Poached Egg on Toast (29 page)

Tosh walked on ahead, while Judith slowed to read every word. Most glass cases contained explanatory cards printed in English. As she zigzagged from one exhibit to another, a part of her was aware of people hurrying past, of a swelling of tension through the long series of rooms. Her feet were swollen; she could not have rushed if she’d wanted to. She looked through a window to the hills beyond, and thought of the slow shuffle into and out of the city. Before she’d left Canada, she had read about the death marchers fanning out in confusion, dragging sheets of skin, and dropping like charred bits of meat along the way.

She turned back to the display before her, a selection of photographs pinned to a black-and-white background depicting devastation. The faces in the photographs registered not horror, but bewilderment, numbness. These were the faces of the insensate. Victims of the human race peering out from inside skinless bodies into a camera eye. Whatever part of them was still living, was trapped inside bodies that decayed as they stood—bodies that gave off the blue flame and smelled of broiling sardines. Judith read from the scorched hollows of those faces what the Japanese themselves had written:
The chance of survival is the thickness of one sheet of paper
.

She was roused by a shout. Beside, behind. A Japanese man was shaking his fist in her face, frighteningly close. A short, muscular man, he wore a narrow band of cloth wrapped around his head and knotted at the temple. He’d been drinking—she could smell whisky—and he shouted in rapid Japanese. She backed away, but he circled and hemmed her to the glass. She looked for Tosh, but Tosh was nowhere to be seen.

She wanted to shout back, “I understand. It’s horrible for me, too. But it’s complicated. The world was at war … I had nothing to do with … it isn’t my fault.” Knowing that this would be ridiculous. She was trapped, pressed to the glass by a man whose anger was so immediate, he was aware only of its existence. He pounded the glass that protected the photographs, and the glass shook, and again he brought his fist close to her face. She braced herself, just as a guard rushed into the room and grabbed the man’s arm, giving her a moment to flee.

She caught sight of Tosh relaxing against a windowsill near the exit. In his face, she saw their lives together. Love, normality; this was the man she knew. But other lives flashed before her. The man she’d left back there, consumed with hate; Teruko, waiting outside at the bus, no doubt in disapproval; the men and women in the photographs, caught during their last moments of survival—whether they were prepared to die or not. She looked towards Tosh again, and understood that, although he was here beside her, he could not help. As long as she remained in Hiroshima, as long as she was in Japan, she would be held accountable. For the shape of her eyes, and the colour of her skin.

When Sarah phones, Em has just torn every letter into fours, then eighths, sixteenths and, finally, fragments so tiny it would take years to put the m’s back together, or to match the dots with the i’s. No one will ever see these letters, though she can call any one of them into view at any time. Each word is stored in the memory part of her brain. She saw a map once, of the brain, its sections delineated like rivers:
knee, hip, abdomen, thorax;
and
neck, face, lips, tongue
. One rippled area was marked:
emotions
. Another—more than one, now that she thinks of it—was labelled
memory
. This is where Michael is stored:
emotions;
multiple caches called
memory
.

Perhaps, instead of tearing, she should have spent days and weeks dismantling the letters, character by character, with her sharp-as-a-knife sewing scissors. She could have created a spectacular alphabet of possibilities. She could have thrown the lot into her deep Scandinavian bowl, the one that sits on a low table beside her desk. She could have picked out fragments and put them together again like particles of an Icelandic saga that rearrange themselves with each telling. Recently, she’d opened a book about Isak Dinesen and read that all sorrows could be borne if they were put into a story, or if a story were told about them. She wondered if for Dinesen this had been true. Or if, after the telling, Dinesen had ended up with both story
and
sorrows. The weaving of words: to bear in mind, to bear tidings, to bear down, to be born.

“Mom,” says Sarah, “are you there?”

Em hears the fullness in her daughter’s voice, the portent, and thinks,
No, Sarah, I’m not. Not now
. But another part of her, a slumbering part, has been roused. She has been the parent of her child for twenty-two years—the last six without Owen—and though Sarah can surprise her, Em sometimes knows as much about the direction of Sarah’s choices as she does about her own.

She imagines Sarah’s face at this moment and matches expression to voice.
Tentative
. But there is something more; she senses and then sees the word
wound
. Open to attack. She cannot keep her mind from inventing this way—it is her peculiar relationship with words. If
she
knows uncountable truths about Sarah, then Sarah understands and puts up with this about her.

“I want to come home,” says Sarah. “For the summer. I’ll get a job waitressing until I go back to school. There’s a flight to the island in the morning. I’m already packed.”

“Fine. Wonderful. It’s your home, too.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“Garry walked away,” she says. She’s crying softly. “I ignored the signs. He was seeing someone else for weeks while he was still living with me. You can say I told you so, go ahead.”

“Not on your life,” says Em. “Get yourself on a plane. Your room is ready.”

After she hangs up, Em stands at the window and looks down over the narrow field that rolls to the edge of the sea. The blue of the sky is so startling it shocks her to be part of its brilliance, its glare. She thinks about the way she and Michael turned away from each other the last time they were together and she wills her mind:
Don’t think about him. Don’t.

How did it begin?

A way of speaking. They fell into it slowly. At first, neither she nor Michael allowed that it was happening. Had already happened. She remembers the word
risk
. They were excited by the riskiness of the language they began to use with each other. Perhaps she was supposed to know enough about herself that she could see what was coming and muster some counterforce to ward off the next thing. But she has never been good at predicting what will happen after the first mark is made. Not until every one of the signs has been followed to the end.

In the early morning, Em leaves the house in the dark and drives the length of the island to the tiny airport, where she waits outside the fence. Night is turning to day. From here, she cannot see the ocean but she is surrounded by a circle of sea-sky. She is always aware, always renewed by it. Each of the island roads is drawn towards an expanse of milky blue as if, inevitably, the height of the next curve will lead off into the sky. She would not know how to live anywhere else, so much is she a part of this place. Even after Owen drowned she did not for a moment consider leaving. And though Sarah has left, in the way young people can and do, Em knows that her daughter is part of this place, and deeply connected, too.

Throughout Sarah’s childhood, Em and Owen took turns telling stories—always stories, it seemed, that rose up from the sea. A gale, electricity out, the house rocking as if it might lift from its foundations and soar out over the Gulf—that was when Sarah begged to hear the tales: the phantom train that wailed through the night fog; ships that went down; women who raised their skirts and dragged themselves out of the Atlantic; men and women who survived the winters and the winds, who became builders of ships and settlers of land, who created what has become Sarah’s ancestral past.

The plane taxis in and Em watches her only child shift her backpack and descend the steps to tarmac below. Sarah spots her mother and raises a hand in a wave. She has to go through the terminal first, and Em heads for the door to meet her.

Sarah is wearing her brave face and moves to her mother’s arms. As Em draws her in and they lock together, she feels her daughter’s body let go. Now she knows what Sarah is holding: real loss, real sadness. In a fleeting moment, she wonders if Sarah detects her mother’s own comfortless shell.

During the drive home they face forward in silence as they recross the island and witness the opening of the day. The dark red of the earth spreads before them. Wisps of mares’ tails curve in a row of feathers across the sky. The car crests the last hill and eases down the long sweep to the house. Em sees what Sarah must, returning: whitecaps sliding in from the northeast; gulls sailing low over the bottom field; tall hillocky dunes that block the view of the beach. At this time of year, spears of marram grass will be thrusting through the sand. Everything is fresh, starting anew. The sea beyond the surf is dark, almost black. Huge to a human eye.
Waters give, waters take away
, Em says to herself, thinking of Owen. Both she and Sarah draw a breath. Aloud, Em says, “The healing sea.”

Sarah leaps out of the car with a whoop and runs down the slope towards shore.

Though part of Em desires solitude, she is glad that Sarah is home. Even unhappy, Sarah has energy enough to fill the rooms. She says little except that the past month has been the worst of her entire life. For the first few days she goes to bed early and gets up late. She seems battered, slugged. This shows in her face, in the movement of her hands, in her walk, in her forced smile. Every morning after breakfast, she laces her boots, heads out the door, follows the path through the field and stomps over the dunes. Each time she goes out, she leaves something of herself behind. Em, accustomed to being alone, is aware of the extra presence in every shadow of the house. Sometimes Sarah does not return by the time Em leaves for the Centre, at noon. Em works four afternoons a week and is grateful that she’s been able to switch from her former morning schedule. She has five new Vietnamese families in her care and at times she admits to feeling hopeless about the extremes of their neediness. But she has learned to set hopelessness aside. It is her job to provide the families with language.

I hav pasport. This issa potato. My babees namis Hang. Here is good country
. This is what they tell her, as they learn. They write lists to show off their English:
boat, matchis, soljer, rats
. At one of the camps during the six-year journey that brought them here, they slept in hammocks high off the ground so rats would not crawl over them in the night. They had been robbed by pirates. Two of the women were raped. They speak with buried expression. On the surface, the information appears matter-of-fact. They want their new country; they want everything about it. They want to know everything about Em, too. In his notebook one young man drew a picture of her in long dress and high-heeled shoes, though she wears neither. Beneath the picture he wrote:
I think teecher pritty. Mikel say she has round eyes
.

Only once has Em bumped into Michael. The face-to-face encounter in the hall caught them both off guard. He could not, she remembers—though he would never admit this—he could not look her in the eye. What she saw in his face was discomfort, evasion. His classes were over and Em’s were about to begin. But before she could enter the room where the families waited—mothers, children, uncles, aunties, babies; they brought their babies, who else would look after them?—she went to her office and closed the door and stood by her desk, shaking. Later, at the end of the two-hour session, Trinh, the old auntie of two young women in the group, reached over to pat her arm and said, “Teacher sad.” Trinh tightened a cardigan about her shoulders and bent to pick up one of the babies who was playing on the floor. She tucked him to her hip and patted Em again, and made her way slowly out the door.

Taut
, says Em, thinking of this.
Kindness, parting, grief
. Old Auntie Trinh had experienced countless partings before being forced to start a new life. “Hope,” says Em aloud. This is one abstraction she will not have to teach.

“We had a great time together,” says Sarah. “He was funny. He had a way of joking about himself that made me love him like crazy. I can’t figure out how things went wrong. What did I do? He didn’t have the guts to look me in the eye and say,
This isn’t working
. The worst part—are you ready for this?—is that
I
feel unworthy.” She sinks to the rug in the living room and digs her hand into the bowl of popcorn she’s carried in from the kitchen. “Why should I be the one to feel unworthy?”

Why, indeed?
thinks Em, who’s so familiar with the feeling she might have invented it. But she’s supposed to know better. She’s supposed to know more.

“Get angry,” she says to Sarah. “Angry is better than unworthy.” As soon as she says this, her memory releases an image so gentle, she doesn’t know what to do with it: Michael, standing in the middle of her classroom, wags a five-dollar bill and grins as he invites her for coffee. And then, without warning, he takes her hand in his and raises it to his lips as if her fingers are at the end of the most delicate limb on Earth. Her body stills as his lips brush her skin.

It’s hopeless
, they say to each other.
It’s complicated
. Michael is married to a woman named Frieda whom Em has never met but whom she knows to be German. Michael tells her he has been with Frieda for thirteen years.

One Friday evening, Em is shopping in the pharmacy, in town. She looks out and sees the two of them across the street; they are speaking with a man she does not know. Frieda has beautifully shaped short blond hair and looks attractive and theatrical at Michael’s side. She is the same height as Michael and, at one point in the conversation, she stretches an arm towards him in an angular way and encircles his neck. Her elbow points out sharply. It’s easy to see that she doesn’t think about this; she’s accustomed to assuming the position. But he must be, too, because he moves neither away nor towards her. He keeps talking as if he hasn’t noticed the choking stance, the bony armour placed around him.