Fog Island Mountains

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

It takes him nearly forty minutes to reach his neighborhood on foot, and when he arrives he does not stand for a second at the half-empty driveway, he knew she would not be here, and he is no longer angry—he is baffled, worried, frustrated, and he only hopes she is spending her nights with one of their children—but his feet move a little more quickly, his breathing chuffs just a second longer, he is exhausted, there is sweat pouring down his back and the pain, a throb really, has begun to beat again within him. The cancer is his heart.

  He packs almost nothing, a change of underwear, socks and shirts, some books and a stack of crossword puzzles, and then he wonders about leaving a note but what would he say, who would he say it to? He isn’t even sure what it is exactly he’s doing right now, he is refusing the hospital and he is refusing his home, he is craving motion, but before he leaves he pulls down the ladder to the attic and scrambles up, finds the box marked Megumi and opens it to rifle through the drawings she made when she was child but this makes him smile because really, his Meg was never very much of a child in the first place, and now he is not smiling anymore because he knows which drawing he wants, the one of their house, a wobbly sketch in charcoal done when she was a teenager, done the year one of the volcanoes in Hawaii had erupted and they’d all seen too many images on TV of hot lava pouring down the hillsides, destroying houses.

  “Japan is a volcano,” she’d said to him. “Kirishima Renzan wa kazan bakari desu.” The Fog Island Mountains are nothing but volcanoes.

  “These are different. They are old. Dormant.” He explained this meant they were sleeping, that they burped from time to time but they weren’t ever going to erupt.

  So he is folding this childish picture into the top of his small bag and heading back downstairs, he is refusing a tour of the building and he knows that the memory of this house will clutch at him in the next few days, he is sure of this, and he is also vaguely ashamed to be feeling so emotional about a structure—this is only a house, only a house, only a house. And then he is closing the door behind him and getting into his car.

  It comes to him in the driver’s seat, hands on the steering wheel, a selfish wish, he is thinking that if he could do it all again, he would get sick much much earlier, when his children were all small, and then he could gather them up into his arms, all three of them against his own chest, all within his long arms and he could feel each of their small bodies against his own, their heartbeats thumping wildly in the intimacy of this crushed embrace and he could say good-bye, all at the same time, all that is important to him, because he knows that as adults, everything is all wrong, he can’t stand the idea of dealing with each of them, each different reaction, each wayward emotion, he will have to look them in the eye and see what they understand about him and what his leaving means to them.

  As they folded up the chess table the night before, Shingo mentioned all the ways there are to help make Alec comfortable and heal so offered to call Alec’s children—neither man mentioned Kanae, and to get through this moment, to get past it as quickly as possible, Alec turned and thanked his friend, and when Shingo asked why, Alec said, “For telling me . . . I know it isn’t always customary.”

  There was a pause and suddenly these two were no longer in this hospital, they were discussing a notion of Japanese culture like so many others they had discussed; here was their friendship, waiting for them both, all over again.

  “Sometimes knowing will make things worse, for the family, for everyone . . . but you . . . you have always been different.”

  Even in his death he will be a foreigner, somehow this comes as a comfort to Alec.

  * * *

  Her children are assembled in the driveway, looking at her, looking at her shortened hair, but none of them say a word, they do not dare ask her what she’s done, why she’s done it, even if Naomi’s forehead wrinkles with a frown—they must think her so old fashioned, they must think she is already resigned.

  “Where’s Jun?”

  “I left him with Mrs. Kenta, I have to be back tonight.”

  Then a flutter at her wrist, Naomi’s quiet face. “But I’m staying here, Mother, I had some vacation coming to me anyway.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” This a reflex, said much too quickly because Kanae already knows that she cannot change what is already happening, she cannot stop the movement of her children as they circle around her in protection.

  Naomi dips her head. “I wanted to . . .”

  Kanae sees that her youngest daughter will not make it through this, she will break like glass, and there will be pieces of her strewn about Kanae’s life.

  Ken’ichi is already coming down the steps, he’s locked the door behind him, he walks so much like his father. “I have to get back tomorrow, but will come again in a few days—”

  “Can we get going already?” This from Megumi, already she is rigid with irritation, her body pulled away from her siblings, away from her mother, tense and taut and ready to explode.

  All of her children move now into her little car, and no one asks her where she would like to sit, but Ken’ichi is driving and she has been placed into the backseat with Naomi, like a child, and she resents it, she is not this kind of sixty-something, she is not ready for Alec’s illness to make her this old, to make it that she must be chauffeured around like a grandmother.

  The words are out before she can stop them, she can only manage to reduce them to a whisper, “What a grandmother you make me.”

  “And about to be made one again,” says Megumi, nudging her brother, “Tell her, Ken.”

  Ken turns his head to the car and is silent for a moment, the smooth arc of his hands at ten and two o’clock, and Kanae can tell he would like to snap at his sister, bark her into a corner, but he keeps it inside, he says only to Kanae, gently, “We wanted to tell you together. Etsu is expecting.”

  “But you’re not married yet.” This isn’t what she means to say but it is what her brain does to what she’d really wanted to say, something about the future and housing and their jobs.

  Megumi is chuckling, “Need we remind you how things work?”

  But Ken is shushing his sister now, looking more like an older brother than the family’s youngest, and he glances at Kanae in the rear view, and Naomi is hedging a hand in her direction, like she might need comforting, and Kanae can only shake her head at her children, and wonder how they can think of her as old and easily shockable. Her children will never imagine what she knows, what her body had done in the past twenty-four hours.

  “I’m sorry, Ken’ichi, congratulations. Is Etsu feeling well?”

  Ken nods. This isn’t the time.

  Naomi has withdrawn her hand and is fanning herself quietly, Kanae reaches toward her now, more comfortable in this role, and places a hand on her knee—as a child, Naomi wore this same frightened expression whenever she was asked to do something new, she has never seemed to have grown out of her fear of change, and Kanae realizes that Naomi, of all her children, is more familiar with betrayal than anyone else, this world that is changing on her and renewing itself all the time, new technologies and products, people who do the unexpected, ask her to accept what she would never do herself.

  “Does Ishikawa Sensei know we’re coming?”

  “Of course.”

  “Does Father know we’re all coming this morning?”

  Kanae watches out the window and fingers the bare skin of her neck, “I expect he does.”

  What no one expects is to learn that Alec has vanished, and no amount of guessing and arguing will tell them where he is—Nurse Uchida believes he must have left during the shift change, and Shingo Ishikawa wonders if he might have left after their late chess match, and young Nurse Noriko worries that he’s gotten lost in the hospital somewhere.

  “What did he say last night?”

  “Nothing. No one said anything.”

  “But his surgery? What were the results?”

  The doctor is quiet, frowning. “We discussed his surgery bef
ore supper. We did not discuss it again.”

  “Mother, how was he last night?”

  “But we spoke again in the evening. Just he and I. We discussed his options.”

  Kanae is not looking at her children. She is looking at the yellow curtains someone has hung up on the window. She is looking at the sky beyond the window and she is thinking, wondering, how the storm has managed to maintain its intensity for so many hours now.

  Shingo Ishikawa is firm. “He took the news very well.”

  “You told him? Everything?”

  The gray-haired doctor nods. Inside the right sleeve of his jacket he is using his thumb nail to pick at a hangnail on his ring finger. “I told him everything. This is all my fault.”

  And then Naomi is crumbling, putting a hand across her face, hiding herself away in shame at the strength of her emotions, and Megumi sits down in the chair by the wall, but then she gets up and moves to lean against the bed that Alec slept in, and she looks ready to rip the sheets from it, or stomp on the pillows, and the only person quiet enough to go on is Ken’ichi and he is asking several questions of Nurse Uchida and reaching for his mother with a hand.

  Nurse Uchida is perplexed, “He didn’t seem that upset. Not so much to . . .”

  Megumi is already pulling her cell phone from her purse, already calling the police.

  “Yes,” says Ishikawa, “It is a horrible possibility.”

  Everyone is looking at Kanae and Kanae is watching her younger daughter crying, so she reaches for her daughter but the gesture is empty because Kanae knows that Alec has not snuck out of the hospital to go kill himself quietly somewhere else, this is not a decision he would make, they aren’t considering him properly, they are behaving as if they don’t know him at all, and she wants to shout at them.

  “No,” she says, “He is angry.”

  “Of course he is, that’s normal.”

  “But this is not your fault, Shingo, he is angry with me.”

  This is when Megumi, her face tilted away from her cell phone, sweeps over her mother with a long arm, telling her to stop being so silly, to stop being irrational, but Kanae cuts her short with a snap, and it feels good for once to stop Megumi’s anger so quickly, to cut it off with a decisive movement, she has always allowed her oldest daughter too much freedom in this anger of hers, because she was embarrassed by it, but she sees now that she was wrong, Megumi is just an angry person and there is nothing she will ever do that will change that.

  “This has nothing to do with you, Megumi. This is me. Your father and me. He’s dying.”

  “Kanae, please . . . sit down, take a moment to calm yourself. This is troubling news.”

  She waves the doctor away, “He’s dying, do you hear me?”

  She does not sit down, in fact she begins to back herself out of the room, out of this little box where she left Alec on his own, and if she raises her arm to her nose she is sure she can smell Fumikaze’s cologne, somewhere on her skin his cologne has soaked in, and so she leaves the room, finds her telephone in her purse and dials Alec’s number, because he is alive, she is sure he is alive. But there is no answer and she must put her phone away, and here is her son Ken’ichi beside her, whispering, urging her to talk to the police. She is looking at him and she sees that he is a man, he is about to become a father, and over near Alec’s bed Megumi is comforting Naomi and she remembers that Megumi has never turned her anger on her younger fragile sister, and this gives her hope, and so when Ken’ichi bows to her, when his eyes come up and he says, Okāsan, she nods her head, because this is what she will remember later, not the hours pacing at home, not the detailed discussions with the police, not the argument she will pick with Megumi in a short while, but this moment, her son’s patience, the ghost of Alec on his face, his please.

  FEEDER BANDS

  You think you know a person, thinks Shingo Ishikawa, you think you understand them and how they think and what they want, and he is puzzled by this, still now, after so many years of doctoring in our small town, so many families and their illnesses have passed through his hands, and he has healed them or occasionally not healed them, and sometimes he is surprised by a patient’s thinking or wishes or words, but most often, what his doctoring has taught him is that nothing can really be expected because, when it is all finished and the cells are multiplying in all the wrong ways, we are mysteries to ourselves.

  It is late morning now and he is not on duty, he was supposed to go home last night and today would be his day off, a day to drive into Miyazaki and visit his brother maybe, if the roads remain drivable, or go to a movie in the early evening when the theater will be mostly empty, or maybe just watching baseball or soccer on the television, another of his favorite things to do, but he is sitting at his desk instead, still in the same clothes he wore last night and fumbling with some paperwork, chewing on the edges of his fingernails and pushing the sharp edges of his teeth against those soft nail beds and knowing that in a moment he will get up and leave this office and offer himself to help in any way he can, to look for Alec or Alec’s body. But for just this frozen second Shingo is remembering a winter afternoon and a teacher’s hospital in another city, the feel of the clipboard in his young hands, and the sturdy shape of the senior doctor at his side and they are both watching Kyōsuke Inomura in his hospital bed.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Doctor.”

  “There is nothing to tell. You must relax.”

  “It doesn’t really hurt, I know what that means.”

  “You’ll be just fine tomorrow.”

  And they stand there—Shingo listening, watching, learning—while Kyōsuke Inomura closes his eyes. His breathing is labored and the minutes pass and no one moves, and once he is fully asleep Inomura begins to shout, his body convulsing, but there are nurses to hold his arms and the senior doctor stands quietly, he makes no sign to Shingo, he makes no comment, and before anyone can look at their watches, before anyone can discuss the details of this man’s advanced illness, Kyōsuke Inomura finally stops moving, he leans his head back and opens his mouth and the sound of the last air coming out of his throat is like wind tearing through a broken pipe, and then he is still. Too still. And Shingo must bow quickly and leave the room because although he has practiced surgery on other bodies, although he has spent hours with the deceased, learning to unfold them, learning from their preserved organs, this is the first time he witnesses the crossover and although it is a selfish thing, he knows this, he has always known this, he was not watching old man Inomura, he was reaching inside his own chest and testing the strength of his heartbeat and building up the walls around his eyes that would make it possible for him to witness these deaths, year after year, again and again, and he would not see the person anymore, he would only know his own beat, beat, beat and feel safe in its strength.

  “Alec, it will not be painful, I will promise you this.” Said at the end of their chess game last night, said carefully between two friends of understanding, two mature men who can speak of these fragile things.

  But Alec did not answer him, Alec only shook his head and flashed his hand across the air between them, like wiping something clean, and this is what is bothering our gentle Dr. Ishikawa, this is what he cannot figure out, that Alec’s face lost its fear, and so he is standing now, removing his doctor’s white coat and putting on his favorite baseball cap, for the wind outside is growing fiercer, the hospital lights have flickered once already, and out in the hallway the nurses are gathering at the station, getting ready for a hospital-wide meeting that will list the tasks they must accomplish before the typhoon arrives above us.

  “Ishikawa-Sensei, please . . .”

  The police have questions, this is only natural, they are holding out a photograph of Alec, and Shingo is nodding, yes, of course, this is him, yes, that’s his grandson in his arms, it looks a few years old, but Alec hasn’t changed, he is maybe a little thinner . . . “He will be easy to identify, he’s a very tall foreigner. Everyone knows
him and he’s . . . well, he’s my friend.” Words broken off in his throat.

  The police man has nodded severely and is turning away in kindness and Shingo is wiping at his eyes, and the nurses are giving him their backs, pretending not to see him, they are a courteous group of women, and he is groping for a chair and leaning over against his hands, rubbing the shock away, reaching for the certainty of this friendship, surely Alec would not do such a thing, and the none of the nurses breaks rank with the others, she is coming to him, sitting beside him and putting a hand on his shoulder and he can only look at this hand and shake his head, and then he is nodding again, he is standing, he is bowing to them all and thanking them for their hard work, and then he is walking quickly to the doorway and the gusts of wind and calling out to the policeman and asking them where he is to go, where can he help?

  * * *

  Old Hoshi crouches to the ground—it must be around here somewhere, he is thinking, and then he’s crawling on his hands and knees, his back already soaked through with rain, the edges of his jacket trailing along in the mud, and he has to push them out of the way as he searches the dirt for the latch to the hidden door. Where is it? Where is it? Old Hoshi is getting impatient now, his heart beating quickly and his tongue already dry in his mouth, even if he’s promised himself he won’t touch a drop of it when he finds it, he just wants to move it, make sure it’s safe from the storm. His hand catches on something, no, just a tree root, wait, that’s right, here it is, and he’s sweeping his old hand once more and catching his fingers in the rope loop that pulls up the wooden hatch-door and now he’s looking down into the old storm cellar and he’s smiling because the rest of his family has forgotten about this place, it isn’t a good cellar really, too close to the river and fills with water at the base, but a perfect place for keeping his shōchū, except in a storm, and so he’s going down the stone steps and he’s got his flashlight and it’s glinting across the gold lettering of the cartons.