Once Removed

by Mako Yoshikawa

  Almost a year has passed since I last tried to lure them back to America. While it's a tough sell, maybe it is time for me to try again. “You know, you guys might want to get a new phone,” I tell my mother. “What if something happened to one of you? You live in such a remote area, and—”

  The static seems to work both ways, though, and my little lecture is lost. “Hello?” she says. The line is suddenly clear, and her voice, pitched loud and deep, is deafening. This is the woman, after all, who has never needed a microphone while lecturing. “Claudia, can you hear me?”

  “I'm here.”

  “Let me try this again: I want to talk to you about Vikrum.” She pauses and then she adds, in a far less confident tone: “That is, if that's okay.”

  Absorbed as she is and has been in her work, she has always been there, eager to proffer help. When did I begin to realize that my mother needed to be taken care of too? Before she and Dad began to grow old, yes, but it is probably giving myself too much credit to think that I knew even before the force of nature that was Hana swept in to turn our lives upside down. “I'd like to hear what you have to say about him,” I say.

  She takes her time choosing her words, and begins with a point that I do not expect. “When I went back to your father,” she says, “after we were apart for more than nine years, I couldn't be sure at first if we could make it work. He was still in love with Hana then. And I thought that maybe he always would be.”

  My mother is a riveting lecturer, able to make the manipulation and analysis of numbers not only lucid but engaging. Narrative, though, is another skill altogether, and I have to try hard not to think about the rising phone bill.

  “I had stopped trusting him, of course,” she continues. “I was furious with him, and horribly hurt. I'd maybe even stopped loving him, or at least I convinced myself that I had. But I went back to him anyway.” This last sentence uttered with due emphasis.

  A few moments of silence follow: the story is clearly over. “I don't understand what you're getting at,” I say. “Sorry. It's an interesting anecdote and all, but you're going to have to spell out its relevance for me.”

  “My point is that the years we'd spent together as a married couple mattered,” she explains. “We'd grown together over the decades. I couldn't not take him back. I would have spent the rest of my life missing him, and—”

  “So what are you telling me?” I say, breaking in. “That Vikrum is never going to leave his wife and that I did the right thing because I would never be able to have him? Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because if so, it's not working.”

  “Oh, darling,” she says. “You do miss him so, don't you.”

  She is silent, as usual, as I cry. Given how much she communicates via physical contact, it is not surprising that my mother hates talking on the phone; no wonder she feels a need to rely on pet names when she does so. It occurs to me now that I could do with her hand stroking my hair back, and the weight and warmth of her arm around my shoulders.

  “I did a poor job of explaining what I meant,” she says at last. “You know, at first I thought that that was the lesson my experience had taught me—that married people grow together like teeth, and that it's difficult and usually impossible to separate them. At first I thought that your being with Vikrum made no sense, but I've been doing a lot of thinking since you left, and I've come to another conclusion.” Another pause.

  “Which is?”

  “I loved your dad,” she says. “It didn't matter what he'd done. It didn't even matter that maybe he would have left me all over again. I loved him, so I had to take him back. I didn't really have a choice.”

  These days, when my mother is in her study, her cat Newton usually sits with or on her. In his youth, Newton's ability to leap and soar led us to conclude that he had been misnamed, but in his old age he seems to have succumbed to the force that clobbered his namesake on the head with an apple one day: once prone, he tends to stay put. He is, in other words, the perfect companion for my mother. She might be beyond industrious when it comes to her work, and she attended to her and Dad's move to England with a productive mix of energy and calm. But when it comes to love, the force of gravity seems to exert its pull more inexorably on my mother than on the rest of the world.

  “You have to follow your heart,” she says. I can almost hear her shrug. Then she echoes a phrase that Rei had used to me. “Nothing's certain, of course; an element of risk is inevitable. But I've always tried to follow my heart anyway. And even if your dad were to leave me all over again, I think, or at least hope, that that's how I'd continue to live.”

  The past eight years that my mother has been in England, coupled with her discomfort over the phone, have taken their toll on our relationship. Not, of course, that we were all that close before. I have always thought that we began to grow apart about the time that Dad left her and she found her life coming apart in her hands—the distance between us the unfortunate but perhaps unavoidable consequence of my desire to be as different from her as possible. Our physical resemblance notwithstanding, I seem to prefer to think of myself as my father's daughter—or, for that matter, my stepmother's daughter—rather than hers.

  “That's all very well for you,” I say, “but in our case, there are other people involved. What about Vikrum's children?” A girl, age six and going on sixteen, except when she laughs; a boy who gives out gifts when he shakes hands. “Not to mention his wife.”

  “The kids have him every night, don't they? He's taking care of them and, it sounds like, her as well. You, on the other hand, seemed to be taking care of him, and he of you,” she says. “So I could ask you just as easily: what about him; what about you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Claudia

  Boston, 1999

  THE SIDEWALK IS CROWDED; IT IS THE MIDDLE OF A Saturday afternoon and Newbury Street is filled with shoppers and late lunchers. Two months ago, when I walked down this sidewalk to meet Rei for the first time in seventeen years, I felt as if I were flying. Even at her slowest, Rei walks much faster than I do, but as we head toward that same café now, we progress at a pace that no one could call swift.

  Harboring the enemy is not a light offense, and Rei has not forgiven me yet. But she is close—perhaps, even, as close as I am to forgiving her for her absence during the past seventeen years. We have passed through the tears (mutual) and the yelling (her) and the begging (me) to what I sincerely hope is the last punitive phase, a silence that straddles the rather wide ford between grudging and companionable.

  Contrary to what Rei first thought, I have yet to see Hana. I made the arrangements, over the phone, to leave the key to my apartment with my neighbor for her, but I have yet to have a face-to-face encounter with the woman my father once loved.

  Rei slows her pace, but we are already going so slowly that all we can do is come to a halt. Even though we are ten, maybe fifteen minutes late already, I stop too.

  Our hair, worn to the exact same unfashionable length, blows about in the wind and threatens to fly into our eyes. We stand, two women in our thirties, silent and grim-faced and dead still in the middle of a busy block.

  THIS IS WHAT I MISS about Vikrum: his feet, large and floppy and flat, the nails on them ridiculously perfect. His smell, a fresh and clean fragrance—was that Lakshmi's detergent?—mixed with the dust of chalkboards and books and the scent of his flesh. The way he listened to me, wide-eyed and earnest as the children in my classroom were—if I were lucky and I had chosen my book well—once a week on storytelling day. His enthusiasm, boyish and wild, its pull so strong it could tow me along in its wake.

  That even after two years of what seemed constant conversation, I still could not guess what he would say next.

  “I CAN'T BELIEVE I LET YOU bully me into this,” Rei mutters, her teeth clenched. “Because you're heartbroken, and can't stop thinking about him”—the look she throws me belying the flippancy of her words—“I've been letting you off easy. But I want you
to know I still can't believe it.”

  Am I transparent, every thought exposed for plucking by the glance? “If you've been letting me off easy, then I'm just going to pray you never keep me on hard. And you couldn't not see her. After all, she took a plane out here, and you know how she is about flying. Not to mention the fact that she came to Boston for you,” I say, mimicking the exaggerated emphasis of Rei's words.

  I take her lack of disagreement with my argument as a small battle won.

  As if at a hidden signal, we begin to walk, brisk now, the edges of our skirts slapping like a baby's hands against our ankles, our arms swinging by our sides.

  WE SEE HER, as I spied Rei more than two months ago, through the window of the café. She is facing into the room, the door directly in the line of her vision. All we can see is the back of her head (her hair worn, as Rei said, in an austere bun; it is largely black still, but woven through with silver), and the edge of her chair cuts off all but the top part of that, yet so saturated is she with the mysterious element of charisma that I feel as if I cannot look away.

  In a few moments, when I have regained enough of my equilibrium to form a coherent sentence, I will explain to Rei that I cannot go inside because I cannot take my eyes off the back of Hana's head. Accustomed to people having that reaction to her mother, Rei will nod with understanding and enter the café by herself.

  If only.

  Rei's tugging on my shirtsleeve now (watching us today, would anyone be able to guess which one of us had set up this meeting, and who had refused to attend and cried?), and if I told her I was incapable of leaving the view from this side of the window, she would let out a dry bark of laughter and remind me that I promised.

  We step through the door. As it swings shut behind us, I notice that Rei is vibrating; I believe it is from trepidation until I realize that it is the quiver of the needle of a compass in the moment before it snaps to point north. Do compass needles, like daughters, sometimes rage at the fact that they are never allowed to chart a course wholly on their own; do they yearn, once in a while, to point due west or, for the hell of it, south-southeast?

  I know Rei wants to bound across the café again, just as she did when she first saw me. Her eagerness to do so is like a hum, infectious and palpable. Yet she walks quietly beside me, every measured step an effort of will.

  Seen from the front, Hana is still beautiful—her bone structure is such that she has gotten more striking, if that is possible, with age. But the set of her head is not as proudly regal as it once was, and as we approach her, I am startled at how small she is. Perhaps Rei's right and she has shrunk over the years, or is it only that I have gotten taller and that Hana's choke hold on me has lessened over time?

  For a moment they appraise each other, mother and daughter.

  Hana's lips are stretched in a smile. “Reiko,” she says, or at least she tries to, but then her lips twist out of that overstretched smile and, suddenly, she begins to cry.

  “Oh, Mo-om,” says Rei, lengthening the word into two syllables in the manner of American daughters everywhere.

  As they move to hug each other, their heads collide so farcically, it might as well have been choreographed.

  The three of us are tucked away in a corner of the café, and Hana is crying almost completely silently.

  Still, people are turning, concerned looks on their faces, to look at the small, weeping woman and the girl who holds her tightly: Hana has always had charisma to spare.

  She is the woman who has dominated my imagination since I was a child, the stories about her, as extravagantly colored as her paintings, the backdrop against which my own life of grays and light blues has been played.

  “ARE YOU OKAY?” she asks Rei, rubbing the sides of my stepsister's arms with vigor, as if she needed warming.

  “I'm fine,” Rei asserts, only a little shaky. “And cancer-free, if that's what you're asking.”

  Dropping her hands to her sides, Hana gives Rei a hungry, searching look. I cannot tell if she is disappointed by the barely perceptible tinge of coolness in Rei's voice; she may have guessed before that winning her daughter back would be neither easy nor quick. Does she recognize that the damage done by a betrayal is a measure of the act in question, but also and perhaps even more of the nature and depth of the relationship that has been violated?

  Of course she does. Hana may have been overly proud, but she never was stupid.

  Now she turns, her arms outstretched, to me. Her shoulders are so narrow, I might be holding one of my students, except that they expect to be hugged hard, and Hana I embrace as if she were a flower in more than name.

  “I'm very lucky,” she says, reaching up to pat me on the shoulder. “I see two long-lost daughters today.”

  “Rucky,” she says, and “rong-rost.” How my father used to love her accent.

  We pull up chairs and sit around the table. There is still a guarded look in Rei's eyes, but what she was dreading most about this encounter was the first few moments: I am officially free to go. Hana is here for another five days still; there is time for us to catch up later. Yet just as I am about to utter an excuse, she turns to me.

  “How is your father?” she asks.

  These words sound stiff, and for a second I think that she is only asking out of politeness. Then I look up and see how closely she is watching me, the shine of her eyes, which she attempts with limited success to veil, as she awaits my response.

  She loved him. How could I ever have doubted it?

  As if that were not enough, nipping at the heels of that revelation comes a pesky pug of a thought: what a waste. Because true love is rare. Because he loved her too—so much more (much as it tears me up to admit it) than he ever loved my mother, peaceable and content though they are now.

  So to answer my own question, perhaps I doubted that Hana loved my father because the idea that she did, and left him anyway, was too sad to contemplate.

  “Dad's good, thanks,” I say automatically. True love is rare: a sentiment so trite it could not even be the title to an eighties pop song, and yet here it is making me catch my breath. “He's—” There is no point in worrying Hana with a report of his stroke, and hurting her with an account of his remarriage is not even a question. “He's retired,” I conclude lamely. “He keeps himself busy with gardening.”

  “Oh,” she says. Then, as if realizing more needs to be said, she adds in a fainter voice, “I'm glad.”

  Not so long ago, my reflexes were fine. I am about to ask Hana about her work, her house in California—anything—when Rei sits up. “Claudia's teaching at an elementary school,” she says to Hana. “She's the best-loved teacher in all the land.”

  Rei is still hurt by what Hana did, of course (“What scares me is the possibility that years might pass,” she had told me, chewing on a nail, “before I can really forgive her”), and yet here she is diving in to save her.

  They are going to be fine on their own.

  Hana looks at Rei and then at me. Finally she smiles. “I'm sure she is.”

  “Her students bring her apples every day,” says Rei. “So many of them that if she ate them all, there wouldn't be any doctors living in the greater Boston area.” Hana looks at her questioningly. “There's a saying,” Rei explains. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Never mind, it's not all that funny.”

  Did she take care of her mother when she was younger too? I do not remember it myself, but I probably did not notice: if you hate someone and at the same time feel an overwhelming fascination with them, it's hard to be attentive to the possibility that they may be in need of care.

  Rei must have wanted to shield Hana from me; perhaps she even tried. I owe a raft of apologies all around.

  Rei is now talking about the students—college level, she says, not the apple-bearing kind—that she sometimes teaches at the museum, while Hana nods and listens. I look at one and then the other, searching for a familial resemblance and finding none. Rei's face is long and pointed at
the end, Hana's, a smooth oval. Their bodies: Rei's seemingly made up entirely of endearingly gawky limbs; perhaps because of her dancer's posture, it is Hana's torso, compact and graceful, that you notice most—after, of course, her face. Even the black of their hair is not the same. The parts of Hana's that are not silver are so dark as to be almost blue, while Rei's is streaked faintly and naturally with brown.

  Then, too, there is the matter of their personalities. To take just one pertinent example, look at how differently they approach love: Rei so impulsively affectionate, Hana cautious to the point that she was, at least once, self-destructive.

  Does Dad regret the years that he spent with Hana? If he had known how his marriage with her would end, would he have chosen not to buy a monkey wrench that he did not need on a snowy afternoon in March; would he have stayed at home with his first wife and biological daughter instead? If I asked him, he would probably try to save Mom's and my feelings. So it is a good thing that these are questions that I do not need to put to him. I know that his answer, his real answer, to both would be no.

  You take what you can get, he would say, for as long as you can.

  At the next break in the conversation, I seize my opportunity. “Excuse me,” I say, pushing my chair back. “I just realized I have an important phone call to make.”

  Rei cocks an eyebrow at me. “The proper phrase,” she says, drawling out the words, “is ‘I just remembered I have an important, etc.' If you're trying to make a tactful exit, then you might as well get your excuse right. Unless, of course”—here she unleashes one of her grins, and I know that she has guessed what I am about to do—“you really mean that you just realized you have to call someone.”