by Kyoko Mori
Returning to the kitchen drawer, Maya scoops up everything in it and takes it back to the worktable. The map she tore out of the phone book is clipped to the list of birds she saw that morning. Sitting down again at the table, Maya remembers the way Eric kissed her closed eyelids after they made love; she pictures his hands with their solid knuckles and square fingernails. She wants to go back to that countryside again, to find out if the cranes are still there in the fields or were just passing through, if the marshes in late summer will be visited by snipes and sandpipers, greater and lesser yellowlegs. The ritual of giving up will have to be enacted bit by bit, not all at once. If she has to make five trips back to the place of his childhood, she will see all the birds that come through the countryside. She will keep records of each trip, a series of migration maps to chart her progress. By the time the summer birds are gone and the warblers have returned—their fall plumage duller, harder to distinguish—her loneliness may feel just as muted.
Taking a piece of the opaque paper she uses for making patterns, Maya lays it over the map. With a pen, she traces the highways, side roads, and creeks, copying their names in ink. She marks the copied map with a red X for each location where she stopped and writes down the names of the birds from her list. Comparing the list and the map, putting in more X’s, she is learning her way through the countryside. The list she made is thorough, including landmarks she noted along the way: an old schoolhouse with a bell tower, a stand of maples, a drive-in diner in the middle of cornfields, a school bus stop. She draws these on the map with coloring pencils, adding Eric’s mother’s trailer and brown car, the farm down the road with the ravine, three children—stick figures—holding sparklers. With an orange pencil, she makes tiny patterns of fire spreading out from the black wands in their hands. Then she draws each bird next to its name and location. When she is done, the map is a cross between children’s drawings of the things they love the most—a house, friends holding hands, the sun in the sky—and an old trail map showing where a treasure is buried.
Maya picks up Eric’s third letter, delivered Saturday. It’s a piece of cardboard covered in strips of red fabric except for one phrase, I dream of us, written backward in gold, like the words flying out of the angel’s mouth in medieval paintings of the Annunciation. She has written three letters to him, ripped them up, and placed the fragments in the drawer. All the pieces are still there. In one letter, she told him she did not have the courage to call him for their good-bye and has decided, instead, to write it. In another, she described the dream she had in which he appeared wearing a black shirt covered with tiny words she could not read. In the third, she said she loved him and could not forget him. Anyone looking at the letters, ripped up as they are, can see the simple truth: it will take something more than bird-watching in the countryside and burning scraps of paper to give her peace.
Near the top of the pile is a one-page letter from Mr. Kubo, found among the pieces of mail Jeff had packed along with her sweaters. When she read it, the morning after she saw Jeff, she didn’t think of it as more than a minor letdown. She had ceased to care about the news while she was waiting. She only put the letter in the drawer as an afterthought.
Reading it again now, she knows why she saved it to burn in her ritual, instead of crumpling it and tossing it into the trash. Like the other letter, it begins with a reference to the weather and other polite formalities, which occupy two-thirds of the page. In the last paragraph, Mr. Kubo explains why her father had said nothing, but it’s no explanation at all.
By the time your father’s cancer was discovered, it was too far gone for effective treatment. His doctor and I agreed that nothing should be said to your father about his condition because the knowledge would only upset him and spoil the time he had left to live. Perhaps your father sensed what was happening, but he did not say anything himself. Undoubtedly, he preferred to spend his last days in peace rather than in unpleasant and morbid discussions about death. He did not leave parting remarks for my wife or me—or you—because we all believed it was better not to dwell on a future in which he had no part. We lived from day to day, making the best of what we had. Your father had a quiet peaceful life, and his death was also peaceful. You must believe that and pray for his spirit in the next life.
The drawing her father made for her in the last year of his life is on her table. Maya has no doubt that he knew the truth of his condition even if no one told him. Kay had been right all along when she said that Japan was the loneliest place on earth. Even as he was suffering from pain and the fear of dying, Maya’s father had to pretend he did not suspect the truth and was completely at peace with his fate. He could not talk about his fears or regrets and hope to be consoled. Mr. Kubo and his wife might have sincerely believed they were doing him a favor by pretending that he wasn’t dying and there was no need to say anything. For them—as for her father for most of his life—words must have seemed like a burden; silence was better than speaking the painful truth. A dying person has nothing to lose by being honest. At the end of a lonely, silent life, her father could have found comfort in words for once. Love isn’t always about respecting the other person’s unspoken wish. Sometimes, people have to be nudged into doing something they are afraid to do. There should have been someone who could encourage her father to talk as he neared his death—someone to help him let go of his life with understanding and clarity instead of false peace. Being honest with him would have been a painful act of love. A true friend would have grieved with him instead of remaining silent.
A small part of that act is still possible. It may be the only thing left for Maya to do: to grieve for her father though she will never know all the details of his dying. For everyone else, his death is a neatly finished business with no loose ends. Mr. Kubo and his wife are satisfied that the end was calm and peaceful. Kay, too, must have found a kind of completion that allows her, now, to reclaim a part of her past. The last time they talked on the phone, she was irritated because her doctor had advised her to postpone her trip to Japan till November. “No one lives forever,” she said. “I don’t want to be on my deathbed someday, thinking I should have gone there at least once. I wouldn’t mind seeing the places where I grew up. Nate thinks he and I should stand in front of that house in Osaka where I was so unhappy. If I stood there with him, I’d know for sure that everything in the past happened to bring us together in the end. We’re still going because it’s a trip we need to make.” She cleared her throat and waited for Maya to say something.
“That’s good,” Maya responded. “I’m glad you’ll be able to do that.” She wasn’t sure how sincerely she meant her own words. She hated the idea of Nate and Kay standing in front of her childhood house. But she had a sudden thought: if she can forget for a moment what it was that she really wanted to say, she can open her mouth and have all the right words come out—words Kay wants to hear. It gave Maya the feeling of being a psychic medium or an apostle possessed by the Holy Spirit. What she was speaking wasn’t, but might as well have been, the truth. Saying something was better than saying nothing and letting her silence express her resentment.
For her father, Maya can offer no words. Still, she can acknowledge the loneliness of his life. Yuko said that being forgotten was the most painful injury. If that’s true, Maya has much to be forgiven for. On the day she left Osaka, she let her father convince her to forget him. The silence he sank into was as deep as the sea that glittered under her plane. Maybe she was too young then to do anything else, but she has had all the years since then to undo his silence, to insist on words of love.
Maya closes her eyes and thinks of Eric’s painting in the studio. He would have turned her father’s face into a landscape full of sorrow, but with feathered brush strokes of hope left along the edges, or a thread unraveling but holding on, saved in the state of coming apart. Maya pictures Eric’s face as she leaned up to kiss him in his mother’s trailer. His eyes squeezed shut, he was trying to fend off the regret he felt about leavi
ng his mother alone in that trailer. He looked like someone waiting to be hit with something hard; he wasn’t sure if he could take the pain. Right now, he is hundreds of miles away from home, thinking of his mother and his childhood and wishing Maya had chosen to go with him.
Maya puts her migration map over Mr. Kubo’s letter. Under the birds and the landmarks she drew in color, the words are still visible. She turns the letter upside down, transforming the words into abstract designs: curlicues and dots and slanted lines. Underneath the landscape of Eric’s childhood, she is seeing the blurred shapes of her own past. Like the song of a bird she recognizes before dawn or when the bird is hidden in thick summer foliage, the combined images announce the presence of something she cannot see or fully understand. Familiar and yet mysterious, the shapes from their separate pasts intertwine like the braided hair the women threw into the solstice fire.
Years ago in Osaka, Maya cut out random patterns from the wrapping paper in which her parents received year-end gifts from the neighbors and pasted them onto her father’s sketching paper. He mixed glue for her by stirring cooked rice with water and mashing it with the back of a spoon. The semitransparent paste had a sweet smell.
Maya shoos Casper away from the stove top, where he’s been napping, and cooks some rice. While it’s cooling, she tears open a brown bag from the shop, turns it inside out, and cuts it to the size of a manila folder. Carefully, she brushes the rice paste on the back of Mr. Kubo’s letter. The paper curls immediately from the moisture. She places the letter upside down on the square made from the brown bag, centering it carefully so an inch or two of brown is left to frame it on all sides. When the glue sets behind the letter, she brushes more on the surface. The words, written in ink, dissolve and bleed. She spreads the map she made and smooths it out over the letter. The words are even less legible than when she simply laid the two pieces together. They are like trees receding in fog.
On the top with a pen, Maya writes, Migration Map One, July 1997. The red square she cut out of the old jacket belongs with the map. She glues it on the lower left corner, where it looks like a seal. It is a red window into her past, a doorway into the heart. She picks up the pen again and writes, next to the title, 2 Eric. He will remember her father’s drawing of the tunnel. Underneath the red square, she writes her own name and draws an arrow. Then, in the space left on the side, she adds, I can’t forget you. I love you. There is room left for more words. She hesitates a long time before writing, I don’t think I can call to say good-bye.
She tries to think of something more, but all her words feel like dried-up paint or broken crayons. Nothing is going to protect her from regret. No matter what she chooses, some part of her will always long for the things she chose against. Nate was right about one thing. There is no guarantee of freedom unless people can forgive and forget everything. Five years from now, living with Eric, Maya might wake up every morning wishing she had kept her own promise and stayed away. Unable to forgive herself for coming to him, she might stop loving him; she might cause him to stop loving her. Instead, she could be living alone in this loft—a simple, pure life. Looking at the blurred shapes behind the map she has made, Maya is no longer sure about purity. At best, it’s an empty, flimsy consolation to be so pure. Her life alone would be like the landscapes her father showed her—a solid geometry of colors and shapes—but without the patch of sunlight or the wispy blue trees in the corner that elude the orderliness of the composition. The trick in drawing and painting is first to get the foundations right—all the major horizontal and vertical lines of the overall composition—but that is not an end in itself. Laying out the foundation allows the painter the freedom to move, to capture the shifting light that flickers across the strict gridwork of the world. Even in her weaving, Maya hasn’t forsaken that principle. She couldn’t help putting those few strands of mohair into her mother’s afghans. Without their rough sheen, the afghans would have been pitiful things, bland, without surprise. That’s what her life alone might be like. If she does not send the collage to Eric, she will go on living here in solitude, calling her mother now and then, never forgiving her for the past but going on as though she did. Year after year, she will be with Yuko, with Peg; her love for them will force her to shield them from the truth about her pain and loneliness. All her words will be as inoffensive and false as the lusterless afghans she might have woven for Kay, had she cared less about beauty.
Maya gets a large envelope from downstairs, writes Eric’s address on it, and places the collage inside. There is a lot of room left in the envelope. Going through the stack on her table, she sets aside the three letters he sent her, Mr. Kubo’s first letter, and her father’s drawing and photograph. She gathers all the rest into the envelope—the torn pieces of her unfinished letters, the two drawings she made on the backs of envelopes, the stolen map and the notes she took. They are the pieces that did not fit into the collage.
Maya tapes the envelope across the back and walks out of the barn into her car. Down the dirt road, she drives to where it joins the main paved road. Here, she can turn left and head for the highway to town or proceed right toward the lake. It’s possible, still, to stand on the bluff where she cycled with Yuko this morning and pitch the envelope into the water. With no traffic behind her, she hesitates. Her foot on the brake pedal feels heavy.
Pitching the letter into the lake is no better than everything she has done since she left her father in Osaka, trying but failing to become an artist, weaving garments and selling clothes and thinking she was honoring his memory without really having to remember him—always choosing a pure gesture over the uncertainty of what she imagined might be worse. All that time, her father was slowly dying, his own cells turned against him like the words he could not say. Sending a short, cryptic message to Eric may be a kind of failure; she should give a clearer explanation. All the same, what is inside the envelope is the only picture she can offer. She can’t pitch it into the water and fool herself that she has made an important statement. Maya takes her foot off the brake, turns the wheel to the left, and proceeds toward the freeway.
* * *
At the post office on the north side of Milwaukee, Maya hands the letter to the clerk. “Two or three days by priority mail,” he says.
Maya pushes her money across the counter and watches him stamp the envelope. He drops it in the box of outgoing mail as she turns to go. It’s too late to change her mind. She opens the heavy glass door and walks out of the building.
Her letter may reach him too late. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, or earlier today, he may have made a resolution to forget her. It is easy to harden your heart against something you cannot have, pretending you had never wanted it. Resignation is as simple as reaching over and touching a light switch; a single action of the mind can change everything. Her letter may be too late.
If it isn’t, he will call her, but his call will only be the beginning of a long, uncertain time. She has never lived more than two miles away from Yuko since she was ten. Even if Yuko forgives her for going away, their friendship will never be the same. They will only see each other a few times every year. Most of their conversations, for the rest of their lives, will take place over the telephone. Maya pictures the phone lines stretching over the flat plains of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. Their voices will meet somewhere over in the air, like spirits. She imagines Peg alone in the barn, sitting next to Wilbur. Since leaving Jeff, Maya’s future had seemed more settled than when she was married. As soon as she moved into the loft, she had envisioned herself living there till she was an old woman, running Peg’s store and eventually buying it from her when she retired. It would have been a good, peaceful life. Only, whenever she thought about that future, she wished Eric would come back someday to disturb her peace, to talk her out of the simple, modest happiness she had allowed herself. Perhaps that was what her father had hoped from her. He might have had a vision of her appearing at his door someday, demanding that he choose her over the quiet life he
had resigned himself to. If she had gone to see him, he would have embraced her and wept; he would never have sent her away again.
Getting into her car and driving out onto the busy street, Maya almost wishes she had burned everything in her folder. Unable to drive on, she turns into the parking lot of a grocery store across the street. Absently, she gets out of the car and starts walking toward the door. If she went back to the post office in twenty minutes and the mail hadn’t gone out yet, she could ask to have the letter back. I made a mistake, she would say. I put the wrong letter in the wrong envelope.
In the first row of parked cars, a woman is opening the hatchback of her tan station wagon to load her groceries. On the shopping cart behind her, her daughter sits among the bags, her legs in white tights. Twenty yards from them, Maya freezes, thinking of Nancy and Brittany. But of course it isn’t them. The woman’s hair is brown instead of red. She’s tall like Nancy but not as thin, dressed in an old T-shirt and baggy jeans Nancy would never wear. Her daughter’s hair is pale yellow. Loading the last bag into the trunk, the mother closes the hatchback, lifts her daughter out of the cart, and buckles her into the child safety seat. Then, without looking, she gets in behind the wheel and backs out, leaving the empty cart in the lot. The rear bumper of her car almost hits the cart before she floors the gas pedal and drives out.
