Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  It was weeks and possibly even months before Rosie caught on. She tended to get absorbed in her work, but the real reason she didn't figure it out was that Rei was very quiet, sitting still, as Rosie later learned, for almost half an hour at a time—a long time for a girl of nine, even if she did have a book, to sit with a middle-aged woman pondering numbers.

  Rosie usually worked on the couch in her study, her head and her feet propped up by cushions, papers spread out on her stomach and in a three-foot-radius fan around her on the floor. The couch had been so scratched up by the cats that its stuffing seemed in danger of escaping in more than one place, but Rosie more or less successfully managed not to notice. When the stuffing did escape, setting off her allergies, she worked on her bed, stomach down, her skirt falling about her thighs and her pale stubby calves swaying back and forth like palm trees in the wind.

  She first caught sight of Rei in the window next to the couch, her thin young face reflected darkly behind her own. She turned around quickly but Rei was already gone, ducking her head out of sight. Rosie turned around and went back to work yet began to notice that if she raised her head and listened carefully she could sometimes hear the sound of someone else's breathing, far more rapid and shallow than her own.

  She would never find out how Claudia felt about her stepsister's curiosity about her mother. Rosie suspected that Claudia was bored by it—how fun could it have been for her that Rei came over and spent the afternoons sitting alone in a room rather than playing with her?—but also mystified and maybe even intrigued by all the attention lavished on her all-too-frumpy mother, the woman her father had stopped loving. Rosie sometimes caught Claudia watching her too, at dinner or at bedtime, with curiosity, as well as what might have been a newfound respect.

  Then one day while Rosie was in the kitchen refilling her coffee, she looked out the window and saw Rei and Claudia playing out in the yard. Rei seemed to be giving a speech of some sort to Claudia, or perhaps telling a story, and there was something familiar about the way she was moving, a trick that she had of using the entire length of her arms as she spoke and of jerking her chin almost as a punctuation to her words. Rosie watched her for a while, frowning, racking her brain to figure out where she had seen those gestures before. She was just about to finish her coffee when it came to her.

  “I'll be darned,” she said out loud.

  That movement of Rei's arms, that jerk of her chin—they were her own. Though Rei's arms were shorter, the sweep of them proportionately smaller, Rosie could have been looking in a mirror as she watched that tiny Japanese-American girl talking with her daughter. Rei had stolen her gestures.

  Rei must have been studying her as she spoke with Claudia. She must have been spying on her not just as she worked in her study but also as she talked over the phone or met with graduate students over coffee in the den.

  The question was why, of course. By all accounts, Rei had a perfectly serviceable mother of her own. Rosie had met Hana by then and thought she seemed fine. She was pretty, certainly, and small, though not as short as Rosie, not much of a talker but what's wrong with that? It was worse when she spoke; her accent and her obvious struggle to find the correct words made Rosie cringe a little. Claudia, who spent as much time at their house as Rei spent at Rosie's, did not seem to like Hana much either, but she would eventually, no doubt (Rosie could not help sighing), come around.

  One afternoon Rosie decided that things had gone far enough. She lay in wait and then, when she heard the sound of that quick breathing behind her, she turned and ran for the child. There was a second in which Rosie saw Rei freeze, her eyes glazed with terror and her mouth an O of surprise, and then she spun around and ran. Rosie chased her down the hall, down the steps, and around the bend toward the back door. She may have been heavyset, but at that time she could still outrun a nine-year-old girl. Rosie caught up just as Rei was making her escape outdoors. She grabbed her, both of them breathless, and tickled her until she screamed with laughter.

  SHE NEVER MEANT TO LOVE HER, and for a long time—years, even—she didn't. Sometimes she flinched when she looked at Rei in a certain light, because the girl looked like her mother. And even when Rei was not in that light, there were times Rosie flinched from the sight of her anyway. But over the years she flinched less, and when Hana left Henry, taking Rei with her, Rosie missed her as if she had been a second daughter.

  She was the child who the man Rosie loved had taken as his own. She was her daughter's best friend, and perhaps a sister to her too. She was the girl who remained fascinated through her childhood and beyond with Rosie's deep absorption in numbers.

  In later years she still had hair that was horizontal more often than it was vertical, and when she became a teenager, her chatter and her antics made everyone around her smile. But for Rosie she would always also be a pair of black eyes that watched her in silence from behind the door; for her she was a face in the window, reflected darkly behind her own.

  Chapter Seven

  Claudia

  Boston, 1999

  A FEW MOMENTS OF AWKWARDNESS, EVEN OF SHYNESS, at the start of the conversation, and maybe even beyond. Or so I told myself this morning to expect. But this I could not have anticipated. Formality, who would have guessed it? My oh my, have we changed.

  We are sitting at the table, facing each other and smiling, a large blueberry muffin by her elbow (“It's not fat-free, right?” Rei anxiously confirmed with the woman behind the counter), two steaming cups of coffee in front of us. Yes, we are grown-ups; the last time I saw her we only drank Diet Cokes and—feeling extremely proud when we did so, self-consciously nonchalant and cool—beer.

  Our conversation follows a gentle rhythm of questions and answers. I say I teach elementary-school students, and that I love it; Rei says that she is an art historian, specializing in conservation, a job that allows her to travel a lot and to work with and be around art. I say that sounds exciting, but she tells me no, that stripping old paintings of the accumulated dust and dirt and smoke of history has lost its appeal, that although she once loved her job, she is tired of working with art and she feels more than a little restless these days. She'll probably consider a change in the next couple of years.

  (Has she been restless, or unwell and unable to travel as she once did? Not a peep about what she mentioned over the phone—the sickness that started in the palm of her hand. That's okay, there is time yet. I have waited so long to see her; a little more patience is not difficult to muster.)

  Yup, she'll be in Boston for the next six months, at least—isn't it wonderful? Think of all that we can do together. As if to punctuate these words, Rei jumps up and down again, as she did when we hugged, but this time in her seat. Although this seems in the abstract as if it might be difficult, she makes it look completely natural, even easy.

  No, not five—funny that you remembered, it's true I always wanted five—just three cats, for now. Heidi, Mr. Bellafonte or, as he sometimes prefers, B, and little Worm. Will I come over to meet them soon? Like, say, Wednesday? Or better yet, what the hell, tomorrow, if I can overlook the unpacked boxes that still crowd the new apartment?

  Yes, Mom's good. Living in England, where she got a cushy job teaching math at a small college. I take a breath and open my mouth—and then I shut it, so abruptly that it makes a snap audible even over the hum of the café. I am not going to tell her about my parents' remarriage yet, not today; I do not have to spoil the sweetness of my reunion with Rei after so many years. I allow another moment to lapse, long enough—surely, hopefully that was long enough—to signal the oral equivalent of period, enter, and then tab, the end of one subject and the beginning of another. Dad's retired. He had a stroke a few years ago—no, don't look like that, he's fine now. Really. He can talk, walk, garden, think, make bad puns, and everything else besides; it's just that he does everything slower. It is hard to believe, isn't it? Defies all of our mortal powers of comprehension. Henry, even slower than he was.

  Anoth
er pause. Rei bends her head down and fingers the corner of her napkin, and I know that she is mentally shuffling through a list of questions about my father, the thought of any of which makes me flinch: where does he live now, who's taking care of him, and—the biggest flinch-draw of all—did he ever remarry?

  As a child, she loved him, of course, and doubtlessly still does: the only father she can remember.

  Rei taps a finger on the table, and then with a swift, decisive motion lifts her head up from her absorbed contemplation of the napkin.

  Well, Kei's fine (she says). Married to a nice guy, a Jordanian—so nice you almost have to pity him; you remember how bossy she always was. . . .

  My breath comes out suddenly: I had not even known I had been holding it in. And with that, the scene that I have been fearing is over.

  She was always such a typical older sister (continues Rei), and in that sense she hasn't changed at all—still likes to tell me what to do. But you know what? We're not at all alike, and we'd never be friends if we weren't related—it's not like you and me—but Kei and I are sisters, after all, with the same mother and father, and it turns out that that means something. She has a baby daughter, Naomi, and she's pregnant now with her second child. Hana continues to produce art, and to sell it too. She's back in the States, living out in California.

  The full rundown on her sister and the brief sentences on her mother a perhaps intentional contrast. If I were made of more finely tempered steel, I would ask one of the countless questions about Hana that I have milling about in my mind. An innocuous one, easily answered—about how her work is progressing, say, and whatever happened to her quest to produce an image of the perfect mushroom? Yet Rei has finished this family summary in a way that closes off further comment, and I am more than a little relieved.

  I tell her I have a boyfriend, Vikrum. Uh-huh, from India; he moved here when he was two. A magician and a post-doc in neurobiology. In answer to her next question, I shake my head quickly. No, no, never taken a walk down that aisle.

  Rei tells me she has been single now for half a year—an unusually long time for her, she says with a quick smile. No, she hasn't been married either. The last guy she was with—Max—she kind of hoped for a while, but it didn't happen. Thank God, she adds with a droll look that may or may not be hiding more emotion, that sure would have been a darn short marriage.

  I want to ask her more about her last relationship, but there is something about the lightness of her tone—or is it the way she looked away from me as she spoke, her usually friendly profile, with its bunny-slope nose and sharp chin, suddenly alpine cool and remote?—that makes me think twice. Taboo subjects have opened up all around us like craters on the moon. But there is time enough for heavy questions—yes, even those about my father—later. God knows that the heaviest topic of all (grand-piano heavy, hernia-alert heavy), her health, has not even been broached.

  Again the thought occurs to me, this time with a sigh: we are grown-ups, for this is what I would have once labeled an adult conversation, politely and lightly skimming the surface of our lives, careful not to create even a ripple.

  It's hypocritical of me to feel this way, of course. How can I be relieved and grateful that she put off asking difficult questions about my father on one hand and saddened by the shallowness of the conversation on the other? Not to mention stupid: I had expected so much of this meeting. I was bound to be disappointed; how could it be otherwise?

  A moment of silence, just long enough to be uncomfortable, and then she dives into it. Splash be damned.

  “So,” she says. “All right already, enough with this chitchat.” She waves her arms in the air, clearing it; because of the length and the skinniness of her limbs, it is a grand gesture, at once sweeping and a little wacky. Then she cups her chin in one hand and leans forward. “Tell me how you're really doing.”

  “Great,” I say, smiling, looking down to stir my coffee. “So happy that you're here.”

  “Really?” A real question rather than a rhetorical one, the skepticism in her voice audible.

  “Of course,” I say with emphasis. “Did you really think I'd be so angry? I'm completely excited about you being here. There's so much we can do, we have to—”

  “No, silly,” she says, breaking in. “I mean, are you really doing great? What's really going on?” She examines me almost hungrily, searching my face for details. “You love your job, your parents are doing fine, and you're in love with this guy, this magician, right? So why aren't you happier? Come on, out with it, you know you want to tell me.” Then, as if to undercut her own seriousness, she takes a huge bite out of her muffin, getting crumbs all over her face.

  “You have crumbs all over your face.”

  With the back of her hand, she swipes unproductively in the general direction of her mouth. “Schgone?” she asks, her speech impeded by muffin.

  Sighing exaggeratedly, I reach across the table and brush off her face with my napkin. “You're as bad as my students. There, that's better.”

  Her eyes on me, she finishes chewing, swallows. “Did I tell you,” she says, “that you haven't changed one whit?”

  “Did I tell you,” I say, “that it only seems like that because you haven't yourself?”

  We smile at each other across the table.

  “Whaddays say,” she says. “Let's blow this joint. Finish our coffees and go for a walk.”

  WE ARE ON COMMONWEALTH, two blocks away from the café, when she stumbles. There is no apparent reason for it: the sidewalk is dry and relatively smooth, and there is not even much of a crowd milling about. We are walking, chatting about the neighborhood, a light breeze on our faces and the sky flawless above—Boston in late September, such an unexpectedly wondrous place to be—when she falls to her hands and knees. She gets up quickly, laughing, of course, and makes a crack about her old tendency to walk into doors, about how in that respect, too, she has not changed. In all the important ways, she adds cheerfully enough, she is, to her chagrin, exactly the same person she was at seventeen; no progress made here. I smile as I give her a hand and help her to her feet, and I chatter about the numerous perils that await city strollers as we brush off the front of her dress together, but all I can think is that I have no recollection of her walking into doors as a child.

  It is easier to talk while walking, because there is so much other than our faces to look at. It is partly that her gaze is so disconcertingly sharp. But mostly, I think, it's that even though she seems much younger than thirty-four, when I look at her it's hard not to be reminded of all the years that have passed, of all the milestones and crises and love affairs that we have had to go through alone. Her face is so thin now, in a way that accentuates those lovely, slanted eyes (which I used to covet, and which I, when it comes right down to it, still covet); they seem perhaps paradoxically both brighter and more black than they used to be.

  Seventeen years, I remind myself: what is surprising is that I could recognize her at all. Her face, so familiar and new all at once (is that wishful thinking on my part to believe that the tightness of her skin over her cheekbones is a consequence of her age rather than of the state of her health? No, probably not, surely not, she was always thin, and her mother also got thinner as she aged), makes me feel shy.

  Her voice, though. A different matter altogether. It has changed too, of course; it is deeper although it is still very clear, maybe even unusually so for a voice so low. It is also easily as musical as her mother's now. Yet in spite of these changes, the patterns of her speech have stayed the same—the rat-tat-tat rhythm of it, and the quick intake of her breath in the pauses of her sentences—so that if I close my eyes while I listen to her speak, we could be teenagers still, speculating on the endless mysteries of sex.

  “So,” she says.

  “So,” I repeat, dreading and steeling myself for the onslaught of her questions.

  We have arrived at the entrance to the Commons. In a couple of weeks the trees will burst into color, b
ut for now they are just tipped with yellow. We cross the street and, without needing to discuss it, head toward the entrance into the park; soon we are surrounded by a stream of people, mostly mothers with small children or babies, prattling and laughing. The day is almost heartbreakingly beautiful, in the way that it is in the fall, with the cool of the air a subtle but persistent reminder of the imminent approach of winter.

  “So-o, I always wish I could take my cats out for a walk,” she says. “Show them off, let them run around a bit.”

  Had she managed to pick up on my dread? “I had a cat too,” I volunteer shyly, “for a while.”

  Her reaction is what I expected, and more. She stops walking, her hand placed over her heart. “You wouldn't kid me about this, right?” When I shake my head no, she throws her head back and, there is no other word for it, howls. “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” she sings, belting out the words in her own idiosyncratic version of Handel.

  So, still a warbler like Vikrum after all.

  “You don't know how happy that makes me,” she says in her speaking voice. Reinforcing the auditory demonstration of her approval with a visual one, she executes what she used to call her happy Snoopy jig right here on the sidewalk. While her feet are not the same blur of motion that they used to be during this dance, her nose still points gleefully upward in the prescribed Peanuts fashion.

  “It's about time you claimed your birthright as your mother's daughter,” she says, when we fall into step again. “I always thought you were a closet cat person. What was her name? Or his?”

  “Orson.”

  “That's a lot of name to live up to.”