Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  “Well, he was a lot of cat.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Diabetes. Three years ago.”

  “Ah.” After a respectful pause, she asks, with delicacy, “Ever think about getting another?”

  “I can't,” I confess. “I think he's haunting my apartment. It sounds crazy, I know, but you'll see when you come over.”

  Rei nods, carefully considering my revelation. “Still. Surely even feline ghosts appreciate feline company, no?”

  “Maybe. But,” I say, dragging out the words, “Vikrum's allergic, besides.”

  “Go to his place,” she says promptly. “That's what I did when I had a boyfriend who was allergic. Of course, since all my clothes are covered with cat hair, I just ended up contaminating his apartment. . . . That didn't last long, not surprisingly. We were pretty much doomed from the start, I guess.”

  “We can't go to his place. Ever. That's part of the problem.”

  “Oh.” She hesitates, and then begins speaking in a rush. “Do you not want to talk about it? Does it feel weird talking to me after so much time? If you want to tell me later, when we've gotten more used to each other, that's okay too. I can understand—”

  It is then that the question I had not meant to utter during this—a reunion I had wanted to be both celebratory and lighthearted, as it has been thus far—slips out. “Why has it been so many years?” My voice cracks a little as it rises, and I have to remind myself of her illness. As it is, there is no doubt that were it not for that, I would be saying far more than I am saying, and at a higher decibel. “How come you wrote so few letters; why didn't you come through on your promises to visit?”

  What was I expecting? An outburst of tears, or an only partly exaggerated bit of groveling? She had been an impulsively affectionate child, capable of extravagant displays of emotion. What I get instead is a pair of serious eyes turned toward me.

  “I'm sorry,” she says. Then she is quiet, hoping, perhaps, that I will step in with words of comfort.

  I wait.

  “I know that saying I'm sorry doesn't come close to covering it,” Rei eventually continues. “I'm going to spend the next fifty years proving to you that I've changed. Heck, the next one hundred years, if that's what it takes. I was a different person seventeen years ago: feckless and heedless, like—well, like my mother. But I'm different now. All reformed, completely full of feck and heed.” She is trying to inject a note of jocularity, one based on the kind of wordplay that my father has always loved. But while she sounds cheerful, she is chewing on her upper lip, a nervous habit that she has inherited directly (in a line of descent that would seem skewed to anyone not in our family) from my mother.

  “I'm not a saint—I'll make mistakes again, I'm sure, although I'll do my best never to hurt you again,” she says now. “But I'm not my mother's daughter either, and—”

  “Not her daughter? You don't really think that,” I say, interrupting. “Think of all those stories you told me about her. And then you made the decision to be a painting conservator, restoring and preserving for posterity art like your mom makes.”

  “Still, I'm not at all like her, am I?”

  “No,” I say. “No, you weren't when you were young, and you aren't now either.”

  If I had told her, back then, that she was not like her mother, chances are high that she would not have looked relieved.

  “I wasn't reliable back when we were kids, at least not in the way that you were,” she says. “But I want to be like that now. I even thought that just maybe I could help you for a change. Not now, or at least not yet, but someday. You can lean on me, you know—I'm sturdy as a rock. Just think of me as a walking shoulder to cry or lean on.”

  She speaks with touching confidence, but she looks pale and gaunt, too weak to support even a corpulent albeit incorporeal cat such as Orson, let alone my weight. “Maybe someday,” I say, but gently.

  “Okay,” she says. “Just remember: it's a standing offer.”

  This conversation cannot be any more pleasant for her than it is for me. Yet she waits, attentive and patient, as I struggle to find the words.

  “I do need to know,” I say at last, “why you disappeared for so long.”

  “It's complicated,” says Rei. “A mess, in fact. But I'll try.” She rubs and then scratches the base of her throat. “We were the poor relations. We lived off Henry's bounty, and then we became the poor relations who broke our benefactor's heart. I know, I know”—holding up a hand to ward off my protests—“we were all family, and you never thought of us as parasites. But we were, and it was horrible, and I was ashamed of us.

  “And then too much time passed—I became ashamed of myself just as much as of my mom.

  “Also,” she adds, with a quick glance at me, “you probably didn't really want to see me, at least during the first couple of years. You were hating me then for what my mother did. How could you not?”

  My head moves back and forth on its own in an almost automatic gesture of denial, yet she is right, of course. Rei watches me, her eyes shrewd, and then nods to herself, reading my answer in my silence. “Claw, you might still resent me now—it's the least that I deserve. But just remember this: I always wanted to see you. I never stopped wanting to see you. And I'm going to be by your side for the rest of our lives, or as long as you can stand me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, nodding slowly, wishing that I could answer her with more certainty: it will not be easy for me to let go of these past seventeen years.

  “Now then,” Rei says, her tone suddenly brisk, “you were thinking about telling me about Vikrum.”

  Her mood shifts are so much the same, I have to smile. “I do want to tell you about him,” I say. We briefly part in order to pass a woman pushing a stroller with two babies. I turn to look as we pass: twins, blue-eyed, with matching mats of dark hair. “I'm just worried you're going to judge him.”

  “Aha,” she says. “That might be a valid concern. Is he not treating you well? Because I'll kill him if he's not.”

  “He treats me really well,” I say. The way he looks at me! I shut my eyes for a moment, hard, to get him out of my head, so I do not disappear altogether from this beautiful day with my long-lost stepsister in the park. I open them in time to see a squirrel, a cheeky fellow, scurrying across our path, mere inches away.

  “But he's—well, he's married. With two children, a boy and a girl.”

  Rei stops walking, so abruptly that a small boy runs into her. She looks over her shoulder absentmindedly to see what hit her, then wheels back to face me. Her eyes are once again on me, but while her gaze is still sharp, it no longer seems disconcertingly so; her face, more narrow though it is now, already feels more familiar.

  “Does divorce come up?”

  “Vikrum comes from a really traditional family,” I say, turning my head to look at the path ahead. “Traditional enough that his marriage was arranged; divorce isn't really an option. But even if he didn't come from that kind of background—” I shrug. “He adores his children, and he takes being a father very seriously.” As my father did as well, though to a clearly lesser extent. “His devotion to his kids is one of the reasons I fell in love with him in the first place. Kind of ironic, isn't it, that it's also why we can't be together?”

  “And his wife?”

  “It's not much of a marriage—they haven't slept in the same bed for years, since their son was born. She drinks. It's nothing too serious, but it's enough of a problem that he's glad her mother practically lives in the house with them. He also says that she's cold, that she never cared for him, but I'm never sure if he's telling the truth there.” Because, of course, how could you live with someone like Vikrum and not care for him?

  The wind picks up and the trees above us and around us stir; a single scarlet maple leaf comes drifting to the ground at our feet. I stoop to pick it up and twirl it in my fingers. The leaf is dry to the touch, its lines delicately etched. I wish, not for the first time,
that I had the talent Hana had; I would try to preserve the memory of it on canvas.

  “So no matter what, he can't even think about divorce until the children are out of the house. Which means, let's see,” I say, as if I have not done these calculations a hundred times already, “Vikrum should be free about a decade and a half from now, give or take a year.”

  “Oh, Claw,” Rei says, and then suddenly her arms are around me.

  She's so thin I feel as if I need to hug her carefully, but her hold on me is strong. My God, did I really get through seventeen years without her?

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Here,” she says, rooting around in the pocket of her jacket and pulling out a couple of tissues. She hands me the less rumpled one, then uses the other to blow her own nose. “You're as bad as your students.”

  We have to walk against the traffic to get to a trash can to throw away the used tissues, a project that takes time as well as patience. When we get there we linger for a few moments, watching the people pass by.

  THE TWO OF US racing ahead to the old graveyard at the top of the hill. How old were we that day—eleven, twelve, thirteen? Young enough, in any event, to want to play running and hiding games among the tombstones (although by that standard, we could have been much older; we are talking about Rei and me, after all). Hana and my father following, hand in hand, lingering behind; Kei even further back. We were in Vermont, where we sometimes went for a week or two during the summer (always, always bypassing Boston on the drive there and back, to my secret disappointment); it was a sunny day just on the cusp of being too warm.

  It was an annual ritual for us, as a family, to hike up the hill and read the dates chiseled on the stones. The graveyard was old, the oldest one, perhaps, that Rei and I had ever seen, with cracked and crumbling stones dating back to the late 1800s, the inscriptions barely legible, overgrown by weeds but sometimes with fresh bouquets of wildflowers—remarkably similar to the ones that we always made sure to gather for them—placed by their side. Those flowers left by descendants, we thought, great-great-great-great-grandchildren, born of a family who had never left the area and, really, who could blame them—was there anyplace more glorious than this hilltop, where the green fields rolled out in a grand sweep beneath us like the finest silk?

  When the Parents, and that slowpoke stuck-up nuisance of an older sister, Kei, made it up to the top, we would marvel all together at the small stones that had been erected for children and babies, as we did every year. We would exclaim over the couple who had both managed to live into their eighties in the nineteenth century, and wonder what miracle diet they had subsisted on (oatmeal for breakfast and red wine with every dinner was my father's guess; a Japanese-style meal plan of fish and rice, Hana's). Small wonder Rei and I loved that graveyard so: it seemed tailor-made to transform death into a concept both benign and unimaginably far away—a game of hide-and-seek, the second date in a fading set of two, a gathering of stones glinting in shades of white and gray under a bright noonday sun.

  “I'd like to be buried here”—my stepmother's lilting voice, pitched low and sweet—“with you.” She was speaking to my father, of course. They were private words, not meant for our ears but caught and carried up the hill toward us by a stray breeze. Heard only because they arrived during a lull in our game, they abruptly silenced us.

  What did my father say in response; did he second the motion, reproach her for her morbidity, or ask if she wouldn't rather be cremated, as all of her relatives had been? I turned my head and saw him fold his long body toward Hana as he replied, but the breeze was gone and so his words never made it up the hill.

  “Don't you dare cry,” I said, whispering, to Rei.

  She gave me a look. “I wasn't planning to,” she said. “Why, are you?”

  I was a little taken aback by what she said, so seldom was it that our reactions differed, and more than a little embarrassed. Rei had exposed me: I was a coward to be frightened by the thought of my father dying, and I was a sap, or worse—possibly even the worst, a girl like Kei—to be moved by Harlequin-romance sentiment.

  Still (I told myself), it was not so long ago that Rei had lost her father. Maybe she had not shivered, as I had, when she first heard Hana's words; maybe she had not felt a chill when she realized that death could be far more immediate and personal than a moldering gathering of stones. Moreover, and more to the point, Rei lived with my father and her mother, so she of course saw far more of them than I did. Perhaps she already knew, as I had not, that Hana loved my father so much that as long as they could be buried side by side, the thought of death did not scare her.

  My father had met Hana in a hardware store one cold day in March. He bought a monkey wrench he did not need, just for the chance to stand in line with her. While this was not an anecdote that I enjoyed hearing or even thinking about, even I had to admit that it constituted the start of a love story, and one that seemed to have brought its hero and heroine to a state of contentment.

  Maybe, someday far off in the future (I thought grudgingly, as Rei and I resumed our game of tag), I would not hate my stepmother quite so much for breaking my mother's heart and for turning my father into a shadowy presence in my life, a tall figure I glimpsed on the path behind me for three nights a week and a week or two in the summer.

  I looked back again. Hana and my father were walking so close together that in spite of the height difference between them, it was impossible to tell where one started and the other left off. I sighed then, acknowledging to myself that it did not matter how kind she was to me, or how much she loved my father, and he her, or even how close I was to her daughter. I would always hate Hana.

  And while one might think that loving a man with a wife and two children for nearly two years would have changed the way I feel, it hasn't.

  WHAT I WANT to convey to Rei is the strangeness of it all—that decades after a childhood plagued by Hana, the thought of her is once again making it hard for me to sleep. There is no one who would appreciate the precise nuances of this predicament more than Rei. But she does not need to be reminded of the havoc that her mother wreaked upon my family.

  “Can you believe it?” I say, with more surprise than bitterness. “After a year and a half, I still can't. I'm the other woman. The potential home-wrecker. The bitch.”

  “I wouldn't have guessed that, no,” Rei says slowly. “It's not the fate I would have predicted for you, of all people.”

  She links her arm through mine, and we begin to walk again. We are quiet, threading our way with care through the throngs of women and their children. I sneak a glance at her. Her head is bent, her eyes on the path ahead of her, and I wonder if she, too, is thinking about her mother.

  Chapter Eight

  New Jersey, 1974–82

  IN THE KLEIN–WATANABE HOUSEHOLD, A RESPECTFUL silence surrounded and protected the subject of Hana's paintings. This silence could in fact be described as wary: perhaps taking their cue from Henry, with his wide-eyed, almost always speechless admiration of Hana's work, the children were afraid to speak about the colorful paintings that flowed in a steady stream from the studio at the top of the house. This was true even though Hana herself seemed casual and hardly intimidating on the subject of her art, asking their opinions of different works and listening with care to what they said.

  Maybe, Kei sometimes thought, their silence wasn't so surprising, given that they could only intellectually (and often, Kei mused, just barely at that) understand the urge to apply paint to paper in order to give shape to the inchoate images of the mind. Whatever the reason, they never spoke about the paintings if they could avoid it.

  Hence their collective failure to ask Hana what she was doing when she first began painting the same object again and again.

  They initially thought that it was a silhouette of a woman: a figure huddling under an umbrella, seen from the back. So indistinctly rendered was this figure that this initial thought was in fact just a guess; the silhouette was
really little more than a shape with what might have been a large, domed hat over it. Still, the idea that Hana was painting someone under an umbrella persisted, perhaps because of the angry streaks of rain visible at the edges of the painting.

  But the question of what Hana was painting was easily subsumed by one that was more pressing: why did she paint so many versions of this not exactly riveting silhouette? To think that they had once taken it for granted that her paintings would cover a pleasingly diverse array of subjects! Flowers, bees, landscapes, boats adrift on the sea, and countless portraits from memory of her aunt Sachiko. Kei hadn't known how much they would all miss it, the fact that they never knew what Hana would paint, until this parade of what was, in retrospect, a spectacularly various range of images conjured up by the wand of her paintbrush abruptly came to an end.

  Kei was seventeen. Tall and poised, with a boyfriend who was now in college, but she could have wailed like a child, in a way that even Rei no longer would, for those pictures, especially the portraits of Aunt Sachiko, that pensive, war-scarred woman.

  (Why was Sachiko—Kei suddenly wondered, as she had many times before—so much more dear to Hana than her own mother? Could it be for the same reason that Rei believed Henry to be the finest of men—out of gratitude, as well as simple affection? If so, that's one way, at least, that it's easier to be a stepparent, or an aunt, than a mother or father: the expectations are lower, and so a small dose of kindness will go far indeed.)

  One day, it seemed, Hana woke up and began to paint this umbrella-like shape, an angry red against a dark gray background. The next day she painted another one, but this time the shape was black, the background, forest green. Then she painted a yellow shape against blue, gray against blue, blue against purple, gray against black, and black against black. Then she painted even more, in an endless variety of colors.

  For weeks that turned into months, she reproduced the image of the umbrella, and she became increasingly quiet around the house as she did so. She worked at what was for her an unusual velocity, sometimes producing two paintings in a day. Her productivity was particularly remarkable given that she painted as she always did, placing her brush and swiping it across the canvas with a bold, even reckless assurance, but then going back and revising almost every one of these strokes with an obsessive care. As soon as her paintings were dry, she stacked them facedown against the wall, neatly in order, until even her spacious studio—the converted attic, the largest as well as sunniest room of the house—began to seem cramped and small.