Sisters of Heart and Snow

by Margaret Dilloway

  “What is it?” Yamabuki said. “What has happened? Let me see. Let me see!” Unexpectedly, the woman sat up and clawed at the baby, wresting him from Tomoe’s arms. The umbilical cord was still attached to the placenta, which glided out of Yamabuki’s body, her uterus convulsing, then fell onto the bedclothes. Chizuru quietly cut the cord away from the baby.

  Yamabuki rocked the limp boy. Her mouth moved to make words. She shook her head and sobbed without sound.

  “He will be all right.” Yamabuki rocked the baby harder. “Wake up, little one.” She rubbed his chest furiously. The baby lay, wilted, in her arms.

  “Yamabuki-chan.” Tomoe knelt. She tried to come up with words. But there was nothing to say. She put her arm around her friend. “I am so sorry.”

  Yamabuki stopped moving and held her baby silently, staring at the small face. Her shoulders shook. It looked like a dozen men had died in here, blood running off the bedroll and onto the tatami, leaking through the woven straw. “It is my fault,” Yamabuki said hollowly. “I should have taken better care of myself.”

  “Yamabuki-chan. You don’t mean that.” Tomoe embraced her hard, stopping her shaking. “It is not for us to say.”

  “I did this.” Yamabuki’s mouth twisted. “I did it.” She hit her own face with a closed fist, smacking it over and over. Tomoe gasped and tried to catch her arm, but the woman had surprising strength. Yamabuki felt feverish, five times as warm as the night air. “I am bad luck.”

  From behind, Tomoe looped her arms under Yamabuki’s armpits and grasped her hands together behind Yamabuki’s neck. “You did nothing. Stop!” The woman thrashed, but could not move. Chizuru took the baby. Yamabuki collapsed, falling into unconsciousness or sleep; Tomoe could not tell. Still she breathed.

  “Let him spend this one night with his mother,” Tomoe said. Chizuru wrapped the baby in a silken blanket and placed him under Yamabuki’s arm. Cries rose up in Tomoe’s throat, but like Yamabuki, she had no tears. She took the baby from Chizuru and placed him on the mat next to Yamabuki. In the dim light, both were the same color.

  Twenty

  SAN DIEGO

  Present Day

  Drew doesn’t show up on Alan’s street until she’s sure he’s taken the girls to school. It’s one of the days when the library opens late, and she takes a chance that he’ll return home after drop-off.

  He does, but not in the way she expects. He pulls up behind her car and stops and walks around to the window before she realizes what’s happening, so focused is she on what’s ahead of her instead of what’s around her. “Drew?”

  She jumps.

  He pulls open her door and she unbuckles her seat belt and stands up. He puts his arms around her and squeezes her tight, and it’s like she’s finally home after a ten-mile trek in a blizzard. Well. Maybe that’s too dramatic. She can smell his green citrusy deodorant, his natural scent underneath. She inhales automatically, as she would if she smelled coffee. My God. Never in her life has she wanted to smell a man’s natural smell. She is attracted and bound to him on a chemical level. Any small bits of anxiety over what she’s going to do dissipate.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” he says into her ear. His breath is warm, nuzzling.

  She shakes her head, unable to speak now.

  He pulls back and looks at her. “I can turn down that job.”

  “No.” She puts her head on his chest again. Listens to his heart, which is beating fast. “You have to do what’s best for you and the kids.”

  “Maybe you’re what’s best.” He lifts her chin and kisses her.

  Drew trembles. Then she lets go of everything else and kisses him back.

  He takes her hand and they go inside his house.

  • • •

  Only later, when they lie in his queen-sized bed, does she notice what kind of house it is. It’s a small Craftsman bungalow, with built-in bookshelves and lots of natural woodwork. Light comes into the bedroom through an eyelet lace curtain that flutters. “I like this house,” she says appreciatively. He puts his arms around her from behind. The fine hairs on his chest and belly tickle her back and she nestles into him.

  “My in-laws own it. We live here very cheap. But they’re going to sell it when they leave.”

  Drew turns. Those lashes. “Then you can’t possibly stay. You’ll be homeless.”

  “Things will work out.” Alan kisses her mouth gently.

  Drew leans back and looks at him. Memorizing his face. Just say it. She’s afraid. She thinks of Tomoe, being so brave when Yoshitaka was taken. This is nothing. She won’t turn into a pile of ash if he doesn’t respond.

  She runs her fingers over his unruly eyebrows, puts her hand on his newly shaved, smooth jaw and takes a deep breath. “I love you.”

  He closes his eyes, just for a moment. When he opens them, the deep brown seems lit from within, the sunlight reflecting into them. Maybe—relief? “I love you, too.”

  It hadn’t scared him away.

  It kind of scares her. But here, she feels brave. And there’s no going back now.

  He leans his forehead over so it’s touching hers. “Do you know when I knew?”

  Drew holds her breath.

  “When you walked into the library, I knew. And when we talked, I knew. And when you played the viola, I knew.” He talks rapidly. “And when you were so sweet with the girls, I knew. I’ve only felt like that once before in my whole life.” He smiles. “I know you must think I’m hopeless and crazy, talking like this, but some things you feel first, with your heart. Your brain follows later.”

  She draws her head back and regards him. “Well,” she says at last, “you’ve already seen me at my worst. Jobless and totally adrift. If that can’t chase you off, I guess nothing will.”

  He faces relaxes. “Drew. This is hardly the worst.” He speaks with the perspective of someone who’s lost his dearest thing. She holds on to his face with both hands and kisses him all over it. His face wet with her tears.

  • • •

  The phone call drew us home early. A stroke, her doctor said. Vitals strong. No organ damage. Stable. I feel like I’m watching this scene happen through glass. A dream. The peculiar antiseptic soap and baby powder scent of the hospital choking me.

  Chase and Quincy are in the ICU waiting room and Tom’s out in the hallway talking to the doctor, with the understanding that he’ll be able to recall more than I can at this moment.

  My mother lies covered in wires and tubes like some kind of supercomputer robot, tethered to various boxes that blink and blip. But these boxes help keep her alive, not the other way around.

  Her breathing sounds soft and even, the heart rate an even mountain range. The faded blue cotton curtains are drawn around her in an ellipse, forming a small room between two other patients. I can see feet on both sides, hear other machines and coughs.

  All I know is that I’m holding my mother’s hand and I’m memorizing how her fingers look. The slender knuckles—her wedding ring was always slipping off. I used to play with it, beg her to remove it so I could examine the diamond. A small diamond, she said. A bigger one would get in the way.

  I forgot about that.

  I have a memory, then, of Mom stitching together clothes for my Ken doll when I was maybe four. That darn Ken—he never had good clothes. I cried when I tried to put Ken’s polyester pants over his sticky vinyl legs.

  My mother never played with me when I was little. She attended to her own chores and expected me to entertain myself or knock on a neighbor’s door. I’m pretty sure that’s half the reason she had another baby, to give me a playmate. Anyway, just one generation ago, nobody’s parents played with them. Kids were meant to entertain themselves.

  That day when I cried, I was sitting on the floor of the living room, my doll clothes spread out over the coffee table. I expected no help, but t
o my surprise, Mom appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands on a flour sack dishtowel. “Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head. I had knotted my hair into pigtails, which pulled at my scalp. My mother looked at me as though surprised, as if somebody had deposited me in the living room that morning. Even then, we had green flowered couches and the dark wood furniture Dad preferred. Everything dark—the wood paneling on the walls, the blue carpet, the cabinets. I suppose it was his cave.

  Mom threw the towel over her shoulder and walked over, knelt beside me. She took Ken in her graceful hands and turned him over, trying to pull the pants up his sticky legs. “Such poor quality,” she said. “I’ll make you some.”

  “You can make doll clothes?” I said in wonder. I had no idea where doll clothes came from, but my own mother making them seemed magical.

  “Of course.” Mom smiled at me, unfastening my pigtails and smoothing the hair with her fingers. I relaxed as my scalp unpinched. Later, we went to the fabric store and bought a doll clothing pattern. I got to choose the material, and Mom made Ken a pair of pinstriped pastel slacks and a ridiculous flowered shirt in pea green and orange. Now that I think about it, it must have taken her hours to sew. All those little stitches, turning minute sleeves and legs inside out. I tried to make Barbie clothes for my daughter once and gave up, my stitches falling out hopelessly. “The Barbies are nudists,” I told Quincy. “They live in the tropics.”

  Something hard lodges in my throat and makes it hard to speak. I lean over Mom. She’s a pale shade of gray, her sunspots standing out against her skin. The hollows under her cheekbones are deeper than the last time I saw her.

  This morning, the nursing home reported, Mom began acting strangely, repeating words, staring into space. The right side of her face went limp and stiff—she couldn’t blink that eye. The nursing home called an ambulance.

  Tom pushes aside the curtain and puts his warm hand on my shoulder. I put my hand on top of it. “How’s she doing?”

  “All right, I guess. What did the doctor say?”

  “We should go home,” Tom says. He scratches his face, the five-o’clock shadow standing out in salt-and-pepper tones. “There’s nothing else we can do. They’ll call us when she wakes up.”

  “I want to be here.” I glance up at him. “What if she wakes up and needs help and they’re busy?”

  His face is concerned, his brows drawn together. “Rachel, they’re taking good care of her.”

  “I’m fine.” I want to be stubborn. With a pang, I think of the photographs, the mysterious people smiling out at me. Stupidly, I had still hoped Mom would have a coherent day and tell me about them. I may never know who the people in those pictures were. If that baby is a niece or a friend or a little sister. I could have relatives I don’t know. I want to cry, but nothing comes out. I’m angry, too, because my mother never told me about these people. Why didn’t she share her life with us?

  Right now, my worries over my children fade. They’re good kids. I raised them as best as I could. Still raising them the best I can. But I’ll never have total control over them. I never did, even when they were babies and I all wanted them to do was sleep and poop regularly. I used to focus on their achievements. Quincy headed toward being an engineer, Chase getting good grades and college-bound, too. Now all I want them to do is be good people. The kind of people who help, who have open hearts. The rest doesn’t matter.

  Tom puts his arm around me. “I called Drew, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t want to leave a message for this. I’ll try again later.”

  “Thanks.” I lean into him. Of course Tom understands deeply how I feel because his father was sick and died, too, but only Drew understands all of this. She is the only person on this planet who shares the little microcosmic culture of the Snow Household—the half-Asian dysfunctional samurai gold-digging tribe. Though her memories of our family may be different from mine in some ways. And I’m sure my mother’s and father’s accounts would be different from mine. Like we’re all writing our own fiction, in the history of our lives.

  I press my hands against my face. I want Drew. I need her like she’s needed me—to comfort me, to hug me, to tell me everything will be okay.

  I wish I hadn’t been so mean to her. I wish I hadn’t been so scared and petty.

  My breathing’s ragged, and I force it to be even. I think of Tomoe riding into battle with hundreds of men, to fight an army outnumbering her. I lift my head.

  I’ve let fear control me for far too long.

  Mom looks so weak lying there on the bed. Those pictures—who are the people in them? Hatsuko Minamoto was a dead end—maybe we’ll never know. “Tell me your story,” I whisper. “I’m listening now. I promise.”

  The machines shudder and blip. For one awful brief moment, I wish Mom would have passed away with her stroke, just to end the suffering. Selfish of me to want to keep her here, just so I can have an ending.

  Some stories don’t end so neatly.

  But what I can do is this. I call my sister.

  She answers on the first ring. “Rachel?”

  • • •

  I’m still at the hospital, in the common waiting room, when Drew arrives with Alan. She’s carrying her viola case. Quincy took Chase home. No use in everyone being here.

  I stand up and hold out my arms. Drew puts her case down and we hug. Hard.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  “Me too.” Drew’s voice sounds husky. Her face is shiny and flushed. I bet she didn’t even bother to eat.

  I hold her by the shoulders and look into my sister’s eyes, the way I did when she was a newborn. And then I think, even if Drew hadn’t been born my sister, even if I’d met her as an adult, I’d still want to be her friend. That’s something worth keeping safe. “Thank you.”

  Drew pushes the strands of hair that have fallen out of my ponytail back behind my ears. “Everything’s going to be okay, Rachel. You’ll see.” She smiles at me and I am reassured, as if Drew is God and can promise that. I sit down as she goes in to see our mother.

  I sip my watery coffee. All this time, I’d pushed away help. But accepting help didn’t make me weaker—it made me stronger. Just like Yamabuki letting Tomoe help her made her stronger. And Tomoe opening herself up to Yamabuki made her stronger. How easily they could have been rivals. Instead, they became like sisters.

  I throw the remnants of my coffee into the trash and go in to be with Drew and my mother.

  Kiso Yoshinaka and Tomoe Gozen, by Utagawa Yoshikazu

  Photograph © 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

  MIYAKO, THE CAPITAL

  CENTRAL REGION

  HONSHU, JAPAN

  Winter 1184

  They left for the capital at daybreak, on a day when the wind blew bitter snow into their faces. Tomoe forced her mother to stay inside, to not see them off. She kissed Chizuru, Aoi, and then knelt next to Yamabuki and picked up her hand. Stiff and cold. All the words that needed saying had been said long ago. There would be no changing anything in the hard days to come.

  Without Yamabuki, Tomoe thought, she would have turned out like Yoshinaka and her brother. Bitter, inflexible, battle-hungry, unable to take pleasure in anything but a fight. It was because of Yamabuki that Tomoe had learned to enjoy the daily humdrum routine of life. To find the poetry hidden in laundry day. To learn how to become a mother. To love somebody better than you loved yourself.

  Tomoe stroked the long fountain of hair under Yamabuki’s head, so white now it might be snow-pale by the new year. Her skin hung like empty kimonos on a clothesline. Tomoe put her ear gently against the woman’s face. She still breathed. “Yamabuki!” she said. “Wake up. Please.”

  I cannot go on without you. My sister of heart.

  • • •

  Yoshinaka and her brother Kanehira went to the palace on their own. Tomoe wand
ered the streets with Cherry Blossom. She had dreamed about Miyako as a girl. The capital city seemed so glamorous. Sophisticated. This was where the court was, the hub of life. Never had she imagined she’d be riding in as an invader, against her own clan.

  She came across a stall selling a beautiful orange silk material with bright red flowers and fans woven in. Tomoe touched the luxurious folds. How Yamabuki would adore this. She imagined Yamabuki healthy again, wearing a kimono made of the beautiful silks. Perhaps it would help her get better. She gave the vendor, an older woman with blackened teeth, a few Chinese coins for it.

  Tomoe had started back to the palace again when she smelled smoke. Not smoke from vendors cooking food or lighting fires to keep warm, but the hot odor of many flames. She looked up, and felt her body stiffen in horror.

  The palace was on fire, its slanted roof blazing. Men ran about, carrying goods in their hands as Yoshinaka’s men pillaged the city.

  “This cannot be. This cannot be.” Tomoe mounted Cherry Blossom and headed inside the palace grounds.

  Yoshinaka stood in the courtyard with her brother and a half-dozen other men. They faced away from her, firing blazing arrows almost lazily into the palace walls, watching as each melted through the shoji screens, through the beautiful wooden scrollwork.

  Beside Yoshinaka, a shrunken and stooped old man stood, bald and thin, his back marred by a hump. He was covered in soot and blood and dirt; at first, Tomoe thought he was a beggar. “Tomoe Gozen. Help me,” the small figure pleaded. She looked down at him. It was the retired emperor, Go-Shirakawa.

  “Yoshinaka! You’ve gone mad,” Tomoe cried. She was so out of breath, so in shock, that she couldn’t hear her own voice. She yanked on Yoshinaka’s arm. “Stop this.” He was focused on the fire, eyes bright. He sniffled and ran his hand along his nose. Tomoe thought of Kaneto, of how disappointed he’d be with all of them. “No!” she shouted, her voice loud now, ringing through the courtyard, battering against the burning building. She had been saying words like this to Yoshinaka since he was a toddler. Tomoe had no more words for him, and no more strength. She wanted to weep, and she wanted to be done.