Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  But as Hana sat there, she'd observe how Henry's first wife talked. She would see how Rosie at times used the length of her arms, and how at others she thrust her chin forward. She had, Hana knew, a reputation as a dynamic lecturer, much beloved by her students; she was, moreover, a fine scholar, well-respected in her field and in the college where she and Henry both taught. Hana would notice that while Rosie talked, Henry would nod, smiling once in a while. Then, suddenly, he'd shake his head, jumping in with a burst of his own.

  Hana would bury her face behind the wheel for as long as fifteen minutes, oblivious to the possibility that one of her former neighbors might come by and tap on her window. When she finally raised her head and turned the key in the ignition, she would see how Henry leaned forward to make his point; while backing the car out, she'd glimpse how he'd raise one long index finger high, and laugh.

  Then Hana would drive through the increasingly unfamiliar streets, the thermos cooling on the seat beside her, her hands clenched so tightly around the wheel that she'd find the next day that her nails had broken the skin on her palms, back to the apartment where her work and her younger daughter awaited.

  THAT ODDLY STILL NIGHT in April, lying next to Henry with the ends of her hair still wet from her bath, her body succumbing slowly but surely to his touch, she didn't know and couldn't have guessed all that would happen. If she did know or, even, could have guessed, would she have acted differently? Could she have brought herself to tell him about what it had been like; could she have made herself admit how little she remembered of the most momentous event of her life?

  Hana shrugs. Whether or not she could have told Henry is an unanswerable question. What she does know—what she has to live with—is that she wishes she had. Never tell anyone about what happened in Hiroshima, her mother had warned. While Hana never had been one to listen to what her mother said, the fact that her mild-mannered aunt Sachiko had endorsed this injunction in unusually strong terms made her loath to disobey it. And then, of course, there was, there is, her own disinclination to speak on the subject.

  Her continued silence about what happened at Hiroshima might, she supposes, seem peculiar to some, especially those whom she has met on these shores. She herself has lived in the States long enough to understand, even if she doesn't quite believe, the concept that talking about an event can exorcise it.

  But after all she is, in the end, Japanese. In these thirty-odd years of life here, she has at times come close to convincing herself otherwise. She'll be with other people, laughing and talking, so caught up in the moment that she'll have forgotten about her accent or her lack of vocabulary, when she'll suddenly catch sight of herself in the mirror. As soon as that happens, she'll go mute again, struck by how different they look from her: big-boned and long-nosed, their eyes so round, their hair in myriad colors. Yet clearly it's more than her looks that mark her as alien in her own eyes, because otherwise she'd think of her daughters as foreigners in the country in which they were born and raised, and she never thinks that; when she observes them surrounded by others, they look natural to her, fitting in so well that she almost can't believe they're her own children.

  She's often thought of aping her daughters' mannerisms, the way they laugh and talk and even blink. If she could do so convincingly, then perhaps she, too, could pass as an American. Of course, it would only be an act. She's not one of them, and she never will be. That fact, for she considers that a fact, serves as a valid excuse as any for why she never bought into the notion that talking about Hiroshima would go some way toward relieving her of its burden.

  Still, whether or not it would have been of therapeutic benefit to her is, finally, irrelevant. She should have told Henry regardless. She should have said to him how, for the first couple of days after the mushroom cloud appeared in the east, she'd been at a hospital where she was a witness to the devastation wrought by the bomb, the mangled bodies of what seemed like and what must have in fact been thousands. Or so, at least, she was told. For weeks afterward, she didn't remember any of those bodies, nor could she recall how flattened the city of Hiroshima was, and how burnt, the smoke curling everywhere, whole buildings—along with whatever or whoever had been inside them—reduced to piles of rubble.

  She should have told Henry, too, about her mother's reaction to her memory lapse. What better way for her to keep what happened a secret, her mother had said, than to forget about it herself?

  But what about the slow return of her memories? The images and scenes, bright as any picture she could possibly hope to paint in her lifetime, first began to come back two or three months later, when she was home once again in Nagoya. Maybe she couldn't have told Henry about those recollections, and maybe that would have been fine. There was, for instance, the so-called hospital that she woke up to find herself in—a cot in a tent, another child lying in a bed so close to hers that if she'd reached out her hand, she could have placed it on his face. Not that she would have. His head and his left eye were bandaged, and he lay still and unmoving, as if in a deep sleep; her touch would have woken him, she thought at the time, and the boy, who appeared a year or two younger than she was, looked as if he needed his sleep.

  Why doesn't she remember what any of the adults in the hospital looked like? While it's possible that she was in a children's ward—or, rather, tent—given how makeshift the hospital was, there had to be some wounded adults nearby, and certainly there were doctors and nurses. But all of the memories that came back to Hana involved children: an older girl wandering around in a daze, her left arm missing from the elbow. Sobbing from what sounded like a young boy—it was so continuous that after the first day, Hana no longer noticed it. Until, finally, it stopped in the middle of the night, and the hush that resulted was so startling that she awoke with a start. Early the next morning, when she saw a small figure, covered by a sheet, being wheeled away, she turned her head to the wall and gave out a sob of her own: she had so hoped that the boy, whom she never had a chance to glimpse, had stopped crying for another reason.

  Children of all kinds and ages screaming for water, relief from pain, their mother, their father, their older brother, their teddy bear, their dog.

  And, finally, the girl in a cot across the aisle. She screamed regularly, piercing sounds that almost but did not quite form themselves into words. Her face, as Hana remembers it, was covered with a violet-colored burn that looked like a map of the United States. Hana's vantage point, from a cot across the way, was awkward; that she, a twelve-year-old Japanese girl, would know what the United States looked like was doubtful, and her memory of Hiroshima after the bomb fell has already proven to be faulty. Still, there it is; that's one of the memories Hana will always carry with her.

  No, she couldn't have described those images to Henry, and she was right not to have tried. They would have been too heavy even for his solidly square shoulders. Some things are better left unspoken; some secrets, best left unshared—a truth to abide by for a lifetime, never mind what they say on talk shows or in the women's magazines she flips through while waiting in line at the supermarket.

  Still, she should have at least told Henry about the mushroom cloud itself. While the cloud is the one part of the experience that she has always been able to recall, her memory isn't completely trustworthy in terms of it either, any more than it is about all that followed. In her recollection the cloud has a rectangular border around it, as if seen through a window, which of course can't be accurate, which makes little sense—unless she was, even then, even as it was happening, imagining it as a painting, its horrors transmuted through the powers of her brush into something flat and portable, an object that could be bound and held within the four sides of a picture frame.

  She gazed at the cloud for what probably was no more than a moment or two, until she felt the air begin to pick up speed. How could the wind be so strong, she had time to think to herself, isn't it August? before it grew even stronger and (she was later told) threw her against the wall with such forc
e that it knocked her unconscious for two days. When part of the roof collapsed on her, it was a blessing, since it seemed to have acted as a shield, the doctors first thought, blocking her from the worst of the radiation.

  Mulling over the cloud years later, she would see how its shape resembled a mushroom, a question mark, a tree in bloom, a woman huddling from the rain. She would eventually come to believe that the Tower of Babel, before it crumbled, must have been formed in the same likeness.

  But on that day, as she gazed at the mushroom cloud, she registered only that it was the strangest, most monstrous thing that she had ever seen.

  Would any of that really have been so hard for her to tell her second husband? She had never told her first one, it's true, but since the nightmares had remained safely in check during the years she'd been married to him, the subject had not come up. That Seiji had never asked about it was a relief, since he was, after all, Japanese, with a visceral understanding of what exposure to the atomic bomb meant.

  Henry, though, was American. What if she had confessed to him how ashamed she was that although her body was not marked by visible traces of that day, it carried invisible ones, coursing through her bloodstream and buried in her very bones—wouldn't he have just held her? Didn't she know that he wouldn't have shied away from her; couldn't she see that he would have forgiven her for this too, as easily as he'd forgiven her for not being able to follow his puns?

  It didn't matter, in the end. The fact that she knew he would have absorbed what happened to her in Hiroshima with kindness and sympathy made no difference. She couldn't have told him; she couldn't have spoken of that day in any kind of calm or coherent way to anyone back then, and she couldn't now either—look how she'd talked to her own daughter about it!

  More to the point, even if she had told him, it might not have made a difference in terms of their marriage. At the most, it might have staved off what was surely the inevitable end by a few more years. What chance, really, did a relationship based on touch alone have? She had worried from the start that their days as a couple were numbered. Their marriage would probably have been doomed even if she had told Henry, even if she could have possibly conveyed to him through words rather than touch or images what had happened on that day in August the year that she turned twelve.

  Still, even so, how she wishes that she had tried.

  HANA LETS OUT HER BREATH SLOWLY: it's a soft sound that no one but she hears. Then she picks up the phone and dials the number for Henry's daughter.

  Chapter Twenty

  Claudia

  Boston, 1999

  WHEN WE WERE YOUNGER, REI AND I USED TO TRY TO trace out the course of our lives in our palms. She was humoring me; I was the one fascinated by the promise of reading our hands. In a way that perhaps presaged how I would one day fall in love with a magician, a trickster with deft fingers who would pull rabbits from top hats and make himself vanish—poof!—with a wave of his hand in a cloud of white smoke, I was consumed by the notion that the blueprint to your life, its twists and turns, its random detours and pointless shortcuts, so often accidentally and thoughtlessly chosen, is inscribed on the flat, square landscape of the palm of your hand.

  I liked to think (and in my more superstitious moments, can still, even now, almost make myself believe) that the palm is like DNA, the lines of the hand a set of instructions, written in code, that dictate the events of your life as precisely as your genes calibrate your susceptibility to summer colds and the facility with which you sing in key. The idea was oddly reassuring to me. Life might be cruelly random, but the thought that it had been mapped out beforehand (and as Rei might add, onhand) restored a measure of order to my sense of it. Your life could still change in the instant that you crossed your doorstep, the bedraggled strands of your hair gathered like a bouquet of seaweed in your hand, or in the moment you leaned forward to check whether you had a poppy seed stuck in your teeth, but at least it was a change that had been preordained, one that you could even have prepared for, if only you had known how to read the lines etched on your palms.

  Rei's hands were crisscrossed with lines. Not just the three main ones where her hands creased, but myriad offshoots, and offshoots from those offshoots as well; together they formed a fantastical pattern, as weird and baroque—although of course without the colors, at least not then, at least not yet—as one of Hana's paintings. My palms, by contrast, were and still are almost completely smooth, even the three main lines on them not as deep nor as long: a classic example of minimalism, a palm for the twentieth century.

  Rei and I were hampered in our endeavors at palm reading by our ignorance about what any of the lines meant. (Many years later, I would ask Vikrum, whose palm lines lie somewhere in between mine and Rei's in terms of wildness of pattern, to read my hand, but acting out the magician divo, the artiste, all he would do was playfully scoff—mind reading, yes, but palm reading? That's for hacks and charlatans; you don't really believe that superstitious nonsense, do you?) I thought I remembered reading that the top line stood for life and the one below that for love, or possibly the other way around, and that the continuity of the crease, as well as the detours that it took and the lines that cut across it and also sprang from it, were all signs by which we could foretell our fate. So the fact that the top line of my palm was short, with a break toward the end, prophesied that at some point I would come close to death and possibly even experience it but then miraculously recover, and that I would die soon afterward. The fact that my middle line was long, straight, and untouched by any bisecting pathway meant that my love life would be simple and straightforward, that there would never be anyone or anything to distract me from my one chosen love.

  I shrugged when I read out my fate to Rei. It was so much what I had always expected, I could not even think to be disappointed.

  And so, too, with her. She just nodded when I told her what was inscribed on the map of her palm. She had always expected that her life would be long and as adventurous as it had been up to then, that it would continue to take her to places and situations we could not even imagine; she had guessed long ago that her romances would be various, tumultuous but brief, and dizzying in their complexity. My assumptions about her had traversed the same route. Rei was destined to lead a life filled with action, while I would always be on the other side of the stage, sitting in the shadows and watching, leaning forward with bated breath, my neck craned as far as it would go during her crisis moments, and leaping to my feet, hands coming together on their own, when she got through them yet again.

  I suppose I still think that.

  For the most part she listens quietly while I talk about Vikrum, her eyes seldom leaving my face; every once in a while she will nod or ask me a question, and if I pause, she will prod me to go on. What does she think of my entanglement in that oldest of all clichés, a love affair with a married man; does she pity me, judge me, or take me for a fool? If she feels any of that, she hides it well.

  As a child, Rei hated to sit for long. In almost all of my memories of those years, she is either dancing or whirling or running; in the few instances that she is not, she is usually just recovering her breath from having done so, or catching it preparatory to bounding up again. Even though she does tire quickly now, it is clear she is still partial to darting motions and the feel of air rushing by her face; only ten minutes ago, she was twirling about the kitchen, and when she talks, she is like my students, making gestures that require the use of the entire length of her arms and even of her legs, just as she did as a girl. But when I tell her about Vikrum, she is completely still. Only the expressions of her face are ceaselessly at play then, her mouth twitching and then suddenly breaking into that yelp of a laugh at certain points of the story, her brows lowering and her eyes darkening at others. I love how closely she listens.

  So for her, I have been putting it all in order, lining up the events of the past two years as neatly as the spices in my pantry and looking them over to see how I have become this pers
on, this woman I cannot like or respect—a potential home-wrecker, yearning to be a real one. And then, and then, and then; cumin and nutmeg and rosemary. It's strange, I hungered for so many years to hear Rei's stories, and I never knew that it worked the other way, that wanting to tell them can be as fierce an appetite. There is a power to the process, a power that seems a little dangerous to me, somehow (perhaps because it is hard in retrospect not to emphasize the role of fate and, in the process, to excuse myself, or is it that I cannot fit my love affair with Vikrum into the box of a story without altering it too?), but it is also intoxicating, and I cannot give it up.

  Still, much as I might like the role of storyteller, it is not really mine. I have been waiting patiently for weeks now; it's high time for her to slough off her silence about what is ailing her. Rei just shakes her head, though, when I tell her that it's now her turn to spill.

  “This is riveting stuff,” she says. “I'm hooked, you can't stop now.”

  I tell her that at best it's a tawdry story, not even original and certainly not sensational enough to make it to the soaps. I say I told myself for the whole first year that I was with Vikrum that I am not the typical thirtysomething still-single woman who ends up in love with a married man with children, but that I then realized that is precisely what every thirtysomething etc. tells herself. Rei's eyes narrow. Then, crossing her heart with her pinkie, she swears that her life isn't anywhere near as exciting as mine, and when I ask her about why she moved here so suddenly—surely there is a story there?—she shakes her head no very quickly; it was just about the job.

  After that Rei turns to look away, across the room, and when she does so there is something familiar about her pose—the lift of her chin and the set of her lips, and the way in which she veils her eyes. When I realize where I have seen it before, I am glad that my hands are busy in the dough, and also that I can use the flour adrift all over the kitchen as an excuse to swipe an arm across my face: even after all these years, I am more disturbed than I should be to be reminded of her mother.