“They did? They are?” I say, taking the chocolates and the tea and feeling myself redden with pleasure. Claudia turns away to fuss with her bag, pretending that she didn't notice the rise of color in my cheeks, but it's all too obvious she did. I don't care, though. My days of trying to make it seem as if I couldn't care less about her mom—the days when I practiced a misplaced, unappreciated loyalty to my own—are long past.
“Thanks for letting me stay here again,” she says, walking through the door. “Hey, little guy, it's good to see you.” She bends down and strokes Worm, who's winding himself around her ankles; he arches his back and lets out a raspy purr.
“What else are family for?”
She just gives me another tired smile, but it's a phrase that I love to say, to her. I should savor it, after all. God knows, it's one that I won't get to use very often to anyone else.
For the past two and a half weeks, Claudia has been camping out most nights on a futon here, set up kitty-corner to my own narrow bed. She has explained that she can't bear to be in her apartment now, haunted as it is by the ghost of a cat and an empty bed. If her aversion to staying in her own spacious, well-organized, and homey living space has anything to do with the fact that Vikrum has been leaving her dozens of pleading messages every day, she doesn't say, and I don't ask. Our nights together follow an easy routine. We order in pizza or Chinese food, curl up with the cats, play a game of Scrabble or a round of gin rummy, and then turn in. Once or twice we've stayed awake in bed, talking for hours; usually, though, she seems to prefer just to be quiet. While I sometimes worry I'm not saying the right things to her—how wise she's always been, through all these years, whenever I've been sad or upset—I try just to let her be.
My apartment is tiny, a studio and not a large one at that, but it's at the very top of my building, with a view of treetops and far-off church towers, and it's filled with light. Claudia calls it my aerie. Aerie—I said to her, the first time she used the word—it has such an airily wonderful sound. Especially, for me at least, when it's applied to my own living space.
I've been here almost two months already, a thought that makes my mind spin if I dwell on it (it's bad enough to think that I've been that long in Boston, a town I was not sure I could even visit; what's worse is that that thought inevitably and unavoidably leads to the next, the fact that it's been six months, a record to end all records, since I've talked with my mother). Yet the small space of the apartment is still filled with unpacked boxes, creating so many nooks and crannies that even the cats haven't found them all.
It embarrassed me at first, having Claudia here when the apartment was like this, but she's spent so much time over here in the past three weeks, I've almost stopped noticing. And, predictably, she's made a point of emphasizing to me that she doesn't mind. She's made fun of me for how I've arranged the boxes and suitcases to maximize the light and the space and to create intimate corners in which to sit; she's said that even the way I pile up my stuff is art and that I should start up a business for interior decorating built around the aesthetic utilization of cardboard and plastic cartons. I shouldn't settle in more, she's insisted, only three-quarters joking: the apartment's perfect as it is. But despite these so-typically-Claudia words of kindness, of course there's no way she would ever have let even a week, let alone two months, go without unpacking.
Still, at least her suitcases fit right in. I slide them into a corner and then we sit, almost hidden from ourselves by all the unpacked boxes, two travelers who still haven't quite made it home.
“DON'T YOU WANT TO sleep yet? You must be exhausted.”
Claudia shakes her head.
“Not to mention jet-lagged—”
“Jet rag,” she says, so suddenly that I start a little; I must have been dozing off. “Do you remember how Dad used to love saying that? He got us all saying it. Your mom took it well, I remember. She was always a good sport.”
“Sure,” I say, stretching and yawning. “I remember.”
Shoving her hands deep in the pockets of her pants, Claudia hunches herself over. “You didn't think he was good for me, did you? Vikrum, I mean, not Dad, of course.”
The lamp next to me is flickering. I turn to make sure the bulb is secured and remind myself to get a new light. “Hell, no,” I say, as I have in some variation the past ten times she's asked me.
Claudia is beginning to rock. Her eyes look swollen—when was the last time she slept?
“That said,” I continue, “if he's what makes you happy, then why not?”
She looks up, startled. “But there are his wife and kids . . .”
“His wife and kids aren't the ones suffering,” I remind her. “And you love him so much. He must be worth it, because otherwise you wouldn't love him so. And also,” I add, knowing suddenly that I'm right; Claudia is too true herself to fall so deeply in love with a man who is any less, “because otherwise there would be no justice in this world.”
“He is worth it,” she says. “Or at least he's definitely worthy of me, anyway. I always thought the question was whether I deserved him.”
“You just have to make a decision, one way or another,” I say, hesitating. I'm not used to offering advice to my capable stepsister—indeed, it's been a long time, too long, since I've been in the position to give help to anyone rather than to receive it—and I have to feel my way. “Either be with him and be happy, accept that he has another life, a set of obligations that he's going to honor no matter how much he loves you, or resign yourself to being without him. Feeling guilty about his wife and children shouldn't play a part in what you decide, although I'm not sure if you, in particular, can help it.”
Claudia tugs at the ends of her hair. “I wish that it was only about feeling guilty.” She speaks so low, her words seem little more than a series of sighs. “I'm scared too. It might never work out, after all. Maybe even after his kids leave home, he still won't leave his wife. I might never have a life in which I can fall asleep with him at night and know that he'll be lying beside me in the morning. I might never be able to go away with him on long weekends; I might never be able”—this last phrase a whisper—“to have children with him.”
It is only with considerable effort that I manage not to cry out at the thought of all that she is being asked to give up. “You have to decide,” I say, the steadiness of my voice a surprise, “if what he's offering is enough for you.”
“It's not enough,” she says simply. “You know that, and I do too. But at the same time, it's more happiness than I ever dreamed was possible.”
Claudia turns and looks out the window. It's so dark out that there's nothing to see but our reflections on the glass, yet she gazes with rapt attention. When we first met, her eyes were bluer than they are now, and I thought them beautiful but also strange and cold.
It is difficult for me now to believe that I could ever have thought such a thing about my stepsister, even when I was a child.
“You know all those stories about my mother and her aunt Sachiko, the ones we grew up on . . .” I begin. The window forgotten, her attention is now directed solely at me. “I always thought that if those stories taught us anything, it's how quickly our lives, lives that we love and count on, can change.” Are the shadows in the room playing tricks on my eyes, or did her gaze just flicker to light on my hand? “Nothing is really certain. Which means that we can step cautiously, watching the skies with dread, or we can stride forth with confidence and live out our lives the way we want to.”
A small sound, not a word in either English or Japanese, escapes from Claudia's lips. Then she nods, shivering a little, even though the room is warm.
“Is there anything I can do for you, anything I can get?” I say. “A blanket, a pillow, any kind of special food? I could still make a run to the store—”
“No.” Leaping from the arm of her chair onto the floor, Mr. B stretches himself out on the rug, showing off his stomach for the world to see. Claudia watches him absentmindedly,
then leans over and gives him a pat. “But thanks. I do appreciate this. After all that you've been through yourself—”
“After all that I've been through, it feels good to take care of someone else for a change.”
Silence. The lamp flickers again and then goes out. My eyes droop; my mind fills with almost unbearably bright images of dragonflies and the blue of the sky through an airplane window.
“You know, there might be one thing you could do, though.”
“What's that?” I say, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. The room is almost completely dark. I shake myself, stand up, and walk to the kitchen, a mere three steps, and pour myself a Coke. “Do you want some too?”
“No, I'm good,” she says. “Well, good except for the fact that Vikrum used to tell me stories too sometimes.”
“And?” I ask, almost tempted to smile, guessing what's coming.
“Aa-nd,” she says, stretching out the word, “stories are like comfort food to me. Like bubble baths or clothes shopping or chocolates are for some people. Stories are what cheer me up the most.”
“Okay,” I say, going to the living-room area and sitting down again, caffeine fix in hand. “Fine. If that's what it takes to cheer you up, I'll do it. What is it you want to hear about?”
“You know, don't you? What I always wanted to hear about when we were young. Same old, same old.” She looks at me expectantly, waiting. “You really don't know? I want to hear about your mom. More specifically, about you and your mom. What happened, why you aren't talking, and how it is you came to live here, in Boston, where you always swore you'd never want to live.”
“I was worried that that's what you'd want to hear about,” I say, but she has me in a bind. With her in this state, I can't deny her anything that she wants, let alone needs. “Well, it's fair enough.” It's more than fair, if I'm really now expecting Claudia to take the place of the family that I did have. But not fun, and certainly not easy.
She waits.
“Do you know that when I first told my mom about the cancer,” I say, opening my hand up and then closing it tight, “I just assumed that she'd take it well? I always thought of her as a pillar of strength during a crisis.”
Claudia doesn't say anything and I have my head down, thinking for a moment, so I can't see the expression on her face. But it doesn't matter; I don't need to see her or hear from her at this moment. I know that she's nodding; I know that she, too, is thinking about how my mother's hands darted out, lightning quick, never mind that she was slow and dreamy with pregnancy, to cover the eyes of her daughters during an accident within a stone's throw of the Canadian border.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rei
Boston, 1999
FOR ME, UNLIKE, SAY, FOR YOU, WHAT CAME AS A revelation was not our parents falling in love but their being in it (I say slowly, a little tentative, rusty after all these years; does it seem strange to Claudia that I'm detouring so quickly in my story? If so, she doesn't show it, shifting her body weight and seeming to relax more deeply in her chair, settling herself for the ride). Which is to say that my mother's and your father's marriage was much more astonishing in its fourth, sixth, and then eighth year than it ever was at the start.
Sure, their initial passion was startling. Maybe my mother wasn't so old when she met your dad, a youthful forty-one to his forty-four, but you and I were only nine at the time, after all. You remember, don't you, how we thought of her, how she might as well have been in her dotage? So it was weird and cringe-inducing to see her blushing and giggling like a girl; it was even worse that the chances of walking into her and Henry necking like teenagers were so high that all of us daughters had to clomp around the house like construction workers, in the vain hope that they would have enough time to untangle themselves from each other before we entered the room.
Still, it was the way they acted after a few years of humdrum marriage—a few years of paying taxes and balancing the checkbook and getting the kids off to school and squabbling over the wet towels in the bathroom and going to sleep and waking up together, day in and day out—that was the real revelation. They stopped cooing and, mercifully, speaking in baby talk to each other and took up inaudibly murmuring instead; it seemed they no longer had to finish or even fully articulate sentences around each other to be understood. They held hands wherever they went; she ran to meet him at the door when he came home from work; after dinner they dozed off together, side by side on the couch, the day's papers spread out unread on their laps.
A prosaic existence, maybe, for a girl who could have been an empress, but I always thought of my mother's life as poetry.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW IT, I compared it to a spreading stain. It was just a freckle at first, a small, irregularly shaped mark, light brown, just to the left of the dead center of my left palm. I had had it in that guise for years, one more variable in the dense pattern of lines on my palm, and I thought of it as an inkblot that had somehow failed to wash out of my skin. But when, one year, it began to grow and change, I (tracking its transformation over the months with bemusement) began to think instead of tea soaking into sheets, brown slowly encroaching on white. Except that that comparison didn't hold either, since the mark wasn't just brown anymore. A colorful swirl about a half inch in diameter, it looked like a black-and-blue bruise except that it was darker, with actual black in it as well as brown.
Over time I began to wonder if it was in fact a bruise, even though I had of course been observing how it spread. But while the mark bore a resemblance to the splotches of purplish blue that blossomed usually on my shins, it seemed curious that I couldn't remember hurting my hand, and even more curious that when I pressed on the spot, I felt no pain. Had I forgotten how I had slipped on the ice and slammed my hand on a rock as I hit the ground? Had it slipped my mind that I had pinched the flesh of my palm on a clothespin as I hung my delicates to dry? I couldn't decide which was more incredible: that I so lacked coordination or that I was suffering from such a lapse in memory; at times like this I found it hard to believe that I was only in my thirties.
Sometimes I tried to see the stain as an abstract pattern rather than a strange growth on myself. While this was a feat that eluded me almost entirely, the couple of times I came close to succeeding I could see that that mark was in fact almost aesthetic, reminiscent of a few of my mother's paintings. I even wondered if I should show my hand to her. After all, it was seldom that she could feel superior about the range of her English vocabulary around her daughters; she'd have a field day showing off her knowledge of the precise name for each of those different colors.
It wasn't until my routine gynecological checkup, the one that I schedule every other year, that I had the first inkling that something might be really wrong. Sitting upright, my legs no longer spread, I was about to reach for my clothes when the doctor asked me if I had any last questions. “There is one thing,” I said, looking down at my hand. “I have this odd mark on my palm that keeps growing.”
The doctor was an older woman, gray-haired, heavyset, and reassuringly sedate. “What?” she said, her voice pitched so high that I knew immediately to be scared.
For the next year, I would be told again and again how lucky I was that my gynecologist had diagnosed my symptoms and had immediately referred me to a specialist: the type of skin cancer that I had, one that primarily afflicts young Asians and African-Americans, is rare enough that usually only dermatologists know what it is. If she hadn't known about it, I probably would have died.
As I'd learn, acral lentiguous melanoma, to give it its official name, strikes randomly. One doesn't contract it because of smoking, which isn't something I've ever taken up, or because of staying out in the sun too long, which I sometimes still do. As doctor after doctor told me, it was simply bad luck.
I'd meet a lot of doctors in the next year. But before I did, I had to call my mother and give her the news.
“I FELT GRATEFUL THAT my mother is so good in a crisis,” I say. “It was a bad t
ime, and I really needed her. It was just after I broke up with Max, and I didn't really have anyone to turn to.”
Claudia twitches, then sits up.
“It's okay,” I say quickly. “It wasn't as bad as you'd think. I joined a support group, and Kei, who was pregnant for the first time and much nicer as a result, helped out a lot. It was almost kind of funny—she kept bursting into tears, she said it was because of the hormones. Totally unlike her, of course, and it actually made me laugh, it happened so often. We grew closer then, for the first time.
“You really shouldn't worry about it. What I went through was a different process than chemo. Interferon, it was called. I only felt a bit nauseous, and only sometimes.”
Claudia takes in a breath, preparatory to what I'm not exactly sure—a scolding or an outburst of affection or, perhaps, both at once.
“Don't be mad because I didn't call you then,” I say, breaking in once again, and pleading now. “I thought about it, believe me. But you know that it was hard enough to contact you when I did, after so much time had passed. I just couldn't come to you after a decade and a half apart and make you nurse me through a potentially fatal illness. I know you would have, and gladly”—I add, tilting my head and smiling as reassuringly as I can—“but I couldn't ask you to do that.”
Clearly not even close to being mollified, she reluctantly settles back into her chair.
“Still, after I got through the worst of it, all I could think about was getting in touch with you. After all that happened with my mother, after all that happened with this hand of mine”—I look down at my palm, although there is nothing more to see—“well, I knew I had to see you again. I know I'm not the first to say it, but a brush with death really does change your attitude toward life. The conclusion that I came to is that you need to be with the people you love, as much as you possibly can.”
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