by Laura Newman
He pushed his feet out, leaned back in the chair. “I’m retiring, Fiona. Hanging up the elbow-patch houndstooth.”
My dad was sixty-five years old, a tenured philosophy professor at Sierra Nevada College—students love his Fear & Loathing class. It’s a forest campus, wood buildings with slanted green metal roofs, built to send snow avalanching. If I thought of my dad, I pictured him there, in a kind of academic diorama for me to move the image of “dad” around in. If not there, where would he be? Children want their parents to remain essentially the same, so the child can go away and know exactly where to find them. A time capsule in a foundation cornerstone.
George
George believes children cannot know the secret lives of parents. They can pick up traces, sediments and smells. Fly-fish their way through their parents’ movements and hope to catch something big enough to eat. But parents, at least the good ones, learn how to hide in the deep. Fiona never knew that her father had a lengthy relationship with the college librarian. He loved to make love to Jessica with her wire-framed glasses askewing her nose, the bounce of her. They broke up because he couldn’t bring himself to introduce her to Fiona as anything but Ms. Winston. How could he bring another woman into Fiona’s life? It felt like he was betraying not so much Roxayn, but Fiona’s mother. Of course this was a mistake. Fiona wanted a replacement mom; Roxayn was always two-dimensional to her. George never understood that.
George was happy with his life as a father and a teacher, he had activities. He was still on a softball team; their pitcher smoked Lucky Strikes on the mound and hotdogs were served to the runners at first base. George smoked a little weed on solitary hikes, looking over Lake Tahoe, the water sometimes densely silver, sometimes so clear it ceased to even exist. He loved his dark daughter, the way her fingers turned purple in the cold, mud-warm in summer. Back when she still reached for his hand, needing just to be sure of him, and then running ahead again. She would always be ahead of him.
Now Fiona was going to college. She had pine needles sticking out of the back of her hair. She looked more like Roxayn, Roxayn at that age, every day. He had spent the winter making his plan.
Pulling his attention back to the kitchen table, George said, “I’ve decided to spend the summer in Japan.” He paused to give Fiona time to picture pagodas and kimonos. Hello Kitty! Things he knew she liked. Then offered, “Come with...?”
And just like that Fiona’s life walked over the crooked bridge.
Roxayn
If we could save our days, could they be like thread? Spools of silky-fine summer days. Rough days of lumpy hemp macramé, chunky with driftwood and shockingly bright feathers. Days of anger, reeling spirals of red. Lanky nights of sex running in inky blue skeins. Workdays of wool. Childhoods spun from apron strings. Bobbins, coils, whorls of floss, loomed together; if each day were a thread.
Roxayn felt, or at least sensed, her body being lifted onto a gurney; the heartless sheet of metal was not as cold as she. She felt aware of the opening of the morgue roll-in freezer, the cloud that escaped its incubation, and the ice-edged air did not chill her. She sensed her body being awkwardly dressed in her decades-old wedding sari; a perfect shroud for wrapping around her pregnancy-and-death-bloated belly. She could see the woman from Bangalore who wove the silk, red and orange, could see the aura of her fingers in the pattern. She could sense the loss of light and vibration of closure. And finally, everything around her turned to sari-shades, intensely saturated with heat, and it did not warm her. Warm air rises, up and away. Ghosts make themselves, white as ice.
Well, it’s an afterlife. Once Roxayn got over the awful shock of dying and body disposal, she settled into her new freedoms and restrictions. She knew that at any moment she could let herself go, unravel the foggy threads that held her together. Dissipate. But it’s hard for a new mother and a young woman in love with her husband, with herself, to let go. Love is the strongest floss. So she lingered. Tried to show George and Fiona she loved them. Remove obstacles for them, like survivor’s guilt, that hard-to-remove heart stain. She was sometimes somewhat successful. She traveled. Saw all the major sites. One Thousand Places to See After You Die. She learned that Mount Everest is not the tallest mountain at all times. That water talks but is inane like a drunken aunt at a wedding, that bricks have a fascination with the rearrangement possibilities of earthquakes. Humans don’t need to believe it for it to be so.
Roxayn waited for a body. She knew she would mostly lose her Roxaynness when she did this. But it was the only way she had a chance to get back to George, to Fiona—to herself—as anything more than a misunderstood moonbeam.
Kimiko
And now we are back to the beginning. The baby born during an earthquake in 2010, Matsumoto, Japan. No one died, not the baby or the mother. But the mother was only fifteen and although she would have liked to keep the little baby (Hello, Kitty!) her parents convinced her that adoption was the best for all concerned. Considering the pain she was in from having her earthquake-assisted delivery, she allowed the baby to go. In that parentless instant, when the child was not being called upon by anyone’s love or expectations, Roxayn slipped in. This kind of thing goes on all the time. You don’t know where your babies come from.
The baby was given the name Kimiko—valuable child—in hopes that she would be.
Kimi was transferred to a children’s home in the city of Kanazawa, on the Sea of Japan. It was a dormitory-style house with a blue-tiled roof and a very important kitchen garden. The children rolled out their futons at night and slept with windows open, because orphans are never stolen. Other babies and children were adopted, new ones came, but it would not be easy to find parents for Kimi. She was a pretty child, slender as the word lily, tissue-paper skin, all her veins near the surface. Eyes with a shadow of lavender. But by the time she was four she had gained the nickname Akimbo. Everything about her moved in unexpected directions. The doctor said the Tourette’s was caused by genetics, but Kimi knew it was aftershocks. She thought of it as her birth-quake, coming through in blinks and boinks. Tics and grimaces. It was disconcerting, and exacerbated when the children were called to stand in the please-pick-me line up for prospective parents. She looked like she had fleas.
Emiko was the head mother at the children’s home. Emiko would not let the children make fun of Kimi in Emiko’s earshot (although the Akimbo nickname stuck), but she couldn’t make them like the tic-ing girl. Sometimes the child sounded like a bamboo grove knocking in a wind storm. To help make up for Kimi’s alienation, Emiko brought Kimi into the kitchen and taught her how to make soba soup for twenty and then a proper matcha tea for just the two of them. Emiko had to make it look like work, or the kids would like Akimbo even less. She messed up Kimi’s hair. In the kitchen, Kimi could twitch, drop an egg. Giggle.
At the end of March, the cherry blossoms emerged in pink to remind the world of the virtues of tenderness and poetry. When a puff of wind tugged a blossom lose, petals floated away like a tiny, gift-wrapped wish. It was around this time that a delivery of used Pokémon cards, dog-eared and abandoned, arrived at the children’s home like a new batch of orphans. It was to great excitement that Emiko passed the cards out. She simply counted out an equal number for each child, unconcerned with the individual card’s worth in the game. The great swap ensued. Here the skills of salesmanship and friendship came into play, neither of which favored Kimi. In each trade, Kimi gave a bit more than she received. But Kimi knew the rules of Pokémon, the value of each card. In her pocket she kept a faded but still powerful Shadow Lugia, the rearing, flying purple dragon. Kimi did not show this card, would not trade it. She hoped Shadow Lugia would help her sumo-wrestle her Tourette’s, or turn her into a long-legged crane, so she could fly away on white, graceful wings.
Most Saturdays the children would go to Kenroku-en Garden (on a year-round free pass given by the government) and it was here that Kimi’s quaking aspen of a body would
be most quiet. At eight years old she had lived in the orphanage longer than any other child and was mature enough to take care of the new babies. But Emiko could see Kimi’s limbs, her face, relax—or order themselves in a different way when they passed into the green. Mostly she let the girl wander; the child knew her way around a koi pond.
Kenroku-en is an old and famous garden—one of three designated most beautiful in all of Japan, a country that would pitchfork those rose-arbor-adoring English in pursuit of the gardening Pulitzer, if such a thing existed. And why doesn’t it? they often ask.
Kimi didn’t know she was rambling a pinnacle, wouldn’t have cared. On this most spectacular day in late May she hopscotched the flat stones of Flying Geese Bridge and headed to the arched Flower Gazing Bridge. She had plastic Hello Kitty barrettes holding back her hair and a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser, fully loaded, in her Hello Kitty vinyl purse. Shadow Lugia squarely in her pocket.
Coming from another direction, crossing the crooked bridge (over which a ghost can never pass), was an overtly white man and a black woman in a rented kimono. She certainly wasn’t the only visitor in a rented kimono, but she might have been the only black one. Or purple one. Her skin was heartwood in the garden.
Kimi walked off of the arched bridge to get closer to the muddy stream. The stands of iris were in bloom! Banking both sides, the water-rooted flowers were a ruffle of color. Kimi knew it was off limits to leave the path, go into the water. She was Japanese—she followed rules. But she was also a marionette to Tourette’s, moved by strings she could not see, seldom able to control her jerky twerks and impulses. She waded right into the iris bank, mud sucking her black shoes under like water beetles, her head really just above the flower-line. She sat down. Her head just below the flower-line. Her eyes submerged, sank, into the color of the petals. Petals the shade of fisticuffs and bloodlines. Who doesn’t want to sink into the singular space, the infinite dash between blue-violet?
Fiona saw the little girl go into the stream, disappear behind the tall fan of sword-shaped leaves. The little girl did not come back up! She ran to the girl, losing her sandals, hitching up her kimono, stumbling into the water. The mud felt like a living creature beneath her reaching toes. Periwinkle silk waved around her knees; the kimono was ruined. Fiona didn’t care. She pulled the little girl from the bank of flowers, lifted her into her arms, and for the first time since an ice-edged night eighteen years ago, their eyes met. A tsunami of the heart flooded them both, drowned them. They could barely hold on. Kimi’s almond-shaped eyes blinked rapidly, an electrical storm of blinks. Fiona subconsciously recognized a Roxaynness in the violet-flecks, in the iris. From all the photos on her wall. Kimi recognized her own flesh, was somehow certain that this murky-purple woman was hers.
Kimi wrapped her legs around Fiona’s waist, took Fiona’s face in both of her muddy hands, and asked, “Anata wa watashi no okāsandesu ka?”[Are you my mother?]
Fiona had no idea what the little girl with the straight-across bangs was asking, but Fiona answered, “Hai.”
And so she was.
About the Author
The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies is Laura Newman’s second collection of short stories. One story in this new collection, “Swisher Sweets,” was a finalist for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. Laura founded the “Heroin Committee,” and she continues to work through JTNN.org to produce and run public service announcements to educate parents and the community about substance abuse issues. She is an Addy Award and American Marketing Association winner for the production of these PSAs. She lives in Reno, Nevada.
Acknowledgments
To my husband, Dave Newman, who is like the Rock of Gibraltar—covered in monkeys. Dave, you are my first reader and editor. You reject every rejection and amplify every success. My eternal optimist; I could not have done better.
To my daughter, Katie Boren. You are more than I could have ever deserved or earned. You are as necessary as air to me. To my son, Austin Boren. Our conversations go all over the world, and when I read you my stories, you really listen. And to your father, Kay, who is fishing the Milky Way.
To my father and mother, Louis and Ellen Vlasek. The two of you are my guideposts and trailblazers. You are both extraordinary and I take you with me everywhere.
To Debbi Engebritson and Rebecca Lack. What a golden kindness to gift your outstanding editing skills and personal time on both of my books. You chiseled and polished. To Jackie Shelton Hall, who said I must have a website and then created it and maintains it still. To Cat Stahl for my cover photo. You made me look not the way I do, but the way I feel. All four of you volunteered your massive skills without my asking! You are Berserkers one and all, and I bow to you.
To my agent, Kathy Green of Kathryn Green Literary Agency. Oh, you are everything. Thank you so much for taking a chance on me. I am just another writer sitting at her kitchen table with a laptop without you.
At Delphinium Books, thank you to Editor Jennifer Ankner-Edelstein, the first person at Delphinium to read and see merit in my manuscript. Thank you to copy editor Nancy Green, who kept me from calling mountains (massifs) dogs (mastiffs) and from disrespecting the flamingos. Your attention to format and detail is exquisite. And to Colin Dockrill for the work of art that is the cover and for the pink feather on the back.
Thank you especially to my editor, Joseph Olshan. Joe, this is a stronger book because of your careful, thoughtful work, and you did every step with kindness. I was so nervous, and from our first conversation, I knew I was safe. You are exceptional as an editor, author, and person. You took me from crayons to perfume.
To Lori Milken, publisher of Delphinium Books. You amplify writers’ voices and hand us our dreams, in hardcover no less! I cannot ever thank you enough.
Lastly, to my newest favorite, Jaxon John Trautmann Aguilera. Oh, the places you will go! I’m tagging along for as long as I can.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Laura Newman
978-1-5040-6640-2
Published in 2021 by Delphinium Books, Inc.
P. O. Box 703
Harrison, NY 10528
www.delphiniumbooks.com
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