Kira opened her eyes wide, summoned the shadowed sky, the invisible mountains, the fast-running wind, the deep silence of the desert. How much there was to see. Digging handfuls of the sandy dirt, she rubbed it into her flesh, welcomed the sting of it. She was here, in this place that belonged to Maddalena and Akira. She understood everything—what love could be, what it took from you. But what did it matter? Knowing changed nothing.
Longing seeped through Kira’s bloodstream. She cried until she choked and retched, until the wind died and she lay still, eyes open, muscles soft, mind at rest. Knowing changed everything. Dan was part of her, as much as Aimi was, as her mother was, as Maddalena. His love made it so. She wanted their bed, his head dark on the pillow, the long line of his body beside her.
She dreamed that Dan was nested behind her, his face in her hair, his leg over hers. Half awake, she tried to move and couldn’t, screamed and broke free, saw a figure in the half-darkness and screamed again.
“Kira, Kira, it’s okay, it’s me.” Dan sat up, reaching for her. “Honey, it’s me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh my God, you gave me heart failure. When did you get here?” Kira shivered, her muscles rigid.
“I don’t know, maybe a couple of hours ago. I tried to wake you but you were out cold.”
“How did you find me?”
“Dustin called and I took off right away. He met me at the motel and drove me out here. Hell of a nice guy to do that in the middle of the night.”
“He was supposed to tell you I’d be out of touch for a while.”
“Like you’d been in touch? Right. When I said I was coming, he told me he figured as much and that I should call him when I got here.”
“I’m not done here. You need to leave.” Kira could feel his eyes on her, his face indistinct in the darkness. “I’ll come home soon, I promise.”
“No way I’m leaving you out here alone. If you’re staying, I’m staying. End of discussion.”
She was dead tired, incapable of arguing. She lay down and Dan settled next to her.
“I should have gone to Martinez; then I would have known you were gone,” he said, his voice drifting toward sleep. “I was trying to give you privacy, but I shouldn’t have left you alone no matter what you said. Stupid of me, with everything you’ve gone through. I love you so much. I promise I’ll never let go of you again.”
Never let go. The words reverberated and Kira’s hands flared, wildfire hot. Sparks of orange and green lit up the shed, blinding her, and she cried out.
Silence. Stillness.
She can see again. Maddalena is curled on the floor beside her, her breath coming fast. Kira touches her, and Maddalena slides toward her and dissolves, leaving a sense of warmth, of weighted air beneath Kira’s skin. She shifts under the arm draped across her. Not Dan’s anymore. Akira’s.
It should be impossible to see much in the seeping morning light, but she can see everything, hear everything. Akira’s breathing, his heartbeat. Wind shuddering the metal door. A coyote. Footsteps. She shakes with every breath.
I have heard it all day, that alarm inside me, and I ignored it, gave in to desire and came here when I knew I shouldn’t, refused to leave him hours ago when I knew I should. I fell asleep. A mistake, a mistake.
This is what I heard in the silence: boots striking the desert floor, voices loud with anger and righteousness. They don’t come quietly because they know we cannot run. There is nowhere to go. I know what is coming. Akira does too, and his arms tighten around me. I clasp his hands, and in the seconds that remain of his body pressed to mine, I tell him I love him, over and over. I am still saying it when the door swings open and my father and Marco stand against the pink sky. The mouth of a shotgun stops my heart.
“See? Like I told you.” Marco is speaking. “I followed her here two days ago, figured she was having some fun with one of the boys from town. Goddamn Jap bastard.”
Marco drags me out of the shed and I spit at him. I am already screaming.
“Don’t hurt him! I promise not to see him again, I promise, Papa, please! Let him go!”
My father’s fingers move, restless on the gun, dark hairs sprouting ugly on his knuckles.
Akira lunges for my father, shoves the shotgun up, and they fall outside the door. I scream and Marco throws me against the wall. My hand rakes the rough metal and I feel nothing. Marco pulls Akira to his feet, pins his arms behind his back.
The gun barrel rises. I scream again, turn to Akira, start to run to him. But the baby, think of the baby. Akira never knew, oh God, he never knew.
Marco shoves Akira toward the open desert and the gunshot echoes off the mountains. I scream, voiceless, run through raining blood and fall on him, the taste of him on my tongue.
My life is over.
Thirty-Nine
August 23, 1945
We heard the shot in the hours before dawn. Startled awake, or waiting for night to fade, or working the night shift, we flinched and went on with our lives. It wasn’t the first time a Manzanar sentry had hit the trigger—of course we assumed that was what had happened. The war had ended, but hatred has no expiration date. Men could be shot, and if they had a drop of Japanese blood in them, no questions need be asked.
It wasn’t the kind of thing a person ever got used to.
The day Akira died, the bells on the mess halls rang all day. We learned of the killing when the white girl’s father appeared in the near dawn outside the western fence, screaming obscenities. We cannot repeat what he said, though it will take us the rest of our lives to forget. A policeman rode close to the fence to try to calm him, to make sense of what at first was unintelligible. As the man’s meaning became clear, the policeman spat from his horse, his eyes telling the man the spitting was meant for him.
Unable to work or sleep or eat, we crowded around the barracks and mess halls. Some of us stayed with Annabelle, prostrate on her bed, her body shriveled and empty of tears, the sheets full of vomit. Those of us who knew Akira best retrieved the body, Paul and a few other boys, walking past the guardhouse looking straight ahead, eyes carrying disbelief, jaws set in fury. “Put your fucking guns down,” Paul said as they passed the sentries. “We’re bringing him back.”
Akira’s father tried to go with them, but we held him back because no man should see his son like that. Akira’s mother collapsed in the garden, crushing the plants she had tended with love. Some of us carried her home. She would need more care than we could offer. Who can survive the loss of an only son?
Once the news was out, many of us claimed to have heard the gunshot, the white girl’s screams. Some of us said the man, her father, hit the girl, threatened to kill her too. It wouldn’t surprise us if it were true.
Perhaps all of it was true. Perhaps we said what was needed to make the unbelievable real.
Akira’s friends brought him back, cradled in twelve hands, shrouded in blankets so that no one could see his wounds, his face, his loss of dignity. Beneath our sadness we struggled with pity, anger, blame. He was in love, some of us said. Others argued that love shouldn’t take precedence over honor, respect for one’s parents, our traditions. How do such things happen? Perhaps Akira was weak. Perhaps he forgot the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth and yearned for attachment, the indulgence of the self, which can lead only to suffering.
We merely observed.
Akira was young, fueled by desire and impatience. We understood why he acted recklessly, tempted fate in the face of hatred and prejudice. But he was not to blame. Manzanar killed Akira.
We suffered, all of us, Akira’s friends and relatives, Annabelle, his parents most of all. All of us grieved together, prayed together.
The white girl, we knew, would suffer alone.
Forty
May 25, 2011
Kira finished giving shift-ch
ange report and went down the hall to say goodbye to Baby Kendall. She found him in his nurse’s arms, sleepy-eyed on her shoulder.
“Hey, little guy, I hear you’re ditching this joint,” Kira said, taking the baby and jogging him gently. She wondered if his nurse had heard what had happened, knew why she had come to say goodbye. “I’m going to miss you. Promise to be nice to your parents, okay? No waking them up twelve times a night.” The baby felt good in her arms, warm and solid, scented with clean blankets and sweet formula.
Since she’d come back to work, it was as if she had never left. New micro-preemies arrived almost daily and the chronic babies were still there, the ones whose lungs and eyes and brains would never recover from the treatment that had saved their lives. Kira didn’t like taking the meds that Dr. Richardson had given her—they made her feel dull and rigid—but it was the price she had to pay to return to work. And to reassure Dan.
She’d scared him half to death in Owens Valley. Dustin had arrived with food and water just after sunrise, and the men couldn’t wake her up. They took her to the hospital in Bishop and she was unconscious for eleven hours after that, and when she woke, she couldn’t speak. There was nothing wrong with her voice; she simply couldn’t make herself talk. The scene in the shed had silenced her, and it wasn’t because of the violence she’d witnessed. It was because lying on that wooden floor she had become Maddalena. Not like in the fragments, limited to thoughts without context, excerpts of Maddalena’s memories. That night in the desert, she was Maddalena, flesh and soul.
In the hospital she’d clung to Dan, shook her head at the doctors’ questions, let the nurses draw blood, check her eyes. Dan told the doctors she had passed out but he didn’t know why. When Kira could speak again, she made a big deal of being dehydrated and hungry, growing cold and disoriented in the desert. Of course she didn’t mention the fragments, and apparently Dan and Dustin hadn’t either, because instead of ending up in a psych ward she’d gotten discharged. See your doctor when you get home, the docs said, get another EEG and some neuro tests. She promised, Dan promised, and Dustin sped them out of there as if a posse were on their heels.
They’d gone from the hospital to a restaurant, where the men ate and Kira drank cup after cup of herbal tea, trying to soothe her stomach and nerves and wondering what to tell them. Nothing, she decided. She’d come here alone and did what she needed to do alone, and now she needed to make sense of it alone. She knew Dustin had a dozen questions lined up, but she could give him no answers. Dan, she knew, would listen if she chose to talk and respect her silence if she didn’t. For now, she chose silence.
Back at home, she and Dan had resumed their lives, Kira quiet but nervous, something unsettled inside her. Waiting for it to resolve, she read, walked, and made peace with Camille, who’d been hurt by Kira’s neglect. Kira told her enough to soothe her, and then with Camille’s help she cleaned out her mother’s house. She brought home Maddalena’s portrait, all the photos, the opera CDs, the housedress and necklace and earrings. She slept long and deeply, without dreaming. The fragments were gone. Either they had run their course or the meds were working, but there had been none since that night in the desert.
Gradually the unsettled feeling faded, as if some tangible thing inside her had dissipated into every cell, bringing with it a sense of peace. The images and emotions of the dreams and fragments remained vivid, their residue like a scarf loosely woven with bits of satin and silk. Now and then a piece broke free and drifted off and Kira would be with Maddalena again, remembering everything. It was all there, crystalline and somehow pure. But she hadn’t disappeared again. She was herself, here in Berkeley, here with Dan. Life seemed normal, if there was such a thing.
Forty-One
January 1, 1946
Manzanar became a ghost town on November 21, 1945. For months, free to go, we had been drifting away, the young among us eager, the oldest afraid. We had grown accustomed to life there, a life measured by wind and heat and cold. Strange that the loss of privacy and dignity that had distressed us could have become normal. Granted our freedom, we clung to the familiar, feared the unknown.
We knew, returning home, that we would not find what we had left. Those who had property had lost it. Everywhere, signs told us we weren’t welcome: Go Home, they said. Go Back to Japan. But Japan was not home. Home was America—California, Oregon, Washington. But our country didn’t want us.
Some of us went back to Berkeley, found a tenement on Parker Street with rooms for rent and a sign that announced: Japs Welcome. A rarity. Akira’s parents took a room, trying, like the rest of us, to remember what it was like to live beyond the reach of barbed wire and searchlights. We visited one another, shared our worries, our food, our cigarettes on those days when we had them. Like many of us, Akira’s father failed to find work. He spent most days in a chair, staring at the wall where, he pointed out, there should have been the radio and phonograph they’d been forced to leave behind. And there, on the other side of the room, over there should be the Steinway they had bought for Akira. While Akira’s father sat, Akira’s mother cooked rice, took in sewing, bargained with fishermen, talked to herself. She had no garden, no interest in knitting.
Some of us made a habit of pulling down signs that said No Japs Allowed or Go Home, Yellow Bastards. Those few of us who had homes to return to boarded up the broken windows until there might be money to repair them, pruned overgrown rosemary and rhododendrons, filled buckets with uprooted oxalis. We told ourselves the war was over, our ordeal behind us. We told ourselves we would go on. We men, trying to comfort our wives, turned our heads when they cried.
We had not been prepared to go to Manzanar, and we were not prepared to leave it. Stripped of our surroundings, we had one another and not much else. At Manzanar, we had watched our families divide, leaving our ways and traditions scattered in the dust.
Freed from Manzanar, we lost everything again.
Akira’s parents lost the unthinkable. They buried their child in Oakland, in a place of beauty, where they visited him often and failed to understand anything.
Forty-Two
August 16–17, 2011
When Kira got to work, the bed for the transport was already prepped—a ventilator, three IV pumps, two arterial lines, the works. A micro-preemie, a twenty-six weeker, placenta previa. They’d gotten him out fast, but he was dusky, and it was hard to say how long he’d been compromised. Still, there was hope. For now, there was hope.
The transport team rolled in. Baby Lopez was a fighter, the transport nurse said; no way he should be on settings this low. He’d gotten blood, was on the usual fluids, diuretics, morphine. But surprisingly, he didn’t need to be paralyzed. Instead of fighting the ventilator, he lay there as if he knew it was keeping him alive, his translucent little chest chugging. Kira placed a pinkie in his palm, and his tiny fingers, ridiculously long, closed around it. He gave a froggy kick.
“Well, hello to you too,” Kira said. Younger in gestational age than Aimi by two months, he was a miniature piece of perfection. She felt a flash of ovarian yearning.
Room C was Grand Central Station that day, with transport teams overlapping amid a constant stream of doctors, X-ray techs, respiratory therapists. But at Bed 7 things were quiet. Baby Lopez had two good blood gases in a row. Baby Lopez was defying the odds.
“Let’s wean,” the attending said. He turned down the ventilator’s rate and watched the baby for two full minutes. “Gas in an hour,” he said when he left.
“You’re doing great,” Kira told the baby. Even his blood pressure was good. “You’re a miracle boy.”
That’s what it was, all of it—a miracle. Conception, gestation, birth. A too-complex-to-be-believed fact of nature. An improbability. At the hospital it was hard to remember that most pregnancies went well, most babies were born healthy. Prenatal care aside, so much of it was plain luck, what with all the genetic variables, the p
otential for disaster. And then there were babies like this one, determined to beat odds that were astronomically not in his favor.
So much could interrupt a life. If only Akira had known he would have a child, that generations would live on after him.
The next blood gas was good. Baby Lopez lay quietly under his eye mask, a miniature sunbather in the phototherapy light, legs splayed below nonexistent hips. Kira wanted to trace every part of his body, feel his perfection. Wispy black hair. Toenails the size of pinheads, a delicate network of blood vessels beneath wet-parchment skin. She wanted to pick him up, tuck his tiny head under her chin, warm him with her breath and body. But he wasn’t that strong yet, and an hour later he proved it when his jaundiced skin went blue. Kira turned up the oxygen and suctioned him, got another blood gas.
The gas wasn’t bad. He was holding his own. Come on, miracle boy.
Baby Lopez was still holding his own when Kira left work. He had months of ups and downs ahead of him, if he was lucky, and if he wasn’t lucky… Well, she wasn’t going to think about that.
She went to the store, bought what she needed to make four pans of lasagna for the big party the next day. Mariko and Kenji were celebrating forty years of marriage at their house, and a hundred people were expected to show up. Forty years. Kira had trouble conceiving of that kind of longevity since she had none in her DNA, marital or otherwise. But she’d married into it, so there was hope.
The next day, the party that had started at noon was still going strong at five p.m. A glowing Mariko greeted guest after guest, talking nonstop; Kira had never seen her drink so much wine. Twice she’d watched Kenji thread through the crowd to interrupt a conversation and kiss his unsuspecting wife. When it was time for cake—a long table was filled with them, Emma’s carrot cake and a dozen more brought by guests—Kenji raised his voice above the clamor and said he wanted to say a few words.
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