Try as she might, Ruth could not banish from her thoughts Jiro’s drunken, but accurate, words: They killed him. Bastards! It was like knowing a murder had been committed but being helpless to tell anyone, to do anything to right the wrong. But she could not exhume the crime without grievously hurting her mother. She just had to learn to live with it.
So she beat back the rage that was pounding in her temples and covered it with a smile and a cheerful tone. Frank had taken vacation time during Rachel’s visit and they took her on day trips to Sausalito, Santa Cruz, and the Napa Valley. The only one who couldn’t join in was Peggy, who was volunteering full-time at Dr. Nealey’s veterinary clinic this summer; the work experience would help when she was ready to submit her veterinary school application.
But wherever they went, Ruth felt irritable—impatient in traffic crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, or annoyed at the crowds jostling her on the Santa Cruz boardwalk. At the end of each day she returned home drained and exhausted. But she lay awake for hours, feeling the rapid fire of her own heartbeat, finally sinking into anxious slumber.
She woke at seven, barely rested. Frank said, “I’ll make breakfast, go back to sleep if you want,” but she couldn’t, everything had to seem normal. Peggy was feeding Max as Ruth came downstairs to the kitchen.
“We’re not going anywhere today, are we?” Don asked as he tucked into his bacon and eggs.
“Nope. Today is a free day,” Frank said, pouring coffee for Ruth.
“Trish wants to go see Tammy and the Bachelor.” Trish was Trish Messina, Don’s girlfriend and also a student at San Jose State.
“You need a lift?” Frank offered. “I’m headed in that direction myself. Car needs filling up after all that driving.”
“Sure, thanks.”
Both Don and Peggy shoveled down their food and were out of the house, along with Frank, before Ruth had finished her second cup of coffee.
“We are abandoned,” Ruth said with an amused sigh.
“At their age, butterfly,” Etsuko noted, “you and your brothers were seldom found in great abundance at home.”
Ruth smiled. “You seem quite stoic, by the way, at the idea of Don dating a non-Japanese girl.”
Etsuko shrugged. “I no longer care about such things. She has a good heart. I have decided that is all that matters.”
Ruth stood and started to clear the kids’ place settings. “You and Rachel sit and relax. I’ll do the dishes.”
Etsuko and Rachel sat chatting in the dining room, and in the kitchen, over the sound of running water, Ruth could make out their conversation:
“—confess that I still wake up at night, expecting to hear the sound of Taizo’s breathing. Even today I find the silence … alarming.”
Ruth’s eyes teared up and she felt her face grow flushed, not from the heat of the water but the seething temper she was laboring to control.
“The silence,” Rachel agreed, “can be terrible. When I lived alone in Honolulu, sometimes I would go to the supermarket even if I didn’t need to buy anything—just to be among people, to hear their voices.”
“I tell myself,” Etsuko said, “that Taizo might have died of pneumonia when he was twelve. He would never have married me, never had sons and a daughter and grandchildren that he loved. But the pneumonia did not take him that day, it let him live a full, rich, loving life, before finally claiming him in the end. I tell myself those years were a gift of fate.”
Ruth’s rage erupted in a muscle spasm that made her hands clench.
She heard a sound like the tinkle of wind chimes—then looked down and saw glass splinters falling into the suds like icicles into snow.
She heard Etsuko call out, “Dai?”
Moments later, Etsuko and Rachel hurried into the kitchen to find Ruth, blood dripping into the soapsuds.
“What happened?” Rachel asked as Etsuko ran to Ruth’s side.
“I … dropped a glass,” Ruth lied.
Etsuko took Ruth’s left hand by the wrist and gently put it under the faucet, the stream of water washing away blood and small fragments of glass. The suds in the sink turned redder than clouds at sunset.
Etsuko pressed a dish towel against Ruth’s bleeding palm. “Is your right hand hurt, Dai?”
“No, I don’t think so. The dishrag must have protected it.”
“Then use that hand to hold this as firmly against your palm as you can until we get to Dr. Higuchi’s.”
“Okāsan, it’s nothing, I’ll be—”
Rachel said, “Just keep pressing. Listen to your mother. To both of us.”
* * *
Dr. Higuchi cleaned out all the glass fragments and sewed five stitches in Ruth’s left hand. The other cuts were small enough to simply bandage. Ruth’s shock had worn off by the time the kids got home; she held up her swathed hand and quipped, “Look, I’m Boris Karloff in The Mommy.” They all laughed, even Frank and Etsuko.
Rachel didn’t laugh.
Frank grilled flank steaks and made French fries for dinner. Afterward the kids washed the dishes, prompting another joke from Ruth: “Dr. Higuchi says I need to keep this bandage on until Peggy leaves for college.”
Again, everyone but Rachel laughed.
Etsuko, exhausted by the day’s emergency, went to bed by nine o’clock. Rachel was with Frank and the kids in the living room, watching Perry Como, when she noticed that Ruth had slipped out of the room. She went into the kitchen, where she saw through the window that Ruth was outside sitting on one of her children’s old swings, slowly rocking herself back and forth.
Rachel followed her into the backyard, sitting down on the swing next to Ruth’s. “Hi.”
“Hi. Just needed a little quiet.”
Rachel asked gently, “What’s been bothering you, Ruth?”
“Just feeling rattled by the accident, that’s all.”
Rachel shook her head. “No. You’ve been irritable all week, ever since the party for your Uncle Jiro.”
“I’m fine,” Ruth said, irritated.
“And you didn’t ‘drop’ that glass. If you had it would’ve broken in the sink, not in your hands. How did you cut yourself?”
Ruth’s eyes flashed with annoyance. “What is this? Am I on trial for breaking a glass?”
Rachel replied calmly, “I saw your father—Kenji—do something similar once. He was drinking a can of beer, trying not to hear the sounds of our neighbor Crossen hitting his girlfriend. When the girl cried out, Kenji tensed up and crushed the beer can. There was Schlitz everywhere, even on the ceiling. Took us hours to wipe it all off, and even then the house stank like a brewery for two days.”
Despite herself, Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. “You’ve never mentioned he had a temper.”
“Oh, when we first met he was angry all the time—angry at being in Kalaupapa, angry that he had his career, his future, taken away from him. I couldn’t blame him. After we married the anger went away—until Crossen moved in.” Rachel turned and looked at her. “So what are you angry about, Ruth?”
Ruth winced. “I—I can’t tell you. My moth—Etsuko can’t ever know.”
“It’s about your father? Taizo?”
“I can’t say. I just can’t.”
“All right,” Rachel said quietly. “I don’t need to know. But whatever it is, you’re bottling it up inside and not doing a very good job of it.”
“What do you know about it?” Ruth said sharply.
“You think I haven’t been just as angry as you are now?” Rachel said. “I saw Crossen beat my husband to death. I watched as he was convicted of manslaughter, only to be sent not to jail but to another room at Kalaupapa.”
There was a fierceness in Rachel’s voice Ruth had never heard before.
“Do you know what I did on the day I left Kalaupapa? Before I left? I went to Bay View Home, where Crossen was serving out his sentence because no jail in Hawai'i would take a ‘leper’ for a prisoner. I walked right into his room. I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘I’m leaving.’
“Then I smiled and said, ‘But you never will. Even if the sulfa drugs cure you, you’ll either be put in prison on O'ahu or just left here, in Kalaupapa … for the rest of your life.’”
“Wow,” Ruth said softly.
“It was the cruelest thing I’d ever done in my life. That’s how angry I was. But it felt like a weight had been lifted off me.” She paused, looked down, haunted by what came next. “At least for nine days.”
“What do you mean?”