The Electrical Field (9 page)

She sniffed her finger. “I never washed it.”

“Stop!” I snatched her wrist, pushed it away too roughly. I could only play the game with her so long. But she persisted.

“It gets in through your pores, see?” She held up her finger to me. I tried not to recoil, what she’d want. There was
nothing to see. “Blood attracts blood,” she said. “Did you know that, Miss Saito?” Peering at me, steely yet quivering, like a tuning fork. Something flared in her eyes, behind her glasses, which she rarely wore.

“I thought you only needed those for reading the blackboard,” I said. So she must have gone to school, then wandered off for the last hour or so.

The books she held tumbled to the hallway floor. She was grimy, her hair mushed flat to her crown. Her braces were clogged with food bits; she must not have brushed in days. “Everything looks wavy,” and she flailed her hands in front like a blind person and smiled stupidly. She was waiting for me to tell her what to do. She let the smile drop and looked into my eyes through her lenses, which widened and blurred her eyes. “If I don’t go to class, Keiko won’t let me out of the house,” she murmured in a voice gone small. “I had to, for Tam.”

I sighed and led her to the kitchen sink and held her fingers close to my nose, in a show for her benefit. “See? Nothing.” Yet I imagined I did smell something, a hint of flesh gone bad. It wasn’t Sachi’s scent. Quickly I spun on the tap and held her hand under it. She screeched.

“It’s hot!”

“All right, all right,” I muttered. I turned on the cold water and loosened my grip on her hand. I turned it over in mine and saw new nicks and cuts across her knuckles, not deep: the kind that form thin scabs and easily peel off. I cursed Keiko in my head. What are you doing to her, I wanted to shout. Why couldn’t they watch her? Pay her a little attention, as I did? Sachi was watching me; my lips must
have been busy, she knew what I was thinking. I didn’t care. I knew she liked it, my seething, my frustration.

I sat her down in the living-room. I dabbed her hand dry, again making a show of searching for traces, babying her as she seemed to want, even need. “Look,” I repeated. “Nothing!” I sniffed at her fingers. “Soap.” I knelt down in front of her, removed her glasses, and pushed aside her greasy hair. I smoothed her face over and over with my hands; a useless gesture, but I couldn’t help myself. The softness under my palms, the velvet resilience. The newness. She watched me as I did so, unblinking, trusting my touch more and more with each stroke. Then it came, as I knew it would. Her face scrunching into a monkey’s. Her mouth cracking open to an animal wail. I cupped her face in my hands. My fingers slipped over her open mouth, sticky and dark. “No, no, no,” I frantically rasped above her tears, trying to stem what I myself had called forth just by touching her.

“Tam!” she finally cried, breaking free of me. “I want Tam!” Her eyes, swimming in her head, at last found me again. “Miss Saito, Miss Saito!” she screamed, wringing her hands, rubbing her fingers, her body vibrating. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” Her sobs rang through the maze of my house. At last she collapsed against me, holding me tight, tighter than Stum had the other night, crying for his ne-san.

She let me hold her hand as we made our way down to the creek, along the path I’d followed her on last Thursday, when the first news came. It was where the creek flowed south, away from Mackenzie Hill into a shallow ravine. It started to
rain lightly after it was too late to turn back, and you could hear the drops slipping in between the reeds to small hidden places. I didn’t know what we were searching for, but this was the only way I could calm her down. As our feet slid into the softening dirt, I wondered what traces were melting; whose footprints we were trampling. The rain was coming down harder, the tap tap tap on the leaves suddenly busy in my ears, and the bushes and trees along the path slowly bowing under it. I’d expected her to take the lead, but she hung back and gripped my hand more tightly as we went on, so tightly that I felt the streams of blood inside our fingertips pulse side by side; I remembered what she’d said about blood attracting blood. I felt the rain pouring down my face, saw it crowding the air in front of us, a forest of needles piercing the ground. All I could do was watch my own feet in Mama’s shoes, and feel the lumpy earth through their soles, taking one step after another.

“Stop,” she said. Our arms tugged as I tried to move on and she stood still. We’d barely passed the willow tree where, days ago, she’d lain in wait to taunt me. She inched us to the small clearing skirted by higher grass and thicker bushes, a spot I knew. She dragged me into the middle of it. The tap tap eased a little under the shelter of the willow, but my heart was pounding, busier than the rain. Sachi scanned the ground, searching for clues when nothing was there; kicked her foot about in the wet grass. She whispered something under her breath. We exchanged a glance, as if to say,
nothing here
, and went on, she still holding tight to my hand.

She took us back to the path, muddy as it was, and I was relieved. Relieved we’d left that too-familiar place, as hushed
and quiet on certain afternoons as a closeted room with a tiny window into it. It haunted me, made me dream forbidden dreams only she could guess at. She let me go, if only for this moment, but she knew. She’d spotted me here, who knows how, when I’d always been so careful, or how long ago. Yet she’d left the secret unspoken. Released me without another glance.

I was grateful for the rain, which made me forget my body’s humiliation. I couldn’t tell if I was weeping or sweating or bleeding, if the dress that clung to me was my own weathered, welted skin, if the sludge under my feet had come from my body or the earth. The whole world was leaking and we were a part of it, and so were Tam and Kimi and Yano, wherever they were.

By now the creek was rising, flowing quickly with the summer rain, frothing on the surface. Sachi pulled me along one bank until we ended up where she’d crossed before, but the rocks she’d danced on then were submerged. She looked back at me, this time as if to say,
now what?
But I shook my head and we kept on along the bank, farther and farther away from Mackenzie Hill and the last electrical tower on this side of the field; away from the last block of houses, out of sight, as if the whole neighbourhood had been levelled by rain.

We kept going for an hour or more, it seemed, following the creek that swelled up its banks. I felt her hand going limp in mine with the fatigue and cold that grow as you venture farther from home with no destination in sight.

“Let’s go back,” I called, though I couldn’t say which way was back. She shook her head. But her pace slowed.

It didn’t take much to coax her. We came to an opening
and found ourselves returning into the far south end of the electrical field, the towers guiding us in. She lagged behind, weakened by the fear that we might never find Tam, I suppose; I had to keep tugging her, pulling on her arm as if on the leash of a stubborn animal. “There’s nothing there,” I shouted through the rain.

At home I took her into the bathroom and began peeling the clothes from her shivering body. Under the layers she was nothing, almost see-through with cold, her skin transparent with veins like an old woman’s, like mine, pinpricked with goosebumps, her nipples shrunken purple-brown. She stood still for me, unresistant for a moment, knowing I wanted to look. But quickly I wrapped the towel around her; she was so thin it went around twice.

“Miss Saito,” she burst out, with energy that came from I don’t know where. “I know what happened.”

“Shush,” I said gently. “Go nen nen. Go to sleep.” I found myself talking as if to a child. I tightened the towel around her. I felt the pumping of her little heart, her breath coming in fits and starts.

“They must’ve seen the man,” she murmured feverishly.

“What man? Who?”

“The one who took Yano’s gun, the one who did it. Tam must’ve seen him. Tam sees everything. The man knows it so they had to take off.”

I thought of Tam’s unblinking eyes as I led Sachi to my bedroom. “I see.” I could feel her giving out, little by little. Her body caving in.

“They’re waiting for the police to catch the man so they can come back.”

I laid her down, slipping her under my faded covers, seeing through her eyes the dowdiness of my room, smelling the musty lifelessness, the meagre stillness. I sat down on the edge of the bed. She kept her eyes open for the longest time, staring at the ceiling as she nattered on with her ideas, seeming not to notice any details of my decor.

“See, Miss Saito? All we have to do is wait.”

This was how she was holding on. I was so used to her being taciturn, in spite of what churned below; it was like another person here with me. But it was Sachi after all, no one else.

“Miss Saito, Miss Saito.” Her hand was stirring beneath the covers. She’d quietened down now, her nervous energy almost spent.

“Yes?”

“Tell me the story about Eiji.”

“Which one?” I was taken aback, and touched that she should think of my brother at a time when only Tam could be in her head. It brought her comfort to hear about me with Eiji. I suppose she liked to imagine the two of us as not that different from her and Tam, though Tam was nothing like Eiji, nothing at all.

“You know, during the war,” she persisted.

“It’s not really a story.”

“I know.” She smiled.

“It’s nothing.”

Her wise smile, the smile I hadn’t seen since we’d heard about Chisako, about Tam and Kimi gone missing, fell away as she surrendered to her exhaustion. That smile made me pour myself out. We’d spent so little time together lately.
Being with her like this, it was almost the way it had been before anything happened. Her eyes fluttered shut.

“When we got there, Mama and I…,” I started to say, never knowing quite where to begin.

“Where? Got where?”

“Hastings Park, the exhibition grounds in Vancouver.” Already I recalled how dizzy I’d felt from the ferry ride over, my first; sick from being inside a hulk that moved against the current while you stayed still. There was the smell in the livestock building that made me more sick—a disinfectant used on the stalls where we slept, and the musty stink of cows and their business lurking under it. It almost hurt to smell, a sharp but burning sweet that made me press my nose to the floor the first night and sniff until my head ached.

Sachi’s eyes stayed shut, but she wasn’t asleep. I felt her hand rustle under the cover next to my leg, urging me on. “Papa and Eiji had been there for weeks already.” Eiji was on the baggage crew, taking in everyone’s shabby bags and boxes, settling us in for the months we would be there, before they sent us to the camps. I could tell he was glad to be busy, to not be thinking about what he was missing. How strange it was to say Eiji’s name aloud to someone other than Stum or Papa. It made me realize how rarely I did say it, how much I kept him to myself. I was grateful Sachi’s eyes were shut. I didn’t care to be watched.

“We’d been there a month or two when a fair came to the grounds,” I told her. “With rides and all kinds of games and candy floss.” I watched her lids flicker at that but they didn’t open.

“One night, after his shift, Eiji took me through the
gates.” There had been no Mounties, no gatekeeper, no pass-taker to check on us or stop us. Only an open field between the gates and the fair, passing quickly as we ran. I had seen the livestock building left behind in the distance, and coloured lights turning in the sky in front. I had seen tickets, pink, in Eiji’s hand. I saw it now like a dream, his hand, his long straight fingers with the tickets held in them. It was his face I couldn’t quite see. It was like seeing through his eyes, because there I was, a girl Sachi’s age, waiting by the ticket booth, in line for the ride. It was growing dark. We were the only nihonjin there, as far as I could tell, yet nobody looked twice at us.

“What was it called? The ride?”

“I don’t know,” I said, startled. It was the only ride besides the Ferris wheel I’d ever been on.

“You used to know.”

“Did I?” I felt the chill of confusion, but then realized my hair was still wet, dripping down onto the shoulders of the dress I’d changed into. I must have looked a mess.

“What’s wrong, Miss Saito?” She sat up on her elbows. Gently I pushed her back down. “Keep going,” she said with quiet authority. “Don’t stop.”

“It was the kind of ride,” I began again, “where you sit in little cars, two together, and hold on,” I said, seeing myself slip in beside Eiji in slow motion. I had the face of an adult, and thin, with too large a jaw and a high forehead, while my body was still a child’s. I watched myself slowly grip the steel bar in my hands, one here, the other there. I loved the ride, the whirr of it, inside and out, up and down. I heard the cries rise and melt into the air, and I was half flung to
the sky, pinned down by my hands. Eiji was beside me and he was smiling, he loved the ride too, he loved it that I was afraid. “You were so scared,” he said after, back on the ground, his eyes with the ride still whirring in them. I was never so happy, never so without care as on that night.

It exhausted me, calling up this memory, and I felt queasy all at once, as if from the motion of the dream, though I could not at that moment remember the ride itself, how the little cars moved. I found myself unable to continue; the words and pictures in my mind had vanished, and Sachi had fallen into a deep sleep, her cheek pressed into my pillow.

I don’t know how long I sat there; long enough, I realized, for the rain to have slowed its pace once again. Long enough that bright light now leaked in around my blinds where before it had been dark. It was a strange thing, the day growing darker, then lighter, as if day and night were changing places. I peeked out between the blinds and gazed down at the creek. I pictured us there, two sodden figures. Anyone spotting us would have taken me for a neglectful mother, crazy even, leading my daughter out in the rain without a coat or an umbrella. Yet I had done more for her than Keiko would have, I knew that.