Sisters of Heart and Snow

by Margaret Dilloway

  “Oh my.” Hikari claps her hands as though the meal is a grand feast. “For me? All this?”

  “Of course.” The nurse adjusts the tray table so the food sits over Mom’s lap. Mom clumsily grips the spoon, making several attempts at the bowl of applesauce before achieving success.

  “Should I help her?” Drew asks.

  “Nah. It gives her something to do.” The nurse leaves.

  “Don’t you want some, young lady?” Hikari dips the graham cracker into the applesauce.

  Drew takes a bit of graham cracker and does the same. She can’t remember the last time she had either a graham cracker or applesauce. Probably back when she was in preschool. She takes a hesitant bite.

  Hikari chews and takes another cracker.

  They eat in silence for a while.

  Drew watches Hikari’s placid expression. Don’t you see me? She wants to ask. She always wanted to ask that. She swallows. Words gather and form at the base of her throat. Things she always wanted to say, but never did. Whether because she was scared of rejection, or because the opportunity never arose. “Mom. I want you to know—I’m sorry we never talked about your life. I wish you would have told me things. I felt so shut out. And you seemed so much closer to Rachel.” But perhaps they weren’t, Drew realizes now. Rachel doesn’t know much more about Hikari than Drew does. Why did she keep herself so walled away from her own daughters?

  Was she protecting them from something?

  What was it that Killian would tell the judge? Her mother had not gotten so much as a parking ticket, to Drew’s knowledge. Drew can’t think of anything it could be.

  Unless it was something that happened in Japan. Before she came.

  She regards her mother. Still, she can’t imagine Hikari doing anything. What was she, a gangster? “Mom, if you know what Dad’s going to say in court, you have to tell me. Tell me now.”

  Hikari dips another cracker. “My dear,” she says, “you are so very pretty. But you talk too much. You’re boring me to death!”

  Drew has to laugh. “Sorry.” Her face is so hot.

  Mom picks up the plate and examines the decoration, a green flowered vine wrapping around the edge. She wipes at it aggressively, and looks up at Drew. “This won’t come off. Why did they give me a dirty plate?”

  “It’s on there permanently.” Drew swipes her finger across the vine to demonstrate. “It’s a decoration, like wallpaper.”

  Hikari pushes the tray table away so hard it topples. Drew catches it before it hits the ground. The plate hits the floor, but doesn’t break. “It looks like garbage. A plate of garbage!” Her voice rises. “I can’t eat garbage.”

  “Okay.” Drew pushes the tray table all the way into the hallway, finds the nurse and gives it to her. By the time she returns, her mother’s asleep again.

  Drew takes her hand. Hikari wasn’t a perfect mother. Drew isn’t a perfect daughter, or a perfect sister. Or perfect in life.

  Drew wishes she could ask her mother many more things. How she felt about Killian, really. What she really wanted for Rachel, for Drew. What kind of motherly advice would she give—she hadn’t been one to do that. Perhaps because of Killian. Perhaps because of something else, some constraint Drew has no idea about.

  Maybe when Hikari said she hated Drew too that day, what she was really saying was that Drew didn’t know her. That Drew didn’t understand her any better than Hikari understood Drew.

  In her sleep, Hikari squeezes Drew’s hand. Maybe this is what Rachel was talking about, about the visits being nice, Drew thinks. Their mother’s not here, yet she is here. She doesn’t remember me, yet we’re having this moment anyway. Moments are what matter, now. Not anything that happened before, or anything that might happen in the future.

  Drew squeezes her mother’s hand back. She listens to the waves breaking onshore, the caws of seagulls and the traffic going by. They sit for a while longer.

  MIYANOKOSHI FORTRESS

  SHINANO PROVINCE

  HONSHU, JAPAN

  Spring 1175

  Tomoe refused to meet her mother’s reproachful glare. She kept her eyes on the sloping riverbank, placing her feet carefully on the slippery new grass. Yamabuki stumbled over the uneven, rain-soaked ground in her geta and white tabi, carrying a basket of laundry down to the stream.

  Yamabuki must learn to be strong, Tomoe thought. We do her no good by coddling her.

  The girl had been here nearly two months, and this was the first time she had emerged from the house to do anything besides sit on the sidelines, watching. When she volunteered in her spectral voice to help with the day’s washing, Tomoe handed her the basket of laundry without a word.

  It was spring. The snow had melted. Wasn’t spring everyone’s favorite time? When the dullness of winter vanished and new energy filled your legs? But Tomoe felt dimmed, rusted as a blade stuck and forgotten in dirt. She scrubbed a kimono on a rock, her hands nearly frozen in the cold water, her legs bent in a squat and her pants hiked up high. In a country fort like theirs, even the wife of Yoshinaka had to do her share of work. This was not Miyako.

  “She’s used to sitting inside, doing nothing but staring into space as she thinks of poetry,” Tomoe muttered to her mother. She couldn’t imagine such a life.

  “She’s barely more than a child.” Chizuru wrung out underclothes. They watched Yamabuki pick her way down the bank, waving. Chizuru waved back. “She doesn’t know what to do. Think of how she feels.”

  “Good medicine tastes bitter in the mouth.” Tomoe quoted the Japanese proverb. “We must push her into this new life, ’Kasan. The sooner she gets used to hard work, the sooner she will be happy.”

  Yamabuki shrieked, took a step, and shrieked again as if the mud was biting her white tabi socks. Impractical. “Yamabuki!” she called. “This is not the city. This is the country. We don’t wear tabi to do chores. You understand?”

  Yamabuki bowed her head. “I apologize,” she said in her whispery voice. Even the skin on her head was moonlight-white, Tomoe thought. The sun would turn her into ashes.

  Yamabuki knelt in the mud beside Chizuru, the folds of her delicate kimono crushing down into the dirt. Tomoe wondered if there was something wrong with her brain.

  “Oh, no!” Chizuru said. “Don’t kneel. Squat, like us.”

  Yamabuki tried to imitate them. She managed to sink down only about halfway. “I can’t. It hurts.”

  “Try again,” Chizuru urged. “You only need practice.”

  Yamabuki attempted to squat once more, but couldn’t put the heels of her feet down fully to the ground. As Yamabuki’s bottom neared the earth, she lost her balance and fell. “Oh!” Yamabuki held up one egg-white hand, covered in mud.

  Tomoe supposed Yamabuki had only knelt on the comfortable tatami mats—squatting was customary for those working outside, but was not proper for noble women. Tomoe stood and faced Yamabuki. If the girl was to survive in any capacity, she would need help. “Hold my hands.”

  The girl did as instructed. Her hands were very small and cold, the skin papery and dry. Tomoe’s own hands had long, strong fingers and were warm from her near-constant exercise.

  “Now, I will squat, too. You hold on to me.” They bent their knees, lowering their bottoms slowly, arms outstretched, until their legs landed in the squat position. Yamabuki’s eyebrows went up into surprised curlicues.

  Yamabuki squat-walked over to the water, her geta squishing in the mud, her white tabi splattered brown. Tomoe stifled a giggle. The girl dipped a kimono into the water gingerly, observing how Chizuru was scrubbing before attempting an imitation. “This place is so beautiful, Chizuru-san. I love the mountains.”

  Tomoe looked about. She had grown up in the north, and after twenty-two years she noticed the landscape only as it practically affected her, assessing the weather to determine if she needed a tanzen jac
ket for the cold or how much water to pack when it was hot.

  Yamabuki scrubbed ineffectually at the cloth. Tomoe wrinkled her nose. They would be better off with a toddler’s help. She glanced at Chizuru, hoping her mother would correct Yamabuki, but Chizuru said nothing.

  Suddenly, the girl stopped scrubbing and spouted a poem:

  “Timid, the pines sway in the springtime breeze.

  Birds look for their homes.

  An iris blooms in the still-hard ground.”

  The girl blushed, as though embarrassed. Chizuru clapped. “Beautiful! How lucky we are to have such a girl here. Our lives have been too long without poetry.”

  Tomoe frowned. Chizuru shouldn’t encourage such foolishness. The girl needed hard physical labor of the body, not the silly mental convolutions of poetry. “The ground isn’t hard. You’re in the mud.”

  Chizuru clucked. “Oh, Tomoe. The poem is about her. She is the timid pine.”

  “And you are the iris in the frozen ground,” Yamabuki said with a shy smile.

  “Oh.” No one had called Tomoe an iris before. Once, Yoshinaka had told her that her skin was like fresh snow, but he said it in such an impersonal way that she knew he was only describing what he saw. As if he’d said, “The stew is hot.”

  “Is that what you did in the capital? Sat around and thought of poetry?”

  “Sometimes.” Yamabuki returned to her ineffectual scrubbing. “It was boring there, honestly. I spent most days alone. When visitors came, my mother made me sit behind a screen. She is very old-fashioned.”

  Tomoe wondered if Yamabuki had ever come across Wada. He and Yamabuki’s father were both courtiers, after all. Wada and his poetry, his round face and earnest air . . . She smiled at the memory. No, she would not ask. Even if Yamabuki were to tell her, Tomoe was not sure she wanted to know. Wada might be engaged to someone else in the capital by now. Besides, Tomoe was glad she’d not chosen court life. She might have turned into Yamabuki herself.

  “This must be quite shocking,” Chizuru said. “All these people. All these men!”

  “Yes, Yoshinaka was quite . . . shocking.” Now Yamabuki colored and scrubbed harder, her pale hands flashing in the icy water.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to him. I did.” Tomoe giggled, surprising herself with her boldness. It was fun to tease Yamabuki, who bowed her head even lower, her face deepening to crimson.

  Chizuru reprimanded Tomoe with a soft slap to her shoulder. “Tomoe Gozen. Ladies don’t speak of such things.”

  “Nor do real ladies wash laundry.” Tomoe wrung out the last kimono and stood. “We are far from ladies out here. You’d better help Yamabuki, Mother, or we’ll have to rewash everything.”

  Yamabuki burst into tears, clapping her hands over her face. The pants she’d been scrubbing caught in the stream’s current and began to drift away. Tomoe rushed forward and grabbed the material out of the water. “Yamabuki! What has crying ever solved? Your weeping will not finish the laundry.”

  “Tomoe, hush.” Chizuru put her arm around Yamabuki and rocked the frail girl against her side. “She has been torn from her family. I am as close to a mother-in-law as she has. And you are her sister. You have always had your family. You always will.”

  “My mother sold me to Yoshinaka after my father lost his court job,” Yamabuki sobbed through her fingers. “She wanted me to be gone. She hates me. She called me a useless burden.”

  Shame swept through Tomoe in a hot rush. Going from a life of doing nothing to a life in the north with a huge hairy husband would be wrenching, Tomoe thought. It wasn’t as though Yamabuki had chosen Yoshinaka. All things considered, Yoshinaka surely preferred Tomoe’s hardiness and practicality to Yamabuki’s fragility. And Yoshinaka and Tomoe were close, the product of having known each other their entire lives. Yamabuki must feel like an outsider.

  “I wish I could be like you, Tomoe,” Yamabuki said, lifting her head. The light bounced off her skin as though it were a precious metal.

  “And what am I? Wife to no one. Captain of a farmer army, a soldier in a war that may never come.” Tomoe started washing another garment with vigor.

  Yamabuki touched Tomoe’s arm. “No. Brave and energetic. Good at everything!”

  Tomoe thought of how Yoshinaka had not been to see her at night since Yamabuki’s arrival. But that was not the girl’s fault, she reminded herself. “Not at everything, apparently.”

  The afternoon sun flickered like candlelight through canopies of tree branches. “You don’t know,” Yamabuki whispered. “You don’t know what you are. How special.”

  “Yamabuki, you must listen to me.” Tomoe peered into Yamabuki’s reddened eyes. Why, she was no more than nineteen, Tomoe thought with a pang, yet had no experience in practical matters. Her parents had kept the girl locked away for so long. Tomoe smoothed Yamabuki’s cheek gently, as she would an infant’s. “We’ll go into town today. Buy you some mochi.” She lifted the girl’s hair. It was as soft as rabbit fur, smooth and glossy. In the sun she saw hints of blue tone under the black. “Maybe a pretty new comb. Would you like that, Yamabuki-chan?”

  Yamabuki smiled. “I’d like that very much.”

  Tomoe handed Yamabuki the pants that had floated away. “But you must finish the wash first.”

  Ten

  SAN DIEGO

  Present Day

  Drew waits for Chase to show at the appointed place after school, across the street, under a tree by the yellow fire hydrant. Her sister, as always, was very specific.

  She reads the samurai story on her phone. The translator’s sent quite a few pages in the past few days. Tomoe—how incredibly resilient she was. If they could bottle that, Drew would definitely drink it. Tomoe had to attend to domestic duties instead of being a kick-ass warrior twenty-four/seven. Even when her love married another, she kept on going. Of course, Tomoe had no other choice. She couldn’t pack up and leave when things didn’t go her way.

  This makes Drew think of her mother. If only her mother had been stronger, surely she could have gotten a good lawyer and divorced Killian. Set herself up well. Taken Drew and Rachel with her. Things would be different.

  Chase opens the back door and throws his backpack into the car before getting in. “Can we stop at the library? I need a book.”

  “Sure. Hello. How are you?”

  Chase turns to her, speaking with exaggerated syllables. “Very well, thank you. And you?”

  “Great, thank you back.” Drew grins at her nephew. “Good manners. I’m impressed.”

  “As you should be.” He bows his head. She drives the short distance to the library and parks. She can’t get over how much Chase looks like a man. She doubts he’d be carded at any bar. Dark blond hair covers his upper lip and his shoulders threaten to burst out of his T-shirt. If he was a comic book character, he’d have energy lines zapping out of his restless body.

  What a terror he was as a toddler. Drew stopped by Rachel’s to say hello to her niece and nephew one Christmas when Chase was two, Quincy eight. Rachel asked Drew to watch him for a moment while she finished something in the kitchen. But Drew had gotten distracted by something—the television, or Quincy showing her a toy—she doesn’t recall. Before she knew it, in seconds, it seemed, the boy scaled the seven-foot bookcase in the living room and was tossing down books. “Chase! Get down!” Drew shrieked, and Chase, startled, fell. He needed six stitches on his chin. Her sister had been mad, to say the least. Drew couldn’t blame her.

  Drew pulls into the parking lot. “What subject is the book for?”

  “Uh. Science.” Chase leaps out of the car almost before she can get it into park. He slams the door too hard.

  She follows him down the flight of steps and inside. The library’s one of the smallest Drew has been in, but there’s an airy atrium attached and a public meeting room from which soft music floats. Drew
peeks in. Toddlers doing yoga with their parents, sort of. Drew smiles at their attempts to do downward facing dog. Most of them fall over.

  Middle school kids sprawl out over the tables in the library proper, talking in not-very-library-like voices. It’s a sea of overloaded backpacks and instrument cases and unwashed teenage bodies. One kid even lies on the floor, a book in hand. An older patron steps over him, shaking her silver head. “Get up,” the older woman says, and the boy ignores her.

  Drew can’t believe how noisy it is. When she was in school, the librarian would have booted them out for talking above a whisper. “Is it always like this?” Drew asks Chase, horrified.

  “Pretty much.” Chase shrugs off his backpack at a table. “I’ve got to find a biography about George Washington.” He lumbers off.

  “I thought it was science,” Drew says, to the air. She makes her way to an empty spot, almost tripping over black musical instrument cases sitting in the aisle. She settles at a round table across from a couple of girls, who ignore her as they text and giggle.

  It’s October tenth. Drew can’t wait any longer to pay rent. She pays it with her phone, using the money Killian gave her. Don’t think about it being his money, she commands herself. It would cause more trouble if she didn’t take it than it would to take it.

  Well, when she gets paid for her viola gig she can stop using it. She’s going to have to make a decision soon about the apartment. Give notice or return. She imagines going up back up to L.A., reteaming with Jonah and the band. Would it be different this time?

  Would she and Jonah get back together? She allows herself to think about him for a moment. How they cuddled, naked in bed, the exact way his muscles tensed against hers. The sex, Drew remembers, had always been incredible. No matter what angry names had been flung out during their fights.

  A boy plops a medium-sized iguana down on the table next to Drew. She glances at it, her brain not processing what it is, looks at her phone, looks back. An iguana? “Hey! Get that thing away from me!” she shrieks, and he laughs. Drew decides maybe she is better off being childless. “What the heck are you doing with an iguana in a library?” Drew says. “They can carry salmonella. Plus, somebody might squish it.”