Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  Now he was yet only a boy, confused and conflicted, his heart aflame for reasons his mother would not know and would not learn of until that day when Mrs. Wilson would appear in her life once more, and I with her, and she would understand at last what wild beast had come to live in her son’s chest. But that day in 1942 there was only his beauty, a beauty which, his mother knew, eclipsed that of the Wilsons’ children, neither of them possessing their mother’s porcelain delicacy but instead taking the hale blandness of their father, his jug-ears, his bucktoothed grin, the boy, Jimmy, getting the worst of it. Many years later she would see a caricature of that boy in the television presence of Howdy Doody and her distress was so acute in the face of that recognition that she fled the room in alarm while her husband and Mary and Doris—both teenagers then—watched her retreat in fear and confusion.

  Except in direct contrast with her mother, Helen was simply ordinary, her skin pale despite a lifetime in the sun, her cheeks blotchy, and her nose covered over with freckles, hair a thin yellow that, Kimiko had to admit, shone with gold threads by midsummer, but which tended to hang thin and lank upon her shoulders. Her mother had long since given up attempting to bring it into some kind of order. In truth, Kimiko was not generally particular about beauty, and certainly not when it came to the children, but something in the tableau before her had given her pause, given her, indeed, a sense that she was witnessing something that she would never see again. It was not that she anticipated in any tangible way that they would not return to Newcastle—although of course they would not—but rather that when they did return things would have changed, even if their absence was, as Hiro and Homer both seemed to believe, just a matter of a few weeks. They would have been removed as enemies of America, and what would that do to the children, who stood now in that clutch in some manner of earnest conversation, about what she could not guess?

  There with them was Raymond, his skin tan from the long summer, not the bronze of Jimmy’s flesh but a darker hue, oak bark or granite. His eyes, dark and slim, still glinted as he spoke, even at this distance, under the black sheen of his hair. She realized now that he was very nearly a man. In a world different from this one he might have been a film star, such was his beauty, intense and deep and with a hint of tragedy. He laughed then and she could hear it, the sound of that moment of joy, and she wondered, not for the first time, what the future would bring to that boy, to any of those children. Both boys, their whole lives set like compass arrows pointing unwaveringly toward their own tragic ends. Hardly a year for Jimmy. Three for Ray. And Helen’s life blown all to pieces in the aftermath.

  Kimiko wondered how long she would have to listen to ­Evelyn Wilson’s nervous and self-involved prattle, but then Homer ­Wilson’s voice came, a short, sonorous sound across the stacked parcels and the gravel, calling Jimmy’s name. Jimmy mumbled something to his friends and then came to where Homer and Hiro stood beside another small cluster of suitcases and boxes, their sides labeled with numbers and names. Beyond them, in the gravel, Helen’s and Raymond’s hands touched briefly, ­Kimiko watching without emotion but wondering what such a thing could mean, the touch seeming tentative and awkward between them. Just children trying to say goodbye, she told herself, for what else could it have been?

  The sound of the buses now. Perhaps Homer had heard it first and this was why he had called Jimmy to his side. But why Jimmy and not Helen as well? Why not both of them?

  “Raymond,” Hiro called now, and the boy looked up. His face was a mask of impassivity held, Kimiko thought, over a second mask of pain and fear and heartbreak. Oh my boy, she thought. Oh my beautiful boy. “Go find your sisters,” Hiro called, and the boy looked from his father to the girl—woman? no still a girl—and then Helen called, “I’ll help,” and they turned as one, moving away.

  “Here they come,” Homer said. His hand was on Hiro’s shoulder. “Christ, this is a mess.”

  “Yes,” her husband said, nodding.

  “A goddamned mess.” And Kimiko was surprised to see that Homer’s eyes were bright and shining with the threat of tears. “We’ll get this straightened out, Tak,” he said now. “You’ll see. Just give it a week or two.”

  “And we’ll take care of everything while you’re gone,” ­Evelyn said from beside him. “Don’t you worry.”

  “Mrs. Wilson,” Hiro said now, turning with solemnity toward their landlord’s wife and nodding and then half bowing, “you are too kind.”

  Doris and Mary were there now, out of breath and excited. The sound that came up the old highway was of the hard, high squeal of air brakes and then the great roar of a diesel engine pushing up the hill. “Where’s Raymond?” Hiro asked them.

  “Dunno,” Mary said, Doris having already spun away again, the dust clouding all around her.

  “Go find him,” her father said.

  The girl was off at a sprint and after a time the buses appeared, three of them in all, their great broad shapes turning in a slow circle around the lot and coming to a stop in a single line, the doors opening one after the other as if choreographed, the rattle of their idling diesel engines and the seep of their exhaust infusing the air with the scent and feel of pistons and gears and the slow drip of oil, and then the engines stuttered to silence. From the windows, faces peered into the bright spring sunlight. Kimiko thought she recognized some of them but there were many she did not; so they would be clambering onto a strange bus filled with strangers headed to a strange place, and this after she had left behind her home and her country and even her language to live here with a man she had not even seen before and to make a life with him as his wife, the whole size and shape of her own destiny seeming in that moment to weigh upon her heart like a great and terrible stone.

  A man had come down from one of the buses—a tall, rangy hakujin in a serge suit and floppy necktie—and it was from his thin, nasal voice that their names began to fill the air. Someone was checking their luggage tags to make sure everything had been properly labeled. She had painted each of their bags with the number and their name. Raymond had returned from wherever he had gone. Mary and Doris too.

  “Takahashi,” the man in the suit called. He paused and then added: “Hiroshi.”

  “Yes,” her husband said, and the whole group stepped forward as one—Takahashis and Wilsons alike—and then came the loading of the parcels and suitcases into the belly of the bus and in the next moment she stepped onto the platform and up the steps, Mary and Doris ahead of her, Raymond just behind, her husband still outside. She knew he would be talking with Homer Wilson, talking with his hakujin friend this final time, but she could not even look through the windows now. Those already on the bus were silent, but some of them watched her and the children as they came up the aisle. She and the two girls slid into an empty seat, Raymond a few seats farther up, slumping by the window that faced the Wilsons, and although his back was to her, she thought his eyes were forward rather than cast out through the dusty glass to the sunlit square beyond.

  And then there was her husband, his bearing crestfallen even as Homer Wilson’s voice came, muffled, from outside: “You’ll be fine, Tak.” Hiro came up the last of the steps and into the aisle, his eyes finding hers and then glancing about for an empty seat and sliding in just behind her, the next family already coming up the aisle, and then the next and the next. Her husband said nothing. Mary and Doris craned toward the window. “When are we going?” one of them said.

  “Soon,” she said.

  As if in response: the roar and rattle. A cloud of diesel smoke. The scent of oil. And then the great hulk lurched forward, first to second and then a grind into third. “Here we go!” Mary shouted at the window.

  The buses rumbled away. In their wake, the Wilsons continued to cluster together in the bright sunlight, watching the dispersing dust, the square about them mostly empty now, the luggage and parcels and packages gone, the people gone, a few orchardists and curious townspeople and teenagers and children meandering around the space wit
hout purpose or destination.

  “Dammit all to hell,” Homer Wilson muttered under his breath. “Let’s get home. Let’s get on home.”

  As for Evelyn Wilson, her thoughts were only of relief. Maybe she would be lucky and they would never return. The thought felt guilty to her but had she not earned it?

  She thought she could still hear the distant whine of the buses on the air, could hear it and could hear it and then faintly and fainter still until the final gargled flatulence of the diesel engine came as the faintest whisper on the distant stretch of the curving highway. And then they were gone from her life, gone for twenty-seven years right up until the day I drove her to San Jose to look once more upon the face of Kimiko Takahashi.

  5

  SO IT WAS TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, TWENTY-SEVEN years in which both women had lived totally separate from each other, years which were, in sum, longer than those they had shared in the quaint, quiet town in which, in 1969, I lived with my grandmother, and while I had assumed that I was driving my aunt to visit some old friend or associate what I was actually met with in Mrs. Takahashi’s living room was a series of awkward and confusing silences. Neither woman seemed interested in talking to the other, a state which became apparent almost from the very moment in which we entered Mrs. Takahashi’s home and were bidden to sit, Mrs. Wilson in the center of a short somewhat worn sofa and Mrs. Takahashi across from her in a wingback chair. The room was a typical middle-class living room that might have been occupied by anyone at all, the only indication that its occupants had emigrated from Japan being a single print of Mount Fuji, its pyramidal shape black against a bright orange sky. Into one of the long pauses between the two women I told our host that I had seen the mountain once from the window of an airplane.

  “Very beautiful,” she said in response, unsmiling but nodding, and then, as if to change the subject: “Would you like tea?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Tea? I guess so. If it’s not, I mean, too much trouble.”

  “No trouble,” she said simply and then stood and moved to the doorway, pausing there long enough to glance back at my aunt upon the sagging sofa. “You as well, Mrs. Wilson?”

  “All right, Kim,” she said.

  In the gap that followed, I watched Mrs. Wilson but she did not meet my gaze, her face tight and sharp, masklike. “I think . . . ,” I began, my throat unexpectedly dry. “I think I might wait outside.”

  Mrs. Wilson’s eyes shifted to mine in an instant. “No, no,” she said, and then, in a softer register: “Please stay. Would you do that for me?”

  “Sure,” I said, “but it’s just that you’re, you know, old friends. I didn’t want to . . . intrude.”

  “Oh you’re not intruding,” she said.

  I thought I might receive some explanation then but when it became clear I was not immediately ready to flee the house for the sunlight of the front yard, my aunt fell once more into silence. I might have pressed her with a question or two had Mrs. Takahashi not reappeared, bearing a plastic tray upon which rested two delicate teacups and a third that was more solid in nature, ceramic and of the style one might have found at a roadside diner. Next to the cups rested a tiny ornate bowl stacked with sugar cubes and a matching pitcher of cream. We set about putting our tea together. It was a task I really did not know how to do, truth be told, and so I followed Mrs. Wilson’s lead. Mrs. Takahashi had taken the heavier cup the moment she set the tray down, reserving the two more delicate vessels for Mrs. Wilson and me, as a result of which I spent the rest of my time in Mrs. Takahashi’s home worrying about breaking the cup and saucer, both of which seemed so thin that even grasping the tiny handle felt a step toward disaster.

  After a time, we settled again into our seats and the awkward chitchat resumed, the whole of it setting my teeth on edge as the two of them, without moving from their seats and sometimes without even speaking, circled each other like lions on the plains of the Serengeti. Why this was the case I did not know and could not even guess, nor could I even begin to understand why Mrs. Wilson had asked me to drive her all the way to San Jose to meet with a person that, at least from my point of view, she seemed to have little interest in actually speaking with.

  “Is your husband well?” Mrs. Wilson said soon after we had resumed our positions in the room.

  “Yes, he’s fine.”

  “Has he retired?”

  “He won’t retire,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Too restless . . .”

  “What’s he doing, then?”

  “He works in a grocery,” she said.

  “Grocery? Is that so?”

  Mrs. Takahashi nodded resolutely but said nothing more and did not ask the same questions of Mrs. Wilson, letting the whole conversation pause yet again. If she wondered at all why my aunt had driven—or had me drive—the two hours and forty minutes it had taken us to get from Newcastle to San Jose, she gave no indication of it. She sat clutching her teacup and offering no quarter at all, not even asking what Mrs. Wilson might have wanted or why she might have come, putting even the announcement of that desire on the shoulders of the woman who had arrived in her living room, apparently unannounced.

  But then something changed in the conversation, Mrs. ­Wilson embarking on a kind of story, a narrative about a time she had taken her daughter to Seattle, although even as she talked of it, it was difficult to unravel the point of the tale. Her daughter had been ill, it seemed, or no, not ill, perhaps pregnant. Could that have been why? Her words were coming quickly now and I realized with a start that this story was why she had come, that she needed to tell it, although I still could not understand any more than the basic outline of the narrative. There were nuns now. An orphanage perhaps. And she had signed something and the nuns had walked away and her daughter, Helen was her name, had been angry at her for all the years since. I assumed that Mrs. Takahashi could follow the story even if I could not, so it was surprising when that woman’s voice began to interject through the rising desperation of Mrs. Wilson’s pleading and nearly incomprehensible tale, interjections which did not grow in volume and yet seemed to increase in intensity until it was clear that Mrs. Takahashi was nearly as lost to the story’s meaning as I was.

  But in many ways I could also understand Mrs. Wilson’s reticence to reveal exactly why she was there, not the specifics of that reticence, of course, not yet, but I knew truth’s great propensity to terrorize all too well. Even when Chiggers came to visit me later neither of us could really talk about what happened to us in Vietnam and certainly could not talk about what we had done there. It must have felt the same to Mrs. Wilson. Like me, she knew, I think, that what she had done had been wrong but, also like me, if given the opportunity she would do it all over again in precisely the same way. Only now, these years later, does it feel as if the story of Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi has come into a kind of focus, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, the tiny image within the circle of the lens stark and crystalline, even what I did not yet know—what no one in the town really knew—held steady in the center of that black circle, that part, the most important part, blowing everything else into char.

  The Takahashis had lived all those years under a falsehood so thick that even Evelyn Wilson’s arrival in San Jose was in part in answer to its shape. But of course she did not know that either. Mrs. Wilson had reached a kind of tipping point of personal desperation and loneliness that finally pushed her to the desperate act, those twenty-seven years later, of tracking down her former tenants. It was the end of a long trail of grief and guilt that had been working upon her heart for a quarter century and without which she might well have kept all of it a secret forever. But there was the date that came back around on the calendar once a year, a date seared into the flesh of her heart, January 4, a date so increasingly fraught with emotional resonance that she began to fear the turn of the year, her mood darkening the closer she came to the holidays and the anniversary of that day in 1943 in Seattle when she had handed the child to a nun and sa
id the words that she would remember all her life—“He’s yours now. Take him away”—and the nun nodding in her calm, quiet way, the papers pale and dry in her hand, and Evelyn signing them without even looking and without any sense that she had overstepped her authority at all, for was she not still the matriarch of that family? Was it not still her responsibility to make those difficult decisions?

  After it was done and the papers were signed and the child, the swaddled child, was taken away, she returned to her sister’s house, that small worn structure with its scrim of dark mold along the edges of its rain gutters, the forest all around so perpetually wet and dripping that the very sight of it made Evelyn’s skin crawl. In her moment of extremis she had known that Dottie was the only person in the world whom she could truly trust, but now that the birthing was complete, the papers signed, the half-breed baby gone from their lives forever, she could not help but feel a gray loneliness that seemed to drip from the very trees, puddling even in the sodden light of ­Dottie’s kitchen.

  “Is it—” her sister began, and Evelyn interrupted her: “Yes, it’s done.”

  Dottie nodded. “You want some coffee?” She stood in the doorway that led to the kitchen, her thin body wrapped in an apron, hands patting the fabric.

  And then came a reaction Evelyn did not expect, her knees wobbling and her whole body seeming to drain of vitality all at once so that she had to grasp the doorframe to keep herself from crumpling to the floor.

  “You come and sit,” her sister was saying to her now, her hands on Evelyn’s frame, her fingers seeming to hold her together.

  For a long while afterwards, they sat at the kitchen table, the coffee cooling in the tiny china cups her sister had inherited from their mother, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window as a flurry of slushy snow began to clump down from the gray sky.