Friday, March 11, began with rain. 

Even though the entire week before had been practically cloudless, Satsuki said the dampness was typical of springtime weather along the coast. She and Daidai donned their rain gear and left the house. Daidai reminded Satsuki of her promise to tell her what she and her father had argued about, but once again Satsuki evaded her questioning. They ate in silence at a ramen stand, then walked along the Sakura River, each woman sealed from the other in her own private thoughts. Looking up, Daidai was startled to note that a section of clouds directly overhead had dispersed to create a small blue heart. It appeared perfectly formed, wonderfully symmetrical, and so highly unusual that as proof of what she was seeing Daidai pointed her phone camera upward and captured a photo, which she forwarded to Hiroshi with the subject line “Blue Heart in Mito” to be included in his virtual tour of Japan. 

Most likely her husband had yet to receive the image when the rumbling began as a queer sound, which then clogged her ears with a fearsome roar. As Daidai and Satsuki struggled to keep their balance, the nearby houses shifted on their foundations, emitting terrible groans, and bits of tile flew from rooftops like birds hurled briefly into the air before crashing to the pavement, where they shot off like fireworks. Windows popped out of their frames, spraying the ground with shattered glass. The earth itself seemed intent on sucking everything down in its fury, an interminable and insatiably greedy fit that seemed as if it might never stop. Satsuki dove and pulled Daidai down with her under a sturdy bench, where they lay with arms covering their heads. Once the violent shaking had subsided, sirens began sounding almost immediately. Satsuki explained that an alarm had been triggered by the threat of tsunami. Human noises replaced the rumbling as people fled their homes and office buildings for the street, as if the bad thing had already moved to the past.

Not until the shouts increased in timbre and lengthened into wailing accompanied by another set of sounds did Daidai hear the torrent of water rushing in from the distance. Where before she’d felt comforted by the presence of the river, within minutes it began to swell. Defying the laws of nature, the rippling brown spirals transformed into a fierce and swirling black as the current reversed its course, dumping in its frenzy sediment from the ocean bottom along with debris from the coastal cities it had already visited prior to Mito—a full nine miles from the coast. 

As if in slow motion, the river overflowed its banks, lapping at the trunks of the fruit trees, which clung stoically to their blossoms. Like two children chased by the tide, Satsuki and Daidai, their fingers locked, began carving a path inland on foot, the salt spray of water licking at their heels as they ran. Who knows why the mind associates the familiar with safety, for without knowing what else to do they ran back to Ichiro’s home with the ocean coming up through the soles of their shoes. It staked its claim as it charged inland, collecting things that did not belong to it like a thief, carrying stolen items as it fled the scene of its terrible crime. Seaweed and garbage floated down the sidewalks along with signs that had been ripped from stores advertising lunch box specials and pictured sale items. One object became indistinguishable from the next as the churning black water turned muddy, the way in front of them smelling of brine and sewage and seeping into everything the water touched. 

Disaster had struck on the day the blue heart lit up the spring sky. Satsuki and Daidai could see the gate that marked the entrance to the house when the cell phone in Daidai’s back pocket began chiming its familiar ringtone that could only mean Hiroshi calling her out of the void. 

A minor fender bender on the Hollywood Freeway was all it took to slow miles of traffic to a crawl, ensuring that Melissa would arrive late for dinner with Mark. Knowing he always got to places ahead of time for the simple reason that he hated to be kept waiting, her heart rate quickened with each passing minute. But the tardiness was not her fault, and at least Mark had his books. Lately he’d been so busy cramming for the California Bar, there was a chance he wouldn’t even notice the passing time. Rushing in to the restaurant, she could see that she’d been both right and wrong. Mark was seated at the booth under the neon green Kirin sign that they picked whenever it was available, his head bowed over a foot high stack of papers while he slurped gyooza and rice from a chawan held under his chin.

“I don’t suppose you want to share any of that,” she teased, scooting onto the wooden bench across from him.

“I waited twenty minutes, then I ordered.” Mark put down his chawan and wiped his mouth without looking up. He obviously wasn’t in good humor.

He had a thing about lateness; she knew that. But she felt the same way about manners. Like not starting to eat until everyone had been served, and so she wasn’t about to apologize. “I’m not that late,” she reminded him, “considering traffic on the 101. I had to drive in from downtown. Remember?” 

She accepted his offer of the remaining gyooza, but begrudgingly, her preoccupation having turned to anger. She would have waited for him, she felt sure of it, the way Bob always waited for her mother to sit down before starting. “Itadakimasu,” he’d say, clasping his hands.

Her mother would pull her chair under her so that she perched on the edge, a bird ready to sing. “Doozo,” she’d say.

Melissa felt fairly confident that her mother liked Mark and knew, too, that she was right to be hesitant about him. It had taken tremendous effort on her part to ensure Asako’s approval. Coaching him on manners, trying gently to inform him of her mother’s way of doing things without offending him—without offending either of them. If she tended to judge him through her mother’s eyes, it was out of respect for their shared values. Things like manners were important to her. If he were Japanese, it might not have mattered so much, but then, if he were Japanese, she figured he’d have good manners. Melissa understood what her mother meant when she said that people were judged by their manners. Manners made a difference. That and the fact that he’d attended their church for so many years. Melissa still remembered how Mark showed up for service with his family dressed in a suit and tie one Sunday when they were both thirteen. How miserably he stuck out. But then it turned out that his Aunt Edith, the wife of his father’s brother, was Japanese.

“If we were having dinner at my mom’s house you wouldn’t start eating until everyone was served, would you?”

Understanding that he was being provoked, Mark finally looked up. “What? Am I on trial here?”

“No, just answer the question.”

“What question, Mel? What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said. You’re not going to be one of those slouches who forgets his manners once he’s married, are you?”

“So you’ve decided to marry me?”

“Did I say that?” She had to smile because lately every conversation they had turned into a debate about marriage. Just maybe, she didn’t want to get married. But the question for her wasn’t really whether to get married, it was when.

“As far as I can tell, I’ve got the best manners in the room,” Mark quipped, and Melissa tried to see the restaurant as he saw it, the black-haired men at the next table talking boisterously and loud, their fashion-conscious wives silently nodding.

“Those couples are from Japan,” she whispered. “I’m not talking about the foreigners.”

Mark shrugged. “I’ll try to live up to your expectations of how a good American man should behave at the dinner table. I just never realized manners were that important to you.”

She could get angry all over again that Mark had failed to recognize something so fundamentally important to her, but what would be the point? “Just promise you won’t embarrass me in front of my mother.”

“What?” he said, taking a moment to think. “Your mother has said I have impeccable manners.”

“Okay,” she sighed, forcing herself not to respond with bitterness to his self-congratulatory tone. “I’m sorry.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “I guess I shouldn’t ask you how your day was.” 

“It was fine,” she told him. “Three visits to treatment foster families, one of which is probably going to return the kid, which I can understand since he’s been smearing his feces on the walls, and my survivors of homicide group.”

“That’s right.” Mark was listening now, genuinely interested, which was a trait she loved about him. “How’d that go?”
Melissa shrugged. She knew she should relay some small detail to him, something someone said, or a smart clinical insight on her part, but she’d been in a foul mood all day, and she wasn’t going to talk about things that could only depress her.

“Okay.” He feigned a smile and waved a heavy text in front of his face. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk again until I finish reading this.”

“Okay.” She stared down at the tabletop, unwilling to meet Mark’s eye. The fact was that she loved him, and didn’t know where her dark moods came from, or why they seemed to strike out of nowhere, the way the night happens when you walk out of an afternoon matinee only to find the sun gone and you can’t even remember where you parked your car. No big deal, except that for a minute you feel completely lost.

Melissa feared unhappiness and the potential for unhappiness, which was connected in her mind to Mark. She wanted to think it was because he wasn’t Japanese, but she knew that was only part of it. Looking up, she followed the hum over the tabletop to the neon sign overhead responsible for casting Mark in a sickly shade of green. They would have to find a new table. The salty smell of shoyu and vinegar drifted in from beyond the parted arami curtains, and just as she was about to complain that the service was unusually slow, the same smiling waitress they always had came by for her order. Then the door chimes tinkled to announce the Kumagais from church.

“Hey!” Mark waved his arms in their direction. “Should I ask them to join us?”

“No.”

But the Kumagais were already on their way over, and behind them another church couple.

“Why does this always happen when you eat Japanese?” she whispered when they were alone again. “You can’t even start dinner without someone dropping by.”

“I am in love with you,” Perish confesses not long after the tea. They are sitting at a bar she has never been to in the middle of the late fall afternoon. She has no idea where she is, though she stared out the window of his truck tracing the familiar path of streets, routes that she has taken with her husband and children to get elsewhere. Along the road she knew so well, he turned off somewhere while she was looking down, and navigating the parking lot that appeared vast with its rough grey cement and white lines poking out beneath the ice, she was struck by how different everything looks in the snow. In the bar with dark wood paneling, glass casts reflections off the surface of tables, and walls appear steeply angled in the cluster of small rooms. He picks a long booth, big enough to seat eight, but the table is so narrow that she could easily reach across and touch him.

“I am in love with you,” he says across the table again, after they have talked about work and other things she won’t remember. “But there’s something you should know about me.”

She thinks death; she thinks disease. She sees her parents’ car, metallic under the moon, barreling down the Thruway, just seconds before the crash.

“Look,” he says.

She turns her face away, letting her long hair drape over the round corner of the table. She can feel time suspended in the rows of upside down wine glasses that hang from the low ceiling, see the fragile stems stretching up over round, curved bowls, how their lips throw reflections at each other, toss light into prisms of color and illusion. She feels herself falling again, and for reasons she cannot imagine, her mother appears before her. It is a face she has not seen in years, but she remembers how, many summers back, they had hiked together into the Sierra wilderness, a day trip during a long summer vacation spent at Yosemite. They were not far from Tuolome meadow, their destination, when her mother suddenly collapsed. It might have been dehydration, coupled with the heat of the summer afternoon; she had lain unconscious in the dirt for no more than a minute, but what she spoke of afterward was an experience like Lily imagined death, of entering a tunnel that shone with light at one end, and of the decision she made then not to press forward, but to turn back into darkness, fighting her way through sticky cobwebs to where she heard Lily’s voice calling her. Placing her mother’s head in her lap, Lily poured water from a canteen over her mother’s forehead, panicked at the sight of her closed eyes as she twisted her neck against forces Lily could not see—the heaviness of her mother’s head in her lap, the fragrance of her hair as Lily brushed it back and called to her. Just ahead, through thick, knotted pines, lay the meadow, and Lily could see patches of grass and orange poppies drifting in the open air. Gazing beyond the sharp-tipped pine needles, she longed to be there, in the vast space and sunlight, and she wondered why their hike had come to an end just short of their destination. In the blackness of her mother’s hair and the smoothness of her skin, she recalls how young her mother had been at the time—young and beautiful and vivid at an age not distant from Lily’s age now.

Turning back to face Perish, she does not flinch when his palm glides across the table and his fingers brush the hollow beneath her cheekbone.

She reaches a hand up to her own cheek to remove his hand. “I don’t know if I—” she says back, but his fingers slide from her grasp down across her lips.

“Look,” he says again.

“What?” she says.

His hand moves to the back of her neck. His fingers are warm and rough. They press against the hollow where skull meets spine until her head drops down beneath the table. The gesture is a forceful one, and with her head pinned momentarily where her shoulders should be she feels stunned. Beneath the table it is too dark to see anything. It is dark until he lets go, her vision adjusting while he reaches both hands under the table to pull up his left pant leg. “I’m not perfect like you,” he says, exposing for her view a mass of silver metal and screws.

“I didn’t know,” she says, coming up for air, her breath stuck somewhere in her throat. “I honestly didn’t know. How could I not have known?”

He shrugs.

“How did it happen?”

“Long story,” he says. “Do you think you could love me?”

Lily does not hear love. Sees instead the gap where the leg should be but is not. Just beneath the pant leg, hidden from view but exposed now to her.

“How could I not know?” she says again.

“I haven’t ever shown anyone.”

Why? she wants to ask. But she thinks she knows. Something more happened the afternoon her mother fainted and she dredges her memory for information. There along the trail, not far from the open meadow, the shrill cry of cicadas, tall trees creating patches of shade along the path. The scent of pine and fir hangs in the hot summer air along with pollen and dust from the trail. Her mother’s neck twists. Dirt collects in her hair. When the spasms stop, Lily smoothes back the hair, wiping away a line of spittle that runs from the corner of the mouth to the ear. It will be all right now as the lids slowly part. The scary part is over. But there is something she’s forgotten. A group of hikers approaches. They are boys, not much older than Lily. She hears their footfalls and the murmur of voices that breaks constantly into laughter. Then she smells it, the unmistakable odor. In the same instant, her mother’s gaze focuses and two of the hikers appear hovering over Lily who crouches above her mother.

“Need some help?” The voice radiates concern and good will, but Lily never takes her eyes off her mother’s face.

“No. Thank you.”

“What happened?”

“She’s okay,” Lily cuts off further questioning. “Really.”

Lily guesses that her mother is not okay. She is doing her best not to respond to the panic she feels that tells her to get help. She is holding her breath to the smell that makes her want to gag and warning herself not to cry. She does not take her eyes from where they are locked against her mother’s, but she speaks to the boys. “The heat,” she hears herself say. “She seems all right now.”

A hand lowers a canteen. Lily pours water into her mother’s mouth and uses a few drops to moisten her hair. “Thank you,” she says, raising the canteen back up to its owner.

The boys are gone. Her mother rises unsteadily and disappears into the brush. When she returns, she does not speak of the incident except for a stern remonstrance. “Daddy doesn’t need to know about this,” she says.

“But are you okay?” Lily is crying now.

“Of course I’m okay.”  Her mother’s voice is matter of fact, forbidding further questions.

There is nothing between the two of them to cover the brown stain, but perhaps it has been absorbed into the pattern of the fabric. Lily doesn’t look. Has no further memory of that afternoon or of a context for the story her mother later told of fighting her way back through the cob webs, though Lily is sure of the story.

Now Perish stares at her from across the table. His eyes are hungry, desperate. She does not know exactly what he sees, but looking into his eyes is like seeing a story she’s forgotten until now.

“Do you think you could love me?”

His voice is barely audible, and she hears him pleading with her. There is only one right answer to Perish’s question. “No,” she says, “I’m married and so are you.”

“I’m in love with you,” he insists.

She does not love him. She does not feel anything for him, except perhaps fear that is both terrifying and terribly exciting. Sliding her hands from the surface of the table, she sees the damp circles left behind by her fingertips.

His hand returns to the hollow beneath her cheek. “I’ve wanted to touch that spot for a long time now.”

She cannot tell if it’s excitement she feels or despair, but she has heard his confession now and other things too. Night is coming on quickly as they walk back to his truck. No longer day, it is twilight, the hour when the sky makes impossible promises, irresistible pacts that will be occluded by darkness and perhaps never renewed but are held nonetheless by a mysterious beauty that envelops everything offered by light. She finds it hard to balance as she concentrates on moving through the snow, one foot in front of the other. She wants to stare down at his legs, to wonder at the way he is able to navigate the ice. She wants to offer her shoulder in case his footing is not steady, but he keeps pace with her. Though he does not reach for her, she can feel that they are already, somehow, entwined.

He drives east up the bony, white face of the Sandias, up past the sun which has sunken below the Jemez mountains to the west. A red glow turns deep blue over the horizon where stars lay hidden inside the darkening sky; they drive past rows of snow covered houses with their porch lights now burning to where the road ends. He stops the truck and she reaches across to where he sits and he takes her in his arms. She is laughing, feeling the creak of her thirty-five years as a bone in her hip pops, surprised to assume an unfamiliar angle. She stretches across him, her toes pushing at the narrow tips of her boots against the floorboard. She can feel the heat of his breath, the damp warmth of his mouth searching for hers, but she turns her head away.

“Marry me,” he says, taking her chin in his palm so that she is facing him. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, for this moment.”

She feels delirious. “You’re already married,” she says to remind herself.

“So are you,” he smiles. “But I’ve loved you my whole life.”

She smiles, glancing down at her watch and tilting it up to the fading light.

In the Berkeley hills, in the backyard of her boyfriend, Richard, my sister sunbathes with her eyes closed, her chin tilted skyward; she is a beautiful statue and I am as invisible as the air around her. With my parents away for a week and Eric gone the whole summer I don’t have anything to do, and Melodie reminds me of that by saying I am only allowed to go with her Richard’s if I behave myself: stay out of my way, serve me drinks by the pool, and talk to Richard so he’ll leave me alone while I tan. I feel sorry for Richard because he’s in love. I see the way he looks at my sister and I know it’s hopeless. She doesn’t even notice him—it’s like she’s got her head somewhere way up in the clouds and he’s practically drowning, calling her name, but she doesn’t hear him.

An admirer of what he calls exotic beauty, Richard talks a lot as he bakes himself in the sun, and I listen, wondering what he thinks of me. “Asian girls are so hot,” he says. “Do you really think your sister likes me?” We watch from the deck as Melodie floats on a raft in her white bikini.

“What makes you think she would?” I like to give him a hard time.

Richard is not unattractive. He’s nineteen, suntanned, tall, and a good swimmer, and toward evening when Melodie drives off to the Safeway for more Cokes and he asks me if I want to race him I agree. We decide on five laps freestyle, three breaststroke, and two underwater to finish it up, and when I come up panting behind him in the deep end he kisses me and I kiss him back. And when he wraps his strong legs around my bony hips and pries my bikini bottom aside I don’t protest. Sex with Richard is uncomfortable, but the pain is not unbearable. My body feels weightless underwater. I do not close my eyes. I watch the spotted shell of a ladybug drift by. She flutters her delicate red wings, drying them for flight, but all at once Richard makes a sharp lunge and she rises on a wave only to disappear.

I look for her under the water, then up in the air, and that’s when I notice Melodie’s feet. I am not sure whether I see her first, or she sees me, or how long she has been standing there.

Richard is the first to scramble over the side of the pool. “Melodie,” he cries. “Melodie.”

“Richard,” my sister hisses.

Their voices sound funny as they call each other’s names. I stand at my sister’s side, across from Richard who appears to have lost some brain cells. I want his mouth to open. I listen for the words that will make things right again, but he says nothing.

“What were you doing, Richard?” Melodie demands.

“Nothing.” Richard speaks at last, but he is not believed. “Go inside NOW,” she turns to me.

In the bathroom I pat myself dry with a large blue beach towel. I begin filling the basin with tap water to soak my suit because that is what I always do after a swim, but I am shivering when it’s not even cold, wondering what happened to the ladybug—she probably drowned—when I should bet thinking what to say to my sister, when Melodie spins me frantically around. My eyes are dry by hers are wet and swollen. “Are you okay?”

She is crying, but I wish she’d stop because I know her tears aren’t for me. She doesn’t care that Richard is in love with her, or know that I let Richard do to me what he wanted to do to her; she is crying because what she saw scared her, and aside from getting caught, I am not sorry.