All these years later, the hat was in perfect shape, just as Kira remembered it. Her mother had stuffed tissue inside it, packed it away in its own special box. A treasured memento, obviously. After she’d found it in the trunk, Kira had taken it for her own, worn it with the veil pinned back, with a vintage skirt or dress, and her mother never said a word, not even to remind her to take good care of it. Maybe she had trusted her with it, this artifact from Maddalena’s life. When Kira wore it, she felt sophisticated and mysterious, and from then on she spent her allowance and babysitting money at thrift stores, excavating history. She felt like she found herself in those old things, even though they were someone else’s history—a cropped black jacket à la Audrey Hepburn, rhinestone brooches, long ropes of cheap, colorful beads. Her favorite item was the pink cashmere cardigan with seed-pearl trim she’d worn the day she met Dan’s parents. As a teenager in the early ’90s, she’d worn it with her mother’s bell-bottoms, elephant bells with blue-and-green-and-brown stripes. The more incongruous the combination, the more she liked it.
“Hey, Cam, remember when I wore this hat with a red spaghetti-strap dress and cowboy boots?”
“How could I forget? Didn’t you get voted best dressed or something in senior year? Crazy.”
Kira put on the hat, struck a supermodel pose. “Most Likely to Model for Jean-Paul Gaultier.”
“The freaks voted you in, you know. Everyone else made fun of you.”
“I kind of knew that. But thanks for not telling me then.”
The truth was, Kira didn’t care about fashion, never had. She liked wearing old clothes because they made her feel connected to a past she knew almost nothing about. Even now, half of what hung in her closet was pre-1960s. Her favorite pieces, the ones she thought suited her best, were from the ’40s and early ’50s.
The ’40s. World War II. How old would Maddalena have been during the war? Kira added to the list she’d started that morning, now stashed in her pocket.
3. Find Grandma’s birth certificate. And death certificate. Mom’s too.
At lunchtime they ate Camille’s tuna sandwiches at the kitchen table. The sun had faded in a darkening sky, rumors of a storm scenting the air.
“These daytime dream things are getting more frequent, aren’t they?” Camille said. “And this woman in them, it’s always the same one, right? And she has a baby.”
“Yeah. Not very surprising, I guess. Dan says she represents Aimi. He thinks this is like some kind of weird grief thing, but I don’t think so.”
“How come?”
Kira hesitated. She hadn’t told Camille that the dreams weren’t hers, that in them she saw scenes from Maddalena’s life.
“I think Dan’s half right,” Camille said. “The dreams probably are about Aimi, but they’re about the other baby too. You never really got to grieve for the miscarriage, after all, keeping it a secret from your mom. That’s got to be in there somewhere.”
“It wasn’t even a baby yet. Barely a fetus.”
“I know, but you were a baby yourself. I wish we’d told your mother or someone at school. I think about that happening to one of my girls and I go ballistic. The first thing I’d do is call the police and track the prick down. We should have done that. At the very least someone could have helped you. You needed someone to talk to, a grown-up, not just me. Your mother would have wanted to know, I think. Honestly, the more time goes by, the more pissed I get about the whole thing.”
“It was a long time ago.” Kira stood and put her plate in the sink, her movements as sharp as her tone. “Let’s get back to work.”
“I’m sorry, Sis. It’s just that I’m worried about you.”
This time the nickname annoyed Kira. Much as Cam loved her, there was nothing she could do to help Kira, and nothing Dan could do. Or a doctor. There probably wasn’t a doctor on the planet who could put a name to what was happening to her. No, Kira was on her own, in a way she never would have been if Aimi had lived. If her mother had lived. But they were both dead, deceased. Ugly words that stalled on the tongue. No wonder people preferred to say a loved one had passed, was lost, departed, gone, no more, sleeping with the angels, with God. Not that a euphemism could disguise the fact that someone you loved had died. Someone who was part of you.
“You know what? Let’s get out of here,” Kira said. “I’m tired, and I’ve got a string of twelve-hour shifts coming up.” She’d put in a vacation request as promised, but she couldn’t get time off until April. Then she’d have two weeks off, and Dan would be happy, and she’d have time to come back to this mess.
Back in Berkeley, Kira said, “Thanks for helping me, Cam. Sorry to waste your day.”
“It wasn’t wasted,” Camille said. “I got to see you, didn’t I?”
“You’re a sweetheart.” Kira hugged her friend, uncertain when they would see each other again, or what might happen in the meantime.
Sixteen
July 8, 1945
Two months since VE Day, and still we waited. With the Third Reich in tatters, we had become impatient. With Hitler dead, we allowed ourselves to dream.
For some of us, those for whom Japan was little more than part of our DNA, for whom freedom meant more than honor or tradition, Japan had become the enemy. Each morning our hopes flew as high as the hawks surfing the Sierra, then shattered at day’s end when the war continued. Some of us drank too much homemade sake, sank into lethargy, erupted into scuffles. Others fell silent, fighting the pall of depression, unable to pray for the defeat of our homeland. The thought tasted bitter, no matter the rewards Japan’s surrender would bring us—freedom, and home.
We longed for home with the same visceral desire that love brings. Our communities might wait and watch with crossed arms and hostile eyes, but we resolved to reclaim our places there, recognizable or not, and bear the lack of welcome. We would return to the communities we had once called home, to repossessed houses, apartments whose locks had been changed, to boarded-up businesses, to empty docks where our fishing boats once slept. We would open storage sheds to find our belongings gone.
We knew that when we left Manzanar, we would look older than we were, our skin toughened and lined by dust and wind, stripped of oils, darkened by sun. We who had become ditch diggers and net makers would wonder if our broken nails and leather palms would ever again be hands we recognized.
The elderly among us, broken and stripped, knew we would not regain what we had been. The young among us looked far into the future, optimism dimmed but spirits resilient. They refused to believe that Manzanar had changed them forever.
Seventeen
March 21–28, 2011
For the next week and a half Kira avoided Dan. She hadn’t convinced him that the doctor’s office had rescheduled her appointment, and his disappointment was obvious. She felt terrible about lying to him; hiding things from him seemed cruel instead of protective. The worst omission was the miscarriage. Cam was right—so what if it hadn’t been Dan’s baby all those years ago? The regret, the unresolved grief, were part of her still, amplifying the pain of losing Aimi.
On Thursday Kira was assigned to Baby Kendall, a stable thirty-six-weeker about to get off the ventilator. One IV, an arterial line, half a dozen meds, a little trouble with his glucose—an easy assignment, assuming he tolerated being extubated. Waiting for the docs to make rounds, Kira changed the bed linens, unsnarled monitor wires and IV tubing, and reorganized the bedside drawers. It felt good to put things in order.
The rounding doctors arrived at ten. “And here we have the well-behaved young Mr. Kendall,” Dr. Craig said. “Rumor has it he’s ready to solo.” He listened to the baby’s lungs. “Let’s do it. Pop a cannula on him and get a gas in an hour, sooner if he’s working hard. Hold his next feeding until you see how he does.”
An hour later Baby Kendall was pink and breathing easily; three hours later he was blowing s
aliva bubbles and fussing. Kira bundled him up and settled in a rocker. “Hey, little guy, let’s see if you can eat and breathe at the same time.” While the formula trickled through a feeding tube, she smoothed the baby’s warm head and allowed herself to pretend he was Aimi. A swiftshattering pain seized her throat, her brain, her heart, as if it knew which were the vital organs and forged a deliberate path. She welcomed it. It was an indulgence to hold this child as if he were hers, to imagine it was her body that created this radiantly complex being, each of its entangled systems necessary for life. An indulgence that, now and then, was worth the pain. She rocked, the feathery scalp warming her fingers.
The doors to the Unit snapped open as a transport team arrived, and a woman’s voice shrilled from the hallway. “Where’s my baby? Fucking sons of bitches, where’d they take her? Rosie!”
Kira’s fingers burned and the color wash swept the room. Instantly, a shadowed scene: an attic, evening; Maddalena, a baby, a rocking chair.
The baby looks nothing like her father, but I see him every time I look at her. I hold his photo in front of her sweet unfocused eyes. “Here’s your daddy,” I whisper. “Rosa, Rosa, your daddy would have loved you so much.” It is not a name my mother would have wanted, had she cared about my child, had she loved her. I chose it myself, the name of no one I knew, a name free of history. It makes me think of a velvet-deep red, a simple kind of beauty. The kind Rosa’s father loved.
My husband calls from the foot of the stairs. “You up in the damn attic again? Christ almighty. I don’t see no dinner on the table.”
“Coming.” I kiss the baby’s head, wipe a milk bubble from her lips, button my blouse.
An alarm sounded, soft and distant. Then a voice: “Kira, you need help?” Before she could answer, another voice: “Call respiratory stat. And page Dr. Craig.” Then Baby Kendall was taken from her, placed on the bed, surrounded, and the room snapped back into focus.
Dr. Craig rounded the corner. “You’ve suctioned? Good, let’s intubate. Chest X-ray and blood gas stat.”
Kira backed away from the damage she’d done. In the hallway, the charge nurse corralled her into an office where she sat and waited, the airless room shrinking around her. She didn’t cry, and she wondered why not. Leaning forward, she cradled her head in her hands. The hemostats pinched to her scrub top dangled, their long-silvered jaws indefinably cruel. She wondered why she noticed them, why she could think of anything besides that baby, struggling to breathe because of her. Why what she’d done hadn’t killed her yet.
The next few days were a blur of half sleep, too much wine, and the constant torment of what if, what if? Baby Kendall was back on a ventilator because of her. She’d harmed a patient, an unforgivable mistake. Every time Kira called the hospital, every hour, she got the same news: “stable on moderate ventilator settings,” delivered in a tone that suggested she call less often.
When she told Dan what had happened, she could barely get the words out. “They put me on medical leave,” she said, avoiding his eyes. They were standing in the kitchen, the island countertop between them littered with sodden Kleenexes. “What if he—”
“He won’t,” Dan said. “They got to him fast, right?”
Kira half nodded, half shrugged. He could have said he’d told her it was dangerous, that she should have called in sick when she couldn’t get time off right away, that she was selfish and stupid. Instead he said, “He’ll be okay.” The look he gave her made it clear that he wasn’t sure he could say the same about her.
On Friday Kira dragged herself out of bed and found the list of psychiatrists she’d been given. The hospital had ordered a physical, which had revealed nothing wrong; now she needed to see a shrink. The first three doctors she called were booked for weeks, but Dr. Alan Richardson had a cancellation on Monday at two. She had no idea what she would say to him.
The doctor’s office was in San Francisco in a homey-looking Victorian on Post Street. Kira sat in a yawning leather chair big enough to curl up in, next to a small table outfitted with a box of tissues and a small sculpture of speckled wood, all maternal curves and warmth. She leaned back, her body buoyed. Lamps tossed out kindly glows that enriched the rusts and ochres, sages and crimsons in the thick rug. Simply sitting in this room, doctor or no doctor, would have been worth the hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar fee.
Dr. Richardson sat across from her, a tall man with a runner’s body and a generous smile. “How can I help you, Kira?” he asked, teepeeing his hands.
“I’m on medical leave from my job. As I mentioned on the phone, I’m an RN, neonatal ICU, and there was this incident. I guess the hospital sent you a report? What happened was…well, I’ve been having these dreams. Well, not dreams, exactly. I’m awake, but I kind of zone out. I had one at work and that’s why I’m here.” Kira twisted a Kleenex. If the doc had understood any of that, he was a mind reader.
“When you have these dreams, do you lose consciousness?”
“Not exactly. It’s more like I go into a trance.” Kira told him about the deaths of Aimi and her mother, about the mysterious man, about the nightly dreams that wouldn’t stop, then started happening when she was awake. She described the babies who waited for their parents to hold them before they died, how everything she was telling him seemed related somehow.
“And then I had one of the dreams at work and a baby got hurt. Because of me.” Kira started to cry. “Why is this happening?” She plucked another tissue from the box. “It’s all just so crazy. What’s wrong with me? My father left my mother because he thought she was crazy, and my grandmother killed herself, so it’s not like I have the greatest genetic track record.”
“It sounds like you were afraid to get help.”
Kira nodded. She recognized the tactic, validation, and was surprised by how good it felt.
“Let’s not make any assumptions about your family’s track record,” Dr. Richardson said gently.
“But I feel so out of control, and I know I’m making bad decisions, and it’s hard not to worry about that. And I feel so terrible about Baby Kendall. I know I shouldn’t have kept working, and the danger seems so obvious now, but I guess I thought I could be careful. I don’t know. Dan, my husband, he thinks the dreams are being triggered, which makes sense.” She paused. “I just didn’t think it would happen again. Not at work.”
“Why does your husband think the dreams are being triggered?”
Kira explained about the video and Hiroshima and the doctor took notes. “Interesting,” he said.
“What do you think is happening? When I had the first daytime dream, I thought I must be hallucinating, but now I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Well, wouldn’t I hallucinate stuff that’s part of my world? With me in it? The dreams don’t happen like that; the real world goes away entirely. And I’m not in them—well, I kind of am, but I’m not me. I’m someone else. Kind of.” Kira shredded a tissue. “God, that sounds worse, doesn’t it?”
Dr. Richardson smiled again. “Tell me about the dreams. Let’s go through them one by one.”
Kira went through the list. When she finished, she was on the edge of the chair, her toes knotted and her fingers dug into the leather. “There’s something else. The girl in the dreams, the person I am in the dreams—I think it’s my grandmother.” She laughed, it sounded so ridiculous. “Actually, I know it’s her. It’s my grandmother in the dreams. I’m her. And I never even knew her.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Richardson said. “Let’s start with that next time.”
“But what do you think is going on?”
Dr. Richardson stood. “We’ve just begun, Kira. I’ll see you next week.” He opened the door and beckoned to his next patient, a man with the sad eyes of a basset hound.
Kira watched the office door close behind them. Now that drooping man was in
there, telling his story, hoping the doctor could make sense of his life. How many screwed-up people did Dr. Richardson try to make sense of in a week, how many strange stories did he hear? She’d bet none were as weird as hers. Still, it was a relief to tell Dr. Richardson about Maddalena.
Kira stepped into the sweet afternoon sunshine feeling better than she had in weeks. Lighter. Then she remembered Baby Kendall and plodded to her car as if she were made of stone.
Eighteen
July 10–11, 1945
The rock landed six feet in front of Scout. Maddalena nodded at Akira, watching from the hospital steps, then slid off the horse, grabbed the rock, and was on her way, all in twenty seconds. The guards didn’t see a thing. Her plan had worked! She couldn’t wait to tell Regina.
Maddalena headed toward a nearby apple orchard where she could read the note safely out of sight of anyone on Foothill Road. Finally, she would learn something about Akira—maybe how old he was or where he came from, though what she most wanted to know was whether that pretty girl she’d seen him with was his girl.
Ten minutes later, an absolute eternity, Maddalena guided Scout into the shelter of the trees and tore off the yarn that bound the letter to the rock. The paper shook in her hands.
Dear Maddalena,
What a beautiful name. It suits you.
A beautiful name! Her heart was thundering like rocks on a tin roof.
Thank you for your letter. I didn’t think I’d see you again after the baseball game, so it sure was nice to see you ride by. I remember thinking that I’d never seen eyes like yours before. I can’t decide if they’re blue or green—you’ll have to tell me. Or better yet, I’ll judge for myself.
Judge for himself? How?
My name is Akira Shimizu and I’m seventeen. I’m an American. My parents are from a village near Kyoto, but I was born here. I live in Berkeley with my parents—or I used to, before the government locked us up. I don’t know what you think about Manzanar, but what they did to us is horribly unfair. When I get out of here I’m going to law school so I can stop this kind of thing from ever happening again.
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