Sometimes, even now, Rosie wonders whether Claudia, always her daddy's girl, regrets that she looks like her mother.

  OF COURSE, not everything about Claudia can be traced back to either her father or mother. Take, for example, her childhood habit of bringing home all manner of orphans and strays—a practice that was indisputably her own. When creeping in to check on Claudia as she slept at night, Rosie knew from experience to tread with caution, as who knew where on the floor was the box holding the latest her daughter had brought in from the cold: the turtle with the cracked shell; the crow, perhaps stunned, who kept turning in counterclockwise circles; a whole nest of baby sparrows, featherless and squawking increasingly feebly for food; a large variety of terrified rodents that Claudia had managed to wrest from the mouths of their cats.

  What puzzled Rosie about this endless stream of feathered/ furred/scaled, whiskered/beaked/gilled, four-legged/two-clawed/ finned but always, always ailing visitors was that Claudia didn't really love animals. She liked them well enough, but even though Rosie urged, she showed no desire for a healthy poodle or guinea pig bought
at the local pet store; while she was always polite and kind to the cats, petting or feeding them whenever they beseeched her to do so, it was clear that she regarded them as her mother's pets and furthermore that she was content to let that remain the case.

  Although it seemed odd and almost inconceivable to Rosie, she had to accept the evidence in front of her: it was the fact that these animals were in trouble (and not their furriness or fetching ways or bright, darting eyes) that drew her daughter to them. Claudia took the orphans and strays in not because she wanted to keep them but because she wanted to nurse and nudge them back to health. No matter what her intentions were, though, through a combination of bad luck and forgetfulness, she had a bad run of it.

  While Mr. Jones, the tiny robin she brought up on minced earthworm and water from an eyedropper, grew big enough eventually to fly away on his own, after a mild storm a mere day later he was found dead outside the house, killed by the same winds that had swept him out of his nest in the first place. The baby rabbit that Jezebel had been torturing, and that Claudia insisted on keeping even though Rosie and even Henry advised her to let it go, refused to eat or drink, sat frozen with shock and fear in the shoebox that Claudia kept it in, and died within two days.

  Then there was the time Claudia found Jezebel sick and half starved in the park. She took her home, fed her, and then went out to play football with a group of neighborhood kids until sundown. It was only by sheer chance that Rosie went into the garage in the morning and found Jezebel tucked away in a corner, too weak even to meow.

  How could she have been so hard on Claudia that day? While it had been an almost fatal oversight—Jezebel had been very close to death; only because she was so tough had she managed to survive and, eventually, thrive, becoming the sleekest and most loved of all their cats—Rosie should not have raised her voice at Claudia.

  Dear Lord, she had only been nine at the time. And while Rosie was not certain how much Claudia understood at that point about her parents' relationship, that had happened during a difficult time for her, to say the least: her father had just decamped to go live with a Japanese woman he had met at a hardware store.

  But what made Rosie's scolding of Claudia really unforgivable was that after any one of those animals died, Claudia cried in a way that frightened Rosie, so violent were her sobs, and so long-lasting. Where did all those tears come from, and what had happened to her self-contained little girl? And was Rosie frightened by the sobs merely because up until this point she had had it so easy in the parenting gig, with a child who had been an exceptionally healthy, easygoing baby, or was what she feared true—was this kind of intense crying, followed by weeks of silence and depression, a symptom of an unbalanced temperament? Sitting next to her and stroking her head, murmuring words that she knew Claudia was not hearing, Rosie would without knowing it bite her upper lip, chewing on it until it shredded and bled.

  To yell at her daughter for forgetting about a sick cat, when she had that kind of reaction when the sparrow that a truck had hit died at her feet—well, Rosie could hardly blame Claudia for loving her father more.

  After all, Rosie knew that Claudia had acted with the purest and shiniest of intentions. If her memory did have a tendency to fall short, it was only because her heart overcrowded it by taking up so much room in her body.

  IT HAD BEEN TEMPTING but almost too easy to blame the separation for Claudia's nearly obsessive attachment to these orphaned animals. There had also been a number of reasons that inclined Rosie to think that (much as she'd like it to be; how simple and also, she had to admit, how satisfying it would be to blame Henry for their daughter's unhappiness) the separation could not really be considered the true source of this problem.

  For one, the parents of many of Claudia's classmates had separated and moved on to different people seemingly without any disastrous consequences at all, stepparents and stepsiblings and stepcousins apparently a satisfactory, standard way of life. Then, too, there was the fact that whenever Rosie asked Claudia how her life was going, and whether she missed her father or their old way of life, she would just shake her head. “The only problem with me, Mom, is that I don't have a best friend.” And she didn't. There had been friends she brought home, but no one who ever took, and while she played regularly with the other children who lived on her block, those her age were all boys.

  So maybe Claudia's desperate need to help the helpless grew out of her loneliness (if only she had a sister, as Rei herself had, or even a brother—if only, for that matter, having just one child had not been a heartbreakingly long, possibly marriage-busting struggle for Rosie). That theory seemed to receive confirmation when Claudia became friends—best friends, and even something like sisters—with Rei.

  Was it possible that out of all the dozens of almost-lost causes Claudia picked up and took home, her stepsister Rei was the only one she successfully managed to rescue? Perhaps—Rosie couldn't quite remember, but she thought there may have been a squirrel who finally managed to scamper its way back up a tree. But what she could state with confidence was that Rei was in fact one of those orphans Claudia took home with her. When Claudia brought home Rei, a girl merely five months younger, after her first day at Claudia's school (a day that had not, apparently, gone well), Rosie thought she didn't speak English, so quiet was she, and so remote, barely noticing when Rosie spoke to her. The girl seemed to be very, very shy. But after a few weeks passed and the shyness showed no sign of wearing off, Rosie began to wonder whether she was in shock of some kind.

  Claudia took this strangely unresponsive girl in. She fed her, mostly fruit and cookies she'd baked herself; she listened so attentively to her that Rei eventually began prattling away with confidence. She watched over her in school and, if she did not exactly keep her stepsister in a box on her bedroom floor at night, she certainly had her over to stay in a sleeping bag on numerous occasions.

  Maybe Rei would have snapped out of whatever traumatized state she was in by herself, but Claudia (Rosie thought with pride) almost certainly speeded up the process. The real question, though, was who rescued whom. After she became friends with Rei, Claudia continued to bring home the occasional stray, and they continued not to do well in her care—there were a couple of badly wounded country mice, yanked out of the jaws of the cats just before they became lunch, who may have turned over on their backs and given up their animal ghost at least in part because they were left out by Claudia in the garage (which was, in her defense, the one place in the house that was guaranteed to be cat-free) on a December night that rapidly turned bitterly cold.

  Yet when these animals died, Claudia cried less, without that edge of uncontrollable sadness that had made Rosie shred her own lip with her teeth.

  CERTAINLY THERE WAS EVIDENCE enough to support the theory that a desire for a friend was at the root of Claudia's fixation with taking in the wounded feathered and furred. But Rosie nevertheless thought it odd that she never admitted to missing her father. Yes, Henry and Claudia saw each other three nights a week—yes, a standard way of life divorce might be. Still, Rosie thought it possible and even likely that somewhere inside, Claudia had to be scared that she would be replaced, as her mother had been, in her father's affections and life. It was all too neat. Henry had found himself a new wife, a new house, a new cat, and not just one but two new daughters.

  About herself Rosie was clear. Although she had yet to begin dating again, she was fine with what Henry had done. So what if he, in a time frame that gave a new meaning to the term whirlwind romance (many years later, she would hear Rei, using a meteorological metaphor apparently of her own devising, call it a lightning romance), moved in to his new love's house on the other side of town within a month, and then, a scant five days after the divorce became final, married her?

  Rosie shrugged. So what, indeed. Love, or at any rate infatuation, can be like that.

  She, too, would start dating, as soon as she finished the imaginary-numbers project she was now at work on. In the first y
ear and a half after Henry's departure from their house, she told herself (or rather promised herself, the proper term to use with a special treat) that often: she, too, would start dating soon. The only question was who with? Okay, maybe just one more question, at the most two: why should she? What could dating offer her, when her life was just as she liked it, and chock full to bursting with her daughter and her work and her lectures and, of course, it was important not to forget those graduate students, shy, but once they got over that, so eager too. Wouldn't it be too unbearably messy to go through it all again, the dating and the mating and the intrusion into someone else's life?

  No, no, she just wasn't ready. Someday soon she would be interested in love and maybe even sex again; she would meet someone who would make the inevitable messiness of it all seem just like—like what? Fun, maybe, like the fog in her mind before she figured out a problem, before the equation came to her in fantastically beautiful forms that were as close as she could come to (and so much more than she, lapsed Catholic that she was, deserved) a religious experience.

  She had spent the last sixteen years of her life loving Henry. She could not have guessed it then, but she would spend the next eight trying to let him go.

  THE DAUGHTER-OF-THE-WOMAN-who-took-my-husband-away would change through the years. Rosie would watch her gradually come out of whatever shell she had been in and blossom into a thin, lively child, a quicksilver sliver of a girl. Bright and curious and with a glad shout of a laugh, her daughter's stepsister would have long, straight hair that seemed to be horizontal more often than it was vertical—always flying after her or whirling about her in a circle, doomed to be always two beats behind the rest of her.

  In that first year, though, the girl seemed but a wisp of black hair. She was the patter of footsteps moving away from Rosie when she turned, a pair of black eyes watching her from behind the door or in the shadow of the bookshelf. When Claudia started bringing her stepsister home with her every day, it turned out that what Rei most liked to do was to sit with Rosie as she worked. Rei usually had a book with her, and sometimes she braided her hair or even dozed for a minute or two, but she always kept at least half an eye on Rosie.