The Wild Impossibility

by Ossola, Cheryl A. ;

  “You had to leave it behind,” Maddalena said. “That’s so sad.”

  “I try not to think about it. Anyway, when I was in sixth grade I decided I was going to be a concert pianist. Play at Carnegie Hall and the top opera houses in Europe.”

  “I thought you wanted to be a lawyer,” Maddalena said.

  “I do now, but that’s because of what they’ve done to us. Back then, all I cared about was music. And baseball.”

  “I want to hear you play.”

  “I’m not very good anymore. But I’ll get back to it someday, when I have a piano worth playing again. There’s one at Manzanar, in the canteen. It’s a real piece of junk, but I play it sometimes. I’m writing a song now.” For you, he thought.

  “Have you written many songs?”

  “I’ve always tinkered. A few songs, and part of what I thought might be an opera one day. Nothing very good.”

  “An opera!” Maddalena laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “My grandfather likes opera, but I don’t know any boys who do. In Lone Pine it’s all sports and trucks and fishing. I bet the boys at my school don’t even know what opera is. What’s yours about?”

  “It’s based on a very old Japanese story about samurai—those are warriors. It’s called ‘Chushingura,’ which means ‘The Forty-Seven Ronin.’ It’s about loyalty, dishonor, and revenge—good stuff for an opera, right?” Akira laughed. “What kind of music do you like?”

  “I hear Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey on the radio sometimes. I like them.”

  Akira nodded. “Big bands, yeah, good stuff. I like classical music better, though it’s not as popular with the girls, that’s for sure. I almost quit playing because of that, when I was twelve. I had a crush on a girl who thought musicians were sissies, and I didn’t practice for a whole month. I dishonored my parents by not working as hard as I could—that was my duty, to pay them back for buying the piano. After I missed two lessons, they made me pay for every one I missed, and pretty soon I had no spending money. Anyway, the girl I liked started going steady with a jock, so I gave up on her. Eventually I figured out that any girl who didn’t like my music wasn’t the girl for me.”

  “I like classical music too,” Maddalena said.

  Akira laughed. “Good. Now it’s your turn to talk.”

  “Next time. I should go.”

  “When is next time?”

  “I don’t know,” Maddalena said.

  They kissed again, lingering this time, and she wanted to crawl inside him, blend her breath and blood and muscles with his. Finally she pulled away, and Akira helped her onto the horse.

  “Please be safe,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. Dream about me, okay?” He grabbed her hand and kissed it.

  When the thud of hooves had faded, Akira set out for Manzanar. Crouched among the cottonwoods, he tracked the searchlights. One beam skimmed past, then another. He ran, slid underneath the fence and stumbled, his mind screaming run run run run! A beam grabbed him, tracked him. He dodged sideways and nearly fell, startled by a high-pitched zing. Then another zing, dirt spraying just ahead, and he rolled, hands over his head. The light swung off him and he ran again, reached the barracks and slipped into the shadows, his muscles quivering.

  Warning shots. If that guard wanted him dead, he’d be dead.

  Shoving his shaking hands into his pockets, Akira headed home. He’d done it. He’d been outside twice now and nothing could stop him, not Executive Order 9066, not barbed wire, not searchlights or machine guns or rifles. He could survive Manzanar. With Maddalena to dream about, he could survive anything.

  Twenty-Three

  April 5–6, 2011

  Kira spent the afternoon and evening in a funk. Twice she almost convinced herself to call Dan, and when she finally managed to do it he didn’t pick up. She left him a message about Baby Kendall and skipped the apology she’d rehearsed in her head. At nine, when she was in bed icing her eyes and nose again, he called back.

  “Got your message. Good news about the baby.” His voice was flat.

  “Yeah.” She bit back a remark about how long it had taken him to call her. “How are you? Did you go for a run?”

  “No, I had dinner with my folks. Mom wanted to know if she could do anything for you, but I told her you were at your mom’s and wanted to be alone.” He sounded either hurt or pissed. Probably both.

  “Look, I know you don’t get why I’m doing this. I understand. But I need you to try to understand too. There’s something about the dreams I never told you. And the fragments. It sounds kind of nuts.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “You’re not making this any easier.” Kira went downstairs, tossed her veggie ice pack in the freezer, and poured a shot of brandy.

  “Sorry, go on.”

  “You know how when you dream, you’re, like, the protagonist? Well, in these things I’m not, my grandmother is. I’m not in them. I mean, I am in them, but I’m her. My grandmother.”

  Silence. Then: “So when I drew your grandma, I was drawing you? You were her?”

  “Yeah, kind of. It’s hard to explain. I guess the best way to describe it is that I’m in her head. There but not there. I know what she’s feeling in the moment and I can see where we are, but I don’t know much else. Anyway, the point is, what if these things aren’t dreams? What if they’re my grandmother’s memories, and I’m living them?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Jesus, Dan, you’re the one who was researching quantum entanglement. I know it’s not that, but it could be something. Dr. Richardson says there’s stuff we don’t know.”

  “Please don’t tell me you think you’re channeling your dead grandmother.”

  “Not funny.”

  “So how many dreams have you triggered so far?”

  His tone stung, but what hurt most was how unlike himself he sounded. Kira heard water running in the background, the scrape of the teakettle. He’d be puttering around the kitchen in his favorite Cal Bears T-shirt, the one he’d worn so often it was nearly transparent. He was trying, this beautiful, sweet man she’d married. He always did. Her mother used to say Kira didn’t appreciate Dan enough, and every time Kira had felt defensive. Which meant her mother was right.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “I’m just distracted by all this, can’t you see that?”

  “You probably don’t even remember what I said the other day.”

  “About what?” she said at the same time the words hit her. Have another baby. “No, of course I remember. It’s just—I’m not ready to think about that yet.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Please don’t be mad. It’s not that I don’t want to. I just…not now.”

  “Listen, I’ve got to get some work done. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Can you come over tomorrow? And bring the photo albums and my laptop?”

  A beat. “Sure.”

  Dan hung up, and Kira spent the rest of the evening sitting at Maddalena’s shrine and wandering around the house, her childhood flooding back. There was so much she’d never told Dan—about her mother’s pendulum swings from loving to neglectful and back, her own loneliness as a child. The miscarriage.

  She texted Cam. Do I take Dan for granted? The message whooshed away, and twenty seconds later a yes pinged back. Then the phone rang.

  “Thanks a lot,” Kira said to Cam.

  “Well, you asked.”

  “Do you ever think you shouldn’t have married Kip?”

  “Of course, every time he acts like a jerk,” Camille said. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, things just feel so one-sided. Sometimes I think I’m faking it. Our marriage, I mean.”

  “I don’t think you are.”
>
  “I can’t worry about it right now,” Kira said, “but if I don’t, I might lose Dan. And I almost don’t care.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “And say what?”

  “Reassure him, I guess. After all, he and I are kind of in the same boat.” Kira started to protest, but Camille cut her off. “I get it—you’ve got to take care of you right now, and that’s fine. I’m here when you need me, and so is Dan.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Kira hung up, remembering what it was like to be thirteen, alone and confused, praying for something she didn’t understand. Not much had changed.

  

  The next morning brought good news: Baby Kendall was on full feedings, and if he held his own for twenty-four hours, they’d extubate him. If her head hadn’t weighed a thousand pounds, Kira would have danced a jig. She texted Dan and Cam, got a string of heart emojis back from Cam, and tried to still a jangle of panic when Dan didn’t reply.

  After sorting through the last of the boxes and files from her mother’s office, she’d found nothing. No journals, no letters that might explain the mysterious man, nothing that triggered a fragment. At lunchtime Kira sat at the kitchen table eating cereal, staring at her grandmother’s photo. “I’m here,” she said. “You can do your thing anytime now.” Maddalena gazed at nothing, as cryptic as the goddamn Mona Lisa. Kira rinsed her cereal bowl and headed upstairs to the attic.

  In the womblike space under the eaves, sunlight bored through grayed windows, casting warm stripes on dusty floorboards. See, Dan, perfect for channeling dead grandmothers.

  She started with the steamer trunk where she’d found the veiled hat all those years ago. Nearly three feet tall, the trunk had dark leather skin that curled at the corners and “Moretti” stenciled in patchy white capital letters on each side. It had probably come from Italy on the boat with her great-grandparents, but Kira had never thought to ask. Inside were towers of folded fabric, curtains and runners and tablecloths bearing the toxic smell of mothballs. A small white cloth bore the initials M.M.B. embroidered in dark blue. Maddalena Moretti Brivio. Joe Brivio, another man who’d left faint footprints in the family’s past. Kira thought of Maddalena in her rocker, the man calling to her from downstairs with a snarl in his voice. If the fragments were real, Maddalena hadn’t loved him. How had she felt about taking his name?

  At the bottom of the trunk was a shallow cardboard box with a housedress in a cabbage rose print, faded red on a dark blue ground, and a silver comb and brush set, browned with age. A small oval box in burgundy leather held a necklace of three twisted strands of beads in rose, sapphire, lavender, and white, plus matching clip-on earrings. In another small box, tortoiseshell hair combs, turquoise costume jewelry, a pale pink rosary.

  Kira sat in the rocking chair and fastened the beads around her neck. Maddalena had sat here, in this chair, rocking her baby. Rolling the orbs between her fingers, Kira thought about Maddalena’s life: growing up on a ranch in Owens Valley in the 1940s, married young, the move to Martinez, a child right away. Then dead at thirty-four. Her own age now, Kira thought, the realization a blow. She should look for Maddalena’s obituary, not that it would tell her much. Obituaries emphasized the positive and the sentimental and avoided unpleasantries like suicides. Death certificates might have more information, but their facts often hid the truth.

  Kira rocked, and the beads grew warm under her fingers. Yes. Warmer still, and she was sinking, sinking into the salmon and yellow and green. Concentrate.

  There. Maddalena is in a bedroom with a single window, an iron bed. It’s the same room as the wedding-dress fragment. The little cabinet with the spindly legs is there, and the necklace Kira is wearing now is piled in a rainbow heap on top of it. Maddalena’s breathing is fast, her motions quick and nervous. She’s wearing a shapeless dress, her hair in a braid. She wedges the back of a chair under the doorknob, pulls the curtains closed, and kneels in front of the cabinet.

  No one can see what I have, so little, so precious. I cannot let them take it away from me. I wonder how I can breathe, my throat is so tight, and my eyes ache from crying. I check my pocket—yes, it’s there. Hide it, quickly.

  A door slammed. “Kira?” Dan called.

  Kira clung to the image of Maddalena poised in front of the cabinet, but it was gone, gone, goddamn it. She wiped away tears of frustration. Dan’s footsteps drummed through the living room, the kitchen, up the stairs. Then the attic door opened and Kira rocked to her feet. “You ruined it! You fucking ruined it!”

  Dan froze, his hand on the doorknob.

  Kira stared at him, her hand at her throat, the beads still warm, willing herself to speak. Say you’re sorry, go to him, forget the fragments. Make dinner, make love.

  Kira turned toward the cabinet. Dan went downstairs, closed the front door, started his car. Kira heard the sounds as if from a great distance, dismissed them. If she’d triggered one fragment, she could do it again. Kneeling, she opened the cabinet door.

  Twenty-Four

  July 25, 1945

  It took no time for word to spread. We heard it in the mess halls, the beauty parlor, the newsroom, the latrines. Someone had been shot at, not going outside the fence but coming back in. A warning: don’t tempt us, don’t push your luck. The war is not over yet.

  Who was it, who saw it? Akira Shimizu, that boy asking for trouble, that’s who it was. No one knew who said it, but everyone believed it. There was talk of the white girl, the one on the horse, that Akira went outside to find her. A fool’s errand. He denied it, but the truth was on his face. The others who went under the fence to fish or taste freedom had no reason to hide what they did; they took pride in their adventures, competed to see who would stay out the longest, come home with the coveted golden trout. Akira’s lie revealed the truth. We saw the change in him, the restlessness, how he ran hot and cold with Annabelle. And Annabelle—we saw the stoniness in her face, how she used it to crush her sorrow. She let her anger rise and surface. We understood. Better anger than devastation, than humiliation, than grief.

  The day after the shot, Akira and Annabelle argued, their shoulders hunched, their voices hushed, then rising. We saw wildness in him, need, frustration. And, in the softness of his mouth, the desire to spare Annabelle the pain he had inflicted on her. But he had made his choice. Her sapling body became an ancient pine before our eyes.

  “My brother was right,” Annabelle said. “He saw you for what you are, but not me, oh no, I was too stupid. I thought you loved me.” Tears in her voice, her face made unlovely by suffering.

  “You’re making it worse than it is,” Akira said.

  Annabelle turned on him, her instincts sharp. “Do you think I’m blind? You’re a selfish pig!”

  He tried to answer, then gave up and drifted away. Annabelle remained, her body bowed.

  At Akira’s barracks, we overheard his parents speak to him about honor, respect for tradition. Akira offered apologies, asked for forgiveness. But he made no promises. He did not say he wouldn’t leave again. He did not say there was no white girl. Although he would deceive Annabelle, he would not lie to his parents. The truth was in what he did not say.

  Some of us called him reckless, foolish, a bad son. Some of us remembered youthful passion, the body’s tempestuousness, and we understood. Not one of us believed Akira would stay inside the fence. All of us wished for his safety.

  Twenty-Five

  April 6–7, 2011

  The cabinet was empty, of course, as it had been the last time Kira had looked, as it had been for years, and opening the door hadn’t triggered a damn thing. Yet she could still feel her grandmother’s urgency, her need to hide whatever she had in her pocket, her blackness of spirit, as if she had lost everything.

  Go there. A thought as piercing as a voice. Kira spun around. “You’re imagining things,” she mumbled into th
e silence, and turned back to the cabinet. It wasn’t much of a hiding place; anyone could open the door and see what was in there. Unless… She ran her hand along the interior. The top surface felt rough, as if it hadn’t been sanded. Or maybe something had been stuck there? Kira took the cabinet to the kitchen and laid it on the table, found a flashlight in the junk drawer. There—the outline of a rectangle, dried glue or the fossilized remains of tape.

  “Way to go, Grandma!” Kira said. Then her excitement trickled away. So what if the cabinet had been Maddalena’s hiding place? Whatever she’d kept there was gone, removed or discovered decades ago.

  Kira put the cabinet in the bedroom, collected the necklace and earrings and housedress from the attic and laid the dress on the bed, smoothing its wrinkles. It slept there, a keeper of secrets, smelling of regret, stale darkness, and neglect.

  

  The next morning Kira woke before dawn, naked and cold. Crumpled on the pillow next to her, the housedress lay like a deflated torso. She must have worn it to bed, taken it off during the night, though she didn’t remember doing either. She did remember drinking too much whiskey, pinning her hair back the way Maddalena wore hers in the portrait, and trying on the housedress. Lit only by the glow of a bedside lamp, she saw what her mother had seen, all those years ago—Maddalena in herself.

  She couldn’t remember getting in bed, but she remembered dreaming. This time she was herself, riding a horse on an open plain surrounded by mountains, flying between ecstasy and foreboding. “Stop!” she cried, but no sound came out, and when she pulled on the reins, they flapped on the horse’s neck, slack and lifeless.

  Kira sat up, and again the thought penetrated her brain: Go there.

  She left an apologetic voicemail for Dan, showered and made coffee. With her hair coiled like Maddalena’s and makeup caked over her bruises, wearing the matching beads and earrings and a white silk shirt from Rosa’s closet, Kira took a cab to the Contra Costa County Clerk’s office. One form to fill out, a reasonable amount of waiting, and voilà—her grandmother’s death certificate. “Cause of death: trauma to the head and internal injuries, car versus pedestrian.” The words gutted her. She’d known how Maddalena died, of course, but the impassive words lent brutality to her death. “Place of death: 1100 block of Haven Street, Martinez, California. Time of death: approximately eight p.m.” After “Witnessed by,” an illegible scrawl that she assumed was Joe Brivio’s. How much had her grandfather known that this paper couldn’t tell her?