The Electrical Field (18 page)

My eyes flew open. “Nothing, dear. I’m fine,” I told her, focusing again on the long road ahead, and the hill in the distance. When had I last done this, walked like this, blind? I suppose, as a girl, I was willing myself to trust: to trust I don’t know what. I remember that dizzy fear, as my foot dangled in mid-air in front of me, of stepping off the edge of the world. Walking from school on a sunlit afternoon, dizzied all the more by the mysterious flashes of bright colour that filled my closed eyes.

On the way home, Eiji sometimes doubled back on his bicycle and followed close behind, haunting me like a ghost. He’d do anything—whoosh past, an inch from my shoulder. Out of the blue, shout, “Look out!” and dare my eyes not to open, then yelp in triumph.

“Miss Saito.” Sachi was peering at me, like that capricious girl I once was. But her gaze penetrated me with awareness, the wise child momentarily come home to me. Then
she raised her eyes to the hill, as if to some majestic mountain. “Miss Saito,” she asked gently, “are you ever lonely?”

She never ceased to shock me; her honesty at the most unlikely times. In the midst of all this. How she disarmed me. I could seize this one chance to confide in her about my darkest moments; I needed only to hint and she, wise child, would grasp.

“What?” I stuttered, and in that instant my foot slipped on gravel sloping into a ditch; my hand clutched Sachi’s arm to steady myself. The dog jumped back nervously. I had to blink twice at the road, which suddenly resembled the road from our house in Port Dover to the school. That bit of gravel I’d stumbled on could have been a pebble tossed by Eiji to startle me. “I’m sorry,” I murmured half-heartedly, releasing Sachi’s arm. “What did you say?” But she didn’t repeat the question, and we walked on in silence, the dog keeping pace obediently. Before long, we came to the gravel road and turned.

“I have my family to look after, you know,” I finally said. “Papa takes up so much of my time. Stum can hardly do a thing for himself. I have no time to be lonely,” I nattered on. “I’ll miss Chisako—Mrs. Yano—of course, but life goes on for the rest of us.” Such gibberish from my mouth. I could barely look at her. We followed the road for some time, until the base of the hill was just ahead. We left the road to shortcut across the field alongside the hill to where the trees sprang up. I watched her small feet in stained canvas running shoes. It irked me that Keiko didn’t buy her proper footwear.

“I don’t know why,” Sachi said after a moment. “But I was
thinking about when I was little and Keiko had these family dinners.” She glanced over, checking, I suppose, to see if it bothered me, her mentioning this. If it stirred up my envy.

I’d watched those cars pull up to the Nakamura house one after another: doors opening to the frosty night, children pouring out; dishes wrapped and knotted in bright cloth, carried to the door. In the early days, when Keiko and Tom were more conscientious about providing company for Sachi. I’d look across the field at the lit-up house that seemed to bustle with movement, before returning to our small, quiet table—just Stum and me and Papa, before his last stroke, sitting down to our own New Year’s gochiso, our feast; and I wondered what it would be like to have people around you at every turn. To talk freely about this and that, to So-and-so and So-and-so, without much time to contemplate what you would say. I tried it once or twice, chattered about the weather, about what I was reading, some challenging crossword, only to find Stum staring at me, stunned and perplexed.

“When everybody left, Keiko turned off the lights and the house was so quiet I couldn’t stand it,” Sachi said. “So lonely.” Her voice, sad and thin, broke my heart. Then: “Like your house,” she added. A parting jab. I let it go; I understood what it was in her, that spark or impulse to wound me when she felt something herself.

Was that when it started, I longed to ask but didn’t dare. I longed to take her scarred hands in mine. Was that when she discovered she could cut and she could bleed?

“I miss Tam so much it hurts,” she whispered, and her hand brushed her side, as if the pain resided there. “I know
he’s coming back, but I miss him.” This time she was calm saying it. A little apart from herself. I couldn’t promise her when he would return, but he would, I knew. He would.

When we reached the edge of the parking lot, where the woods thickened, I realized I could not go in, not again. “I’ll wait here,” I said firmly. I turned my back to her and stared up at that familiar fringe of sparse trees that skirted the top of the hill. I thought I could hear the creek not far off, where it took a bend and flowed east of Mackenzie Hill. I felt the dog swish its tail against my leg. She didn’t try to change my mind.

“All right,” I heard her say behind me. “Come on, girl,” and I heard the snap of twigs under her canvas shoes and the dog’s low whine. “Come on, Yuki,” Sachi coaxed, and it was only then that it struck me, the name of the dog. Yano’s homely face appeared to me, reminding me, on one of the morning walks that he joined me on, what it was and what it meant. “Snow,” he declared. “I named the dog for the snow on the mountains in the camp. Remember? Remember how deep it was? How cold? Remember, Saito-san?” He was watching me, hugging himself, muttering:
samui, samui, cold, cold
, trying to make me feel the chill in my bones once more.

I paced towards the hill, then back again, almost curious enough to go in after her. But the thought of that place—the soiled, tattered yellow police ribbon on the tree, what traces remained of Chisako’s dried blood—made me nauseated. I looked around me, affected no doubt by Sachi’s imaginings. She clung desperately, morbidly to this place, convinced that clues to Tam’s whereabouts lay here.
Everything was very still; the trees stood motionless, but I recalled how, in winter, their icy branches swayed with a cracking sound, like frozen bones fractured from within.

The nausea in my stomach rose higher as a particular odour returned to plague me, or the memory of it, perhaps. That scent of burnt flesh that I’d detected here several days ago, that I could not forget. It made no sense at all, really, since there had apparently been no fire, only gunshots. I squatted down to quell the sickness. I stared at my shoes, Mama’s, now more than a little muddy from traipsing across the field. The sight of their blunt rounded toes, the creased leather, made me all the more ill, reminding me of the day I removed them from among Mama’s things.

Abruptly the dog came whipping out of the lot, away from the trees and into the open field. Sachi stumbled after it, breathless, the loose clothesline in her hand. The dog tore in circles until it became a white racing ball, with the fierce motion of its paws gouging the ground under it. All either of us could do was watch.

As I did, I thought of my ride with Eiji, the whirr of it up and down, so quick and so light, we could lift off into the air. As the dog slowed, its shining eyes searched and found us, the animal drawn back to whatever it knew. It returned to us, white fur splattered with mud, white paws brown, tongue slopping out of its panting mouth.

Sachi threw down the useless clothesline; the poor creature had no one else to go to.

“Well, that dog’s not going to lead us anywhere,” I said.

“I know, I know,” Sachi broke in. Slowly she began trudging up the side of the hill. I was about to ask her where she
thought she was going when I had to get back home, to check on Papa, but saw she was in no mood to explain. All I could do was follow. I felt a cold wet slither across my fingers, familiar from the other night, yet I recoiled; the dog had bounded up behind me, panting messily, anxious for the salt on my skin, I suppose. I pushed it gently away. I lost my breath momentarily, absurdly imagining, in a glimmer of deceptive sunlight, a dot of red dust on the creature’s nose, but when I looked again there was nothing. I wiped my hand on an old tissue found stuffed up my sleeve as the dog clambered along beside me. Above us, a peculiar band of rose extended across the sky.

When I reached the top, Sachi was squatting, gazing down at the spot where we’d begun our climb. The trees looked out of place from up here, the way they sprang up from the flat field. They should have been levelled a long time ago, or the whole area left wooded as it was when they put in the hill. An odd spot for a lovers’ lane, hidden in plain sight. Scarcely anyone went there, and yet lovers’ lane was what the newspapers called it.

Sachi beckoned to me and, as I reached her among the tufts of crab grass, she was smoothing out a piece of paper she must have found in her pocket for me to sit on. By a strange coincidence it was one of Yano’s flyers for another meeting at the school, two days earlier.
Redress the wrong
, it said, the letters fat and clumsy. “Oh” was all Sachi said when she realized.

I pushed her hand holding the paper away; she let it sail down the hill. Who came to Yano’s meetings anyway? I knelt beside her.

“I know you used to watch us here, Miss Saito,” she burst out. “Tam and me.”

I froze, did not dare look at her, did not dare move. As if, by staying absolutely still, I might be forgotten; I might disappear. My wise child might return, my wise, silent child who kept my secrets, even from me.

“I really should go now,” I stuttered. “Papa—”

“This is our spot, Miss Saito,” she said quietly. Then she glanced from me to a nearby cluster of bushes.

I could only stare down at the bottom of the hill, at the trees that surrounded the parking lot.

“It’s all right, Miss Saito. I’m the only one who knows. I never told Tam.”

All I could do was nod. Let her go on.

“You see, Miss Saito,” she continued. Repeating my name in that disturbing way. As if to show there was no mistake it was me. “That’s why I brought you here. You’re the only one besides Tam and me who understands. Keiko would never. Nobody would, except you. Because you saw with your own two eyes how it was for us.”

She fixed her eyes on me; they were fired with desperation.

“Don’t worry, Miss Saito. I’m not mad.” She paused in that way I had learned not to trust. Calculating how she might hurt me. “I know you get lonely.”

I stood up warily and touched her shoulder. I wanted only to slip away.

But she grabbed my hand and would not let go. Her hand held mine so tightly that I had to squat down once more. “All right,” I murmured.

She paused again, calculating further. “Miss Saito,”
she said slowly. “Tell me the story about your brother again.”

“You’ve heard it enough times,” I said. I had no wish to bring Eiji into this. It shamed me, for him to know this of me. “No, no,” I said. “Not today.” I was shaking my head.

But I felt dizzy, and the whirring ride Eiji and I rode at the fair at Hastings Park came back to me again, myself light in the air; it lasted but a second.

“Tell me another one. One you haven’t told before.” I thought I glimpsed a threat in her eyes, a glimmer, and her hand tightened around mine.

I sighed, giving in, and she let go. I looked to the sky, trying to decide what to tell her. The pink band had melted away, and the clouds went up in ridges to the north, like distant mountains. At the moment there were no airplanes passing overhead. I tried to concentrate on Eiji, to give myself over to him and forget my shame.

As usual, I didn’t quite know where to begin. “Did I tell you how he took me with him to deliver newspapers every morning?” I asked. She gave a half-nod that could have been a yes or a no, but meant for me to go on.

“Every morning at six o’clock, Eiji lifted me out of bed and put me on the front of his bicycle. In winter it was so cold,” I laughed, “that my fingers stuck to the handlebars.” I hung there on the bars by my hands and knees, the same way I’d swung on his arms as he held me over the outhouse benjo when I was afraid I’d fall in. He had his bundle of papers on his back and I’d feel his body and the bicycle pumping up up up as we rode to the hakujin part of town, up away from the mill. I learned not to look down at the rush of ground under
the turning wheel as we rode; squinched my eyes shut when we flew downhill.

When we reached those blocks of big frame houses with porches that wrapped three sides, Eiji slowed down, pulled one paper at a time out of his bundle, and tossed it onto a porch. In three steps: pull, aim, toss. I felt the bicycle sway each time he turned and thrusted, as if I were one more muscle or tendon on his body.

“Ara?” I exclaimed. Sachi was nudging me. “Miss Saito, you’re leaving parts out again,” she said, holding back her irritation.

“All right, I’m sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “On collection days, he brought me right up to the houses with him,” I told her. What I remembered about the hakujin women who came to the door was their eyebrows, perched fine and lonely on their big faces as they dropped extra nickels in Eiji’s hand at Christmas and Easter.

“Sometimes they didn’t pay,” I said. “Can you imagine? Hiding away in their big, rich houses when we came knocking. What Eiji did,” I told her, winking, “was sneak up onto the porch and wait until they came out for their paper, thinking we were long gone.” We squatted there on those porches, still as another piece of their wicker furniture. Eiji clamped me between his legs, his hand ready if I let out the tiniest sound. When the door finally opened, he sprang up with his tickets, me tumbling from his lap.

“Once we were waiting at a big, big house. They hadn’t paid in weeks. Eiji had to get the money. They’d take it out of his pay otherwise.” Thinking back, it made me angry that Eiji should be treated that way, a young boy like him.

Sachi was nudging me again. “Go on, go on,” she prodded, less gently this time.

“Maybe it’s not such an interesting story to you,” I said, perhaps more gruffly than I meant to. The spell seemed broken, or not yet cast. Perhaps I was too disturbed by being here, sitting in sight of the place where Chisako had died. Disturbed by Sachi’s outburst.

“I’m sorry, Miss Saito. Go on, please,” Sachi said. “I want you to.” There was a yearning in the way she said this, so I went on.

“We were sitting there, just like this. The door was about to open, I was sitting quiet as could be, holding my breath, and—” I started to giggle. This wasn’t the story I’d meant to tell.