The Journey Prize Stories 22 (12 page)

For an hour. Sometimes two. It goes on for weeks. Her body attenuates – strips down to a new leanness, searching for its truest form.

Peter talks to the college.
No, not yet. She's not ready
.

He calls her mother.

I'm worried
.

He calls the doctor.

She's disappearing
.

She walks in a new direction and passes a convenience store, and then she stops, alarmed. She recognizes the face behind the counter. It is Esam. Katrin sits on the parking lot curb and watches him among racks of chips and bags of milk, his stillness backlit by fluorescent lights.

She comes back again the next night, crouches outside the store.

She is in love. The untrembling mouth. The strength of his forearms. The genius of his belt pulled taut. The harsh exactness of him – they are the same person at the core. She can feel her heart beat again, her lungs push sorely against her ribs. She returns to Peter, before the alarm sounds, works her mouth over him like a cash-hungry addict. He wakes up crying. Katrin lies on her back, listens and thinks of Esam.

She walks to the convenience store every night. She feels desperate, stretched thin working up the courage to go in. She brushes her hair again, puts on lip gloss, fresh clothes. He is there, counting out change, stocking cigarettes. Katrin opens the door. Their lives are fused.

Esam is talking to another customer when she enters. Katrin flips through a few magazines and then selects one. She will buy something, respect the protocol of commerce. She stands in line and then there is no one else but her. And him.

“Hey, Miss. It's you.”

She smiles.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Good. Good. Back at school, working a few shifts.”

She waits.

“Hey, I visited Giovanna in the hospital. She can curl her fingers.”

Katrin goes silent. She has forgotten about the girl; she has not gone to the hospital.

“Have you lost weight, Miss?”

She looks at herself.

“I guess.”

“You look so different.”

Now she sees what they don't share. He looks just the same, the very same as he did the first week of classes. And Katrin realizes all she knows of Esam is what he did. She doesn't know if he is originally from Iraq, or Palestine, Medicine Hat or Brampton. She has no idea how far his life has been pulled taut. How elastic he is.

“Are you okay, Miss?”

She comes to, nods her head.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What happened in the classroom, in our classroom …”

“Yeah?”

She clears her throat.

“That's not the worst thing to happen to you is it?”

His dark eyes retreat perceptibly. The smile flattens. He holds her gaze.

“Not even close, Miss.”

————

The drive takes an hour. Katrin sits across from Giovanna and they do not speak. Her mother is in the kitchen making espresso. The girl shifts on the sofa, and her cardigan falls to reveal her bare upper arm. The bullet wound is a fleshy sinkhole rimmed with mother-of-pearl scarring. Katrin pulls her eyes away.

“Are you okay?” she asks weakly.

Giovanna sniffs and shoots back a hot, hard look. Katrin's face gets warm.

“What is it Giovanna?”

“Those stories – the newspaper stories.”

“Yes?”

“Not one of them ……Nobody interviewed said …”

“I never read them.”

She feels the girl's centrifugal anxiety; how she grips the armrests of the chair. Katrin longs to flee.

“You
never
read them?”

“No. I couldn't ……why?”

Giovanna pulls her shoulders back, thrusts her face forward.

“Nobody mentioned the memo. That you didn't read the fucking memo!”

Katrin starts. Giovanna's cheeks are pink, her eyes bright and glassy. The mother enters the room and places a tray on the coffee table.

Then the large woman kneels before Katrin, grabs her hands, and wraps them in her own.

“I want to say thank you. On behalf of my daughter and I, I want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

A tear streams down the woman's cheek and Katrin watches Giovanna stiffen behind her mother's genuflection.

Back in her car, she knows she won't go back to visit. Still she feels lighter, released. Giovanna's version of events feels familiar, akin to her own. She pulls into a roadside diner, orders gravy-smothered mashed potatoes and a butter tart. Her stomach throbs with its new fullness.

Katrin stops walking and starts sleeping. She sleeps at night and she sleeps into the morning. When she gets up in the afternoon she is still so dizzy with accumulated fatigue that making a bowl of soup leaves her drowsy all over again. She sleeps for a week like this, and then one morning she wakes to the sounds of her husband in the kitchen making breakfast for Ariane. She gets out of bed and goes down the stairs. Peter jumps when he sees her at the threshold. She walks over to Ariane, who is slouched in a chair, listening to her iPod and staring out the window. She kneels before her daughter, pulls out Ariane's earbuds, and lays her head on the girl's lap.

Finally, she awakens aching for her old routine. She opens cupboards, makes a list, goes grocery shopping. Between the baking supplies and confectionary of aisle 2, she stops her cart at the heels of a young man staring at her. It is Cody. His T-shirt hangs off him like a wet sweater.

“Miss.”

Katrin smiles.

“How are you?”

He lifts a trembling hand to his jaw, as if to comfort an ache there. She sees his eyes are watering, the lazy eye more so. “Okay, I guess.”

He hesitates. “I didn't …”

She reaches out and brushes his shoulder with her hand.

“You did. You stayed safe.”

“But Warbly? Ole Bill? And the leotards, Miss. The fuckin' leotards.”

His nose is running; he wipes it across his forearm.

“If I didn't, somebody else would have.”

She pauses, finds something else. “Like you. Most definitely you.”

She feels him deflate, right there between the Magic Baking Powder, coconut milk, and instant frosting tins. Weeks of something sour and uncomfortable escape through the invisible puncture made by her touch.

“I'm afraid all the time,” he says.

The words feel extraordinary, weightless. They hang between them.

The air in Katrin's lungs thins. Her heartbeat whacks against her ears. For a terrible second, she is overwhelmed by the ferrous scent of blood, the crack of bullets and shattering glass, the taste of puke in her mouth.

A resin of sweat beads on her upper lip and she reaches out towards a kilogram of sugar, anything to keep her upright. It's the young man's arm that rescues her, provides the ballast.

“You okay, Miss?”

Her steadiness returns. She remembers now the glance that passed between them – a moment of emptiness, certainly, but something else, something warmer too. Recognition of the part of themselves reflected in the other, perhaps. She sees again how his body – the muscled trunk, the squat powerful
thighs – unclenched, crumpled, gave in to a bliss of forgetfulness, sinking into the shoulder of another startled being. Katrin remembers, finally, how wholly the boy yielded in that moment. The sight appeared devastating to her and, at the same time, so very, very beautiful.

E
ver since his wife had planted the notion of Mitsuo's loneliness in his mind, Toshiyuki Nakai found that images of his grown son floated unbidden before his eyes with increasing frequency. These images came to him at odd times throughout the day, without any apparent reason or connection to what he was doing. He might be seated at his desk scanning the latest sales spreadsheet when he would suddenly picture Mitsuo trudging home to his dark, empty apartment. Or, in the middle of the weekly managers' meeting, when Yamakawa-san was reading the same monotonous business report he always did, Toshiyuki might close his eyes and see his son's head bowed over a bowl of instant noodles, which he ate in his blank, unadorned kitchen. Lately, while standing in the crowded Tokyo commuter train he took home every evening, Toshiyuki found he was repeatedly assailed by the image of Mitsuo lying in bed by himself, curled over on one side, his knees drawn up to his chin like a child.

But while Toshiyuki felt a growing heaviness in his heart
each time he thought about his son, tonight's event filled him with a not inconsiderable amount of dread.

He left the office as early as he could – at the last minute a colleague had wanted to go over some details for a new marketing plan, but Toshiyuki managed to beg off until the next day, explaining without elaboration that he had an important appointment and promising to take the document home to read. By the time he arrived at the Dai'ichi Hotel and made his way to the Azalea Room, where the seminar was being held, there was a long lineup. He groaned inwardly, recalling how anxious Yumiko had been. “Try to get there early if you can,” she'd urged repeatedly this morning as she helped him on with his raincoat and handed him his briefcase. “Remember, this is for Mitsuo. We want to get good seats.”

Toshiyuki joined the line, and immediately two middle-aged women came and stood behind him. They were talking in loud, excited voices, and one of them pressed up so close he could feel her warm breath on the back of his neck every time she laughed. As they had arranged, Yumiko was to wait for him inside.

The Azalea Room was spacious and brightly lit, large enough to hold a good-sized wedding reception, the function it usually served on weekends and holidays. Round tables covered with white linen filled the room, and in the middle of each table was a slender silver stand holding a numbered card. Over to the far right, at “no. 24,” Toshiyuki saw Yumiko waving her arm at him. Normally his wife was not the type to flap her limbs with such abandon like an excited teenager, but these past few weeks Toshiyuki had noticed she was acting bolder and more direct, even at home.

“You made it just in time,” Yumiko murmured in a low voice as he sat down next to her. “Here, let me pin your badge on.”

He lowered his head in silent greeting to the couple sitting across the table and they bowed in return, their name badges – Mr. and Mrs. Yamaguchi – lightly grazing the top of the table as they bent forward. Through the doorway, Toshiyuki could see more and more people streaming into the room. The tables were filling up rapidly; it would be a big crowd tonight, a full house. The two women he'd seen in the lineup were on the opposite side of the room, yet even from here he could hear their loud laughter.

They were here because of something Yumiko had said one night several months ago just as they were about to go to sleep. “Lonely,” she'd whispered hoarsely, following this with a heavy sigh. “So lonely.”

At first Toshiyuki assumed she meant herself. Mitsuo was their only child and his decision to move to his own apartment almost two years before meant that the house was quieter than ever.

“It's normal to feel lonely,” he said, trying his best to show sensitivity. “You need to get out of the house more.”

“No, not me. I'm talking about Mitsuo.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said: Mitsuo's lonely.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No, of course not. Mitsuo doesn't want us to see his loneliness, he's trying to protect us.” Yumiko paused. “He needs someone.”

“He's still got lots of time.”

“Thirty-four is not young. But it's more than that.”

In the darkness Yumiko shifted her weight and turned over on her side. Toshiyuki heard her sigh several times, the last time a long, noisy rush of air, almost as if she were trying to exhale all the disappointment she felt. After a moment, she said, “Do you really believe your son is happy?”

Toshiyuki didn't usually stop to think about things like happiness, but he definitely counted himself blessed in marriage and family. It had been an arranged marriage, nothing unusual for his generation, and it had worked out uncommonly well. Yumiko had been a good wife to him and a loving, tender mother to Mitsuo. Toshiyuki, in turn, felt comfortable in the belief that he was a solid provider. Even after so many years, he still enjoyed his job in the electronics firm where he had risen to a senior management position; he liked the invigorating stimulus of the workplace. Of course, work could also be subject to sudden shifts and unexpected changes – there'd been more than a few rocky times – but that was inevitable in the world of business. His marriage, on the other hand, had been a source of stability, like a thick heavy pole planted firmly in the water, against which he could measure the rise and fall of the tide, the tug of the waves left and right. Yes, marriage was a good thing. As a father, it was only natural to hope – to assume – that his son would eventually settle into a similar equilibrium.

After the lights in the Azalea Room dimmed and brightened three times in quick succession, the hum of conversation subsided
and everyone watched a tall, trim woman enter from a side door and march towards the podium. The woman tapped her finger lightly on the microphone.

“Good evening, everyone, and welcome. My name is Aiko Mori, president and founder of Concerned Parents of Un-married Offspring.” The woman spoke in the crisp, confident manner of someone used to addressing large audiences. She wore a dark purple suit with a short fitted jacket that emphasized her narrow waist and slim hips, and her hair, which was cut very short, had a glossy sheen that reflected the light whenever she moved her head. Toshiyuki was reminded of the sleek head of a seal. “Tonight,” Aiko Mori continued, “is an important beginning for you and for your children. Tonight is the beginning of a journey towards happiness.”

A hush fell over the room, intensified by the dramatic pause in Aiko Mori's speech. Toshiyuki noticed several people nodding their heads. He stole a sideways glance at Yumiko, but she was facing straight ahead, perfectly still, her neck stretched forward as if pulled by an invisible wire.