Yellowstone Memories (49 page)

“Yes.” Taka raised his face slowly. “But you’re not the only one who suffered unjustly from the war, Jersey. Nor your grandfather.”

She tipped her head and waited for him to continue.

“My mother was a prisoner here.”

“Here?”

“Right here, as a matter of fact.”

Jersey looked at him as if he’d lost his marbles. “I don’t follow.”

“In one of the Civilian Conversation Corps buildings here in Yellowstone National Park.”

Jersey rocked forward and put her hand on the grass to steady herself. “Wait a second. You mean your mom was held here?” She dropped her voice. “During the war?” She squinted at Taka in disbelief. “Was she an American citizen?”

“I’m an American citizen.” Taka’s head came up, and his voice sounded harsh in her ears. “I’m both Japanese and American. I have dual citizenship. But I chose to stay in Fukushima after I heard how Americans treated my mother.” His eyes snapped. “She was a child then, Jersey. No more than three or four years old. But because she was Japanese, she and her family were rounded up and jailed like prisoners just a few miles from here.” A muscle in his jaw tightened. “Believe me, Yellowstone was the last place I wanted to come to do my research. But it was the only place left after I applied to all the others. So you’ll pardon me if I harbor a few prejudices of my own.”

Jersey opened her mouth to reply, in pity and in indignation, when Masao spotted Taka through the pines. He put down his saw and threw up both hands in delight, grinning and waving a handkerchief for Taka to see.

Taka stood up abruptly and strode over to Masao, greeting him in effusive Japanese and bowing repeatedly.

She crouched there among the pines, watching him go. Picturing Taka’s mother as a little tear-streaked toddler, boarding a ship bound for Fukushima. Leaving the snowcapped mountains of Yellowstone behind her as a dark and frightening dream.

Between the hauling and the machete whacking and sanding, Jersey didn’t have a single moment to speak to Taka until nightfall of the following day. He’d politely refilled her teacup, and she’d equally politely thanked him in front of the group for organizing the volunteer team.

They’d fished and fried cutthroat trout—ahem,
Oncorhynchus clarkii
—and Jersey was elbow-deep in dirty plastic bowls when Taka tapped her arm with the blunt end of a chopstick.

“Taka.” Jersey looked up. “Thanks for the fish tutorial.” She said it partially in jest, as he’d rattled on for nearly twenty minutes about some special predator-prey relationship with the bull trout that was supposedly key to “ecosystem integrity”—and how the species name “clarki” came from Lewis and Clark’s 1804–1806 expedition into the Northwest.

He’d translated it of course, into Japanese, which took another twenty minutes.

“Fish tutorial?” Taka blinked rapidly. “Oh that.” He gave a hint of a smile. “No problem. Can you walk with me?”

“Now? I’m finishing dishes.”

“Ah.” Taka shrugged. “You’ve done enough. Come on.” And he started down toward the dock.

Jersey dried her hands on a towel and followed him. The sun was setting, slipping below the horizon in a blaze of orange. It sank like a dying fire, glittering on the lake water, until it disappeared in a wash of starry deep blue. They sat down on the dock, not speaking, and watched fish jump in the dark lake waters.

“You’re doing great with the team, Jersey.” Taka spoke without looking up.

She turned, wrinkling her nose at the stench of bug spray that wafted from his direction. He reeked of DEET and chemical repellant.

“I didn’t know if you’d be able to deal with the language barrier, but you’re doing just fine.” He flicked a bug off his shirt. “Even if you have been avoiding me.”

“No I haven’t.”

“Yes you have. And it’s probably my fault. I’m sorry.” Taka reached up to smack a whiny mosquito. “There’s no excuse for prejudice of any kind—regardless of what happened to my mother. You didn’t do it to her.”

“No.” Jersey didn’t know what to say. If only it were so simple to release years of mistrust.

Jersey crossed her blue-jeaned legs on the dock, gazing up at a strip of frosty green sky on the horizon. Instead of darkening with the setting sun, it shimmered there, stretching pale arms the length of the black, pine-studded horizon.

Taka was looking at it, too. “Aurora borealis?” he gasped, jerking his glasses straight to see better. “I can’t believe it. Our latitude isn’t exactly conducive to sightings, is it? Most aurorae occur in the auroral zone, typically three to six degrees in latitudinal extent—normally ten to twenty degrees from the earth’s magnetic pole. The pole, that is, defined by the axis of the magnetic dipole.”

“Aurorae?” Jersey scrunched an eyebrow. “You’re making this up as you go, aren’t you?”

“Of course not. That’s the plural from the Latin. You studied Latin, correct? During a geomagnetic storm, however, this auroral zone may expand to lower latitudes, including the one represented here, no?”

Jersey sank her head into her knees in exasperation. “How am I supposed to answer that?” she mumbled, rocking her head back and forth.

They lapsed into momentary silence on the creaking dock, interrupted only by the lapping of water on the pilings and the occasional whine of a mosquito and subsequent slap.

Jersey watched as the glow misted and spread, rippling around the edges like an enormous gauze curtain of filmy ghost-green. Lances of palest green, nearly white, pierced the starry sky like a searchlight, stretching over the black lake waters and shimmering, dancing, on their darkened surfaces.

A fish jumped, sending out sparkling black rings dappled with green.

“What does the
T
stand for?” Taka turned to Jersey suddenly and without warning, his whole face a wash of palest green.

“What
T
?” Jersey glanced at him uncomfortably.

“The wooden
T
you used to wear around your neck on a chain.” Taka gestured, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “Where is it?”

Jersey didn’t answer. She looked out over the lake and drew her feet up, stiffening a bit in the night breeze. “My son’s name,” she finally said, drawing the delicate cord from her pocket. “The cord broke, but … I had a son once.”

She waited for Taka to grimace in displeasure or scoot away, but he said nothing. Didn’t move. Black eyes fixed gently on her face.

Jersey started to put the necklace back in her pocket, but Taka reached out instead.

“Let me fix your necklace,” he said softly. “I’m good at fixing things.”

Jersey hesitated then handed him the necklace in a crumpled pile. Almost afraid to release it into someone else’s hand.

“I was seventeen. My boyfriend was nineteen, and …” Jersey looked down at the dock, stroking a weather-worn crack in the wood with her thumbnail. “My family’s a bunch of prominent designers in Chicago, and they didn’t approve. They told me to … to get rid of my child.”

“Designers?”

“Fashion designers. Haven’t you ever heard of the Ana Peterson line?”

“Of course, but you can’t mean …” Taka’s mouth wobbled open.

“Yes. The same.” Jersey scratched at a spot on the knee of her pants. “Ana’s my mom. A famous runway model for years. My dad was her tailor, and now my twin sisters and younger brother are all models and designers. My dad makes a fortune in bespoke suits that cost tens of thousands of dollars each—all imported thread and fancy stitching. A hand-carved button in his shop on the Magnificent Mile costs two hundred bucks.”

Taka leaned back on his hands, sizing her up. “You didn’t care for their way of life?”

“Cocktail parties and fashion shows and inflated egos? No thanks.” Jersey shook her head. “One of my sisters is still struggling with anorexia, last I heard, and my brother’s trying to hide his drug habit. I don’t look like them, all perfect and thin and creamy-complexioned, and they let me know it.”

She looked down at her hands, her nails clipped close and clean. The thin coat of sheer polish she’d swiped on before the trip already beginning to chip along the edges.

“So what if you don’t look like them? You say it as if you regret it. But you don’t need to. You’re you, Jersey. There’s nothing wrong with that, and you don’t need to apologize.”

“I’m not apologizing.” Jersey’s voice came out a little more snappishly than she intended. “But I didn’t exactly enjoy being called ‘the ugly duckling’ or told to suck in my gut so I could fit in something frilly like my two dainty sisters. My mom wanted me to get a nose job when I turned fourteen. I refused.”

“Good for you.” Taka lifted his chin.

“Yeah, well. That’s easy for you to say.”

Taka didn’t speak for a second, and Jersey thought the conversation was over. But when she glanced over at him again, his look had darkened.

“It’s not easy for me to say,” he said stiffly, sitting up straight and crossing his arms. “You don’t know my past.”

“And you don’t know mine.” Jersey faced him, feeling anger flare up. “It’s always easy to judge someone else from the outside of a situation, isn’t it?”

“I’m not judging you.” Taka raised his voice slightly—a first for him.

She turned huffily back to the northern lights, spreading misty green fingers through the pines, and watched the colors shimmer and stretch across the lake water.

“My mother was a seamstress,” Taka began in a husky, faraway voice that told Jersey she was about to hear something deep. “I told you that. Who knows—maybe she even sewed some of your father’s suits?”

Jersey’s shoulders jumped in silent laughter at the thought. “Nah. They were mostly from New York. But I like the thought.”

Taka scooted across the wooden boards next to her, dangling his socked feet over the edge. One shoulder brushing hers. She scooted away, but one long strand of her hair stayed stuck to his sleeve.

“She was an amazing seamstress. The way her hands moved with the needle, the way she pulled the thread through the fabric in a beautiful straight line, shining like … like one of your hairs when the sun hits it.” He glanced at her with an unexpected fond expression, his eyes faraway. “And my father. He also worked with beauty.”

“How so?”

“His family descends from one of the most respected houses of flower schools in all Japan—called Ikenobo. They’ve been practicing flower arranging for nearly five hundred years.
Ikebana
, it’s called. The art of giving life to flowers so that they create poetry and symmetry with nature. My mother was proud to marry him because, being rather highborn herself, it was an honor to align her family with a man descended from the Ikenobo.”

Jersey swung her feet, and her toes felt weightless. Down below her the water swirled in surprising tones of jade, not quite close enough to touch.

“And then my father did the unthinkable: he converted to Christianity.”

Taka put a hand up to fix his glasses, and Jersey looked up in surprise at his calm, even emotionless tone.

“Worse yet, he converted because of a friendship he struck up with an American GI after the war, which made him more than a mere embarrassment. It made him a deserter, consorting with the enemy and rejecting his family’s religious beliefs for those of a foreign invader. My mother was mortified with shame. She wept; she could scarcely show her face in public.”

Jersey bristled at the words
enemy
and
foreign invader
.

“In his blinding fanaticism, as some might call it, he turned his whole style of art on its head—to the horror, or perhaps fascination, of the ikebana schools. Instead of the traditional Buddhist expressions of the beauty of nature, or the relationship between heaven, earth, and man, he created something new: an ikebana style that depicted the Gospel and the fall of man.”

Jersey’s eyes shot up in the darkness. “Huh?”

“He made incredible displays where the viewer could turn at different angles and see a cross, for example—as if carelessly formed between the leaves. Or a crown of thorns that bridged the gap between the traditional heaven,
ten
, and man,
jin
. He was magnificent. He used the best rare flowers, the most precise calculations and formulas for angles and leaves and stems—poring over them for hours. He knew it all, and he decided to use his medium as a mouthpiece to the world, turning his new heart and mind into his art.”

“And what happened?” Jersey leaned forward.

“He was forced out of his position in disgrace. The Ikenobo sensei said he’d defied all the most cherished tenets of ikebana, and he worked a salaryman’s job at a computer store chain until my mother’s death.”

Jersey sucked in her breath, not having the courage to ask.

“She threw herself under a train. The traditional method of suicide in Japan.”

“Taka.” Jersey shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me, too.” Taka sighed. “But … that’s my story. Like my dad, I’ve thrown all my caution to the wind.” He imitated a plane crashing. “All of my research is about one thing: migration. And my thesis, as it did with my kangaroo studies, leads to creation by intelligent design as opposed to the traditional evolutionary theories of order from chaos. I’ll be laughed off the planet and ridiculed as a crazy man, but I can prove my points with any biochemist out there.”