Kira stepped on the gas, desperate for home, for wine or whiskey, for her comforting bed. She would burrow into the blankets, pretend that what had just happened was nothing to worry about, cry for Aimi and her mother, feel the weight of their absence flatten her spine. She would dream, wake her husband Dan with her tossing, ignore the chasm widening between them. These were the new rules. They weren’t normal, but they were predictable.
Two
June 16, 1945
Maddalena squeezed Regina’s hand as they walked past the Manzanar guardhouse. The day was blistering, hotter than usual for spring, but she didn’t care about the sweat and stink. She was here, finally, in this mysterious place she’d seen only from the back of her father’s car on the road to Independence, or from the back of her horse, riding on Foothill Road. From either direction Manzanar looked the same—flat, repetitive rows of colorless, dismal-looking buildings and dry streets, giving off an air of despair she could smell from a distance.
The camp had been off limits since the day construction began more than three years ago. Her mother’s orders. It was dangerous, Mama said; who knew what the enemy might do? Maddalena had thought about arguing—she’d heard that the camp was going to be home to families, and how dangerous could grandmothers and children be?—but it would have been pointless. Once Mama made up her mind, that was that. Maddalena had kept her word and ventured no farther east than Foothill Road, but that didn’t stop her from wondering what went on in the camp, what those people, supposedly so different from anyone else in Owens Valley, were like. So when Mrs. Henderson poked her head into Regina’s room, where the girls were sitting on the bed playing Hearts that blistering day, and said she was going to an art show at the Manzanar community center and did the girls want to join her, Maddalena jumped up.
“Yes! I mean no,” she said. “I can’t. My mother won’t let me anywhere near Manzanar. She thinks it’s dangerous. She’s afraid of the Japanese.”
“She’s entitled to her opinion, dear, but I think they’re lovely folk.”
“You’ve been there before?”
This was astonishing. Not only was Mrs. Henderson, who wrote poetry and painted with oils, a mellow, indulgent mother—the opposite of fearful, overprotective Mama—she was daring! Brave! Or, if she was wrong about the Japanese and Mama was right, perhaps foolish.
“I go several times a year,” Mrs. Henderson said. “Their gardens and art shows put the rest of the county to shame. But we must keep peace with your mother. Oh, don’t look so down in the dumps. You’re going, and we’ll make it our little secret.”
Maddalena bounded out of the bedroom and down the stairs before Mrs. Henderson could change her mind.
“Wait up!” Regina called.
In the front hall, Mrs. Henderson tied back her hair and put on a pair of dark glasses. Then she summoned the girls outside and settled authoritatively into the driver’s seat of her husband’s dark-green Chevrolet pickup. Shaking off her surprise, Maddalena climbed into the truck bed after Regina. It seemed there was nothing Mrs. Henderson couldn’t do.
As they bumped along the desert road, Maddalena gripped the edge of the truck bed, stealing glances at the camp through spumes of dust. Such an adventure, made all the more delicious by being forbidden. Little by little Manzanar filled the horizon, creating a rush of anticipation so thrilling that Maddalena wished the trip would take longer.
Once through the gate, Mrs. Henderson parked with a jerk of the brake and Regina leaped out. Maddalena stood in the truck bed trying to absorb everything at once.
Manzanar buzzed with activity. Men and women who had stopped to chat knotted the streets, while others breezed along, all business. Boys in short pants raced by on important missions, laughing and shouting and tussling with their friends, while teenage girls sauntered in groups or sat on barracks steps, heads together, giggling and gossiping like girls did everywhere. The breeze carried evidence of a baseball game—the distant crack-smack of hide against wood, the hoarse cry of a referee, a smoketrail of cheers. Manzanar seemed vibrant, as full of mainstreet activity as any town in Owens Valley—perfectly normal, Maddalena thought with a shiver, if you ignored the guard towers. Eight of them, where men with guns surveyed the camp.
The girls followed Mrs. Henderson to the auditorium, a cavernous building with a stage at one end and an open space dotted with easels and bulletin boards. The only breath of air came from people moving about; the building sucked in the heat and held onto it, suffocating itself. After twenty minutes of studying watercolor paintings and ink drawings of mountains and flowers, Maddalena thought she’d melt. “Let’s go outside,” she said to Regina. The paintings were pretty, but it was the camp itself that Maddalena wanted to see. After all, she might never get another chance.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Tell your mother we’ll meet her back here in a little while.” Outside, the breeze carried whirls of dust and little relief.
“It’s so hot,” Regina said, fanning herself with a flyer from the art show.
“Hotter than Hades.”
“Maddalena Moretti, you watch your tongue! That’s almost swearing.”
“Hotter than hell,” Maddalena said, and laughed when Regina shrieked. “Let’s follow those girls.” She pointed to a trio heading north.
They walked past row after dismal row of meanspirited matchstick construction, squat buildings that looked as if a windstorm would send them skyward. No one had designed them, as far as Maddalena could tell; they were too ugly, too cruel, to have been built with anything but disregard and haste. The only beauty came from things the Japanese had created themselves—colorful curtains, flowerpots on the narrow stoops.
“Look,” Regina said, pointing toward a baseball field. “Boys. Lots of them.” She poked Maddalena in the ribs and ran to the bleachers. Maddalena followed, and the girls found seats in the front row, across from left field. Shielding their eyes, they took inventory.
“The pitcher is cute,” Regina said. “And look at his muscles!”
Maddalena shrugged. “You can have him.”
“Well, who do you like?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
A few of the boys wore baseball caps, but most of them didn’t. How strange to see an entire field of dark-haired boys, when the Lone Pine boys had red hair, or blond, or a million shades of dirt brown. Most of the Japanese boys wore crew cuts. One boy in left field, with glasses, had hair that was short on the sides but long on top, and he kept tossing a forelock out of his eyes. He should have worn a cap, Maddalena thought.
A boy built like a bulldog blasted a line drive and the stands erupted. Regina and Maddalena jumped up, screaming with the crowd, then groaned when the boy got tagged out at second.
“This is almost perfect,” Regina said. “All we need is some Coca-Cola and cotton candy.”
“I wish,” Maddalena said. Still, it was a perfect day. No chores, no mother fretting over her, no obnoxious brother making her wish she were an only child. Here she was, on her own with her best friend in this exciting new place. She felt like a tourist in the valley she’d grown up in, seeing things kept hidden from her. And all of it ordinary yet startling.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
She walked along the edge of the field, taking in the city around her. That’s what it was, a city of more than ten thousand, according to her father, bigger than any other in Owens Valley, built for people who didn’t belong there and didn’t want to be there. Looking up at a guard tower, the rounded eye of its searchlight puncturing the brilliant sky, Maddalena shuddered. It was easy to forget what those towers meant when you were outside the barbed wire, doing whatever you pleased. At first, when the plans were being made, then when it was built and the first Japanese came, the camp was all that anyone in Lone Pine and Independence had talked about. No one wanted it, and plenty of people were like he
r mother, afraid of the strangers who didn’t look like them. Now, three years later, most of the valley residents had lost their fear, and some, like Mrs. Henderson, considered the Japanese people part of their community. Eventually Manzanar blended into the desert valley’s landscape, no more remarkable than the sagebrush and fruit trees born there.
Fifty yards past the ballfield, Maddalena stopped, gazing west. These transplanted people had made Manzanar their home, with art shows, baseball games, and victory gardens. Not the kind of things you’d expect to find in a prison, yet Manzanar was a prison.
From here, inside the fence, Manzanar felt wrong in a way it never had before.
A wild cheer rose from the bleachers, but Maddalena couldn’t pull her gaze from the the city sprawled before her. It was seconds before she turned. Then, in a flash, everything snapped into place—the game, the ball hurtling toward her, a boy chasing it, hollering, “Get out of the way!” In another flash he pushed her aside, then flung himself on the ball and threw it with his entire body, landing on his shoulder and hip in a whirlwind of dust. The crowd kept on cheering as the ball bounced into center field and rolled to a stop. The batter was home safe.
The boy stood, slapping away dust. “Sorry to scare you. I thought you were a goner.” He wiped his face with the hem of his T-shirt.
“What?” Maddalena tried not to stare at the boy’s flat, tanned belly.
“I didn’t mean to shove you, but I thought you were going to get hit.”
“It was my fault. I wasn’t…” Maddalena forced her gaze upward. He was a few inches taller than she was, with glasses, hair that fell forward—the boy she’d thought should be wearing a hat. Up close, she could see the fine hairs of his eyebrows, the veins lining his thin forearms. “I wasn’t paying attention, I meant to say.”
“I know.” He smiled, and the delight in his eyes made him look ten years old.
The strangest feeling percolated beneath Maddalena’s skin, like warm rain drenching her insides.
“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” the boy said. “See you.”
It might have been her imagination, but when he was twenty feet away Maddalena thought he slowed his trot as if he might turn around and run back to her, ask her name, put his arms around her, kiss her. Then he broke into a run, headed for the players rushing the field shouting of victory or defeat, and dissolved into the throng.
Three
February 28, 2011
Kira flicked off the alarm and listened to the pulse of the shower. Dan was up early. The space between them stretched beyond the half-lit room, beyond her body, immobilized in the bed, and his, streaming with soapy water. The thought of him in the shower would have aroused her once, but after Aimi’s death, desire had drowned in the wake of despair. As Kira surfaced from sleep, the memory of what had happened in the hospital parking lot hijacked her brain. Panic followed, and she lay there blinking back tears, muscles contracted, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with her.
The best explanation, the one she wanted to believe, was that nothing was wrong with her, that she’d dozed off and dreamed, the same kind of dreams she’d had every night since her mother’s death. Of course weird things would happen after weeks of minimal sleep. And Rosa’s death had reignited Kira’s grief for Aimi. It had been there all along, buried and unresolved, a constant background thrum with the half-life of uranium, and the dreams forced it to the foreground. Every night they tormented Kira with reminders of what should have been—Aimi crying, Aimi at her breast, Aimi asleep, drooling milk.
Dan said that the dreams were a grief response, and Kira wanted to believe that. It would have made sense if the dreams were normal. What Dan didn’t know, and what left Kira disintegrating in fear every morning, was that she wasn’t herself in them. She wasn’t in the dreams at all, had no presence she could connect to her own psyche. And didn’t dreams arise from your psyche, acting out whatever drives your anxieties and regrets, your hopes, your memories? Not these. She’d been ambushed, disappeared by this teenage stranger whose identity now clung to her cerebral cortex, as tenacious as a tumor. And even odder, these dreams refused to fade or disappear with time. They stayed with her, every one of them, tangible, vivid, indelible, as if she were supposed to make sense of them.
Kira couldn’t make sense of them. She couldn’t make sense of losing both her child and her mother, or of the fact that when she saw Dan sitting at the dinner table or lying next to her in bed she wondered why he was there and whether she wanted him gone. It was a dispassionate exercise. Kira would ask herself if she still loved him, this gentle, clear-headed man, and the reasoning side of her mind said yes. She’d been with him for five years now, when she’d left every other guy she’d dated before the one-year mark, bailing when she saw, or imagined, signs of an imminent exit. Better to leave than be left; Kira had learned that lesson at the age of four.
Now, she couldn’t remember what love without devastation felt like.
Maybe what happened in the parking lot had something to do with the fight she’d had with Dan that morning. Not that it was anything new. She’d been furious at him ever since Aimi died, because he seemed incapable of losing control, and yesterday she was furious at herself for being furious. Which was probably why she’d overreacted.
Dan had made eggs and toast, and coffee strong enough to shred stomach lining. He sat across from her, pretending, as usual, that neither of them was thinking of the darkened room upstairs, the empty crib.
“I’ve got a late meeting, but I should be home by eight,” he said. “Pizza sound good?”
“Sure.” Kira knew what was coming, let him struggle.
“Rough night,” he said carefully.
“Sorry I kept you awake.”
“It’s not that. You know it’s not that.”
“You’re the one who says there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I know, but you could get something to help you sleep. Some Ambien, or that stuff you took after Aimi—”
“This is different.”
She could tell him that she was afraid to take medication, tell him there was something so wrong with these dreams that she was afraid drugs would make them worse.
“Maybe you should talk to someone. Or how about a grief support group? I’ve thought about going.”
Kira forked into a yolk as if she might actually eat. She knew that she should reply in a way that matched his love, his good intentions, but saying the words he needed to hear would feel like tendons snapping. She dropped the fork, grabbed her mug and winged it toward the sink, where it crash-landed in a satisfying eruption of china and glass. Leaving Dan stunned, she grabbed her jacket and keys and backpack, telling herself to stop, go back, apologize. At the front door she hesitated, willing him to understand that she wanted to apologize, that she needed him to come after her, to hug her and forgive her for being a cruel person she didn’t recognize.
He didn’t come. And Kira had stepped outside, shivering in the gray grasp of early morning, shaking at the thought of what she was doing to her marriage. And terrified that she couldn’t seem to stop it. In the wake of two deaths, love seemed like an abstraction she could no longer grasp.
They’d taken different paths since Aimi died, she and Dan. He tried to normalize things, believing that if they pretended to have recovered for long enough, eventually they would. Kira couldn’t do that. Every month she silently marked the single date of Aimi’s birth and death, each time wondering if a child who is born dead really has a birthdate, and each time anticipating the stab of agony that followed. Every thought, every memory of that day brought more pain, regenerated the wound that went deeper than Aimi, twenty-one years deep to when Kira was thirteen, pregnant and desperate not to be. She’d never told Dan about that pregnancy, saw no reason to. And after conceiving Aimi, Kira had wanted her baby in a way that was visceral, stronger than any compulsion she’d
known. She’d dreamed of their future, her daughter’s life tied to hers, imagined the ways Aimi would imitate the past, the ways she would defy it. A world had awaited Aimi, the black-and-white outline of a life that she, this small, wondrous being, would fill in with colors only she could envision. But Kira’s body had failed her, and Aimi had died.
Yet Kira couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t her body but she who had failed Aimi. And Aimi had died.
No wonder there was a crying baby in some of the dreams. That girl, whoever she was, rocking a baby at her breast—an innocuous scene in theory; there was nothing frightening about a mother and child. What terrified Kira was the persistent presence of this unknown young woman, her apparent isolation and unhappiness, and the subtext of the dreams, a sense of urgency that screamed, “Pay attention!” And, most of all, the way she, Kira, disappeared.
After Aimi died, Kira and Dan had agreed on one thing without having to say it: their baby was not to be discussed. The practice brought relief, and almost as much guilt. Kira had stopped saying her baby’s name—what kind of mother does that?
While Dan was in the shower, Kira dressed quickly, hoping to avoid him. She left a note saying she was having breakfast with Camille. Camille was her oldest friend, the kind of person who always said yes when it mattered, who heard the imperceptible catch in Kira’s voice or recognized the desperation buried in a text message.
When Kira walked into Peet’s, Camille was waiting, a black coffee and a cappuccino on the table in front of her. Kira shook off the cold-needle rain and hugged her. “You’re a sweetheart.”
Camille slid the coffee across the table. “Because I didn’t buy you a blueberry scone and spared you all those calories? Which you could use, by the way. Anyway, how are you? Besides the usual level of not-good.”
The Wild Impossibility Page 2