“What’s this?” he said.
I hadn’t come across or even thought about Mariko’s book in at least a year, and seeing it in Hugh’s hand give me a jolt of emotion difficult to describe. I was happy, happier than I ever dreamed I would be. The last time I had seen that book, Ralph had just died, and my life was again in flux, as life often is.
“It’s a story that was never finished,” I said.
“A story?” he said, smiling. “Yours?”
I reached for the book and he handed it to me. “No. This belonged to the girl I met at Crystal City.” I fingered the aging cover. “The one I told you about.” By this time, there was no part of my life I had not shared with Hugh. He knew about Brigitte. About the alley in Stuttgart. About Mariko.
“Your Japanese friend?” Hugh asked.
I couldn’t help but smile. I had told him about Mariko but I hadn’t told him I never thought of her as Japanese. Before she was anything else, she was my friend. Knowing her had changed my life.
“If it weren’t for her, I never would have met you.” Tears threatened when I said these words, because it was true. It was because Mariko had been lost to me that I agreed to Ralph’s crazy idea to marry him, and then met Hugh.
My husband drew me into his arms and held me there as those memories slid back to the velvety place in my mind where they belonged, hidden away and safe.
“Would you like me to try to find her?” he said a few seconds later. “I could try, you know.”
For half a minute, it seemed like the most amazing idea ever. We had the money to hire someone. She had to be somewhere in Tokyo. A good private detective could perhaps do just that—find her. But the second half of the minute brought me back to reality.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I don’t know that it would do any good. Her new family won’t let me see her; they won’t even let me write to her. I think it would be worse for me if I knew where she was and could do nothing about it.”
Hugh said nothing else as he held me close.
I brought the book into the house and placed it in a jewelry chest that had been Irene’s and that she no longer wanted. I piled wool scarves I hardly ever wore on top of the chest and set it on the top shelf in my closet, as far back as it could go.
* * *
? ? ?
Two years into her new marriage with Bradley, Irene took me to San Francisco for the first time. One year after that, Bradley left her. She came back to the house, broken and angry, bringing Pamela and Teddy with her; they were eleven and nine by then. The children did not miss Bradley, and they had not seen their own father in several years. Hugh was the father figure in their life and always would be. The children were happy to be home.
Hugh had been right about the limitations of his body; we never were able to conceive a child. But I did not sense great sorrow in that, because we had Pamela and Teddy. Even though they were not my flesh and blood, I loved them like they were. And I knew they loved me.
I continued to make my flower arrangements and take them around to various nursing homes, sometimes bringing Teddy and Pamela with me. I wanted them to see that not everyone is lucky enough to have family around who love them, and I also wanted them to know that we are all on the road that leads to the edge of our mortality. Life is too brief to waste a minute of it chasing after things that don’t matter.
In 1959, just after her sixty-second birthday, Frances had a minor stroke and moved back into the main house so that Hugh and I could take better care of her. It was a trying and yet tender time, because Frances softened as her strength waned. She forgot to be opinionated and heavy-handed. Her more gentle side was released, a side that she had not let anyone see since she was young.
She died on a Wednesday of a second stroke, a massive one this time, a year later.
At her grave site during her burial ceremony, my gaze traveled to Ralph’s headstone just a few feet away. My hand reflexively reached for Hugh standing next to me. Beside him stood Pamela, who had blossomed into a beautiful young woman. She was the same age I’d been—seventeen—when I found myself on the very path that led me to that moment. Teddy stood just at my left, Irene next to him. All around us were the markers of other lives, people who had come before, who’d been on their own paths. They, too, had lived their lives, for better or worse, within the confines of the time and circumstances they’d been given.
I thought of Mariko. She was usually very far from my thoughts until those scattered seconds when she wasn’t. As I stood there with the people I loved all about me, I knew somewhere far away Mariko was walking her own path. I leaned into Hugh, wanting so very much to believe it was not a path of stones and thorns.
A moment later we walked away from the broken earth to hired cars—shiny, sleek, and black—because the rest of our lives were waiting for us.
35
San Francisco, 2010
For a moment I can only stare at Mariko, unable to reconcile in my head that if I had stayed in Germany she and I might have found each other.
“When did you write to me?” I finally ask.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she says weakly. “I waited too long and you were gone.”
“When?” I persisted.
“I . . . I was twenty-three. It would’ve been 1952. I wrote to you at the address I had for you in Stuttgart, the one you wrote me from, but the letter came back to me. You didn’t live there anymore, and neither did your parents.”
“But they were only in Munich!” I reply. “They weren’t that far away. Why didn’t the post office forward the letter?”
But I knew why even as I said it. By 1952, it had been five years since my parents had moved to Munich. “So . . . so you stopped looking?” I added.
“I stopped trying to escape the punishment I was due,” Mariko said. “I did not deserve to have you for a friend after what I had done, and when the letter I sent you came back to me undeliverable, I knew the fates were giving me what I did deserve. I had treated you terribly, Elise. I’m so very sorry.”
Astonishment that I have been on her mind all these decades has paralyzed my tongue.
“I’ve been thinking about you as I’ve been lying here,” Mariko continues. “It has been my one great regret that I never apologized to you for what I did all those years ago, and that is why I thought perhaps I had died in my sleep, because I opened my eyes and there you were.”
My voice feels like it is wrapped in yards of cotton batting.
“Can you forgive me, Elise?” she says. “I know I don’t deserve it, but can you?”
“There is nothing to forgive—,” I begin, but she stops me.
“Oh, but there is! We made a promise to each other!”
“It was a promise we couldn’t keep, neither one of us,” I tell her. “We couldn’t meet in New York like we had planned.”
“No, but we could have stayed friends.”
“Mariko. Look at us. We did stay friends.” Even as I say this I know it is true. She remained in my heart and I in hers, all these years.
“But I don’t know what you did with your life,” Mariko says, and a weak sob escapes her.
I smile at her. “Well, that is easy to fix, isn’t it? I shall tell you.”
And so that is what I do. I tell her about Ralph. About Hugh. I tell her about Pamela and Teddy, Frances and Irene. I tell her about my volunteer work and the flower shop Hugh and I opened on Olympic Boulevard in 1968, so that girls aging out of the foster care system and who didn’t have homes or families could work there, learn floral arrangement, and live above the store until they’d figured life out, and that Pamela runs that operation now, along with the three other similar flower shops we subsequently opened across Los Angeles. And even as I’m telling her what I have done with my life, I realize that I have in fact learned what I am good at, what she told me so very long ago I needed to figure out.
I am good at loving people. I have always been good at loving people, and I don’t suppose there’s any skill better than that. Surely that is what God intended all along for me.