Hiroshima in the Morning (26 page)

“Whoo, whoo!”

The noise has changed, is now a challenge. Dylan is racing downhill, Ian trying to catch up behind him. They are galloping, heading for the next set of stairs; something terrible is about to happen and Brian and I both yell at them
to stop. There’s a man on the top of the stairs, directly in front of Dylan’s charge. My son seems to be flying toward him, his feet cycling beneath him to keep up with his body’s gravity. There is no way he’s going to avoid hitting the man. I can see it in my mind’s eye—bodies falling together, tumbling over each other down the long, stone stairs. I am waiting for the collision when suddenly Ian has overtaken his brother; he gets between them and throws his arm around Dylan just in time to swing him around the startled man. As I watch, Ian’s body takes the momentum, absorbing it easily as the boys seem to dance together on what looks like the horizon. Then, without looking to us for approval, without even thinking, my young American son, the one with green eyes and dark blonde hair who never fails to take care of his little brother, says a word to beg the man’s pardon, with perfect Japanese inflection:

“
Sumimasen!
”

The man bows slightly to my children as I begin to smile, and then the boys are gone—down the stairs.

THE SONG IS VERY SOFT and sad,
the man’s voice says.
Inside . . . it tightens you up.
The voice is past, taped in Tokyo on that afternoon when Ian could not reach me.
Please don’t use my name. I have nothing special to say anyway.

If it still seems that I can no longer write, at least I can transcribe what I have gathered. This man was a Japanese American, an “enemy alien” in Tokyo who was visited often by the secret police, who was hired, at the end of the war, by the Americans to help with the War Crimes interrogations in Shanghai. He was a translator, probing for instances of torture, of slaughter and rape, of following orders. Was it justice? I asked him then, and neither of us knew the answer. The tribunals were a gesture, no more than a sampling, because, isn’t war atrocious? When you’re facing down the enemy—when you both think you are right, and the other is wrong—where can fairness come from? Where is humanity?

In the absence of new interviews, the old ones whisper. The Colonel proclaiming himself a hero; the young boy giving a heroes’ welcome to empty boxes of remains. I am unlocking their voices in my room, playing their tapes, my earphones muffling the sound of the boys jumping on the futon. I am plugged into the past, scanning the tapes for purpose. For a pitch to make to Brian that he won’t reject.

Lily Onofrio is coming; I have just received an email
confirming that next week Lily will be visiting Japan. I have been waiting for months, hoping to meet her; I’ve been reading everything I can find about her story, and there are many questions I want to ask. This is the one interview I need and now, in this untouchable time, she is coming at last—coming to Fukuyama to visit her brother, and she will speak to me there.

This pitch sounds rushed and overly logical, even to me. Ami has gotten a television crew interested in the story. Maybe I do not want this coverage; maybe the crew will only get in the way. TV could make it explainable, though. Even inevitable. But how can it feel inevitable when I have never broached the subject once?

When the bomb drops, our lives must change: utterly, and forever. The only question is, will we look up or not? Will we recognize that moment when it happens, or only long after it has past? Will there be many moments—a procession, a spiral, a cloud—or only one, one we will live over and over again, until we can feel the world we knew slip out from under our feet and a new one come up to catch us, for good or bad, before we fall?

Here is the truth: I don’t want to have to stay home to be loved. I don’t want to believe I am loveable only as I was. If this is what we have come to, I will not let it stand unspoken. I will not say no to myself any longer, and I can only pray Brian will not say no to me.

I know that the promise I’m about to break is one that
I
made, an offering, unasked for. If this is true, it should be simple enough to change my mind. My lingering fear is that
I promised because Brian
was
asking, that it is a test—them or me—that I am about to fail.

I am going to Fukuyama to see Lily. There are no excuses anymore—no optimistic twisting. Jane’s sister is dead. One of the other women I wanted to base my story on is dead too. But Lily is coming, Lily who may be one of the few people left alive who knows both the camps and the ruins of Hiroshima; one of the few people I can talk to who has not forgotten.

She has something to tell me that I need to know.

BREATHE.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe again.

I am past the point of caring whether I am crying, whether I am yelling, whether Brian is pounding his chest with such fury and desperation that I imagine his sternum might actually break. Neither one of us can hold it down when the children are asleep or hold it back until the children are gone. I am beginning to experience sobbing the way a sick person experiences vomiting. I feel it coming; I fight against it; I do not want under any circumstances to give into it and lose control.

And yet, when I have lost my mind to my tears, lost any
concern for presentation, any ability to move or to censor what I’m saying, I am liberated. It is truthful, and animal, and when it’s over, I am empty.

WHEN THE CHILDREN are finally, possibly asleep, I leave. Do I say where? Would he believe me? Do we talk at all in these days, except to the children or in their presence, when they begin to cling to one or the other of us—sometimes even me now, but only out of fear, I suspect, since I am the one who left. I have taken Kimiko’s old rusty mama-san out for a ride in the December evening, in my two layers of clothing and the men’s jacket I bought at the Gap in the Shareo because nothing in the women’s section fit me. My nose is running and freezing at the same time as I pedal faster to keep myself warm. When I’m tired, I will look for a set of stairs tucked near a bridge, the kind I like to hide in when I sit beside the river, sheltered from the wind.

Two nights ago, it was cold in our apartment, the heater set up in the bedroom for the children, so Brian and I sat at the
kotatsu
that Kimiko lent us for warmth, our lower bodies beneath the blanket at the table in the main room, and I made tea. That is where I finally told him about Lily, that I needed to travel to Fukuyama to do one last interview.
That is where his hands flew up and he came to his feet in a gesture that seemed born in the moment he first saw me in Narita airport. Where his words still linger in the broken air: “That’s it. Do what you want from now on. I’m going back to New York.”

There is no moon tonight along the river. The sky is clouded, so it’s not so cold. I have dropped my bike in the grass and made my way to the set of stairs where I watched the paper lanterns launch from the landing at the Peace Park. How long ago that seems. It’s dark here, but no one will bother me. The stone wall that doubles as the arch of the T-bridge is cold, and rough against my head. There’s nothing here to keep me from my thoughts.

Brian’s expression was as appalled as mine when he heard his own threat. His words unimagined by both of us. We left them there, both of us hoping he would not enact them, both of us knowing these were not idle words. If I had worried about my own responsibility for the slow disintegration of our marriage, it never occurred to me that he would end it. That he could, simply, end it.

“Where is Fukuyama?” he asked. It was the beginning of an offer to follow me there, a willingness to backpedal; we could carry our struggle with us, draw it out without end. I heard his voice echoing off the walls of old conversations:
The boys will be bored while you are working.

“You don’t want to come,” I said.

“You don’t want us to.”

I could feel how it would go—Brian and the boys on the train. Me sitting with Lily while Brian waits somewhere
nearby, hanging over me, a deadline, the exact pressure of being late to meet someone who is waiting on a busy corner. Could I invite them to Lily’s brother’s house? Send them to a castle, but who knew how long that would take? Interviews were just not a series of questions, they were experiences I wanted to think about afterward, mirrors I wanted to look into, thoughts to record in my notebooks for days. If Brian came too, impatiently waiting, wherever I settled him, for “it to be over,” I would have to rush to put Lily away.

I can no longer say what I’m doing. Not what I’m really doing, not even what I think I’m doing. I had no answer for him that night, only the stubborn truth that I did not want him there.

Brian says I’m a wreck. That I have fallen apart. That I have taken myself apart, disassembled who I was and left everything on the floor, where it spins and kicks but is no longer working. I am not the childhood sweetheart he married, I am no one he recognizes. I have forgotten who I was at home, and before that, who I was pre-children, and before that even, I forgot my very childhood.

But if I have a different view, that there was no mold for me in Japan so I’ve grown as I needed to, he is firm in his opinion that I should have definition, that we should both know who I am.

Who am I?

My mother knows. She always did, and that was my safety. That I existed in her, entire, even when I could not
put a name to myself or face the emotions and impulses inside me. Now I cannot seem to stop them from taking me over, but she is still the only one who can tell me what I should do now.

I could ask her.

By the river where I watched the paper lanterns, the only light is from the cars that pass like ghosts on a mission. I close my eyes, waiting to feel my mother beside me. If there is a world of spirits, then surely we are also them incarnate, and we can call them to us.

At one time in my life, I was embedded in my mother. In her knowing, and seeing, before I was consciously able to project what I thought I was. Before I was old enough to get mixed up in that projection, she knew me. What did she say to assure me? What words did she use, even when I was an adult, on the subway train, about to have a breakdown; how did she tell me
you are my child
? And if she is the only one who might still recognize me, is it me who is already gone?

There is no answer. When was the last time I felt my mother’s presence? What was the last thing she said to me before my family arrived? It is crazy to me that I cannot remember this. I was given a gift, to know her, how could I have let that slip away, not have cherished those revelations? They are written somewhere, in my diary in the house where Brian waits, but how can they not exist in my mind? My mother was always there for me. I remember her
body lying next to mine, holding me on the day when I was five and I stole bubblegum from the local store. I remember the orchid she put on a plate next to my sandwich when she was the only one I allowed in my room on those first, postpartum depression days after Ian was born. Where did she get an orchid in Brooklyn? How did she wear her hair in those days?

What did she say to me that day, on my bed, or did she say nothing?

Where did you go? How can you have left me? I am not ready for this, not equipped yet—I know I should be, a thirty-seven-year-old woman and a mother in my own right, but you are the one who made me a mother, you are the one who said,
things will change
. What do I do now, that they are changing? What do I do with the boys who will not hug me for more than an instant, who send their cheerful I love yous from across the room? What do I give up for them? And what of this husband of mine who will not love me as I am, who will not let me love him, who wants the life he had, the wife he had, and feels cheated that these were not objects, immutable and possessable? He wants to know who I intend to be now; he wants me to propose it so we can negotiate who I will be.