Kira shook her head. “I’m…I don’t know…just exhausted, I guess.” She glanced around the coffee shop, populated by graying women in threes and fours, a tattooed skater hunched over an iPhone, a barefaced young woman with a baby bump who was trying to get her three-year-old to stop blowing milk bubbles. Suddenly the woman smiled and pressed her son’s hand to the upslope of her belly.
Kira remembered that feeling, the weird invasion of privacy, the duality of body within body.
“What’s going on?” Camille said.
Now that Kira was here, in the reality of rain and coffee, she found it nearly impossible to explain. In the daytime dream, or whatever it was, the girl was the constant, the protagonist; like the nighttime dreams, it was too sketchy to understand. The dreams left Kira with a sense of foreboding, as if there were something about them she should know. Yet she felt the girl’s emotions, carried them implicitly with her as if they’d taken root in her own DNA. She was that girl with the baby—and that terrified girl, without her baby, in the daytime dream—but Kira had no context for any of it. No names, no childhood memories, no labels. Trying to make sense of them was like trying to put together a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle when half of the pieces were missing.
The table next to them was empty now, the young mother maneuvering her strollered child toward the door. “You know the dreams I’ve been having, with the girl and the baby?” Kira said. “I had one yesterday, kind of. I mean, I guess it was a dream but it was after work and I couldn’t move and it was so fucking scary.”
“Yeah, I’ve had dreams like that, when someone’s coming after me with a knife or a gun and I can’t scream, much less run. I hate that.”
“I wasn’t asleep, though. I was in my car—Jesus, I don’t know, I must have dozed off, right?” Kira told Camille everything that had happened the day before, about the fight with Dan and the twins dying and the terrifying not-dream. Then she was sobbing, Camille’s alarmed eyes on her, everyone’s eyes on her, and what she was saying sounded worse than when it was trapped in her head.
“Come on, let’s go sit in my car.” Camille steered Kira to a Subaru wagon strewn with sippy cups, stray socks, and pulver-ized Cheerios. Kira crumbled into the passenger seat, shaking.
Camille turned on the heat. “With all the crap in this car, you’d think I’d have some Kleenex. Wait, here’s a napkin. Okay, listen. First of all, you’re going to be fine. Yes, you are. You’re strong; look at everything you’ve been through. I know you had a horrible day and it was really scary, but give yourself a break. Your mom died and you’re exhausted and you spent the day dealing with dying babies. That’s a lot.”
“Babies die all the time.”
“But they’re not always your patients. And you’re vulnerable right now; it’s only been a few weeks. Give yourself some time.”
“Dan wants me to see someone.”
“You told him?”Camille squeezed Kira’s hand. “That’s good.”
“No, he said that yesterday morning. I didn’t tell him about the daytime thing. I’m not going to.”
“Why not? I know you don’t want to hear it, and I’m not trying to piss you off, but he is trying, you know. Let him help you get through this.”
“I’ve got you for that.”
Camille gave her an exasperated look. “You’ve got him too. Don’t you think he wants that?”
“I’ve got to go.” Kira dug her keys out of her bag. “I’ll call you later.”
Standing on the sidewalk, Kira lifted her face to the wind whipping the gingko trees along the curb, then walked, jacket unzipped and hood down despite the scattered rain. The skies shapeshifted, gunmetal clouds gathering force.
When a child is born dead, you give up your future, yours and hers, the promise of a blended life. When your mother dies nine months later, when you are still little more than animated cardboard, you forfeit the opposite—your history, your identity, both drawn from the woman who held you, nursed you, comforted you with her body, voice, touch, smell. Kira felt unmoored without the only person who’d known her intimately as a child, who’d shared her memories, who would have had answers if Kira had been allowed to ask questions.
She hadn’t been. Don’t ask, her mother had said. Betrayal and abandonment are not proper subjects for dinnertime conversation; that message was clear by the time Kira was eight. There were the two of them; that was enough, her mother said. They would do fine without her father, the goddamn son of a bitch. “You were four, Kira, four years old. Who ditches his wife and kid, disappears and never sends a dime?” Kira had tried to make herself invisible when her mother talked like that. A headache, then silence, would follow the rage, and Rosa would retreat to her bedroom, snapping the door shut behind her. To Kira, the door closing sounded like an accusation.
If Aimi had lived, there would have been no closed doors, no child left alone to do her homework and put herself to bed. Aimi could have asked any questions she wanted to and Kira would have done her best to respond, even if she didn’t have many answers. They would have been a family of four—if she counted Rosa, and it was impossible to use the word “family” without thinking of Rosa—but on the day Aimi was born and died they became three again, hopeless; two again when Rosa died. Two people joined by marriage, not blood, and it wasn’t the same thing. Kira chastised herself for thinking that way, remembered hating that her mother swore by the old saying that blood was thicker than water. Yet she pushed Dan away, and he drifted alongside her on silent currents until he couldn’t stand her distance any longer. When he reached for her, she pushed him harder, below the surface, and still he bobbed up, treading water alongside her. She was grateful for his resilience, certain it wouldn’t last, incapable of worrying about it.
Dan tolerated her sabotage as if he understood it better than she did. When the dreams started, he’d reassured her that of course she’d dream about a baby after Aimi died; you didn’t have to be Freud to figure that out. Kira didn’t point out the flaw in his logic—that the dreams didn’t start after Aimi’s death but nine months later, after Rosa’s. Dan promised that all this would fade with time and they would move on. But he didn’t feel the rending Kira did, the physical betrayal. The helplessness when her labor started at thirty weeks, she’d never forget that. And when her hope died, an ashen despair buried itself in her muscles and bones.
Kira had been at work when the back pain started, so severe that she couldn’t stand. By the time Dan arrived to take her home, the contractions were coming fast.
“You’re dead white,” Dan said. “We’re going to the hospital.”
Kira reached for his hand. He was disappearing, getting smaller by the second. How odd, she thought. Is that what fear does? Do we all get smaller until we disappear? Her body enlarged to make room for the pain, dense as clay.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” the charge nurse said.
“It’s ten minutes to Oakland General,” Dan said. “I’m not waiting.”
They were at the ER in five. Dan jerked the car to a stop and helped Kira out. “Fuck,” he said, staring behind her into the car. Kira looked at the tan leather seat, black with blood, and that was the last thing she remembered until after the surgery.
A partial abruption, blood pooled behind the placenta. There was no explanation, no reason it should have happened; Kira had no risk factors. If she’d seen the bleeding sooner, Aimi might have lived. The C-section should have saved her, but the blood loss was too great. No explanation. Should have saved her. Meaningless, infuriating words.
Afterward, Kira and Dan held Aimi for hours, Rosa crying next to the bed, looking ten years older. They unwrapped the pink blanket, stroked Aimi’s small body, kissed her sweet face, smoothed the hair like black down. Touched the tiny fingers that Dan, at some point in that void, wrapped around Kira’s index finger and photographed. Tears like lava. Dan’s rav
aged face. Rosa’s whispered prayers. The pain of breathing. The loss, the memory of loss, hollowed into Kira’s body. She had wanted this baby. She wasn’t thirteen anymore, worried about shaming her mother, willing her fetus to die.
No, the baby in the dreams wasn’t Aimi; she was someone else’s. Dan was wrong, despite all his reasoning and good intentions. He would insist that in dream language a baby was a baby, a manifestation of longing. No. Whoever this baby was, she was someone. That baby and her mother meant something.
At home, chilled from the rain, Kira took a bath. Thoughts assaulted her—the dreams, the weird daytime thing, Aimi, her mother, the long-ago miscarriage. “Stop, just stop,” she whispered. “Please.” She sank below the water, stayed there until the knifing pressure in her chest silenced the clamor in her head.
Some time later, a tap at the door. “Kira? You okay?”
Dan was there, worried about her, about them, waiting for her to give him a sign that she was, or could be again, the person he loved enough to marry. She wasn’t that person anymore. She wasn’t sure she could be.
Four
June 18, 1945
Maddalena picked at her dinner, her family’s voices floating past her as insignificant as cricket song. Shifting in her chair, she tried to unstick her thighs from the seat. She didn’t care about the war, or how many calves they’d have next season, or whether Papa could get a good price for the cattle he planned to sell. She didn’t care whether next spring would be a good time to plant alfalfa, or that her mother wanted her to bake three pies for the church social on Sunday. She’d seen the Manzanar boy again—from a distance this time, but she could tell he recognized her. She’d been to Manzanar three times since the day of the ball game and she’d seen him twice, both times on the hospital steps. He’d been wearing hospital clothes, so she supposed he worked there. Her body hummed. He was the one good thing that had happened to her since school got out, something to perk up a long summer of boring chores and loneliness. She didn’t get to town very often, and when she did go, she might as well not have bothered, because the Lone Pine kids stuck together like wolves. Doing the shopping was about as exciting as summer got. That, and seeing Regina. But this summer would be different.
Maddalena had already ignored her mother’s rules, and she intended to keep ignoring them. Stay on Foothill Road, her mother said; don’t go near Manzanar; don’t go to town alone. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Her mother overreacted to everything, and now that Maddalena had been to Manzanar she’d seen for herself that it wasn’t the dangerous place her mother said it was. Mama liked to worry, maybe needed to. Mrs. Henderson wasn’t like that. “Our little secret,” she’d said about their visit to Manzanar, and with those three words Maddalena’s world burst open. What her mother didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. So today Maddalena had ridden Scout up Foothill Road until they were out of sight of the house, then veered east on one of the old irrigation ditches left over from when the valley was full of ranches and farms, back when there was plenty of water. Before the Los Angeles water thieves, as her father called them, bought up everybody’s land along with the water rights. More than twenty years ago, ancient history now.
Marco reached for the breadbasket and Mama slapped his knuckles, giving him a look that made her brown eyes black. “Where are your manners? Maddalena, pass the bread.” She got up to refill the milk pitcher, one impatient hand sweeping from forehead to knotted, inescapable bun.
Maddalena couldn’t remember when her mother hadn’t been impatient or irritable or tired. One time her mother had told Papa that everything was his fault, that their life would have been better if they’d stayed in East Los Angeles. The desert was no place to make a living, she said. But Papa hadn’t been happy in East L.A., not with all the Jews and Mexicans moving into their neighborhood. That was why he’d bought this ranch for next to nothing, sight unseen, when a cousin who owned it got deathbed sick. Papa took to ranching immediately, puffed up with pride when he surveyed his land and cattle, his muscles stretching thin the shoulders of his work shirts. He seemed to thrive on the hardship of surviving in the high desert, while Mama grew drier and harsher by the day.
Marco grabbed two rolls without saying thank you and stuffed half of one in his mouth. The boy at Manzanar might be Marco’s age, Maddalena thought, but she knew from a thirty-second conversation that he had better manners, and he was a heck of a lot nicer too. Marco had a mean streak as wide as the valley. As a kid, he used to catch lizards and snakes, cut their heads off, and wave them in Maddalena’s face. One time he found a coyote pup and brought it home, and when Maddalena went to the kitchen to get some milk for it, he smashed the poor thing’s head with a rock. Maddalena had cried for hours, and Marco laughed. Later she buried the pup in the scrub beyond the paddock, where he wouldn’t find it and dig it up to spite her.
“Papa, have you ever been to Manzanar?”
Her father studied her as if she were a horse he might buy, flicking specks of cheese from his moustache. “Once or twice. Why?”
“When I ride past it on the way to Regina’s house, it looks sad.”
“Three years, and you’re only now noticing it?” Marco said, snorting.
“Very funny.”
Her mother’s eyes were sharp. “You’re staying on Foothill Road, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Mama. You know what I was thinking today? The desert is awfully beautiful, isn’t it, in a ferocious sort of way?”
“You’re a strange one,” Mama said, rising. “Clear the table now.”
The men disappeared, Marco out the back door and her father into the living room. The radio clicked on. Time for another war report. Gathering the plates and silverware, Maddalena wondered if the people at Manzanar listened to the news, if the boy did. What did he do besides play baseball and work at the hospital?
“Ferocious,” she whispered. She liked the sound of the word, the wildness buried in it.
Mrs. Henderson didn’t know it, but she had changed everything. If she hadn’t taken Maddalena to the art show, Maddalena and Regina wouldn’t have gone to the baseball game, and Maddalena wouldn’t have wandered away from the bleachers and met the boy. He was different, not like any boy she knew in Lone Pine, who talked only of pickup trucks and hunting. When he looked at her that day, it was like he saw her, in a way one else did. She had to talk to him again, and not from the back of a horse.
Akira was halfway down the hospital steps, a trash bag in each hand, when he spotted the girl. She rode as if she’d been born in the saddle, looking more relaxed than anyone on a thousand pounds of animal had a right to. Like she owned the desert.
“There she is,” he said to Paul. “The girl I told you about. The one at the game.”
“Eh. Pretty enough, I guess,” Paul said.
“You must be blind. She’s a looker. You should see her up close.”
“What do you want with her when you’ve got Annabelle? Say the word, my man, and I’ll take that little lovely off your hands.”
The girl was closer now, riding along the western fence. Akira watched her, waiting for the small, surreptitious wave he knew would come when she saw him.
Paul dumped his bags, then Akira’s, and slammed the trash bin closed. “Let’s go, dreamer, time to get back to work. You’re in here, she’s out there. Forget her. You playing poker tonight?”
“Sure, if Annabelle doesn’t raise a stink.”
“So what if she does? You’re not married yet.”
Inside, Akira stopped to wipe his glasses. The wind was hot today, flinging dust and sagebrush with malicious intent, coating his lips and tongue with the iron taste of desert. Every time the heat returned he thought there was nothing worse; then winter rolled around, cold that drilled right through his wool coat, made his bones and teeth brittle. The one good thing about winter was that the frozen ground held i
ts own against the wind, which meant there was less dirt pelting his eyeballs and filling every pore. In three years he hadn’t gotten used to any of it—the desert that alternated between oven and freezer, the dryness, the wind that made his nerves jump. What he wouldn’t give to be standing on the fishing pier back home in Berkeley, gazing at the Golden Gate and tasting the salt spray.
He headed for Ward 2, his station for the day. Officially, he and Paul were orderlies, but they did whatever the nurses and housekeeping supervisor wanted done. Only two of the ward’s eight beds were occupied, so he’d been told to clean the floors. Slinging a mop was better than being bored, and it earned him twelve dollars a month, enough cash for poker and sodas and smokes.
Akira worked the mop in careful swaths, making sure every inch of the linoleum floor gleamed. He had to admit Paul was right; he was nuts to think about the girl. Not because she was white, though. Her skin was warm, not the kind of white that burned in the first spring sun, but she was whiter than he was, or at least she was to the kind of people who thought the Japanese were yellow. He’d never been called yellow in his life until Proclamation 9066. Then the word was everywhere, in the papers and on signs and posters, on ugly lips and tongues, and everybody with so much as an ounce of Japanese blood was sent to the camps. As if the Japanese were worse enemies than the Germans or Italians.
Three years of being called yellow bastards. Three years in prison.
Apparently the Italians had been sent away too, though not as many—only the ones too close to the coast for comfort, as if living near San Francisco Bay put them in cahoots with “the Japs.” Japs. Such an ugly word. And ridiculous since many of the Japanese at Manzanar had never even seen Japan; they were Americans, plain and simple. And what were people who were born in Japan supposed to do, like his parents? They couldn’t become American citizens and they didn’t want to go back to Japan. So they’d stayed, belonging nowhere and putting up with it, happy to make a good living and be part of the community. Then the war started, and suddenly they were accused of being the enemy.
The Wild Impossibility Page 3