Fog Island Mountains

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  So Momoka it is, and she says the name to herself in between breaths in this bathroom, and she places her hand on her belly in exactly the right place and she holds it there, and she waits for that light pressure again, a body curved into her own, and the floor is still swaying and the storm is still beating against the building, but here she is fine, here they are fine, two people in this little room, and Etsuko knows that when this storm is over and Ken’ichi comes home, she must put an end to his silliness, because pregnancy is not a disease, she isn’t ill, she isn’t about to break so he must stop trying to carry her around in his hands like a fragile vase. And she wonders if this will work, will it be enough, because it isn’t just this, there is also the question of there being three now, no longer just Etsuko and Ken’ichi, but a family of three, and maybe someday four, and here she is gripping the edge of the bathtub a little, just resting with her hand on this cool plastic rim, and she is not worried, she reminds herself, every couple must deal with these varying influences, the legacy of their childhoods, the events of their families, and it does not matter that Ken’ichi isn’t wholly Japanese, that his parents are different, it has never mattered—she will repeat this a few more times until it feels less forced—and Etsuko touches her belly, she presses back just a little, a promise at the ends of her fingers, she will make sure he understands, she will make him turn from her a little, make him widen the sphere of his love, show him that they are three now, because this is best, of course it’s what’s best, and he will see. Won’t he?

  * * *

  Every story has a seed—a word, an act, an image; Grandfather used to tell me that even a gardener cannot remember exactly where and when a seed is planted, but when the first sprouts break through our dark volcanic earth, that is the time to pay attention . . . to stand guard and help the plant grow taller, and we are always standing guard, we are always watching for that first shoot of a leaf and wondering what kind of plant might be waiting below the surface, and then only when it comes and it’s grown to its full height can I go backward and remember the day I first touched the seed, pushed it deep into the soil.

  Those of us in the neighborhood hadn’t seen her for years by then, except on national holidays and the rare weekend, but this was not unexpected because Kanae was away at university in Miyazaki in those days, and she was studying hard, her parents were incredibly proud, and careful to show their pride through standard complaints of her distraction—she is so quick to forget her parents, she is a silly young woman and does not know how to cook for herself properly, we’re not so sure this university is a good idea—and so we knew she was busy and we knew she was doing well in her studies, and when she came home after graduation, no one wanted to ask about a husband, perhaps she will marry another teacher, we thought, these young women are waiting so long these days, we thought, nodding then, a little worried perhaps, but she was the same young woman who had grown up on our street, her hair a little longer, yes, her smile just a bit older. That summer is when he first came and Grandmother was the first to stand shocked on the front porch, the first to stare at his far-too-long legs and wonder at the face below his pale hair while he stood at the Endos’ front door, and then we saw Kanae open it and pull him inside, her arm on his forearm, such a familiar gesture, and her smile so big it blinded us on our porch, and so we knew then that she would be leaving us soon, and we only wondered if she would send for her parents from America and would the house go up for sale, and would their children know nothing of our Fog Island Mountains.

  But we were wrong, and I was the first to know of their plans to get married, I was the first to tell Grandmother that he wasn’t even American—He’s from Africa! But he’s white!—and that they would be staying in Komachi, that he was a teacher and so on and so forth, and Grandmother clenched her fists a little, some of the other neighbors did too, but slowly, over the months that turned into years, we got used to his long shadow and his great brown shoes and his sloped shoulders, and we especially got used to watching him walk her home in the evening, right up our small street, and we would wait in the dark at our windows and we would watch how he kissed her, we would watch how he held on tight to her hand.

  And the years passed and his visits changed, no longer a man walking alone up the street, he came in a car with his wife, our Kanae, right beside him, coming on weekends and evenings to see her parents, and he drove carefully, never too fast, and so it wasn’t his fault on that one winter evening when it was time to say goodnight to his in-laws, time to lead his pregnant wife back to their car, time to turn from the driveway onto the street, and he couldn’t have seen her dashing out from behind the Endos’ back garden, there is no way he could have moved his foot to the brake in time, but she is fast, my kitsune is ever so fast, and so the car only bumped her rear hip. Still, what a bump, and she was knocked sideways off of her feet and into the trash can at the end of our street, and she lay there for too long, and she was not moving, and anyone else might have left her there, might have been afraid of this wild animal, might not have dared to get out of the car to see if she was breathing, and wasn’t it a cold winter night, and wasn’t it warm in that car, but our Alec moved quickly, and so did Kanae, and the two of them saw that she was hurt but not killed, they saw that she was not bleeding, and so they waited there—the two of them, kneeling over her, shivering within minutes, not afraid to touch her fur but knowing also to make it quick and give her space—they waited there for those long minutes of waiting, wondering to each other if maybe she had internal damage or maybe she was just stunned, because they hadn’t been going that fast, they really hadn’t, and then…wasn’t she beautiful, this from Kanae, and Alec agreed, and they watched my kitsune for as long as she needed watching, and when she stirred, when she raised her head and came back to herself, both of them froze, awestruck, humbled, at the light in her eyes, at the fire flash of her fur as she leapt to her feet and was gone.

  It is funny, this is not a story that either of them have even remembered, and really, it was only a few minutes of their lives, one of many moments of experience that have lined up against each other to become a lifetime of living, and who would have guessed, not our Alec, not our Kanae, that it was this moment that mattered more than the rest, at least to me, to this old woman with her wild animals and her ink pot, with her healing and her poetry, with her voice that will go out to this town.

  * * *

  She does not see Alec at the end of the street, she sees only the pavement below her rolling front tire, only the edge of the road, this road she has known all of her life, this road settled into the base of a gorge, just at the opening really, a road dotted with only a few houses and which branches off at its end into trails that wind up the hill through the forest, my forest, and as a child Kanae explored its recesses, hunting insects and gathering pock-marked volcanic rocks from the stream, picking flowers that her mother displayed carefully on the family yakusugi chest, and Kanae had a hiding place, too, because all children will find one if they are able.

  Kanae is pushing now, knees burning, thighs on fire, pushing past the old onsen that is sealed up tight for the storm, canvas slings covering the plate glass windows; still, though, steam is rising from somewhere beneath the resort, escaping through vents in the roof, and Kanae pedals on past this building and quickly past her old home with only a glance at its boarded up face, turning now onto the trail between her former house and mine, a trail that is now paved but was not when she was a child, and she knows exactly where she is going as she finally gets off her bicycle, leaning it up against the low guardrail that runs the length of the trail, keeping walkers hemmed in tight against these steep moss-covered walls, and the sheer gorge walls provide her some shelter from the wind and the missiles of debris that threaten.

  Alec is shouting now behind her, but she cannot hear him, she can only press forward on foot, ignoring the click in her ankle, the tightness in her chest, and she is worrying that she will miss the old shrine, because how long ha
s it been? Years and children and work and laughter and time and more years since the week she married Alec, since an afternoon spent quietly at her parents’ home, since the suggestion of a short walk into the gorge and the promise of breathing tree scents and pressing pine needles with the soles of their feet and time spent alone, and the thrill of sharing a secret with this man chosen for her, chosen by her, sharing with him a secret from her childhood, and she led him up this very trail and to the rock ledge and she showed him the half-buried rope on the ground, she explained about sacred spaces, she walked him along the little row of statues with their worn-off faces and she showed him the shrine itself, she gave him the shrine, a gift of knowing, and he fingered the peeling paint, he traced the indentations of the characters chiseled in the stone, and he asked her to explain its presence, its meaning, and she invented its history and then admitted that she was making it all up.

  And she told him that it had been hidden in this forest for so long that she didn’t think anyone even remembered about it anymore, even she had forgotten until they’d headed up into the woods for their walk. It was no longer cared for, long-ago left to weather away and disappear.

  And Alec had said, “It’ll be ours, then. We can take care of it.”

  And these words remain, ours, and Kanae repeats them as she climbs the trail, she holds the idea up against the rain at her face. She showed him where she had left her little girl treasures—stones, drawings, pieces of wood worn soft, beaded bracelets, plastic figurines—and she admitted that she had believed the statues to be her gods, and she’d worried whether a person could have her own gods, but Alec had only smiled, had understood both her boldness and her humility, and he’d helped her clean the shrine that day, he’d looked through the little lacquer box she had not remembered hiding inside the shrine, and they had laughed at the faded bits of paper that had been her girlhood wishes, and together they wrote new ones, secret haphazard wedding vows traced out on whatever scraps of paper they happened to have in their pockets.

  The path seems longer than she remembers, but at least she isn’t facing the wind head on . . . still, every few minutes a gust tears down through the gorge and she must lean low, tuck her head, and the path begins to narrow and in just a few meters it will start to climb this rainy mountain, and she is breathing hard now, flexing her hands now that they are free from their grip on the handlebars, and it is hard to see out from under the hood of her rain jacket, but this is the trail, she is sure, she remembers, and only for this second does she wonder at her certainty that Alec might be in this place, would he have remembered? What is she thinking? This day and this storm and her escape have done strange things to her reasoning, she almost stops and turns around, but she is so close now, and it won’t hurt to pause again, to take comfort in this place, to pray.

  She spots the path leading into the hidden shrine, it is just ahead, and she is so focused that she doesn’t hear the crack above, she doesn’t hear the sudden brush of limbs and leaves on other limbs, and then the branch is upon her, landing squarely onto her shoulders, pushing her down onto her knees and then nearly flat, and her legs are slipping, she is slipping, this path so steep, but she gets a hand on the guardrail to her right, she breaks her slide, and this is when she hears the shout—she hears her name now, she hears his voice.

  * * *

  Naomi is folding laundry in the basement of the Chester home, folding laundry her mother left to dry a few days before, and her hands are shaking, fingertips unsteady, and she tucks them into the folds of fabric, smoothes them along the creases and into the dips of the collars and hollows of the sleeves, and the faster she moves the quieter they become, and when the entire stack of clothing is finished she picks it up, ready to go back upstairs, but the house is still creaking, the sound of the wind against the roof, and the water running past the ground level window above the utility sink is thick and brown and she closes her eyes against this, she whistles to block out the sound of the storm.

  She hesitates on the stairs, would like to carry these clothes upstairs and seek out her sister for the company, but Megumi has been leaving her behind all day, each time finding an excuse to do something in another part of the house, and Naomi knows that her sister cannot bear to be in the same room with her today, and while she knows this isn’t an active dislike, it isn’t that Megumi cannot stand her—still she feels her sister’s impatience, knows her own weakness causes this, and out of courtesy she will keep away.

  The lights flicker again but this time they do not go out, not like earlier this morning when they lost power for a few hours and then mysteriously regained it, but they have continued to flicker and with each dark second, Naomi shudders, what she wouldn’t give to be in her apartment in Miyakonojō, with its modern design, its earthquake- and typhoon-proof girders, its reinforced basement and extra storm gutters, a safe structure to keep the world’s unexpected interruptions at bay.

  Naomi is still holding that stack of laundry and still poised on that bottom step, and the wind is rattling against that low ground-level window, and somewhere above her Megumi is moving around, but otherwise the rest of her family is out in this storm, running around, risking their lives, and she feels a little rise of panic, a sharp edge of fear, because why can’t they be more sensible? Even Ken, she thinks, with a pregnant fiancée who is probably terrified at home in Kagoshima and he’s here in Komachi, waiting inside the hospital with dozens of other people, and wherever her parents are Naomi does not want to consider anymore, not just her father but now her mother, not sleeping in her bed as she and Megumi had thought, and they have told the police of Kanae’s disappearance, and the police were sorry but said there was nothing more to do than what they are already doing for Alec, double-checking the bridges and rivers, having officers visit those places that should be avoided on a day like today.

  I could be out there, too, Naomi is thinking, I could be driving back to Miyakonojō, braving this violent weather to get to someone, too . . .

  The idea makes her breathe more quickly, tightens her hand on the banister, not the sudden image of her boyfriend James that rises with the thought, but the image of her own little car hurtling through the wind and rain, up along the flooded streets, the possible downed power lines and blocked tunnels—would she hazard this storm for James? Would he hazard it for her?

  “Remember, lamb, nothing is stronger than you.” This her father once said to her, on a day much like today, only she was little, still a child, terrified and crying beneath her blankets at every loud knock of tree limb against the roof, at the rattling of the shutters, at the great gusts of wind that pushed even their garden pots off the edge of the back deck where they broke against the low garden wall.

  “The wind has empty fingers. The rain cannot come into our house.”

  English was the language of safety, her father’s soft voice telling her there was very little to be frightened of, and Megumi on the other side of the room, trying to help in her own way—“Nao-chan, if the thunder scares you, shout back at it, like this!”—and then Megumi would raise her fists above the futon cover and yell at the ceiling, and Ken, still a toddler, would stare at them all, silent, his eyes wide.

  James is from America, from Pennsylvania, and he tells her there are no such things as typhoons or earthquakes where he comes from, there are no high mountains on the horizon, no threatening ocean, and twice he has already mentioned marriage, four times he has invited her to go with him on a visit home; just for a week, he tells her, just to see if you like it, he says, but I know you will love it.

  And our Naomi knows she will love it, too, but each time he has asked her she tells him no, for now, she always says she will think about it, because Naomi knows she is not like her mother, not like Megumi, no, she is like her father, she knows she will give up her entire life for this man, so she is holding tight, for now, of the only thing she can control—when her new life will begin.

  Naomi is walking up the stairs now, gripping the railin
g with one arm, carrying the basket of laundry with the other, and crying again because she cannot seem to stop crying these days, and she is placing one foot in front of the other, she is ignoring the shift of the house and the clatter of another tree branch against the roof, and she is promising herself that if her father comes home today, if they find him, if her mother is still safe, she will tell her family about James, she will admit that she is leaving Japan once his short contract is finished, and she knows that her mother will not understand, her mother might even be angry, but her father will know, he must know, he will remember what it feels like to want to give yourself up completely, to lose your own culture, your own language, to exchange one self for another, to become the person it finally feels comfortable to become.

  * * *

  Alec is running now and shouting again, she has turned to him, is waiting for him, but his feet in their flat soles are slipping, and he, too, must grab onto the guardrail to keep from sliding down this hillside, and the mud and the water and this inside pain that is all his own, that is everywhere now, a most unwelcome witness to this moment, but he has climbed the path, with this rain on his face and this wind above and all around them, and this small river that is now overfull, that is climbing its own banks, coming nearer to the path, but he has made it and here they are together, at last, and quickly Alec is brushing the mud and leaves from her shoulder and there are words shouted out at each other, a chaos and tumble of words, none of them mean anything, and Alec’s hands are shaking and here is not a place for anything but this first touch of one hand to the other, and they are pulling each other up the path toward the narrow opening in the rock wall, and Alec can feel her finger bones, the solid bump of each of her knuckles against the inside of his larger hand.