A Girl Like You

by Maureen Lindley

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “Yes, Joseph was in good form, he always is when Hunter is around.”

  “I guess you miss him, huh?”

  “Well, I can still see him in the city when I go.”

  “You could have asked him here, you know. It would have been a bit odd, but he is your friend, and we will have to get used to that, I guess.”

  “I thought about it, but honestly, I don’t think Abe is ready for that yet, and Joseph wouldn’t know what to do with himself in a normal family.”

  Frances laughs. “I’m glad you think we’re normal.”

  Satomi doesn’t want to think about Joseph tonight. Thinking about him induces feelings of guilt, the idea that she is not entitled to her happiness. She has attempted in small ways to make Joseph a part of her and Abe’s life, but neither man seems willing to give friendship a try. Inch by inch and without intention it feels as though she is letting Joseph go.

  Perhaps, though, her feelings of guilt are really about Cora, about the child she has promised to reclaim. Now that Abe is willing, she must put more effort into finding Cora; she will never be completely happy, she knows, while what happened to that little one remains a mystery. She is due a letter from Dr. Harper anytime soon. Perhaps he has found a trail for them to follow.

  Frances, noticing that Satomi has fallen into one of her reveries, puts aside the cooking and suggests they go outside. “We could do with some fresh air,” she says, guiding Satomi to the door.

  Unhooking Abe’s waterproof from the stand on the porch, Satomi hangs it around her shoulders. It flaps against her calves, reminding her of the peacoat issue at Manzanar. She can feel the curve of Wilson’s ball in the pocket against her thigh.

  The day has been cold, mostly overcast, but as they look up at the night sky the clouds part, allowing a slice of moon to light the sea. It plays on the tips of the waves as they roll into the harbor. All along the coast where sea strikes shore the coves shift in an undulating silver seam.

  “Just look at that,” Frances marvels. “The moon and the black sea. Now, that sure is a sight.”

  Satomi slips her arms into the sleeves of Abe’s jacket as the moon dusts up behind a cloud. It’s Thanksgiving eve and Abe will already be on his way home. It’s time to shower, to loosen her hair and put on the blue cardigan and the narrow Capri pants that she brought from home to change into, because Abe says she looks sexy in them.

  “You make everything you wear look a million dollars, honey.”

  “It’s an odd time of day,” Frances says, turning back toward the house. “Too early for a drink, too late for a nap.”

  Out on the Richmond Hill track, stalled in the dark, the Hempstead train, with its air brakes jammed, sent its flagman with flag and lamp to slow down the oncoming Babylon train, only four minutes behind it.

  Press accounts in the aftermath of the collision made much of the fact that the Babylon train had been barreling down the line close to sixty-five miles an hour when it slammed into the rear of the stationary Penn-to-Hempstead with a boom some likened to the sound of an atomic bomb.

  The truth of it was, though, that the motorman of the Babylon, too late to do much about it, had made out in the gloom the stilled train, the panicked flagman at the side of the track frantically waving his flag. In the last seconds of his life he had applied his emergency brakes, slowing his speed to more like thirty than sixty. Still, thirty was speed enough to shunt the Hempstead train seventy-five feet along the track, to toss its last car higher than a house, and send the onrushing train slicing down the middle of the Hempstead, causing “overcoating.” Such a word, such an ugly addition to the human vocabulary.

  They hear the news of it on the radio as Frances is cutting a lemon for their gin and tonics. It doesn’t seem real at first, a story told to frighten, so that you might laugh at it after, might think what a fool you were to have been taken in. It’s a Halloween story, not a Thanksgiving one.

  “It won’t be Abe, not Abe,” Satomi cries. But Frances doesn’t hear her; her head is full of, Not again, please, God, not again. Her knees have buckled under her so that she has to hold on to the sink to keep upright. And Satomi, seeing her distress, can’t go to her. If what she sees in Frances is a mother’s intuition, then it is a horrible thing. A thing she can’t bear the sight of.

  The news is coming at them unrelentingly, the voice on the radio almost hysterical. Satomi is shaking, Frances whimpering. On and on it goes, the reporter’s voice rising at each new discovery. They listen, sucking the words in, finding it hard to breathe them out.

  Neighbors from across the track are the first on the scene. They had been deafened by the sound of the crash, sickened by the sight of it. The train cars are high above the bank, too high for them to reach at first. They had rushed for ladders, blankets, first aid. They are eager now to give witness.

  “The ground shuddered. You felt the noise as much as heard it.”

  “We had to jimmy those doors open to get them out. People were screaming in pain, beating at the windows.”

  “There were limbs everywhere, arms and legs on the floor, hanging from the windows.”

  “They were packed like sardines in their own blood.”

  In Frances’s sweet-smelling kitchen they hear on the airwaves fire engines and ambulances ferrying the wounded to the hospital. For some there isn’t time even for that, so surgeons have converted the kitchen of a nearby house into a crude operating theater. They work under a bare bulb on the family’s kitchen table covered with a sheet.

  “People are giving their all,” the reporter shrieks.

  “Abe will be helping them,” Frances says in a moment of hope, her voice hard and emotionless. “He’ll be needed there tonight.”

  “But Abe always goes in the first car,” Satomi wails. “He says it makes him feel that he is getting home quicker.” She is on the floor now, rocking herself back and forward, banging her head against Frances’s leg.

  And suddenly Frances too has crumpled to the floor, torrents of hot tears streaming from her eyes, although she doesn’t feel as though she is crying. She is merely comforting Satomi, who has gotten everything out of proportion.

  Satomi doesn’t want to go to the funeral. She doesn’t want to see Abe lowered into the wintry ground, see the casket that Frances had chosen on her own, because Satomi is a coward, because she couldn’t bear to even look at one.

  “Satin-lined oak. Their best line,” Frances had reported back in a papery voice.

  Satomi had put her hands over her ears. The words were disgusting to her. “Satin-lined,” “coffin.” What had those things to do with Abe?

  If she goes, how will she be able to leave his beautiful broken body there alone in the hard clay? How will she ever be able to say goodbye?

  She thinks of Abe’s face, the firm set of his mouth, the tiny chip on his third tooth in, the stubble of his beard when he doesn’t shave. He can’t be dead. In her grief she is more like her mother than ever. Like Tamura, she wants to retreat under the covers of her bed, to never come out.

  A magical sort of thinking has taken over her mind. She looks to find him in the stars, in the tiny pearl-eyed bird puffed up with rancor that this morning as she woke in Abe’s childhood bed had pecked at the window as though it were trying to get in. Tap, tap, the hammer of its beak shaking the glass.

  “Where are you, Abe? Come back to me,” she had shouted at the bird, frightening it away.

  She had told Frances about it, as if Frances knew about such things, might translate some mysterious Morse code message for her.

  “They dig in the putty for insects when the ground’s too hard to mine,” Frances said pragmatically. “It’s the same every year.”

  Every bone in Abe’s body had been crushed, every organ bruised, but it is the tear in his heart leaking blood that is given as the cause of death. A small tear no bigger than a dime, no bigger than a dime. The thought of that little leaking hole breaks her own heart
.

  “I can’t go, Frances,” she had sobbed. “Don’t make me.”

  Frances had pleaded with her at first and then insisted.

  “You must go. It’s Abe’s funeral. It’s the right thing to do. The only thing left you can do for him. You will regret it always if you don’t.”

  Weak with grief, she had given in.

  Frances buttons up Satomi’s coat for her, advises gloves, and hugs her briefly. Satomi wonders how Frances can bear to worry about her, how she can think of anyone else but herself. Her mother-in-law’s shoulders are hunched, her mouth pinched; she seems smaller somehow, as though she is shriveling by the minute.

  “It’s cold in that church, even worse in the cemetery,” Frances says.

  A stony misery creeps through Satomi’s body. Time has run out, and she can’t remember when she last told Abe that she loved him, and she hadn’t yet told him of Haru. She will never, now, be able to tell him anything ever again.

  The minister in his church is comfortable in his role. He enjoys the onstage part of his ministry, the sweetness of christenings, the joy of weddings, even the somber air of funerals. He performs well in front of his audience, as he sometimes guiltily thinks of his congregation.

  “We think with great sympathy,” he says, “of Abe’s new bride, widowed after such a brief marriage.”

  It was to be his only reference to her. He speaks of Abe’s history in Freeport, of the town’s love of Frances, their love of her boy. It seems to Satomi that he is saying their long knowing of Abe has the bigger claim to grief at his loss.

  But she’s being unfair, she thinks, small-minded, possessive. Abe had been popular everywhere, always. No one knew better than her how easy he had been to love.

  Abe’s friends, some holding hands, some with their arms around each other, make a space for her at the graveside. Without the glue of Abe to bind them, they seem already to be separating from her. Their parents, who have known Abe since childhood, stand around the grave too, ashen-faced, their eyes slipping to Abe’s father’s headstone nearby. They are touched by their children’s grief, secretly thankful that it is not one of their own, who might so easily have caught the Penn-to-Babylon that night.

  The rain has come on, so that people begin opening umbrellas. Red and blue canopies, a yellow one with blue raindrops dancing on it, carnival colors, she thinks, as Abe’s best friend, Don, moves to her side, sheltering her under the shade of his black one.

  It takes a while for the exaggerated moan of the fair-haired girl she hadn’t noticed before to reach her. Satomi has held herself back from giving vent to the animal part of herself and looks toward her with curiosity. People are embarrassed by the awful sound, they shuffle their feet, cough politely as though to cover it.

  It’s Corrine, clutching a spray of snowberries to her chest, swaying uncontrollably. Nothing to be done, she has always been a bit of a drama queen.

  “Shush, Corrine. Be brave for Frances’s sake.” A man Satomi doesn’t know puts his arm around Corrine’s shoulders, a bit too firmly for it to be thought comfort.

  Abe’s colleagues from the hospital cluster together uncomfortably, their medical skills of no use here. The neighbors from Jackson Heights who had hardly spoken to her, but had thought him a fine neighbor, have come. They have all known and liked Abe. It is odd how she feels an outsider.

  Joseph had phoned in distress, concerned for her.

  “Oh, my dear girl, I’m coming. You will need me.”

  “No, don’t come. It wouldn’t be right. I don’t want you to come.”

  He had been hurt at her dismissal, but she couldn’t picture Joseph among Abe’s people. He would have been a distraction, would have highlighted the fact that she is cut from a different cloth too.

  At the sight of Abe’s coffin she is reminded of Tamura’s. Were they together now, Abe and Tamura, forever linked by their love for her? She shakes the thought away. She is already feeling the burden of ghosts.

  On the walk back, Frances takes her hand as though she is a child. People arrive at the house. Women fuss in Frances’s kitchen, food appears as if from nowhere. It is as though a party has broken out. She goes upstairs, and Frances follows.

  “You need sleep,” Frances says, undressing her.

  “I’ll come down soon, Frances. I just need a little time.”

  Sleep is the only thing that holds attraction for either of them. Satomi would sleep forever if she could, but as though an alarm is set in her she can only manage an hour or two at a time. She lies on the bed and buries her head in Abe’s pillow. Even the scent of him is fading, she thinks.

  “I’m sorry, Frances, it should be me helping you.”

  “We’ll help each other, Satomi. Abe would want that.”

  “I can’t say his name, Frances. It feels like my heart is ripping too when I try.”

  “Day by day, inch by inch,” Frances says, without belief herself.

  “Yes, day by day,” Satomi repeats mechanically.

  “You will stay with me here for a while, won’t you, Sati, just for a while? I want to be with someone who loved Abe, someone he loved,” Frances says.

  “Come back to the apartment,” Joseph says. “Let me take care of you, just until you put the pieces back together.”

  She considers briefly living on her own in their house by the salt marshes. But the thought of occupying their bed without Abe, of taking down a book from the shelves that he had made for their living room, is too painful. She will never live there now, not without Abe. Hope has been eaten up there, sent packing.

  She stays with Frances, holed up in Abe’s room, breathing him in as her mother had breathed her father in all those years ago. She will look after Frances, make her eat, make her go for walks, act like a daughter-in-law is meant to.

  She finds herself either full of a terrible nervous energy or so tired that she can’t lift herself from the bed. Sometimes she shuts her eyes and prays that when she opens them she will find herself ten years into the future, ten years away from the misery that runs through her blood, contaminating everything. She can’t pray, as some do, for it all to have been no more than a horrible dream. To close her eyes and imagine Abe returned to her wouldn’t save her from the pain of opening them to the knowledge that he never would be.

  Frances’s friends come to comfort.

  “Be grateful for the wonderful summer you had here together, for the precious time you shared,” they say. “It will get better.”

  Like Frances, they are the best of women, the best of American mothers. Unlike Frances, though, they rarely say the right thing.

  Her days are filled with what is needed next, as though Abe is directing her in some way. Sleep when you must, eat when you remember, sit with Frances, look at the photographs with her, cry with her, make her laugh, and lie with her so that she can sleep a little. And Frances does the same for her in return.

  She dreads the nightmares that come in her troubled sleep, black featureless landscapes where she can’t find who she’s looking for. She doesn’t dream in color anymore.

  Frances lets her fuss, acquiesces in the game while looking herself for a reference point back to the routine of her old life, which seems to have escaped her.

  They find comfort in focusing on Abe’s dog, it is the only thing they can do for him now. Wilson won’t eat, not even the delicious stews of marrow bone that Frances cooks for him. He lies across the door to Abe’s room, head on paws, his body curled around one of Abe’s old shoes that he found on the porch, as though he is made for misery.

  “Come on, old fella,” they imitate Abe. “You can’t go on like this, now, can you?”

  They go through Christmas in a daze, no decorations, no tree, but “merry Christmas” slips from Frances’s lips as Satomi appears at breakfast. Some atavistic memory has triggered the words without her consent.

  “I don’t think that I will ever be able to cook a turkey again.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Frances,
I couldn’t eat it anyway.”

  They walk the two-mile strip alongside a distant canal without seeing anyone, returning home to soup and cornbread. In bed by nine, they have survived their first Christmas without Abe. They are both glad to see the back of it.

  Frances rallies first. Perhaps because she knows what her life will be like now, knows what to expect from it. There are no decisions for her to make, the cycles of grief are familiar to her, there will be bad and better times, times so completely terrible that she will look back on them and wonder how she has not been made mad. And even when she thinks that she is better, she knows that the pain will come slicing out of nowhere, catching her off guard. The thought of it exhausts her, but she must start the living of those times, or walk into the sea and be done with it. She tells herself that she doesn’t have the courage for that. She isn’t made for Greek tragedy.

  And Wilson has perked up, pleading for walks, dropping his ball at their feet, hanging around the kitchen before his mealtimes, his big begging eyes full of expectation. He has a better sense of timing than them, knows instinctively when to let go.

  Letters have come from Dr. Harper and Eriko. They are worried about her, shocked at what has happened.

  It is too cruel, Dr. Harper writes. A terrible thing.

  It must be borne, Satomi. You don’t deserve it, Eriko says.

  Her answering letters are brief. I’m fine, getting better, she lies. Don’t worry about me.

  She has refused to see Joseph. It’s ridiculous, she tells herself, but seeing him would feel like she was betraying Abe.

  “Not yet,” she says when he phones, his voice all hurt. “I’m not ready to see anyone yet.”

  By spring she has taken to spending her days on the boat. She doesn’t sail, never releases it from its moorings, but in its narrow confines her grief feels contained. She lies on the bunk and reads all day, books from the Freeport library, novels and biographies, books about fishing and the care of dogs, anything that her eyes settle on. She knows now a little about fly fishing, about trees and plants, and Emma Bovary, and Tiny Tim.