“Lena, if you’re done in here, help me with supper,” her mother said, bustling in and turning on the radio loud enough to hear it in the kitchen. Amanda of Honeymoon Hill, as usual. A couple in love, doomed to constant troubles that always ended happily. Predictable, which was why her mother liked it and Maddalena hated it.
“Lena, did you hear me?”
From the radio, the breathy gushing of Amanda, then her deep-voiced beau declaring undying love. Maddalena pictured Akira, his arms around her, leaning in to kiss her.
“Maddalena!”
“Yes, Mama.” Maddalena flushed. Thinking about Akira when her parents were nearby made her feel like she’d done something terrible.
Half an hour later Regina burst through the back door, hauling a pink suitcase and waving an issue of Movie Mirror. “Lena! Look at my hair!” She spun around.
Regina’s hair, which usually framed her face in straight blonde curtains, now swept high from her forehead and curled in soft ringlets around her neck. “It’s a Lana Turner ’do. I had to sleep on prickly rollers all night, but it was worth it.”
“Awfully fancy for a girl your age,” Mama said. “You girls can set the table now.”
Maddalena rolled her eyes. “I think you look beautiful,” she whispered.
After supper was over, an eternity of talk about livestock and weather forecasts and the autumn apple crop, the girls cleaned up the kitchen and ran upstairs. Maddalena closed the bedroom door, then the window.
“Are you crazy? Open the window, I’m dying.” Regina sprawled on the floor, fanning herself.
“It’s only for a minute. I have something to tell you.” Maddalena sat cross-legged on the floor. “Can you keep a secret?”
Regina bolted upright. “Of course!”
“Cross your heart?”
Regina made an X on her chest, and Maddalena told her everything, from her encounter with Akira at the baseball game, to seeing him again on her rides to Manzanar, to getting shot at. The words flew out, and Regina listened with her mouth half open, her face shining like it did when she talked about Robert Taylor. But this was different. This was real life, a matter of life and death.
When Maddalena got to the part about the gunshot, Regina clapped a hand over her mouth, her blue eyes big as an owl’s. “Heavens, it’s so romantic!” she said. “But dangerous! What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to write a letter, and I need your help.” Maddalena got a pencil and paper from her nightstand.
“You’re crazy! Why don’t you go after Rickie Hutchins? I think he likes you. He plays baseball too, you know.”
Of course Regina would say something like that. She’d had crushes on at least six boys since eighth grade, and she’d let Frankie Mitchell kiss her at the last sock hop. She probably thought crushes were the same thing as love.
“This is different,” Maddalena said. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. Now think. What should I say? And don’t try to talk me out of it.”
“All right. Say ‘Dear’—what’s his name?”
“Akira.”
“How about ‘My darling Akira’?”
Maddalena shook her head. “That would scare him off.”
“Well, say ‘Dear Akira,’ then. Tell him your name, and how old you are, of course; that’s important. And where you live.”
“All right.” Maddalena started writing, then jumped at a rap on the door. She shoved the paper and pencil under her skirt.
“I’m going out to the garden,” her mother said through the half-open door. “There’s a casserole in the oven. Take it out when the timer goes off and set it on the stove.”
“Yes, Mama. How long should it cook?”
“Forty minutes. Don’t forget to close the damper. And open that window before you die of heat.”
“Yes, Mama.”
When the door closed, Regina whispered, “That was close!”
“Time me,” Maddalena said, picking up the pencil. “I have to be done in exactly thirty-nine minutes.”
Twenty-five minutes later Maddalena read aloud what she’d written.
Dear Akira,
My name is Maddalena Moretti, and I’m the girl the guards shot at because I got too close to the fence. You talked to me at the baseball game, remember? You saved me from being hit by a ball. I’m fifteen years old. I guess I should say sixteen, because my birthday is next week. How old are you?
“That’s good.” Regina nodded, her chin on her fist. “But I think you should say he’s your true love.”
“This isn’t a movie, Regina, it’s real life. People don’t say things like that to someone they’ve just met.”
I live on a ranch near Lone Pine. That’s south of Manzanar, if you don’t know. I want to see you again. My friend Regina lives north of Manzanar, so I can ride by the camp when I go to her house. Or I can pretend to go to her house sometimes, because everyone around here knows we’re friends and they’re used to seeing me on Foothill Road. But I have to be careful because people around here have eyes in the back of their heads and gossip like magpies.
Regina giggled. “You told him about me!”
“You’re part of this. You’re the keeper of my secret now.” Maddalena studied the page. “I suppose I should tell him when I’ll be back so he’ll know to watch for me.”
“Say you’ll come back two days after he gets the letter,” Regina said. “That will give him time to reply.”
“Good idea.”
The ending was the hardest part. It was too soon to say “love,” and “sincerely” sounded stupid.
“Use your initial,” Regina said. “That’s how they do it in the movies. An M with a big swirl after it.”
“Good idea.”
I’ll come back in two days. I hope you’ll write to me.
~M~
p.s. My parents would kill me if they knew what I was doing.
p.p.s. I think it’s terrible that you’re locked up. I hope this stupid war ends soon.
p.p.p.s. I think we are destined to meet again.
p.p.p.p.s. I mean it.
“There. Done.”
“It’s perfect,” Regina said. “He’ll be powerless to resist you.”
Maddalena wrapped the paper around a rock the size of her palm, using six rubber bands, blue ones to make it as pretty as a wrapped-up rock could be. Everything was ready. All she had to do was wait.
Akira squinted into the sun. His back ached from weeding, and there was a ton of work left to do. The beans, running crazy on twisted vines, needed to be staked and the lettuce thinned. The marigolds that were supposed to keep bugs away from the vegetables were nothing but papery skeletons, their heads frayed on broken necks, crumbling at the slightest touch. He would take them out, restore order, simplify. He stretched, and the movement pulled his soaked shirt away from his skin for a blissful second.
Helping his mother in the garden had been a good idea. It made her happy, and that made him feel less guilty—not that she knew about the girl, and not that any amount of gardening would make up, as far as she was concerned, for his interest in someone who wasn’t Japanese. But what his parents didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Whether the girl offered adventure or something more, Akira didn’t know. Maybe he just liked the idea of her, the newness, the distraction. It didn’t matter. For now, distraction was enough.
His mother had worked her way to the end of a row of cabbages, her narrow shoulders rounded against the sun. Akira knew that making things grow in this desert soil gave her pleasure, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her smile. She had become as dull and colorless as the gray in her hair.
“Akira!” Annabelle waved, walking toward him, hips like music. “See you tonight, same time, same station?” she said softly, glancing toward his mother. “We can
go for a walk. You and me, alone.” She bit her lip and smiled.
“What about Harry?”
“He’s not my keeper. I told him so.”
“I don’t know. I might play cards.”
“Oh, you men and your gambling.” She tossed her head, then gave him a peck on the cheek. “You know where to find me.”
“Sure thing.” Akira began staking the runaway beans. He didn’t want to see Annabelle, not tonight. The mood he was in, the piano was more tempting than she was. He was writing a song, and he’d only half admitted to himself that it was for the girl on the horse.
That evening Akira offered to have dinner with his parents, and when they responded gratefully he felt ashamed. A neglectful son, that’s what he was. At one time he wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but everything had changed. His parents used to take pleasure in the smallest things—a ladybug climbing the stem of a cut rose, cold steam rising from a wet railing drying in the morning sun, a Bach cello suite. Now, his parents merely existed. That was Manzanar’s fault. Existence wasn’t good enough, not for him. He wanted to live.
In the mess hall, Akira followed his parents through the line, carrying his mother’s tray. His mother refused the hot dogs and creamed spinach, choosing only rice and watery coleslaw. When she picked up her fork to eat, the round bone of her wrist stuck out, a golf ball instead of a marble. His father was thin too, the cords in his neck arching like fishing rods.
They ate silently, quickly. A chore to be completed.
“Can I get you more rice, Mom?” Akira said.
“Yes, please.” His mother set down her fork and put her hands in her lap.
“Thank you, son,” his father said when Akira returned. He held his son’s gaze for a fraction of a second longer than was proper.
Akira spooned rice onto his mother’s plate. “Eat,” he said. “Please eat.”
The canteen was packed that night. Someone at the piano was banging out “Shoo Shoo Baby” while a trio of girls sang along. Voices and laughter rose above the music. Tables were strewn with decks of cards and packs of cigarettes, soda bottles and half-filled glasses, and half a dozen couples shuffled around in a semblance of a dance, wet shirts stuck to their backs. The place smelled like a barn.
Akira bought an orange LaVida and wandered over to a poker game in the corner, where four guys sat in a cloud of smoke.
“You want in?” asked the dealer.
“Nah,” Akira said. “I’m not in the mood.”
It was Gus at the keyboard, and he was damn good, even on a piano so decrepit he claimed it made him want to cry. Before Manzanar, he’d been a music teacher in L.A. He was in his thirties, a short, bouncy guy with lank hair thinning in front, but he was pouring on the charm for the girls tonight, all smiles and jump jiving on the piano bench. He launched into “Don’t Fence Me In” and everyone whooped and sang along, cupping their hands like megaphones as if serenading the guards. The girls threw out song titles and Gus played one into the other, from “In the Mood” to “Rum and Coca-Cola” to “Sentimental Journey” with hardly a breath between them. It was clear that Akira would get no time at the keyboard that night.
Lighting a cigarette, he bummed a pencil stub from one of the fellows and sketched a music staff on a napkin. The first few bars of his song were solid, but he couldn’t get beyond them, what with Gus’s jazzy syncopations and all the noise in the room. After ten minutes of trying he pitched the napkin into a trashcan and left. Striding past barracks, their stoops dotted with bored women and restless men, windows lit in sickly yellow, he headed toward the midnight void of desert and mountains. The girl was out there somewhere, far away and free. Akira took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, pushing hard until the blackness shattered. Somewhere in front of him was the end of the street, the fence beyond it.
Akira put his glasses in his pocket and broke into a run. Near the fence, a flash of blue-white light caught him and his shadow danced in front of him, twice his height. He turned, walked backward, saw nothing but the blinding light, felt nothing but the crosshairs of a gun. Raising his hands, he dropped to his knees and the light swung off him. Laughter drifted from the canteen, distant as another world, as the girl beyond the fence.
Thirteen
March 11, 2011
Kira was leaving for work when Dan’s phone rang. He listened to the caller for a moment, then turned to her. “Turn on the news when you get in the car. Dad says there was an earthquake and tsunami in Japan, really bad.”
“Oh no! Is his family okay?” Kenji’s uncle and cousins lived near Tokyo. Dan shrugged, listening. “Let me know as soon as you have any news,” Kira said.
When she got to work, the NICU was buzzing with talk about the disaster, and it didn’t let up. But her day passed quietly, with two stable feeders—no vents, no arterial lines, no dicey blood counts, just two babies who were learning how to breathe and eat at the same time. So far both of them were better at vomiting than nippling, but they were getting the hang of it. At midday Dan called to say Kenji’s relatives were safe. Kira finished feeding baby number two, and when he settled with a sigh, a lovely weight in her arms, she relaxed too. He would be fine, one of the lucky ones. His mother too.
Kira was changing a diaper when the night nurse arrived, phone in hand. “I’ve been glued to YouTube all day,” the nurse said. “There’s this unbelievable video of a whole village being swept away. You’ve got to see it.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” Kira said. “Oh, damn it, you pooped again, you little stinker! It’s all over your blanket.” Holding the baby with one arm, she rummaged for clean linens in the bedside drawer.
The nurse stuck her phone in front of Kira’s face. “Look at this.” Surging water and floating cars, a building flicked off its foundation like a gnat off the back of a hand. A British-toned voiceover spoke of thirty-foot waves, entire schools and villages swept away, untold casualties. Then the announcer said “annihilation” and heat shot through Kira’s hands. She grabbed the edge of the bassinette, clutching the baby to her chest. Not here, not now. She bent over, tucking the baby into the curve of her body. The color shift began, a rush of salmon to yellow to green.
I’m sitting at the dinner table, my sweaty legs stuck to my chair. On the radio, an urgent voice saying something terrible about a bomb, a city called Hiroshima, a certain end to the war. I can’t believe my ears. An end to the war! I repeat the words silently, wanting to cry and rejoice. My father lights his pipe, then says, “Goddamn Japs deserve what they got.” My brother smiles; my mother nods. I stare at them in horror and shame, disgusted by my father’s lips curling around the pipe stem, the yellow of his teeth.
“I’ve got him,” a voice said. “Kira, what’s wrong?”
The room came back into focus and Kira zeroed in on the baby, now in the other nurse’s arms. Nausea hit as she realized she could have dropped him. He could have died. Dizziness followed the nausea, and she seized it as an excuse. “Yeah, I just…I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I guess I shouldn’t have skipped lunch. Thank you for taking him.”
Kira gave a quick shift-change report and left, her hands trembling as she opened her locker, still trembling when she got in her car, adrenaline surging at the thought of what could have happened. But that wasn’t all. The newscast in her dream, about Hiroshima—if she’d had any last doubts, they were gone. World War II. The girl in the dream was Maddalena. Her bloodstream hummed.
At home Dan was chopping vegetables, his laptop perched on the counter streaming the news. Magpie squatted underfoot, gnawing on a piece of wilted parsley.
“My parents are pretty shook up, so I spent the day with them,” Dan said. “They wouldn’t turn off the TV. It’s unreal. Entire villages gone.”
“Yeah, I saw some of the footage. It’s so horrible—all those kids.” Kira sat at the kitchen island, alternately watching
the news and reliving the Hiroshima dream. Amid the scenes of walls made of water, cars and buildings afloat, an overhead shot of a pulverized, inanimate town flashed onto the screen. Absolute devastation.
“Just like Hiroshima.”
Kira didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until Dan said, “Hardly. But I know what you mean.”
She hesitated. She could leave it at that, but at this point there was no reason not to tell him what had happened at work. In the three days since they’d been to her mother’s house, Dan had been subdued, obviously worried, but he hadn’t mentioned the doctor again except to ask whether she wanted him to go to the appointment with her. She said no, omitting the fact that she’d canceled it. Dan hadn’t mentioned the sketch either, which she’d brought home and put in one of the photo albums for safekeeping. Another topic on the Do Not Go There list. She was sick of the silence, the deception.
“I had another dream today. About Hiroshima.”
“At work? Shit. That’s dangerous.” Dan’s eyes were still on the computer screen.
“Nothing happened.” Kira explained about hearing the man’s voice on the YouTube video, and in her dream, the newscaster announcing the end of the war.
“It makes sense,” Dan said. “The tsunami, the earthquake, Hiroshima.”
“It does? How?”
“Think about it. You just said the footage reminds you of Hiroshima. Devastation in Japan, that’s the link. The dream was triggered.”
A chill flew down Kira’s spine. She grabbed the laptop and googled “Hiroshima bomb broadcast” while Dan peered over her shoulder. “There, that one,” he said, pointing to a YouTube link to a CBS news broadcast from 1945. She clicked on it.
“Tokyo Radio finally acknowledged…the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima, and admitted that extensive damage was done. Apparently the damage was so great that the Japs aren’t sure what hit the place….”
Zero gravity, like freefall. “Jesus. That’s it, what I heard during the dream,” Kira said. “Or something very close to it.” She clicked on another link.
The Wild Impossibility Page 10