“Thank you for bringing me here,” she called over.
Kaz’s face softened though he remained silent, slouched against the wall. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, baffled by how he could look at the doctor with such hostility. Before she could say anything, he’d slipped out the door without so much as a glance back.
“That boy.” Dr. Takemitsu shook his head. “Better watch out for him.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
But the doctor had already walked away.
Sitting up, Lily observed that only a few other patients occupied the row of beds. An old woman snored lightly, her long white hair pouring over the pillow. A young man with two black eyes tried to hide himself behind a magazine. Wasn’t he June Shigetani’s younger brother?
“Bob, is that you?”
He tried to smile, not very successfully. His nostrils had disappeared into a swollen mound.
“My God! What happened to you?”
“It’s nothing. Just a scrap over some girl.”
He was lying, she suspected. His battered face had nothing to do with a girl.
Before she could question him further, the double doors flew open. In stormed a gaggle of shrieking women. They were carrying a pregnant girl, laid out on an old door being used as a stretcher. Lily half recognized her from the barracks — Esther, wasn’t that her name? She was moaning like no tomorrow. The room started to spin again as the salty, raw smell of blood and oozing innards wafted over.
“She slipped!” Esther’s sister said. “Rolled down the hill like a watermelon.”
Dr. Takemitsu and the nurse sprang into action, stretching the poor girl out on a bed all too close to Lily’s. The sheets were soon soaked in watery crimson.
She was amazed by how the doctor remained so calm and in control, swiftly commanding this and that instrument. On the periphery of her vision, giant forceps rested ominously on the table.
Lily clenched her eyes. The room faded in and out, everything drowned out by Esther’s cries. Guttural, inhuman cries.
After a while, the noise levelled into a thick hum that insulated the walls of her brain. A story edged its way in, one of the Japanese fairy tales her mother used to tell her.
A poor charcoal maker, who lived up in the mountains, had a beautiful, young wife. Every evening, she insisted on spending a great deal of time alone, shut inside their bedroom closet. Perplexed and rather hurt, he struggled to respect her wishes. One night, when his wife didn’t come out for hours, his curiosity got the better of him and he peeked through the crack of the door. All he could see was a gangly crane — naked of all feathers, covered in ruddy, bumpy skin. Lily couldn’t remember how or why the woman had been transformed into a bird; the story was dim and fragmented in her mind. All she could recall was that the crane had been holding the last feather plucked from her own behind to weave into an exquisite tapestry that unrolled at her feet.
“You’ve seen my true body now and must be disgusted,” the crane said to the charcoal maker in his wife’s voice. “So I must leave you immediately!”
A window flung open and the naked bird made her escape as a thousand other cranes converged in an upsurge of snowy feathers to shelter her.
Look away.
That seemed to be the story’s peculiar message. It was wisest to look away from such things: a naked crane weaving its magic, a naked woman pushing life into the world. To see that true body could only spell disaster. Some secrets were best left untouched; Lily had learned that lesson all too well. Her mother’s pale, downcast face. The cadence of her words in Japanese like the clink of falling dominoes.
That was the last story her mother had ever told her. Not long after, her mother, like the crane, had disappeared forever.
A shrill cry pierced the air. How much time had gone by? Ten minutes, an hour, a day? The next thing Lily knew, the doctor was beaming at the foot of Esther’s bed, holding in his hands a slick, purplish bundle of flesh. A crying baby. And Esther was crying, too, sweat and tears mixed on her florid cheeks. Her sister ran outside to tell their family.
“It’s a boy,” Dr. Takemitsu said proudly.
“Haruki,” Esther whispered, cradling the baby against her breast. “Harry, for short. Thank you for saving my little Harry!”
An hour later the excitement had subsided. Esther and her entourage of visitors had been moved to another room, leaving the doctor with nothing to do except make rounds again.
He paused at Lily’s bedside.
“Would Esther have bled to death if it hadn’t been for you?”
“We do what we can.” He wrapped something around her arm, pumping a small bulb, and as the cuff inflated, it cut off her circulation. Next, he placed a cold metal disk on her chest and slipped a peculiar noose-like instrument into his ears.
“What’s that for?”
“Listening to your heart.”
So the doctor could hear the wild wings flapping in her chest? The thought made her cheeks burn. “Why did you say I have to watch out for your son?”
“Let’s just say that Kaz has a way with the ladies.”
“He seems pretty nice to me.”
“You don’t know him like a father knows his son.”
“But he saved me.”
How strange that the doctor would malign his own son. Her imagination raced to grasp all the scenarios that might be responsible. Had Kaz stolen the family car and joyously, drunkenly, crashed into a fence? Had he set fire to the house as a kid?
“Young lady, your heart is racing. You have to calm down.”
The cool metal sent tingles through her body, while his eyes brushed past, amused, knowing.
Kaz. Kaz. His name thrilled her, like the sound of thunder or waves whooshing over her skin. This ne’er-do-well, this doctor’s son, this degraded scion. Her rescuer. The metal migrated another inch over. With every passing second, she became more fearful that the doctor could hear the wayward murmurs of her heart.
Four
Some afternoons they took long walks together under the tattered canopy of dead fruit trees. Yellow splotches of brittlebush and spiny hopsage tickled Lily’s ankles. She tried to brush against Kaz’s side so he’d take her hand, but he seemed oblivious to the opportunity.
He just kept rambling on about his hick dreams. Before the war he’d been driving down the coast, taking pictures of the lush strawberry farms owned by Japanese farmers, salt of the earth. That was what he planned do after the war: buy a farm and start afresh.
“When I think of how those farms had to be sold off or abandoned, I want to kill somebody. That land belongs to our people.”
