Edward died the following afternoon, surrounded by friends and flowers that spilled from the nightstand beside the hospital bed. She remembered thinking 1961 and catching her own aging reflection in the bathroom mirror. She was in black, her pale face like an old scuttling nun’s, and somehow this struck her as perverse, as though she’d glimpsed something she had no business witnessing. Like the time she caught her visiting neighbor, Elizabeth—Elizabeth Derby!—stroking the tie that was draped on the armchair, which Edward was fond of and wore often.
The voice in her head, which was not her own, said: Everything turns out as it must.
* * *
—
SOLACE CAME intermittently, like the bumpy signal of the radio she used to listen to in the few stolen minutes before dinnertime, alone in the shed behind the house in Niigata.
One morning, in a moment of such absolute peace, she looked out the window to discover snow had fallen. When had it fallen? Time had become glassy. She stared at the cup in her hand. How long had she been holding it? When she realized she’d been observing a robin twittering on the birdbath in January, she was surprised to find that she’d been resentful of Edward all these years for leaving her so abruptly.
* * *
—
SHE WAS hospitalized for the final time in the spring. She was coming down the stairs from her bedroom; the pain dazzled her. When she came to, she was in darkness, a faint sizzle still beneath her. When she moved, it flashed from her legs into her eye sockets, clarifying her body’s borders.
The injury was to her left tibia. It required a cast and did not set right. The doctor, a prim fellow less than half her age, clucked his tongue with all the reprimand of a wagging finger, as though she’d fiddled with the cast and displaced the bone.
Her daughters did not blame the doctor but did not blame her either. You know how she is, this small child who cannot be blamed for her mistakes. She looked at her new, bow-shaped leg and thought: at least she’d been faithful to Edward.
* * *
—
SUMMER SAW her get temporarily better. She remembered the names of her daughters, the name of her son. She even recognized their faces, knew their exact relationship to her, and asked about the people in the pictures they brought, nodding when she was spoken to. Her daughters were elated. They pushed her to widen her world, one inch at a time, always one more inch.
Soon her son’s children came to visit. They were bigger than in the pictures, and knobbier. She stared at them, her foreign grandchildren (but how familiar their chins!), until they hid behind their mother, whom she recognized from the pictures, but of whom she did not have a single memory.
Her eldest, Miriam, said, “Tell us everything about Japan.”
Her son, Robert, said, “Where did she put those Super Eights?”
Her other daughter, Marjorie-Keiko, said, “Mother, you do exactly what you want.”
The voice in her head, which was very much her own, said: When will they stop demanding?
* * *
—
EDWARD DID marry her, but not until 1948, when California repealed its antimiscegenation law. They could have married as early as 1942, when the first Civilian Exclusion Order nudged them to the liberal East, to the house Edward had bought, sight unseen, with his late mother’s money. But at that time world freedom was under attack, democracy at risk, and afterward, after the war, they were too tired to bother with what was a formality, until the repeal made the headlines and reminded them of not only the principle but the practicality of it. They, after all, had had three children technically outside of wedlock.
The house was a two-story Cape Cod. It had three bedrooms and a kitchen that opened into a living room overlooking a lawn divided by a pebble walkway, also visible from the attic with its lone cataract window that appealed to no one.
She spent three years confined to this house, to this view of the lawn and the backyard where she hung the laundry with her teenage girls and homeschooled her son, who looked so much like Edward but also enough like her to be bullied. Ching chang chong! It was the longest three years of her life, its taut monotony stretched by a shifting fear that made her rage at her children who couldn’t help testing the lockdown, lured by the voices of other children, other teenagers. For the first time, three decades since she’d last been in Niigata, she allowed herself to admit she was homesick, her heart squeezing with irrational longing, especially for her brother, who, as rough as boys were, had taken her gently by the hand to feed the ducks in the lake.
One night, unable to settle, she composed a letter to her family, but Edward—Edward!—had forbidden her to mail it, telling her they shouldn’t risk it, not even in liberal Massachusetts. Damn war.
She ended up complying—he was right: who knew when this country would come for them?—but she never forgave him this restriction. But maybe it wasn’t this or that confinement; what she resented was her own dependence, his complete authority over her. After all, these were prohibited days she’d been granted; unlike Bob, she’d escaped uninterned. What right had she to raise her voice? She pictured their house back west, the letters from Niigata, fed through the mail slot, piling by the door. She watched her children and reminded herself to be grateful for all that she’d kept, which did not include her yukata, just in case.
She did send that letter in 1961. It required additional postage, and she mailed it in a new envelope with a second letter, praying for her family’s safety and health.
A reply arrived weeks later in a large envelope containing both her letters, plus another in handwriting she didn’t recognize. For the rest of her life, she’d wonder how it might have turned out had Edward mailed her letter all those years ago.
According to the house’s current owner, her family home had been officially declared abandoned in 1951; he regretted knowing nothing further.
* * *
—
HER FINAL tomato came to her by chance. She didn’t discover it until it blossomed and ripened at the edge of the yard where the weeds gripped the ground and did not permit much growth.
The stalks were feeble and the fruits sparse, but so was she by this time, alive closer to the end of the century than she’d ever imagined possible. She never learned the name of the tomato, which yielded only once, exhibiting their spectacular rainbow colors before they were plundered by crows and other small animals that lived in the woods behind the yard.
* * *
—
IN THE fall, her very last, her daughters rented a minivan to take her west to tour the place she had once lived. The drive was long, spread over seven days and six nights, and her daughters took turns fussing over her comfort and pointing out signs—MOOSE CROSSING, CAMPGROUND—in loud cheery voices meant to snap her attention. “It’ll be worth it,” they kept reassuring her. Certainly, it was worth it to them.
Haight-Ashbury. Chinatown. Golden Gate Bridge. The daughters moved her closer to the car window where sunlight, crosshatched with wind, clawed at her face and stung her eyes. When her daughters noticed her tears, they stopped the car and watched her look. She gazed at the water, shimmering with boats. She gazed at the sky, twiddling the sun. After a moment, sharp-eyed Marjorie said, “No, Mother. Angel Island is over there.”
She remembered the overcrowded immigration building, the gloved fingers prying her eyelids, the cheap falling sleeves of the kimonoed picture brides. She remembered the miracle of her walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on Pedestrian Day. Then she remembered Dr. Kerr, a small man with slim fingers, who had talked Edward into a pessaire (as he said, delicately, in French). How they’d fought, she and Edward! Not that she wanted another child—Miriam, at three, was a horror, with her doughy obedience and costly appetite—but it was her body they were conspiring to plug.
In the end she submitted to the trespass, opening her legs for Dr. Kerr’s fing
ers, which probed and groped for an eternity, intent on finding the “slant” he wished to detail in his new book. When at last he conceded that she was no different from any normal woman, he jammed the pessary (as she insisted on calling it, in English), locking her in.
But her body refused to be sealed, and she gave birth to their second daughter a year later. Marjorie-Keiko. She announced the name and refused to retract it. Not for another dead ancestor who had helped spread Edward’s family line.
She did not fight the device after that and appreciated its practicality during the Depression. It would be ten years before she’d be pregnant again, and after that—the Caesarean, infection, and fever—it would strike her that she hadn’t wanted any of these children—not Miriam or Robert, or even Marjorie-Keiko, her sole successful act of mutiny.
* * *
—
NO! THAT wasn’t true! She had coached Edward to make the argument—better education, more opportunities—to persuade her idealistic father to leave her behind.
* * *
—
SHE LAY in the bed she’d slept in every night since Edward’s death. At the foot of her bed was her trunk. The trunk was packed. In the morning her daughters were taking her to a new home. She stood by her window. Something had woken her, compelling her to draw back the curtains.
Not much had changed over the years: the square yard barren in the wintertime, the bare flowerbeds empty of the colors that spilled from them in the summertime. She touched the windowpane; she knew by the feel there was frost in the beds. High in the sky, the moon radiated luminous rings of yellow and pink.
At this hour between night and morning, her fingers were stiff, but she swept them through her empty drawers. Where were her letters? Her thoughts drifted with the clouds that passed over the moon. When was the last time she’d left the house?
A few flakes squeezed themselves from the sky, and she felt weightless, illuminated by moonlight. In this luminescence she was light.
She had taken these stairs many times before; as usual they were cold, but today there were no specific memories attached to them, and her feet were fluent over their surfaces.
Outside, the air was clear, and it gave incredible range to her eyesight. Here was the pebble walkway, here the low wooden gate with the rusted latch. The gate creaked when she opened it.
No lights were on at her neighbors’, and the street was latticed with shadows. When she peered down, she saw the road zooming into the sky. The openness delighted her. She was delighted by the dark and the quiet that had conspired to make it so.
A breeze fluttered her nightgown. She had not dressed properly. In this light, her nightgown was translucent, the naughty hem uncovering her knees. But what did she care? This morning, she was utterly careless, her thoughts and feelings flapping as though teased by a miraculous gale. Later, they may settle into their hard, familiar forms. But for now there were only sensations skimming her skin and scattering her memories. Today, her heart was flying, and so were her feet. She ran into the crisp horizon just beginning to break.
TWO
LUNA
Luna hadn’t slept all night. She hadn’t slept because she couldn’t get the feeling of water out of her ear, the left one, which felt numb, rubbery and dense, as if it no longer belonged to her.
All night she conjured birds and fields, then roads to bisect the fields, then cars to put on the roads, cars with rolled-down windows, and, in one, pigtails that belonged to her sister Katy. Then there was the ticking car; the rustling shade; a pair of hands setting out all her favorite things—chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes. She saw her own fingers elongate across the picnic blanket, then the sudden flash—her sister covered her mouth—and Luna heard it again. That plugged sound. Like the sound of water underwater. It flung open her eyes.
Then it was morning. The room was milky with sunlight, and her father, who had come to wake her, was disappearing into the seam of the half-open door. She pulled on her clothes and was sitting at the dining table staring at a plate of scrambled eggs, two sausages grinning like a clown. Her mother said, “Your shirt’s backwards.”
Katy laughed. But when Luna opened her mouth, her sister’s laugh muted on one side, and she remembered her ear; her protest shriveled back down her throat.
* * *
—
THE PROBLEM with her ear had been coming and going all week—Luna knew exactly where it started. Shōnan-kaigan. Her father had pointed out the beach on the map. See, here? A nick on the belly of the seahorse: the eastern shore of Japan. Katy, as she was prone to these days, rolled her eyes, but Luna liked this about her father, the way he spoke to her as though to his university students. That morning, when he looked up from the map, he’d said, It’s important to remember where you’ve been.
But Luna, at six, never remembered. This was their third consecutive summer in Japan, but it might as well have been her first, except that she was familiar with her grandparents’ house, where they’d stayed their first two visits. She liked it there, despite her grandfather’s room, always closed, the white door emanating an incubated silence, like an eye turned inward. On his good days, her ojīsan used to slip out of his room to tend to his shapely plants in the foyer, and Luna remembered how, the first time she and Katy happened upon him, he’d surprised them by inquiring in gentlemanly English whether they were enjoying their day. Later, her father explained that both her ojīsan and obāsan knew some English from the American Occupation days, but unlike Ojīsan, Obāsan never gave herself away, prattling on in Japanese, content to transmit only her feelings: an open warmth, like the house itself.
Now Ojīsan was confined to a room at the hospital, but Luna never forgot how, on that first foyer encounter, he’d pressed a finger to his lips and, eyes glinting, shuffled into his sandals to show them the white peaks of Mount Fuji protruding like a giant tooth above the telephone wires.
Fujisan. It was the first word he’d taught them, telling them about their ancestors who congregated on the mountain to watch over the house. By the end of that first visit, even Luna, still three then, could follow his ritual, clapping her hands three times and pressing her palms together, eyes closed, a prayer for Fuji-san, his mountain god. Keeper of health.
Ojīsan recovered that time, but her parents had already decided to spend a few weeks every summer in Japan. This summer, their third, they were staying two months in a rented apartment midway between the hospital and her grandparents’ house.
* * *
—
MODEST ON the map, Shōnan-kaigan was a surfer’s hub teeming with colors: blue tubes, green boogie boards, towels like puddles of paint, the occasional rainbow parasol adrift in smoke billowing from the beachside cuttlefish stands.
All summer they’d gone to beaches along this coast, but none had been like this, with pink-lipped women, hair the color of hay, their men equally bleached and beaked with visors. At first their mother sat in the car, observing, and Luna worried that another afternoon might be ruined. But then her mother opened the door, plunging her hand into her bag—Luna knew exactly what she was looking for, what she was always looking for in Japan: sunglasses. Her father, who had also been watching, placed his hand on her head and said, Go help your sister.
Up ahead, Katy was inflating a beach ball. She’d already inflated their tubes, which were looped around her shoulders. The ball was enormous, and as Katy tried to inflate it further it kicked off her face. Luna laughed, but when she turned to see if her father had witnessed it too, she heard her mother say, I’m sick of being stared at. I feel so goddamn white.
But nobody noticed her mother here, and soon everybody nestled into their patches of sand as the sun drifted and the clouds flickered, brightening, then graying, stirring up a breeze that roughened the waves and lifted the tide, reminding the sisters of their afternoon’s last task: to choose their seashells, pearly pink ones toda
y, pierced like earlobes. Luna wanted the whole pile to add to her collection. Katy planned to string hers together, like the necklaces she’d seen at a shop near the giant statue of the goddess their father had called the Kannon. Behind them, their mother was powering through her paperback, her brown sunglasses occasionally rising like a camel’s back to check on them. Down by the shoreline, their father was combing through bands of seaweed for the larger shells that washed up there.
“Hey,” Katy said, nudging her sister.
Ankle-deep in seaweed, their father was holding up a palm-sized shell. They raced to inspect it: a peach-colored dome shaped like a snail. No holes in this one, and too big for a necklace: Katy discarded it into Luna’s hand.
The shell was light, warm like an egg. When she turned it over, it looked like an ear. Her father said if she listened, she could hear the entire ocean inside.
Luna matched the shell to her ear. She heard the roar of the surf, the trill of the wind, and then: absence; the deafening slap. Her father spun around. Say, he said. Her mother, horrified, retracted her hand. Masa. She pointed at the gray spider retreating across the sand. It could’ve bit her.
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