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The Wild Impossibility

Page 15

by Ossola, Cheryl A. ;


  Kira hit the brake and the car veered off the road, the steering wheel twisting from her hands. A sickening impact, and she pitched forward. A baby cried, then nothing.

  Twenty

  July 17, 1945

  At Manzanar, the wind made us crazy. Days when it never stopped, days when it came in sudden bursts, a desert storm flaunting its power. Infernos of sand and fragmented sage flailing our skin, worse than the creaking cold, more relentless than the lingering sun. The wind tormented us, ruled us, shaped our days.

  When the wind blew hardest, flinging dust and grit in our eyes and mouths, we knew something would happen. It might be a lovers’ spat, or two drunk men arguing with their fists. It might be despair muting the voices of the Issei at dinner or keeping them at home, their hopes and appetites worn down. It might be a guard jumpy enough to swing his gun at someone for getting too close to the fence. Though the sentries’ vigilance had eased, we did not trust a man with a gun.

  It was blowing hard the night we heard Akira was asking for trouble, going outside the fence for more than fish and a taste of freedom. We saw defiance in him, recklessness. The fishermen went for the trout, the peace, the rhythmic air-slice of a fishing line, the satisfaction of a well-placed cast. And they went for the pleasure of thumbing their noses at the government. Akira went for another reason, and for him it would prove more dangerous than machine guns, searchlights, rifles with bayonets. Akira went for a girl.

  Those of us with eyes and experience pitied Annabelle. She’d staked her claim, but the look in Akira’s eyes told us she stood no chance of keeping him. To the Issei among us, his behavior was incomprehensible. He’d been well raised, schooled in our traditions, taught to respect his parents, brought up with a proper sense of duty, of on and giri. In turning away from our ways and traditions, he brought dishonor to his family.

  Or it could be that the girl, and whatever would happen because of her, was his fate. Shikata ga nai. It cannot be helped.

  One night soon after the rumors started, Akira came into the canteen. There was an edge to his gait, a restlessness that uprooted our calm. He walked over to Annabelle, glancing at the piano with an expression that told us he wanted it, not her, under his hands. If she noticed, her face did not show it. She smiled, crossed her legs, sat up straight to fill out her blouse. The girls sitting with her drifted away with knowing looks.

  Annabelle sipped her soda straw. “There you are.”

  “I said I’d be here, didn’t I?”

  “These days I’m never sure.” She patted the chair next to her and Akira sat, hands on his knees. “Did you hear about the picnic on Saturday?” Annabelle said, her voice too bright. “A bunch of us are going to spend the day at Bairs Creek. Jackie and Hiroki already have dates.”

  Akira struggled. We knew what he should say.

  “I might have to work on Saturday,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “Someone asked me to trade shifts.”

  “So tell him no.”

  “I don’t like to go back on my word.”

  “Or maybe you have other plans.”

  Akira stood. “Come on, let’s blow this joint.”

  “What’s the rush? Have a soda.”

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “All right, keep your hat on. Let me say goodbye to the girls.”

  He nearly dragged her out of the canteen. The tension between them paralyzed us.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere.” Akira propelled her up the street. Some of us followed, strolling as if we weren’t trying to eavesdrop.

  “You’re acting awfully strange,” Annabelle said. “It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

  Akira swung her around and pinned her against a barracks wall, kissed her hard while she struggled. Some of us paused in the shadows, debated whether to stop him. Then Annabelle grew still and Akira caged her, his palms on the wall.

  “Happy now?” he said. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? You want more? You want to screw right here?”

  “Stop it.”

  “You know you want it. Why wait for the picnic? We can go to Bairs Creek right now and do it there. Then will you believe what I say? I said forget that girl and I meant it.”

  “You’re being mean. I thought you liked me.” Annabelle began to cry.

  “I like you fine, and you know it. But don’t tell me who I can talk to and who I can’t. We’re not married, for crying out loud.”

  Annabelle twisted away. “Well, you can keep your pants zipped, mister. I wouldn’t go with you tonight if you were the only man in camp.”

  “Fine by me.” Akira turned to go.

  “Some gentleman you are.”

  Akira bowed his head, then looked west, beyond the fence, before turning to Annabelle. “Look, I’m sorry, I’m being a Class A jerk. Let me walk you home.”

  Annabelle pushed ahead of him, arms crossed. Akira caught up and took her arm. A tumbleweed whirled past them, then settled in the dust as the wind died. The street was suddenly still, the air thick and cool.

  On the barracks steps, we sucked our cigarettes. They walked past us, Annabelle staring at her feet, Akira’s eyes on the horizon. Both of them looked miserable, like dogs left out in the rain.

  Twenty-One

  April 4–5, 2011

  Kira woke up splayed over the steering wheel. Pain pulsed through her head and torso, and blood sweetened her lips. She tested her fingers and toes, assessing for spinal cord damage. Movement possible, sensation intact. Thank God.

  “Are you all right? Hello? Can I help?” In the driver’s side mirror, the image of someone hurrying toward the car, silhouetted in headlights. “Should I call an ambulance? Oh, don’t try to get out, let me help you.” The woman opened the car door and eased Kira out.

  “Thank you. I need to call my husband. Can you find my phone? It’s in there somewhere. And my purse.” The car was nosedown in a shallow ditch. Luckily there were no trees around.

  “I’m calling 911.”

  “No, I’m okay, really—I’m a nurse. But you could call Triple A for me.” Kira lowered herself to a grassy patch of ground, careful not to overtwist her aching neck. The woman brought her the purse and phone, which showed four missed calls from Dan. It rang again and Kira picked up the call, said yes, she was all right, she didn’t know about the car, someone was there with her, he shouldn’t worry.

  “Of course I’m going to worry,” Dan said. “Jesus, Kira, I’ve been picturing you dead. Where are you? Did you call an ambulance?”

  She said she didn’t need one, and he said nurses were crappy judges of their own health and would she at least stay put and not try to drive the car. As if she’d be that stupid. But the edge in his voice told her to stop at yes.

  “I’m on my way. Where are you?”

  “On 4, a little west of Alhambra.”

  The woman got off the phone. “Triple A is coming. And you’re shivering, poor thing.” She draped her sweater over Kira’s shoulders and sat next to her, peering at her in the darkness. “Your face looks pretty bad, honey. I really think I should call an ambulance.”

  “My husband is on his way.” Kira pulled the sweater tighter. The urge to sleep was overwhelming, but she knew she should stay conscious in case of a head injury. What a fucking idiot she’d been, driving when Dr. Richardson said not to. Just as she’d kept working after the Hiroshima dream. Denial at its finest.

  Dan arrived twenty minutes later, armed with antiseptic wipes, bandages, ibuprofen, and a flashlight. “You forgot the vodka,” Kira said, but Dan didn’t smile.

  “God, look at you,” he said, and the love and dismay in his voice made Kira want to collapse onto him, cry and apologize. But he turned away to talk to the woman, who retrieved her sweater and left a few minutes later, wishing Kira well.

  A siren screamed and Kir
a looked at Dan accusingly.

  “Yes, I called 911,” he said. “And if you had any sense you would have too.”

  Kira succumbed to the paramedics, avoiding Dan’s eyes. The EMTs were worried about a concussion and wanted to take her to the hospital, but she convinced them she could monitor herself. Besides, she added, her husband would be with her. While they were telling Dan what symptoms to watch for, the Triple A guy showed up.

  “There’s a body shop on Alhambra, right off the highway,” Kira said. “I can’t think of the name, but it’s the only one there.”

  “I know the one,” the driver said. Dan said no, he should take the car to their Berkeley mechanic. The driver shrugged and said, “Your call.”

  “Martinez is closer,” Kira said. “And I want to go back to my mom’s house.”

  “I am not going to argue right now,” Dan said, his voice steely. He told the driver to go to Martinez, then helped Kira into the car. At the house, climbing the porch stairs, he gripped Kira’s arm so hard it hurt.

  Kira lay on the couch with a bag of frozen corn over her eyes. “Rest for a while, then we’ll go home,” Dan said. “I’m going to leave a message for the body shop to call me in the morning.”

  “I’m staying here.”

  “No, you’re not. You can’t be alone tonight, and I’ve got an early meeting in Menlo Park tomorrow.”

  “Reschedule it,” Kira said. “I need you to stay here.”

  “We need to go home.”

  “I’m staying.”

  Dan swore under his breath and went into the kitchen. Kira heard him on the phone, his voice low, edged with worry and something darker. Fear, she thought. Guilt simmered in the back of her mind, then vanished when she snapped back to the scene in the car. Childbirth, the absence of free will, a nonnegotiable biological drive. A loss of control she knew all too well these days.

  Dan came back with some ibuprofen for her and a glass of bourbon for himself. He left the kitchen light on and they sat in the semi-darkness and said nothing.

  

  Kira woke up at first light, her body stiff and her mind a vacuum. No dreams, or none that she remembered. That was a first. Dan’s side of the bed was empty, but before she could do more than register his absence she fell asleep again. When she got up two hours later, she moved as if her body were a single ambulatory bruise. It was a mistake to look in the mirror: nose spongy and bloodcrusted, raccoon eyes dark and shiny as eggplants.

  She inched downstairs to the kitchen, and Dan abandoned his phone and papers to reheat the oatmeal he’d left on the stove. “You slept, so that’s good,” he said as if he didn’t give a damn.

  “Yeah. Where’s the ibuprofen?” Kira took a bag of peas out of the freezer and molded it to her face.

  “You crashed the car because you had a dream, didn’t you? I can’t believe I let you drive.”

  “I don’t recall asking for your permission.”

  Dan slammed a cup of coffee, a bottle of ibuprofen, and a bowl of oatmeal on the table. “So what did the doctor say?”

  The aroma of coffee made it past the frozen peas, earthy and spicy, the most desirable thing in the world at that moment. Kira lowered the ice pack to sip it, braving Dan’s unhappy gaze, his perfectly justifiable concern. She contemplated lying, which would make her feel like shit and add more wreckage to their marriage. The truth would infuriate Dan, but it would be better in the long run. She tossed the ice pack on the table and downed four ibuprofen tablets and half the coffee.

  “We talked about trying to find out more about the dreams, you know, the stuff that happens in them. It’s that or try meds, and I don’t want to do that because if they work I won’t have the dreams anymore, and—”

  “Isn’t that the point?”

  “It was, but if it really is my grandmother in these dreams—fragments, I mean; that’s what I call them now. I think they’re fragments of her life. If it really is her, I want to figure out what’s going on. So I need to be here to go through Mom’s stuff, to see if more fragments happen, and I can’t go back to Berkeley because I can’t drive. Obviously.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re going to stay here and look at old papers and shit and hope you’ll have more dreams instead of taking meds and trying to put our life back together.”

  It wasn’t a choice, not really. The hammering in her head intensified. “Yes. For now. I think they’re happening for a reason and I need to know what it is. Dr. Richardson thinks you’re right about the triggers, so I’m going to try to trigger them.”

  Dan was staring at her in disbelief.

  “This is about my grandmother, Dan. It’s important to me.”

  “More important than our marriage, obviously.”

  “I’m talking about a few days. A week at most.”

  “Suit yourself.” Dan took out his wallet and tossed a stack of twenties on the table. “This should keep you in takeout for a while. Do me a favor and promise you’ll see a doctor if you feel worse tomorrow. Although why I think you’d do anything I suggest is beyond me.”

  He gathered his things and left. No kiss, not even a goodbye, an omission she’d thought Dan incapable of. The thought crossed her mind without weight, left her sitting in welcome silence, the childbirth fragment replaying in her head. The abandonment of will, the sublimation to a biological force, a feeling of hurtling toward something wonderful and terrifying, of trying to control a runaway horse. Hands like flies. An unimaginable force. Two pregnancies of her own, and it took her grandmother’s laboring to show her what childbirth was like.

  Leaving her oatmeal untouched, Kira went into the office. An hour later she gave in to fatigue and pain, took a nap and a long bath, and lay on the couch listening to her mother’s opera CDs. When her phone rang, it was Cam.

  “Ignore whatever Dan told you,” Kira said. “I’m fine.”

  “Shit, Kira, you could have been killed.”

  “I know, it was stupid of me to drive. I learned my lesson, I promise. So I’ll be at my mom’s for a while.”

  She turned down Cam’s offer to come over, promised to call the next day, then slept. When she woke up, she remembered Baby Kendall and called the hospital. The charge nurse spoke in the careful tone she used with parents whose anxiety rattled the phone. Baby Kendall was doing well; they’d weaned the vent again and started feedings. Relief swept through Kira, dissolving as her mind snapped back to Maddalena.

  Kira hobbled to her mother’s office and picked up the photo of Maddalena: collarbones as delicate as nasturtium vines, hair knotted low on her neck like an old-fashioned ballerina’s. A few wayward curls suggested a woman free of care, perhaps playful, but her eyes said something else. They were grave, distant, as if she could see something the photographer couldn’t, as if she didn’t see him or his camera at all. As if she wasn’t really there.

  What was so important in Maddalena’s life that it had to be relived in her granddaughter’s head?

  Kira took the photo to the kitchen and placed it in the center of the table. It looked solemn in its silver frame, commemorative, like the pictures of dead relatives some Italian families put on small altars in their homes, their loved ones side by side with the Virgin Mary or Jesus. Maddalena deserved an altar, Kira decided. She placed white tapers in cut-glass candlesticks on either side of a white linen placemat, then decided to add flowers. The pruners were where her mother always kept them, on a shelf by the back door.

  Outside, sunlight streamed pain into her eyes. A koi nosed the edge of a lily pad, drawing Kira to the pond. Orange torpedos in black water, silent and sinuous. The fish had made a ruckus the day she and Dan got married, right here by the pond, thrashing about as if they’d been celebrating too. Four years ago. Were these the same fish from her wedding day, still swimming in unending circles, constant and serene in their confinement?

  It had
been an intimate ceremony, family and a few friends semicircled around the pond. Dan had designed their rings, gold bands etched with kanji that said, “I love you.” His suit was of pale gray linen, her dress an off-the-shoulder sheath of creamy raw silk, its simplicity sparked by spiraling sapphire earrings. She’d carried a bouquet of white roses, accented with irises that matched the blue of Dan’s shirt. Her vows were minimalist, his poetic. His words had lingered in her mind for weeks afterward. He cried when he said, “I do,” and Kira hadn’t. Did that mean she didn’t love him enough?

  Dan had never proposed, had simply spoken, from their earliest days together, as if their marriage was a given. No question about their future, no discussion of whether they were right for each other. A truth not worthy of doubt. And now look at them. On that June day four years ago, neither of them could have imagined losing a baby, or a mother.

  Kira went to the garden, where the light was more forgiving, filtered through rhododendrons and skeleton trellises tagged with new green. As a child she had spent hours here, lying in the damp shade and listening to the rumble of bees, the mechanical growl of lawnmowers. The garden offered a peaceful kind of solitude, an antidote to the loneliness of a house too big for two. Sprawled on her back, the blue sky umbrella above her, she used to imagine her blood racing in circles, from her head to her toes and back again. With her hand on her bony chest, she’d feel her heart thump, soft and constant, a gentle reminder of something her child self couldn’t identify but that she was convinced connected her to the world.

  Now the rain-softened earth beckoned, as if time had stopped. Kira lay down, head boomeranging, hand on her chest. Same heartbeat, same sky, same shaded silence. She imagined Aimi running on the garden path, grabbing peonies and tulips with her chubby hands, bringing the crushed blossoms to her grandmother, the two of them laughing together.

 

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