A Girl Like You: A Novel Part 36

"Yumi is married. Can you believe it? She is far too young, but she is happy, even though they have no money and there's a baby on the way. Haru teaches in a j.a.panese school near San Diego. He wants me to join him there, but I can't leave Yumi."

"And he's married?"

"Yes, he is married, Sati."

"Happy?"

"I think so. He works too much for the future, though, to enjoy the present."

"I'm glad for him, Eriko."

"Really, Sati?"

"Yes, really. I can see now that it would never have worked for us. We were children then."

"Well, it seems to me that there's no boy left in him now. He is all duty."

Eriko makes tea, "real tea," she says, and they share a look. They are waiting for Dr. Harper to arrive from the airport, and the thought of seeing him again excites them.

"What will you do if it isn't Cora?" Eriko asks.

"Keep looking until I find her."

"Good girl."

Satomi feels sixteen again, happy to have Eriko's approval.

"And your home, Sati? What is your home like?"

"It's simple, clean, not enough furniture yet. The breeze from the ocean blows through it, front door to back, just like the house I shared with Abe. You would like it, I think. It won't be a home, though, until I have Cora. I need to see her grow up, see her happy to be an American."

"And are you happy with being an American now?"

"You know, I guess I am. But then, it's easier on the East Coast, so many nationalities that I hardly stand out at all. And they seem to have won a different war than the one we fought. People there hardly know about the camps."

"How is that possible?"

"It's unbelievable, isn't it? Quite wrong that they are never spoken of."

"I'm as much to blame as anyone for that, I suppose," Eriko says. "None of the j.a.panese left around here speak of them much. We are ashamed, I think. Yumi says that she won't tell her children, that there's no point in making them afraid. She wants them to grow up fearless, like Haru."

"But the shame is not ours, Eriko. We must never let it be ours. You should tell Yumi as much."

They pause for a moment in their talk, both thinking of Yumi as the child she was in the camp, plump and naughty, one of the new breed of disobedient daughters.

"I miss your mother still," Eriko says. "She is the one I miss most in life."

She leads Satomi downstairs to the shop, which has a CLOSED sign on its door. The air there smells of felt and disinfectant.

"Roaches everywhere," Eriko says. "Just like Manzanar."

"We should keep a lookout for Dr. Harper." Satomi goes to the window. "He is a stranger to this district."

"It was brave of you to come alone," Eriko says. "And flying too"

She hadn't wanted Joseph to come with her. Cora doesn't know him, after all, it will be enough that Satomi is there with Eriko and Dr. Harper.

In any case, Joseph is caught up with Leo, and hates, these days, to be parted from him for long. It turns out that Leo is a count after all, the genuine article. He is new to the city but has found old friends among his fellow emigres in New York, and has been embraced by the Russian n.o.bility a.s.sociation. According to Joseph, new blue blood is rare, and is to be feted among his fellow exiles.

"We are a novelty," he says. "The latest distraction."

She has never seen him less cynical, or so openly happy.

"We are always at some ball or other," he says. "There are at least a hundred dates that must be celebrated with the most extravagant parties that you can imagine. Anything and everything demands a celebration, Peter the Great's victory at Poltava, Gogol's birth, Romanovs visiting from Spain, things I never knew about before Leo. It's quite extraordinary."

Russian n.o.bility, it seems, has the good manners not to pry into their friends.h.i.+p, their particular arrangement.

"We dance with the girls for form's sake," Joseph says. "But the truth is that I'm the nearest thing that Leo is going to get to an heiress.

She is relieved not to feel responsible for Joseph's happiness anymore. Leo is a good match for him, an artist at heart, and the most perfect of traveling companions. Maybe among the disposed Russians Joseph will at last find a place where he can settle.

"And you, Sati," Eriko breaks into her thoughts. "You have been married and widowed since I last saw you. It seems astonis.h.i.+ng to me."

"Oh, Eriko, I wish you could have known Abe."

"So many gone." Eriko sighs. "To lose your man so young." She reaches out and pulls Satomi to her.

The tears that come are nothing like those she had shed in the months after Abe's death. They fall warm and soft, without the accompanying urge to howl.

"I took a strange journey after Manzanar, Eriko. My mother would have loved Abe, but she wouldn't have approved of my choices before he came along."

"Maybe, but I never heard her judge anyone. Tamura understood how life can overtake you."

Dr. Harper has been counting the days since the letter from Satomi came. And now the time is here, he is on his way and will see for himself the circle completed. He is hopeful now that the child is Cora. The photo that came is grainy, blurred at the edges, showing a shy-looking girl, older than the Cora he remembers, of course, but something in her stance seems familiar to him. He is ashamed to discover that in their dark-eyed, soft-featured prettiness, all j.a.panese children's faces look alike to him. He imagines that all white, gray-haired old men look the same to them too. It's no comfort.

His records of Manzanar are packed in boxes, piled up in his garage, ready to send to Satomi when she is finally settled. His heart has been rocking a bit lately, giving him a warning or two. He suspects that if he h.o.a.rds his little archive for much longer, it will end up as kindling for his wife's fire when he is gone.

It's an unconventional doc.u.mentation, he knows, a strange collection, but telling all the same. The time is surely coming when the j.a.panese will fight for compensation, when they will insist on the longed-for apology. He is convinced that Satomi's spirit, her strong open heart, will make her part of that fight.

He asks the cabdriver to stop across the street from Eriko's shop. He needs a minute or two to compose himself. The journey from Lone Pine in the single-engine plane had been something he had looked forward to as eagerly as a boy, but the excitement of it has stirred old ambitions, present regrets. Looking down on the landscape as the little craft battled the wind, seeing woods and rivers, a tiny dot of a boat on the ocean, he was filled with self-reproach. He should have done more with his life, had adventures, been braver.

He watches the women behind the window talking animatedly, waiting for him to come, two where there should be three. It's strangely hurtful. He feels like sitting down on the sidewalk and weeping. Oh, why couldn't Tamura be there waiting too? He shakes his head, takes out a handkerchief to dab at his moist eyes. His recently acquired varicose veins thump uncomfortably in his legs. He hates the look of the raised blue tracks that run along his white liver-spotted skin. He can't remember when he last looked at himself with any satisfaction. His wife is right, he is vain for his age.

To his old man's eyes Satomi looks the same. Eriko is only a little fuller, her dark hair streaked with gray now, that's to be expected, after all. It's good to see them in the real world, good to have Manzanar behind them. Since they left, the place has reverted to wasteland, a picked-over plot he averts his eyes from when driving past.

It had been awful seeing off the last of Manzanar's inhabitants, the old ones who had to be forced out. Painful to observe the women watching their homes demolished, and the old men wondering how they were meant to provide now, how they could feel proud of anything. He thinks that there are too many kinds of impotency to wound men.

And to add insult, those awful lectures, compulsory, so that it was hard to feel like the free men they were told they were now. Inmates, it was insisted, must learn how to behave in the outside world, how to get along with their fellow Americans. The sermons had done little to ease their bewilderment. Having suffered the loss of everything that had been theirs before incarceration, they had wept at their separation from the known. Those old boys were a lost tribe he couldn't feel optimistic for, no matter how much he tried.

It was astounding to him to read that some in the House of Representatives were still angling for their repatriation to j.a.pan. It made him sick with shame. He wrote as much to them, but they never replied.

It's a joyful reunion, a hug for Satomi, a clasping of hands with Eriko.

"It's been too long," Dr. Harper says. "And so much has happened, especially to you, Satomi."

She smiles at him, registering the tremble in his hands, noting that his eyes are a little paler than she remembers, his step slower. She wonders how many times she will see him again, and it comes to her that she loves John Harper. That he means too much to her to let his work be forgotten. She puts her arms around him, lays her head on his shoulder for a moment.

"I'm ready for it now. Send me your archive," she says softly. "I won't let it go to waste. I promise."

Of course, she and Tamura and their kind were not the only victims of the war. There are victims of all kinds all over the world, she knows. Yet still she feels there is a need for justice, for someone to admit that at worst the incarceration had been a wicked betrayal, at best senseless. She doesn't want to see the j.a.panese inmates' story cleaned up, rewritten, as she and Tamura had rewritten Aaron's story. She wants to be part of the reconciliation, to be around for the longed-for apology. She may never escape her ghosts, but her memories are lighter now and she is healing, she knows.

"We should go," Dr. Harper says. "Put an end to Cora's waiting." The Sisters of Charity are housed in a three-story red-brick building. There are bars at the windows, no curtains, smudges on the gla.s.s. The place looks shabby, halfhearted, uninviting.

The three of them pause in front of the rusty playground gates as if by order, and Satomi pushes the bell, which immediately creates a hissing of white noise.

"Yes?"

"It's Dr. Harper and Mrs. Robinson," Dr. Harper says in the strongest voice he can muster. Since his school days he has felt uneasy around the religious. When he was young it had to do with guilt for his boyhood sins, he supposes. Now he thinks it's most likely the fear of a day of reckoning.

"Come through the yard and ring the visitors' bell on the front door. Someone will come for you."

Satomi is the first to enter the bitumen quadrangle. She takes a deep breath and sends Eriko an anxious smile. In place of flowers, litter is caught up in the tufts of needlegra.s.s that grow at the base of the high wire fencing enclosing the playground.

"To keep the children from the road," Eriko says quickly, as if to rea.s.sure Satomi. "At least it doesn't turn in at the top."

They are all thinking of the fencing at Manzanar, and look around nervously as though seeking gun towers, guards. A chalked map of hopscotch on the ground is fading under the sun. Garbage cans are lined up against the building, spilling over with refuse.

"It's horrible, horrible," Satomi says, feeling the sweat pooling under her arms and in the palms of her hands. The awful realization that Cora may be here feeling, herself forgotten, panics her.

"It's not so bad, is it, Eriko?" Dr. Harper says. "The street is nice enough."

"No, it's not bad at all," Eriko says. "Not bad at all."

"She's as fenced in here as she was at Manzanar," Satomi says, not willing to be comforted.

Whenever she had thought of finding Cora, her imaginings had been kinder than the sight of this place. They had included lawns and flowers, trees to shade the child from the sun. She realizes now with shame that they were nothing but pretty pictures, good only for soothing herself.

There is a choice of bells on the black-painted door, a foot-high polished bra.s.s crucifix nailed to it. Satomi pushes the VISITORS bell and hears a faint ringing from deep in the house's interior. It reminds her of the one in Mr. Beck's lodgings.

Inside, on the checkered linoleum that runs the length of a narrow hall, so narrow that they have to walk in a line one behind the other, they file behind a nun, who has not spoken, only indicated that they should follow her. Something soapy sticks to the soles of their shoes as they walk, making them squeak. There's a sickly scent of cheap beeswax, the trace of past meals in the air.

"It smells like the mess halls," Eriko whispers.

"Inst.i.tutional," Dr. Harper says. "Mess halls, hospitals, they all smell the same."

In the Mother Superior's large and comfortable office, Sister Amata, a fluttery sort of woman in a brown habit, who coos somewhat like a pigeon, is sent to find Mary.

"She doesn't know you are coming," she says excitedly as she leaves the room.

The Reverend Mother too is a pale bird of a woman, hawk-nosed, with small brown eyes that Satomi fancies are seeking out quarry. But when she speaks, her voice is soft, her stance kind.

"She has no idea that you have been in touch," she tells them. "She may not be the right one, your one. She came without papers from an orphanage that was being demolished. They called her Coral there, but she could have been Cora, I suppose. Coral did not seem to us a suitable name, and we wished to spare her teasing, so we named her Mary. On the whole she is a helpful child, but she doesn't speak much, and is subject to temper tantrums at times."

Satomi wants to yell, Of course she is. How could she not be? The cost to Cora of being left, unloved, she is sure has been a terrible one. But a sudden dread stops her from speaking. Her chest feels heavy, her mouth dry as ash.

"Was she originally at Manzanar?" Dr. Harper asks, anxious now that he has projected Cora into the blurry photo, glad that he had decided against showing it to Satomi.

"I have no idea. I've never heard her speak of it."

"So you have never asked her about the camp? Never wanted to know about her life before she came here?" Satomi, finding her voice, can't keep the criticism out of it.

"No, we have been advised not to talk to the children about the camps. The j.a.panese children here are in the minority, it would set them apart from their fellows. In any case, all that's better forgotten, don't you think? The important thing here is that we are all Catholics, children of G.o.d."

The Reverend Mother finds herself hoping that her Mary is not their Cora. If she is, she will not, she thinks, be brought up in the faith. And after all, it's not as if they have a blood claim on the child. But the promise of Joseph Rodman's astonis.h.i.+ngly generous check if she is the child they are looking for is surely a gift from G.o.d, a benediction. They could expand, take more children, build a schoolhouse, the possibilities are endless.

And the Mother House, their spiritual home is expecting to receive a good portion of the money. It is only through donations, after all, that the order survives, that it can fulfill its calling in the world, where there is so much human misery to alleviate. One small child in exchange for so much, how can she say no? Mary's soul is not in the balance, after all. Their bishop, on hearing that the child may have found a home, had hurried to confirm her in the faith so that her soul is already saved. And the Blessed Virgin Mary, the child's namesake, has her in her sights.

"We have given the children extra playtime in honor of your visit," Sister Amata trills on her return. You will be able to see Mary at play, make your decision without the child knowing."

In the yard the children dart about. Their cries are distracting and it takes time for Satomi to start singling out the girls one from another. Some of them are at hopscotch, some skipping, but Satomi hardly looks at them. She thinks that Cora will be standing alone, indulging in the lonely child's habit of watching, but she is nowhere to be seen.

"She's there, right there." Eriko grasps Satomi's hand and points out Cora, who is next up to play hopscotch.

Dr. Harper and Eriko are smiling, there's no mistaking that it's Cora. She hasn't grown that much, legs a little longer, and her hair too, but she is still a narrow child, small for her age, pretty as ever.

At the sight of her, Satomi draws in her breath, her hand flies to her mouth, tears stab in her eyes. There's no mistaking that it's Cora, and she can't quite believe it. She finds herself yearning for Tamura. That blue-black hair, the girlishness, the bow perched as precariously on her head as one of Tamura's hats.

"Oh, Cora, little Cora."

After all her imaginings of running to the child, their joyful reunion, she is suddenly afraid, can't seem to move. Sister Amata puts her hand on Satomi's shoulder and propels her forward.

"It's her, isn't it?" she says, and Satomi nods.

Slowly, as one by one the children stop to watch the visitors, Satomi moves toward Cora.

"It's Satomi, Cora. Do you remember me?" She is trembling, her voice not her own.

Cora takes a step backward, hangs her head, and looks at the ground.

"No," she says quietly.

"From Manzanar, Cora. I'm Tamura's daughter. Your friend. You know me, Cora."

Cora has pictures in her head of the camp, of Tamura and Eriko, and especially of Satomi. They are, she thinks, the people of her dreams, the people she suspects she has made up. It's scary to see them now in the flesh, not knowing what they have come for.

"You will have to forgive me for taking so long to come," Satomi says. "I'm sorry, Cora, so very sorry."

She longs to kiss the child's sweet tilting lips, hug her to herself, but she doesn't want to frighten her.