Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  As she had not since her school days, when the thrill of painting had taken hold of her full throttle, like first love, Hana began to be careless about how the paint made its way onto her body, so that her face, arms, legs, and of course her hands seemed to be perpetually covered with it. Once Kei came down and caught her cooking with paint on her fingers. Horrified, she took over the filleting of the fish while her mother scrubbed her hands under her strict supervision, but since Kei's track schedule kept her from checking on Hana every evening, who knew how much paint-laced food they were taking into their mouths? In private, Kei warned the others, so that they began turning their food over with care for traces of exotic color.

  Whereas Hana had once spent her nights reading the papers or watching television on the couch with Henry, she took up the practice of heading toward her studio as soon as dinner ended. There she worked until midnight, when Henry came and stood at the foot of the stairs on the second floor, tilting his head upward so that his glasses winked with the light, to call her to bed.

  SHE STRUGGLED AGAINST IT, but in the end Kei came to the reluctant conclusion that she would have to ask the question that was troubling them all. She loved Henry, of course, gentle soul that he was, as Rei did, but perhaps because she remembered their father, their one and only oto-san, as her sister, younger than her by four years, couldn't, she was (she told herself) understandably a little more skeptical of this benign, very tall presence in their lives. She could see, for starters, how Henry was rendered almost ineffectual by his adoration of his second wife. Kei was fairly confident that he would not ask Hana about how strangely absorbed she had become in her work, and that even if he did, he wouldn't tell her daughters what she had said.

  And Rei and Claudia—the steptwins or stepbrats, as she'd begun calling them, to their equal delight—were all too wrapped up in their own private world of past stories about Hana, the most romantic ones, such as the almost fairy tale about her and the prince, to notice what was happening to her now, let alone inquire about it.

  No, it was up to her to find out what was troubling Hana, and then to find a cure for it. Kei didn't like it; she in fact flat out dreaded the prospect. Almost adult though she was, she too would have liked nothing more than to bury herself in a world made up of the sweeter stories from her mother's strange and often troubled past. Yet her oto-san, with his easy laugh and deep voice and the sprinter's stride that she had inherited, her special pal just as surely as Claudia was Rei's, was long gone, so what else could she do but leave that world for another far less romantic?

  Kei knew that the stepgirls saw her as a worrywart, that when it came to having fun, they had written her off as a lost cause. That they thought so stung a little, young and idiotic though they were. If it weren't beneath her dignity to do so, she would have sat them down and explained to them the reason she tended to frown, watching Hana, far more than she smiled or laughed.

  Her father would have wanted her, he would have expected her, to take care of her mother. Indeed, every morning when he left for work, that was what he used to say to Kei—Take care of your mother—the fact of Hana's vulnerability, a fragility that seemed at odds with her single-minded dedication as an artist, a secret that they shared. While unacknowledged, this secret had bonded Kei and her father together and marked them as kin, as surely as did their ability to outpace all others in the field and their love of the wind on their face as they ran.

  So even though her oto-san never had a chance to say good-bye to her, that was the charge with which he left her, and the one that she would at all costs fulfill. She would take care of Hana.

  If only she knew how.

  KEI WOULD LATER COME to think that it was because she panicked that she blurted out the questions in the way she did—at Sunday brunch, over pancakes and cereal and tea, when Claudia as well as Rei was there, and Henry too, anchoring the table with his quiet presence. She panicked for a simple, stupid reason, one that probably would have disappointed her father badly if he'd still been alive: because she realized, sitting at brunch, that Hana was the linchpin to their gathering that morning.

  Technically, of course, it was Hana's relationship with Henry that brought them all together. But he always seemed the passive partner in the enterprise known as their marriage—who knew why? Perhaps because it was Hana who, at least according to family lore, pursued him. Or was it merely because it was she who called them to this table? What did seem clear was that if they did make up a family—and while Kei was almost superstitiously careful about including the if before that phrase, after four years of living with Henry even she could admit that she could drop that preposition if she chose—then it was Hana's presence at the head of the table that conferred that particular title on the gathering.

  They were a motley group. Rei and Claudia might be equally rumpled and disheveled, and yes, they were wearing pajamas with matching patterns, Rei in blue and Claudia in violet, but whereas Rei was dark and quick and far too thin, her steptwin was another story altogether, fair-skinned, stockier, and slow-moving, gazing out at the world with those large, mild eyes. Then there was Henry, ludicrously long, always looking a little sloppy, even when dressed as he was today in a long-sleeved shirt and khakis, and Hana, tiny and chic even in her paint-streaked sweatshirt and pants. Then, finally, there was herself. Kei straightened, angling her butter knife so that she could glance at her reflection on its surface. Dressed in black, her best color; hair brushed and styled; mascara and a trace of lipstick on her face.

  In terms of both fashion and biology, they did not form a cohesive group, as anyone peeking in through the window would realize. Yet there they were nonetheless, sitting together during that most intimate hour, ten on a Sunday morning, crowded around a table that was at least two places too small, dipping their knives into the same jar of jelly, diving their spoons and unfortunately all-too-grubby fingers into the same bowl of blueberries.

  A family, if you will.

  Kei shot a quick look at her mother, who was absorbed in sliding the lid of the jelly jar in a small circle on her place mat. Lying untouched beside her was a plate of pancakes—they were made by her, so, predictably, they were soggy in the middle and burnt around the edges, but when had Hana ever cared about what she ate? The diminishment of her appetite these days was striking, her weight loss, worrisome. She was becoming steadily more unbalanced, as she had for the year following Seiji's death; that was obvious. Kei felt a surge of fierce protectiveness toward the group gathered around the table, innocently chewing and swallowing, unaware that their comfortable existence as a group was under threat.

  The fate of the family resided in Hana. It went beyond the question of whether she would become so obsessed with her work that she would lose interest in Henry and decide to leave him, or, more implausibly, whether he would leave her. Hana was the family. What Kei feared was not the prospect of losing yet another father, but the possibility that she would lose her mother.

  “WILL YOU COME TOO?” Henry turned to Hana, looking at her with what seemed to his daughter, at least, to be more than a hint of wistfulness. He had been discussing the day's excursion, a walk up the highest hill in the county; Rei and Claudia and even, for once, Kei had all agreed to come.

  So quiet had Hana been, and so busy too, rising to get butter, brown sugar, blueberries, and then more butter again, it was unclear how much of the conversation she had heard. Standing now at the refrigerator, she turned around. She gazed down at the carton of milk in her hand, shook it a little so that it sloshed, and then came and sat down. “I think I'll stay home today,” she said. In the years to come, her daughters would wonder, with more than a trace of guilt at their long-term aversion to speaking Japanese, whether Hana's inclination to state the obvious was a direct result of the fact that she was a woman who'd grown accustomed to being misunderstood, even—or was that especially?—by the members of her own family. Here she didn't even slow down to tack on a note of explanation that was, for the people seated at
this table, hardly necessary. “I want to paint today.”

  The group was still for a moment; Rei may have sighed. No one asked, because it was no longer a matter of debate at this point, whether Hana would paint more pictures of that curiously bulbous shape.

  It was then that Kei asked her questions. Discussing this moment later, Rei and Claudia would agree that to her credit, Kei managed not to express either annoyance or exasperation, even though, knowing her, she was probably feeling both.

  Kei herself was appalled. Even as she opened her mouth, she was aware that when she rehearsed these questions in her mind, she always sounded mildly inquisitive, and humorous too, and that, furthermore, they always came at the end of a long, meandering, and most of all private conversation about art and work. But when she actually spoke them—when she, let's not mince words, actually blurted them out—the best she could hope for was that she didn't sound too aggressive. “What are you trying to do with all of those hat shapes? Don't you want to paint anything else anymore?”

  Hana bent her head forward. Her lips were apart; her gaze was rapt. She cleared her throat, and then she looked up at the small group gathered around the table.

  Yet as she looked at each of them in turn, the brightness in her face gradually faded. When she spoke, her eyes were cast down again, this time focused on the sugar bowl. “I want to paint,” she said, taking the lid off the bowl and peering into it, “the eternal mushroom.” Then she stood up and moved to the cabinets to replace the sugar.

  Kei pushed her plate—of blueberries, and nothing more; she was still thin, but you never knew, and it never hurt to watch what you ate—away from her and frowned. She glanced over at Henry, who adjusted his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and looked, she thought suddenly, old, far older than he usually looked, older even than his really very considerable years; had he always had those lines around his mouth, and if so, when had they become so deep?

  But Rei and Claudia just squirmed in their chairs and thanked their lucky stars that they were seated next to each other and so could not catch each other's eye. The eternal mushroom? Maybe they wouldn't have worried about dissolving into laughter if Hana had chosen another adjective. Maybe, in a pinch, they could have respected the desire to reproduce an image of the perfect mushroom, even if they wouldn't have understood it (a fungus, after all, a creepy, unnatural thing, thriving in the dark and the damp and hating the sun), but that wasn't the phrase that she used.

  It was her English, of course, strange and stilted even after years of living in America with two American-born daughters and an American man. They were all used to it, and generally kind and patient about both her mistakes and her accent. Still, it was hard for Claudia and Rei, thirteen years old at the time and, as such, perhaps inevitably prone to parental mockery, not to giggle at the phrase, and probably asking too much to think that they would not joke about it later in private: Hana's Quest for the Eternal Mushroom or, as they would quickly come to say, her Quem.

  LIKE HER ELDER DAUGHTER, Hana had known that she was not saying what she meant to say even as she spoke. What she had wanted to say was that her old childhood nightmare of the cloud had begun to recur, that she couldn't sleep for dreaming it. What she should have explained was that her hope was to capture the image so perfectly that she could banish it from her mind.

  She'd wanted to tell her family that with the only tools she had at her disposal, her paint and her brushes, she hoped to trap the cloud on paper, to pinion it like a butterfly so that it could no longer hover on the edges of her mind throughout the day, fluttering its wings and distracting her. She had wanted to explain how bright this image was, how it was almost blinding; she had wished to say that she had become afraid to drive, let alone conduct even the most casual conversation, because she was sure that at any moment it would fly out in front of her, revealing itself to everyone.

  Perhaps it was, yet again, a problem with her English. The eternal mushroom, such a stupid phrase: what on earth had she been thinking? Could it be a lack of vocabulary rather than the sheer lunacy of the ideas that she had wanted to express to her family that had kept her from speaking out? Perhaps if she had the words, and the eloquence with which to string them together, she could have said to them that although her paints and brushes had never let her down before, she herself was another matter altogether. That no matter how hard she worked, and how many hours and days, her talent was meager, and that she despaired of summoning the necessary skill to pin down on paper the image that tormented her.

  Yes, maybe it was just a question of language. If it weren't for that barrier, maybe she could have told them (how she had wanted to tell them! sitting in expectant silence, their faces turned toward her, wearing that expression she knew so well, polite bafflement coupled with a keen desire to understand), and they would have nodded and understood, that she had circling in her head in an endless loop a nursery riddle, perhaps American, perhaps Japanese, that she had heard somewhere: how do you catch a cloud?

  The answer being, of course, that you don't. That you can't.

  Chapter Nine

  New Jersey, 1974–82

  “WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER, MY MOTHER WAS OBSESSED by the role that luck played in every person's life. That was because of what had happened to her aunt Sachiko,” said Rei, looking down at the ground. She never needed to check whether her audience of one was paying attention. “My mother always used to say that if it hadn't been for her youngest aunt, she might have felt differently about the possibility of marrying the prince. And that, even more, she would have led her life as a whole very differently.” That the life Hana led would have been a different one altogether, with a whole other set of decisions about love and children and career and travel made at every step, paled in significance when compared to this fact—her approach to and indeed her whole attitude toward life was different because she knew her aunt Sachiko, as well as what had happened to her.

  What had happened to Sachiko was this: during the morning of a hot summer day, exactly a month and a day before her twentieth birthday, she made the decision to step outside to let her hair dry in the sun. She lived then, as she would until the end of her life, in a suburb almost two kilometers away from the city of Hiroshima, and that day—August 6, 1945—the annals of her small town, like that of all towns in a hundred- and, for all she knew, perhaps even a thousand-kilometer radius of the city, would become filled with stories that chronicled the most minute of people's actions and movements, with particular attention paid to the chain of events (random, quotidian, and in retrospect, jaw-dropping) that led to their being in a certain place at a very certain time.

  An elderly man who stopped to admire a cherry tree he had planted that spring and so missed his train by no more than a minute: had the leaves of the tree seemed less lush that day, or were he just a little less careful in his admiring inspection of its growth, he would not have lived past that morning. A pregnant woman who was traveling all the way from Kyushu, where she had moved with her husband and child, to visit her cousins and her grandmother. Because her son had been ill with a fever, she had not planned to leave Kyushu until the sixth, but when he showed signs of improvement and her grandmother slipped on a puddle outside her doorstep, breaking her left hip and ending up in the hospital, the young woman changed her plans and left instead on the fifth. After spending the night at her cousins', she left for the hospital, which was located in the dead center of the city, at six-thirty A.M. the next day.

  By her own account, Sachiko's story was not as dramatic as theirs. What she had gone through wasn't even on the order of what had happened to Mari-chan, the little girl, her hair always in pigtails, who was the younger sister of one of Sachiko's old classmates from school: at 8:14 in the morning of that day, the boldly colored spine of one of her father's books caught her eye. Perhaps partly because she was not supposed to touch them, Mari-chan could not resist; her hand outstretched, she was almost at the bookshelf when it fell on top of her, putting her in
a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

  No, Sachiko had been one of the lucky ones, as she herself was well aware. The bomb had neither marked nor damaged her body. When she remembered what had happened to so many thousands of others—and how could she forget, when some had been her neighbors, and others her classmates—she knew she had little right to complain, or even to be surprised at the way the life she'd loved had changed forever in an instant.

  But for Hana, eight years younger and not a resident of a Hiroshima suburb, astonishment and anger at the sudden way in which Sachiko's life had changed seemed the only reactions that would ever make any sense.

  IT WASN'T EVEN the usual time she washed her hair. Because her hair was long and difficult to wash, she usually ended up reserving that particular chore for the evening: Sachiko operated on the premise that unpleasant tasks should be put off for as long as possible (which meant that her nights tended to be very full). Besides, she liked to stay in bed in the mornings, past nine as often as she could manage it.

  This week, though, sleeping in late was impossible; a peaceful morning was not an option with Yuka visiting from Nagoya with her three children. When the baby began to wail at a quarter past seven, Sachiko had opened her eyes and then found that she could not get them to stay closed again no matter how she tried. Giving up at last, she sighed, sat up, and stretched.