Her gaze was beseeching, the way a child turns to a parent for succor, but there was something more, too—a glance directed at Daidai that she couldn’t read. Turning away, Daidai recalled an aphorism her mother often used: “Shoganai,” she’d say, throwing up her hands. It can’t be helped. Whether despite or because of Satsuki’s peripheral awareness of her, she was seized with jealousy over the intimate exchange between her husband and his student.
It can’t be helped, she told herself, forced to return to the kitchen alone to turn the heat off from under the pot that still simmered on the stove. A trail of steam rose into the air, giving off the fishy aroma of dashi and fresh ginger, and the sight of the table set with mismatched dishes and colorful garnishes filled Daidai with trepidation. Usually she was the one to take charge, but in this case she had no idea how to respond, whether to serve up dinner or pack the meal away.
It was quite late when the three gathered at the table at Satsuki’s insistence. As if to show he still had an appetite, even at such a late hour, Hiroshi slurped down a bowl of noodles. “You should join him,” Satsuki told Daidai, stroking her long fingers across the tabletop, perhaps responding to the eye roll cast in Hiroshi’s direction. “You have to eat no matter what. My mother used to say that.”
Daidai tried to eat but couldn’t, and her voice felt strained and unnatural in conversation. Satsuki had directed the trio to focus on the meal set in front of them even in the wake of her mother’s death. They’d assumed their positions at the table like three reference points on a compass with the needle pointing north and away. Unmoored and alone, they’d each been implicated in a story that had only just then begun to take shape. Satsuki had arrived in Los Angeles ostensibly to enter Hiroshi’s academic program, but had she also come so that she could live closer to her mother? If so, she’d never mentioned her mother’s proximity. As far as Daidai knew, Satsuki spent the time she wasn’t in class at their apartment. But that fact seemed to exist at the surface of her life, which had now broken open, exposing a great abyss.
No way yet to see inside, but the air felt, for lack of a better way to put it, tainted.
Silence engulfed the table and they were forced to feel their way through it, each ensnarled in his or her own private thoughts: Daidai with questions she’d not yet been able to articulate, Hiroshi uncharacteristically fidgety and mute in his chair at the head of the table, and Satsuki by her silence, indicating she wasn’t ready or had simply elected not to share information. In an attempt to ease the mounting tension, Daidai left the room and brought back a bottle of whiskey from which Hiroshi measured out a double shot. Satsuki refused, preferring the tea she’d brought with her in a Thermos. For herself, Daidai poured a tumbler of soda water.
“So what happened?” Daidai finally asked, leaving her husband out of the conversation, unable to bear any more tension.
Satsuki frowned. “Evidently the death is under investigation.”
“Were you even in touch with your mother?” Daidai noted the perturbation in her voice. Was she still feeling excluded by Hiroshi’s expression of concern for his student? Was that it?
Hiroshi’s sideways glance clearly indicated that he found his wife’s question inappropriate. “We’re sorry for your loss,” he said, letting Satsuki off the hook from responding.
“It’s not easy to explain my life to you,” Satsuki said.
She wasn’t asking Satsuki to explain her life, was she? Was that how she’d come off? Of course Satsuki would need space to sort through the feelings engendered by the loss of her mother. Hiroshi nodded his understanding, tracing his finger along the length of his wife’s thigh, his touch both an approbation of Satsuki and a willing of his wife into silence.
Removing his hand from her lap, Daidai scooted her chair back, still longing for a point of connection and fed up at her perceived missteps. “I’m sorry,” she said, stacking the dinner plates so that she could retreat to the kitchen. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“The first four years of my life were idyllic,” Satsuki volunteered before Daidai could leave the room. “My life was perfect until my mother disappeared.”
“What?” Setting the stacked plates back on the table, Daidai refocused her attention on Satsuki. “What do you mean disappeared?”
“Just that.”
The mother who’d just turned up dead had disappeared? So there was more to it. Daidai’s heart beat against her rib cage, shifting the energy in the room away from Satsuki.
“As a young child, I lived to please my mother,” Satsuki went on, seeming caught up in reverie.
“But you hadn’t seen her since you were a child?” Daidai asked.
“You’re sweet to care about me. I’m touched by your concern,” she said, but the way she shook her head ever so slightly, refusing to make eye contact, indicated that her thoughts had drifted somewhere else entirely.
Hiroshi pinched his wife’s kneecap, causing the length of Daidai’s thigh to shudder. “Why did you do that?” she scolded her husband, wondering how anyone got past the disappearance of her mother, especially at such a young age. Then her thoughts settled back on Satsuki. “What was your mother like? Do you remember?”
“I remember everything about her,” Satsuki said. “You might find it odd for me to say that after having lived apart from her for more than twenty-five years, but it’s true.”
“You fainted after the call came just now,” Hiroshi said, evidently still replaying what had just happened.
“You don’t understand,” Satsuki said, shuddering. “I’m sorry.” She glanced up before casting her gaze downward again. “Of course it’s not possible for you to understand.”
“I want to understand,” Daidai told her.
“I didn’t know until quite recently that my mother was living in California. After she vanished, my father took me aside to explain that she was dead.”
“Dead of what?” Daidai asked. “Didn’t he look for her?”
“I don’t remember much about the days after her disappearance. My grandmother took care of me while my father was away. In the spring that I turned six, Grandmother Nobu brought me to my first day of school. But my grandfather became ill that year, which meant that she needed to return home to him. As a result, I was sent to live at a boarding school.
“I worried that entire first year that my father had sent me away so he could find another wife and forget about me, but that’s not what happened.”
Hiroshi scooted his seat back from the table and picked up the stack of plates that Daidai had set down. Satsuki’s gaze shifted from him to Daidai as if she might explain what had just happened, but Daidai waved her hand at Hiroshi, dismissing him from the conversation. “Who called you tonight?” she asked.
Satsuki looked perplexed. “A police detective, I think. I can’t recall his name.”
“I’m sure we can find out if we need to,” Daidai volunteered, assuming that anyone could access the public records produced by a police investigation. It’d be as simple as tracking down background on a painter, research she did all the time. “Have the police been in contact with your father?”
“The person
