Читать книгу Inappropriate Behaviour - Irene Mock - Страница 10

FOR A WHILE, THE BOX WAS KEPT in Michael's study, not because there wasn't room for it elsewhere but because he always felt it his role to see me through things. It was small, the size of a tea canister, wrapped in brown parcel paper. We sometimes speculated on the contents. We both felt we wanted to shake it, but didn't. Then Michael said he was finding it hard to go into his study with the box there.

"Can't you put it behind a cabinet drawer?" I asked. No, he'd already tried that.

"Behind some books on the shelf?" No, that didn't work. As long as the box stayed in his study he felt uncomfortable.

Eventually we moved the box to the closet in the spare room, which would have been the baby's. We talked about doing what we'd planned: climb a mountain and have a small ceremony, when we were healthy again, when it was summer, when it was all over.

It is summer now, but we still haven't done it. I've tried to bring up the subject. "It's a lovely day for a hike." Or, "What about climbing Elephant Mountain, going across the bridge?"

Michael is reluctant. And there are additional restrictions now. The mountain has to be further than five miles from where we live. It cannot be within sight, or be where people are likely to go. It must be a place that overlooks a lake, but if it's a very private spot, it can be on a lake and doesn't have to be a mountain top at all. Recently, Michael, who is an avid cross-country skier, has gone so far as to say we shouldn't climb a mountain at all, but rather wait until winter when we can ski up to a remote summit.

"But if we wait until winter," I protest, "Natsumi won't be able to come with us."

"Do you really think she should," he says, "after what she's been through?"

"But she'd want to be there. She's always loved me as her own child."

I was twelve when Natsumi came to New York to live with my family as a nanny. That year kids at school stretched the corners of their eyes and laughed about Japs eating "lice" and "Commies" taking over the world. The year of sirens and air-raid drills—duck and cover—lying on the floor with hands over our heads so we wouldn't get cut by flying glass when the bomb exploded. People were building bomb shelters and stock-piling powdered milk, canned soup, ammunition.

I remember being very curious. What was her family like? Did people really live in paper houses? Sleep on mats?

One day she showed me a photograph of three girls and pointed to the one in the middle. "Youngest sister, such a pretty one, isn't it?"

The girl she pointed to was the most slender of the three, with a smiling face like the others, but then, in their kimonos, all Japanese women looked alike to me.

"You have such a nice family," she said suddenly.

Confused, I asked, "Isn't yours nice too?"

"Yes, but this world too sad for the human being," she said.

Then she told me about the the loss of her parents and youngest sister. About Hiroshima. About her infant son, who would have been a few years older than I.

"Your family now my family," she said.

This didn't seem quite right to me. She talked differently, for one thing. For another, she was so small. And her sisters wore kimonos.

"No," I answered. "Your family is Japanese."

In my fourth month of pregnancy, during the nightmares, I phoned Natsumi in New York. I kept thinking something was going to happen to the baby. I dreamt I was about to give birth when I heard a loud explosion and everything around me went up in flames.

"We can only believe things turn out right," she told me. "Nobody can ever know." She said she was saving money to come out here, all the way to British Columbia, to see the baby. That she would not return to Japan until she had.

"Maybe you're right," Michael says. "Maybe she'd want to be here for the ceremony."

I'm not really sure, though, that either one of us is ready. It's almost a truce now, a warding off.

The box stays where it is.

I'M TEMPTED TO REMOVE the box myself. I doubt he'd notice; neither of us goes into the spare room much. The door to that room used to be kept open for ventilation on hot, stuffy nights. But now the door stays closed. Sometimes one of us will go in there and open the window, if it becomes unbearable.

I could move the box, but where would I put it? In the garden? Garage? Certainly not buried in the front lawn.

"OPEN YOUR EYES, silly girl. It won't hurt you," Natsumi would say, "it's only a hachi."

Hachi. Japanese for bee. I was in the spare room going through all the baby things again when I heard Natsumi's low voice. I stood in front of the closet door, listening; her voice was so encouraging. I opened the door. On the shelf above the box was an envelope and inside it old photographs of Natsumi and me.

My eye caught the view of the lake from the window. Elephant Mountain. The sun shining; the sky, a radiant blue.

I removed the box and shook it, not sure what I expected to hear. When I didn't hear anything, I shook it again.

Across the street a girl was playing with a ball: throwing it up in the air, then running to catch it. I stood watching her with the box in my hand. If she catches the ball before I count to three, I thought, everything will be all right.

The girl threw the ball high; I counted. As if by some miracle, she caught the ball before I'd finished.

IT WAS SILLY OF ME to tell Michael that I took out the box and shook it. He thinks we may have been cheated, that there's nothing inside.

Even if it were true that what's in the box is not what we expect, I hardly think it matters. But Michael is not like me; he needs proof. He still keeps the certificate in a drawer—I don't ask where.

I always expected the worst. At the hospital I watched doctors rush around, attaching tubes and bottles with a frenzied urgency. All this to save lives when every day a new set of insanities is invented to put an end to them.

Michael thinks I look on the gloomy side. "Until a thing happens," he says, "how can you know it will go wrong?" Sardo's Law, he calls it: if you don't think positively, you're not giving yourself a fair chance.

"But bad things do happen," I say. "They happen all the time."

We still can't talk about it.

I'm telling him that I'm phoning Natsumi. We need to do something now.

MICHAEL SEEMS RELIEVED, though he met Natsumi only once, five years ago at our wedding. He's told me how close he feels to her. Showing him the photographs of her from my childhood, I think how quickly we're no longer children ourselves, but wanting children of our own.

Natsumi looks directly at the camera, shielding her eyes from the sun. I am struck by her petite body, and her thick black hair pinned loosely. She's thirty-three and wears my outgrown clothes from summer camp; shorts, a blue and white T-shirt, and shoes with wedge heels to make her appear taller.

In another, taken when she visits me at camp a year later, Natsumi and I hold hands in front of a rowboat. Although I'm only thirteen, I am a head taller. The man holding the camera is Natsumi's boyfriend. A year later the boyfriend would return to Japan for an arranged marriage to another. Natsumi knew this but, in the photograph, her face is not unhappy, not a bit. The two of them spent the summer travelling through Quebec, crying when it came time to say goodbye.

"Arranged marriages are so stupid!" I said.

Natsumi replied patiently, "This is our way—the Japanese way." It would not be right to interfere with his young bride's happiness.

"But you love each other!" I exclaimed. "It isn't fair."

"This world not always fair," she answered. "Do you think life always fair?"

WE COULD BE GOING on a family outing, an August picnic. The three of us are exuberant. Natsumi looks older, her rich black hair grey now, though she still wears it pinned loosely. She has on a brilliant blue crepe dress that shimmers in the wind and, of course, shoes with wedge heels.

We've come to the park at Sandspit, a forty-five minute drive up the lake from where we live. The sun is hot, the sky clear, but the beach is nearly empty. Several families, probably people who live close by, are clustered together at one end on towels and blankets. Three or four children are building sand castles; other children run in and out of the water. Further on we pass an older couple in folding lawn chairs gazing at the mountains. As we walk along the shore, I stare at the box.

I've been reading about ceremonies: small rituals people perform at burials. I've thought about what we might say.

It has been over a year since we've had the box and I'm pregnant again, but not far along. As we sit on the shore listening to the loons call, I wonder if the child I'm carrying might someday play in this same place. Michael lays the box on the sand gently and looks at me. It's time to unwrap it.

First, the brown parcel paper, slowly removed. Underneath, a cardboard box. I'm disappointed; surely it should have been made of wood, something substantial.

A thin gold ribbon is tied on top. It pulls off easily. Inside, mounds of cotton stuffing stick to tiny white brittle pieces. I keep hoping to see ashes—but there aren't any ashes at all.

"What are these?" I ask.

Natsumi puts her hand into the box and takes some pieces from the bottom.

"Bones," she says, examining them. "My baby's bones must have been like this too."

I look at the tiny white pieces. Then it comes back, what she told me about her son. "There was no time, no time at all," she said. "Everyone was all mixed together, can you imagine? All mixed together in some cans and boxes." There'd been no time to mourn, or to identify. To prevent the spread of disease, the bodies had to be cremated as quickly as possible. Though some boxes were marked with the sites—schools, factories—where the dead were found, their names were unknown.

"Feel them. Rough, like sand." Natsumi holds the pieces out to me. "Now you can see it really was a baby."

All too real. I had planned to say a few words, something about love; something also about loss.

But now, seeing tiny shreds of bone, my words seem meaningless, abstract.

As the three of us take the tiny pieces in our hands, I scatter them in the water and watch everything disappear.

The box empty, we hold each other, then sit staring at the lake and mountains. Natsumi takes off her wedge-heeled shoes and wades into the water. I watch as a light breeze catches her dress.