Yellowstone Memories (50 page)

A stray bit of cattail fluff fluttered from one chunk of his hair. “What do I care? That’s the way of the cross, Jersey. Living out your truth with all your being. And it has a cost. I lost my mother, and you lost your son.”

Jersey hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to speak. “I didn’t have the abortion like they ordered, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She drew her knees up and hugged them, feeling a pain through her chest as she remembered Phyllis’s tears. “I left town and lived with a friend until he was born.”

“So how old is he now?”

“He’s … passed away, Taka.” Jersey’s words came so softly she wondered if he’d heard them. “He was born with some pretty severe health issues, and I put him up for adoption. My boyfriend wanted nothing to do with either of us once he heard I was pregnant and especially not after I told him the baby wasn’t well. My parents were scandalized when they heard I’d let him live. I was seventeen, without even a high school diploma. What could I do?”

Jersey’s knuckles tightened against the rough wood of the dock. “But I couldn’t take his life. I couldn’t. He had as much right to live as I did, and if I hadn’t slept with my boyfriend, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. But he passed away anyway. The adoption agency let me know about two years ago.”

She sighed. “That’s what my mom was calling me about. She said to tell the agency to quit calling our home because it was bad publicity. I don’t live there anymore anyway.”

Taka turned to her, his face an ugly green in the glowing light. “You lived your truth, Jersey.”

“I didn’t even know God then, Taka.” Jersey shook her head and gave a light laugh. “I didn’t know anything. I read the Bible some, but I was clueless.”

“But you knew what was right, and you stood by it. He was guiding you even then, you know that?”

Jersey drew in a shuddering breath, willing herself not to cry.

Taka touched her shoulder lightly, the only time she remembered him ever touching her.

“You did what my father did.
Kamikaze
.”

Jersey wiped her cheek. “Excuse me?”

“The cry of Japanese soldiers and pilots to fight to the death, if I may borrow an expression from a truly tragic war. ‘Crash and burn,’ in modern speak. Living out what’s right, though it costs you everything you have. The Gospel is like that. Jesus says it’ll cost you your entire life, but not many people seem to believe Him.”

Taka shrugged. “It’s what you do with your job every day—protecting one little corner of the environment and teaching people to do the same. It doesn’t matter if they listen. It matters that you tell them. Because it’s the truth.”

Jersey picked at a broken piece of plank, her breath held tightly inside as if afraid to exhale and forget his words. “Yeah. Well.” She tossed a broken wood splinter in the water. “It doesn’t bring my son back, does it?”

“No, but you did the right thing. You gave him life.” Taka smiled. “And those kids with health problems and special needs teach us so much.” He leaned back on one arm and took off his glasses, massaging his face with his free hand. “There was one kid I’ll never forget.”

“Oh yeah. You did some fostering or something, right?”

“On and off for about six years—for kids with special needs and health issues. I’d do it again if I wasn’t stuck out in the field for days at a time.” He put his glasses back on. “And if I had my neurosurgery and biomedical student roommates again. They were great with medical stuff. I never needed a doctor.”

“I have to hand it to you, Taka. You’re sure different.” Jersey shook her head.

“Why? I think more people should dare to be different, Jersey. What else do I have to do with my life anyway?” He leaned back on his hands. “All those kids were special. But that one was something extraordinary. I wish you could have met him, Jersey. He was just … I don’t know. Alive. He reminds me of you somehow.” Taka spread his fingers wide. “His eyes had this
life
, this … this fire. He wanted to live, conquer, explore.”

“Where is he now?”

“He passed away from his health problems.” Taka’s voice sounded sad. “He’d just turned two—and I’d kept him almost from birth.”

Jersey turned suddenly, an odd feeling welling up in her chest. “What was his health problem?”

“Spina bifida. A really severe case.” Taka bit his lips. “Poor guy. Never really had a chance. Couldn’t walk, probably never would.”

“My son had spina bifida.”

“Really? So you know about it then.”

“Of course. It’s a neural tube defect—a problem with the spinal column. And even with surgery, it’s not really cured.”

He looked away. “He didn’t make it through the last surgery.”

Jersey’s palms felt sweaty suddenly, and she wiped them against the knees of her jeans. “You said he was two years old when he passed away?”

“Right. Just turned two that November.”

A charge of cold electricity passed through Jersey’s stomach, and her mouth felt dry. “November what?”

“November third. Why?”

Jersey had to grab on to the side of the dock to keep from lurching sideways into the water.

“Jersey?” Taka reached out to steady her arm. “You don’t think …” Taka’s face morphed into a blank mask of shock, and then he shook his head. “No way,” he chuckled. “It’s a nice thought, but it’s simply not possible.”

“How long ago did you foster him?” Jersey tried to keep her voice calm.

“Oh, years ago.” Taka waved it away with his hand. “I was a young guy still doing my first master’s. Around twenty-three, I guess. So maybe … fourteen years? Something like that.”

Jersey started to count off on her fingers. “Wait. You’re thirty-seven?”

“That sounds right.”

“You don’t look thirty-seven.”

“Neither do you.”

“Because I’m not.” Jersey resumed counting rather coldly and then grabbed Taka’s arm with shaky fingers. “Fourteen years ago, you say? You can’t mean that.”

“Sure. I studied the chemical composition of the planets and various chemical processes and reactions at work in the formation of rocks and soils.”

Jersey waved a hand in front of his face. “Taka. Where did you foster this child?”

“It was through a private organization, Jersey. Listen to me. There’s no way.” He brushed a strand of hair around her ear. “Although his name did start with a
T
now that you mention it. But he couldn’t have been your son. He was Japanese.”

Jersey’s face went white, and she felt everything spin—the green glow in the sky, the stars, the water, everything. A blur of color and brilliance. Shooting stars exploding around her head so that she could hardly think.

She felt her lips moving, slowly, like they carried a heavy weight. “My boyfriend was Japanese, Taka. His name was Hiroyuki.”

Taka stared. Glasses crooked. He didn’t bother to reach up and fix them.

Jersey tried to speak again, but her voice came in ragged gasps. “And I named our baby Tadashi.”

“Which means honest and sincere.” Taka seemed to break from his stupor, and he reached clumsily into his pocket and pulled out his fat, battered, stained wallet. Fat from business cards and pressed leaves and notes scrawled with logarithms and scientific names and a copy of the numbers in Jeremiah Wilde’s logbook. Spilling them across the deck.

He thumbed through the blistered plastic pages of his wallet, which looked like he’d bargained for it at a secondhand shop, and stopped on a photo. “Here,” he said, holding it up for her to see. “See for yourself.”

Jersey froze there, terrified, and then reached for the wallet. She turned the faded photo up in the frosty overhead glow.

Jersey sat alone on the sand, knees drawn up, when the sun spread pale pink light across the horizon, turning the black pines a smoky gray. Mist rose up from the lake like clouds, impossibilities—hovering just over the water.

She’d left Taka there on the dock in the middle of the aurora and found a spot on the beach by herself. Not wanting to speak another word.

She’d watched the sky flow like green rivers, streaking over the lake, and then softly fold into itself and fade into the silent black of night. The green glow had slowly died back into stars and pines like a retreating elk, its life and energy spilling out from an ignominious arrow wound.

The magic had vanished, withdrawn.

Except Taka’s words. His story, too preposterous to be true. And the little photo of a boy with dark eyes who had, by some miracle, her dimpled chin. Her ears that stuck out, her heart-shaped birthmark.

Jersey’s nose was stuffy from tears as she shuffled her bare feet against the sand, squeezing it between her toes. She slapped at mosquitoes who were so intent on human blood that they stung her flesh through her long-sleeved ranger’s shirt, a gray cotton undershirt, and a thick layer of supposedly noxious DEET repellent that seemed no more threatening to mosquitoes than strawberry jam.

Taka had held her child.

It seemed improbable—that fourteen years ago the story of her own son would come back to her, like a message in a bottle chucked in the vast waters of Yellowstone Lake.

And yet not so improbable after all. It wasn’t like people were breaking down the doors of adoption and foster agencies to take children with severe special needs. Children that may never live more than a few years, or children who might never speak or walk.

Perhaps Taka was the only one willing.

Jersey was sure of one thing: it was Tadashi, all right. His pale skin and thick black hair, and the little heart-shaped birthmark on his upper arm. His curved black eyes and long lashes.

Jersey had memorized them—memorized his milky baby-powder scent—as a final good-bye before the nurses whisked him away. Trusting him to a God she’d only met in bits and pieces, like scattered stones from a mosaic that depicted nothing until ordered and shaped.

Her son had been loved. Fed. Cared for. Given medical care. And now—what else was there to say except thanks?

Jersey bowed her head there on the beach and tried to pray, feeling the breeze pick up as peachy light flowed across the water. Her heart still felt empty, a Tadashi-shaped hole, but she could embrace it now. Could kiss it and let it go, like one of the broken cattail fronds floating on glassy ripples. Farther and farther, borne on a strength not her own. Shifting softly into the misty distance until she could no longer see it.

“Now you know,”
she’d whispered, tear-choked
.
“Why I vowed I’d never trust Japanese people again. Hiroyuki was Japanese. And he left me.”

“I am Japanese,”
Taka had said, drawing himself up. His eyes black and luminous.
“And I didn’t leave your son.”

The beach smelled of sand and water, of moist pines and lingering smoke.

Jersey rested her head on her knees, listening to distant trumpeter swans cry out to the spreading glow of morning.

I
think I’ve figured it out.” Taka held out a piece of paper full of mathematical scribbles—covering both sides of the page.

Jersey looked up from her bowl of cool
soba
noodles and swatted away gnats. The sun was sinking gold on the horizon, and she’d just mastered the art of lifting a noodle with clumsy chopsticks.

“You’ve figured what out?” She turned in her folding chair and put her bowl down, bobbing her head in a slight bow to the volunteers she was chatting with.

“The numbers in Jeremiah Wilde’s logbook.” Taka squatted next to her and pointed to the paper. “I believe he wrote them intentionally, but I need to ask a few more questions to explore my theory fully.”

“Shoot.” Jersey crammed a mouthful of noodles into her mouth, relishing the flavors of ginger and green onion in a cold brown dipping sauce. The thin buckwheat noodles were chewy and flavorful, refreshing. If she sold soba on the streets during Wyoming’s ninety-degree summer heat waves, she wouldn’t need Ezra Kind’s gold.

“Tell me something. When did Jeremiah Wilde die?”

Jersey wiped her mouth on a napkin and put down her chopsticks, reaching for her cup of green tea before speaking. “In 1903.”

“After President Theodore Roosevelt dedicated the park in April, right?”

“Right. The info I have says he died of a snakebite just a week later.”

“A week, huh?” Taka rubbed his jaw and sat back on his heels.

Jersey dug a gnat out of her hot green tea with her finger and then shook her hand from the searing heat. She sucked on the tip of her finger. “What are you getting at, Taka?”

Taka picked up a notebook and flipped through pages, each one crammed from top to bottom with tiny mathematical calculations.

“Did you do all that?” Jersey lifted a page in horror. “I only sent you the numbers a couple days ago.”

“This? Yeah.” Taka shrugged, adjusting his nerdy glasses. “Observe.” He drew a perfect graph on his paper with a thin, clear plastic slide rule and began carefully plotting points.

Jersey sipped her tea in silence as he flipped back to his calculations, comparing numbers, and then dotted new points on the graph. “Connect the dots?” she raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a matrix code.” Taka evened his slide rule, sticking his tongue out slightly as he edged it into place.

“What, Jeremiah Wilde’s numbers?” Jersey jerked her head up.

“An odd one, but I think I’ve solved it.” He pointed to the pages of calculations. “Instead of replacing a letter or a symbol one at a time, a matrix code replaces groups of letters—which is much more difficult to solve than a traditional numerical code.”

Taka drew another point on the graph and connected it with a straight line, using his slide rule for a straight edge. “Jeremiah didn’t leave a written message using letters. He created a list of points to plot on a graph.”

Jersey leaned forward. “As in … a location?”

“Precisely.” Taka drew in two more dots, and suddenly the points on the graph began to curve. Straight on the sides and domed at the top, like a candy cane. An arrow, and a small rectangle below.

“Oh my goodness.” Jersey’s pulse raced, and she nearly dropped her tea as she rushed to set it down on the grass. “Is it what I’m thinking?”