The Last Year of the War
Susan Meissner
We belong far less to where we’ve come from than where we want to go.
—FRANZ WERFEL
PART ONE
1
Los Angeles, 2010
I’ve a thief to thank for finding the one person I need to see before I die.
If Agnes hadn’t slipped her way into my mind to steal from it willy-nilly, I wouldn’t have started to forget things, and Teddy wouldn’t have given me the iPad for my birthday so that I could have my calendar and addresses and photos all in one place, and without the iPad, I wouldn’t have known there is a way to look for someone missing from your life for six decades.
It’s been a very long while, more years than I care to count, since I’ve spoken Mariko’s name aloud to anyone. And yet, from the moment I found out Agnes is not only here to stay but here to take, my childhood friend has been steadily on my mind, having emerged from that quiet corner where the longest-held memories reside. It’s these oldest and dearest of my recollections that presently seem to be the hardest for Agnes to filch, but I know the day is coming when she’ll find every moment I’ve ever had. The thief will uncover those ancient memories—the good ones and the bad—and she will take them, as gently as dusk swallows daylight. Right now, however, my memories of Mariko are still mine.
I’ve been told by my doctor that this Alzheimer’s I’ve got will eventually kill me.
It is so strange to be diagnosed with a fatal disease and not feel sick. What I feel is that I’ve been saddled with a sticky-fingered houseguest who is slowly and sweetly taking everything of mine for her own. I can’t get rid of her, the doctor assured me, and I can’t outwit her. I’ve named my diagnosis after a girl at my junior high school in Davenport—Agnes Finster—who was forever taking things that didn’t belong to her. My own Agnes will be the death of me; I know this. But not today.
Today I am sitting at LAX at a Delta gate waiting to board a plane. I have written Mariko’s name—first, last, and married surname—and her daughter’s name in felt-tip on the inside of my left wrist, and Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco on the inside of the right one, just in case I forget why I’m at the airport with a carry-on bag at my feet. Agnes is adept at seizing little moments of my day, and when she does, she takes control of my mouth and then says the most ridiculous things, some of which I can remember when I’m me again and some that I can’t. Yesterday she asked the mailman where the children were. For heaven’s sake. Pamela and Teddy are not children anymore. They are both married. Retired. They have gray hair.
I feel badly that Pamela and Teddy don’t know about this trip I am taking, but I couldn’t tell them. They wouldn’t have allowed me to go. Not alone. Maybe not at all. They don’t know about Mariko, and they don’t know about Agnes, either, but I believe they suspect something is up with me. I have seen it in the way they look at me and more so in the way they look at each other. They are wondering whether it’s time to move me out of my home of sixty-three years, perhaps into one of their homes. Or maybe to a facility of some kind. A nice one, they would say. But still. A facility. They are thinking the iPad that Teddy gave me will reveal whether my recent trouble with remembering routine minutiae and even calling to mind how many grandchildren I have is more than just the simple forgetfulness of an eighty-one-year-old woman. I’m not the only one using the iPad. I think they are using it, too, to gauge my faculties by watching how I use it or by seeing if I remember that I have it at all.
Pamela convinced me to surrender the keys to my car five months ago, after I had trouble finding my way home from the supermarket. Or maybe it was five weeks ago. I can’t recall at the moment. I don’t have the keys; I know that. And my garage is empty. I had to take a cab for that doctor’s appointment where I learned the truth, though Pamela would have taken me. I had a feeling I knew what the doctor would tell me, and I wanted to hear it alone. I wrote my address on the bottom of my shoe to make sure I could tell the cab driver on the return trip where to take me. Agnes delights in dancing away with my address, like a devious child, and then giving it back to me hours later.
“You need to tell your family,” the doctor had said. “You need to tell them right away, Mrs. Dove.”
It’s not that I want to keep my diagnosis from Pamela and Teddy. I love them so very much and they are awfully good to me. It’s just that I know how hard this will be for them. For all of us. Agnes will swallow me whole, inch by inch. Every day a little more. She will become stronger and I will become weaker. It’s already happening. I will forget forever the important things. The things that matter.
God help me, I will forget my old friend Mariko completely. She will fade into a fog of nothingness, and strangely enough, that pains me more than knowing I will forget the names of my grandchildren, and Pamela’s and Teddy’s names, too. More than knowing I’ll forget I was married to the most wonderful man in the world. To know I will lose Mariko is the worst ache of all because she and I had only those eighteen months at the internment camp. That’s all the time we shared before my family was sent to Germany and then hers to Japan. I’ve had a whole lifetime with my beloved husband, children, and grandchildren. And only such a short while with Mariko.
As I sit here on the edge of my life, I know I’m a different person for having known her, even though our time together was brief. I can still hear the echoes of her voice inside me despite what separated us, and what kept us apart for good. I still feel her.
It was this feathery and renewed sensation of Mariko’s presence, and knowing that soon it would be taken from me, that had me stunned after I’d returned home from the doctor’s office. My cleaning lady, Toni, her car keys in hand, ready to go home, had come into the living room, where I was sitting. The house where I have been gifted a million happy moments is beautiful, and spacious. Toni is the fourth housekeeper I’ve had and the youngest. Teddy thinks I hired her despite her pink highlights and the starry stud in her nostril because she came highly recommended. I hired her because of them. Her youthful look makes me feel not quite so old.
So there I was, letting remembrances of Mariko that had been long neglected play themselves out. On my lap was a notebook, weathered by age. It had once been Mariko’s. It had been mine for far longer. I must have looked as astonished as I felt. Toni asked me if I was all right.
“Oh. Yes,” I lied.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Toni said. “You sure you’re okay?”
I smiled because that is what Mariko’s presence felt like at that moment—a wisp. There, but not there. “I was just thinking about someone I used to know. A long time ago,” I replied.
“Oh, sweetie. Did you just get bad news? Is that why you’re sitting here like this?”
I shook my head. This, again, was somewhat of a lie. Toni was surely wondering if I’d just received word that this old friend of mine had died. I hadn’t. But I had just gotten bad news. “No,” I answered. “I actually don’t know what became of this person. We were childhood friends. That was a long time ago.”
“Ah. And so you were suddenly wondering where he or she is?”
It was that, but it was more than that. Much more. But I nodded.
“Well, have you googled the name?” Toni asked.
“Have I what?”
“You know. Looked him or her up on Google. It’s hard to be completely invisible these days, Miss Elsie.”
“What do you mean? What is a . . . google?”
“You just type the name into Google and see what results you get. Google is that search engine on the Internet. Remember? Where’s your iPad?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
I followed Toni into the kitchen, where there was no iPad, but we went next into the breakfast room, and there it was on the table where I’d eaten a bowl of raisin bran hours earlier. I handed Toni the iPad. I’d written my pass code on a yellow Post-it note that I’d stuck to it. She tapped and swiped and soon there was a screen with the word Google there in happy, colored type.
“What’s the name?” Toni asked.
I suddenly didn’t want to give her Mariko’s name. It seemed too sacred to spill to someone who did not know her or what she had meant to me in another time, another place. And I still had no idea what Toni was attempting to show me, so I thought for a moment and decided on the name of a boy I knew in junior high whom other boys had liked to tease. I had felt sorry for him then, but I hadn’t had one thought about him since.
“Artie Gibbs.”
“Artie? An old boyfriend?” Toni smiled coyly.
“Heavens, no. He was definitely not that.”
Toni laughed. “Okay, so his real name is probably Arthur, right?”