Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  Seiji muttered a curse. Hana turned to him, the beatific smile of a young madonna on her face. He looked back at her and then, suddenly, he smiled, rueful about his own bad mood. He turned around and chucked his older daughter under her chin, tousled the younger girl's hair. Then he opened the door. As he stepped out of the car, Rei picked up the song, this time under her breath, from where she'd left off; it was an American song that she had learned recently in school, and one that she particularly liked.

  “. . . ninety-six bottles of beer on the wall . . .”

  Her mother, who was more musical as well as more artistic than anyone else in the family, but of course did not know the words to the song, easy as it was, hummed an accompaniment from the front seat.

  “. . . ninety-six bottles of bee-er, take one down . . .”

  Her father was not a handsome man. Kei might marvel almost daily at the unfathomable depths of Rei's stupidity and ignorance, but this much Rei knew. His facial features were laughably mismatched: his nose bulbous and squashed; his eyes so squinty they were barely visible behind thick glasses; his teeth small and crooked.

  When he walked down the street with her beautiful mother, people often stared at him as well as at her, in bafflement at his luck.

  “. . . pass it around . . .”

  Rei turned to watch him as he ran out onto the highway. He was not a handsome man, her father, but it was impossible to remember that fact when he was in motion. He had the loping grace of a cat; his stride was strikingly easy, and effective too, good enough to have made him the Japanese equivalent of an all-state sprinter in his youth. He was still young, only thirty-seven, even if he seemed impossibly old to his younger daughter then—even if he, with his job in the States and his two-and-a-half children, probably seemed old to himself—and he looked like a boy as he ran, stretching his legs out with some eagerness after the long hours spent cramped in the car.

  They were traveling eastward, and it was midmorning. The sun, which was particularly radiant that day, hit him full in the face. He held one arm up to shield his eyes from its light as he raced back to retrieve the wayward piece of luggage.

  FOUR YEARS LATER (a month before Rei turned nine, half a year before Henry came into their lives), Kei learned that her younger sister remembered only one half of the most momentous event of their lives. Trying to fill in the blanks in Rei's memory, she told her of the stretcher on which their father rested, a sheet, the red stain on it visibly seeping outward, that covered him to the top of his head, and of how they had been ushered into a police car while their mother, who had remained dry-eyed and self-contained until then, began sobbing hysterically on the shirtfront of an embarrassed paramedic.

  Kei said (incredulous at her sister's lack of memory, but trying, for once, not to scoff) that Rei, too, began to bawl then, and would not stop even though the policeman that was with them picked her up and held her in his lap during the ride to the police station, even though he reassured them both that their daddy could not have felt any pain, as the truck had hit him too fast.

  “Were the sirens blaring?”

  Kei nodded vigorously, hope in her eyes. “And the lights were flashing. You remember that?”

  Rei shook her head slowly, sifting through her memories. “No.”

  THE SUN HURT HER EYES TOO, and Rei turned her head forward again (“. . . ninety-five bottles of bee-er . . .”), away from the sight of her father. Kei slipped back into her book. Hana opened the window and tilted the side mirror toward her; she had been eating a muffin and she needed to see if she had poppy seeds caught in her teeth. Five more seconds (“. . . take one down, pass it around . . .”), and then a loud screech of brakes from behind made them all jump. With a swiftness that would not have seemed possible for a woman so dreamy, Hana turned. Rei had a blurred impression of her mother's face, the eyes dark and huge and the lips parted, and then she could no longer see: Hana's hand was covering her eyes.

  “Don't turn around,” said Hana. “Don't look.”

  Rei wanted to protest that there was no way she could, with a hand blotting out her vision. She wanted to say that her mother was hurting her, that her grip was too tight. But there was something in Hana's tone that commanded silence as well as obedience.

  Telling this story to her stepsister in the years that followed, Rei would find herself stunned anew by the traits exhibited by her mother on that day: the lightning-quickness of her reflexes, and the strength of will that made it possible for her to remain calm and quiet, covering her daughters' eyes, while she gazed out at her husband's broken body.

  “YOU REMEMBER HIS FUNERAL, at least, don't you? You and I cried so hard that Mom almost didn't have time to cry herself.”

  Kei sounded so uncharacteristically anxious, so desperate to dredge up a shared glimmer of recognition, that Rei thought momentarily of speaking up. Instead, she shook her head again.

  “What about afterward? You couldn't sleep at night because of the bad dreams. Mommy had to sit up with you.”

  “No. Nothing.”

  She had been only five, after all. Who wouldn't believe that the memories she retained of her father's death stopped there, with the tight clasp of her mother's hand over her eyes, and the picture, shot through with sunlight, of Seiji running with his easy, loping grace?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Claudia

  Boston, 1999

  “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD,” REI SAYS, HER VOICE HUSHED with awe. “Would you look at this sandwich.”

  “Yup,” I say, “that's the Hi-Rise Bakery for you. I always figured the people who work here are engineers or architects rather than chefs.”

  “Because it would take a fine sense of spatial relations and maybe an advanced degree in applied science to build a sandwich that combines so many elements and still manages to tower so high?”

  She is so poker-faced I have to smile. “Something like that.”

  The sandwich is not only tall, it's huge as well—calculated to make a girl add flesh to her frame. Or so I hope. Rei eats and eats, so why is it that she does not gain weight? But then again, perhaps I am being too impatient. After all, only a few weeks have passed since she and I met up; maybe a little more time is needed before all the food I have been making her eat shows up on her body.

  Time or no time, though, it would help my cause immeasurably if she would stop admiring her sandwich and take the first bite out of it instead.

  Tilting her head far back, Rei drains the last bit of water from her cup. She wasn't in the mood for anything but water, she said; it did not matter how eloquent I waxed on the subject of the Hi-Rise juices.

  “Didn't you say you were going to tell me about how you got together with Vikrum when we stopped for lunch? Not to hint or anything,” she says, chewing on her unused straw.

  Even when she was little, Rei had to be coaxed into eating. If she needed movies (more, even, than butter and salt) to go with her popcorn back then, why not a story to go with her tuna and avocado sandwich now? “I did, didn't I? Let's see, where to begin . . . What do you think of as romantic? In terms of a seduction.”

  With a cock of her head, she eyeballs me. “Are you planning to seduce someone new? Ah, and here I thought Vikrum had it so good.”

  “Just trying to lay the foundation to my story. Come on, help me out here: ingredients for a romantic seduction. I'll name some if you do.”

  “Let me think.” Removing the straw from her mouth, she—finally!—picks up her sandwich and takes a large bite out of it. “Atmoshphere,” she says, her mouth half-full. “Damn, that's a good sandwich.”

  “Be more specific. About the atmosphere, not the sandwich.”

  “Hmm. Moonlight?”

  “Starlight.”

  “Candlelight!”

  “How about,” I say, swallowing with a gulp a bite of my own sandwich, “no light at all? Some of the sexiest encounters I've ever had have been in pitch darkness, under the covers.”

  “That's good,” says Rei, nod
ding. She pushes her sleeves up her arms, and then picks up her sandwich again. “Darkness is very good. Although sexy is different from romantic, isn't it?”

  “Maybe. Probably,” I say. Like the other women of her family, Rei has unusually slender wrists, so much so that she regularly has to have an extra notch put into the bands of her wristwatches to make them cinch tight. Her forearms are so skinny now, it takes a real effort to focus on what she is saying. “Okay, what else?”

  “Another ingredient for a romantic seduction?” Rei asks. “I've had so many, it's hard to remember details of any one of them in particular; they just all start to blur in my mind. . . .”

  She sounds as if she's kidding, but it is impossible to tell. “How many have you—” I begin.

  “We're talking about you, remember?” she says. “Or we're supposed to be at least leading up to a talk about you and Vikrum. If it'll help you get there faster, I'll give you a list of what else I think is romantic, with the caveat that it's probably going to expose how banal and girlishly sentimental I am at heart. There's champagne. Balconies, beaches, cars speeding along deserted highways—basically anywhere there aren't too many people. Rain. Not buckets of it, but a mist or a light patter will always do it for me, maybe because I like the idea of huddling under an umbrella together with someone.”

  I always used to wonder why Hana's aunt Sachiko, that wraith of a woman, loomed so large in the tales that Rei wove out of her family's past. Sure, Rei's mother adored her aunt, but Rei herself barely knew her, and Sachiko was only a bit player in the drama that most transfixed the two of us, the ups and downs and unlikely twists and turns that characterized Hana's life. Yet for all that Hana's favorite aunt hardly ever took center stage, she was a persistent presence, lingering in the background in many of the stories, like the moon on certain sunny days: a faded white mark, out of place and out of its time, serving no apparent function. A compelling figure in her own way, without a doubt, but was Rei haunted by her at least in part because she resembled her so closely? When I looked at their family album, the only way I could tell their pictures apart, aside from the quality and the age of the photographs, was that my stepsister never wore a kimono and she was not quite as thin. Now it would be that much harder to tell.

  I give myself a small shake and force myself to sit up and look directly at Rei. “Well, what you're saying confirms it. It's what I thought. What Vikrum and I had was an antiromance.”

  Chewing meditatively, she observes me with grave eyes over the top of her sandwich and waits for me to continue.

  “We got together in the middle of the day, under fluorescent lights,” I say. “We were surrounded by people. Neither of us had drunk anything—champagne, wine, beer, or even water for a few hours; come to think of it, we were both pretty dehydrated at the time.

  “So that's it. The End. I warned you, didn't I? It really is such a disappointing story.”

  And it is. The story of my romance with Vikrum is, in fact, so disappointing that were I to think much more about it, it would overwhelm me. So perhaps I should be grateful that all I can think about is how once, long ago, Rei described Sachiko's wrists as being so thin that they did not look as if they could bear the weight of her hands.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rei

  Boston, 1999

  “WAIT,” I SAY. “WAIT, WAIT, WAIT. YOU'VE RUSHED THE story way too much, haven't you?”

  Claudia looks up innocently. While we've sat here having lunch, the rain has stopped and the clouds have cleared. Backlit by the sunlight trickling in through the windows, Claudia's outline seems hazy, her hair shot through with gold. The light enhances her look of innocence. She's a religious icon waiting to happen, and I'm a fool and, even worse, a cynic for thinking that she was trying to hold something back.

  “I have?” she asks.

  “Definitely. Rewind, please. Much, much further back. I need to know what happened after the post office. How did you meet up after that; did you contact him, or did he somehow find you? And what was happening with Doug?”

  “Okay,” she says, putting down her coffee cup. “Fine. After I met him at the post office, I called him. We became friends. In a completely aboveboard way—his wife knew about me, and Doug knew about him.

  “It was a bad winter—the clouds and the snow seemed to be hanging on and on, and you remember, don't you, how blue I get when there's no sunshine—so we used to meet often.”

  I have to smile. To think that I could actually have forgotten how she hated bad weather! It's been a long time, of course, but still. Her aversion was striking because she hardly ever complained about anything other than the cold and overcast skies, but then she complained a bucketful. I told her that as soon as she could, she should light out for southern California, where the temperature never dropped below freezing, palm trees lined the streets, and the skies were blue all day, every day. Even back when she was ten, though, she just shrugged at that and said Boston was where she'd like to live. Why Boston? I asked, guessing what she'd say, and sure enough, she hesitated only briefly before answering as I'd been expecting: because of the way that it sounds in your stories.

  In my stories, tranquil Boston was an enchanted city, the setting for the long honeymoon that was my parents' marriage. It seemed very flattering that Claudia would want to live there based on how I'd described it, but considering how mythologized Boston always has been in my family, that she had set her sights on making it her home in spite of a deep aversion to the cold seemed neither misguided nor surprising.

  When we left Boston for good, I was five, too young to remember it with any real clarity now. In some ways, I still can't believe I've returned to it. I never thought I would ever live in Boston, mostly out of some perverse sense of loyalty to my mother—perverse in that she wouldn't have minded at all if I did. Just because she herself can't bear to live here, it doesn't mean that she's stopped loving the city; in fact, she would have relished the chance to hear what I said about it.

  It astonishes me, really, how misplaced my loyalties have been.

  VIKRUM HUMMED WITH ENERGY. He sang with it too, often and loudly and sometimes even tunefully, with or without cause. That, Claudia tells me, is what she liked about Vikrum when they first became friends. His energy was contagious: if she didn't exactly hum and certainly didn't sing, she did find herself striding briskly through the streets of Boston (“Can you imagine, me striding?” she says, at which image I can only shake my head in disbelief). He spurred her on to a renewed mental vigor as well, so that even the ambling rhythms of her speech speeded up to keep pace with the increased production of her thoughts.

  Were it not for his apparently boundless store of energy, she would have felt guilty about taking up as much time as she did. They were, in fact, spending a lot of time together—four or sometimes even five hours at a shot, two or three evenings every week. His energy was the reason he managed to have time in the day for all that he wanted to do, and then some: cloning, magic, mornings and evenings with his family, and long hours at the coffee shop arguing politics and life with Claudia. Tireless, efficient with his resources, and blessed with a rare ability to focus on whatever he was doing as if it were the only matter that concerned him in the world, Vikrum could see her for ten-plus hours every week without his research suffering, the precision of his magic tricks slipping and, most of all, his children having to give up one iota of their daddy's attention.

  He was, Claudia knew, adored and even worshiped by his children. A dad who could produce flowers and rabbits and even a tricycle or two with a wave of his hand and a few muttered words: how could they not? And he, in turn, adored and even worshiped them back. Claudia didn't have to worry that she was taking up time once allotted to them, because Vikrum himself was vigilant about excising anything in his life that might come between him and his daughter and son.

  Or so she told herself, anyway.

  THIS NEW IDYLL in Claudia's life was broken short when she fell victim to a part
icularly virulent case of the flu (“Exposure to every strain of virus that mankind is prone to,” she says with a resigned air, “of course being one of my greatest occupational hazards”) and found herself bed-bound. Racked with fever, shivering with chills, and aching in every limb of her body, her nose dripping and her throat swollen, she was able to call Vikrum to cancel their next coffee-shop rendezvous but could not tell him when they might meet up next.

  When she heard a knock at her door an hour after she had hung up the phone, she only went to answer it because she thought it might be Doug, coming over to take care of her in such a hurry that he had forgotten her house key again. Her apartment was littered with used tissues. She was in her pajamas; her hair was matted and dirty, her nose a vivid shade of crimson. Her eyes teared with the fever.

  When she opened the door and it was Vikrum, she squinted up at him without surprise, believing him at first to be yet another flu-induced hallucination. He had never been to her home before, and she could not remember if she had ever given him her address besides, and surely he was supposed to be at his lab now—wasn't it mid-afternoon on a Tuesday or Wednesday?

  He had brought her chicken soup and orange juice; she tried to thank him but the hallway was tilting at alarming angles. After half leading and half carrying her back to her bedroom, Vikrum sat down on the edge of her bed and fed her the soup spoon by spoon, ignoring her laughing protestations that she could lift it—it was just plastic, after all, nothing as heavy as metal—by herself. When the soup was all gone, he took out the orange juice and helped her lift the cup so that it slid easily down her inflamed throat. Before, they had always crammed every second of their time together with conversation. As he wiped off a few drops of juice from her chin and tucked her back into bed, as deft as one would expect a father of more than four years' experience to be, she reproached herself for having contributed to their fervent pursuit of words, the silence between them was so sweet.