The Garden of Dead Dreams (19 page)

“You’re keeping stuff from us.”

Etta shook her head.

“Reed and I are your underlings. You treat us like children. Even worse, like step-children.”

She did tend to think of herself as much older than Poppy, who was all of twenty-three. The smell of Poppy’s jambalaya swirled all around her.

“You want the glory.”

“Glory?” Etta snorted. “What glory?”

Poppy stared at her.

“There’s no glory here. I don’t even know what we’re doing. I don’t understand any of this—Olivia, Matthew Lowther, Robert North. Galen. Jordan. Opal. Any of it. I haven’t eaten a meal in a week, and I’m so ravenous that it’s all I can do not to grab that sandwich off Reed’s plate, and I’ve been waking up about ten times a night if I can even get to sleep, because when I close my eyes, I see Olivia standing on the stage next to Robert North, and I hear her crying. I actually hear her. And if I don’t write a story in two days . . . I have nowhere to go when they expel me—no house, no family, no money.”

Etta felt someone next to her and jerked her head up. Reed’s gaze flitted away. He set the bowl of jambalaya on the table, his hands trembling. The water sloshed over the sides of its glass as he set it down.

They ate in silence. Etta shoveled spoonfuls of jambalaya into her mouth, hardly chewing, only momentarily savoring the way the green chilies complimented the Creole spices and the smoked Andouille sausage. “Where did he go?”

Poppy glanced up for only a second then stared back at her bowl. It was the first time Etta had ever known Poppy to hesitate to speak. Etta shifted her gaze to Reed, whose face was still pale, his glasses sitting slightly crooked on his long nose.

“Robert North. He left two hours ago. I saw him go outside, out into the rain. Carl’s the only one who could drive him to Jackson, right? And Carl’s over there. So where did Robert go?”

Poppy dropped her fork into her bowl and pushed it away. Their heads drifted toward the middle of the table.

“He said Galen got Olivia into this place, which means Galen wrote her story and Galen wrote the play.” Etta brought her hand down, and Poppy and Reed both flinched at the clatter the dishes made. “Hans is Matthew Lowther, right. He was at the academy looking for the truth. The truth about Vincent Buchanan?”

“I do not understand. Do you think they led Matthew Lowther into the forest, because he knew something?” Reed whispered.

“Olivia was acting so strange that night . . . terrified.” Etta glanced toward the director’s table. Hardin and Opal were there now, seated in their usual spots. “No. Not scared. She was furious.” Etta dropped her voice. “At Hardin.”

After lunch Etta, Reed, and Poppy walked to the theater. While Reed fiddled with the switches on the light board, Etta drifted onto the stage, moving toward the place where Olivia had been standing the last time she’d seen her. Etta stood in the spot for several minutes and stared into the shadows beyond the curtain. “Here?” she mumbled to herself.

“You found it in the theater?”

Etta had almost forgotten she wasn’t alone, and the sight of Poppy on the floor in the middle of the stage with her legs folded beneath her sent a startle through Etta. “I was just wondering if this was where Olivia . . .” The name caught in Etta’s throat.

Poppy stared at her, lines forming at her brow. “Did you even hear my question?” She pulled her fine hair into a ponytail then let it fall across her shoulders.

Etta shook her head.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I asked you three times.”

One of the velvet curtains wavered, and Reed stepped from behind it. The reverberation of his footsteps rippled across the stage. “We should not stay long if we wish not to be interrupted.” He spoke just above a whisper. “Winston will arrive in fifteen minutes.”

“Why is Winston always in here anyway? It’s creepy.” Poppy’s voice echoed into the narrow room.

“This is where he writes,” Reed whispered then glanced over his shoulder. “I saw him one day when we were preparing the production, and . . .” Reed looked from Poppy to Etta. “He was standing in the middle of the stage speaking into a voice recorder. It was as though he was watching a production unfold in front of him. He recited every stage queue, described the sets, the music, random sounds, the lights. Later I saw him transcribing his recordings onto a legal pad, the sound of his own voice filling the theater. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. I read an interview years ago, where he said, away from the stage, he cannot write a word.”

Etta folded her arms across her chest and rubbed at her shoulders, even though she knew the chill that had rippled through her had nothing to do with the temperature. It was the idea of words springing forth when someone stepped into a theater, of words springing forth at all. Would that ever happen to her again?

“For the fourth time, where did you find this letter?” Etta jumped at the sound of Poppy’s voice. But Poppy didn’t seem to notice. “I bet it’s worth a fortune. I saw this guy on
Antiques Road Show
who had a signed edition of
The Triumph of Folly
. It was worth, like, three thousand dollars. Can you believe it? Just for Buchanan’s stupid signature.”

Reed shoved his hands into the pockets of his khaki pants and began to pace, his shadow mimicking his curved spine. “Poppy is correct. Buchanan ephemera is valuable. That’s why Buchanan’s personal correspondence, interviews, notebooks, and other such documents are stored in the archives. Unless the letter is of no relevance, perhaps?” Reed stopped pacing and stepped toward Etta, peering at her through his glasses. His feathery hair was coiled into tight curls. It apparently reacted to rain in the same way Etta’s did.

Etta slipped the dissertation from her bag, sat down on the edge of one of the folding chairs and opened the book to where the envelope lay between its stiff pages. The name on the envelope made her heart pound, just as it had the first time she’d seen it: Vincent Buchanan.

Etta slipped the stationary from the envelope and unfolded it. Careful cursive letters filled every inch of the page. Etta read, her voice tumbling across the stage:

July 20, 1940

Dearest koibito,

In a few weeks time, I will be on the other side of this ocean we share, but I assure you that nothing can ever wash you from my heart.

It gives me great shame to recount this even now. You probably believe that a mother always loves her child, but for a long time, it was only my sisters my mother loved. She would say her Issei child would ruin the family long before I knew what Issei meant, before Issei Child became my name. In Portland I was an extra mouth to feed. My sisters were my family’s future. The Nisei era will blossom, my father said. My parents saved every coin to send Natsuki to the university. They planned for Natsuki and Miki to buy land for us and to run our store when they came of age. They hired you to teach English lessons only to Natsuki and Miki, because I would need to learn to read and write no more than my mother had. I was able to join them only because I begged and refused to eat for many days. I only tell you this now, so you will understand that your friendship was like the sun on my face at the end of a long, cold winter.

When we returned to that foreign place my parents called home, I was sure I couldn’t survive the ache I felt for you. I could not say your name aloud, because mother would turn her silence on me for weeks, and Natsuki and Miki would run about the house taunting me with “rabu rabu.” That’s when Mother began to call Natsuki and Miki gaijin, outsiders, because they were not born in Japan. I became the favorite, but I could never forgive that she could treat love like rice, giving it and taking it away so easily. I was afraid to leave Natsuki and Miki alone with her. Her anger was like those black tornadoes of dust that swept across America a few years later.

One time Mother threw all of Grandmother’s tea bowls, the only valuables in our small house, across the room, shattering them one by one, yelling about that day my father was forced to put the sign in the window of our store proclaiming we were Japanese. Do you remember that day? There were so many tears in Nihonmachi that day, but it is yours that I remember still. How could a stranger feel such sorrow for my family?

Each time my parents said we had come home to that strange city of Kyoto, I knew it was not home, because there could never be a home without you. I read the books that you gave me and practiced my English every day, and I repeated your promise over and over inside my heart until I could bear it no more. The seasons turned from spring to summer to fall to winter. When the snow blanketed the trees, I stopped believing you would come.

Then you were there in the garden, as full of life as the first time I met you, and I thought I would never let you leave my sight. I never told you this, but now that I will never see you again, secrets seem as futile as dreams. As a child I wished I was one of the picture brides on the boat with us, girls who seemed so old then, but were younger than I am now, dressed in their nicest kimonos. I watched their wedding ceremonies on the boat. White men climbed aboard dressed in strange clothes and filed past us, taking their hats off, holding black-and-white photos in their scrubbed fingers.

I knew even as a girl that I did not want a marriage like my mother’s, a sea of loneliness, with a man who only knew obligation. I wanted poetry, someone who would lie awake at night listening to my heart. I found you, my koibito, and I would never leave you, except I am terrified for your safety as these two great lands I’ve called home dissolve around us.

Etta glimpsed the last sentence before she read it. Her hands started to quake, and the rice paper slipped from her fingers and wafted to the stage. It folded over itself and landed face-down next to Poppy’s boot. Reed crouched to retrieve it, squinted, and read the last sentence, his baritone voice resonating across the stage:

I hope you will find comfort in the words my grandmother spoke to me before I crossed the ocean for the first time. It is impermanence that gives the monotony of breathing its radiance.

Yours forever,

Sakura

Reed stared at the letter then he folded it and passed it to Etta, pushing his glasses up with his index finger. Poppy’s round cheeks glistened. Reed noticed Poppy’s tears at the same moment as Etta did, and he dropped to his knees and knelt beside her, clearing his throat several times.

Poppy waved her hand in the air then wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “You should have seen me the last time I watched
Pretty in Pink
. I went through an entire box of Kleenex.”

“
Pretty in Pink
wasn’t even a sad movie.”

Poppy snapped her gaze to Etta. “Are you kidding? It was the greatest movie of all time. Remember when Andie and Duckie—”

“Excuse me,” Reed interrupted. He looked as surprised as Etta that his deep voice had sliced through Poppy’s. “Forgive me, but we need to put the letter away now. Winston will be here soon. We should not stray off topic.”

“Sorry,” Etta and Poppy both mumbled at the same time.

Etta slipped the letter in its envelope, staring again at the neatly-written address. “Sakura is Yumi.”

Reed stared at her, unblinking.

“Are you speaking English?” Poppy asked.

“‘Impermanence gives the monotony of breathing its radiance.’ It’s the last line of ‘Cherry Blossom.’ Lowther must have stolen it from this letter. In the story Peter Morrison meets a beautiful woman in a garden, a shop keep’s daughter named Yumi. Peter Morrison is Vincent Buchanan , and Yumi is Sakura.” Etta grabbed the dissertation off the chair and started flipping through the first chapter.

“It sounds like a line from a fortune cookie.” Poppy wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Maybe Matthew Lowther brought his dissertation here with him. Vincent Buchanan was obsessed with Japantown as a child. He went with his brother for the first time when he was eleven or twelve, always to the same store.” Etta flipped through the pages, her fingers turning back to lobster claw, fumbling with the thick paper. “Tanaka Grocery. That must have been Sakura’s family’s store.”

Poppy stretched her legs out in front of her. “So Vincent Buchanan wrote to a woman named Sakura? So he went to Japan? I’m sure he did a lot of things. What does any of this have to do with Olivia?”

Reed cleared his throat then stood and started to pace again. “It would be of great interest if Buchanan had a relationship with a Japanese woman. I prepared my honors thesis on Buchanan’s use of symbolism in
Rebellious Tides
.
Rebellious Tides
made Buchanan into a household name, a celebrity even. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. It’s still considered by many to be Buchanan’s best work, although it was all but forgotten after
The Western Defense
became such a sensation.
Rebellious Tides
became a Bette Davis movie in 1940, and some think the movie’s success incited William J. Donovan, the man who oversaw Franklin Roosevelt’s Office of Strategic Services to tap Buchanan to help with the anti-Japanese propaganda effort.”

Poppy laughed. “You sound like Isabella Peña.”

“Well, her rhetoric may be hyperbolic, but her contention that Buchanan worked for the OSS is not implausible. Steinbeck is the person who encouraged the president to create the propaganda office in the first place. He wrote
The Moon is Down
about Hitler. Hersey wrote
The Bell of Adano
about Italy. The Office would have been looking for a celebrated author to write a piece about Japan. And a fictional attack on the West Coast would have been just the sort of novel they would have commissioned—a story that would build American anxiety about Hirohito and bolster the public’s resolve to sacrifice for the war effort in the Pacific. It would explain why Buchanan, by all accounts, had unprecedented access to military and naval information while writing
The Western Defense
. He purportedly even toured the map room with Roosevelt and Churchill.”

Reed stopped pacing, and silence engulfed the stage. Etta was startled to see that she was squeezing the dissertation so tight her knuckles were white. She relaxed her hands.