“No more English, okay?” Andrea said in a low voice. Marie was heading back to take the breakfast order. When she arrived, Andrea asked if they had any specials. I noticed Andrea’s voice was changing its timbre, becoming more Southern. I could understand the phenomenon. The Japanese I’d spoken with the people at the friendship group and even with Jiro at the restaurant had been formal. With Norie, my Japanese was faster and more casual.
“Yep,” Marie said. “Y’all just having breakfast or are you gonna order something from the lunch menu?”
Norie looked totally uncomprehending, and I realized how difficult this Southern dialect must sound to my aunt, who could barely understand Hugh’s Scottish accent after two years. I spoke under my breath to her in Japanese, and together we consulted the menu. Norie ordered fried rockfish, which didn’t surprise me since Japanese usually ate fish at every meal. Just that morning—after Hugh had slipped out unnoticed, of course—Norie had presented a dried bonito fish from her luggage and insisted on grating it to make soup for our breakfast. For some reason, the soup hadn’t sat well with me that morning, so I was now in the mood for starchy comfort, a grilled-cheese sandwich. Andrea ordered a BLT. Afterward, she added, “By the way, you could tell Robert Norton he’s got family here from out of town.”
Marie’s eyes passed rather incredulously over the three of us. “You sure about that?”
“Very,” Andrea said. “I’m his daughter. I grew up in D.C.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Marie looked at Andrea again. “You got his height and his nose, that’s for sure. What’s your name, honey?”
“Andrea. Andrea Norton.” My friend seemed to grow as she spoke her name.
Marie’s eyes widened and, tucking her order form in her apron pocket, she went off without another word.
“Do you think people around here ever heard about you?” I asked Andrea when we were alone again.
“It doesn’t seem like it. Ssh, I think it’s him coming out from behind the counter.” I was sitting next to Andrea, so I shared her view of her father. He wore a white apron over a short-sleeved checked shirt. The apron was spotless, I noticed, and he had a kind of net over his close-cropped, graying Afro. When he saw our table, he did a double-take, then fixed his gaze on Andrea.
“Why did I do this?” she muttered.
“Don’t lose your nerve,” I whispered. “See, he’s coming over. Norie and I will visit the rest room. That’ll give you the first few minutes alone.”
When we came back out, I looked over at the booth where we’d been sitting and saw that lunch had been served. The time elapsed since the order had been given was five minutes. Just good service—or were we wanted out?
Robert Norton was sitting across from Andrea. I could see her face, but not his. Once I would have thought it a haughty expression, but now I knew it meant that she was scared to death.
“She wants us to come. She motioned her hand to me,” Norie said.
We walked back together, side by side. Norie bowed first, and I followed.
To my surprise, Andrea spoke up quickly. “Aunt Norie, may I introduce my father, Robert? And this is her daughter, who is my cousin, Rei. Rei studied English in school, but Aunt Norie doesn’t speak much.”
“Do you still live in Japan?” Robert Norton said. He didn’t stretch out a hand to greet us, but that made sense. Japanese were bowers, not shakers. He’d remember that from his time in Sasebo.
“Until recently, I lived in Toe-kyoe.” I drew out my vowels, trying to pronounce the city name the way Japanese did.
“Oh. Well, this is a surprise.”
“Oh, rearry?” I changed my ls to rs, and Aunt Norie nodded and smiled. I was speaking English the right way at last, the way she and her friends did.
“Yes. When, ah, I married Andrea’s mother, your family wasn’t too happy.”
“There is a Japanese saying, water washes everything away,” I said slowly, continuing to exaggerate my accent. “That means time makes forgiveness.”
“What Rei’s trying to say is that the family wants to understand what happened to Mom. Especially Aunt Norie here.” Andrea nodded at my aunt. “They need the rest of the things that were in the storage box, so they can bury them.”
“Bury them?” Robert asked.
“In the cemetery. If Mom’s really dead, she should have a marker somewhere. Her Japanese family wants to do it.”
“This is the first I heard of it.” Robert sounded uneasy.
Andrea was making mistakes. The Japanese wouldn’t bury mementos, they’d make a family altar around them. Would Robert know that?
“We have family altar, so pictures and personal items would be welcome,” I said slowly. “We seek the true story of what happened. You can say in English. I will translate for my aunt.”
“Not here,” Robert said tightly.
“We’ll wait for you to get through,” Andrea said.
Robert stared at Andrea, and it seemed to me a mix of emotions was running through him. He looked angry, sad, and, finally, very tired. “All right. I’ll have to call in Davon. When he gets here, you-all can follow me to the house. I still have a couple of boxes of odds and ends relating to your mother. I’ll give it to you.”
“Thanks. I’ll bring it back,” Andrea said.
“Keep it! Please.”
“Can you also tell us what you know about what happened?” Andrea asked.
“I told you ten years ago—”
“They haven’t heard it,” Andrea said. “And I’m sure they’ll have questions of their own.”
Robert Norton didn’t look happy at that. He got up, he said, to go back to the kitchen to call in Davon. When he was gone, Andrea told us this was her half brother, Robert’s child by Lorraine. I attempted to eat my grilled cheese, but it had long grown cold, and I got a faint feeling of nausea from its taste. I guess I’d gotten too used to really good restaurant food. Aunt Norie, I feared, wouldn’t like the cornmeal-dipped fried fish in front of her; but after the first bite, she closed her eyes in rapture.
“Oishi!”
“Delicious,” I translated for Andrea. Then, I got down to business. “I don’t know how you want me to play this.”
“You’re doing fine. You, too, Norie-san.”
“You must try the fish!” Norie started cutting off a piece for me with the fork I wasn’t using. “It is so good. Do you think, when we visit your house, your father can teach me how to cook this?”
I toyed with the sandwich, and Andrea, too, didn’t seem hungry. After about fifteen minutes, a tall, slim black man who looked barely twenty walked in the diner. He wore a baseball cap backward and overalls over a muscle T. He had a warm, open expression: A baby face, I thought to myself.
“Davon,” Andrea said under her breath. Her eyes widened as she looked at him; he glanced at her without recognition and went behind the counter and into the kitchen.
“I guess your father didn’t tell him why he was coming in,” I said.
“I’m sure the staff will let him know.” Andrea sighed. “I never met him before. Lorraine kept him away.”
“You should let him know who you are. He’d probably like to have a half sister.”
“I’m sure he’s heard no end of crap about me,” Andrea muttered.
“There’s always a chance to change that image—”
“Here’s my father. Come on, we better catch up with him just in case he plans to bolt.” Andrea laid a twenty on the table.
“We haven’t gotten the check yet,” I worried.
“This’ll cover it, easy. And it’ll make Marie happy.”
“Thank you for the lunch,” Norie said, rising to her feet and bowing. “But really, I am older than you two, so I should be pay—”
“Ssh. Not so much English, okay?” Andrea said as we moved toward the exit. Outside, Robert Norton was getting into the pickup truck I’d noticed earlier.
“Do you remember where the house is?” he said out the open wind
ow.
Andrea shook her head. “Not really. I’ll follow you.”
12
“Of course I remember where the house is,” Andrea said between gritted teeth once she was in the Lexus beside me and Norie had taken the back. I had to slam the car into gear, because after pulling out, Robert Norton picked up speed so quickly he raised a small cloud of dirt behind him. I was edging toward fifty miles an hour to keep him in sight, and the speed limit was thirty. Was this his game, getting me to speed past a cop who would of course give me a ticket, since I was from out of state?
A few turns, and again, these nightmare speeds past fields of fledgling corn shoots and soybeans, fields that should have been enjoyed at a leisurely pace.
“He’s talking on a cell phone!” I could make this judgment based on the way his head was cocked to one side.
“He’s probably calling Lorraine,” Andrea said. “Don’t miss this left coming up. He’s not using his turn signal. I guess he wants us to miss it.”
“He doesn’t have a hand free to hit the lever,” I said, making the hairpin turn right behind Robert Norton. We were on a gravel road now, and going so fast that a piece of gravel struck the windshield, chipping it. I hoped Hugh wouldn’t notice.
The farm was five minutes farther down the road. As Andrea had said, it was a brick ranch house that I guessed had been built in the sixties. A huge satellite dish was the only ornament in the front, but fields stretched on either side of it; the corn that Andrea had mentioned, and something else, low and creeping and green. As soon as we parked, Norie was out of the car, photographing the fields.
“What’s this all about?” Robert Norton, standing outside his pickup truck, gestured toward Norie.
“Of course she’s going to take pictures,” Andrea said smoothly. “My aunt came all the way from Japan.”
I wandered off in Norie’s direction, planning to warn her to rein in her photographic impulses. I could still hear the conversation behind me.
“So they convinced you to bring them down. How did they locate you?” Robert Norton asked Andrea.
“Oh, you can find anyone on the Internet these days.”
“So what you been doing with yourself?”
“I’m the hostess of a restaurant in D.C.,” Andrea said. “You may have heard of it. It’s called Bento.”
“A restaurant?” He sounded incredulous. “I thought you’d do something more than that, with your schooling—”
“Yeah, the D.C. schools are really wonderful,” Andrea said, sarcasm heavy in her voice. “And that community college you sent me to afterward! Wow, that really opened my future!”
He sighed. “You look like an uptown girl. Sound like one, too. Seems like you’re doing all right.”
I gently coaxed Norie out of the field and back to the two of them. As we reached them, Andrea said to us, “My dad’s going down to the basement to bring up the box with my mother’s things. He said we can wait on the patio or in the house.”
“It’s such good weather today,” I said. The last thing I wanted to do was get holed up in some Silence of the Lambs basement.
“Do you ladies, ah, want something to drink?” Robert Norton offered.
I translated for Norie and she shook her head.
“I could use something,” Andrea said. “You have any Cokes in the fridge?”
“Pepsi,” he said.
“Whatever. I’ll get it while you’re downstairs,” Andrea said.
“Lorraine’ll be stopping by on her lunch hour,” he said. “That’s any minute.”
“Looking forward to it,” Andrea said.
Norie and I settled on plastic lawn chairs set on a newly built cedar deck and looked at the view. I could just make out the soft line of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, so I pointed it out to Norie.
“I don’t think he is an easy person,” Norie said to me in Japanese.
“Really? I’m not sure he’s all bad,” I said. There had been something, in his conversation with Andrea, that made me understand that he’d struggled with guilt over the years. And the presence of guilt meant the presence of feeling, I thought. It was a good omen.
“He seems dishonest,” Norie said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Let’s see how he answers our questions,” Norie said.
I put a hand on her wrist. “Obasan, please remember, you’re not supposed to speak English.”
“I will ask questions in Japanese, just as I have been doing. You shall translate for me,” Norie said primly.
There was the sound of a door opening behind us, and I turned, expecting to see Andrea. Instead, I saw a very tall, light-skinned black woman of about sixty. Her hair was elegantly upswept, and she wore a black-and-red knit dress with a matching jacket. She had gold bangles on her wrist and a plastic ID card hanging from a chain around her neck.
“Well, this is a surprise. I’m Mrs. Norton.”
Lorraine Norton’s voice was so authoritative my first thought was that she was a school principal, but after I took a quick glance at her huge ID tag, it became clear that she worked at the local Social Security office.
“Herro, Mrs. Norton. How do you do? My name is Rei Shimura, and this is my aunt Norie Shimura. We are visiting from Japan.”
Norie popped to her feet, bowed, and murmured the proper Japanese words of greeting someone for the first time. Lorraine Norton arched a pencil-thin eyebrow at her and said, “I thought you were mother and daughter, not aunt and niece.”
Oops. “I—we are aunt and niece. It is sometimes difficult to translate to foreigners, we make mistakes,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” She sounded unconvinced. “I heard you-all came to collect the remaining possessions. A call ahead of time would have been nice. I don’t know if Robert will be able to find anything down there on such short notice.”
The door opened again. This time, Andrea came out with a can of Pepsi in her hand.
“We’ve been here twenty years,” Lorraine said, then her head whipped around. “Andrea, hello. I see you’ve helped yourself to the refrigerator. Please close that door behind you. I don’t want bugs getting inside.”
“Dad said it was okay to get a drink.” Andrea slid the door closed.
Norie said to me in Japanese, “Ask the new Mrs. Norton about Sadako’s things. Why did they save them when they moved from the old house to here?”
I translated, “My aunt is very grateful that you have saved her sister’s valuable things all these years. I know it must have been a burden to carry, can you please tell us why you saved them?”
“We don’t really have much left. Robert gave her clothes to charity. It wasn’t worth much, except for the kimono. We donated that to a church auction.”
“Do you remember what the kimono looked like?” Andrea asked.
“Red. Real stiff and shiny. Or was it orange?” Lorraine asked herself.
“If it’s red, it was the wedding kimono,” Andrea said. “I saw it in the wedding picture Dad gave me. I’m sure her family would have liked to have it.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but where were y’all thirty years ago when this was an issue?” Lorraine retorted. “We had no idea you-all would be interested. Since the time of the wedding, your family had apparently cut her off. Pretty cold, I thought.”
“Do you think so?” Andrea said, giving Lorraine the evil eye.
The moment of tension was broken by the sound of the sliding door. Robert poked his head out. “I found it, but because of my back, I can’t carry it up. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll help,” Andrea said quickly.
“No, Andrea, you’d better keep me company. We have a lot to talk about,” Lorraine said.
I expected Robert to protest, but he didn’t. So I stood up and headed through the door and into the house before anyone could object. Just a half hour ago, I’d felt hesitant to come to this house. But in the time that had passed, I’d lost my fear of Robert Norton and become aware of two things
: one, that Lorraine was going to do everything possible to keep Andrea and her father from spending any time together, and two, that I wasn’t afraid of Robert Norton. I felt sorry for him, almost.
Robert was now leading the way through a tidy living room filled with 1980s-style bleached wood furniture, all upholstered in pastel florals and covered carefully with clear plastic slipcovers. Matching end tables were decorated with vases of silk flowers and little glass animals. My mother would have winced at the horror of it, but I tried to refrain from passing judgment—except for the thought that the room had been designed by Lorraine. There was nothing on the beige walls except pictures: Lorraine and Robert on their wedding day, Lorraine with her sorority sisters. I read along the names underneath to identify her: Lorraine Neblett, third from the left. I hadn’t needed to; she looked exactly the same, with a handsome, high forehead and commanding eyes. She wasn’t a girl I’d want to have as a roommate, I thought to myself, and moved on to the large, framed family portrait of her with Robert standing behind her and Davon at her side, age about ten.
“Your room is wide,” I said, again translating Japanese to English the way so many of my former students had. “May I see?”
“Ah, okay.” Robert seemed uncomfortable as I made a slow sweep through the living room, looking at everything. “Are you sure you can handle this box?” he asked.
“I’m quite strong,” I said. We were passing through a small kitchen, avocado appliances and a coordinating vinyl-tile floor. The color scheme was so out, it was actually in again.
“A little thing like you.” He shook his head. “Well, I know Japanese women can be small, but strong. Sadie told me there was a saying, something about small peppers—”
“‘The Japanese peppers may be small, but they are hot.’” I said it first in Japanese, then in English.
“I think that was it. And Andrea, well, she’s a tall one, but she fits that bill, too. Takes right after your aunt.”
“Heh?” I was confused. Aunt Norie was so small, smaller than me, even.
“She’s like her mother was. Always asking questions, and then getting upset about the answers.” As he spoke, he was opening a door papered with notices about recycling and their church choir. Then he snapped on a light, illuminating a steep staircase covered in golden-brown plaid. Robert held tightly to the rail going down; I could see that he had some stiffness to his gait. Nothing was going to happen with a man whose knees hurt, I thought to myself.
The Pearl Diver Page 12
