“Can you imagine how it would’ve been to make this journey crammed on a bus, all your worldly possessions in a sack?”
“It must’ve been … unreal.” She pictured her mother: a small, shocked face pressed against the glass. What would it be like to be driven out into this no man’s land, your entire life stripped away?
“Where was your dad interned?” she asked, a moment later.
“Kaslo. This ghost town in the interior of BC.”
“Did he ever go back to visit?”
Mark shook his head. “I asked him several years ago whether he wanted to. Offered to go with him. We could fly to Vancouver, rent a car. Make it a father-son road trip.” He kept his eyes on the road, forehead creasing. Then he laughed, a bark almost. “My dad thought I was nuts. Not his idea of a fun vacation. He’d remarried by then, and he and Shirley were more Vegas types. And then, three years later, the guy was dead of cancer.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. It happened a long time ago.”
The landscape had flattened into washed-out lines.
Rita thought about the Japanese fairy tales Lily had once told her, all the stories of sudden disappearances and reversals of fortune. Girls who dropped iridescent eggs and accidentally killed their unborn children — their resplendent, palatial surroundings suddenly vanishing. Young men who opened boxes they’d been forbidden to look inside, only to be confronted by clouds of smoke and broken mirrors that revealed faces of old men. None of us are where we think we are. None of us are who we think we are. The present constantly disappears, time violently yanked away. That inevitable process of aging could be mysteriously — tragically — accelerated. So many of these tales were about lives evaporating, futures cancelled in a heartbeat.
Lily’s extreme frugality, her refusal to throw anything away. How they’d quarrelled when it came time to clean out her basement. Her eyes ablaze, she clung to a cheap, glass vase and barricaded herself in front of that shaky, battered desk she’d rescued some years ago from the sidewalk. Nothing could be wasted — not a sandwich crust, not an empty bread bag. She carried washed-out margarine tubs and plastic spoons in her purse, for you never knew when you might need them. Once while they were walking past an abandoned house, the front yard clogged with weeds waist-high, Lily crouched down to forage. Some thorny purple wildflower had caught her attention, and she wanted to transplant it to her own garden. She was constantly salvaging these scraps of beauty as though this was the only way she knew how to live.
Rita let her face roll toward the window just as the tears started to prickle and burst. She pretended to be asleep.
With a thud, her eyes popped open.
“Shit!”
“What’s going on, Mark?”
“Mommy, who said a bad word?” Kristen bolted awake.
“Sorry, I did,” Mark said. “I think we’ve got a flat.”
“Crap. Oh, Christ, I didn’t mean to say that.”
As luck would have it, there was no spare in the trunk.
A truck sped by. The driver ignored Rita’s frantic waving from the side of the road. Over the next fifteen minutes, three more cars passed by, no one even slowing down.
Mark insisted that Rita and Kristen stay in the car, where they’d at least have the comfort of shade. He’d seen a gas station ten or fifteen miles back. Hopefully, well before he made it that far, someone would stop to pick him up.
Just as he was setting off down the highway, another truck appeared on the horizon. Rita got out of the car and began wildly flinging her arms around while Kristen imitated from the side of the road. This time, by some miracle, the truck pulled over.
“Where you kids headed?” The face that poked out was tanned, leathery.
“We’re looking for that camp you folks put us in,” Mark said.
Rita’s heart jumped. What was he thinking? The heat must have gone to his head. The last thing they needed right now was a brawl with a redneck.
“The war camp.” The man squinted with the effort of reaching a long way back into the pit of his memory. A tense silence. “Well jump in, kids, if you want!”
Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have gotten into this guy’s truck if her life depended on it. Old Dell was his name, he informed them — not to be mistaken with Young Dell, his ten-year-old grandson. It was jackrabbit hunting season; he gestured at the rifle at his feet. Rita jammed in beside him, their sweaty shoulders sticking together like saran wrap. Kristen sat on her lap.
Old Dell lived in a town nearby. Although there wasn’t an auto repair for a hundred miles, he’d be happy to find them a spare tire for the price of a song.
“I’ve noticed you folks makin’ yer way up north.”
“Us folks?” Mark said.
“Yellow folks. I’ve seen ’em makin’ their way back there.”
“To Matanzas?”
Old Dell nodded.
“Why would they be headed up there?”
“That’s what I’m askin’ you.”
“Oh. I’m looking for my mother.” Rita passed over a crumpled flyer. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen her around?”
“Good lookin’ woman, her. But no. I’d be lyin’ if I said I had.”
By this point, the disappointment barely even registered.
“Did he take Granny?” Kristen whispered. “Is he a bad guy?”
“No, honey.”
“Bad guy?” Old Dell said.
“We’re solving the mystery of what happened to my Granny. Are you the bad guy?”
The old man chuckled. “Sure, if that’s the role you wanna cast me in.”
“So you were saying that Japanese folks have been coming out here?” Mark pressed.
“I think it has somethin’ to do with protest. Carloads of these long-haired Oriental hippies lookin’ to march over stuff, now that Nam’s long gone. They started comin’ out here, maybe startin’ ten years back, wavin’ banners with Japanese writing and beatin’ them big crazy drums out in the sand. Bonfires, strummin’ their guitars. Guess they wanna revisit where their parents did time.”
“Redress,” Mark said, with a steely edge. “It’s tied to the Redress Movement. Getting compensation for what our folks went through. The movement’s been getting a lot of traction out west.”
“Yeah? I’ve heard rumblin’ about that stuff. Sure, it was bad what happened, but we’ve all had to take the short end of the stick from time to time. That’s how history works — winners and losers. If all the losers wanted the government to write ’em a cheque, where’d the handouts stop?”
“Maybe if the government didn’t have its head up its ass so much, it wouldn’t have to keep writing cheques.”
A sharp, hot sensation, something like pride, like indignation, surged in Rita’s chest. Mark was right to speak up.
“Hey, I’m just sayin’!” Old Dell raised both hands from the wheel in an exaggerated shrug. “Me, I had a Paiute grandma once, ya know. You’d never know lookin’ at me, but go figure. D’you think her people liked gettin’ kicked off their land? That’s what Matanzas was, in the beginnin’. For thousands of years, they’d lived here. Had trade routes all the way to the coast. Their ancestral spirits are bound to the land.”
She imagined dispossessed spirits wandering along the side of the highway, forever dusty and tired.
“That’s another injustice that the government should answer to,” Mark said. “One of many.”
By the time they reached Lone Pine, it was afternoon already. She’d been expecting a dumpy little town, no different than so many of the places they’d passed through. But this place was surprisingly bustling. Although it had the look of a small town up in the mountains — with restaurants designed to resemble log cabins and shops with neon arrow signs announcing SPORTING & HUNTING GOODS — there was something too freshly
painted about its blatantly nostalgic edifices. A young father in a Hawaiian shirt stepped out of an old-fashioned candy shop, a toddler hoisted on his shoulders with lollipop in hand. A chubby woman with tightly permed black hair waved around a map and called down the street to her friend. Apparently, the town was famous as a location for old movies.
Mark parked at the end of the street. They got out and stretched their limbs.
An Asian family was coming down the sidewalk, everyone dressed in matching hiking gear. She’d hoped that in this hillbilly town, Lily would stick out like a sore thumb. Not during tourist season, apparently.
“So what now, Chief?”
“Let’s check that motel we just passed. The police said my mom charged a room to her credit card.”
Pastoria Inn. Deer heads poked out from the walls of the low- ceilinged lobby. No one was at the front desk. Rita rang the bell.
It was an old, uncomfortable feeling. Growing up, she’d never quite known what explanation would spring from her lips until she’d blurted it out. “My mother, she loses track of time, sometimes. She’s absent-minded. But she’s okay, really she is. Have you seen a woman who looks like this?” Flash of a photo. People’s distantly concerned, fascinated stares. The spectre of craziness was fun to contemplate so long as it remained far removed from your own family.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” The receptionist had a lion’s mane of auburn hair, teased out as wide as high.
“I’m, uh, looking for a woman named Lily Takemitsu. I think she may be staying here?”
The woman consulted her records. “Sorry, ma’am, you’re outta luck. No Lily Takemitsu here.”
“Are you sure? This is her picture.”
“Never seen her. And I’d remember a mouthful of a name like Lily Takemitsu.”
“Oh. She’s my mother.”
“And my Granny!” Kristen piped up.
“Sorry, hun. That still doesn’t change the fact that this Lily lady’s not here.”
“Are there other motels in town?” Mark asked.
“There’s another one down the street and a couple more off the highway.”
They walked out into the blazing, punishing sun. They wandered in and out of shops to make more inquiries. Kristen was getting a burn, so Rita stopped in a souvenir store to buy her a visor. They checked the motel at the other end of Main Street, but Lily wasn’t there either. Tired and famished, they ended up at a Chinese restaurant with a sea of red lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Heaping fried dishes covered in gooey bright sauces floated by on the arms of waiters.
“She looks familiar.” The hostess glanced at Lily’s picture. “Yeah, I remember now. A busload of Japanese tourists was here last week, all the ladies under their white sun umbrellas. That must’ve been where I saw your mom, right?”
Twenty-Nine
“What camp?” The girl behind the cash register stared back, pimples glistening amid her freckles.
Rita cradled a bottle of water to her chest. The fan on the counter wasn’t doing anything to cool her, just swirling hot, sticky air. “You’re sure there’s no site around here where all the Japanese folks used to live? Matanzas.”
“Mom?” the girl called over her shoulder. “A lady here wants to talk to you.”
The woman who sprang out from the backroom had the same freckly skin and catlike eyes, yet these features had been stretched over a face twice as wide and unsmiling. “Oh, that place? Maybe there used to be something up past Lone Pine, but it isn’t there now, I can tell you that much. Got torn down a long time ago.”
It wasn’t the first time Rita had been told this story. Store owners and gas station attendants remembered virtually nothing. All anyone would say was that the camp, if it had ever existed, had long ago disappeared. And no one had been comfortable with all those Japs living off the fat of the land anyway while the rest of America had suffered wartime shortages. So maybe it was for the best that Matanzas had been swallowed up whole, nothing left to remind anyone of what had happened.
Rita returned to the car where Kristen and Mark were munching on licorice.
“Any luck, Mommy?”
“Nope.”
While they continued driving down the highway, scanning for some trace of Lily, the sand swept up and danced in ghostly apparitions.
Maybe they were barking up the wrong tree. They had no real evidence to suggest that Lily’s return had anything to do with camp. But Kristen’s question about why Granny had come out here kept nagging. The only reason Rita could think of was camp. Lily had some unresolved business that had drawn her back here.
The land stretched out in cryptic patterns of sage and scrub grass. It was all there, written in some secret code. If only they could figure out what it meant, they’d have the key to understanding everything.
Kristen rummaged in Rita’s purse for a stick of sugar-free gum. What she extracted instead was a tiny flashlight attached to a key chain. Flicking it on, she waved the spotlight over the roof of the car.
“This’ll help us. All detectives have flashlights, right?”
“Sure,” Rita said distractedly. “It’ll be useful if we have to search any deserted buildings.”
“We might need it before then,” Mark said. “Look at that, isn’t it something?”
Dusk was falling. Clouds of fiery red, softening to coppery orange, spilled across the mauve sky. The smell of sage and something pungent — like the earth itself was perspiring — filled the air.
“I still don’t understand why Granny had to come out here.” Kristen stuck the head of the flashlight in her mouth, her cheeks lighting up like a glow-worm. “She must’ve come for a reason.”
“It’s hard to explain, honey. Your grandmother has problems. She gets confused about things sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not inside her head, Kristen.” Rita bristled at the sharpness of her own voice. She wanted her daughter to feel comfortable asking about all this stuff, didn’t she? “Granny’s had a hard life — going back to the time she had to leave everything behind and come live here — and that’s made it difficult for her, sometimes, to remember the past and behave like a normal person.”
These words were still way too vague and evasive for Rita’s taste. It was a cop-out, not much better than the cop-outs Lily flung her way when she’d been the kid asking uncomfortable questions.
“You know what I think, Mommy? Granny lost something here.”
And maybe, Rita thought, just maybe, it really was that simple.
The last time she saw her mother, Lily had looked tired, so tired, as she had for Rita’s whole life. The faint lines on her skin had deepened over the years, so they weren’t so faint anymore — they were caked with makeup, badly applied, the look of parched, cracked earth. “You’ve had a good life, haven’t you, dear?”
And this time there’d be no hint of hesitation or adolescent sarcasm in Rita’s voice as she’d answer, in the affirmative. “Yes, Mom.” Despite everything, yes. Yes, yes, yes. What she wouldn’t give to be able to voice these simple words.
“Hey, what’s that?” Mark slowed down.
“I saw something, too,” Kristen said. “Like a tall, white ghost!”
He turned the car around with a grind into the gravel.
There was something out there. A spike of whiteness shooting up in the distance. All by itself, nothing around it, just sheer desert. Then a blur of sand and wind had erased it already.
They got out of the car and began walking toward whatever that thing had been. The setting sun reflected off grains of sand like ice crystals. A jackrabbit hopped by, its ears like giant antennas. They found a path, cutting off the road, that was little more than remnants of pavement faded into pebbles and dirt, firmly packed, mosaic-like. Clumps of old tamarisk trees spotted the horizon, more dead than alive,
trunks branching off in upturned, arthritic claws.
A faint apparition. As they got closer, it materialized, gained solidity. There it was — they hadn’t imagined it. It was a white stone tower, beautifully proportioned and simple in design. It narrowed into a pyramid at the top, pointing like an arrow up to the heavens. A couple of Japanese characters had been painted on the front in dramatic black strokes. Rita tried to think of a phrase that could capture what Lily had experienced here.
The land that swallowed me whole.
Crude gravestones were clustered on either side.
“Do you think this is where the camp was?” Rita heard herself ask.
“Maybe. This could be a memorial stone or something,” Mark said.
“Looks like this was the camp cemetery then.”
“Most people would’ve wanted their dead moved after the war. These few graves must’ve belonged to the folks who had no family.”
Walking across the colourless expanse, her legs wobbled. There was nothing but wide-open space. She might have been standing at the edge of some extraterrestrial land, void of life for millions of years. The place had no boundaries. They must have taken down the barbed-wire fence a long time ago. Whatever roads or paths had once existed had been covered over, absorbed into the earth. It was impossible to walk in Lily’s footsteps, to imagine her life here.
As they got farther in, the land became rougher in texture. The wind settled. Rocks dotted the ground in massive squares. They walked around one of these peculiar configurations, and Rita was reminded of a TV documentary about geometric patterns that had appeared out of nowhere in cornfields. Aliens from outer space were thought to be responsible.
After the Bloom Page 27