I notice on her nightstand a picture of her three children when they were young; at least that’s who it appears to be. I recognize Rina’s graceful features in the face of the little girl.
I point to the frame. “Your children?”
“Yes,” she says quickly, as if also relieved to move on from how I found her. “Rina and our sons, Masao and Shuji. My sons and their families are in Japan. They run the family business now. They came to see me last month. I wanted them to come now, not, you know . . . I wanted to be able to say good-bye to them.”
Again we are quiet as what she is saying swirls around us. My silence confirms to her that I know she is not long for this world.
“Do you have children?” she asks.
“In a way,” I answer. “Pamela and Teddy are as much my children as any two I could’ve born out of my body. They are my niece and nephew, but in my heart they feel like my children. I love them like they are mine.”
She nods in understanding. Mother-love transcends biology. She gets this. “Grandchildren?”
“Yes. Five.”
“Same as me,” she whispers.
And for a moment I can feel the Texas sun on our faces and the smell of hot mesquite and sand, when Mariko and I were both fourteen and we had far more in common than not. But then I see that to the right of the portrait of Mariko’s children there is a photo of a young Yasuo. He is sitting on a pier and a perfectly placid lake is in the background. Reflected clouds are shining onto the surface as if the water is the sky.
Mariko is looking at the photo, too.
“Was he good to you?” I ask. I have to ask. The photos in the living room are telling me she had been happy with this man that her father forced her to marry and who plainly didn’t want me to stay in contact with her.
She turns her head slowly to face me again. “I grew to love Yasuo very much.”
“But was he good to you?”
Mariko’s eyes turn silver with new tears, too. She nods. “He was.”
For a moment I cannot speak. A thick, hard ball of stone seems to have lodged itself in my throat. Mariko had been happy with Yasuo. She had loved him. She hadn’t looked for me. She hadn’t wondered over the years where I had ended up. She hadn’t set for herself one last goal, to find me before she slipped into eternity.
Mariko can see all these painful thoughts playing out in my head. She must be able to, for she suddenly strengthens her hold on my hand even as I start to let go.
And as she does, I whisper the words that I know will hurt her. “How can he have been good to you if he kept us apart?”
But she doesn’t wince. Instead, tears trail down her hollow cheeks. “It’s not his fault, Elise.”
“Of course it’s his fault.”
“No.” She shakes her head.
“He sent back every letter I wrote to you!”
Again, Mariko shakes her head like I’ve got it all wrong. She releases my hand and her arm drops to her side. “Elise,” she murmurs. “I told him to.”
The air in the room seems, for a moment, to be robbed of its oxygen. I can’t have heard her right. Can’t.
“What?” I ask.
“I told him to send them back.”
She holds my gaze like a confessor ready to receive due punishment for a crime. “I don’t believe you,” I sputter, because I don’t. Mariko wouldn’t do this. Not the Mariko I knew.
“It’s true. My parents and his parents were adamant that I cease having anything to do with my old life as an American, but Yasuo wasn’t that way. He knew about you. He would have let me keep writing to you. But I was young and stupid and envious that you still had your whole life in front of you. You could go back to the States if you wanted, anytime you wanted. You could still do everything that I had wanted to do. I was jealous of you, Elise. It was easier to accept what had happened to me if I pushed you away and tried to forget about you.”
I can only stare at her for several long seconds, too astonished to say a word. “You forgot about me?” I finally get out.
“I said I tried to forget you. For several years, I tried. But I couldn’t. I became so ashamed at what I had done in sending your letters back. Even though I knew I didn’t deserve it, I wanted so very much for you to forgive me. I was hoping against hope that you would. But when I finally sent a letter to you, too many years had passed. Your parents weren’t in Stuttgart anymore. I had waited too long. The letter came back to me address unknown. You were long gone.”
28
Los Angeles, 1947–60
Sometimes on hot Texas nights, when the sun had set but the heat of the day still simmered all around us, Mariko would tell me about what life was like in Los Angeles, where tall palms on impossibly skinny trunks swayed with their funny frond hats, and where street vendors sold tacos instead of hot dogs, and where movie stars sailed down Sunset Boulevard in fancy cars that were never subjected to icy salted roads. She told me about the lacy and surprisingly frigid Pacific surf and the golden foothills the shade of toast and caramel, and how no one ever needed a pair of mittens or was chased by a swarm of mosquitoes. She told me about the tight Little Tokyo streets and wearing sandals and shirtsleeves in December and how the city never completely went to sleep. I had already imagined Los Angeles in my head a hundred times from the way she described it.
What surprised me most when Ralph and I arrived on a nearly balmy afternoon in February was how carefree it seemed. Like a playground for children. There was absolutely no sign that a grueling war had been fought and won two years earlier. None at all. Perhaps I was still dealing with the time change, or the amazement of having flown for the first time—we had flown to Los Angeles from New Jersey by way of Chicago on a glistening United Airlines airplane. Perhaps it was simply that I was still dazed by finding myself back in the States at seventeen with a wedding ring on my finger. But as I gazed out the backseat window of the Dove family Packard, I wanted to laugh at the sight of where I had arrived.
The highway was alive with other cars, all chrome and bright glass and shining with color. The sky was so blue, the glimpses now and again of bougainvillea and bird-of-paradise so dazzling, the music from the car’s radio so cheerful. I nearly giggled when our driver told us there was a bit of traffic up ahead, as though our afternoon were about to be ruined. I had to swallow the urge to throw back my head in hysterics. One chuckle escaped, and Ralph turned to me, wanting to know what I had found funny. I didn’t know how to explain what I was experiencing, so I said I was just happy to be here.
Ralph had met my ship the week previous, when it docked after an uneventful voyage, and we had then spent a week in New Jersey as he finished processing out of the army. He had found for me a comfortable room in a nice hotel, and I spent the afternoons walking up and down snowy sidewalks, looking in shopwindows, and reveling in the sound of English being spoken all the time, all around me. I bought doughnuts and ate them. I watched children making snowmen. I listened to a trio of girls, probably my own age, talking at a soda fountain about the boys they liked at their high school. Toward evening, Ralph would return to the hotel and ask me how I spent my day. I would tell him, and I could see that he was pleased. I was reconnecting with my American life, he said. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing.
A few days before we were to fly to California, he sent a telegram to his mother, which I saw him compose at the Western Union office. I will be home on Thursday and I have a big surprise, he’d written.
His mother, in return, wired him money for some new clothes and told him Higgins would be picking him up at the airport. Ralph returned to the hotel two nights before we left with her telegram and a wad of cash.
“Higgins?” I’d asked, as I got ready to head out with him for dinner.
“Higgins is my mother’s driver and butler and errand runner,” Ralph said. “He’s been with the family a while. He used to drive Hugh and Irene and me to school. Nice grandfatherly kind of guy.” He’d tossed the telegram from his mother into the trash.
“And you are still quite sure keeping me a surprise is the way to go?”
Ralph had not hesitated. “Quite sure.”
His quick answer made me wonder if I was heading into a hornet’s nest. “Is it because your mother won’t approve of me?”
Ralph had turned from the trash can to look at me. He placed his hands on my shoulders, gently but with purpose. “Neither one of us needs anyone’s approval to live the life we want to live, all right?”
I slumped a little despite his strong arms. The thought of being yet again the Undesirable filled me with disappointment. “So you’re saying she won’t.”
“You, she will love. She might be a little angry with me. Actually, she might be a lot angry with me, but that’s only because she likes to be in control. My father did, too. It’s a wonder they never fought about it. He had a plan for my life, and it was the same as hers. Go to college, get the business degree, come back and work with Hugh at the company.”