“Hey, what’s this?” Kristen held up a beer bottle.
“I guess the old hippies who come out here need to keep hydrated,” Mark said.
“Something’s written here.” She’d crouched down to look at a large rock at the corner of one of the square figures.
“Nice work, kiddo.” Mark bent down, too. “Someone’s etched something with a knife. DAD’S BARRACK.”
Rita came over to examine the block letters, running her fingertips over the rough incisions as though she were reading Braille. They walked around the perimeters of several other phantom buildings and tried to imagine their walls and roofs. More etchings identified them as mess halls, latrines, and barracks.
“It’s amazing. People have gone to a lot of trouble. Do you think they mapped all this from old photos and plans?”
“Or memory. Maybe some of the old hippies who come out actually grew up here. It’s like the folks who did all this are trying to create a kind of invisible museum.”
“God, it’s weird being here.”
They were making their way around an L-shape.
“This was the hospital,” Mark said. He was reading another etching.
The hospital where the riot had occurred…. An explosive crack of gunfire, like something had blast open, between Rita’s ears. She could hear it, she could feel it now: a mass of bodies rising in an upsurge — so many panting, terrified bodies falling on top of each other, everyone merging into a single creature, slick with fear….
“Are you okay?” Mark was at her side.
“I feel kind of weak.”
He held a water bottle up to her lips.
They continued walking around the ghost of a building. Her eyes remained fastened to the ground though she had no idea what she was looking for. She rubbed a bit of dirt between her fingertips, letting it soften, turn velvety.
Kristen and Mark moved on to explore other areas. The flashlight came out, a dot of bright white light dancing like a firefly on the periphery of Rita’s vision. Their excited voices began to sound distant, hushed. She lingered behind, still near the hospital.
A tremor of movement over on the right. Behind that pile of rocks and debris at the far corner of the floor plate, under the shadows of a dead tree. At first Rita thought it was just wind kicking up a mound of sand. But the movement was coming right from the ground — dirt was being flung up in an arc, and with each heave the tip of a small shovel or tool could be seen.
As she approached, she felt her insides go very still, as though her body had forgotten how to breathe. A cold, shrivelling sensation passed over her scalp.
It was Lily.
That dark mound, crouched down among the rocks and shadows, was her mother.
“Mom?” The word died softly.
Lily didn’t look up, didn’t seem aware she was being watched, even. The task of burrowing in the ground completely absorbed her attention.
“Mommy, where are you?” Kristen suddenly shouted through the dimness.
This time, Lily bolted up. She looked thinner than before, her bones lost within the crumpled, stained dress. Skin stripped bare of makeup, blotchy and sunburnt in patches. Hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, a thick band of salt and pepper visible around the roots. But it was the same face that Rita had always known: the high, delicate cheekbones and eyes that never stopped moving. Her lips, without any lipstick, appeared chapped, childlike.
“Mom …?”
The eyes rested on Rita, but appeared confused, cornered.
Mark called out, his voice urgent. Lily’s eyes darted over to him — a sudden, shining joy overtaking her face. It was as if she knew him. As if she thought he was Kaz. Glimmering through the shadows, far away, ephemeral. In her imagination perhaps he was beckoning, calling out her name, just as playful and arrogant as the day they first met. And then she was running toward him, plumes of sand obscuring her thin figure, her hands extended like they held something. A small box.
When Lily got closer, though, her smile faded, bafflement taking over once more. She staggered backward, inhaled a slap of dust. A piece of sagebrush roped around her ankle and threw her off balance.
Rita ran over and put her arms around the trembling, sobbing body. She drank in the faint scent of lilac lotion mixed with a dusty patina and the acidic sting of perspiring flesh. A sudden bewilderment of dizziness that encompassed both grief and joy. This living, breathing, troubled woman, who would always be her mother.
Thirty
When the Countess Motel was first built, it probably had swanky aspirations. COLOR TELEVISION, a yellow sign proudly announced, a chandelier visible through the glass walls of the lobby. But now the paint was peeling like a bad sunburn, and every third neon letter didn’t light up.
Lily’s room wasn’t much to look at, but it wasn’t as bad as Rita had expected. There were two double beds covered in faded terracotta print, and the wallpaper had a seashell pattern. The place was tidy enough. Lily didn’t have anything with her.
Mark had taken Kristen to the diner on the main floor. Rita was going to join them as soon as she was sure her mother was okay. That could take a while. Maybe they should get a room for the night, too. Or maybe the best thing was to get Lily cleaned up and tucked into the car. They’d all had enough of the desert to last a lifetime. Rita wondered if it would be possible to fly out tonight.
“Coffee?” Lily’s hands clasped together, as she straightened up in an incongruously hostess-like gesture. “I can make real.”
“No, Mom. Thanks though.” It sounded surreal. She’d trekked all the way out here for coffee and chit-chat?
A strained smile.
Then Rita’s heart relented. “Fine, Mom. A cup of coffee sounds good. Here, let me make it.”
She fiddled with the small drip-coffee maker on the dresser, emptying the pouch of grounds into a cylindrical filter. They sat in silence as the machine began to gurgle and drip and steam. Rita poured two mugs. As Lily cradled hers to her chest, wisps of steam made the air thicken, waver. The skin on her right cheekbone, where the scar had once been, appeared smoother and shinier than the rest of her face, like a worn-down patch of velvet.
Lily’s hands suddenly shot up, balling in the eyes. Her knuckles were swollen and streaked with blood from all that digging. Rita wasn’t sure whether her mother was crying or simply trying to block the world out.
“You must be wondering what happened, Rita. Why on earth I came out here.”
Strangely, her hunger for the truth had died down. “It isn’t important. You don’t have to explain anything. Let’s just get you cleaned up so we can all go home, okay?”
“But I want to tell you.”
“Okay.” Always this out-of-sync dance. “So why did you come out here, then, Mom?”
“It started as a … as a mission….” A snuffle.
“A mission for?”
“Ted started it.”
“Ted Fujita?”
A slight nod though she didn’t look very certain.
“The photographs?” Rita prodded, excitement spreading up her neck. “I visited Mr. Fujita and he told me about the JCNA’s book project. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Mmmhmm. They needed pictures. I told him I had some. But — but — they’d gotten lost. I couldn’t remember where I’d left them.” Hugging her arms around her rib cage, she stared at the air above her knees. “And then — then — well, it came back to me.”
“What came back to you?”
“The pictures. Where they were. I can’t explain it. It was like I’d watched a movie of myself — my old young self — burying them. Something I always had a feeling I’d done, but that person never seemed like it’d been me. But now I knew she was me — so I had to come out here to find them….”
At first, Lily had planned to tell Gerald about the trip. But she w
orried he’d try to stop her, and the urgency of getting to Matanzas seemed overwhelming. Reading between the lines, Rita gathered that the stress of explaining about the internment had been too much for her. The next thing Lily knew, she was at the bus station boarding a Greyhound for New York. All she knew was that she had to make it to the States and keep heading west. As she transferred from one bus to another, she’d drift off and wake up to sun-drenched fields and deserted barns speeding by, and sometimes, Rita suspected, she had no clue what she was doing on the bus at all. Reality — memory — cutting in and out, like footage from someone else’s life.
Upon arriving in LA, she had no idea how to get to Matanzas. No map, no compass, no scribbled directions. It was a miracle she’d made it at all. Walking and hitchhiking along the highway and taking many wrong turns along the way, she’d finally ended up here.
“I found them.” A shy glow. Lily extracted from her purse a dirty, rusty tin. So that was what she’d been so intent on digging up. She held it out like proof. Proof of what?
The tin felt light in Rita’s hands, as though it contained nothing more than a single feather. The lid made a screeching noise as it popped off. An array of brittle, discoloured pictures scattered across the bedspread.
All the pale, sombre faces. Her palms began to sweat and she worried that the paper would dampen, disintegrate. A manila tag with a number had been tied to a little girl’s coat, fluttering in the wind like a dead leaf. She was standing outside the bus that had brought her to camp. The scuffed toes of a young man’s boots. His folded hands appeared still and heavy as rocks. He sat on top of his rucksack and stared ahead at nothing in particular. The puffy, swollen hands of an older woman, who might have worked in a dry-cleaning shop, as Lily’s mother had. How fiercely those blunt fingers clutched the handle of her suitcase. Dry, dusty roads. Houses like garden sheds. Some of the people peeking out through the shadowy doorways seemed aware that their pictures were being taken; they met the camera’s gaze head-on, their lips set in grim, wavering lines or self-reliant smiles that showed they knew they were expected to play the part of pioneer settlers in this anachronistic joke of history. Other people simply went about their business, waiting in endless lines under the searing sun, plates and bowls tucked under their arms, just another day of being herded around like cattle.
More than anything, these pictures emitted a feeling: a dim, grey, monotonous feeling. Of life having been exposed as something less than the Technicolor dream they’d once expected.
A close-up of a man with deeply tanned cheeks. His bushy eyebrows added emphasis to his defiant stare. A dirty apron had been thrown over one shoulder. He looked at the camera with a familiarity that suggested he was buddies with the photographer. There was a proud complicity between them that had everything to do with the black eye this guy wore like a badge of honour. He was smiling — sneering even. Anybody who knew what was good for them wouldn’t mess with this dude.
“Is this Kaz?”
“No, Kaz isn’t here.”
There wasn’t a trace of family resemblance, really. After all these years, Kaz wasn’t about to show his face now.
“He’s … Kenny. A good friend of Kaz.” Something wavered in Lily’s expression, like it hurt to keep looking at his image. There was some history, some buried pain between the two of them. But when Rita gently prodded, Lily only shook her head, her lips moving in a silent mantra.
Rita continued sifting through the pile. Curious how these images appeared, at first glance, to offer tantalizing glimpses through some secret window that looked directly onto the past. Chunks of reality, miraculously recorded. Yet the more she examined them, the less certain she felt of anything. Where was the larger narrative that could link all these fragments together?
“Who took these pictures, Mom?”
“Kaz did.”
“What? Kaz?”
Lily nodded, like the whole thing made perfect sense. She picked up a photo and looked at it wistfully.
It showed a girl strolling across the desert, as the wind whipped her hair into a tangle that concealed her eyes. Still, her mouth remained visible: a dreamy, secretive smile, melting inward. Oh, yes. Rita would recognize that smile anywhere.
“It’s you, isn’t it, Mom?”
“Kaz took it.”
The rumble and whoosh of a truck in the distance. Rita might have been standing at the side of the road, winded, covered in dust.
Kaz was the eye behind this bleak, mysterious, fragmentary world?
“He loved taking pictures.” Lily gasped, fell into silence. The skin under her eyes twitched. “He always wanted his pictures to do good. I — I should’ve retrieved them sooner, but instead — instead — I stood in his way.” Her voice dissolved into sobs and she hugged her arms around herself, rocking, like a devastated child.
“What happened, Mom?”
“I told Kaz I’d burned the lot of them. It … it upset him terribly.”
“When did this happen? When Kaz came to Toronto — after the war?”
A hesitant nod. “He wanted the pictures. I thought I could make him want me, too.”
“Why did you pretend you’d destroyed them? And why did you have the pictures in the first place?”
“I had to hold on to them for safekeeping. Kaz asked me to. But I couldn’t keep them in my room anymore — they gave me awful nightmares. So I snuck out one night and borrowed Mr. Murase’s gardening shovel to bury them.”
Lily began talking about how someone had been coming to seize the photos — that was why Kaz had come to her. That much she seemed clear about. But when Rita pressed about the details of what had happened, she fell into silence or incoherence. Rita sensed that there was more to her mother’s desire to have those pictures off her hands. No doubt it had something to do with the shame of being captured on film as an internee, a prisoner. At the time, Lily probably felt that burying the pictures was the only way for them to move forward, as a family, into the bright, harsh future of hard-working immigrants, ready to sacrifice everything to rebuild their lives. Forget everything, turn the other cheek. Pull yourself up by your goddamn bootstraps.
There was still so much that Rita didn’t understand. “So Kaz was mad that you’d supposedly burned his photographs. Is that why he left us? Surely, it would have taken more than that. What happened? What happened to our family?” The torrent of questions shot from her lips, a restless sensation wrapping around her throat. She was incapable of holding back or speaking more softly.
Silence. Lily stared at her lap.
So that was it, all Rita would ever know.
“Kaz was … jealous,” Lily said at last.
“Jealous? Jealous of …?”
“His father.”
When Rita asked more questions, though, her mother wouldn’t reply. She simply turned away, turned off. It was as if all certainty about everything she’d just said had floated away, like a wisp of smoke.
Aunt Haruko’d had more to say about what had happened. When it came right down to it, she was quite willing to talk, as if she longed to get the whole thing off her chest. Apparently, Kaz had shown up on Margueretta Street out of the blue, after no one had heard a word from him since camp days. He just waltzed in off the front porch one evening and proclaimed himself the man of the house, here to lay claim to Lily as if no time had elapsed at all.
“I was surprised she even recognized him,” Aunt Haruko said.
“He looked that bad?” Rita said.
“It was more than that. Lily never talked about Kaz. I don’t think she even remembered him. After the riot, after her injury, she was confused for a long time….”
“Confused how?”
“Forgetful. Full of ridiculous wishes.” Mortified, downcast eyes. “You remember when you were little, Lily was sometimes … not herself around the doctor, ne?”
When was Lily
ever “herself”? But Rita knew all too well what Aunt Haruko was getting at. Lily’s fantasies about Grandpa. The way she’d look at him with heat and longing, as though they were old lovers who shared a colourful and turbulent history, and his attempts to spurn her were part of some cyclical dance. It was gross and disgusting, so Rita and Tom ignored it, ate quickly, and asked to be excused from the table while Grandpa stared at the mushy river down the centre of his plate.
The doctor’s wife. There were times Lily truly seemed to believe it. Still. She’d told Gerald that her first husband was a doctor, with a note of pride, no doubt. She’d gotten what she wanted in the end, she’d landed her man.
So Kaz had been jealous. Who could blame him? Was that the real reason he’d left town, choked up by rage?
Or maybe he’d been relieved that there was another man around to assume the paternal role he’d never wanted in the first place.
Aunt Haruko had spilled her tea.
Rita mopped it up, slowly. “There never was anything between them, was there?” She couldn’t believe she’d said it — had she actually spoken aloud? This question that had been buried in her soul. This question she hardly dared to think.
“Between …?”
“Grandpa and Lily.”
The old woman’s hands jumped to her cheeks and as they came down, knocked the teacup clean off the table. It hit the floor with an egg-like crack.
“I never saw anything.” Rasping breath flowed out her nostrils. “So I wouldn’t know anything about that, ne?”
Rita got down on her knees to clean up the mess. Her hands felt weightless, spastic — the paper towel clumped and fell apart in brown pulp. She thought about how Aunt Haruko had been so quick to make her escape from Margueretta Street. She thought about her grandfather: the slackness of his ashen cheeks, the slap of his fake-leather slippers against the linoleum floor, the coffee-mixed-with-caramels scent of his breath, sour-sweet, as he would sit beside her at the dining-room table and help her with her homework night after night. He was a lonely, solitary man who devoted whatever extra time he had to being there for her. As if he were trying to repent or fulfill some old duty he couldn’t fully face up to.
After the Bloom Page 28
