“New air attacks have been thrown against Japan. Washington and other capitals are buzzing with speculation about the new bomb and its possibilities.”
“Possibilities? I’ll say. For annihilating the world.” Dan pushed his glasses up, rubbing his eyes. “God, what a day. Honey, I think we’re out of our league. If these things are being triggered, they’re probably likely to happen again. I don’t think you should go to work until you’ve seen the doctor.”
Kira nodded absently, her eyes on the screen. Everything fit. Hiroshima, the earthquake, the tsunami. Devastation. Maddalena listening to that broadcast, blowing out candles, wearing that wedding dress, holding that baby. The dreams were scenes from her grandmother’s life—disjointed scenes, but part of a whole. Pieced together, they might tell her something.
“I think you’re right; the video caused the dream,” Kira said. “It was a fluke.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that,” Dan said. “From what I’ve seen these things just sneak up on you.”
“Fine, I’ll put in a vacation request tomorrow.” It was a good idea; she could spend more time at her mother’s house. Kira clicked on another broadcast.
A few minutes later Magpie jumped in her lap and Kira realized the house was silent. Dan had probably gone for a run before dinner, she thought, typing in “triggered memories.” Of course there wouldn’t be anything about triggering someone else’s memories, but she searched anyway. Maybe it didn’t matter if she found out what Maddalena had wished for on her sixteenth birthday, or why she was sad on her wedding day. And maybe it did. For whatever reason, Maddalena was making herself known.
Fourteen
July 8, 1945
Maddalena rode into the desert, the note and rock in her back pocket, digging into her hip like a promise. Or a reminder that she’d tried to see Akira three times with no luck and was beginning to think she’d jinxed the whole thing by telling Regina about him. But surely it was only a matter of time. Maybe today he would read her note; maybe today he would sit down to write to her. “Today, today, today,” she sang.
At Manzanar people were everywhere, swarming the streets and stoops and gardens. Old men nodded in the sun, and dozens of hatted women worked the vegetable gardens. A policeman on a horse sashayed over to the fence, and Maddalena was surprised to see that he was Japanese. How strange that a man could be both prisoner and policeman! She waved at him, no longer worried about being seen. She had nothing to hide.
The hospital steps came into view, empty again. If she kept riding, it was over—another failed mission. She would not give up. Dropping the reins, she let Scout graze. A cloud of dust announced a pickup truck rumbling north on Foothill Road, reminding her that if her father or Marco were to drive by, there she would be, out of bounds and unmistakable. Don’t borrow trouble, she thought. The road was far enough away that they probably wouldn’t notice her.
Ten minutes later, two older women left the hospital through the side door and set off down the street. Then the door opened again—let it be him!—and the chubby boy she’d seen with Akira appeared and sat on the steps to smoke. A minute went by, then another, and another. Heat rose from the desert floor, shimmering the mountains and laying sheets of sweat across Scout’s neck and flanks. Maddalena wiped her face on her sleeve, thinking how terrible it was that she’d look sweaty and ugly if she saw Akira now. Then, all at once, there he was, walking fast down the street—and talking to a girl! A slender girl with bobbed hair, sleek and shiny and perfectly framing her too-pretty face. Pretending she hadn’t noticed them, Maddalena clucked at Scout, furious with herself for not realizing Akira might have a girlfriend.
“You’re late again,” the boy on the steps called to Akira. “Better watch out or they’ll start docking your pay.”
“Get a life, Paul,” Akira said.
He spoke loudly, as if he were trying to get Maddalena’s attention. She looked up, and the minute she did, the girl gave her a nasty simpering smile and touched Akira’s hand as if she owned him, her gaze triumphant. Maddalena glared at her with her best malocchio—the evil eye. “Get your hands off him,” she muttered, and the words felt good, violent on her teeth and tongue. A minute later the girl left, swinging her hips like a little puttana. Akira watched her go, for longer than he needed to.
Paul stood. “I’ll punch you in,” he said. “You owe me one.”
He left and Maddalena took the rock out of her pocket, eyeing the guard towers. This time she’d be patient. Akira was watching her and pretending he wasn’t, one foot on the steps, lighting a cigarette. Then a car backfired somewhere on the east side of the camp and the guards turned and Maddalena threw the rock with all her might. It landed close to the steps and Akira startled, then flashed a surreptitious thumbs-up. Maddalena rode off, certain she’d burst from happiness. Her plan had worked!
Akira grabbed the rock and went inside, slipping into a storeroom to read it. Damn, she was resourceful! He read the letter quickly. Her name was Maddalena—a beautiful name, so musical—and she was almost sixteen. He’d figured her for pretty young, so that was no surprise. He smiled when she mentioned the ball game and the gunshot—as if he’d forget!
She’d come back in two days. He would be ready.
That night, instead of going to the canteen, Akira stayed home to think about the letter he’d write. Lying on his cot sipping cold tea, he listened to the clicking whisper of his mother’s knitting needles. The note was stashed in his shaving kit, the only place his mother wouldn’t find it. His parents sat quietly as they always did, unaware that his world was about to change. His father was reading, his mother making a scarf from the last of the wool she’d brought from home—good wool, she said, not the cheap yarn sold in the commissary. She knitted to keep busy, not because anyone needed another scarf.
An hour passed. “Akira, please help me,” his mother said.
He sat next to her and held out his hands, palms facing inward, fingers toward the ceiling, and she wound the strands of yarn around his fingers, untangling them as she went. Teasing, Akira said, “Is it the wind or the rats that tangle the yarn?”
His mother didn’t respond. This was a ritual of hers, one that seemed to calm her. She tangled the yarn herself, to give her something to undo, something to make right, since there was so little else that was right in her world. He understood that. People did whatever it took to get through the days, the endless waiting. For his mother, it was knitting and gardening; for his father, books and daily games of goh; for himself, work and Annabelle, and an idea he had about going to law school and helping Japanese Americans when he got out of here. And now Maddalena.
His mother’s fingers grazed his, her once-soft skin thick and rough. So many things changed in wartime, in ways a person could never imagine. His parents had wilted, but Akira felt like a live round waiting to blow.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said.
The air was crisp, the stars an arm’s length away. To the east and west of camp the mountains slumbered, one more barrier between Manzanar and the rest of the world. Berkeley seemed unreal, a dream lost upon waking. Akira followed the line of the fence, dodging the searchlights. Leaving Manzanar to see Maddalena would be worth braving the guards and their guns. The real risk was that out there, with miles of sand and air around him unbroken by any fence, he would remember what it felt like to be free.
Fifteen
March 14, 2011
When Kira got up the day of her canceled doctor’s appointment, Dan was gone, off to work early according to a note she found with a stack of papers on the kitchen counter. The note continued: I pulled this info together for you, and I wanted you to have it for your appointment today. Not sure if any of it’s relevant, but take a look. Love, Dan
“Love, Dan.” Not a couple of x’s or a cartoon heart, but a deliberate, sprawling “love.” Kira touched the ink, carved into Dan’s favorit
e heavy paper stock with a calligraphic flourish. He was reminding her of what they’d had, what they could have again. No doubt he thought that if he tried hard enough, and long enough, he could convince her it was possible. Love for him, or the memory of it, flickered in her brain until thoughts of Maddalena and her dreamed life shoved it aside. Immediately the self-recriminations began: Kira was a failure, first at motherhood, now at marriage.
She made coffee, fed the cat twining around her legs, and sat down to read. Camille was due to pick her up at nine-thirty. They’d been texting almost daily, and when Kira mentioned her plan to go through her mother’s things, Camille insisted on helping. Remembering how overwhelmed she’d felt when she’d been there with Dan, Kira agreed.
Dan had assembled three sets of papers and written notes in the margins: memory recall, triggers, recurring dreams, earthquake/tsunami = Hiroshima, woman in dreams, 1940s, WW2 = our grandparents. The first set was about hallucinations; Kira put that one aside. The next was about ESP, the findings of half a dozen studies, and the last was about something called quantum entanglement, a principle of quantum physics. She started there.
A scientific journal explained that interacting particles can become an indivisible system, connected on a quantum level, even across large distances. Quantum entanglement wasn’t ESP, the article emphasized; it was physics, a theory that Einstein had discounted as “a spooky action at a distance.” But it was real. Quantum entanglement was the reason birds could navigate the way they did, something to do with the Earth’s magnetic field.
Kira skimmed the pages, the science beyond her, until one sentence caught her eye. Scientists were exploring whether quantum entanglement existed in people, on a cognitive level. Entanglement in people? Holy shit.
There was no evidence yet that quantum entanglement occurred in humans, the article emphasized, but scientists were testing the psychic connections between people who had strong emotional attachments to one another.
No evidence? What about the dying babies who hung on long enough to die in their mothers’ arms? Quantum entanglement came closer to explaining that phenomenon than anything else Kira could think of. If anyone was entangled, it was mothers and their children. Why not grandmothers, then? But that couldn’t be true for her; she’d never known Maddalena, had rarely thought about her in recent years. Her excitement fizzled into disappointment. What did she know about her grandmother, or anyone else in her family? With twenty minutes until Cam was due to arrive, Kira began making notes.
Maddalena had grown up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere—Owens Valley, east of the Sierra.
1. Find out where the house is/was.
The people at the table in the Hiroshima dream were obviously Maddalena’s parents and brother. Kira had forgotten she had a great-uncle.
2. Look up Maddalena’s family.
Maddalena’s brother died in his twenties, Rosa had said. She didn’t say when or how, only that Maddalena hadn’t seemed sad about it. “No love lost there,” she’d said when Kira pestered her with questions. Kira must have been about ten, because that was when she’d started asking more questions about her relatives, as if they might offer clues to her father’s desertion. She kept the one photo she had of her father in a notebook, hidden under some old clothes on a closet shelf so her mother couldn’t tear it up. Kira was in the photo too, about two years old, and her dad was smiling and hugging her as if he loved her. Did he? Did he miss her after he left? She’d spent hours studying the picture, trying to find something in his eyes that suggested he was a man capable of deserting his wife and child.
Rosa had told Kira little about her father other than how they’d met and what he did; nothing at all about who he was or why she’d married him. What had her mother, an English major at UC Berkeley on full scholarship, seen in Frank Esposito, a laborer who spent his days wielding a blowtorch? In the few pictures Kira had seen, he looked tough and weathered, with the pitbull neck and shoulders of a man who’d done heavy work for years. Rosa had met him in a coffee shop in downtown Martinez two days after she graduated, and they married a year later.
As far as Kira knew, Rosa had never tried to find Frank after he left. As a child, Kira searched the library for books about families that had been reunited, about heroic fathers. She read A Wrinkle in Time until the binding fell apart, wishing she could save her dad like Meg and Charles Wallace saved theirs. Only her dad wasn’t a brave scientist. To quote her mother, he was a “goddamn worthless son of a bitch.”
Rosa had evaded questions about other members of the family too. Asked to identify individuals in the photo albums, she’d answered with “I don’t know,” or “I can’t remember,” her expression becoming blacker by the minute. She hadn’t seemed to understand what it was like for Kira to grow up with a family that existed only in photographs.
Kira restacked the papers and got ready to go. She had no idea what Maddalena had been like or how she had spent her days. She didn’t know whether her grandmother had knitted or played golf or liked to go to the movies, what her favorite color was, what her laugh had sounded like. She didn’t know a damn thing except that Rosa had often talked about how hard it had been to lose her mother at seventeen, when she was on the verge of adulthood and had needed a mother’s counsel. Needed her touch.
A mother’s touch. If only Aimi had known it. No one should die without knowing her mother’s love, the warmth and smell of her skin.
On the way to Martinez, Kira told Camille about the wedding-dress dream, Dan’s sketch, and the quantum entanglement theories.
“Damn, that thing with the sketch is just weird,” Camille said. For a Catholic, even a progressive one, she swore a lot. “It’s got to be a coincidence.”
“Come on, Cam. He drew exactly what I saw, even the things I didn’t tell him. No way that’s a coincidence.”
“It’s really strange that Dan would even suggest quantum entanglement. He’s so practical.”
“In some ways. He also says we shouldn’t limit our thinking. I made fun of reincarnation once and he got really pissed.”
“You don’t really think quantum entanglement explains any of this, do you?”
“No, but it’s all weird as shit. Listen to this.” Kira told Cam about the Hiroshima dream and Dan’s theory that it had been triggered by the YouTube video.
“Okay, that’s freaky.” Camille changed lanes and took the first Martinez exit. “What about seeing a doctor? Maybe a neurologist could figure this out.”
“You must be in cahoots with Dan.”
Cam parked in front of Rosa’s house, now polished and manicured by Dan’s second choice of landscaper. Rosa would have been pleased, Kira thought with a momentary glow. Then she wondered what the hell she was getting herself into. What secrets did the house hold? Wouldn’t she be better off tending to her marriage than dredging up history?
“Let’s go,” Kira said, and bolted from the car.
When the front door swung open, the house seemed lifeless, uninterested in its own secrets. Stop inventing things, Kira thought. Stay focused.
Camille stashed the sandwiches and bottled water she’d brought, then turned, hands on her hips. “Ready! Where do you want to start?” She had clipped her spiky hair back and wore an oversize T-shirt that made her look shorter than the five-foot-nothing she was. The oldest of seven kids and the mother of three, Cam was a diminutive dynamo, practicality and efficiency personified.
“I don’t know,” Kira said. “It’s kind of overwhelming.”
“You think?”
“Smart-ass. Thanks a lot, Sis.”
Camille’s face lit up at the old nickname. Ever since eighth grade they’d called themselves sisters, after Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney in Kira’s favorite holiday movie, White Christmas. Camille wasn’t a fan of old movies, but she’d agreed to watch it each year, even let Kira persuade her to sin
g and dance along with “Sisters.” They’d laugh themselves to tears, but Kira always cried for real when Rosemary Clooney, wearing a sparkly black mermaid gown, sang “Love, You Didn’t Do Right by Me.” Camille would say, “How can you cry? It’s soooo corny,” and Kira would wail, “I know!” It was all part of the ritual. But part of the reason she cried was that at times like these Cam really did feel like the sister Kira had always wanted.
“I guess we should start in my mom’s office. That’s where she kept important papers.”
An hour later boxes and accordion files littered the floor and Camille sat at the desk leafing through shoeboxes stuffed with receipts, cards, and dog-eared photos.
“Look at this.” Kira pulled the last box out of the closet, a small hatbox in a faded floral print of blue hydrangeas. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“Pretty old and musty, if you ask me.”
Kira made a face and opened the box. “Oh my God.” She held up a black pillbox hat with a short veil.
A jolt of memory—a weekend when she was twelve, helping her mother clean out the attic. Kira had complained until she found this hat in a steamer trunk and fell in love with it. She put it on and turned to her mother. “How do I look?”
Rosa’s face went slack. “That belonged to your grandmother,” she said, her voice pained. She went back to sorting through yellowed linens, then put a hand to her head. “The mothballs are getting to me. We’ll finish another time.” She went downstairs, and Kira admired herself in a dusty mirror. In the filtered attic light, and with her eyes narrowed, she decided she looked like her grandmother. Her almost-black hair was darker and straighter than Maddalena’s, and her nose was flatter and not Italian-looking at all—because she’d slept on her stomach as a baby, her mother said—but her eyes were like Maddalena’s, a changeable green that often drifted toward blue. Rosa had them too: three generations of matching eyes.
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