The Electrical Field (31 page)

“I know what I did. I know what’s true and what’s a lie,” she said, “even if you don’t.” She had moved away, out of my arms.

“Sachi!” I cried, unable to restrain myself. Was it for me or for her I was crying out? Left alone, I would never find my way out of this place. How would I find her in the dark? How could I stop her from doing what was my worst fear?
What I would do? The awful resignation in her voice, the terrible calm. “Sachi, please don’t!” I cried again. “Don’t leave me!”

But she did. I was alone, left behind as I’d always feared. I had no sense of time, of how long I’d been there, what time it was. Everything pressed in too close, all at once, blaming, suffocating me. The sky closed its lid over me; the half-moon was pocketed in the clouds, behind the trees. The water roared in my ears, became a lion. I’d had my chance to save her from herself: my one chance, now gone. It was me I should have saved her from, I saw that now; all along it had been me. How would she do it? It hardly mattered. She would do it, smart girl that she was, with that will of iron, with her shattered heart; she would do it, whatever way.

I heaved myself forward, towards the creek, drawn into the roar. I held my arms in front, blindly pushing aside branches that twanged back to scratch my face. Stumbling down, calling out. In one step the air was different: cooler, moister; there was mist on my skin, and the creek hardened to a machine’s roar instead of an animal’s. Yards ahead, a small figure, darker in the night, teetered at what had to be the edge of the creek. I did not dare cry out; I scrambled forward, and the figure seemed to see me coming; its eyes, catching some moonlight, glittered like the dog’s.

She fell. With a strange, crashing sound she broke the surface. Her glittering eyes vanished. Before I could think, I was falling, my clothes heavy and sinking, pulling me down. I opened my mouth to call out but it filled with water. I saw nothing, felt only cold, burning. Light poured over me, and I saw myself, bloated in the water, and I was crying, trying to
point upstream to where I knew Sachi had fallen in, but my arms were weighed down. Then Sumi appeared above me with her bucket, frantically waving, running from side to side of the bridge, calling me, calling Eiji.
Let go
, she was crying, or something.
Stop, ojosan, stop
; but only Eiji could call me that. Sumi’s face came close, grimacing, pained, was there and gone.
Sachi
, I called feebly, but the sound died in my mouth. I know what’s true, I know what’s a lie, I meant to tell her. I know what I did and I will say it. For you I will. Sachi. I didn’t save him. I longed to say this; to have these be the last words in her ears. Instead, I closed my eyes and sank.

“W
HAT KIND OF MAN
would do this?” Detective Rossi looked at me in that way of his that had grown so familiar. As if nothing I said or did could change it. The same way he had looked pulling me from the creek, not more than an hour ago. When he had shouted, “Take my hand, take it!” and I had obeyed. When he had pulled me up, wrapped me in a blanket, and I had glimpsed his face above me before collapsing against his tall frame. It was the same as in my living-room, with his questions, his pad and pen. “Sachi!” I must have cried out; I must have pointed to where I’d heard her fall, where I couldn’t see.

Because he shone the light and there she was on the bank of the creek, bundled in a blanket as I was, with Keiko and Tom holding her. Holding her as a mother and father should. Their faces opened by the light, the lingering terror, like walnuts cracked from their shells. She waved and mouthed something to me, and it was all a game once more, one of
her silly games. I was too exhausted to decipher the curl of her lips.

“The case is closed now,” Detective Rossi was saying as we drove on, one eye on the road that tunnelled into the darkness. In the flash of oncoming headlights I glimpsed the sweat across his brow. He had turned the car heater on high so I wouldn’t catch a chill, but I felt nothing, neither heat nor cold. He went on. “I keep thinking he had to be some kind of …” He didn’t finish.

The road bumped under us, and as my body lifted and sank into the car seat in that barely airborne second, I was taken back to being small and light, bounced on the handlebars of Eiji’s bicycle at dawn. Without a care.

“Monster,” I said softly.

“Was he crazy?”

“No, no. Yes. Maybe.” The blackness crouched around us until Detective Rossi flicked on the high beams. “You might not understand,” I murmured.

“Why? Because I’m not Japanese?” He said this too quickly, with the first hint of bitterness. It brought the echo of Yano’s words:
They thought we’d all commit hara-kiri.
I heard his sour laugh at the expectation of every last thing going against him. I thought of the nod I’d given him on our morning walks; the smile to loosen the clenched fist, to tell him that I knew there was an impressive man inside who’d had his chances taken away. How I held back, the time when it counted most.

“No, no,” I said quietly. I pressed close to the window and the passing darkness. I did not wish to see the detective’s face, the change there, however fleeting.

Yano had stood at my bedroom window that day, the first time any man who was not my father, not my brother, had set foot there. His shirt, ripped in two, left on my lawn. I’d followed him up from the garden. My room filling with his scent, once so repugnant to me. He raised the blinds I always kept down, loosing a flurry of dust.

He was looking out at Mackenzie Hill. Thinking,
wrong, wrong, wrong. That bugger Mackenzie
, he was thinking. As if it could have been just one man, the same man, this hill. When all the time, in the woods at the foot of the hill, Chisako was lying with her Mr. Spears, and he didn’t see. Blind man, fool. He began to wheeze then, from the dust I’d let collect on the blinds.

I drew him away from the window, sat him down on my bed. I went to rub his back, as I always did during his attacks out in the field, as he’d shown me—so long ago, it seemed—but this time my hands met his flesh instead of the thickness of his clothes. My hands sticky with secrets. He didn’t notice; how could he, coughing and wheezing as he was? “Lie down,” I told him, with the sternness of a nurse, or a wife who knows her husband’s stubbornness only too well. “Chotto. Lie down and close your eyes,” I ordered. I surprised myself.

He did not flinch from me when I began to rub his chest with my cold damp hands, the place where, inside, the fluid had thickened in his lungs and kept back the air. His face was red and contorted in my lap, ugly; he tried to struggle up, shamed, I suppose, but still I held him.

I turned to the detective now, pulling the blanket close. “Everything was ruined for him, you see,” I said wearily.
“Everything went wrong. It was no good any more. No good.” It was Yano, his words, what he’d left me, in my mouth.

Detective Rossi fell silent and focused once again on the road. If he was surprised by what I’d said, how I had tried to understand Yano, he didn’t let on. We drove like this for I don’t know how long. Long enough for the sky to brighten, abruptly it seemed, the light coming on like a siren out of nowhere, in a single, climbing streak.

“She knew, didn’t she?” the detective asked, as if no time had lapsed, as if we hadn’t left that dark world behind. “Mrs. Yano knew what her husband would do when he found out.”

I saw her now as I had seen her then, as I had felt the press of her thigh beside mine on the loveseat in that small room she’d made hers alone. Her breath smelling of something, of manju, its sweet-bean filling. “I think I understand you, Asako,” she had said, as if seeing me anew. “You want to think badly of him. You want to believe he is a monster so you can hate him, ne?” She nudged me with her dainty slippered foot. “You want to believe he would harm me.” I could only stare into my lap.

“You have feelings for him, don’t you?” Again she nudged me with her foot, harder this time, then stood over me. My cheeks burned. “It’s all right, Asako,” and she reached down to pat my hand, not so gently, for it made a sound, a soft slap. “Perhaps you didn’t know this about yourself.” She went to the window with its view into the neighbour’s kitchen, half watching me still.

“The way you wait for him to come out and walk with you every morning. It’s obvious, Asako, can’t you see? Even my son sees.” My face burned and burned, the tears hot and
unspilled in my eyes. “You want them to see, ne, Asako? You have no shame,” she chided, with a harsh, teasing laugh.

“It’s not true,” I cried after a moment. “It’s him waiting for me!
He
waits!”

She sat down again, to calm me, I suppose. Refusing to take in what I said. “Your feelings frighten you. I understand.” She looked me in the eye, hers so fixed, so startling inside the black lines drawn across her lids. “He’s just a man, Asako. Nothing to be afraid of. Different from us, and not so different.” I tried to protest, but she went on.

“It’s true he likes you, Asako. He has respect for you.” She rose. I felt something then—the ride, Eiji’s ride—rise and tumble inside me. Sensing this, she added: “Of course, not in the way of a man having feelings for a woman.” Again she paced two steps this way, two steps that.

“Asako, you must understand that Yano would never—”

“Of course not,” I interrupted, if only to stop her words.

“He’s not that kind of man, Asako. If he knew …” She touched her hand to her breast. It was not me she was speaking of. She did not finish.

I glanced at the detective, afraid that, in his wisdom, he’d divine my thoughts. The truth, whatever that was. Now I felt the sweat on me, a cold clamp on my buttocks, the fiery ring of the blanket at my neck, amid the blare of heat from the car vents. A sickly sensation. I rolled down the window and instantly the detective reached to adjust the heat setting.

“You all right, Miss Saito?”

“Yes, yes.” I nodded as fresh air streamed over my face.
A man knows his wife. As she knows him.
“Yes, detective,” I said finally, gulping the wind. “Chisako knew him. She knew her
husband very well.” I paused. “You see, she loved him.” I glanced again at the detective’s profile, unmoved, and his hand with its band of gold on the steering wheel; then said: “Surely you understand, detective.”

After a moment, he took something out of his pocket and placed it on the dashboard. “They found it nearby, in the parking lot,” he said. It was the glass dome Mr. Spears had given Chisako, with the pink rose inside. A terrible thought came to me, seeing that perfect blossom bounce in its watery vault as the car bumped along.

“Where is she? All this time … how did they—”

“Her body’s been kept in facilities downtown,” the detective said. “They’ll be buried together. When there’s no family—”

“No family,” I repeated. There was no use mentioning Yano’s crazy brother. I took a deep breath and exhaled, just as Detective Rossi had once shown me.

We rounded a corner and the electrical towers, Chisako’s cages, my giants, swung into view, and I saw myself there, foolish and clinging, insignificant beneath those monstrous beams. Clinging to another, no less dwarfed—to Yano, on that morning as grey and early as this: two ants struggling in that empty field. I had not given him the comfort he deserved that day, the comfort I knew how to give; what I’d done was far worse.

The field came into view now, blank as snow in mid-summer, and a panic struck me. “The dog!” I exclaimed. I heard myself; the hysteria still lurked there, my heart was still racked; after everything, nothing, nothing was settled.

“It’s with the Nakamuras,” the detective answered, pointing to the road behind us. “The girl wanted it with her.”

“Of course.” I calmed myself.

We pulled into the driveway, and there were Stum and Angel huddled in the window. How odd to see them there. Detective Rossi opened the car door for me, cradling my elbow in his palm. He slipped the glass dome into my hand. Quietly said: “It was a brave thing you did, Miss Saito. You saved that girl.”

No, not brave. Nothing but fear. I looked into Detective Rossi’s eyes, the kindness there that would accept anything I said, anything that was the truth. “I didn’t save anyone,” I told him. I wanted him to understand. He was about to reply, but just then Angel came scurrying towards us, Stum lagging behind. Angel cried in her fussy way: “Asako! You’re safe!” and I let her take me in her puffy arms, I let her chastise me as if I were a child who’d wandered off from home.

I slept and slept. Did not wake until late the next morning, when the air was already stale. My fever gone. I felt the busyness of my heart, of a lingering presence and the exhaustion of having dreamed, yet I remembered nothing of it. Angel came in as I started to push away the covers, Stum hovering behind her. She scolded me to lie back and rest. I surrendered to her fussing, avoiding Stum’s little worried eyes, and told them to go off to work before they lost an hour’s pay. “I’m fine, fine,” I said, closing my eyes. I opened them and I was alone. This was how it was to be: fuss, fuss, then gone, forgotten.

I sat in my garden, my neglected garden. It seemed so long since I’d tended to it properly. On my fingers I counted seventeen days since the first news had come of Chisako’s death.
That long since my routine had been disrupted. I wanted the number to hold some special meaning, but when I searched my mind, my memory, nothing came. How quickly the weeds had encroached to threaten my precious blooms. Only my roses were unwilted. I began clipping the withered flower heads vigorously, digging up thorns and stray grasses. As I surveyed the heap of weeds and petals, his voice entered my head—Yano’s—as I knew it would, as I knew it would for years to come.

“Mottai-nai,” he’d said, the day when I, Chisako’s accomplice, invited him into my home. He was holding up my Eiji, clumsy fingers pasted half over that tiny face. Holding the picture above us as we lay back on my too narrow bed, his breath regained. I might have giggled, like the girl I had been with Eiji. But Yano was an old man, muttering his old refrain.