Akira submerged the mop and the drowned strings danced, tangling and untangling themselves. No, the problem with wanting the girl wasn’t that she was white. The problem was that she was free and he wasn’t.
Five
June 23, 1945
At Manzanar, it wasn’t long before we knew about the girl. In places where the mind is as confined as the body, where privacy is as thin as a brush stroke wanting ink, there is nothing that isn’t everyone’s business. We took our entertainment where we found it, watching days pass from the hard stoop steps, counting the number of times people walked by, speculating about where they were headed and what they’d do when they got there. Manzanar gave us little to do but wait, and endure, and we distracted ourselves with the imagined intimacies of others.
And so we noticed when Akira watched the desert for the girl. We watched for her too, envied her command of the far side of the fence, her freedom to go where the wind whispered to her, to follow whim or instinct. Freedom made her seem as distant as our old homes—Terminal Island, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle—homes we would never forget, homes we wondered if we would see again.
The girl rode past Manzanar as if we weren’t there, as if she had forgotten about our city wrapped in barbed wire, impossible to miss. The first time, we took her nearness for chance. The second time, her glance suggested curiosity, though the passage of three years, two months, and twelve days since the first prisoners arrived should have made us part of the terrain, not zoo animals to be stared at. The third time, the talk began. Those of us who were less observant wondered why the girl kept coming here alone, why she paid no heed to the guard towers, the machine guns and rifles, the searchlights that jabbed holes in the sky. Those of us who had eyes, who saw how Akira looked at her and how she looked at him, knew why she came. Some would call it love; some were less romantic. On the baseball diamond, in the schools and mess halls, making nets or stoking boilers, we whispered about what we had seen, what we had heard. Or what we imagined.
We knew the girl would keep coming back. We old men who remembered our youth—the recklessness, the blindness of it—we knew there would be trouble.
Six
December 17, 2010–January 14, 2011
Death seldom announces its intentions. Living alone in her house in Martinez, Rosa seemed happy for the most part, at least to those who didn’t know her well. Kira knew better. As a child, she watched her mother give way to the darkness that came without warning, sometimes in short bursts, sometimes dominating her for weeks. When the darkness came, Rosa would retreat to her room and a bleak chill would infiltrate the house. Kira didn’t know why her mother had these “spells,” as Rosa called them, but being abandoned by her husband seemed reason enough. By the time Kira was ten, she’d grasped that if you’re seventeen and your mother dies, as Rosa’s had, you don’t come away whole. By the time Kira was a teen herself, she understood that Rosa couldn’t have watched her husband walk out the door, his rigid back signaling his dismissal, without wondering what was wrong with her.
The darkness in Rosa thinned when she met Dan and brightened when Kira married him. But it was the promise of Aimi, of a blood-borne through-line, that made Rosa burn with a joy Kira had never seen in her. Technically, Rosa died of pneumonia, an invasion that defeated her emphysema-pocked lungs. But what really killed her, Kira thought, was Aimi’s death.
After the funeral, Rosa had gone into recluse mode, and Dan would drive to Martinez every few days to make sure she had groceries and her bills were paid. Kira withdrew too, lying in the darkened bedroom in an emotional coma, wanting her mother—who would understand the loss in a way no man could—to come to her. Rosa didn’t come. When Kira surfaced, her body commanding her to drink or eat or go to the bathroom, her dulled brain recognized a pattern of absence, how much agony could come from nothing. The recurrences stunned her—years ago, the silent, shadowed nights of her childhood; the kitchen, forlorn, with only a little girl at the table. Today, the baby’s room down the hall, empty and holding its breath. Motherhood—that most essential of human states, a concept of serenity that dominated religions and cultures and tamed violent men—it kept its distance. The physical act of giving birth didn’t make Kira feel like a mother; she needed a child at her breast, on her hip, at the table.
There had been no pattern to her mother’s retreats, and no way for a child, however determined or desperate, to anticipate or prevent her disappearances. One night they would make hot chocolate and popcorn and play Mouse Trap or Scrabble and the next Kira would be alone, eating Rice Krispies for dinner and telling herself everything was okay, that all mothers locked themselves in their bedrooms sometimes. With her books for company, Kira would read aloud a favorite chapter of Ramona the Brave or Harriet the Spy, raising her voice to mask the dread creeping into her heart.
These intermittent withdrawals of her mother had happened for as long as Kira could remember. She supposed the resultant loneliness was one reason, at thirteen, she took up with a janitor at school, a chunky blond guy named Buddy. He was older than her friends, so he seemed to offer what they couldn’t—the comfort and guidance of an adult—but not so much older that being with him felt wrong. The attention felt good even if the sex didn’t. The first time he entered her, pain knifed through her pelvis and she sobbed the whole time he did his business, which she was sure would split her apart. The sex didn’t get much better after that. She liked the kissing, the heat and jumpiness she felt when he touched her, but eventually he skipped the foreplay, gave her one rough kiss and shoved her down on the bed. She had been wrong about Buddy, stupid to think that his sweat, his grassy-smelling semen, could drown her loneliness.
When Kira found out she was pregnant, she knew what was coming. She was six weeks along when she told Buddy the news; afterward, while she was in his bathroom, he stuffed forty dollars in her backpack and walked out. For an hour she sat on the bed in his filthy apartment, lit only by a skinny window and a dim overhead light, in case he came back, knowing the whole time that he wouldn’t. She didn’t want the baby, or Buddy either, and she’d only told him she was pregnant so that he would know what he’d done. If only Cam were there. Cam was the only person besides Buddy who knew Kira was pregnant, and Kira had sworn her to secrecy.
When she got up to leave, Kira grabbed a T-shirt that Buddy had left on the bed and stuffed it into her backpack. Something of his for the baby, she thought, then realized she wanted no reminders of him and threw the shirt into the toilet. She didn’t cry, only wondered how it was possible, with this living thing inside her, to feel empty.
At home, Kira stood outside her mother’s closed bedroom door, wanting to tell her what had happened, afraid to tell her, hoping she would sense her daughter’s presence and call her into the room, pull her onto the bed and ask her what was wrong. The house was silent except for the irritating tick of the cuckoo clock. When her mother’s door didn’t open, Kira took it as a sign that she should keep her secret. She took a bath and tried to scrub away the scent and memory of Buddy.
Later, downstairs in the kitchen, she made toast slathered with Nutella. From her place at the table, with the lights off and the back door open, she had a clear view of the fishpond and the stony wall behind it, where a statue of the Madonna stood guard over the golden koi below. Everything looked moonlight cold except for the Madonna, whose face radiated kindness. Kira wolfed the toast and went outside. The garden was beautiful and slightly unreal, like a black-and-white photograph. Blossoms glowed white and lilac gray; shadows draped themselves everywhere, black velvet voids. The damp grass chilled Kira’s bare toes. A breath in the water, the sigh and gasp of surfacing fish, sleek canisters scaled and feathered and lipped. Kira strained to see the Madonna’s face in the darkness, the curve of her cheek and forehead, the gentleness of her mouth, all so familiar and dear. She murmured the only prayer she remembered from the time Rosa had tried to make them both practici
ng Catholics, said it over and over until her mouth was dry and the chill in her feet had reached her throat. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Kira spent the next three weeks willing the thing inside her to disappear and visiting the garden Madonna to pray for forgiveness, though she believed she was stupid, not sinful. Mostly, she wished she’d never met Buddy, never let him touch her, never let his Neanderthal DNA anywhere near her eggs.
Then, late one night, her answer came. Pain cramped her belly, and clots and threads bloodied the toilet bowl. Crouched on the bathroom floor, Kira cried with relief, confusion, sadness. She had wanted this baby gone, and now it was gone, leaving her empty belly blade-cold. She’d wanted her baby to die and it did. The Virgin might have forgiven her for getting pregnant, but Kira wasn’t sure she could forgive herself for wishing her baby would die.
She never told her mother. The loss of her virginity, the loss of the baby, the monstrousness of her death wish—three more unspoken truths in their silent house.
Like the first pregnancy, Aimi was an accident. At first Kira didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant. Trying to reconcile her identity with the concept of motherhood, she questioned whether she could love a child with the selflessness all children deserved, whether she had the right to have a child after what she had done. She spun through circles of ambivalence about the pregnancy, her trajectory interrupted now and then by happiness and often by fear. Then, out shopping with her mother one day, Kira bent over to try on some shoes and Rosa noticed the small bulge of her belly. “You’re pregnant!” she said, and nearly knocked Kira over with an exuberant hug. “When were you going to tell me?” Kira leaned into her mother, the warmth of her body. As a kid she’d pulled away from Rosa’s caresses, the nervous fingers stroking her hair. She’d resisted Rosa’s displays of love despite her relief that her mother was back from one of her periods of isolation, being a mother again, visible and overbearing. Now Kira welcomed that smothering, the love that came with a dose of desperation.
Rosa insisted on being present when Kira told Dan, whose joy equaled his mother-in-law’s, the two of them as giddy as teenagers in love. Kira watched their normal, uncomplicated response to good news and wished she could be like them. But as the months passed, Dan’s happiness infiltrated Kira’s defenses, as did her growing belly, and she began to want this child with the same degree of ferocity she’d wished for a miscarriage so many years before.
One day, when Kira was sitting on the couch reading, book propped on her domed belly, she caught Dan gazing at her with a kind of reverence.
“What, you’ve never seen a pregnant woman before?” she said, laughing. “It’s a pretty normal thing, you know. Not like I have a special talent or something.”
“I keep trying to imagine what it’s like, and I can’t. I’m envious, to tell the truth.”
“Imagine nausea and heartburn,” Kira said.
“You’re so romantic.” Dan leaned over and cupped his hands on her belly. “Hey, child of mine, your mother isn’t as jaded as she pretends to be. Besides, you’ve got me. We can team up against her.”
“Just what I need, you turning my kid against me before she’s even born.”
“A man’s got to have allies. So, any nausea now?”
“No.”
He tossed her book aside. “Heartburn?”
“No.” Kira laughed. “You’re kind of obvious, you know.”
“I know.” Dan kissed her and started unbuttoning her shirt.
When Aimi died it became clear what having a grandchild meant to Rosa. For her, Aimi would have been more than a wondrous addition to the family, the first stamp of a new generation. A unique distillation of genetics, this baby was part of Kira, part of Rosa herself, part of the mother Rosa had lost at seventeen. And so Kira endured her mother’s persistent lament, even when each mention of Aimi seared her brain, when the word “death” made her think of not one child but two. And every day she buried deeper inside herself the hope that with Aimi she would have redeemed herself.
The first inkling that something was wrong with Rosa came on a rainy Saturday in December, eight months after Aimi’s death. Kira went to see her mother after work and Rosa came to the door in her bathrobe, her graying hair loose and tangled, eyes capsized with worry. This was not like Rosa, a woman who put on eye makeup when she had the flu.
“Mom, are you sick? Why didn’t you call me?”
Rosa pulled away from her daughter’s embrace, and Kira followed her to the kitchen.
“I’m frozen,” Kira said. “You want some tea? And why aren’t you dressed?”
“She should have told me,” Rosa said.
“Who should have told you what?”
“My mother. It doesn’t make sense.” Rosa pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Who was he?”
“Who was who?” Kira surveyed the tea in the cupboard. “Chamomile? Earl Grey?”
“You know, the man my mother told me about. The special one. You don’t remember anything I tell you.”
At first Kira had no idea what her mother was talking about. Then it came to her—the day they’d buried Aimi, on the way home from the cemetery, a distraught Rosa had launched into a tirade about a man she said her mother had known, saying she needed to find him but she couldn’t remember his name. Kira, snowed on Valium in the backseat, had let Rosa’s hysteria float past her, aware enough only to resent her for worrying about some nameless man on the day they’d buried Aimi.
“You mentioned him once, after the funeral.” Kira put three boxes of tea on the table. “I had other things on my mind,” she said, and instantly regretted the sarcasm. “I’m sorry, Mom. I thought you’d forgotten about him.”
“No,” Rosa said quietly.
“So what’s the big deal? Why is he so important?”
“I don’t know!”
“Try to calm down, okay? We’ll figure it out. What else do you remember? What did your mother say about him?”
“He has black hair, and he’s not too tall.”
“Great, Mom.” Kira smiled to show she was joking. “That only describes about a million Italian men.”
“You don’t understand,” Rosa said, her breathing ragged. “I’m afraid.”
She looked ancient, frail, betrayed. Kira sat for a moment, corralling the anger that always muscled in when she worried about her mother. Her mother had to be okay. Kira needed her to be okay. She had no reserves left after Aimi.
“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, Mom. Certainly nothing to be afraid of.”
Rosa wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue from her bathrobe sleeve. Her breathing sounded like a chainsaw.
The kettle screamed. Kira silenced it. Time to change tactics, acknowledge, validate. “I’m sorry I don’t remember him, Mom. Whoever this man is, or was, I can tell he’s important to you.” Textbook talk, straight out of Psych 101, but it worked. Usually. “Try to remember something about him. Where did your mother meet him?”
“I told you, I don’t know! He’s important, that’s all.” Rosa was wheezing now, her face ghostlike.
“Try to calm down. Where’s your nebulizer?”
“I told your father…” Rosa forced the words out. “About him. He…didn’t believe me.”
The words carried a challenge. After all the years growing up without her father, after all her mother’s refusals to speak of him, now Kira was supposed to take sides? Fatigue slammed into her, followed by panicked adrenaline. She found the nebulizer on the counter and gave it to Rosa.
“I believe you, Mom. Please don’t worry.”
If this man was so important, how had Kira managed to get through her entire childhood without hearing about him? And why wouldn’t her father believe Rosa? Either the man was real or Rosa was showing signs of e
arly dementia, a thought that made Kira lightheaded. Her mother should see a doctor as soon as possible.
Rosa puffed, hands shaking. “I want you to find him.” It was an order, not a plea.
“I’ll do my best, I promise. Write down anything you remember about him, or call me. But don’t think about him now; you’re too upset. Things will come to you when your mind’s on something else.”
Rosa nodded, her respirations less strained.
“Speaking of other things, remember Kendra Martin, the micro-preemie we were sure wouldn’t make it? She went home yesterday, one year old. How’s that for a birthday present?”
Rosa sat with her eyes closed, clutching the nebulizer. Then she spoke as if she hadn’t heard a word about Kendra Martin. “He wanted a child. He would have loved our Aimi.” She wept again.
Kira took her mother’s hand. “I know, Mom. He would have.” Her voice fogged with tears. “We all loved her.”
An hour later, after convincing her mother to lie down, Kira left for home. She didn’t believe they would ever find this mystery man and she was pretty sure her mother didn’t believe it either. Once in the car, fatigue dulled Kira’s body, but her mind shifted into overdrive. The rises and curves of Highway 4, usually hypnotic, seemed revelatory, each incrementation of the wheel under her hands sending her thoughts in a new direction. Work had been rough that day, with three transports, a cardiac kid who’d coded, and a baby who got discharged to a mother Kira didn’t trust. Something was off with her. Plenty of parents had off-the-charts anxiety about going solo after weeks of cardiac monitors and round-the-clock nurses, but this mother was edgy, restive in a way that spooked Kira. Social services had greenlighted the discharge, though, so there was nothing she could do except tuck the baby into his car seat and wish him a good life. A life of love.
The Wild Impossibility Page 4