Dreaming water Page 10

  During my second year at Jefferson, I was reunited with Laura and my other friends from Daring Elementary. I still remember how intensely happy I felt then. I had a best friend again, who knew me for who I was. Over the summer, Laura had had a growth spurt and stood almost a foot taller than me. The first week of school we walked down the long, green hallway lined with gray lockers, and I paid little attention to the stares or wisecracks. We were dubbed the Princess and the Pea. Once, when Laura heard some girls making fun of us during study hall, she went over and told them, "You're right, Hana is a princess, and I don't mind being her pea at all!"

  It was during a sleepover on my fourteenth birthday that I first told Laura that something might be wrong with me. We were sitting on top of our sleeping bags and she was eating popcorn and deciding what nail polish color to use.

  "Laura, I need to tell you something."

  "So tell," she said, not looking at me.

  "You know how I've been feeling tired all the time?"

  Laura reached for more popcorn. "My mother says we get those dark pillows under our eyes when we don't get enough sleep."

  "Laura!" I said, hard and flat, demanding her attention. She looked up at me. "Well, my doctors in San Francisco think there might be something wrong with me, that's why I'm still so small. I might have this disease. It's called Werner's syndrome. It'll make me grow older much faster than normal." I said it all in one quick stream of words, glad to have finally gotten it out.

  Laura kept watching me, her blue eyes narrowing, trying to decide if I was playing a joke on her or not. "What do you mean?" she finally asked.

  I swallowed hard. "Well, if it is Werner's syndrome, it means there's something in my body that'll make me grow older twice as fast as you. I'll be an old lady way before you." It seemed like such a silly thing to say that I almost wanted to laugh.

  Laura stared at me and became serious. "Is that why you were taking all those tests?"

  "Yeah." '

  "You'll look older? Sooner?"

  I nodded. "And I'll most likely die a lot sooner, too." I was surprised at how easily the words came out of my mouth, as if I were talking about someone else, a tragic character from Anna Karenina, the novel I was reading.

  "And the doctors can't do anything about it?" she asked, putting the bottle of Cherry Mist nail polish down.

  I shook my head. "They don't know that much about Werner's syndrome yet. They aren't even sure I have it. The signs of it don't really show until I'm in my twenties."

  "But they discover stuff all the time," she quickly added.

  "Yeah, they do."

  Tears filled her eyes as she listened to me. I don't know if she really understood what I was saying, since Werner wasn't really evident yet, and it sounded like something out of The Twilight Zone. I remember the Jim Croce song "Operator" playing in the background.

  "Are you in any pain?" Laura finally asked, her blond bangs falling across her eyes. She whispered the words as if she were in pain.

  I shook my head. "Right now, it's hard to believe there's anything wrong with me," I said, "except that I'm small."

  "Will you grow any taller?" she asked. Laura had grown to five eight by the time she was twelve.

  I shook my head again. "This is it." I could see Laura's eyes glance quickly up and down my body in wonderment. Until that moment, I still hoped I might reach five feet. We looked like a circus act walking down the street together, but it never seemed to faze Laura. Without knowing what possessed me, I said, "Wanna see?" I unbuttoned my pajama top to show her my breasts were still two flat nipples. Laura was so thin and gangly herself, I couldn't imagine she was much more endowed.

  Laura laughed and wiped the tears from her eyes. "Breasts are overrated, especially when you have to run the mile in RE. Who needs the extra baggage?"

  We laughed, then listened to the music in silence, neither of us saying anything else about Werner.

  That night, we slept side by side in our sleeping bags on the floor of my bedroom. It smelled of popcorn and nail polish. When we turned off the light, moonlight filled the room with a strange white glow. We whispered words back and forth until we were too tired to talk. Just before I drifted off, Laura reached over and took my hand in hers, holding it tightly.

  CATE

  Ghosts

  I look up at the window but Hana hasn't returned. I imagine she's retreated to Max's study, where hundreds of books, mostly concerning Asian and European history, ancient civilizations, subjects he loved to teach, line the bookcases. A voracious reader, Hana takes after him. Rarely did I ever see either of them without a book in hand or close by. I remember, early in our marriage, asking Max what was it about the past that intrigued him so.

  "How can we appreciate the present and our future if we don't understand the past?" he responded thoughtfully, then looked up at me with a smile of pure joy. "The more I learn about other cultures, the more I see how much we're all alike."

  I knew at that moment why he was such a good teacher, because even if he had to say the same thing over and over again each year to new groups of enraptured students, it was a subject he never tired of.

  I prune the last of the rosebushes. Sometimes I find myself surprised it's just Hana and me living here together. At the oddest moments, I still feel Max's presence. It's strangely comforting, yet painful at the same time. Is this what it means to be haunted?

  The evening Max died three years ago, it was so sudden I never had a chance to say good-bye. He came home from work, walked up the stairs to the bedroom to change before dinner, and never came back down again. When I went up to get him, Max was half slumped on the bed, almost in a kneeling position, his tie on the floor, his shirt unbuttoned. I knew he was dead the moment my fingers touched the back of his neck, the warmth already waning, the last of his life seeping away. I stroked the back of his gray head, leaned over and kissed him just below his ear.

  I've tried to imagine what he might have been thinking the instant the blood vessel burst in his head. Did he realize that death had come? Did he call out my name, or did blinding pain take away his voice? Did his life flash before him in black-and-white photos like you see in the movies? For weeks after, I felt numb, his presence still everywhere. I tried to remember our last conversation, what words he had gone away taking with him. I couldn't. I lay in bed night after night playing it all back in my head, until one sleepless night I turned on all the faucets in the house. Hana must have thought I'd gone insane, and rightly so, though she didn't say a word. Just the sound of all the rushing water seemed to calm me, and with it, Max's last words came back to me.

  "Where's Hana?" Max had asked. He kissed the back of my neck, his lips dry and cool. I still long for those kisses.

  I was making meat loaf, potatoes, and vegetables. "Upstairs, I think." Words said without thinking. Did I even look back at him? See how tired he was? His hair had grayed considerably the year before he died, and there was a slight puffiness to his face that came with age.

  "I'll tell her dinner's almost ready," he said, his voice sounding weary.

  But he never did.

  What were Max's last words to Hana? All I could think was that she'd have to reach back even further, to that morning, before he left the house, to find his voice again.

  I was unprepared for the cold, sudden shock that my life with Max had ended. It was much too soon. After spending more than half of my life with him, I couldn't believe that he would no longer walk through the back door every day, the sound of his calm voice like a cool drink of water. After his deaths I couldn't catch my breath. Grief made it hard to swallow, to talk, even to think. During all those sleepless nights after Max died, I still had one-sided conversations with him in my head. "Where are you?" Frightened, I touched the empty space in our bed. Who would be left to take care of me? It seemed like such a selfish thought, but in the darkness all my fears surfaced in flashes of self-pity. Suddenly it was my responsibility alone to stay healthy and alive for Hana. An
d then one day, she too would be gone. These thoughts circled my mind like a swarm of stinging bees.

  Lily came over and stayed with us the first week after Max died. "What about Ben?" I pulled myself together enough to ask. Her easygoing husband owned the Daring Hardware Store.

  "Don't worry about Ben. Now that the kids are out of the house, he wants nothing more than to be alone with the 'sixty-four Sting-Ray he's rebuilding," Lily said. "He won't even notice that I'm gone."

  Lily took over the household, ordering me to get some rest, as if I were one of her students. She made our dinner and kept Hana company, while I went upstairs to lie down. With the curtains drawn, I lay in the shadowy room and tried not to cry, emptying my mind of all the voices and memories, but they kept coming back like unwanted guests.

  I took care of Hana in silence, going through the motions I knew by heart. I couldn't bear the thought of losing her too, of being left behind. I kept waiting to hear Max's voice whisper in my ear that it was all just a bad nightmare.

  But it was Hana's voice that called me out. One evening after Lily went home, as we were clearing the table after dinner, she said, "God made another mistake. I was the one who was supposed to leave first." I heard the anger and grief in her words as they came out hard and flat. Her face was sad and serious. And then my sorrow rose up and a great, warm flood of tears fell and, for the first time in months, I slept through the night.

  I shake the thought away, forcing myself to stay in the present, turning on the water and picking up the hose to water the barren rosebushes. Come late spring, when their green buds begin to emerge, I'll have Hana right here with me to explain how important this garden is to me.

  HANA

  My Father s History

  I feel Max's presence most strongly in his study. The worn leather chair, the large old desk, and his favorite pen still in the top drawer. All the hours he spent among his books, preparing his classes, writing papers on the ancient civilizations of China and Persia, extracting the wonders of the world and the peoples who lived thousands of years before us. Sometimes I still hear his voice. When I was a child, he told me stories of Alexander the Great, Marie Curie, and Marco Polo, but it wasn't until I'd studied the internment camps, in seventh grade, that I saw for the first time my father's own history.

  I finally began to understand what his family had gone through, how they were herded together like cattle and sent away to relocation camps in the middle of some barren landscape, name tags clipped to their coats as if they were pieces of merchandise. I learned that eighty-five men from Heart Mountain, the largest number from any camp, refused to mark yes to questions asked on a "loyalty oath" to America. They were branded resisters and sentenced to a state penitentiary for three years, while hundreds of other Japanese American men fought and died for their country.

  That was just a few months before I found out about Werner. Max's family had been silent for so long, I was stunned to learn that this was part of my history, too. I couldn't understand how he could have folded away his past so completely.

  But it wasn't until I was twelve that I questioned Max about Heart Mountain for the first time. I came downstairs after reading a chapter in my history book on the Japanese internment camps to find him correcting papers in his study. "What was it like at Heart Mountain?" I asked, leaning lightly against the doorframe.

  He looked up and rubbed his cheek in thought, then put down the papers. "Let's go for a walk before dinner," he said.

  I could hear my mother in the kitchen talking to Lily on the phone about a class she was substituting.

  "We'll be right back," I yelled to her as we stepped out into a mild May evening. The sun was just falling behind the redwood trees in the distance.

  "Let's go to the creek," he said.

  It was a place in the nearby woods that we both loved. At the end of our block was the dirt trail that led to the creek. The air was sweet and pungent from the pine trees.

  I looked up at Max, a glint of gray showing around his temples. "What was it like at Heart Mountain?" I asked again, eager to know more.

  "It was a prison," he answered, his voice tight as he kept walking, leaves crackling under his foot. "There were nine guard towers and fences with barbed wire surrounding the entire compound. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in nineteen forty-one, everyone of Japanese ancestry was suddenly caught in the web of suspicion. President Roosevelt ordered all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to be confined in internment camps, under the guise of protection. We were all forced to sell or leave behind everything we owned and had worked so hard for, only to be herded into camps in the middle of nowhere. All because the government thought we were dangerous, simply because of our heritage."

  "But you were Americans." My voice rose higher. We walked onto the well-worn trail, lined with pine and eucalyptus trees, that led us to the creek, where the clear water flowed all year round. We could hear the birds fluttering in the trees, the soft songs of the crickets already playing.

  Max nodded. "We were. We always were, no matter how the government tried to make us feel as if we weren't. Your uncle Tag and I played baseball and football, dreamed of hamburgers and milk shakes. Uncle Tag even tacked up a poster of Veronica Lake above his cot. At the same time, we ate rice, spoke broken Japanese to our parents, and occasionally lit incense at a makeshift shrine to honor our ancestors. It was part of our heritage. Did that make us less American?"

  I shook my head no and leaned over to pick up a fallen branch.

  Max stopped and licked his dry lips. He was tall, and still lean and athletic for a man in his forties. I could see his Adam's apple move up and down as he swallowed. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "We live in a world in which to look or act different is to inspire fear and provoke anger." He looked at me, and his eyes were kind and tired. "People seem to make the same mistakes over and over again."

  "I'm sorry," I said softly, poking the fallen leaves with the branch. "If you were old enough, would you have signed the loyalty oath?" The sudden dark, dank coolness of the tree tunnel we were walking through made me shiver. I gripped the branch tighter in my hand.

  Max leaned closer and smiled. "Do you know about that?"

  I nodded. "It was something you signed to prove your loyalty to America."

  He smiled, then turned serious again. We walked on in silence and continued down a path to the creek. I could hear the water rippling and smell the damp earth.

  Max stopped when we reached the creek, where he watched the water for a while, then said, "There was a young man, Danny Ito, the older brother of my school friend Bobby, who refused to sign the loyalty oath." He paused. "Danny was eighteen, old enough to be drafted. The two questions on the loyalty oath asked, first, if he would fight for the United States and, second, if he would forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan. Danny marked no and no to the questions and wouldn't change his mind, even at the urging of all his family and friends. 'Why do I have to prove I'm loyal?' I remember him arguing, I'm as American as any one of those guards out there! If they'd treat me like an American, I'd fight tomorrow. And I've never sworn allegiance to the emperor, so why should I revoke something I've never done!' "

  Max helped me down the embankment, and we sat on a flat rock at the edge of the creek. The sound of the water was comforting. Then he continued, "Late one afternoon, when Bobby and I were about ten, we were walking around the camp minding our own business, still full of energy after winning a baseball game with some other boys. Before we knew it, we'd walked to the far end of the compound by the water pumps, lost in the excitement of our win. Bobby was swinging the bat, and I was punching my mitt like we were major leaguers." My father stopped and leaned over to dip his cupped hands into the cold, clear water, drinking a mouthful and letting the rest trickle through his fingers. "It was a warm day and there was a dry wind blowing. Out of nowhere came the smell of cigarette smoke, which we picked up and followed like a couple of hunting dogs. When we reached
the last tar-paper barrack, we heard a low moaning sound and men laughing. We looked around the building to see three guards hitting and kicking somebody slumped on the ground. When he shifted his arms to cover the back of his head, we saw it was Danny they were beating."

  "What did you do?" I asked, my voice breaking.

  "Before I had a chance to think, Bobby ran toward the soldiers swinging the bat and screaming, 'Leave him alone, or I'll kill all of you!'The soldiers laughed at first. I ran after Bobby and heard the dull thud of the bat making contact with one of the soldiers. It all happened so fast, I didn't really see who he hit, but the next thing I knew, Bobby was falling to the ground, still clutching his bat. Then something hit the side of my head and I went down, too."

  "Were you all right?" I asked, incensed that they would hit a ten-year-old boy.

  Max touched his cheek. "Only the memory of it hurts now. Well, it's about time I told you about Heart Mountain. You're old enough to understand it now."

  I nodded.

  "Anyway, I heard a soldier say, 'Damn it! The kid broke my nose.'Danny was trying to get up, and Bobby and I were already on our feet swinging at the guards again. I don't remember ever feeling so angry in my life. It made me fearless. ' We're Americans, too!' I screamed. After all, I had just as much right to be here as they did. Tears were streaming down my cheeks and I was ready to be slapped down again, but instead one of the soldiers said, 'They're just kids. Let's get out of here.'And they took off. I can still see Bobby wiping away the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. We helped Danny up and to the camp clinic. He had a couple broken ribs and cuts and bruises. Less than two weeks later, he was taken away to prison."