The Wishing Trees (3 page)

JAPAN

Memories Awoken

“ONE KIND WORD CAN WARM THREE WINTER MONTHS.”

—JAPANESE SAYING

“I
t’s not so bloody bonkers in here, is it?” Ian asked, helping Mattie to her seat, relieved to be free from the press of bodies on Tokyo’s sidewalks.

Mattie studied the mini conveyor belt in front of her, which carried servings of sushi to customers lining a long table. Different-colored plates held the sushi, and Mattie glanced from one to another. “Why are there so many colors?” she asked, exhausted from the lengthy flight, her voice slow and steady—so different from her father’s, with its Australian accent and his tendency to run words together.

Ian nodded to a passing waitress. “Well, each plate represents a different amount of money, my little ankle biter. The green plates hold the cheapest sushi, I reckon. The blues ones might be in the middle, the red ones the most expensive, and so on. That’s how they do it over here—keeps things moving fast and efficient.”

“Oh.”

“Care to have a go at it?”

“Sure.”

The waitress, dressed in a black T-shirt and skirt, asked if they wanted something to drink. Ian tried to remember Japanese, pulling a few phrases from his past life. After the waitress had taken his order and left, he put his arm around Mattie, who was rubbing the end of one of her long braids against her chin. “She must think I’ve got kangaroos loose in the top paddock,” he said, seeking to put a smile on Mattie’s face, a task that had become an obsession of his. “I don’t know if I ordered us water or told her we fancied a swim.”

Mattie kept watching the plates, thinking that she might like to sketch them. “Did you ever come here with Mommy?”

“No, luv, I reckon not. Tokyo has something like thirty million people. It’s a heap bigger than even New York. And restaurants like this one are on about every corner, so stumbling upon the same place twice would be like finding your favorite needle in a mountain of needles. Plus, we lived in Kyoto and didn’t come to Tokyo but two or three times.”

Nodding absently, Mattie studied the various offerings of sushi. Rectangular cuts of pink, red, white, and orange fish occupied most plates, though piles of roe, octopus tentacles, slices of shrimp, and bottles of beer and sake were also moving from her right to her left. She was surprised to see that a man two chairs down from her had a stack of almost a dozen plates in front of him. How could someone so small eat so much? she wondered.

As Mattie studied the man, Ian watched her. Since Kate had died, Mattie didn’t talk as much as she used to. She still asked lots of questions but seemed more interested in answers than conversations. Once Mattie had been nine going on nineteen, so eager to tell her parents how the world worked. But now, a year and a half after her mother’s death, she seemed to have lost interest in sharing her knowledge.

“I reckon it’s no help being an octopus in these parts,” Ian said as a nearby customer devoured some tentacles. “Having eight arms didn’t do him much good.”

A smile spread across Mattie’s face. Her smile was like a sunrise, warming him. “Don’t be silly, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll embarrass me.”

“Embarrass you? The lass who used to run around naked on our deck?”

“Daddy!”

He leaned over to kiss the side of her head. “Ah, you’re best off to ignore my yammering.”

The waitress brought them water and Ian thanked her. Mattie continued to watch the food flow past. She picked up her chopsticks, remembering when her mother had tried to teach her how to use them. Her mother had taught her so many things—how to ride a bike, how to plant tulip bulbs, and, most important, how to draw. They had often gone to Central Park and sketched together. Sometimes her mother read her a story and Mattie drew what was happening in it. At first her sketches weren’t more than simplistic collections of uneven lines and colors. But as the seasons played hopscotch, Mattie’s creations became more complex and refined. With her mother’s encouragement, she learned to draw with emotion, to put her hopes and loves and happiness into whatever she was trying to bring to life.

Mattie glanced out a window into the chaos called Tokyo. The city was an infinite assortment of moving parts. She saw elevated trains, thousands of people moving like rivers, and lights of every color that blinked, pulsated, and seemed to be alive. Suddenly Mattie missed her room. She was disoriented in Japan, and even with her father beside her, she felt alone.

“Daddy?” she asked.

“Yeah, luv?”

“Do you think Mommy really sees us? Even with all these people around?”

Ian pursed his lips, her words echoing his own thoughts. “Your mum always saw you, Roo. She always watched over you.” He sipped his water, trying to keep his voice steady as memories of Kate flooded into him. “One night, only a few months after you were born, I came home, quite late, from work. You were in your crib, and she was asleep on the floor, still reaching through the crib’s rails to hold your hand. You two looked like a couple of angels.”

“We did?”

“You were a couple of angels.”

“Did you take a picture?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been a dimwit a thousand nights of my life and that was one of them.” Seeing that Mattie was huddled low, as if cold, he moved his chair closer to hers until their legs touched. She was wearing a T-shirt with one of her earliest sketches on it—a shirt that Kate had ordered—and it was wonderful, but hardly warm. “I’m dead cert that your mum’s watching you now,” Ian said, putting his arm around her.

“I miss her so much.”

“I know. So do I.”

Mattie reached for his free hand, a tear tumbling from her eye. “Daddy, will . . . will I always be sad?”

He brushed away the tear. “No, luv. You won’t. That’s why your mum asked us to go on this walkabout. She wants us to laugh like we used to. You remember laughing, don’t you? We used to laugh so bloody hard.”

“I remember.”

Ian leaned toward her, kissing a freckle near her nose, seeing pieces of his wife within his daughter. “Will you try to laugh with me? Like your mum wanted you to?”

“She really said that? She wanted me to laugh?”

“That’s what she wrote. In her letter to me.”

Mattie tried to remember her mother’s smile. “Aye, aye, Captain, I’ll laugh.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “That’s my first mate. That’s the spirit. Let’s have heaps of fun together, like we used to, like we always will.”

She reached for a plate that held thin slices of cucumbers. “Can you tell me a story? About you and Mommy in Japan?”

“Something to tickle your funny bone?”

“No. Tell me about something good she did. How she helped someone.”

Ian nodded, walking through memories. He picked up a plate of tuna but didn’t touch the perfectly cut fish. “One day, luv, your mum and I were outside, eating our lunch, taking a break from teaching. We were in downtown Kyoto, near the train station.”

“And what happened?”

“I’ll tell you in a tick, Roo. But have a go at those cucumbers first.”

“Tell me.”

He used his chopsticks to place a slice of cucumber in her mouth, thinking that her lips had grown fuller in recent months. “As you know, luv, your mum fancied helping people,” he said, dipping a piece of his tuna in soy sauce. “People who couldn’t help themselves. And we were out there, on that lovely day, and there was a homeless man, and he was drunk, so legless that he couldn’t stand. Well, a heap of people had gathered around him, and these three businessmen came up and started to pester the bloke. The dimwits were laughing at him, mucking around, knocking over his bag. And then they began to kick him. And soon more people came to watch the spectacle—a bunch of bloody cowards if you ask me, because no one did a thing to stop it, even when those three mongrels started kicking him.”

“Did you stand there?”

Ian smiled, remembering how Kate had stepped forward. “Your mum, she dropped her food and ran right up to them. And I had no choice but to do the same. By the time I got there, she was already yelling at the businessmen. She had two of them on their heels. I reckon she had them beat, but one of those mongrels stood his ground. At least until I showed up. At that point he scampered off like his backside had been set afire.”

Mattie picked up another cucumber. “And what did Mommy do?”

“Your mum bent down and helped that homeless chap to his feet. And then she gave him some money. A proper sum of money, if I remember right.”

“Wasn’t she afraid?”

“I don’t know. I was. If something had happened, we might have been deported. And I’d only been in the country for a few months. I didn’t have anyplace to go.”

Mattie nodded, not surprised by the story. “I want to be like Mommy. I want to help people.”

“And you will, luv. You will. Just don’t be in a rush to grow up. You can still help people when you’re young.”

She finished her cucumbers and picked up a pink plate that held thin slices of shrimp. “Daddy, should we open our messages from Mommy tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

“I think we should.”

Ian added wasabi to his soy sauce, giving himself more time to think. He didn’t know if he was ready to read Kate’s words again. He was afraid she might ask him to do more than he was capable of. Already she had pushed him to his limits, pressuring him to return to Japan, to the place where he had fallen in love with her. A part of him hadn’t wanted to come back to Kyoto, as sometimes it was best not to stir up the repertoire of his memories. Such memories weakened rather than strengthened him, and he needed to be strong for Mattie’s sake. He couldn’t let her know about his demons, about the sorrow that threatened to suffocate him. He had to be an actor, convincing her that he wanted to go on this trip when he sometimes resented Kate for begging him to do so. She had asked too much. How could he walk through memories that would never be relived? How could he make Mattie laugh and smile when so many joys had been stolen from him? He would try, of course, but feared that he would fail. He’d never been as strong as Kate, and she should have thought about that before asking the impossible.

“Can we wait, Roo, until after tomorrow?” he finally answered. “How about that? You and I will do a Captain Cook tomorrow, and the next day we’ll open the canisters.”

“A real Captain Cook?”

“Sure, luv. A real look around. Let’s explore Tokyo. Let’s have some fun. And then we’ll read your mum’s notes.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Mattie replied, trying to smile, aware that her father was worried about the canisters. She knew that he thought he could hide his feelings from her, but she’d seen too much of his suffering. She’d pretended not to, but he couldn’t fool her. Not when she watched him stare at her mother’s photo, not when he paused in midsentence as a smell or sight reminded him of his loss. And especially not at night, when he went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and cried.

Mattie understood her father. She understood him because she’d seen his face in happier times. She knew how he liked to laugh, to tickle her, to play jokes. Now he rarely did such things and didn’t do them nearly as well as he once had. On occasion she’d glimpse his old self, but these glimpses were as infrequent as her own feelings of happiness.

“I love you, Daddy,” Mattie said, placing another plate of tuna in front of him.

Ian managed to push his thoughts of Kate aside, at least for the moment. “I love you too, Roo. I love you so bloody much, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”