A Girl Like You: A Novel Part 20

At the orphanage, Cora, standing alone, twisting her hair in a new habit, runs to her.

"Will your mother die, like mine did?" she asks.

Satomi doesn't answer. She can't say the words that will give truth to her fears. Cora can't remember her own mother but knows that she is dead, knows she has lost what is precious.

"Shall we have a story, Cora? Would you like that?"

Cora devours stories, lives in them long after the telling of them is over. All the children like the stories Satomi tells, especially the ones she makes up, in which she likes to weave their names, their little habits. She is a good storyteller, and how should they know that they have become characters in such cla.s.sics as Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island? There is only so much she can invent, after all.

"You must be proud of who you are," she says, looking at the mix of them. "Your mothers and fathers were beautiful Americans. And you are all brave little Americans because you are like them."

In the telling to them of who they are, she is flooded with grat.i.tude for who she is herself. It is a wonderful thing to be the daughter of Tamura Baker, to have Aaron Baker's determined blood in her veins. How could she have ever thought otherwise?

"You teach me as much as I do you," she tells the children.

Cora hates sharing Satomi. She sets up camp next to her in the storytelling sessions, and has been known to shove away the children who get too close to Satomi.

"She is mine," she says, as though speaking of her little string-tied bundle of possessions.

"You mustn't mind that I talk to the others, Cora. It doesn't change the fact that you are special to me, you silly girl."

"Can I live with you when your mother dies, Satomi?"

"I will ask, Cora. But don't get your hopes up, they don't say yes to much, do they? But you can still visit, and I am here every day, after all."

She worries that Cora seems agitated these days, more needy than before. The orphanage can be a lonely place despite that it is full of children and loud with the crying of babies. There is too little for the children to do, and they are all suffering from loss of the familiar. Perhaps she shouldn't have allowed herself to get so close, but it is done now, she can't desert Cora, she loves her.

Dr. Harper agrees to ask permission from the orphanage for Cora to live with her, but not, as he puts it delicately, while Tamura is so ill. It wouldn't be fair for any of them.

"I can't imagine they will allow it anyway, Sati. It would hardly be a conventional arrangement."

He longs to get Tamura into his hospital, to see her coc.o.o.ned in clean white sheets where she will be available to him the whole day long. He wants to care for her in her last days, be on hand to ease her pain.

"She should be in the new hospital," he tells Satomi. "You can't look after her properly in the barracks."

There is a morgue attached to the hospital, but he doesn't say that would be more convenient too. Taking the dead from the barracks is bad for morale, it unsettles the inmates. Since the riot and the No No Boys looking for trouble, tearing down the American flag, being insolent to the guards, they hardly need more to unsettle them.

"She wants to stay at home," Satomi says, quoting Tamura.

The absurdity of Manzanar being spoken of as home by her mother is not lost on her. Yet even in the face of the horror of the place she has come to understand that Tamura has experienced something rather wonderful in the camp, something that has restored her to herself.

Since she insists on staying where she is, there isn't much that Dr. Harper can do for his favorite patient, except to visit her daily, a pleasure, he thinks, more for himself than for her. He shouldn't favor patients, he knows, but who could not love Tamura, after all?

More like a nurse than a doctor, he plumps her pillow, places pans of steaming water nearby, futilely hoping to create a s.p.a.ce in her lungs so that she might catch a few easier breaths. The science is not good; the hope, though, is a comfort. He has rigged up a line of oxygen, but Tamura doesn't want it, doesn't want to prolong things. In any case, it's hardly more than a placebo at this stage of her disease. Occasionally he takes the unearned liberty of a lover and strokes her hair, caresses her hand.

"You are pale yourself," she tells him teasingly. "I recommend lettuce juice twice a day."

They laugh together. He wonders if it will be the last time Tamura laughs, he wonders if everything she does will be for the last time. The thought of never seeing her smile again, or push her hair back in the delicate way she does, hurts too much to dwell on.

"It won't be long," she says, as though in apology for putting him to the trouble.

"I'm not listening," he replies. "I'm not listening, Tamura."

It seems to Satomi that Tamura must be shared with everyone, so that only a small part of her mother is hers alone. The days are taken up with Dr. Harper's visits, with Eriko's nursing, and with Naomi, who comes to sit with Tamura, talking to her all the time in j.a.panese, her shaky old voice full of tenderness.

Cora comes to visit too, eyes wide with curiosity at the sight of Tamura propped on her pillow. She is not sure what death is, except she thinks perhaps an angel might come to take Tamura away, like in the story she heard long ago but can't remember where. She has set up her daytime camp at Eriko's, where she can hear Tamura's labors through the wall. Eriko and Naomi are kind, but it is Satomi she wants, Satomi she waits for, as she takes Yumi's fan from the wall despite the fact that she knows that Yumi has forbidden it. She wafts it in front of her face to smell the sweet clean scent of cedar.

Only at night does Satomi have her mother to herself, lying next to her on the mattress that she has pushed up against Tamura's bed. She talks quietly until Tamura dozes off, hardly sleeping herself, terrified that she will wake to her mother gone.

"I know that you will be surprised to hear it," Tamura says softly, "but I have enjoyed my life here with you."

"You have enjoyed Manzanar, Mama?"

"Well, it is strange, but I have. After your father died, I couldn't imagine making a life of my own, having friends. Now our friends will help you after I have gone. Eriko is like a mother to you already."

"n.o.body but you will ever be like a mother to me."

Eriko has stopped going to work. Every morning she boils water and gently washes Tamura's wasted body, she brushes her hair tenderly and brings her sweet pears and miso from their favorite mess hall, which Tamura has no appet.i.te for. Her heart seems to shatter over and over at the sight of Tamura's smile, at the effort her dear neighbor still puts into their friendship.

"Try a little sip, Tamura," she encourages. "Just one little sip, for me."

Over time their neighborliness has turned to friendship, their friendship to love. They have become like loving sisters. Eriko is already grieving for the loss that is to come.

Tamura is not afraid. She thinks of Aaron and hopes that she will see him soon. He would be at odds with her for thinking it, but there is nothing to be done about that, she can't make herself believe in oblivion. And Satomi will rally, what else can the young do? She is strong and full of life. And even though Haru will not come for her, something tells her that her daughter will prosper. She is ready to go, worn out with the fight against the inch-by-inch drowning. She is longing not to come up for air.

"You have the choice of burial or cremation," Dr. Harper says, the words ringing brutally in his ears, sickening as the cracking of bones, so that he shudders and shakes his head as though to dismiss them. He should feel embarra.s.sed for loving Tamura, he thinks, but he can't regret it. He has loved her in a way his wife would have thought of as betrayal, although no word of his had ever communicated that love, which he is certain Tamura did not return.

"It's up to you, Satomi," Eriko says. "It's you who must decide."

"Yes, of course we will do as you want, Satomi. I was her doctor, but we never spoke of it. Of such arrangements, I mean."

"She would have thought it bad manners to burden you, Dr. Harper. You are not an easy man to talk to about such intimate things."

It's not the truth, but in the moment she wants to hurt where she can, to off-load the terrible pain she is feeling.

"I did my best, Satomi, and you know, whatever small things we spoke about, your mother and I found pleasure in those conversations."

"I'm sorry, so sorry, Dr. Harper." She is ashamed. "I know that you did. My mother always said that you do your job honorably."

"Did she? Did she say that?"

He hopes that it's the truth, that he has been honorable with all of his imprisoned patients. His job, which started out as something patriotic he could do for his country, has become a burden to him. He is amazed now that he ever could have thought it would be anything else. Manzanar has knocked that idealism, and much more, out of him. It's a pointless place, a place to feel shame for. Thousands of people incarcerated in a monument to stupidity. And the time, money, and effort spent on things that don't work, that never have from the start. He feels only disgust at the cruelty of crushing people together as though they are livestock, not to mention the ridiculous business of guarding people who don't attempt escape. Food in, trash out, diseased sewers, schools without desks, orphans being guarded at play, lines to be able to eat, to wash, to s.h.i.t, it is all a horrible, inhuman nonsense.

If there are such things as j.a.panese spies in his country, then it is the camps that have made them. Dissent has germinated behind the barbed wire and under the guns. And what is it that America is fighting for anyway, if not for liberty, and the freedom of its citizens? Along with that of its inmates, Manzanar has stolen a portion of his life too, robbed him of his pride in being an American.

"Here, Satomi." He sighs. "Your mother's death certificate is ready. You must sign in two places, there and there. Her ashes can be sent home, if that is what you want."

As though to soothe him, to steady his trembling hand, Satomi touches it lightly as she takes the pen from him.

"We will bury my mother here, Dr. Harper, at Manzanar, close to her friends and neighbors. Angelina is not our home anymore. I have heard that there are strangers in our house, that our land has been given to them."

"I'm sure that you will get it back. War is tough on everyone, but every war has its end, and this one will be no different. We are getting on top of it."

"I don't care anymore. I wanted my mother to live to see it. I wanted to walk arm in arm with her from Manzanar, although she would have been sad to leave you all."

"At least you had the good fortune to have Tamura as your mother. What a stroke of luck, Satomi. What a start in life."

The past tense hurts. She has already overtaken Tamura, left her behind. She couldn't keep Tamura in the world, although on the night of her death she had held her in her arms in an attempt to transfer her own warmth, the life in her, to her mother.

"Don't leave me, Mama. Please don't go."

Tamura had lifted her hand to Satomi's cheek. Satomi, kissing it, had taken up the other one, kissing that too. Her mother's hands, rough from sewing the camouflage nets, from pulling sagebrush up by the roots, were nothing like the ones that she remembered from her childhood. She liked them better now somehow. The calluses and torn skin mapped Tamura's more independent existence, showed even in her failing that she had lived a muscular life.

"Listen to me, Satomi. Obey me this one last time."

She had to bend close to hear Tamura's words.

"Once you leave Manzanar, don't ever come back. Whatever they do with my body, I will not be here. I will be with your father somewhere, perhaps. And never think of the life you might have had if we had never come here. Make a better one."

Hearing more the cadence, the familiar rhythm, rather than the reason the words conveyed, Satomi was all pain. She was lost to everything except the idea of drawing into herself the sound of Tamura's voice, which had accompanied her her whole life. She feared the time was coming when it would be lost to her, when she might forget it.

"Take my little bird, Satomi," Tamura said. "Keep the little t.i.tmouse for luck. It is such a pretty thing, the most precious object I have. And, my sweet daughter, don't feed your anger anymore, you only nourish your own enemy."

The weight of Eriko Okihiro's hefty arm across Satomi's shoulders is causing an ache, but there is comfort to be had in her solidity, in the heat that emanates from her ample body.

So this is what being without Tamura is like. It's being homeless despite having a bed to sleep in, it's not caring if the sun shines, it's feeling nothing when the mountains turn from blue to mauve in the blink of an eye, it's being orphaned.

"You mustn't sleep alone tonight, Satomi. Stay with us, we would be happy to have you."

"I'm not afraid, Eriko, and there are things I must do."

She will clean their barrack, take down the silk robe and wash it with the rose bath crystals that Lawson has brought at her request. Surely Tamura will forgive her that. Rose oil would have been better, but it wasn't to be had.

"No such thing in Lone Pine," Lawson told her, shaking his head. "Nearest thing I could get to it was this."

It takes three washes to reveal the colors of the robe, to bring back to life the b.u.t.terflies and the dark little moths. Only in the final rinse does the cheap scent of the bath crystals waft up the merest trace of rose. Still, it is the scent of Tamura. It catches at the back of her throat and suddenly she is doubled up on the floor moaning, her head buried deep in the wet folds.

"Oh, Mama, I can't bear it."

Naomi hears her cries and, breaking her daughter's rules, she calls through the wall.

"I am coming, Satomi."

"No, don't, Naomi. I am fine, and I must finish here."

A picture of Tamura wearing the robe comes to her; she is sitting on the floor by Aaron's chair, teaching her the words for the tea ceremony.

"Wa, for harmony; kei, for respect; sei, for purity; jaku, for tranquillity.

"It's a good day, Satomi, when you can feel all of these things and know that you have spent the hours well."

Tamura had been torn between the centuries, just as she has been torn between her two races. Satomi Baker, the very name says it all.

"Who am I?" she sobs. "Who am I without you, Mother?"

When the robe is dry she folds it carefully and takes it with her to relieve Eriko, who is sitting by Tamura's coffin in the morgue so that her friend will not be alone in such a place.

In death's stillness Tamura is wearing the dress she had worn on the day that they had left their farm. A modern American dress, as she would have wanted. With the robe folded neatly at her feet, her hands crossed, the paper money that Eriko has placed by her side so that she might pay the toll to cross the River of the Three h.e.l.ls, she is returned to something of her old beauty. Satomi bends to kiss her, she must take her leave, but she is afraid to feel Tamura's cold lips on her own and can't move.

"We have to close the lid now, honey." says Dr. Harper's nurse with a pitying smile. She pushes Satomi toward Eriko, who is crying.

"Oh, Tamura," Eriko sobs as the lid goes down. "My dear, dear friend."

Dr. Harper wrote to Ralph to tell him of Tamura's death, and a letter comes to Satomi by return from him. It is a sweet letter, full of Ralph's humanity, his optimism for her.

Haru has written too, a formal letter of condolence. He can't get leave to be at Tamura's funeral. He wants her to know that he had admired and loved her mother.

She is grateful that she is not able to differentiate the pain of losing him from her grief for Tamura, which leaves no s.p.a.ce to distinguish one ache from another. The loss of Haru, which had cut so deeply, seems such a tiny thing now in comparison to the loss of Tamura.

"Did he say anything else?" Eriko asks.

"I think that he may have, but a page is missing and the censor's pen has been at it."

"The contraband check is getting worse," Eriko says. "I've had pages of other people's letters mixed up with mine more than once lately."

Satomi doesn't tell Eriko that Haru had written that they were lucky to be safe in Manzanar; that the inmates of the camp have no idea of what people on the outside are suffering. Europe is being destroyed and we are lucky to be American, he says.

Well, she doesn't feel lucky. She and Haru will never agree on what being an American means.

"It is very annoying," Naomi says, tutting. "Perhaps what they blacked out was important. It's too bad."

"He sent you all his love, of course, and his good wishes to me."

"Oh, Satomi," Eriko says with a sigh.

"Would he have wanted me if I were entirely j.a.panese, do you think, Eriko?"

"Perhaps, but it isn't about being j.a.panese, is it? It's about love, and you can't summon that at will no matter what your race."

"I think it's about not being what people want you to be, Eriko. I was never the person that Haru wanted me to be. Even the j.a.panese part of me is not compliant enough for him!"

The wind is getting up as Tamura is put in the ground. Strings of origami brought to honor her blow about like ribbons at a carnival, getting caught in tree limbs and in the mourners' hair.

Tamura's allotted plot is just a few yards from the little consoling tower.

"It's a good spot," Naomi says. "You couldn't ask for better."

"It's very dry," the Buddhist priest remarks. "You must remember to bring water in your offerings."