The worst part of her punishment was that she, who did not deserve to be confided in, could not by the same token help through counsel. It was not for her to advise her daughter that just as teeth, those strangely shaped bits of enamel and bone, yearn for the positions they have always known and eventually go back to them, so too do lovers, no matter how ardent, return to their wives. She could not tell Claudia that she wanted her, too, to know what it was like to stand side by side with someone, a pair of crooked teeth; she could not describe to her the sweetness of living with someone for so long that you no longer had to rely on the spoken word to signal your thoughts to each other. She could not say how glad she was every day—every hour, every minute—that she and Henry were standing at their rightful posts as they entered the last stage of their lives, and that such a happiness was what she wished above all for her daughter.
Because, after all, Henry's sleeve had touched Rosie's arm as she stood frying eggs at the stove. She had been standing closer to Claudia than he was, but inattentive to her suffering; she had been in her husband's way when he, slowed in his walk as well as his speech by his illness, shuffled forward to offer their daughter aid.
Chapter Twenty-Four
New Jersey, 1974–82
“THE VERY LAST TIME WE LEFT JAPAN,” REI WOULD BEGIN, her voice barely above a whisper, so that Claudia had to strain to hear, “I carried a dragonfly with me on the plane to America.” By the time Rei first told this story to her stepsister, more than two years had passed since she had been in the country where her parents were born and raised, and she had begun to forget Japanese. But there were some words that came to her if she thought hard enough, others that suddenly floated up to her, unbidden, like the memory of a dream that she had had the night before, and others still that she remembered and that, she felt strangely certain, she would always remember. The word for dragonfly fell in that last category. Tombo. Sounding, to Claudia's American ear at least, like tomboy, which was the term that Rei's relatives in Japan applied to Rei (not without affection and more than one tear, for she was young yet, as well as recently bereaved, and would with proper training doubtlessly soon grow out of those unfortunate American ways) when they saw the way she chased after dragonflies, climbing trees, scrambling over rocks, and wading through streams in order to get to them, from morning until night.
The dragonflies that Rei spent her days chasing were in Karuizawa, where her grandparents had a summer home and where she and her family came to stay for two weeks every summer. While it was always a great relief to escape to the cool green mountains and the silver streams of Karuizawa after the heat and the humidity of Tokyo, when she returned to Japan after having lived in America, she could see that her grandmother was not unjustified in her continual lament that the region she had been visiting since she was herself a little girl was becoming spoiled. In the evenings, the pathway by the neighboring lake was thronged with people, and the air by the road leading in from Tokyo smelled of the city, of smoke and, faintly, of garbage. Even on clear nights, Rei could not see the stars as she had in Massachusetts.
Still, there were the dragonflies, which went a long way toward making up for the fact that the fields were not as large and empty as they were in America. Some were striped gold and black like a bumblebee, their bodies fat as Rei's middle finger; some were scarlet, lean and long; a number were a deep yellow that was offset by the black of their wings. There were the kagero, which, her mother said, reading to her from her old reliable Japanese–English dictionary, meant a shimmer of hot air, so thin and light that Rei was not surprised to also learn that they lived only for a day. The kagero were easily identifiable because of their transparency, and also because when they perched, they did not hold their wings out but, rather, folded together like hands in prayer. They were the only ones she refused to catch, even for a few seconds, for surely a moment or two of captivity for one of them would be the equivalent, for her, of years away from sunlight. In their variety, size, and number, the dragonflies in Japan were not like any that she had ever seen in America, not even close.
Eight hundred eyes. That's how many dragonflies have, at least in Japan, or so Rei had heard. Eight hundred, which is to say a whopping four hundred tucked away within each of the two eyelike orbs that anchor the front of its body. Thanks to this legion of optical organs, the dragonfly can see what's going on behind it as well as to the left and the right and in front. Looking at one closely, Rei thought she could see its eyes, a multitude of tiny dots that floated in the orbs. Was it possible that eight hundred was the actual number and not an approximation? Once she did try to count them but, worried about the strain on her own (“I only have two,” she would say, sighing, years later to her stepsister; “I couldn't exactly afford to wear them out”), she gave up after reaching sixteen.
That they had what seemed to be an excess of eyes did not render the dragonflies immune to visual trickery—indeed, quite the contrary. With her arm, Rei would draw a large circle in the air in front of her intended prey, over and over, gradually coming closer and shrinking the circle until she was drawing a small one with her finger, right in front of all eight hundred of its eyes. Her mother had taught her this trick years ago, and it never failed. Its wits dulled by dizziness, the dragonfly would sit there, pliantly waiting for Rei to pick it up with her hand.
She never kept the dragonflies for longer than a minute. She was interested only in examining them closely; she wished to admire, from a privileged vantage point, the brilliance of their colors, the intricacy of their patterns, and the dizzying multitude of their eyes. Most of all, perhaps, she wanted to throw them up in the air and watch them lift up, shining wings whirring, and bound away.
For just as Claudia had a need to take wounded animals of all kinds home with her to nurse them, Rei had an obsession, active only during the eighteen months she and her suddenly incomplete family returned to live in Japan, with letting captive ones of all types (including the ones that she herself had captured) go free. She took her white mouse, Taro, who had been born and raised in captivity, out to her favorite field in Karuizawa and watched him wander off, zigzagging to sniff at the occasional clump of plants, standing on his hind legs every so often to lift his nose into the air, until she could no longer see him. She could not bear to wait until summer to let her pair of parakeets go, so she threw them up into the dusty air of Tokyo and saw them, startled, beat their wings hard until they found themselves borne aloft and then shakily fly away. She pointed them westward, toward Karuizawa, which was the direction that they flew; four months later, when she found herself in that region of rolling fields once again, she looked for them tirelessly but fruitlessly, in all the trees and bushes.
She lived in a tiny apartment in concrete-lined, perpetually overcrowded Tokyo. Her sister yelled at her throughout the day and cried herself to sleep every night, and her memory of her father was already fading. Her mother, who had once been so energetic and cheerful, no longer seemed to have the energy to talk. Hana sat listlessly at home, occasionally patting her belly in the unconscious gesture that she still had not managed to lay aside, although months had passed since the miscarriage that had followed swiftly on the heels of her husband's accident.
But just because Rei could not fly away, it didn't mean that no one else could.
THE DECISION TO TAKE A DRAGONFLY back to America with her was a spontaneous one, which seemed appropriate given that the decision for them to go back at all was too: Hana had arrived at it suddenly, after seventeen months of living in Japan, with a certainty that appeared to bring with it a measure of her old vitality. It was fortunate that at least some of her energy had returned, since Hana's plan to move her daughters and herself back to the States was not easy to execute. Her mother was horrified; her sister and brother, shocked.
Their reactions made sense, as Hana herself was willing to admit. She and Seiji had gone to America because his job had temporarily required him to be there. Now that he was gone, there was, as
Hana's mother pointed out repeatedly and incisively, no good reason for Hana to leave Japan, and every reason for her to stay. She had Seiji's life insurance, but that would not be enough for her and her daughters to live on forever. She needed the help of the extended family, as well as, perhaps, a job. And what, after all, would she do out there; why should she consider going back? Sure, she had a handful of friends in America; of course her children missed its wide-open spaces as well as its freewheeling schools. But Hana had friends in Japan too. Children forget quickly. In no time at all, her daughters would not be able to remember America; why, already their understanding of English was slipping.
Hana had no answers to any of the questions put to her, and no defense to mount to any of her mother's arguments. Yet she was adamant. If she had not lost her unborn baby, who was, she had known, going to be a boy, someone who could carry on Seiji's family's name and shoulder the responsibilities that came with it—if, perhaps, her beloved aunt Sachiko had not died a few years ago, quietly slipping away in her sleep—then maybe, just maybe, she would have considered staying. But given what had happened (given all that had happened, in less time than it takes to complete the verse of a song; would she ever be able to get over how the life she'd loved, how all of their lives, could change in a flash?), she would not live in a country that she had never liked. She would use her American-born daughters' passports to get herself a new green card, and she would move them all back to the country where she and her husband had lived, and they would stay there for the rest of their lives.
So no matter how much she argued and how persuasive the arguments that she amassed were, Hana's mother was unable to make any headway.
Rei, by contrast, met little resistance in her plan to take a dragonfly back with her to America. She had caught it in Tokyo, in the small garden that abutted their apartment complex, the evening before they were to leave for the long trip back to America. She seldom saw dragonflies in the city, where the exhaust fumes could choke you and the smog was so thick and the buildings so high that sunlight seldom penetrated below.
The dragonfly that she caught that evening was a small one, in a pleasing but not particularly bright shade of blue-green. In her first violation of her self-imposed rule of not keeping the dragonflies confined for more than a minute, she took it home with her and placed it into a small bamboo insect cage, never used, that her mother had bought for her long ago. After lining the cage with an assortment of leaves from the garden, she rested it on the very top of their towering pile of suitcases.
CUSTOMS, NEWARK AIRPORT. September 1972.
“Kei, you can put that bag on the cart too.”
Rei looks up. Her mother looks exhausted, with her hair running away in every direction and with what look like tiny pillows under her eyes. Flying has always made her violently sick, and this trip was no exception. But now there is a smile flitting across her face.
“Not long now. We're almost there,” she says. Placing a hand on Rei's shoulder, she beats out a light, excited rhythm with her fingers. Rat-tat-tat rat-tat-tat. “The tombo's okay?”
Her hand clenched tight around the handle of the cage, Rei nods.
If her mother feels skeptical about the dragonfly's chances, if she is thinking back to what happened when, twelve years ago to the month now, she made her first trip to America with a daikon stashed in her bag, she does not let on. In later years, Rei will not be able to recall what she and Kei and her mother talked about to while away the long minutes spent standing in line—at passport control, the women's room, baggage claim, and then the women's room again—as they waited to reenter the country. Still, she will be able to tell her stepsister with certainty that one subject that did not come up was the damage inflicted on American vegetation by the Japanese beetle (with its metallic sheen and the way it changed color in a flash from green to brown to gold and then back again, as beautiful, although in a very different way, as the architectural dragonfly; you could stick a pin through it, Rei always thought, and it would not look amiss on your hat or breast). Yet another perfectly serviceable conversational topic that goes unadressed is the fact that many years ago, that beetle had, somehow—stashed away in an unsuspecting traveler's cargo, perhaps, or riding in style in a carton of fresh fruit—also made the long voyage across the Pacific that they had just completed.
The line ahead of them sways and moves; Hana leans over the cart to give it a push, and the Watanabe family takes another step forward.
IT WILL BE ANOTHER TWO HOURS before they reach their old family friend's house in New Jersey, where they will stay for a week before moving into a new house of their own: while both Kei and Rei want to return to Boston, Hana has promised that this new town will be a better place, a fresh start, for all of them. They'll all be tired and spent, but it's the late afternoon of a cool, windless fall day, and Rei will not see much point to waiting until the morning. Accompanied by her mother, she'll step out into their friend's large yard (seemingly as large as any of the fields in Karuizawa, and graced by two old willow trees, the leaves of which make a curtain, long and thick enough to hide a young girl), and she'll open the door to the small cage in which the dragonfly has lived for the past two days.
It'll take some coaxing and some tapping on the cage to make the dragonfly realize that it's now free to go.
FINALLY IT'S THEIR TURN. The customs official who takes the passports from Hana and looks them over is a woman. She is young, with soft brown hair, and her uniform is a little large on her, which makes her look even younger and more girlish (or so Hana thinks) than she actually is.
“What have you got there?” the customs official asks Rei, gesturing toward her cage. She has already looked over their documents and their bags and listened carefully to the stammered comments Hana gave in response to her questions.
“It's a dragonfly.” The words come easily to Rei. Listening, Hana knows that it was ridiculous of her to worry that her children had lost their English—if only her own was so good! In her fatigue, which borders on nervous exhaustion, as well as her profound relief at getting them all there, she finds herself singing a song in her head that she had made up out of the rhythm she had beat out on her younger daughter's shoulder: It's going to be fine it's going to be fine.
“I caught it in Tokyo,” Rei continues proudly.
“A dragonfly? May I see?”
With a grave nod, Rei passes the cage over to the woman in the uniform.
SHE'LL STILL BE FEELING the thrill, almost like a small shock, that she gets as she sets an animal free, when the crow appears. It will all happen very fast, the bird flying in a straight line toward the dragonfly, its beak opening and then shutting in a split second. Many, many years later, when Rei tells this story to her stepsister for the hundredth time, the unfolding of this scene will serve as a sort of wry punchline—“as if it wasn't bad enough that my father had died and we had hardly any money and my mom didn't have a job, that damn crow had to swoop down out of nowhere and swallow my dragonfly. . . .”—but when she witnesses the quick death of the insect she had kept in a cage beside her for the voyage over from Japan, she'll look up at her mother, mutely, and she will not feel like laughing.
For a few seconds her mother will also be silent, gazing up at the spot where the dragonfly had vanished. Then, suddenly, she will move, crouching down beside her daughter so that they are eye level.
“Listen to me,” she'll say, her hands holding Rei's shoulders firmly. “Listen. It was a good thing that you did. That moment of freedom—here, where the air's so fresh, and the trees and grass are so green—was worth more to your dragonfly than a whole lifetime in Tokyo. You have to trust me on that.”
And Rei will nod slowly.
Later that evening, she'll cry herself to sleep, her face muffled in her pillow so that neither Kei nor her mother will hear. Later still, the next day or perhaps the one after that, she'll think over what her mother had said while standing at the foot of the willow tree and she will come to believ
e it, just as she always, eventually, comes to believe what her mother says.
“THAT'S A BEAUTIFUL DRAGONFLY,” says the customs official, passing the cage back to Rei. “Go ahead, and welcome back to America. And you'll take care of that dragonfly, won't you?”
“Thank you,” says Rei, her good manners bringing another smile to her mother's face (it's going to be fine it's going to be . . . ). “I will.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Rei
Boston, 1999
HER KNOCK IS DISAPPOINTINGLY FEEBLE, NO MORE THAN a faint scratching at the door—so faint that it would do dishonor to any one of my cats, even little Heidi. After I run over to open the door I'm grateful for the advance warning that her knock gave me: Claudia still looks broken, her eyes blank, her mouth straining to come up for a smile. When she drops her bags onto the floor and we hug, she holds on to me, tight, for a second longer than usual, and I don't think it's just because she's glad to see me again.
I had hoped for more from the three days that she spent in England with her parents, but maybe she's still tired from the journey. She's never liked to fly any more than my mother has, and of course it's almost nine now, which means that it must be late indeed by her clock.
When I first saw her after Vikrum proposed to her, Claudia was so quiet she seemed almost catatonic. She didn't cry and barely even spoke. It took me hours just to find out what had happened.
“Welcome back,” I say. “Come on in.”
Claudia stoops and begins to rummage through one of her bags. “Mom wanted me to give you this,” she says, pulling out a box of chocolates and a tin of Fortnum & Mason tea and handing them to me. “She also sends her love. As does Dad, of course. They asked a lot of questions about you—they said they're really looking forward to seeing you when they come visit in the spring.”
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