by Kyoko Mori
Her lines are shaky. She will never draw with confidence again. All the same, from the bag she brought from Jeff’s house, she takes out the envelope that contains Mr. Kubo’s letter and turns it to the back. With a pencil, she draws the phone booth outside the gas station near the highway. It’s a square box in the middle of cornfields, which she indicates with jagged vertical lines, adding the roads intersecting in the front. The box resembles something dropped from the sky. Perhaps it longs, in vain, to be lifted back into the air. If she had called her father, she would have felt like someone inside that booth. It would have taken courage to stand in the middle of nowhere, dial the number, and wait, with the whole silent world listening in. A person named for a flying arrow should have had that courage.
Maya reaches into the first envelope and takes out her father’s drawing and the black-and-white portrait of him. The lines in his sketch are decisive and strong. He drew the flames of hell as though he had seen them, not simply imagined them. In the photograph, his eyes appear sorrowful, his forehead etched with deep lines of loneliness. He would have looked less pained, Maya is sure, if he had never gotten married and had been alone all along. His solitude then might have been tolerable or even satisfying, a peaceful life dedicated to work. But once a person falls in love, being alone is never the same. In the last two weeks, Maya and Eric have only been separated for five, six hours at a time, and yet every time he comes to the store or she goes to his apartment after work, one or both of them says, “I missed you.” One afternoon, he went inside a store to buy some tea while she waited in the car. When he opened the car door, he said, “There was a long line, and I started getting this terrible feeling that you might be gone when I came out. I almost walked out without getting the tea. I didn’t want to miss out on any time I could be with you.” The rest of Maya’s life will be like those ten minutes he was gone. Alone with a gray road stretching before her outside the window, she won’t find the comfort she used to feel in her hours at the loom, on the path by the lake, in the store surrounded by shawls and dresses. For the first time, she will know the solitude her father endured.
Eric is waiting for her in his apartment. “I wish you’d let me help you,” he said, when she left to meet Yuko. “I can’t,” she answered, “but I’ll be back as soon as we’re done.” Maya gathers the things on the worktable—the two envelopes, the photograph, her father’s drawing, Mr. Kubo’s letter—and takes them to the kitchen. She pulls the utensils out of the top left-hand drawer and places the letters and the pictures inside. This is the one thing she can keep from her four years with Jeff. The drawer under the sink is where she will keep all her unfinished business to mull over late at night when she can’t sleep. A few pictures at a time, she will sketch the images that come to her. In time, layers of faint pencil marks will accumulate inside the drawer like fossils. Perhaps she herself will be turned into stone. If there is a goddess of solitude, as there are goddesses of love and wisdom, she must be like the Medusa of her father’s stories, a woman whose unflinching stare could turn a person to stone. The goddess of solitude has been with Maya all along; she has watched over her childhood and all the years Maya lived alone before her marriage. When Eric is gone, Maya will have no choice but to go back to her. The courage that failed her before may finally come to her then. Though she could not step into a box out in the middle of nowhere and send her voice wavering across the ocean to her father, she will face the silence of his death without running away.
17
Every night for the last week they have woken up together between three and four, in the middle of a conversation they hadn’t finished.
“You’ve never felt like this about anyone else,” he said, “so how can you let me leave without you?” Instead of answering, she touched his hair, pressed her lips against his throat, and heard him sigh. “Until I met you,” he insisted, “I thought I was perfectly happy alone. Now I think I must have been lonely without you. I must have missed you even before we met.”
She kissed him before he could say another word. Until now, she did not know that desire is an unfailing way out of difficult talk, a shortcut through everything she cannot say. When she and Jeff came to the silence at the end of their argument, there was nowhere to go. Now she holds Eric’s hand and kisses his fingertips as though each word she can’t say might stay, like evidence, caught between the lines of his fingerprint.
On summer solstice, light lingers in the sky past nine. Everything in Eric’s apartment has been packed except for the few pieces of furniture he sold to a young man who’s coming to pick them up tomorrow afternoon. By then, he’ll be halfway across Indiana. Sitting next to him on the front steps with her head on his shoulder, Maya remembers the night they struggled up these steps together, his arm around her waist as though he’d gotten hurt in an accident. Nighthawks are circling overhead. They fall a long way before soaring up again, their white wing patches shining. Maya has put her binoculars and field guide inside Eric’s suitcase. He’ll find them when he unpacks at his friend’s house three days from now. Out in the woods in Vermont, birds will come to him with the field marks she showed him on their walks along the bluff: white eye rings, yellow wing patches, a faint orange wash over the breast—each mark will be a message from her even after they have lost touch.
Eric opens the box of sparklers he bought on his way home from his mother’s last night. Maya was sleeping when he came back at eleven. “I wish I could make you fall asleep just as I’m leaving,” he said. “I’d hypnotize you and take you to Vermont.” Now, as the sky darkens, he hands her two of the sparklers. Watching him strike the match, Maya remembers her father lighting bottle rockets on summer nights. He always made her stay back a safe distance. Their favorite kind had a small parachute that came down at the end, a messenger from the sky. The sparklers in her hands begin to hiss softly. Eric gets two more and tips them toward hers. The buttons of fire move from her sparklers to his, splitting themselves. In the dark, there are four webs of light.
“We used to do this out on the farm. There were fireflies in a ravine in the back on summer nights. I thought the light from my sparklers was flying away and turning into those fireflies.”
Maya pictures three children by the ravine, surrounded by the irregular flight of orange light. The sparklers would have made the same noise she is hearing now, and there would have been crickets in the grass. She wants to get a clear picture of everything he has told her. On the walls in his mother’s trailer, the photographs of Eric’s childhood are tacked next to those of his nieces. In Maya’s mind, the three children by the ravine are across the street from herself and her father lighting their bottle rockets in their yard; the butterflies her father caught and then set free soar into the air next to Eric’s fireflies. Perhaps memory can spread like the light Eric imagined as a child—bright sparks freeing themselves from the source and coming to life as they depart.
Her sparklers are almost extinguished. Just in time, Eric reaches into the box for another pair and holds them to the ones about to go out. The fire moves from one pair to the other, this time without splitting. He offers her the new sparklers with their orange webs. No matter how much it hurts when he leaves tomorrow morning, she wants to remember this moment when she is almost perfectly happy.
* * *
The only things left in the bedroom are the bed and a lamp on the windowsill.
“We can go to your loft if you feel better there,” Eric says. “It looks desolate here.”
Maya shakes her head. She can already picture herself waking up tomorrow night. She is going to sit up with a start, stunned to be alone without him. Yuko left her house because she did not want to be haunted by memories. By tomorrow night, this room will be completely bare. Maya would rather leave the ghosts of herself and Eric here, in an empty room at first, among other people’s furniture later, in a place that will belong to neither of them.
“I want to stay with you here.”
The blue blinds on the w
indows and the lines on the hardwood floor remind her of the nudes Bonnard painted against the checkerboard of a tiled floor, the steep diagonal angle of a bathtub, the long vertical downsweep of curtains. The figures looked oddly fluid amid the overlapping gridwork of the surrounding composition. The woman leaning over the tub or drying her hair resembled the soft light that moves across a room on winter mornings—unfettered but tenuous, a temporary brightness against the solid geometry of the world. Eric has turned off the overhead light, leaving only the lamp on the windowsill. He is holding out his hand toward her. The shadows in the room have changed already. We are here for such a short time, Maya thinks, as she takes his hand and steps toward the light.
* * *
Standing next to Eric’s car at seven the next morning, Maya glances back at her own car, parked behind his. She will be the first to go.
“Will you let me know if you change your mind?” he asks. “I’ll drive back to get you. I don’t want you to come out alone. Your car’s not going to make it all the way to Vermont.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.” She holds him tighter.
“I have a vision of us driving across the country. Your cat would meow across Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania—those big states between here and there. You’d look so worried and serious, and I’d do everything to reassure you.”
“I’m going to call you in a month to say good-bye. Until then, I won’t write or call. You know I love you. That’s what I want you to remember.”
“You won’t let me call you?”
“No.”
“Can I write to you at least?”
“I wish you wouldn’t. I need to start being alone. It’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. It’ll only hurt me to get letters from you. I don’t know if I can bear to read them.”
“You’re crazy, you know that?” He pulls away long enough so she has to look up at him. His eyes are red.
“I know it sounds crazy. But going with you doesn’t make sense to me. Being alone does.”
“I don’t know anyone like you. That’s why I love you.”
“I know that, too.”
When they kiss, it’s as if their lips and hands continue talking when nothing more is left to say. All night, they kept waking up with their arms and legs tangled together. Soon after they finally fell asleep, the alarm went off. In silence, they went into the shower, where Maya couldn’t tell if it was water or tears she felt on her face. She kisses him one final time and pulls away.
“Be careful driving,” she says. “I’m worried about you. We didn’t sleep very much.” We’ll never have another sleepless night together, she thinks. She strokes his arm, wishing her touch could protect him on the road to Vermont and everywhere.
“I love you,” Eric says, as she walks to her car.
He is behind her when they get to the freeway. As she turns onto the northbound ramp, she can see him in her rearview mirror, driving straight across the overpass to the southbound side. She beeps her horn as though they were saying a happy good-bye. He waves but does not beep back. Halfway down the ramp, she looks up at the overpass, but he is already gone. In the line of traffic heading north, she finds a space between a purple pickup truck and a blue sedan. Almost bumper to bumper in the morning rush hour, the traffic still keeps flowing fifty miles an hour. From the sky, the cars would look like strings of beads moving through an assembly line. The invisible needle descends, stitching her to the fabric of summer trees and roadside flowers.
18
After the Fourth of July party at Peg’s house, the air outside is warm and humid. Peg follows Maya to the Civic parked on the grass. The moon has a faint yellow rim above it, as if it were holding an umbrella. Maya’s father used to say that a moon with an umbrella was a sign of approaching rain.
“Anytime you get lonely up there”—Peg points in the direction of the big barn—“come on over.”
Except for the slight breeze rustling the leaves of the trees and the corn in the fields, everything is quiet. As Maya pulls her car onto the dirt road, Peg waves as though she were departing on a long journey. After the road curves, there is nothing around the car except the fields. The headlights fan out into the dark. In the distance, an orange flare shoots up from someone’s fireworks. The light breaks into streams of green and red as it fades away. Out in Vermont at his friend’s house, Eric, too, might be thinking of the sparklers they lit on his front porch. “I’m still seeing the sparklers,” she said to him as they fell asleep, and he answered, “Me too.” She imagined tiny webs of fire imprinted on their closed eyelids forever.
The last time she drove away from Peg’s house after a party, she was taking him home. Though that was three months ago, it seems like a lifetime away in another place; out in the country, summer is nothing like early spring. In her memory, every day she spent with Eric is like a coastline that curves curlicue after curlicue to touch the water, each minute stretching beyond ordinary measure by coiling tightly around itself. But the coastline is only a small part of the map. Thirty-five years of Maya’s life had already happened before the night she met Eric. By then, her course had been unalterably set. Ever since she left her father’s house, Maya has known she was meant to live alone. Solitude has been her calling the way devotion is for other people. Nearly all her father’s stories had the same ending: love, no matter how deep, cannot alter anyone’s destiny.
Eric sent her a drawing, in red ink, of himself and Maya holding each other in the middle of nowhere. The lines at their feet might be grass, ripples in the water, or flames in a lake of fire. His hand disappearing in her long hair, her face upturned toward him, they looked like currents of light tangled together. Around the figures, he’d placed blue and pink squares the size of fingernails. The squares were cut out of the cloth Maya wove to make the jacket for her show. She had given him what was left and told him the story of the heavenly garment, but he had arranged the squares so that the meticulous sequence of colors from blue to pink was broken. The effect was that of a sky shaken up and made brighter, as if a rainbow had been mixed back into pure light. He didn’t include any words, but she knew everything he must have been thinking and remembering. “Your father must have loved you so much,” Eric had said, when she showed him the picture of the tunnel. “I wish I could have met him.” She put Eric’s drawing in the kitchen where she kept her father’s and her own drawings. If the dark space inside the kitchen drawer were a universe of its own, the pictures would cleave together in time and become a shiny black rock.
* * *
Maya parks the car in front of the barn and steps out under the stars. The Milky Way is a belt of white light stretched across the sky. Ama no kawa, her father used to call it—the River of Heaven. This time of the year, the two stars separated by the river, Altair and Vega, move closest. On the seventh of July every year, Maya and her father strung colored pieces of paper from bamboo branches with their wishes written in ink. He told her the story of the two stars. Vega, a weaver, and Altair, a farmhand, were lovers who neglected their work because they were too much in love. As punishment, they were placed on opposite banks of the River of Heaven and allowed to meet only once a year by crossing the river on a swan’s outstretched wings. On that night, they could grant the wishes of the people living below. Maya cannot recall wishing for anything specific. The words she and her father wrote were large and all-encompassing: happiness, safety, peace, strength.
Separated from her lover for an eternity, the weaver is still at her celestial loom. Maya imagines her weaving a silver cloth of starlight, an indigo garment of the night. Vega is a gentle goddess of solitude, lonely but resigned, not at all like Medusa, whose gaze turned people to stone. The star is somewhere near the Swan, in the constellation called Lyre. But the sky is full of stars Maya has forgotten. The weaver could be any of the bright stars along the Heavenly River. Maya raises her hand in its general direction, saluting the vast empty space between the earth and the heavens.
*
* *
When she opens the door, Casper is waiting. He follows her up the stairs and clings to her as she gets ready for bed. In the bathroom, he perches on her shoulder while she brushes her teeth. He does not notice his own reflection in the mirror above the sink. He rides on her shoulder to the middle of the loft, where she pulls open the futon that she folds up and pushes against the wall every morning. The day after Eric left, Maya borrowed Larry’s pickup and drove to the futon store on the east side. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before on the couch. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Eric’s face as though she could still touch him if she only reached out her hand.
Casper is at her side, nudging her to lift the thin sheet she is lying under. He raises his paw and taps her face over and over until she lets him crawl in and curl up against her neck, his face flattened against her throat. Falling asleep to his purring, Maya remembers the night she almost ran over him. Out on the highway, he had shown her that a whole life could begin from a chance meeting, a near calamity transformed into a lucky accident. Casper knew how to stretch his body on the road at her feet and be lifted through the crack in fortune that opened up to save his life. He might have been trying to teach her to trust. It’s a lesson she has learned only halfway. No matter how much she trusts Eric’s love, she can only picture herself letting go and moving on alone.
* * *
Yuko is waiting outside her apartment building in a yellow sundress. She has gotten another haircut. Her hair barely covers her left earlobe; on the back and on the right it’s shaved close, exposing her nape and right ear. The haircut makes her head look like a single daisy in a glass vase—a beautiful and sad flower.
“Are you all right?” Maya asks, as Yuko gets into the passenger side.
“Yeah.” She lifts her feet to point to her black sandals. “Do you think I should have worn nylons and regular shoes?” Her toenails are painted red.
