I had been so certain that I would never see Mariko again that I’d long stopped imagining what it might be like to be in the same room with her. She had become, for lack of a better word, a relic of my past: a memento from that long-ago time when I knew nothing of the world, only that I wanted to be happy in it.
As I stand now in Rina’s living room, a beautifully appointed space with comfortable furniture and Georgia O’Keeffe paintings on the walls, I realize to my dread that I’d practiced only what I might say to Rina today, not what I would say to Mariko. Despite the serene atmosphere of this room, I feel like a young girl again, unsure and anxious. Rina excuses herself after telling me to make myself at home. She wants to check on her mother before inviting me to her bedside.
“Are you going to tell her I’m here?” I ask as Rina starts to walk away.
She turns to me. “I don’t know, actually. I think I might need to see what kind of day she has had. Do you want to surprise her?”
“What will a surprise like me do?” I ask, uncertain of what the same surprise would do to me.
“I’m thinking it will make her happy,” Rina says with a hint of a smile. She resumes walking away from me, down a hallway. I hear the opening of a door and Rina saying hello to someone named Nancy—a nurse, perhaps. And then the door closes.
A moment earlier Rina had shown me to a couch, but I cannot sit and wait in this lovely but strange room, not with Agnes knocking about in my head, wondering where we are and what we’re doing here. I walk over to a long mantel set atop an amply sized stone fireplace where framed photographs are arranged. The first is a family portrait of Rina, her American husband, and their two daughters. The girls look to be college age in the photo. It is probably a few years old.
Rina’s husband is a kind-looking man with nondescript Anglo-Saxon features—sandy brown hair, blue eyes, an average build. Their daughters are attractive amalgams of Asian and Caucasian features. They favor both their parents in lots of little ways: slightly wider eyes than Rina has, cocoa brown hair, skin that looks sun kissed. The next two photos are of each of the daughters’ weddings. Two more are baby photos of grandchildren, surely.
But I do not linger at these portraits, because the next one is of Mariko and the man she married, Yasuo Hayashi. Mariko and Yasuo look to be in their early forties in the shot. They are curled into each other and are smiling happily, as if they are very much in love. And still the photos on the mantel draw me on. The next is of Rina as a teenage girl, maybe fourteen, like Mariko and I had been when we met. Two young boys—her brothers, no doubt—are standing on either side of her. Seated in front of them are Mariko and Yasuo. They are in a park of some kind and there are flowering trees all around, beautiful even in black and white. And the family of five looks joyful. They appear not to be just smiling for the camera, but genuinely happy.
I am still looking at the photographs when Rina reenters the room.
“I’m afraid my mother had a bad morning,” she says. “The hospice nurse had to give her a dose of pain medication and she’s still asleep. I hope you don’t mind waiting.”
“Not at all,” I reply, but I sense Agnes at my elbow. “Is it all right if I just sit by her bedside? I promise I won’t awaken her. I just want to sit by her.” And Agnes the Thief will have me forgetting why I’ve come if you don’t let me, I could add but don’t.
“Of course,” Rina replies.
She leads me down the hallway to Mariko’s room and I brace myself for whatever I might see inside. The frail figure lying on the hospital bed dominating the room has her back to me. Mariko is facing a sunny window and a still-flowering mimosa tree. A trio of hummingbird feeders hang from a branch close to the window, and little winged diners are flitting back and forth, drinking at the flower-shaped cups. Aside from the bed and the IV pole and a cabinet of medical supplies, the room is decorated in calming shades of nautical blue and white. Mariko’s hair on her pillow is short and gray and sparse.
A middle-aged woman in a polka-dot nurse’s smock is standing just inside the door. She smiles at me.
“Hello, I’m Nancy. It’s so nice you could come and visit today. I understand you are an old friend.”
“Indeed I am,” I reply.
“I don’t think she’ll be asleep much longer. The drug should be wearing off soon.”
“I don’t mind waiting.”
Rina offers me the armchair closest to the bed. The table next to it is covered with magazines, a remote for a flat-screen TV in the corner of the room, an empty teacup, and a candle that is half-spent from earlier lightings.
The hospice nurse grabs a handbag from the corner of the room and reaches inside for car keys. “Well, it was very nice to meet you, Mrs. . . . ?”
“Dove,” I reply. “It was likewise a pleasure to meet you.”
The nurse leaves and Rina tells me she needs to return some phone calls and e-mails but will come back in a bit with tea for us. I think she knows I want to sit here alone with Mariko while she sleeps.
When Rina leaves, the room becomes so very quiet. There is only the sound of Mariko’s breathing and my own. It is the kind of quiet in an unfamiliar room that could easily let Agnes loose and I can’t have that happen. So I open Mariko’s notebook and I begin to read Calista’s story from the very beginning so that I can stay focused.
I haven’t read the unfinished tale in such a long time, but I have not forgotten it. Still, it is bittersweet to read it again in Mariko’s somewhat childish hand. I am so immersed in Calista’s quest that I do not hear Mariko turn in her bed. I don’t see the moment she opens her eyes. I don’t know if she wondered for a second or two who I was or if she knew the moment she saw me.
There is suddenly a whispered voice that quietly shatters the silence.
“You’re here,” Mariko says.
I startle in my chair at the sound of a voice that is not the one I remember and yet is distinctly Mariko’s. The notebook falls to the carpet. For a second, we can only stare at each other’s faces, both lined with age and the passing of years. Her cheeks are pale and drawn, though, sunken from the disease that is killing her.
“Yes. I’m here,” I finally say, concentrating on Mariko’s eyes, which have not changed in sixty-plus years.
“Am I dead?” she asks.
A smile breaks across my face even as tears begin to slide down it. “No.”
Mariko stretches a rail-thin arm toward me as though to make sure I am not lying to her, as if to be sure that we are both still alive, still made of flesh and bone. I grip her offered hand. It is soft and slender and cold.
“It’s really you,” she says in a shaking voice. “You’re really here.”
“Well, we did make a promise, didn’t we, that we would see each other again, here in the States?” I try to make light of an impossibly emotional moment, but Mariko does not smile in return. Instead, tears begin to course down her cheeks.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” I say as tenderly as I can. I lean toward her and press my forehead close to hers.
“I never thought I would see you again,” Mariko says when her tears subside and she is able to speak again.
As I sit back in my chair, I want to ask right then if she’d tried to find me, if she had tried to write to me even though her husband’s family and her own had forbidden it. Did she try after her husband died? But she seems so fragile, as though she is made of porcelain. I cannot ask.
“How did you find me?” Her hand is still tightly clasped in mine. I tell her about the iPad and that my housekeeper had shown me there is a way to use the Internet to find someone. I realize as I am telling her this that if I had told Pamela and Teddy about Mariko sooner, I might have found her sooner. I want to ask Mariko, since Rina so clearly knew about me, had she used the Internet to try to find me? Had she? But then, she doesn’t know my married name, does she? And Elise Sontag is no one.
“And just like that, you found me,” she says, incredulous.
“You are the only Mariko Inoue Hayashi in all the world,” I answer with a grin, “although I knew that already.”
A slight smile finally breaks across her face, but it quickly disappears. I tell her about finding the article that had been in the paper five years ago, and that I had taken a chance that Rina was still employed at the Ritz and still in San Francisco.
“From Los Angeles? You came here today from Los Angeles?”
I nod. “I’ve lived there since just before my eighteenth birthday.”
Mariko seems to need a moment to process this. “That’s where you were all this time?”
“Yes.”
“I went back to LA once, after I returned to America,” she says breathlessly, as though it takes strength to say it. “I don’t know why I went. Everything had changed. I had changed.”
We are both quiet for a minute. She is not sad to see me, but I don’t sense great happiness, either. I don’t know what emotion she is feeling, and that scares me. I don’t want to ask her if she’s glad I came, so I cast about in my mind for something else to say.