I throw her a small smile back, and stand.
“I'll see you soon,” I say to Hana.
She thanks me and hands me my house key. This morning, she moved out of my apartment into a hotel in Cambridge, within a half mile of Rei's place. Today, for the first time in weeks, I will go home to my own apartment. The three of us make plans to have dinner tomorrow, and then we go through another round of embraces.
There may be little to mark Hana and Rei as mother and daughter, yet when they hug me, they each whisper in my ear.
“Let me know how it goes with him,” says Rei. “If you need me, call me and I'll be there.”
Hana's whisper is so quiet, I could almost have just imagined it. “Thank you for bringing her back to me.”
At the door, I turn back to look at them. They sit close but do not talk, looking away from each other in a way that makes it clear that what they are experiencing is not just a lull in the conversation. But then, as I continue to watch, Hana turns to Rei and begins to speak.
Will it really be years before Rei truly forgives her mother? Perhaps. Surely what counts, what is cause for celebration, is that they are already halfway there.
I SEE HIM SITTING ON MY STOOP from halfway down the block. His head is buried in a book, but when my downstairs neighbor, coming home from a run, takes the steps in two bounds, he looks up quickly. It is as he is bending his head down to his book again that I catch his eye.
I lower myself down next to him, a decorous six inches between us, and sit gazing straight ahead of me: I do not dare look at him directly. He turns and stares at me but then, as we continue to sit, he catches on and follows my lead.
“How long have you been here?”
“Today,” he says, looking down at his watch, “about half an hour.”
“You were here yesterday too?”
“Yesterday, and the past five days before that. Maybe two hours each day. At first I came in the morning or the evening, so that I'd catch you on your way to and from school, but when that didn't work, I began trying to come at different times of the day. It sounds creepy, I know,” he says. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him shrug. “But I was desperate to see you.”
Chances were that on one of those days, Hana walked by him as he sat here. Perhaps the ends of her skirt brushed against his arm. After seeing him there for the third time that day, maybe she even nodded a hello at him.
“It's not fair to you,” says Vikrum. “I keep thinking that if I were a better and stronger person, I'd be able to walk away, never bother you again. But I can't. I miss you too much.”
“It's not not fair,” I say, speaking too fast. “What I mean is—” Then I make the mistake of turning to look at him.
He looks terrible. Gaunt and pale, with darkness under his eyes. I have always loved his laugh wrinkles, but here, in the bright afternoon light, I can see each of the lines edging his mouth and those running parallel across his forehead. While he usually looks younger than thirty-two, anyone seeing him now would think he is far older. It is all over for me; all I can do now is lean into him and cry.
TOMORROW, WHEN I SPEAK to Rei, this is what I will say to her.
How hard it is, and how terrifying, to come to the realization that not all is perfect in your fairy tale. That whereas the damsels in the stories, in their eternal and often passive pursuit of the happily-ever-after, benefit from the intervention of fairy godmothers, of wishing wells and talking mirrors and helpful dwarves (and not just two dwarves, or four, or even six, but seven), we are on our own.
That while I finally concluded that my fairy tale, flawed though it is, is worth holding on to for as long as I can bear it, her mother decided differently, and that that is no less valid a choice.
I DISENTANGLE MYSELF from Vikrum's kisses, take his hand, and pull him to his feet.
“Come inside,” I say.
“Are you sure?” he asks, suddenly uncertain. “You deserve so much more than what I've given you, than what I can give you—”
“You're what I want. Even like this. I'm sure of that now. Come inside.”
So he does.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hana
Boston, 1999
UNBIDDEN BUT NOT, FOR ONCE, UNWELCOME, A MEMORY of her second husband comes to Hana as she sits waiting for her daughter and stepdaughter in a Boston café. One afternoon, coming by his office to pick him up for lunch, she was a few minutes early, and not wanting to disturb him in case he was hard at work, she quietly poked her head in through the half-open door. He was sitting on a stool, in front of him a container filled with earth that was the warm, rich color of burnt sienna. As she watched, he picked up a handful of soil and let it run through his fingers. Then he scooped up another handful, held and examined it, cupped, in his palm. She was about to call out to him when he lifted up the soil to his nose and smelled it, and then, taking a pinch of it, placed it on his tongue.
She was in her late forties at the time, a mother to two teenage girls and stepmother to a third (so old they seemed, and at the same time so young, to an almost wrenching extent), and she was standing in the dusty, echoing hallway of the geology department of the most prestigious small college in the area. Given this context (she reasoned), perhaps it wasn't so surprising that she felt not only disconcerted but also ashamed that she was aroused—the way his tongue felt on her! and of course his hands too—by the sight of her husband of six years smelling and tasting a handful of dirt.
Hana crept back out into the hallway and sat herself down on the corner of the bench (earmarked for students, and therefore narrow and hard) placed outside his door.
A few minutes later, Henry was in front of her, folding almost in half to reach down and kiss her, standing back up and tying the scarf she'd bought him their first Christmas together loosely around his neck. It was a cold day, the winds gusting hard, but he didn't even own a winter coat, and he always just laughed, as at a joke, when she suggested that they get him one.
“How did it taste?” she said, with a nod back at the lab.
He looked puzzled for a moment, and then his brows lifted. “You saw me do that?” he asked, amused. “I was checking to see if it was silt. It was.”
Hana stood, and they began walking down the hall. “You can tell by tasting?”
He shrugged. “When you've been around soil for as long and as much as I have, you can.”
So modest was he usually about his work, and reticent too, she thought for a moment that he was referring to his gardening. But then he went on dryly: “It's hard to believe, I know—the scientist at work.” Looking down at her, he brightened. “Actually, it's one of the real perks of being a geologist. You develop a taste for it, after a while. And that's not to mention all the minerals contained within one mouthful of the stuff.”
Hana smiled up at her husband. His arm was slung around her shoulder, outside it was cold but so bright that the sky was a brilliant blue, and she felt like making a joke back at him. Something about how now she knew why he ate her cooking with a gusto that, if it were feigned—as she, who had few delusions about her own culinary skills, always thought it had to be—then it was well-feigned enough to have her children, at least, fooled: if he spent his days eating dirt, then it was no wonder he could put on a happy face over a dinner of food meant for people, even if the meal in question was rubbery hot dogs with a side of overboiled cabbage.
But the joke was too complicated, and she remained silent.
Henry joked with their children often. While it was tacitly understood that Hana would not participate in these jokes, which almost always involved wordplay, while she usually busied herself in the kitchen or with her reading at those times, she did enjoy them when she understood them; she had, on occasion, even essayed puns herself, though never yet with Henry.
The children usually groaned at Henry's jokes, but he never cared, laughing out loud at them himself. It gave Hana particular pleasure to hear him laugh. For such a soft-spoken man,
his laughter was surprisingly loud. It came from the stomach and made him shake all over, which seemed odd to her because, of course, he was by all rights far too elongated to have anything to shake.
They were nearing the exit of the building. She could hear the winds howling beyond the doors.
“Are you going to be warm enough? Here,” he said, “let me button up the top of your coat for you.”
As her daughters used to with her when they were younger, she lifted her head up, submitting to his ministrations. When he finished, every one of her buttons buttoned and her scarf tucked tightly around her neck, he tilted her chin up and kissed her. She thought she could taste the loam in his mouth, a hint of something dark and rich, or did his tongue always taste like that?
The kiss lasted a long time, a clear reminder that he was her husband rather than her parent. When they drew apart—a move necessary for her mind to function with any sort of clarity—Hana realized that Henry had, somehow, managed to pick up on the lust that had required her to sit down, hard, just minutes earlier.
“What does it taste like?” she asked, a little breathless, stalling for time so she could lean into him a few seconds longer. “The soil, I mean. Is it really any good?”
“Hmm,” he said. Despite all the layers she was wearing, they were holding each other so close she could feel the hum of that sound vibrating through her. He began rubbing his hands in circles on her back. “How does one describe a taste? That sample was a little salty, and rich too. And I could feel the texture of it, the grit of it, on my teeth.”
“Do you think I should make it tonight for dinner?”
It wasn't really funny at all, of course, nor was it witty in the least, and it didn't involve an iota of wordplay. There was a short pause after she made her joke, as Henry tried to absorb what she said.
Then Hana had the pleasure of hearing her husband's laugh boom out, echoing through the hallway, so loud that it temporarily drowned out the shriek of the wind.
HENRY, AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-TWO (an age that seemed so old to them that they used to marvel together, half-seriously, at the fact that he'd attained it), once said that when he looked back on his life now, he saw a pattern. It was as if all the thousands of different pieces fit together. “Seamlessly, even,” he told Hana in his slow drawl, drumming a long index finger on her arm for emphasis. He said that he had thought, while he was living it, that the course of his life had been wholly random—determined by a series of accidents and encounters, some more lucky than others, and by decisions arrived at under pressure and in great haste, made out of need and whim and a what-the-hell bravado rather than by dint of careful reasoning and thought. But as he looked back now, it was clear to him that there had been an outside force guiding his fate.
A greater plan, maybe even a master one, he'd called it too, but Hana, perhaps predictably, had preferred the idea of a pattern: a visual concept and, as such, one that she knew she could grasp.
At the time she hadn't paid much attention, dismissing these ideas as a consequence of a new hobby of his, churchgoing (a practice that his daughter hadn't liked any more than she had, but for different reasons: Claudia had scolded her dad for loosening his already tenuous hold on his Jewish roots. For Hana, it was quite simply the boredom of the church services that had been hard to take, since she knew that, protest though he might, he'd wanted her presence beside him, and so she had felt obliged to accompany him on every fourth Sunday or so). Hana had given his ideas about a pattern no serious thought as a viable theory. But now, as she, at the definitively advanced age of sixty-six, waits with a mounting sense of excitement for Rei and Claudia to arrive, she thinks again about what Henry had said and wonders if it isn't true.
That she is thinking about Henry, and that she has been doing so with some frequency for the past two days, comes as a surprise to her. She would have guessed that while in Boston, she would be thinking of her first husband, and not of her second. Melodramatically, perhaps, she had thought that this city would be so crowded with memories of the life that she and Seiji had led that she would not be able to move; her mind would get stuck, trapped and immobile as her body used to be in the Tokyo subway cars during rush hour.
Instead, Boston has turned out to be just another town. She remembers it unexpectedly well—she still has a sense of the streets, even though in the past twenty years much of what stands on them has changed, and she always knows where the Charles is in relation to where she is, as surely as she knows up and down. But it doesn't make her remember anything startling or painful about Seiji. Indeed, this small, innocuous city seems to have the curious effect of making her think not about him (a development that makes her feel melancholy and even a touch guilty, so faraway does her first husband seem; when did he turn into a memory that elicits a tender warmth rather than a pang?) but about the man who took his place.
There is one way, of course, in which it makes perfect sense that she's thinking of her second husband. After all, any minute now—they're six minutes late already, so really any second—his daughter will walk through that door.
His daughter, accompanied by Rei.
Hana cranes her neck, even though there's nothing obstructing her view of the door and the street lying beyond it. She feels for the handle of her teacup without taking her eyes off the door; she lifts the cup to her mouth and pours the one or two remaining drops down her throat.
THE FIRST TIME Henry told her about Claudia, Hana had thought about her unborn child. Her third, who would have been (she knew it, just as she knew that Kei was going to be a thumb-sucker and that Rei would be a giddy child, hopelessly in love with motion) a boy. She had lost him soon after Seiji's accident, along with so much blood that she wondered, with a sense of calm that bordered on hope, if she, too, was going to die. Neither that calm nor, mercifully, that feeling approaching hope had lasted for long, yet though she had cried for her third child, a part of her was never sure whether she had been mourning him, or Seiji, or the life that they all would have had. So when she heard about Claudia—and she heard about Claudia within minutes of meeting Henry, by which point she was already hoping, she was already determined, that their fates would be entwined—Hana thought of it as another chance. At last she would have a third child.
What Hana hadn't counted on was, of course, Claudia herself. Almost immediately Claudia made it clear that she was more than content with her own parents and didn't need another. The best that Hana could do was to approach her as a friend, and not a very close one at that; their relationship, to her own continuous disappointment, was never more than barely civil.
Eventually Hana came to believe that it was only what she deserved. She already had a third child. Insufficiently mourned for, and one whom she had not had a chance to hold or even name, but a third child regardless. It had been terrible of her to think that she could so easily replace her son; it served her right that Henry's daughter wanted nothing to do with her.
Yet that didn't mean she couldn't think of Claudia, secretly, as her fourth child.
Four children. A large number for a woman who never imagined having any as a child herself. Hana can still remember what it felt like to want a life without children, and at times she could even still imagine herself leading it—an existence in which the forms and colors of her paintings, so vivid and consuming, fill all. The thought of such a life puts her in mind of her childhood ambition, ridiculously unattainable but oh! so well worth pursuing: to bring as much beauty into the world as she took out of it.
Hana knows that Rei, with her university degrees and her background in theory, does not think highly of her old-fashioned views on art. Rei believes that Hana had the potential to be a great artist, with paintings hanging in museums, but that she was undone by her relentless pursuit of beauty. What she does not understand—what Hana will, perhaps, explain to her in time—is that Hana never harbored any ambitions for museum exhibits. She would be more than content if, after her death, her paintings went from garage sale
to garage sale, canvases splashed with color and light that passed from one set of hands to the next.
Contemplating this fate for her paintings makes her solemn. She has so many more paintings to create, and there are but a few years that remain to her.
If she had been childless, how much more would she have painted? Hana would be wistful, except that she remembers too clearly a day thirty-eight years ago, when she took Kei out for one of her first walks. Pushing her in a baby carriage up a small hill, Hana began to sob. A doctor today might call it postpartum depression, but she knows that what she was feeling then was a sense of loss, as keen as she had ever felt, because she and her baby were no longer one, because she had to push her in a contraption with wheels that kept them two meters apart rather than carry her inside her.
And then, too, there was the day on which Rei was born. Why had fears about giving birth to a child with deformities only surfaced during her second pregnancy? She'd known, none better, that it was a risk, albeit a small one indeed, for someone exposed to the atomic bomb to have a child, but she'd been blithely impervious to worry when she was pregnant with Kei. Maybe she had become nervous about her second pregnancy because having another child, when the first one was so pretty and healthy, when she and Seiji woke up every day, it seemed, with grins on their faces and songs on their lips, seemed to be tempting fate.
Perhaps she had been taking a chance, but once again she'd been lucky. On the day that Rei was born, she'd sobbed again, but with joy this time, counting (in Japanese, as she would count, she knew then, for the rest of her life, even if she never set foot in her native country again) the dear, pudgy five fingers on each hand, the unbelievably small toes on each foot, the perfectly formed nails, again and again: Ichi ni san shi go. Ichi ni san shi go.
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