After the Bloom

by Leslie Shimotakahara

  Day after day, the room remained empty. Nevertheless Lily continued to sit at the receptionist’s desk, long after her face had lost its dreamy quality and frozen over into dogged optimism. After school Rita would find her mother still sitting there while Grandpa stayed in the backroom off the kitchen, his so-called office.

  His face lit up as Rita came in, and sometimes he’d pretend that she was his patient. He slipped the stethoscope into her ears so she could listen to that strange thrum inside herself. Then he patted her head or hugged her fiercely before telling her to go do her homework. Once or twice she glimpsed tears in his eyes.

  A few months later, he removed the sign from the front door and went back to Dr. Chong’s office. Yet the clunky receptionist’s desk remained front and centre in the hall for years, in the way, crowding everything.

  Although they looked more like adults than the brood Rita was used to, they still had that hapless, bewildered air of adolescence. They were crouched down, sprawled out in plaid pyjama pants, or perched atop lumpy backpacks, reminiscent of homeless people.

  “D’you get what Turner means by ‘betwixt and between’?” a girl with candy-apple hair asked another girl, whose shaved head made her look monk-like. They both munched loudly on chips.

  “It’s all about thresholds. Bad things happen when you go from one state to another. Life to death, you know, crap like that. It’s gonna be multiple choice, anyway.”

  The smell of mildewed carpet mixed with sour cream and onions was making Rita queasy. But lining up for office hours seemed the fastest way to get face time with Dr. Mark Edo. It turned out that he was a professor in the Department of Archaeology, a rundown Edwardian building at the edge of U of T’s campus, barely distinguishable from the frat houses nearby. When she’d called, his phone went to voice mail. So here she was, camped out with everyone else.

  The door opened, as a thin kid with a sage-like beard stepped out. The voice inside the office kept right on rattling off titles. “Yup, I’ll add it to the orals list,” the kid repeated, dazed. Rita had never heard of these authors. Clifford Geertz? Someone who’d written about the savage mind — whatever that meant. Clamminess nipped at her armpits.

  “Next.”

  A jam-packed bookshelf and an Amnesty International poster greeted her. Several masks hung on the wall opposite. Woven out of red, white, and black straw, they appeared to represent some demonic animal with a long snout and tiny, catlike ears.

  “They’re used by indigenous groups in Panama to establish connections with animal spirits.”

  “You’re not freaked out having them stare at you all day?”

  “Naw, scares the kids.” A light chuckle.

  The guy behind the desk was younger than Rita had expected. More surprising was the fact that Dr. Edo didn’t look Japanese at all. His nose was a bit flatter than a hakujin’s normally would be but, that aside, this guy could be a mountain climber or modern-day shepherd. Pale brown hair, longish, scruffy. Stubble all over his chin. Late twenties, early thirties? In an attempt to look a bit more professorial, he’d thrown a linen blazer over his cycling jersey, which, if he were to stand up, would probably reveal nice stomach muscles.

  “I’m Rita Takemitsu.” She sat down across from him, flustered.

  “You’re in which of my classes?”

  “I’m not in your class. We’ve never met before.” Didn’t she look a bit old to be one of his students? She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or insulted to be grouped with the squatters outside.

  “Gave up trying to remember names and faces a long time ago. So what brings you by, Rita?”

  “I hear you’ve been pretty active on the redress scene.”

  “Oh, yeah. My other job. As if teaching a full load isn’t enough.” He rubbed his eyes, laughing grimly, as though he couldn’t figure out what had possessed him. “Yeah, I’ve sunk my teeth into the whole redress thing. Why? Are you interested in getting involved? Because we need people, big time.”

  “It’s more of a personal matter.”

  He looked slightly rebuffed.

  “My mother” — she passed him a flyer — “I think you may have met her?” But if he couldn’t remember his students, what were the chances he’d recall Lily?

  “What? Lily’s gone missing?”

  Rita began talking, stumbling over her own fragmented thoughts. The whole thing sounded so crazy she had to keep reminding herself that this was real — this was the reality of her life right now. Her mother was missing. Hurt, maybe. Or worse. Panic filled her throat. All the problems in their relationship suddenly seemed so petty. Hot pressure gathered behind her eyeballs. If Lily could just be found, Rita resolved to let go of all those old resentments, turn over a new leaf.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  For a heaving second she didn’t trust herself to speak. “I was hoping you could tell me about my mother’s involvement in redress, Dr. Edo.”

  “Mark. Call me Mark. Everyone does.” He extended a box of tissues.

  “Fine, then. Mark.” She blew her nose with embarrassing loudness.

  “Well, what do you want to know?”

  “Did Lily strike you as the type who’d get involved?”

  Mark leaned back and blew air through his cheeks, which expanded like balloons stretched to their limit. “I don’t know what to tell you. There isn’t really one type of person who starts cheerleading for redress. To be honest I don’t remember much about Lily, beyond the fact that she was kind of glamorously dressed. I think she just came to a couple of the house meetings and stood at the back, silent.”

  “Yeah, sounds like her. She was probably uncomfortable being there at all.”

  “A lot of folks are at first, particularly the older generation. They’re scared out of their wits to come to public meetings, worried that if they talk about the past, they’ll end up provoking discrimination, like in the old days. That’s why the JCNA started holding meetings at people’s houses over tea and snacks. Make it more like a social visit.”

  A social visit. Seriously? These redress types were naive as a bunch of kids running for student council. “You really think a cup of tea’ll change anything?”

  “We’re still in the early days — I’m not expecting the government to cut us a cheque tomorrow. That said, we are making progress. Do you know that when they rounded everyone up and carted them off, the government called them ‘evacuees’? Like we were being evacuated for our own good to save us from a flood, for fuck’s sake. It was systematic imprisonment, Rita.”

  His words touched some place deep within her body where she didn’t want to be touched at all — some old fracture that had never healed properly and still tingled and ached. How did he find it so easy to talk about this stuff? Maybe it was because he was only half, or a quarter. He didn’t know what it was like to be a true outsider.

  “Do you actually remember camp, Mark?”

  “Naw. I was born a couple years after my dad got released. So growing up, what did I know? It was like the place never existed. Occasionally, someone on my dad’s side of the family would mention the bad old days, but I had no clue what ‘camp’ meant, not really. I thought it was some place naughty kids got sent as punishment, like reform school, you know?”

  He held her gaze for longer than felt comfortable. And now he expected her to open up, too. Her shoulders had clenched into rocks.

  “So what’s next on the redress agenda?” she said, after a stiff silence.

  “We have several projects in the works. Some of the older folks who remember being interned are putting together a book that’ll document their memories. The JCNA is going to publish it and get it into the hands of the media and government leaders. Ted Fujita’s heading up this initiative.”

  “Ted Fujita?” She straightened up.

  “He’s a prominent retired businessman.�
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  “I know who Ted Fujita is. My mother used to date him.”

  Lily’s scrawled notes, tucked inside Glamour: plums, meringues, Ted F., Folgers, pork chops, Ted F., 3:00 Fri.

  “I think she’d started seeing him again, maybe. Not seeing him, seeing him.”

  “They’re friends, you mean?” Mark asked.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Like Lily could ever relate to men purely as friends.

  Perhaps they’d run into each other at one of the house meetings and decided to catch up over a drink. Rita couldn’t imagine they’d have much to talk about — not after the way things had ended. She wasn’t sure how the whole thing had played out, but it seemed that Lily’s penchant for bragging about how well the Fujita clan had done financially had ruffled a few feathers. Mr. Fujita’s kids had staged a kind of family intervention; maybe they’d passed a conch around in a circle, each taking a turn to catalogue Lily’s faults. In any case, their message had been clear: don’t walk down any aisles, Dad, not without signing an airtight pre-nup, and keep the silverware under lock. A couple of weeks later, Mr. Fujita had unceremoniously dumped her.

  “I can give you Ted’s number, if that helps any.”

  Calling the guy out of the blue would be awkward, to say the least. “Sure. Thanks.”

  Mark flipped through his Rolodex. “You know, we’re having another house meeting Thursday evening. Let me give you the address. There’ll be lots of people there you can ask about Lily. Maybe someone knows something useful.”

  Glancing at the slip of paper, she was startled to see that he’d included his own number, too.

  “Or call me if you just want to talk.”

  A blast of warmth she didn’t want to be feeling hit her stomach. But he was probably just being nice because he was that kind of guy. He seemed like one of those tree-hugger, do-gooder types, like the protest leaders she’d known back in her hippie days, so eager to get all worked up and stage a sit-in about anything. That was the last thing she needed right now. Her days of tie-dyed T-shirts and grubby bare feet were long behind her.

  Nothing about Lou’s office had changed much. It was your basic vanilla doctor’s office at Bay and Gerrard. He’d tried to make it a bit homier by laying out a few knick-knacks: a jade Buddha, a rubbery-looking plant, an embroidered scarf stretched out over the radiator. There was a bookshelf crammed with the usual suspects — Freud, Jung, cognitive behavioural readers — but also some surprisingly avant-garde tastes, like Proust and Colette. Rita wondered if he had a soft spot for Paris and the louche underworld.

  Lou, Dr. Louis. His chocolatey eyes fastened on her with warmth and curiosity, yet always with that familiar remove, that air of aloofness. She felt sheepish coming back to him after they hadn’t seen each other for so long. It was like being in one of those interminable friends-with-benefits things, where the door was always left open a crack, no matter how awkwardly the last tryst had ended.

  Whatever the case, here she was, stretched out on his worn leather sofa. The meandering crack across the ceiling looked like a hair on the bathroom floor. As if this whole bizarre day had never happened. She could be standing in her bathroom, fresh out of the shower and snapping in her contact lenses.

  When Rita had gotten up that morning, she would never in a million years have believed that Lily could be involved in redress. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Lily’s sad, searching expression the last time they’d seen each other, her need for confirmation that they’d had a decent life, despite everything. It made more sense in light of the internment being on her mind. What other vestiges of the past had forced their way to the surface?

  Rita wanted to run her palms over Lou’s bald head, trace the contours of his brain, as though the answers to the riddles of her life lay within. They certainly weren’t coming from her. Not today, that was for sure. Come to think of it, though, Rita didn’t feel he was pulling his weight either. All in all, the session was going nowhere fast. At the beginning, she’d tried to talk to him about Lily’s disappearance, but Lou had no helpful suggestions, or even words of comfort. Rita wanted practical advice that would enable her to find her mother while Lou, as usual, was more interested in yakking about what had made their relationship sour in the first place. Then she found herself getting sidetracked, distracted by stupid, petty stuff. A good deal of the session had been wasted on all her bitching and moaning about how she dreaded that Kristen would fall in love with Jodi, come home gushing about how they’d gone watersliding and done tons of cool stuff together. Lou seemed to think that this suggested Rita had insecurities about her ability to be a good mother and it all came back to her own warped relationship with Lily. Christ. It was like he was deliberately goading her today, trying to get under her skin. If Lou weren’t Lou, like hell would she pay money to take this abuse. Then they’d somehow moved on to the topic of Tom, who loomed in Rita’s mind, his catch-you-later smile lit up like a hologram. Her brother was a recurring source of irritation she circled back to. How tedious and repetitive Lou must find her rants.

  Then again, he had it coming. At the start of their session, he’d said, “Just think out loud. Anything at all that comes to mind.”

  So there it was: her mental diarrhea.

  “If I’ve understood you correctly,” Lou said, sitting back, his fingers interlocked in a teepee, “you resent Tom for treating you like his kid sister who doesn’t remember anything about that whole period when you were young. At the same time you’re resentful that Tom does have more insight into that time.” He looked at her for confirmation.

  That was what she’d been going on about? Okay, maybe.

  “How do you feel when he withholds that information from you?”

  “How do you think it makes me feel?” She’d forgotten how therapy made you spit out the most obvious answers, like you were in grade school again. “It makes me feel like crap. Like he holds all the cards.”

  “So you’re playing a game? Where one person wins and the other loses?”

  Now they were chasing metaphors. “Kind of. But not just your average game. Tom was never into cards.”

  “Keep going, Rita. What kind of game, then?”

  “One Tom invented. One where he made up all the rules. The night stalkers.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned this game. If she ever found out Kristen were engaged in anything so twisted, she’d be livid. Kristen was lucky to be an only child. No one would pull her into a dark, cramped closet that smelled of the mildewy depths of the earth, her wrists bound so tightly that her palms had turned tingly, a gorilla-like hand clamped over her mouth until the edges of her consciousness seemed to be fraying, unravelling…. “The night stalkers are here to get you,” Tom would whisper, and she could see — thanks to the crack of light that danced over his face — how much he enjoyed her terror. Almost as much as he enjoyed being the one to alleviate it. Just when she thought her lungs would explode, the door burst open, light flooded in, and Tom switched over to his other role. Her big brother, her hero, here to save her from the night stalkers.

  Surely, Lou didn’t want to hear it all again. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t even remember. How many patients did he have, all inundating him with their sob stories?

  “I wonder, Rita. You’ve talked before about how your brother could be mean to you.”

  “I’m sure the whole experience was character building.”

  “Character building how?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” There wasn’t enough food in her stomach to sop up all its corrosive acids. “Let’s just say I could see where he was coming from.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Tom was jealous of me, and he had every right to be jealous. Let’s face it — I was the favoured child. The good child. At least, that was the case for as long as Grandpa was alive. As long as I had him, I could keep my shit together.”

  “You wer
e always your grandfather’s favourite? What makes you feel that way?”

  “He took an interest in me. Helped me with my homework. If I got sick, Grandpa made me soup. He taught me how to play chess and cards.”

  Lou’s eyes flicked from her to the paperweight on his desk — an insect fossil with willowy legs — and then back again. His nostrils flared like tiny parachutes. It was how he always looked when he was on the verge of some insight, some aha! moment in the puzzle of her life. Although she rarely remembered his radiant conclusions, the thrill of just watching him get so excited made the whole exercise feel oddly worthwhile.

  “What makes you think your grandfather never took an interest in Tom?”

  “It was different with him.”

  “Different how?”

  “Just different, Lou. Because he was a boy, I guess. Tom must’ve reminded Grandpa of Kaz.” The words sprang from her lips, leaving her drained.

  When Grandpa had died, there’d been a will, a lawyer. There must have been a reading of the will, which Rita hadn’t attended because why should she? She hadn’t expected him to leave her anything. And by that point Rita was caught up in the hallucinogenic world of musicians and poets and lovers and the great, overflowing world spirit she’d flung herself into. She couldn’t remember how the lawyer had tracked her down. He was a balding guy with yellowed teeth, sharp and crooked. They glinted as he spoke, and his words somehow seemed intrinsically tied to those pointy incisors. Money. He said the word in practically every sentence. It turned out that Grandpa had left her a nice bundle. Nineteen grand. The news left her winded. It was more than anyone would have guessed the old man had socked away for a rainy day.

  While Lily inherited the house, Rita had been given a nest egg that would put her through art school and pay for quite a few lifestyle excesses along the way.

  But Grandpa hadn’t left Tom anything.