“No, he—”
“You have pretty hair, dark like Lena’s. Not as curly, though.” Regina patted her white wisps. “I had blonde hair, straight as rain. Lena always said how much she envied it. I wanted her curls, of course. You know us girls, never happy with how we look.”
“What was she like?” Kira said. “She died before I was born.”
“Yes, such a terrible, terrible thing, how young she was. I went out of my mind when I heard she was gone. I simply couldn’t believe it. She was full of life, that one, and smart as a whip, got As in everything. She used to help me with my homework, especially arithmetic. Long division! Heavens to Betsy, I couldn’t make heads or tails of all those numbers. I would have flunked without Lena’s help. She had the patience of Job, going over and over those numbers with me. I was better at hairstyles and such. I worked as a beautician before I got married.” Regina patted Kira’s hand. “You’re Lena’s granddaughter, are you? Bless my stars. She was such a dear, and very pretty. She had the prettiest big green eyes, like you.”
“Did she have a horse? What kinds of things did you do together?”
“Oh yes, of course, a big bay. A beautiful horse, his name was—oh, I don’t remember,” Regina said, her voice rising in frustration. “My memory isn’t what it used to be. Old age is no picnic, let me tell you! But let’s see. We did the usual girl things, I suppose. We had sleepovers and baked cookies and talked about boys and clothes. Lena liked to try on my clothes because I had fancier things than she did. I had this one dress she was crazy for, white with a red belt. It fit her, but she didn’t have much of a waist. She was small like me, but sturdier. The war changed everything, of course. Then she met that boy from the camp. Have some tea, dear.” She gestured to a tray table where Florence had put iced tea and cookies.
“Akira. Did you ever meet him?”
“No, I never did,” Regina said. “I wanted to, Lord knows, to see what all the fuss was about, but I never so much as laid eyes on him. I helped Lena write a letter to him once. She asked me for advice because she didn’t know much about boys. I never would have had the nerve to do such a thing myself, but that was Lena for you. She took that letter and threw it right over the barbed wire, right under the guards’ noses.” A wavery smile. “And then there she was, sneaking out at night and going off to meet him. It was all so exciting, but it scared me to death! She said she was in love, and I suppose she was, but heavens! I wish I’d talked her out of that whole affair. Of course, there was no telling Lena anything—once she made up her mind, that was it. She had a wild streak in her.” Regina sank back against the pillow, tears in her eyes. “We were young then, of course. So very young.”
“Do you remember what happened?” Kira said. “How did Maddalena’s father and brother find out about her and Akira? Where were they when he was killed?”
“Didn’t the article say where?” Dustin said.
“No, only that my grandmother’s brother found them. Do you know, Mrs. Cooper?”
Regina’s eyes were closed. “Is she asleep?” Dustin mouthed to Kira.
“She does that,” Flo said. “Just fades out. Give her a minute.”
Regina’s eyes fluttered open and she clutched Kira’s hands. “Lena! Oh, my dearest, dearest friend, I’ve missed you so much. That man they made you marry, I hated him for taking you away. And then your letters stopped coming and they told me you were dead.” Her voice shook and she pulled Kira against her thick, soft body. “I’m so glad you came back.”
“I’m glad too,” Kira said. She was kneeling next to the bed, her head on Regina’s belly. The old woman smelled familiar. And that voice, she knew it. She could see Regina at fifteen, sixteen, in the birthday party fragment, her blonde hair swinging as she pirouetted in that polka-dot dress with the red belt.
“Ma, this isn’t Lena,” Florence said loudly. “It’s her granddaughter.”
“I missed you so much. So terrible, all those years, so terrible what they did to you and that boy.” Regina wept a little, then her eyes closed again. In seconds she was snoring softly.
“I missed you too,” Kira said, and began to cry.
“Missed her? What kind of nonsense is that?” Florence said. “I think you’d better leave.”
“Kira, come on.” Dustin’s hand on her shoulder, insistent. She felt half asleep, trapped in the smell of Regina’s powdery skin, the pillow of her body. Dustin pulled her up and steered her out of the room.
“The nerve, making an old woman cry like that. I don’t know why people have to go around digging up the past.” Florence glared at Kira on the word “people.”
“She didn’t mean anything by it,” Dustin said. “Just playing along, right, Kira?”
“Yes, I’m sorry.” The room was in sharp focus now. “She thought I was Lena, so I thought she’d want to hear that Lena missed her too. By the way, does your mother still have those letters from Maddalena?”
“Can’t say I’ve seen anything like that,” Florence said, crossing her arms.
“Would you ask her? Please?” Kira scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper from her purse and held it out. “Please call if you find anything. It would mean a lot to me.” When Florence didn’t take the paper, Kira left it on the hallway table.
She wept quietly all the way back to Lone Pine. For a moment, kneeling beside Regina, she’d felt like Maddalena. The old woman’s scent and warmth felt familiar, and everything she said felt right, as if Kira had known all along that Maddalena was good at math, had a horse, wrote a letter to a boy at Manzanar and got it to him somehow. Plainly, she was fearless. Sixteen years old and she knew what she wanted. And when she couldn’t have it, she wanted to die with Akira but had chosen instead to save her unborn child. Rosa. Until the day she ran in front of those headlights, Maddalena had protected Rosa as best she could.
Kira dug Kleenex out of her bag and wiped her face. She shared DNA with a woman like Maddalena, and yet here she was, wandering around in the desert trying to figure out what a bunch of dreams meant and ruining her marriage in the process. Her old fear stirred, reinvigorated. What if she lacked the capacity for motherhood, for loving anyone in that self-sacrificing way? She’d tried to will her first pregnancy out of existence—what if she’d fooled herself into thinking she’d wanted Aimi but she really didn’t, and that was why Aimi died? And she seemed hell-bent on sending her marriage into a death spiral. What if she couldn’t really love anyone?
Manzanar appeared, then receded in a scrim of dust. The desert, in all its supreme cruelty, was toying with her, making her think she was Maddalena. If she stayed long enough, she might disappear completely.
Kira let her head fall back on the scorching headrest. She wanted a bubble bath in a bug-free bathroom and a glass of good wine. She wanted to curl up in Dr. Richardson’s big chair and take his meds and be fine, absolutely fine. No more fragments, no more questions without answers, no more fighting whatever it was that ruled her.
“I’m done, Dustin. Take me back to the motel, please.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll hit the last place tomorrow.”
“No, I’m going home. We found Regina, and I’ve got the box. That’s enough.” She pretended she didn’t see Dustin’s questioning gaze.
At the motel, Dustin let the engine idle. “I’m going to miss you, boss. Let me know if you’re ever in town again.”
“I will. Thanks for everything.” Kira hugged him. The truck trundled off, a toy superimposed on the twilit Sierra. Mountain guardians of this desperate valley, but not of Maddalena. The Sierra had failed her. When she left the valley in mourning, the mountains watched her go, witnesses to devastation, to injustice, to the murder of a teenage boy. That’s what love got you, at least in Owens Valley in the 1940s. Maybe anywhere, even now.
Kira stepped into the dead quiet of her motel room. It would be a relief to get home.
>
Thirty-Five
August 20, 1945
We should make a plan,” Akira said. “I’ll be leaving soon.”
Maddalena snuggled closer, twining her naked legs around his. She missed the orchard, the apple trees standing guard along with Scout. He would have stamped his hooves and snorted if anyone came near. If the night winds hadn’t grown so violent, they’d be there still. The shed was cozier, even though the door didn’t close properly and the floor was hard, but she didn’t like not being able to see outside. It gave her a jittery feeling, which she supposed would pass with time.
“What sort of plan did you have in mind?” she asked. It didn’t matter what it was as long as they’d be together.
“I’ll need to go back to Berkeley with my parents,” Akira said. “I’ll wait to tell them about you until they’re home and settled; it’ll be easier on them. I’ll find some work and save up money for train fare for both of us, and to rent a room for a while. Then I’ll come back to get you. You’ll have to be ready to go anytime, so have a suitcase packed and keep it at Regina’s. I’ll write to you to let you know when I’m coming.”
“Send it to Regina. I never get letters, so if you wrote to me my parents would ask questions.”
“I’ll meet you at the train station in Lone Pine, and we’ll take the train to San Francisco, lay low for a while. You won’t be able to say goodbye to your family, but you can write and let them know you’re safe.”
Leave without saying goodbye? She hadn’t thought of that, but of course it was necessary. She’d come back once her parents had gotten used to the idea that she was in love, that her life was going to be different from the one they’d imagined for her. Maybe Akira would never be welcome in their home, but they would be happy to see her. They would realize how happy she was, and maybe they would forgive her.
“Can I meet your parents?” she said.
“Someday. They’ll need time to get used to the idea that you’re not Japanese. But when they see how much I love you, I think they’ll accept you. Especially once we’re married and they get to know you.”
Akira stood and pulled her up with him, then knelt in front of her. She stood there naked, disbelieving, her skin alive in the cool air.
“Maddalena, I love you.” He kissed one of her hands, then the other. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes, yes! I love you, Akira.” She threw her arms around him, happier than she’d ever been. A proposal in the desert, in an empty shed, hospital blankets under her bare feet—it was theirs. It was perfect.
They made love again, and afterward Maddalena lay next to Akira wondering what it would be like to be his wife. Mrs. Akira Shimizu, she thought. Maddalena Moretti Shimizu. What an elegant name.
“I should go,” she murmured, then drifted off.
A rattling sound woke her. “Akira, wake up!” The shed door bounced and shuddered against the frame.
Akira went to the door and listened while Maddalena half whispered a Hail Mary. A minute went by, then two. The door quieted. No sounds but the wind, a distant howl. “Coyotes,” Akira whispered. He pushed the door and it swung open, fell back against his hand. “It was the wind,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll walk you home.”
“That’s dangerous,” Maddalena said.
“I don’t care. If anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen to both of us.”
They dressed quickly and hid the rolled-up blankets under an old seed bag. Then Akira took her hand and they set out across the desert. Maddalena shivered. It was too dangerous, what they were doing, yet there was no going back, no undoing what they had started. She would say goodbye to Scout, to her home, leave her family, make a new family with Akira. They would be together. That was all that mattered.
When they were fifty yards out from the paddock, Akira took Maddalena’s face in his hands and kissed her. “Wherever you are, wherever I am, you’re in my heart,” he said. “I’ll never let go of you. Remember that.” A coyote answered, its howl sharp on the wind.
“I will.”
“Go now,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”
Thirty-Six
April 12, 2011
The next day Kira got as far as the door, then parked her bag and hurried to the motel office to tell Mike she wasn’t leaving after all.
“What’d I tell you?” Dustin said to Mike. “Pay up, dude.” Mike handed him a folded bill, muttering something about knowing better than to make bets with Dustin.
“You bet that I wouldn’t leave?” Kira said to Dustin. “Then you know me better than I know myself, which is pretty scary after only two days.”
“Yep. My mom says when I was a kid I knew things, like who was on the phone before she answered it or what someone was going to say before they said it. It creeped her out. So, you ready to check out the other name on that list?”
“Not today,” Kira said. “Tell me, if you were a teenage boy at Manzanar and you wanted to hook up with a girl outside the camp, where would you go?”
Find it.
“Oh, shit.” Kira sank into one of the tiny lobby’s orange chairs, her bones crumbling. That first fragment—men’s voices, boots crunching on rock, immobilizing fear—she hadn’t connected the dots. That was Akira’s murder. That was what she was supposed to find, not the house where Maddalena had lived but the place where Akira died. It was why she’d come here. If she wanted to find a connection to Maddalena and Akira, she had to go to the place where they’d been together. Where Maddalena might have died with Akira, but for Rosa. Cold sweat soaked Kira’s T-shirt.
“Here, drink this.” Dustin gave her a cup of water. “You don’t look so good.”
The screen door stood between Kira and the Inyos, fine wire hashtagging the mountains, blurring their hues. It still surprised her to see such beauty in this desolate place. It was a changeling, this valley. Had Maddalena thought that too? Did the valley become more beautiful when she fell in love, uglier when Akira died?
“Better?” Dustin’s face was inches from Kira’s, his hands on his knees.
“Yes, thanks. It’s that medical condition I mentioned,” Kira said. “I get dizzy sometimes.” At this moment, not a lie. “I’ll bet wherever they used to go to be together was where he died.”
“You want to try asking Regina again? She probably knows.”
“No, I don’t think we’d get past Florence. Not this soon anyway.”
“Okay. So where would they go, where would they go?” Dustin hummed, pouring coffee into his thermos. “There was an old fishing shack up Shepherd Creek, couple of miles into the foothills. That could be it. Kids used to go there to get high. I bet it’s still there.”
“Meet you at the truck,” Kira said.
Back in her room, she turned off her phone and left it on the bedside table. The newspaper article and the cigar box went into her backpack; for whatever reason, she wanted them with her. Maddalena’s presence? That made no sense, but what did anymore?
The truck was idling in the same spot where she’d said goodbye the night before, where Dustin hadn’t believed her goodbye. She swung her backpack onto the seat and climbed in.
“Let’s go.”
The fishing shack stood by the banks of the listless creek, little more than a lean-to furnished with rusted cans and the stink of fish. “Nope,” Dustin said, peering inside. “Not here. This wasn’t the place.”
“Why do you say that?” But Kira knew it too. The place was cold, damp in a way that leached every bit of warmth from your flesh, hostile enough to bar lovers at the door.
Dustin shrugged. “Some things you just know. Okay, plan B. You got that article on you?”
“In the truck.”
Leaning against the pickup’s hood, Dustin scanned the story, talking as much to himself as to Kira. “Let’s see.
Odd that they don’t say where it happened, but maybe they wanted to keep people from snooping around. From what this fellow Marco says, it sounds like he and his dad were on foot. That means wherever your grandma and her honey were, it was probably someplace close to your grandma’s ranch. I can’t think of anything around there, but I’ll drive down that way and you put your antennae up.”
They headed east out of the foothills, toward a dark blot on the landscape northwest of Manzanar. Kira pointed to it. “What’s that straight ahead?”
“Used to be an apple orchard, not much left of it now.”
“It looks like it’s close to Manzanar. Let’s go there.”
“Sure thing. It wouldn’t have been the greatest place to hang out, but it’s not like they had a lot of choices. And there would’ve been more trees back then.”
Up close, the orchard looked like a relic of another time, before the water wars, when the desert was ripe and the trees exploded in springtime, white blossoms jettisoned by hard green fruit. Now, their dull leaves edge-curled, thin bark mottled with thirst, the trees stood farther apart than they should have, half of their contingent missing. Twisted limbs spiraled, reaching for neighboring branches that were no longer there. Kira could walk between the trees, arms out to her sides, and not touch a leaf.
Dustin leaned against the truck, face to the sun, while Kira wandered through the orchard. Near the center, an overpowering scent of fruitwood lingered. Parting the low branches of a gnarled tree, she stepped under its scant canopy and touched its trunk, a riverbed of furrowed bark. Within seconds she fell to the ground, lay there as if weighted, fingers grasping the earth. She was whirling, airborne, caught on a wave, spinning into the speeding sun. Faces, fleeting and transparent, there and not there: Aimi, Dan, Rosa. A searing joyful pain, an endless alabaster shimmer, warm as a mother’s breath, sweet as her milk.
The Wild Impossibility Page 24