The men in dark suits came to see her. Nothing invisible about them. They were the same type who’d come before, the stale odours of their breath masked by spearmint gum and the waxy, medicinal stench of hair cream. Their questions never varied much in content. Despite their efforts to change the way they phrased them — more gently after a while, recognizing that she was, after all, a frightened, traumatized girl — Lily couldn’t tell them anything. It didn’t even feel like lying. All she had to do was give in to that chorus of voices, and all certainty slipped beyond her ken.
Fighting the weight of her limbs and eyelids, she had an urgent sense of needing to surface, surge up from the black pool. Someone was calling out to her. A child’s face, lit by a halo of silver-blue light. The halo swelled and subsided, and the child’s face was replaced by a man’s.
Kaz.
The way they’d met — the life they were going to have together — soared up in Technicolor splendour. He’d come to her father’s shop one afternoon. A photo of Lily, decked out in her finery on stage, had been circulating through the neighbourhood. And he’d seen her, yes, yes, he’d seen her as she’d walked across the stage, yes, that was how it’d happened. She was the one with the giddy laugh that made her cover her mouth — a second too late, after the judges had seen her crooked, discoloured teeth and docked her points for being unladylike. But that didn’t matter to Kaz one bit.
All the while, it was a different face that appeared before her, day after day. Or was this face so different after all? The same, only different. Older, gentler: all the sharp edges smoothed over, everything wilted a little. Still, there was something beautifully familiar about those lips and chin and the faint violet hollows held up by the delicate architecture of bones around the eyes that kept on watching her. She looked back while this man — the doctor — spooned crushed-up food into her mouth. “Eat, Lily.” As he mouthed these words, it was another face saying them in her mind, but that was all right because she knew that in some strange way the doctor was Kaz; they were one and the same person. How wonderful that this man was taking care of her, and at the end of the war he’d marry her, and she’d run his practice from the ground floor of a big white house with a splendid veranda.
The doctor was Kaz, as Kaz would become over the years. If only he could grow into his true self.
“Your strength’s returning, ne? Time to get some fresh air.”
So Lily let Aunt Haruko brush out her hair, pulling at the knots like tangled weeds. They got bundled up in several layers.
It was a bright, chilly day, the kind that can seem dizzying, the way the light and cold conspire to assail the senses. Lily clasped Aunt Haruko’s arm as they made their way in mincing steps over the terrain, sun reflecting off the frost in silver patches.
Outside one of the barracks, she was surprised to see a tinsel tree, decorated with tarnished brass balls and snowflakes cut from newsprint. Could it be December already?
Beyond that lone effort there were no other signs of Christmas festivity. Most of the barracks appeared more rundown than ever.
What the heck was going on here? That was Cecil Watanabe, with his burly teenage sons, ripping the place apart. The skeletal frame of their house was surrounded by dislodged floorboards, broken apart like toothpicks. Furniture had been thrown outside in a junk heap.
A cluster of people, laden with suitcases and boxes, stood around. Others had already waddled down the dirt road, all their possessions strapped on their backs. Tiny Mrs. Watanabe looked ready to topple over. Vagabond families. Someone’s old bachan turned around and looked back, as though a sudden yearning to stay behind had overtaken her heart.
“Where’s everyone going?” Lily heard herself ask.
“It’s starting. The exodus.”
“Exodus?”
“The government’s set up a permanent leave program. To start emptying us out.”
“A leave program? But why?”
“The doctor says it’s because of all the trouble and mischief. Bad publicity for the government, ne? So now they try to separate the troublemakers from the loyal Japanese-Americans. The troublemakers get sent to real prison camp and the loyals have to go back into the real world.”
Real world? So this wasn’t the real world. The sun’s glare had a mesmerizing effect and sent her back into the funhouse of distorted mirrors that lined her mind.
She hadn’t seen Kaz since … since when? Where had he been dragged off to? Had he been sent back into the real world already?
“How do they decide who goes where?”
“They have their ways. Some questionnaire. Since all the trouble lately, everyone wants out, but they take their time processing the papers. When the time’s right, the doctor’ll decide what to do about us.”
Behind them loomed the net factory, a giant spiderweb flowing down. But the web was only a ghost of Lily’s imagination: green and brown and mustard tendrils weaving up into its intricate texture, brushing like seaweed against her hands, cheeks. The factory was deserted now; nothing was going on there. It resembled the carcass of some long-extinct beast.
She remembered hearing rumours that the war was going to end soon. On the other hand, people had been saying that for ages. Some were convinced that Japan would be victorious, and there were excited rumours that the Emperor would pay twenty thousand yen to every internee who chose to return home. Plum jobs would await them.
“One day we’ll go back to Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun,” her father used to say. So maybe now he’d seize the opportunity. Would he expect her to go with him? Yet it had been months — years, maybe — since she’d received a letter from him.
“What if I don’t want to leave this place?”
Aunt Haruko let out a snort. “Trust me, we want to leave, Lily.”
“But where’ll we go?”
“God will guide us.”
She felt safer around the doctor. It was preferable to spend her days with him at the hospital. He gave Lily simple chores to keep her hands occupied, like cutting gauze into tiny squares and refilling bottles. Off in the corner of the ward she sat with her chin down, doing these mechanical tasks for hours.
People looked at her strangely, as though she were cursed; they’d heard rumours about what she’d been through. They knew she was mixed up in the Frank Isaka business.
From the second floor window, she could see in the distance a smattering of tiny, dark heads. So people had started gathering at the firebreak again. Although there weren’t that many at first, more folks soon began coming. Each day more heads were clustered there, like an ever-growing black fungus.
Sixteen
Rita’s apartment looked more lived in now. Stained wine glasses sat on the coffee table, a vinegary tang in the air. Bed unmade, a crumpled mass that made her think of toppled over sandcastles. A numb ache crept over her. Lily was still out there, and they were no closer to finding her, yet that hadn’t stopped Rita from pissing away the morning in bed with Mark, like a horny teenager.
Images of her mother, lost, desperate. On a street corner, panhandling beneath a skyscraper. Wandering past neon sex shops and feral-eyed junkies. If she’d even stopped in New York. Just as likely she’d never gotten off the bus or had slipped onto a connector that sped through the night to Boston, Providence, Chicago. Or she’d hitched a ride along the highway. Had some thug picked her up? Had she been left for dead in a cornfield?
Closing her eyes, Rita counted backward from ten, slowly. She tried to breathe and talk herself down.
Mark had left to teach his afternoon class. He said he’d call later so they could make plans to go to the library. The library. It sounded so ridiculously wholesome.
In these situations she usually immersed herself in blasé indifference. It didn’t matter if he didn’t call her. Big fucking deal. He had a nerdy laugh and snored as though he were sucking a pillow up his nostrils.
The problem was that she did need to see him. If for no other reason than he’d said he was a kick-ass researcher. Something useful might as well come of their tryst.
She stared out the window at nothing in particular and then wandered out to the porch. The park was empty, beyond a couple of small, pudgy children waddling across the grass. A girl in cut-off jean shorts with a bandanna tied around her hair sat on a blanket, half watching them, half looking like she wanted to get away. Was she their mom? She looked too young to have kids already. But Lily must have been around that age when she had Tom and the whole family moved to Toronto. That had been after the war, after they’d been released from camp. How had they managed to build a new life here? What a world of struggle it must have been. When Rita tried to imagine how her mother had done it, every muscle in her body felt heavy with tiredness itself.
It had been three days since she’d heard from Gerald. She wondered if he’d received any updates from the police. When no one answered the phone, she waited twenty minutes and called again. Nada. Finally, she decided to go over and wait until he got back.
Rita let herself in using the key under the flowerpot. In the kitchen, dishes were piled up, smeared with bright orange sauce and pellet-like bits that looked disturbingly like mouse droppings. A twenty-sixer of Crown Royal — half empty — had been left open on the counter.
Gerald’s wallet lay on the ledge by the door along with his car keys. At least he’d had the sense not to jump behind the wheel. But why wasn’t he responding to her shouts? Had he fallen and hit his head? Bleeding to the brain, that could really do you in. Or maybe he’d gone missing just like Lily — this house had the tendency to swallow people whole, push them down rabbit holes to the other side of the world.
Rita ran upstairs two steps at a time. She felt like she’d slipped into Murder, She Wrote, some minor, clueless character about to burst into the master bedroom and discover a dead body.
It was empty. The ensuite, too. A peculiar bumping was coming from somewhere up above. A repetitive thud, not the scuttle of squirrels you’d expect in the attic. She rushed to the rear of the house. In a little office room, a pull-down ladder dangled mid-air.
“Gerald?” she called up into the black pit as the rungs creaked and a flurry of silver moats floated down on her forehead.
Diffuse, watery light spread across the sloped ceiling from a flashlight on the floor. He was slumped against the back wall, his head rolled forward, long white strands curtaining his eyes, the look of a mad composer. Rita ran over and shook him — the hair flew back as his head banged behind. His eyes clenched and then sprung open: piss drunk, mocking, sad.
“Hiya, Rita — what’re ya doin’ here? Your ma no longer lives here, haven’t you heard?”
“Gerald.” She touched his forehead. At least, his skin didn’t feel too cold. She remembered when one of her old roommates had nearly died of alcohol poisoning — her skin had been icy, like defrosting chicken. “Lily hasn’t left you. Don’t be silly. She’s just … away. For a little alone time. Remember what Officer Davis said?”
“Sure.” His jack-o’-lantern grin faded. He pushed a box of doughnuts toward her with his foot. “Have a cherry Danish. Or two. Cherry Danishes always make things better.”
That explained the red smear across his shirt — better than blood. “How much have you had, Gerald?”
“Three — maybe four — pastries.”
“To drink.”
“Aw, I dunno, Rita.” An empty mickey rolled on the floor. “I was just, I was just, I dunno, tryin’ to be a nice husband, so maybe my wife’ll come back, ya know?”
“By getting shit-faced?”
A look of mild indignation. His arms made an expansive gesture. “Lily’s always wanted this palace to be her sewing room. So I figured, let’s surprise her, okay?”
The clunky black Singer sewing machine sat on the floor beside him. Lily hadn’t used that thing since Rita was a kid. Now sewing was her hobby, her passion? What was she going to make? Heart-shaped pot holders?
Rita sank to a crouch and nibbled a Danish; the artificial cherry filling was surprisingly comforting, like children’s cough syrup. Gerald’s feet stretched out, clad in those fake-leather old-man slippers that Grandpa used to wear.
“Ya know, I thought how could a poor sucker like me get so lucky? Why did Lily marry me?” His eyes filmed up, his face, the colour of oatmeal, hollowed out by grief. “I mean, I know her first husband was somethin’ amazing — a doctor and all.”
Grim laughter caught in Rita’s throat. “Oh, you must’ve misunderstood. That’s my grandfather. He was the doctor. My father, Kaz, might’ve wanted to be a doctor at one point. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t much of anything.”
“Are you sure ’bout that, kiddo? I’m pretty sure Lily said she was married to a big shot doctor.”
“Yeah, Gerald. I know my own father.” But she didn’t know her own father; she’d never known her fucking father. Anger splashed over her, hot, roiling — suddenly, she felt she might be the drunk one. Why did it always feel as though everything had happened too late? Before she’d been born, it had already been game over. They’d never had a chance at being anything resembling a normal, happy family.
“Then why would Lily lie to me about her first hubby?”
He was about an inch away from using her shoulder as a pillow. “Sure, Mom wanted to marry a doctor. She probably wished she could’ve married Grandpa. Had he been twenty years younger, she’d have been all over him.” The last morsel got stuffed into her mouth, mealy and nauseating. “That’s the thing about my mother. She’s not so good at distinguishing between fantasy and reality. She wishes she’d married a doctor, so voilà! She did. Only in her crazy-ass mind.”
“I guess there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t realize about my wife. Okay. Everyone has flaws. I just wanna help her get better.”
“Yeah, well. That makes two of us.”
They sank into silence and Rita draped an arm around his shoulder.
“So who was your old man, then?”
“I don’t know. Some guy my mother met at camp.”
“The internment camp?”
She nodded. “Grandpa and Mom never talked about Kaz. I think he must’ve been a real bastard, frankly.” Maybe Kaz had never wanted to marry her. A shotgun wedding. Maybe they hadn’t even bothered to get married; no one had ever seen any wedding pictures. A man who was good with the ladies, a man who liked to dance. Had Lily actually said that? Or had Rita only imagined it, her memory willing to fabricate anything so it would have a fragile scaffolding?
“What happened to this Kaz fellow, in the end?”
“Oh, Gerald. It’s way too complicated.”
“Try me. Tom mentioned he took off before you were born. Then he died of a stroke, out in California. Where in California?”
“Dunno.”
“Well, where was the funeral?”
“We weren’t taken to any funeral.”
Had there been a funeral? If it hadn’t been for that woman who’d called, they wouldn’t have even known anything was amiss. Rita had been the one who’d answered. She’d just turned six and found the telephone a great source of fascination — a voice from another realm whispering in your ear through a magical cord — so Lily had let her pick up, finding something cute about a little girl so eager to play receptionist. The voice on the other end sounded husky and mannish at first. Then it softened. A cough or hiccup, as though the woman had been crying. “You must be Kaz’s daughter.” Or maybe, years later, Rita only imagined the hiccup and cobwebs of emotion. Only in retrospect did everything about that brief conversation seem preserved in minute detail, as if time itself had slowed down and the afternoon light would continue flowing in watery, goldish beams down the centre of their kitchen forever. It was one of her earliest memories. The before moment. Before everything c
hanged. If nothing out of the ordinary had happened, all that would have been forgotten.
But something had happened. Rita passed the phone to her mother. Whatever the woman said, it caused Lily to straighten up, jump back. She held the phone away from her ear like it was a scalding iron. “He couldn’t — he couldn’t have —” Then she sank to the floor, her legs splayed out at weird angles.
As Rita bent down over her mother’s heaving body, she noticed for the first time that the linoleum was covered in a pattern of grey-brown pebbles. Perhaps you were supposed to imagine yourself at the edge of an island, looking out, stranded. Those fake, intricately rendered stones jumped out with all their absurdity and from that day forward, a shivering, nauseous sensation would overtake her whenever she set foot on linoleum.
Without realizing it, she must have screamed for Grandpa because he came shuffling along in his slippers. He picked up the dangling phone. While he talked to whoever she was, on the other end, his gaze swept the room and fastened on a crack across the ceiling. “Oh, I see. I see. I see.” His eyes bulged. The crack seemed to grow longer each time he repeated himself.
The next day, Grandpa left for California to settle Kaz’s affairs. The rest of the family stayed behind. Not that there’d been any discussion about them going with him.
“You’re staying at Jodi’s apartment?”
“Yeah.” Kristen spoke like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Daddy’s here with me, too.”
“Because …?”
“Something went wrong at his house. Water’s everywhere. All my shoes got ruined!”
After the Bloom Page 18
