The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama

  Daniel smiled, happy to see her. The wind blew and he breathed in the salty spray from the ocean, the tinny tangs of wet earth and fallen leaves. It wouldn’t be anything more than a passing rainstorm. For tonight, he could pretend everything was the way it should be. He didn’t have to pack to leave. He still had the house, and Maile was standing right in front of him.

  “I could too,” he said. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you, something that happened in Chicago.”

  Daniel took a step back and swung the door open for her.

  Ghost Voices

  MARIKO, 1912

  Franklin and Daniel return from the river just after I arrive home from playing Hearts with the Hilo Aunties. I don’t know what it is, but I immediately sense something happened. My little boy is quieter than usual, while Franklin can’t stop talking. Standing next to each other, I see the growing resemblance between them, the thin lips and the narrow shape of their faces now that Daniel has lost his baby fat, even in the way they move. I know I’m just being overprotective and swallow my concern. I don’t want to waste the moment—they’re home, and I’m just happy they spent the afternoon together. A boy needs to know his father, yeah.

  Franklin pours a cup of coffee, lights a cigarette, and sits down at the kitchen table. “Had a little accident at the river. Daniel skinned his knee,” he says.

  Daniel nods.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  He looks up at me and nods again, eyes glassy.

  “He’s fine,” Franklin says. “It’s just a scrape—right, buddy?” He blows smoke upward.

  “Yep,” Daniel answers.

  I reach for his hand. “Come on then, let’s get you cleaned up before we go to dinner.”

  Before we make it down the hallway Franklin’s chair scrapes back and he’s standing in the kitchen doorway. “Forgot to tell you, I have to run a quick errand, be back in half an hour. Be ready to go then.”

  “What kind of errand?” I ask. I hate the sound of my voice.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he says. “Be back soon, yeah.”

  Franklin smiles at us and is gone. It isn’t until I feel Daniel squeeze my hand tighter that I move again.

  Daniel sits still on his bed while I clean the wound, cover it up. “There you go,” I say, “good as new, yeah.” And for the first time since he came home, he smiles.

  “Did you have a good time with Daddy?”

  “It was hot,” he says. “We had shave ice.”

  “Did you swim?”

  Daniel shakes his head. “Too rough,” he says, sounding like Franklin.

  “But it sounds like you still had a good time.”

  He nods. “Yep,” he says, and smiles.

  I leave him to play and go to change my clothes for dinner.

  Two hours later, Franklin still hasn’t returned. I’m so angry I can barely keep my emotions in check, but there’s Daniel in the living room waiting and waiting. I swallow my anger, make him eggs and toast for dinner, and tell him Daddy had an unexpected meeting.

  “Where’d he go?” he asks.

  “A meeting,” I repeat. “We’ll go out for dinner another night.”

  “Aren’t you eating?” he asks.

  “I’ll wait for Daddy,” I say, knowing I wouldn’t be able to keep anything down.

  He simply nods and says, “I like eggs.”

  After I put him to bed, I clean up the kitchen and try not to think about where Franklin might be, what bar or card game he’s fallen into. He just came home and he’s already left us again. By the time I go to sleep, its past midnight and he still isn’t home. By 2:00 a.m. I hear the front door open, his noisy shuffling through the house to the kitchen. He staggers down the hall and there’s a short pause before our bedroom door opens.

  “Baby?” he says. “Baby, I’m sorry, eh, I got caught up. We’ll go out for dinner tomorrow, I promise.”

  But I turn away from him and his cigarette and alcohol stink, close my eyes tightly, no longer listening.

  A New Year

  January 1–2, 1936

  45

  The Beating Heart

  By the time Koji drove back up to the plantation, the sun had set low across the mountains. He’d been gone for two weeks, though it felt longer. He touched the raised scar on his forehead and knew how lucky he was. He felt better, coughing less since Daniel urged him to quit smoking. Nori and Samuel had tried to convince him to stay in town until after the New Year, but Koji couldn’t be swayed. There’d been something pulling at him to return to Puli since the bombing. “Be back soon, yeah. I promised I’d visit Kazoku village on New Year’s Day,” he’d told them. “A turnaround trip,” he added, knowing the lava’s flow toward Hilo was escalating and they were running out of time. Still, he needed a night back at the plantation to check on the cottage and to sleep in his own bed. Nori let him go with a promise that he’d be back down in the next day or two. Koji left shortly after, stopping by to see Mama, who remained in a state of deep sleep, Daniel called it. He saw it as straddling life and death.

  When Koji finally pulled in front of the sugar train cottage, it was like returning home to an old friend.

  Koji poured himself some cold green tea like his mother used to make and sat down on the steps outside of his front porch. There was still a warm, muted light. All the cane workers were back at their villages getting ready for the New Year. It was the most important day of the year for all the workers, and Koji looked forward to seeing his old friends. From the villages scattered across the plantation, the warm wind carried a fragrant aroma of cooking as they prepared for tomorrow’s celebration. Koji’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the village fires brought back those boyhood days when he ate platefuls of his mother’s kiri kinton, the plump dumplings made of mashed sweet potatoes and chestnuts, which represented good fortune in the year to come. He later felt the same gratifying New Year’s spirit when he was down in Hilo with Mariko frying mochi to be dipped in soy sauce and sugar, Daniel watching, excited, and impatient to eat and begin celebrating. He smiled to think his two worlds weren’t so far apart after all.

  Koji turned when the old cat Hula stole around the corner of the cottage, leaped up the steps, and waited in front of the screen door to be let in. “Nine lives,” he said, smiling.

  He stood up to let the cat in.

  * * *

  New Year’s morning was cool and clear and rainless. It was still early when Koji cut across the fields. The sky slowly brightened, bringing everything into focus as he walked down the rutted dirt road that led to Kazoku village. Over the years, not much had changed since his family moved from the cane straw shacks and into one of the tin-roofed cottages. The village was its own community, crowded with families, dogs, cats, and chickens. Every empty patch of dirt in front or back of the cottages became small vegetable gardens, brimming with sweet potatoes, taro, turnips, beans, and pumpkins. Koji had walked down the same dirt road hundreds of times over the years. There were the faint sounds of the villagers just rising, but it was still quiet except for Mrs. Takahashi grating carrots on her front stoop. He knew she’d be up and cooking before dawn.

  “Koji-chan, that you!”

  He smiled to see Razor’s mother. Thin and gray-haired, her face was a myriad of wrinkles and furrows as she smiled to see him. Next to her was a bowl piled high with grated daikon in which she would add the carrots, along with sweetened vinegar, to make namasu, a New Year’s salad that Razor had loved. After he died, she continued to make namasu every year, leaving a generous bowl for him at the table where he sat as a boy.

  “I’m hungry,” Koji teased, patting his stomach. She always loved to cook for all the children of Kazoku village.

  “You come to the right place, eh. Come, come in,” she said. “The ozoni should just be about ready.”

  He helped Mrs. Takahashi up and followed her into the house she shared with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, who were still asleep
. She had lost Razor, and another daughter in childbirth. She seemed smaller every year, the top of her gray head barely reaching his chest, her clothes swallowing her up. Koji stepped into the small house, the air thick with the smells of ozoni simmering on the stove, the New Year’s soup that was eaten in the morning and made of miso, dry kelp, dashi, and yuzu peel. She made it her own by adding chicken or fish, taro, spinach, and mushrooms, leaving the toasted round mochi rice cake to place in each bowl last. It had always been Koji’s favorite way to start the New Year.

  Koji paused at a photo of Razor as a young boy, sturdy and bull-like, holding up a cane knife with two hands pretending to cut. Even with her back turned to him, dishing up a bowl of soup, Mrs. Takahashi said, “He always had big dreams, eh, sometimes too big for his own good.”

  Koji sat down at the kitchen table. In the quiet moment before the others would be up, he asked her, “Have you seen him?” She was the only other one who saw his spirit.

  Mrs. Takahashi turned around and placed the steaming bowl of soup in front of him. With chopsticks, she placed the mochi on top. She brought another bowl and sat down across from him. Only then did she shake her head. “Gone,” she said. “I’ll see him soon enough, yeah. It’s time.” She looked up at Koji and smiled. “For you, too.”

  “I never told him why I stayed with the cane work even after . . .” he said and then couldn’t finish.

  Mrs. Takahashi smiled. “We make our own lives, Koji-chan, right or wrong, we have to live with our choices. The rest is no one’s business.”

  Koji still felt the need to say it aloud. “The cane work was all I’d known, the only thing I was good at doing.”

  “You never gave yourself a chance,” she said.

  He felt the tears push against his eyes and looked down at the table. With her, he felt like a boy again. Cutting cane was simply a means to an end. The only life he ever wanted were all the days and nights he had with Mariko and Daniel. He couldn’t leave them to make the long trip back up the mountain to sit in a sweat-stink room of men whose fight he believed in, but not more than the life he was finally living in Hilo. He would never apologize for needing Mariko and Daniel. Still, it didn’t make his grief any less for failing Razor.

  Mrs. Takahashi reached out to him. “Koji-chan, don’t be like your okaasan. After your father died, your mother felt as if her life was over; she was filled with anger and couldn’t see beyond it. Is that what you want, to live with this sorrow? Not too late to let it go, eh,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Life’s too short and too long for anything else.”

  She stood and refilled his bowl with the New Year’s soup he hadn’t realized he’d already finished. “Eat,” she said. “A good start to the New Year, yeah. A new beginning.”

  Her words soothed, at least on the surface.

  * * *

  Koji turned back for one last look at the train cottage, his truck packed with all his worldly goods as he drove down the hill and away from the plantation. There was nothing left for him at Puli. He looked at the quiet fields and heard again the faint refrains of the holehole bushi work songs that once rose above the stalks and into the air. Even Razor, his last tie to the cane life, was gone. Koji had spent New Year’s Day at the village catching up with old friends, seeing the wealth of all his years on the plantation. The sugar plantations were what brought them to the islands, but it wasn’t what made them stay. It was the community they’d formed in spite of it, growing friendships and families as well as cane. Even in the hottest, cruelest days, filled with blisters and boils, itching bites and stinging whips, Koji knew, even if he hadn’t fully realized it back then, that fate had brought them all so far from their homelands to their new lives at Puli Plantation. He heard his mother’s voice rise again like on the first day they arrived, asking his father where the beating heart was. “There,” Koji would tell her now, looking back across the fields and beyond to the villages that held the men and women who worked the sugarcane. “There is where the beating heart lies.”

  46

  January 2, 1936

  Mama was running, the muscles in her legs strong and taut. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt such pure happiness or had covered so much ground. She ran down the wide-open streets crowded with vendors on market day, selling everything from fruits and vegetables to freshly caught fish and sushi, along with her favorite, mochi filled with sweet red beans. Dogs whined for scraps of food as people moved in thick throngs from one vendor to the next. Still, she ran down the dirt paths unhindered, wearing her favorite loose muumuu with the red hibiscus flowers, the crowds parting to let her through. Mama felt like a child of privilege, though her family had little. She was running toward her family home, a two-room shack near the beach, filled with beans and nuts they sold at the market. Her mother made a soup with them, which was the best thing she’d ever tasted. At one point, it felt as if she were soaring above the town, looking down and seeing her lithe body weaving in and out without a care in the world, so young and daring.

  Mama could have gone on running forever, but for Nestor’s voice calling out to her. She strained to hear what he was saying until the wind carried it to her. “Not time yet,” her husband said.

  Mama opened her eyes.

  * * *

  There was a stillness in the early hours of the morning, mouth dry as chalk and hungry. Mama hadn’t felt this kind of hunger in a long time, her thoughts slowly awakening, her arms and legs so stiff it was like swimming through a blanket of seaweed. Her fingers inched away from her body until they traced the deep dip left in the mattress by all the years Nestor had laid next to her. She was relieved to be at home in her own bed, the thought calming her confusion. Mama looked around the quiet room for any signs of Nestor, but even his shadow was gone now. She sighed and tried to push herself up into a sitting position, but her limbs refused to cooperate.

  Where had she been all this time? Mama still wasn’t sure if she hadn’t walked on, to the other valley. She recalled seeing Nestor by the monkey pod tree and walking toward her husband but never reaching him. The rest had been lost in smoke. Mama did feel as if she’d just returned from a long journey, like when she was a child and her parents had taken her to visit her Auntie Kobayashi, her mother’s sister, in the village of Honomu, two hours north of Hilo. It was a world away from town back then. In a hired wagon drawn by two horses, she sat on rough burlap bags in the back of the wagon as every hard bump along the dirt road rattled through her body.

  Honomu was a small, rural town with wooden walkways, a row of one- and two-story wooden houses, and a general store. Auntie Kobayashi was squat and white-haired; her eyes dark and attentive. She sat on a low chair in the middle of the small, cluttered room that smelled of damp earth and eucalyptus and greeted them. They drank a tepid tea and ate rice crackers. “I see a dark shadow just over your shoulder,” Auntie Kobayashi said, looking directly at Mama, her eyes hard and focused. “The spirits are with you, child, you can’t outrun them, but they will guide you later, yeah. Always remember that, eh.”

  “Nestor, you old fool!” she called out louder than expected. Her throat was dry and rusty. “Where are you?”

  Mama inhaled. The room was hot and stale, a mix of her own sweat along with the oil and herbs and the coconut lotion that Leia rubbed across her saggy skin. She heard heavy footsteps and then Leia was in the room, the light suddenly too bright and everything too loud as the waking world returned.

  “Mama!” her daughter cried out, “You’re awake!” Leia rushed to her, touching her cheek before she bent down to scoop her up in her arms. When Leia pulled away she had tears in her eyes, looking relieved.

  Mama wasn’t sure why Leia was so happy. She hadn’t seen her so excited since she was a young girl. My girl, she thought, my talented girl who deserved only the best. Did she ever find it?

  “Where I been?” she asked.

  “You’ve been asleep for almost a week now, yeah.”

  Her stomach made a growling soun
d. “Hungry,” Mama said.

  Leia stepped back and laughed. “Let’s get you something to eat and drink, eh. Be right back.” She squeezed Mama’s hand and stared hard at her as if she were trying to memorize her face before she stood.

  My girl, Mama thought again.

  Leia then stepped across the room to open the window. “Love you, Mama,” she said before she left.

  Mama wondered what had gotten into Leia, who looked as if she’d seen a ghost. She shifted toward the sudden breeze, grateful, sniffed the air, something missing. Mama opened her eyes wide and took a deeper breath, but there was no whiff of sulfur that had been in the air day after day. She lifted her head, closed her eyes, and listened, but couldn’t hear the snap and crackle she imagined it sounded like; the smooth, slithering heat of the lava flowing down the mountain and swallowing everything in its way had stopped.

  “Think I don’t know?” Mama said, trying to sit up. “Pele, you a sly one, you finally stopped, eh, showed them fools who’s boss, yeah.”

  Mama smiled then. She lay her head back down on the pillow and waited for Leia to return.

  47

  The Living

  A low hum filled the fish market as Nori watched the crowd from behind the counter. The young, thin geologist had announced that the lava flow had stopped just miles from the watershed. The fissures were no longer spouting hot lava, only the last remnants of steam and smoke. Nori saw him stand straighter as he said, “We’re happy to announce that the bombing was a success.”

  It brought very little response from the locals, who believed it had nothing to do with the bombing, but knew the haoles wanted to make sense of the air show they’d put on. “If the bombs had succeeded, the flow would have stopped a week ago,” voices whispered. “No, this was all Pele’s doing, yeah.” Nori couldn’t have agreed more with them. As a little girl, Mama told them all the stories of Pele’s power and might. “Pele does as she pleases; her fire is always burning, yeah, moving at her will.” She imagined Pele had grown tired of all the noise and nonsense, simply deciding to stop the flow toward Hilo as if she were blowing out a candle. Nori paused to take a breath and steady herself. She was relieved the lava flow was over and they could get on with their lives. She watched the crowd of locals disperse as quickly as they came to spread the good news.