Aimi would have had that.
Her phone chirped, announcing a text message. Maybe Cam, who was probably pissed that Kira hadn’t called when she said she would, or Dan saying he was going for a run before dinner, or working late—something he did more often lately. He’d always been a runner, but now he was training for a marathon. Kira took his action as a form of condemnation, something he did in order to avoid her. She half expected him to lace up his shoes one day and take off for good, even though he told her repeatedly that he loved her. She believed him. But when she said, “I love you too,” it was as if she were standing at the bottom of an abandoned well and her words snagged halfway up its mossy sides. Whether she was imagining this lack of conviction or if Dan heard it too, she didn’t know.
At I-80’s long decline through San Pablo, she pushed the Fiat’s engine, taking advantage of the open road. On the other side of the freeway, the bay rushed to shore under a restless sky.
Kira couldn’t shake the image of her mother standing in the doorway with her hair a mess. Rosa had been tough enough to raise a daughter on her own, and she and Kira loved one another with an intensity that came from knowing they were alone in the world. Alone together. But now Rosa seemed frail, as if the darkness she’d fought for years had finally worn her down.
Kira’s father had vanished when she was four. When Kira asked where he’d gone, why he left, when he’d be back, Rosa would say he had “grownup problems.” Kira didn’t know what grownup problems were or why her father couldn’t stay home and fix them, but she didn’t like the way her mother’s pretty face sagged when she talked about him, so Kira would hug her and say she loved her bunches and bunches and bunches, like flowers, careful not to say “and Daddy too.” By the time she was six, she’d learned to wait until her mother was in a good mood before asking questions about her father. By eleven, she’d discovered boys and clothes, and she thought of her father less often, decided she didn’t love him. Still, every time she brought in the mail she looked for his name on a return address. Frank Esposito, whereabouts unknown.
Recalling what Rosa said about her husband’s disbelief when she’d told him about the mysterious man, Kira flashed on a memory. Once, when she was twelve or thirteen, she’d asked Rosa again why her father had left, and this time her mother surprised her. “He thought I was crazy,” she said. Were those things related? Surely her father hadn’t really believed Rosa was crazy. Did he think his wife was in love with another man, and it was jealousy that drove him out the door? He must have wanted an excuse to leave, because if something had been wrong with her mother, Kira would have known.
She had only one memory of her father, and that was the nickname he’d given her. When they were alone he’d call her Cara, saying the name was a secret and she wasn’t to tell her mother. Her mother had chosen the name Kira, he said, and it meant nothing to anyone. Kira liked having a secret pet name, especially one her father had chosen for her, and she liked it even better when he told her it meant “dear.” Proof of his love, she thought when she was older, able to look back on that time but still naïve enough to believe such a thing as proof could exist.
At home, Kira parked the car and read the text message: Dan was out for a run, picking up Chinese after, home by six-thirty. She took a shower and settled on the couch next to The Thieving Magpie, an elongated feline odalisque showing an expanse of white belly, black paws masking her face. Sipping wine, Kira flipped through an issue of the New Yorker. There was an article about the opera singer Marina Poplavskaya, and she thought about saving it for her mother, who loved opera. The thought made her realize that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard opera, or any music, at her mother’s house. She tossed the magazine aside and the cat went airborne, then sat on the rug in a patch of sunlight to smooth her fur and restore her dignity.
This mysterious man—how could she find him when they had nothing to go on? If he was a relative or family friend, he might be in one of the family photo albums. Kira had taken the books—four in all, the family archive—because Rosa had said looking at them made her sad. To Kira they were time capsules, their mostly unlabeled contents open to interpretation. Her family history, such as it was. As a kid, she used to imagine the house filled with the people in the photos, an extended family of old and young, living and dead, frozen in time. After Kira’s father left, Rosa didn’t bother with the albums anymore, just tossed photos into shoeboxes and stashed them on closet shelves.
Kira got the albums from the bedroom. The first one held scallop-edged black-and-whites of stocky, unsmiling Italians in Naples and L.A., plus a few blurry photos of her grandmother Maddalena’s childhood home, a ranch in Owens Valley—a horse near a barn, a boy and girl sitting on the steps of a two-story house, a vegetable garden. Other pictures had been taken in Martinez, the family’s home since the end of World War II. Maddalena and her husband, Joe Brivio, had lived there with Rosa; then, for a short time after Maddalena’s death, Rosa and her father. Then Rosa and Frank and Kira, then Rosa and Kira. Mothers and fathers and daughters. A stream of daughters that ended with Aimi.
Kira paused at a photo of Maddalena as a young woman, her face melancholy, features gentle as a child’s. Her death was a suicide, Kira had been told, except for one time, in middle school, when her mother said Maddalena had died as a result of an accident, a revelation she later denied. Sometimes, when Rosa thought she was alone, she muttered to herself about why Maddalena would kill herself and leave her daughter with the man she hated. It worried Kira. All Rosa had left, at seventeen, was her dad and his family—distant Central Valley people, she said, who liked to keep their distance. Rosa had never received so much as a birthday card from them; Kira didn’t know their names. And hardly a word was said about Maddalena’s family.
If the mysterious man was in any of the photos, Kira couldn’t tell. Maybe her mother would recognize him.
She checked the time; Dan was half an hour late. A nudge of dread that he wouldn’t come home at all, then she fell asleep on the couch, dreaming sketchily of two-dimensional men in black-and-white scenes, all of them young, their skin pearl gray, hair gloss black, eyes minimized behind wire-rimmed glasses. All of them turning and walking away.
She woke when Dan kissed her. “Ready for spring rolls and kung pao?” Still groggy, she clung to his neck. “Hey,” he said, kissing her again. “I could get used to this.”
“I thought you weren’t coming back.”
“What, are you crazy?”
“Maybe.” Kira pulled away, thoughts about her mother’s odd behavior resurfacing. “I’m worried about my mom.”
In the kitchen, Dan set the table and opened bottles of beer while Kira told him about the encounter with her mother. Every few minutes she had to refocus because evening light from the floor-to-ceiling window behind Dan threw him into half-silhouette. He looked as if he’d stepped out of her black-and-white dream.
“Anyway, she wants me to find him, like that’s remotely possible,” Kira said. “I mean, I don’t even know if he’s real. I think I should take her to a neurologist.”
“Maybe you should ignore her.”
“Not funny,” Kira said. “I’m really worried. She was still in her bathrobe when I got there. She hadn’t even brushed her hair.”
“I’m worried too. And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to be.” Dan took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.
For the first time, Kira noticed the fatigue in his voice. He was struggling too. What would it be like to be happy and spontaneous again, capable of leaning across the counter and kissing in the unstoppable way they used to? They wouldn’t bother undressing, just do it right here.
Magpie jumped on Kira’s lap and snatched a piece of chicken. “I’m going to bed,” Kira said, dumping the cat on the floor. “I’ll go see Mom after work tomorrow.”
The photographs yielded nothing. “He�
�s not here,” Rosa said, page after page. “I knew he wouldn’t be.”
“We’ll keep looking. Don’t worry, we’ll find him,” Kira said.
A week went by, then another. Christmas was a subdued event, with few mentions of Aimi. Rosa was quiet throughout the holidays and stayed that way, which was as unnerving as her obsession with the mysterious man. She excused herself from Sunday dinners with Dan’s family, stopped calling Kira daily. When she answered her phone, she wouldn’t talk for more than five minutes, her voice distracted. Around Dan she was more animated, touching his arm and looking at him lovingly. It was sweet, Kira thought, how her mother had always adored Dan. But given how withdrawn she was now, it was odd that Dan remained the object of her attention.
One day in mid-January Kira stopped by the house and found her mother feverish, barely able to breathe. She was moved to the hospital, silenced by a ventilator. Then she died and everything went to hell.
The day it happened, a doctor swept Kira into the hall as soon as she arrived. Rosa had been hospitalized for three days, making zero progress.
“I’m the attending,” the doctor said. “You’re the daughter?”
Kira nodded, the floor beneath her unsteady. She put a hand on the wall, surprised by its solidity. “Yes. And I’m a nurse. Neonatal ICU,” she managed to say. Her body tensed and coiled.
“Your mother is extremely acidotic,” the doctor said. He was tall, too skinny, as if he’d been eaten away by his patients. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t think she’s going to make it.”
The floor dipped and buckled. “What’s her pH?” Her hand was there on the wall, seemingly suspended. She could feel nothing.
“Seven point twelve, down from seven point two-five.”
“Shit.”
“Do you want us to code her?”
Kira stared at him. “God, yes.”
She followed the doctor into the room, where her mother was a low-lying ridge under the sheet, still in a way that made Kira go cold. She kissed Rosa’s forehead, cool and papery. “I’m here, Mom. I’m here with you.” No flicker of eyelids, no tremor in her cheek. “Are you giving her bicarb?” she asked the nurse.
“Yes. She’s not responding.”
Oxygen saturation eighty-five. Shit, shit, shit. She called Dan, left a message saying to come as soon as he could, then took her mother’s hand. The cool fingers tightened on hers and Kira squeezed back, hopeful for a fraction of a second. Her mother lay silent, her face the dull gray of concrete.
“I’m here, Mom. I love you.”
All at once the room contracted, amplifying everything, as if Kira had lost the ability to filter sensations: her hamstrings taut against the plastic chair, the open weave of the blanket beneath her hand, the bleat of the monitor, the hissing sigh of the ventilator. Her lungs felt tight, too small. The air turned leaden and the room dipped and rose, earthquake sharp. Kira stiffened. The room, the air around her, settled into a slow-stretched suspension, as if time had stopped. Every alarm went off. Oxygen saturation seventy—inhuman, impossible. Rosa dusky, rigid. Heart rate eighty-two, then one-forty, one-fifty.
“What the hell?” the attending said.
“I love you, Mom, please hang on.” Kira squeezed her mother’s hand again. “I’m here, Mom. I love you.”
The cardiac monitor went mute. Then the alarms blared again, the ECG tracing wild, the scribbles of a child. Rosa’s cold fingers softened and Kira’s hand grew warmer, then hot, hotter, acid running beneath her skin. She tried to jerk her hand back, but her mother’s fingers tensed again, knitting into hers. The heat spread deeper, creeping up Kira’s fingers and palm.
“Code blue,” a voice blared overhead. “Code blue, Room 225.”
“V fib. We need you to clear,” the doctor said, paddles ready.
“I can’t. I can’t let go.” Kira leaned forward, her cheek against her mother’s hand. Then the heat in her hand vanished and Rosa’s fingers opened, the skin unyielding as plastic.
There was no point, no choice to be made. With a pH that low, her mother didn’t have a chance. Kira wanted to ask the doctor if he’d felt his hands burn in the chill grasp of a dying person, but she knew the answer.
“No code,” she said.
“Time of death, twelve seventeen,” the doctor said, and pocketed his stethoscope. He touched Kira’s shoulder. “I’m very sorry.”
A nurse hit a switch and the ventilator gasped into silence.
Blood was already pooling in Rosa’s fingers, her skin rubbery, mottled like blue cheese. As the minutes passed, her mother’s face took on the chiseled look of a statue, recognizable but wrong. At some point—she had no idea when—Kira found herself sobbing in Dan’s arms.
That night she dreamed about a sad young woman, about oncoming headlights, a crushing impact. It seemed appropriate, a normal manifestation of grief.
Seven
June 23, 1945
The barn glowed pink in the seconds before the sun cleared the Inyos and splashed yellow hues over the valley. Maddalena dressed in a rush, trousers and a faded cotton blouse suitable for laundry day. It would be a dreary morning of washing, but the afternoon promised a visit to Regina’s house and a ride past Manzanar on the way. A happy prospect, and even if she didn’t see the boy she would savor the possibility of next time. Each time she saw him she inked a tiny B in her calendar; when she found out his name, she would mark the days with his initials.
She tied her hair back with a yellow ribbon, the best she could do to pretty herself without making her mother suspicious. If only her mother were more like Mrs. Henderson. Maddalena could walk into the Hendersons’ house and shout, “I’m in love with a Japanese boy!” and she’d bet her bottom dollar Mrs. Henderson would smile and say, “That’s nice, dear.”
Downstairs, the sharp smell of boiled coffee lingered in the kitchen and the breeze filtering through the screened door promised another scorching day. Her father and brother would be outside already, working the cattle. Her mother was in the vegetable garden, inching down the rows with her gathering basket. Maddalena fixed tea and toast and ate it while watching her mother work. The garden ran the length of the house, territory her mother was determined to defend. Papa wasn’t allowed to set foot in it, not that he showed any signs of wanting to. But Mama squabbled at him anyway, and he squabbled right back. Like chickens, Maddalena thought, and sometimes she couldn’t tell if they were angry or simply arguing out of habit. She couldn’t even tell if they loved each other, though she supposed they must. Maybe after they got married they let their love shrivel up like everything else in this desert. Not her. She was going to have a real love affair with the man she married, and she wouldn’t let anything dry it up.
Three hours later the last of the wash flapped on the clotheslines. Maddalena stretched her aching arms overhead, gazing toward Manzanar. A hot wind lifted her blouse, grazed the skin beneath and churned up a feeling of pleasure deep in her belly. In minutes she’d be on her way!
In the kitchen, earth-scented air welcomed her—basil and oregano in the sauce simmering on the stove, freshly shelled peas in a sieve on the counter. She gulped water from the tap, then pocketed a few carrots from her mother’s harvest.
“Use a glass, Maddalena,” her mother said. “Did you wash your hands?”
“Yes. I’m going to Regina’s now.”
“Be back before dark.”
“I will!” Maddalena called, already out the door.
In the barn, Scout flapped his lips in greeting, snorting softly. “Here you go, boy.” Maddalena gave him a carrot and rubbed his forehead. “I know you’d rather have sugar cubes; I miss sugar, too. But these are sweet, I promise.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had one of her mother’s almond cookies or a slice of her brown sugar pound cake. Probably at a church supper, since her mother used up their sugar rat
ions baking for church events. Mama said she didn’t miss the sugar, but she guarded coffee as if it were gold dust. Papa complained too, about not having good whiskey anymore. He liked to say bootleg whiskey was criminal in more ways than one.
Rationing was tiresome, and a daily reminder of what was happening so many thousands of miles away. When the war started, Maddalena didn’t think it would affect anyone except the boys and men who went off to fight. Then Manzanar was built and thousands of Japanese were plunked down, and people said it felt like Owens Valley had been invaded. The newspaper labeled the Japanese prisoners enemies of the state; the government called them spies and the men who weren’t at the front called them Japs and kept guns at their bedsides. Everything Maddalena thought was normal had changed in the first six months of the war.
After saddling Scout, Maddalena jogged toward Foothill Road. Her parents didn’t know it, but for her everything was changing again. The people at Manzanar weren’t the dangerous traitors she’d been told they were, they were people, plain and simple. How could a boy who played baseball be a threat to the country?
The breeze picked up, a few degrees cooler this time. Maddalena took it as a sign; the afternoon would be good, she felt it in her bones. Manzanar lay ahead, a promise on the horizon. Would the boy be there? Yes, yes, yes, she thought with every chug-step of the horse. But she hated calling him “the boy.” Was he a Mike or a Billy or a Bobby like the boys at school, the ones whose families had been Americans as long as they could remember? None of those boring, ordinary names seemed to fit. A Japanese name would be more interesting, and different too, like hers. She supposed they had that in common, she and the boy—knowing what it was like to be different. At school no one could pronounce Maddalena, so she went by Lena, but they said that wrong too, Leena instead of Lehna. And there wasn’t a thing she could do about her last name. When the teachers called roll, it was all Adams and Bagwell and Kirk and Miller, except for her. Her first two years in school here, every time her teacher called out “Maddalena Moretti,” fat-face Stevie Stewart whispered, “Moretti Spaghetti,” to his stupid friends and they’d all laugh. When he cornered her on the playground one day, chanting his stupid rhyme over and over, Maddalena punched him and knocked him down. The split lip she gave him earned her a visit to the principal’s office and a smack from his paddle, but it was worth it. And eventually everyone got tired of the joke and Fat-Face shut up.
The Wild Impossibility Page 5