by Ruth Ozeki
He felt his heart constrict. “For what?”
“Well, a lot of things. You got his friends thrown in jail, for one.”
“I didn’t make them go into that potato field.”
“Then your girlfriend called and talked to him. By the way, she seemed shocked to hear that you’d had sex with me when you were my teacher. I didn’t think people in Washington, D.C., got shocked about that kind of thing.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“But mainly Phoenix blames you for his grandpa’s heart attack.”
“Me?”
“Sure.” He heard the ratchet of her lighter as she lit up a cigarette. “Lloyd has hallucinations about you. He calls you the Terminator.”
“Why me?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
He could almost hear the subdued rattle of her scimitar, the build of her rage. He knew he was making a tactical error, but he was tired of getting stepped on. “Listen. I didn’t start this. I wasn’t the one exploiting a sick old man to further some political agenda.”
She exhaled sharply. “No. You exploited me instead. And now you’re exploiting Cass and Will. You lied to me about being a reporter. Why didn’t you just tell me? I wouldn’t have cared.”
“I never said I was still a reporter. I said I was working on a story. Which was true.”
“Oh, right! Your girlfriend told me all about the slimy way you operate. Phoenix is right. You are a scumbag—and a murderer.”
He could picture it perfectly, the old man’s panic, the pain as he gripped his heart.
“No,” he told her. “I saved your father’s life.”
“What?”
“That night in Liberty Falls. When you ran away.”
It was time to lie down under her feet. Time for full disclosure. He started talking. The words came, fast and urgent, and he hoped that when he finished, her manifestation would be merciful and compassionate.
“That night, after the abortion, when I drove you home, I knew I had to break it off. I’d made a terrible mistake, Yummy, and I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already had. When I told you, you didn’t seem at all sorry or surprised, and I figured you were sick of me. I didn’t know you had run away until later.
“I was asleep. There was a pounding at the door, and I got up to answer, thinking it was you. The wind rushed in. It was freezing outside. Your father was standing there. I could barely see his face, but I knew who he was. He had a rifle hugged to his chest. He demanded to know where you were. He raised the rifle like he was going to shoot me, but instead he pushed me out of the way with the barrel and came into the house. He was clumsy and half crazed, knocking over chairs and the table, slamming doors and smashing holes in the drywall with the butt of his gun, just tearing the house apart.
“I stayed out of his way. I managed to find some clothes and put them on. I had my car keys in my hand and was looking for my shoes, about to make a run for it, when it got real quiet. I heard a strangling noise coming from the bedroom. I went in. Your old man was kneeling on the floor next to the mattress, rocking back and forth. He was holding a small knitted thing. A sweater you’d left behind. He was twisting it in his hands and saying, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ like he could wring you out of the fabric. He was sweating, then this gurgling sound came from his throat, and his body went rigid. His hands curled into fists, like mallets, and he struck his chest, once, twice, hard, then he doubled over and started gagging. I went over to him, asked him what was wrong, but he couldn’t talk.
“Somehow I got him on his feet and out the door. It was icy, and I could barely support his weight and keep from slipping in the driveway. I didn’t call 911. Maybe he didn’t want me to. He was so big I could barely manage to fold him into the Volkswagen. He didn’t say a thing for the whole ride in, just sat there gasping and clutching your sweater, but as we approached the emergency room, he started to speak. He told me one of your neighbors was going to report me to the sheriff and have me arrested for statutory rape. As the orderlies were taking him away, he grabbed my sleeve. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Find her. . . .’ There were nurses and people watching, so I guess I promised. He let go, and they wheeled him off. I went back to my house and packed and left that night. I wasn’t going to wait around for the sheriff or a lynch mob from the PTA.”
He paused. Full disclosure, he reminded himself.
“Your father survived, so you see? I saved his life. But I didn’t try to find you. I had no idea where you might have gone. I figured if you had run away, it was just some attention-getting stunt, that you’d come home on your own. Kids do it all the time, and you were pretty precocious. Right then I just needed to get out of Idaho before the cops showed up. I had friends in New York, so I drove east. You know the rest. I wasn’t proud of what had happened, and I guess I just forced myself to forget all about you.”
He took a deep breath, waited, and then he spoke again into the deadening silence of the long years and miles that lay between them.
“Yummy, you’ve got to believe me when I tell you how deeply I regret all this now.”
full circles
I replaced the receiver into the cradle and stared at the phone. It was the living room phone, made of thick black plastic, and, like the phone in the kitchen, it had a real metal bell inside that rang loudly whenever a call came in. These old phones are cumbersome to operate, and the higher the number, the farther your finger has to travel around the dial. I stuck my finger in the zero hole and rotated until it hit the crescent-shaped steel stop, and then I pulled it out again and watched the dial revolve slowly backward. Zero has the longest arc—the wheel has to come full circle.
Momoko was weeding by moonlight. I walked out onto the porch with a glass of ice water and watched for a while, then threaded through the maze of beds to join her. The moon was almost full again, and my mother’s garden glimmered. She didn’t hear me coming, but I could hear her. Amid the night cries of insects, she muttered and sang. Cajoled her seedlings. “Gambatte ne, tané-chan. . . .”
Be strong, little seed.
It was a sound that moved me like a heartbeat. I walked along the dirt paths to the bed of bunching onions where she worked. The smell of onion was sweet in the air.
“They’re not tané, not seeds anymore,” I said, squatting down next to her. “They’re full-grown plants.”
She looked up and blinked. The moon cast a silvery light across the planes of her face. “No,” she said. “Grown-up plant is seed, too. Like those ones.” She pointed to a cluster of tall purple flower balls, perfectly round and globelike on their thick stems. “Those ones are only flowers now, but they gonna be seeds.” She stretched her arms to accommodate the whole garden. “Everyone gonna be seeds.”
The onion flowers looked comical. They oscillated like Styrofoam balls on the ends of car antennae. I pulled one close to my face and studied the little florets. The smell was stronger. Momoko went back to her weeding. I released the flower and watched her for a while longer, drinking my water until the ice rattled against the plastic in the bottom of the tumbler. It was tricky, talking to her. Her memory waxed and waned, returning in phases only to disappear into darkness again. These days she usually remembered she had a daughter and that daughter had run away, but only rarely did she connect that girl with me.
“Mom? When did Lloyd have his first heart attack?”
She jabbed at the earth with a trowel. “I don’t remember.”
“Was it the night I ran away?”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
“I didn’t know that.” I dug a small hole in the earth and planted an ice cube, then covered it up again. Maybe tonight was a good night. I took a deep breath. “Was it my fault?”
She shook her head. “No. It was his heart. His fault.” She jabbed the ground vigorously, over and over. His heart. His fault. I watched the chrome tip of the trowel sink into the loam.
“Why didn’t he ever come after me? You know, aft
er he got better.”
She looked up, bewildered, and nudged her glasses with the back of her hand. No, she was too far gone for this conversation. She couldn’t possibly remember, but still I pushed on. “The least he could have done was write. He never answered a single one of my letters!” It sounded like whining, but I couldn’t stop.
She bent over and teased out another weed, then sat up again on her heels. She wiped her hair off her forehead with the back of her sleeve. In the moonlight she looked young as she gazed off toward the potato fields.
“He never saw letters,” she said.
Her words were slow to sink in. “Never saw them?”
She looked down at her hands. “He was too sick. He almost dying. Doctor said I must not make any upset for him. Upset will kill him.”
She was talking to herself now, and her voice sounded far away. “Yumi’s letter is so full of upset, I think maybe it gonna kill him. Even if she is so mad at him, I know she don’t want to kill her daddy. She is not that kinda girl.”
“He never knew about them?”
“Oh, no. I tell him. I tell him about Yumi, how good she is doing.”
“But he never asked to see them?”
She shook her head. “He is too scared of her. He is too much coward.”
“Dad?”
She nodded. “His heart attack make him like that, cut him down like a big tree. Before that he was so proud man! He make big money that year. He was real big shot around town, let me tell you. All puffed up. He got lotsa land and lotsa potatoes. Nine-Dollar Potatoes.”
Momoko smiled, remembering, and so did I. “What happened?” I asked. “What changed him?”
“First she run away from him. Then his heart go against him, too. After that he is always scared. Doc say when the man cannot trust his heart no more, maybe he gonna go a little crazy, too.”
Momoko was stabbing the earth and pulling up clumps, tossing them onto a wilting heap. I watched her, then noticed she wasn’t pulling up weeds but the onion plants themselves. My own heart was beating fast.
“Mom?”
Mechanical. Plant after plant.
“Didn’t you worry about me?”
Yanking the stems. Head bowed to the task. “She write me lotsa letters. I know she is strong girl. Shikkari shiteru, you know? Like me. I send her all my seed money.”
I reached out and put my hand on her wrist. “Those are the plants, Mom. Not weeds. You don’t want to be pulling those up.”
She looked up, and her eyes were wide and confused as she searched my face.
“Yumi-chan?”
My heart leaped. It had been weeks since she’d called me by my name.
“Yes, Mom.” I knelt in the dirt in front of her and put my hands on her shoulders, facing her squarely, the way I faced Ocean when I wanted her to understand how seriously she was loved. I pulled her toward me and hugged her. She was as small as my child, and I felt her frail bones next to my breast and her heartbeat against mine. She clung to my waist like a vine, and I wanted to whisper to her, Gambatte ne! I watched the moon over the top of her silvery head.
Small explanations, pulled like pebbles from the ebbing tide of her mind. But they helped to fill me up, so I didn’t feel so hollow.
“Come on,” I said, releasing her. “Let’s get some sleep now.”
She nodded obediently and looked around to collect her tools. “I’ll come back for them,” I told her. “I’ll pick them up later.”
I helped her to her feet, steadying her as she navigated the crumbling earth. I led her by the hand, out of the onion patch and back up to the house. After she was tucked into bed, I crept up the attic steps. Phoenix was asleep, the blankets and bedclothes all tangled around his skinny limbs. I wanted to go and straighten them out and smooth down his covers, but instead I just stood in the doorway and listened to him breathe.
birth
When Charmey was hungry, Cass felt the pangs. When the baby kicked and fluttered, burped and hiccupped, these mundane signs of life made Cass stop what she was doing and catch her breath. Charmey sensed the pull, and she shared the baby’s gestation, drawing Cass’s hand to her abdomen and pressing it against the swell until Cass could tell the difference between a punch and a roll, a poke in the cervix and a kick in the ribs. Together they played Name That Bump, gently pressing Charmey’s belly to identify the baby’s body parts—the rebounding head, the soft bottom, the bundle of extremities opposite the smooth arc of the spine. Charmey was not shy with her body. She shared her most intimate indications: the thin leak of colostrum from her breasts and all her various discharges. Cass spent hours rubbing oil into the girl’s tight, itching skin while Charmey described the details of this miracle of birth.
“Oh! C’est terrible, these . . . how do you say? These diarrheas, les hemorrhoids! ”
They were like mother and daughter, Cass thought as she calculated their ages. It was not a stretch. Charmey was nineteen, the age Cass had been when she miscarried her first child. That child would be Charmey’s age now. The thought excited her, and she felt fiercely maternal as she coached Charmey with her breathing exercises, puffing along, or peeked into her room at night to watch the girl sleep.
Then she realized that if she were Charmey’s mother, she was about to be a grandmother. This was not so exciting, and she shook off thoughts like these. They confused her, made her angry, as though the whole middle section of her life—the part where she was supposed to grow to adulthood, bear children, be a young mother, and watch her children grow—had simply been elided. Slurred over. She felt, at once, far too old and impossibly young, and there was a great gap in the middle, like a section of her torso had gone missing. Sometimes in dreams she lived in these gaps, where small false starts came to naught, and sparks of life shriveled or spiraled up like burning ash only to turn to powder on her fingertips when she tried to catch them in the air.
Will would shake her awake, woken himself by her twitches and groans.
“Cass,” he said, his hand firm on her arm. “Cass.”
It was the only time she still felt close to him, in these half-dream states in the middle of the night. He had bad dreams, too, and over the years she had woken him often enough, sweating and shaking, to feel grateful when he reciprocated.
The two of us! she’d think, watching him crawl back into consciousness and shiver off the nightmare.
The two of us. Will had first used the phrase one night before they were married. How it had thrilled her seventeen-year-old heart! It was a grim little phrase, and hardly as grand as other declarations he might have made, but the sense of bonding it conveyed made Cass feel safe for the first time in her life. They were survivors. They belonged together. Running beneath the words was a feeling of awe at the luck of their union. It meant far more than “I love you.”
Daily living had eroded much of the awe, but the phrase had endured. It continued to comfort her even while its meaning changed, growing tougher with every year as it mocked their childless number.
When Will had decided to go forward with the lawsuit, Cass felt a huge rift splitting the two of them apart. And maybe the rift had started earlier, since the arrival of the Seeds, or since Yummy had come back to Liberty Falls—Cass couldn’t quite locate the onset, but she had felt herself drifting away from Will.
“I’m not testifying against them,” Cass told him. “I don’t want any part of this.”
Will stuck to his guns, even though she could sense that he was not convinced by Elliot’s fast talking. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he insisted. “They can’t just go around violating other people’s rights.”
“People’s rights? What about Frankie’s? You don’t think he has a right to be here when his baby’s born?”
“Not to mention the fact of them bringing that pornography into the town.”
She exploded at that one. “Oh, like no one in Liberty Falls ever bought a dirty magazine at the gas station! That’s just hypocritical, Will, and yo
u know it. You never even looked at the Web site.”
“I don’t need to.” Will shook his head. “I just don’t approve of them, is all.”
Conversations always ended something like this, and Will spent a lot of time out in the fields or in his office. He stayed clear of the spare room. Meanwhile, down at the courthouse, the Tri-County Interfaith League of Family Values was holding a daily vigil, picketing outside with signs that read TERMINATE THE DEMON SEED! and PORNOGRAPHY IS TERRORISM OF THE SOUL! and RID US NOW OF THE SEEDS OF TEMPTATION!
Cass had to pass by this gauntlet on her way to the jail next door, where the Seeds were being held. People recognized her as Will’s wife and cheered whenever she passed by. She knew some of the local folks, but others were strangers to her, clearly from out of town. She wondered why they were there and where they had come from. They had crazy petitions for passersby to sign, demanding that the Seeds be brought to trial for felony offenses including terrorism and even treason. Of course they all assumed that Cass was supporting her husband and their cause. What they didn’t know was that she was harboring a demon seed in her spare room and conveying updates to another one in lockup.
“Charmey’s fine, Frank,” she told the boy. “The doctor just wants her to stay lying down. That’s why she can’t come to see you.”
He didn’t look so fine. He had a fresh cut on his chin, and a bruise healing on his cheekbone. He beat on the bars with his fist. The guard glanced up, but Cass shook her head, and he went back to his magazine. It was the local jail, and the guard was the son of someone she knew.
“I can’t believe this shit!” Frankie said. “That’s my fucking kid getting born. I gotta be there!” He bowed his head and ran his hands over his scalp and stayed like that for a while. Outside, the protesters had started to chant something, but she couldn’t really hear what they were saying.
“Listen,” Frankie said, raising his head. “Tell Charmey to hang in there, okay? Tell her to stay chill and keep on breathing like we practiced. Tell her . . . I don’t know what the fuck to tell her.”
