Bands of pressure tighten around Ayla’s chest. She focuses on her breath as she follows Elise through the security doors and into the ward. She’ll say her farewell to Dad, and once she’s on Mars, none of this will matter. She can put it behind forever.
Elise opens the door and leans against the wall outside, arms crossed.
“You have fifteen minutes. Hospital rules. Don’t upset him!”
The door shuts behind Ayla. Her dad is hooked up to a bevy of monitors that are mercifully silent, but their coloured lines wriggle eloquently across the screens. The room is a plush single, furnished with dark wooden cabinets, an armchair, and an attached bathroom, though judging by all the tubes running in and out of her father’s body, he won’t need the facilities anytime soon.
She sits by the bed on a wheeled stool.
“Hi, Dad.”
Her father’s head lolls toward her, but his eyes are glazed and unfocused.
“Felicia. You’re here,” he rasps.
The good side of her face resembles her mother’s. She turns so he can see all of her.
“No, Dad, it’s me, Ayla. I came to see you—to see how you’re doing—and to tell you something.”
Her father’s trembling hand gropes around on the bed until it finds hers. He curls his fingers lightly, and his eyelids droop.
“I’ve missed you so much, Fel. Why didn’t . . . when . . .”
The rest of his words are too soft to hear. Ayla leans close until his papery lips brush her ear and his stubbled chin scratches her cheek.
“Forgive me, Fel . . . terrible thing . . . little Ayla. I let Samsara take her . . . was a mistake. Stupid . . . lost. You left me alone . . . Ah, I’ve missed you.”
Ayla has been waiting her entire life to hear these words, but not like this, not like she’s eavesdropping on her mother’s ghost. She pulls back. Her Father’s eyes are closed, and his whispery voice trails off to silence. She wants to tell him that she forgives him, that she loves him and understands, but it’s not her blessing that he wants.
“Dad, I have some news,” Ayla says, swallowing against tears. “I’m going to Mars. I’ll be on a ship called the Mayflower, and it leaves in a couple months. I probably won’t be back, not ever. I’m,” she stops. The words stick in her throat, and she forces them out. “I’m here to say good-bye.”
She can’t tell if any of her words register, but she hopes that some part of him will remember them when he wakes up. She takes a deep, shaky breath and lightly kisses his cheek. His face is peaceful, but it hits her that he looks old—old and fragile like she’s never seen him before.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says, wishing it to be true. “I’ll send you a postcard from Mars.”
She walks out of the room and finds Elise gone. Her shoulders tense as she strides away, waiting for her sister to chase her. But no one comes, and then she’s outside and away.
Ayla spends the rest of the day at Zuma Beach watching the surf crash. Gulls squawk, and the sand is littered with prone bodies worshipping the sun, but there is not a single reminder that it’s Halloween Day. The sight of the ocean makes an indelible memory: the vastness of it, the colours from turquoise to silver and sapphire; the way the foam traces chaotic patterns before vanishing underground. These are the colours of the Earth. Her future is one of brown and red, the colours of her heart.
She holds on to those images in the following weeks at Corpus Christi, returning to them when she needs to escape the presence of her crewmates—her lifemates. Some of them are already forming romantic attachments, but she holds herself apart. It’s not hard. Men have always found it difficult to look past her deformities, and she doesn’t mind now. She belongs to Mars.
Ayla spends her three days of leave in Denver with Aunt Sam. They ring in the New Year together, toasting with champagne and caviar. Samsara even drags Ayla to a party with some of her graduate students to show off her celebrity niece. They both avoid any mention of the past until it’s time to say good-bye.
“I wish you could’ve had one last day with your dad,” Aunt Sam says as they stand next to the taxi. Her breath fogs in the sharp morning air.
“I can text him from the Mayflower and occasionally after we get the colony set up. It won’t be much different from what we’ve done here.”
Samsara looks at her strangely.
“What?”
“How—You can’t—”
The taxi chimes to remind Ayla to get in, but Ayla stays still, watching her aunt’s face and feeling confused.
“Nobody mentioned you at the funeral,” Samsara says. Her voice is heavy with anger and regret. “I assumed you couldn’t come because you were at training. What a stupid person I’ve been! It never occurred to me that she wouldn’t tell you.”
“Funeral? You mean—Dad’s dead?”
“I’m so sorry, love. I thought you knew.”
“Not your fault,” Ayla says reflexively.
The taxi chimes again, and they give each other a long, tight hug before Ayla gets in. Her cheeks are wet from her aunt’s tears, but she’s numb inside, reeling from the news. Anger builds on the drive to the airport. If she owed Elise nothing, then perhaps the same was true in return, but not when it came to Dad. His life belonged to both of them.
She finds herself at the check-in counter saying, “I’d like to change my ticket. I need a flight to LAX, and I need to be in Corpus Christi tonight.”
“Let me see,” the agent says. “We can get you on a noon flight to LAX, but you’ll have to move fast. It arrives at 1:30 p.m., and there’s a 5:30 p.m. flight out to Houston that gets you in at 10:30 p.m. That’s the best I can do.”
Ayla checks the map on her tab. She can drive from Houston to the Mayflower base in four hours. It would mean arriving in the middle of the night, but she wouldn’t miss the final morning briefing.
“I’ll take it. Both flights.”
Ayla’s stomach clenches with hope and fear all the way through the snarl of Los Angeles weekend traffic, right up to their—Elise’s—house. She knocks on the navy blue door. When it opens, Ayla looks up from the cheery “WELCOME” mat, but not very far. A tiny person with curly brown hair, rather like her own, peers at her.
“Uh—is your Mom home?”
“Mom!” bellows the child, running off and leaving the door ajar.
Elise stops halfway down the stairs when she sees Ayla at the door. Ayla feels herself trembling and rushes the words out before she loses her nerve.
“How could you? How could you let me miss Dad’s funeral, too?”
Elise storms down, out, and closes the door behind her, forcing Ayla to back up a few steps. Now that she’s closer, Ayla sees the lines and shadows on her sister’s face, which is also pinched with fury.
“It’s not my fault you’re running off to Mars, like you ran off to Denver. That’s all you know how to do, right? Run away! What do you care if Dad’s dead or alive? You weren’t here. You weren’t the one looking after him.”
“You didn’t let me help!”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t. Do you have any idea how much it hurt us when you left with Aunt Sam? You killed Mom, and then you abandoned me and Dad.”
“Abandoned?” Ayla says, her voice raw and shaky. “I saw how much you hated me. And Dad—he couldn’t even look at me! I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”
The tension between them erodes, like grains of sand into the ocean, and regret with the patina of two decades arrives to take its place.
“He was never the same after you moved away. I hated you so much for that, for what you did to him.”
“He said—at the hospital—he said he wished he hadn’t sent me away. I didn’t want to go, Elise, not really. This was home. I thought I was helping. I thought, maybe, you could forgive me and move on with your life once I was gone.”
“So you could do the same? Admit it! You want to move on, too.”
Heart hammering, Ayla whispers, “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you fix your face?”
Ayla traces the old scars with her fingertips. “To remember. To punish myself. I don’t deserve to look normal.”
“So you can wallow in self-pity? There were times when I felt sorry for you.” Elise sighs. “I’ve been seeing a therapist again, after Dad died. He says we need forgiveness from each other, but also from ourselves. You deserve to be happy, Ayla. Me, too.”
Tears surge behind Ayla’s eyes.
“How do I forgive myself? And you—not telling me about Dad, when you knew I was in the hospital for Mom’s funeral—how do I forgive you for that?”
Elise looks away, past Ayla, to the distant hills. “That’s up to you.”
Ayla stares at her sister’s face, almost a stranger’s face, and the anger drains out of her body as if the earth is drawing it through her feet. She lifts her shoulders and chin and inhales deeply, filling her lungs with regret and breathing out stale anger. She imagines her father’s body lying next to her mother’s, restored to the side of the woman he loved. He must have forgiven Ayla. She owed it to him to do the same.
“I forgive you, Elise, and I’ll work on granting it to myself. I want to leave in peace.”
The front door opens and the same young child peers out.
“Mom? What are you doing? Who are you talking to?”
“Come out, Ashwin. Come meet your Aunt Ayla.”
The boy stands by Elise’s side and stares with wide brown eyes. His resemblance to her—and his grandmother—is striking. Ayla kneels so they’re level with each other.
“Hello,” she says, holding out her hand for a shake.
He grins and gives it a big shake.
“I’m building a rocketship with my Legos. Do you want to see?”
“I wish I could, but I’m afraid I have a real rocket to catch.”
“Where are you going?”
“Mars.”
“Wow!” He looks up at Elise. “When can we go to Mars?”
Elise lays her hand on his head. “Maybe when you’re older.” Her lips turn up in a small smile as she looks at Ayla. “Maybe you’ll go visit your aunt someday.”
“I’d like that,” Ayla says and stands.
“Can I go in?” Ashwin loud-whispers to Elise.
She nods, and they watch as he dashes back into the house.
“I suppose he’s my reminder of you and Mom,” Elise says with a broken laugh. “I wish we’d done this sooner, that you could’ve gotten to know the boys. At least you met Ashwin. Paco—my older one—is at his friend’s house.”
Ayla reaches for Elise’s hand. She squeezes it lightly before letting go. “I’ll write you?”
“Yes. Of course. We’ll stay in touch.”
Ayla’s last image as she drives away is of her sister, standing in the driveway of their childhood home, arms wrapped around herself against the chill.
She replays their conversation, over and over, as she drives to Corpus Christi. The regret stings: all the years she missed, not seeing her nephews as babies, not being a part of their lives. Is Mars a mistake? Will that be her next great regret?
Ayla considers turning around. Highway 77 is devoid of cars, and she pulls into the grassy median and stops. She steps outside and looks up.
“What should I do?” she whispers.
The stars blaze overhead in a giant bowl over the plains. They beckon her, reassure her. If it hadn’t been for the mission, they murmur, this reconciliation would never have happened. Be glad for what the future holds.
As she climbs back into the car, Ayla realizes that at last she can let go of the past. She can start fresh, not because she can leave her past behind, but because it will anchor her as she ventures onward and outward. She gets on the highway and continues through Corpus Christi to the base.
The Mayflower stretches up into the night sky, ablaze in floodlights and drawing her in like a beacon in a storm. The silver scaffolding hugs the ship, but she can already feel the struts falling away. She’s light enough to fly.
A Star Is Born
Miki Dare
Journal Entry: May 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (The numbers just keep going up and I can’t find the damn calendar, nurse must have taken it again.)
I’m an iota of flotsam. A senile speck of sentience. A little old Asian lady. I’m fighting against the tides of space and time, but you won’t ever find me in any history books.
Don’t let my wizened apple exterior fool you. Tiny is powerful like electrons bounding about in multiple places at once. And I’ll let you in on a secret—I can do something like that. Somehow in my old age, I can time travel. I haven’t told anyone because they’ll call me crazy and not let me use scissors anymore. I don’t know how I have this power, I just do. Like some people have freckles and some don’t. I have freckles. And age spots. Maybe it came with the age spots. Oh, I’m getting off topic.
It’s not like Doctor Who and I just jump into a machine and travel about. My time travel happens when I dream, and as any good senior citizen, I nap a lot. But I can only look at my own personal timelines along one specific vein of existence when I travel. I don’t visit dinosaurs-still-exist timelines, or aliens-took-over-the-Earth timelines, or we-nuclear-bombed-the-crap-out-of-our-own-planet timelines. I’m always locked in as the same Japanese-Canadian-girl-born-on-Salt-Spring-Island-in-1928 timeline, but I just get thrown into my other possible permutations. I watch alternate “me’s” taking different paths of actions and having different reactions.
When I watch the other me’s, I see how limited my choices were back then. An iota of flotsam. A silenced speck of sentience. A little Jap alien. I don’t ever have a chance to become a movie star or the Prime Minister of Canada. I’m not able to stop World War II or stop the internment of my family and every other Japanese person. The shitty stuff still comes.
Some of my timelines are better than others, but I can only exist in the timeline I was born to. The other timelines feel real when I visit, but to everyone there, it’s like I’m the invisible woman, and folks can walk right through me like you see in movies about ghosts.
Sometimes, I can do little things. If I “push” with all the might of my mind, I might nudge an object just a bit or if I yell with all my heart, “myself” might turn around as if someone’s in the room. But the other “myself” never sees me, although she might think something strange is going on. My existence in the “here” I was born stays fixed, and everywhere else I am just ghosting while I sleep.
I travel more and more as the years go by. Sometimes I forget what a toothbrush is for or how to tie my shoelaces. Eeeeh, I don’t know what the fuss is about. None of my real teeth are left, and all my shoes are slip-ons. But because I muddle up my pasts with the present, my grandniece put me in a special seniors’ home. The doctors tell me it’s Alzheimer’s, but I know the truth. My travelling times are just catching up to me.
I won’t be here much longer, but don’t be sad. I’ve lived a good long life and then some. I want it to be a surprise for you, so I’m not going to spill the beans. But I can say that everything is going to be peachy. Momotaru is coming!
Timeline Capture: AZ1267983243234333495569023WQM843925237
Hitomi kicked a rock as she trudged along the gravel walkway. The Armstrong’s house oozed joy with its lacy white trim and a fresh coat of paint in robin’s egg blue. Planters burst with yellow primroses at the base of every window to make the house all the more lovely. Hitomi balled her hands into fists until her fingernails jabbed pain into her palms.
Unbidden images of her once-upon-a-time home flashed in her mind. Her house on Salt Spring Island shone this same blue, fresh-as-spring. The daffodils she and her dad planted in jade-green pots by their doorstep. The taste of sun-warm strawberries freshly picked from their farm. The pink cherry blossom wallpaper her mom let her pick for her bedroom. The doll from Japan with the wistful red-lipped smile and glittering gold and green kimono, her favourite birthday gift from her mom and dad. All her cl
othes, books, records, drawings, her scrapbook of her accomplishments from swim badges to her high school track meet ribbons were now ghosts of what used to be. Memories that now attacked her like angry wasps.
Everything was gone. The Canadian government had sold her family’s house, their farm, and everything they owned. All their possessions were taken, sold, given away, or thrown out. The fabric of her reality for which generations of her family had worked so hard, for her good life in Canada, no longer existed.
Instead, she was shipped off to live in a giant wooden box in the middle of Alberta. It came with no heat, no running water, no dividing walls, and absolutely nothing inside it. It was as empty as she felt. Hitomi shivered remembering how painfully cold it was when they first moved to Magrath. Her father had to sell his gold pocket watch for a poor deal so they could get a desperately needed stove. Her mother said at least they were all together. Some families were split up where the men were sent to camps, or worse, jail.
Now Hitomi’s parents and teenage brother, Sadao, picked sugar beets to pay for their “home sweet home.” The only reason Hitomi wasn’t out picking was because she babysat her two little sisters, Etsuko and Kyoko. They’d lived here for two years, and Hitomi’s soul ached with the unreality and unfairness of it all. It was a horrific Cinderella nightmare where a happy ending was against the law for a Jap like her.
Journal Entry: Square with the number 1 and 8 in the month of Demember (Get it, I have dementia so Idemember things! Hahaha!)
I overheard the nurses talking about making Jell-O shooters and liquored gummy bears for a Christmas party, and it reminded me of my father. Anything to do with booze does. My dad was a great word-weaver. His own alternate reality was often fuelled by a bottle. He was Nissei, born in Canada, but the “yellow” never came off as far as most Canadians were concerned.
So let’s have a drink and take that bitter-tasting fruit that life has thrown you and turn it into something magical. Let’s make it golden pink and sweet. Change it into this perfect fragrant peach sitting in the forest that is waiting to be appreciated and loved. As kids we loved to hear my dad tell us the story of Peach Boy.
Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 9
