Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Present Day
The night of Liam’s return party, he suggested to Lily that they go home with Yoko instead of staying at her mother’s place, like they’d originally planned.
Yoko listened with her hands folded on her thighs, marveling at how good her son was at manipulating his future bride.
All he had to do was express a need, and boom, Lily was ready to meet it.
Yoko hated how much of herself she saw in the young woman, how, after her injury in Australia, she’d been more than keen to step into the bounds of Kendall’s life, have his child, and give up on everything she’d seen for herself.
It went without saying that it had been one of the strangest weeks of Yoko’s life.
As she drove home from the Sutton House that night, following her son in Lily’s car, she thought back to the panicked moment at the grocery store.
One minute, she’d been upright, trying to remember what she’d written on the grocery list she’d left at home, and the next, she’d been sprawled on the linoleum, looking up at Esme and Valerie Sutton.
It reminded her, horribly, of her accident in Australia, all those eyes upon the great tennis player.
Now, she was a middle-aged lady, talking to herself at the store, waiting for her cheating husband to come home.
Did she still want him to come back? Now that everyone knew about the affair, wasn’t it too late?
The public damage had been done. A part of Yoko was grateful that Coach and Kathy were no longer alive to see Kendall treat Yoko like this.
Coach would have looked at Yoko the way he had during her tennis matches. Pull yourself together, Yoko.
When Yoko, Liam, and Lily entered the Reynoldses’ house, Yoko experienced a harrowing moment of déjà vu.
She thought back to many years ago, when she’d first moved into the main house with Kendall and Kathy.
She’d nursed her wounds and wandered around and tried to make sense of her life without tennis.
All the while, Kendall and Kathy had watched her nervously, as though she were a wild animal they’d let into the house.
She didn’t want to think of Lily like that.
But she could sense the young woman’s discomfort as she crept through the house, not wanting to disturb anything.
Yoko imagined herself saying, Break something!
Throw that vase against the wall! Make the space your own!
But she worried that the Suttons would think she was even crazier.
“What a nice party,” Lily said, pressing the tips of her fingers together.
“Yes,” Yoko said stiffly. “It was kind of your family to throw a welcome home party for Liam.”
The air between them stiffened. While Yoko had spoken so freely with Lily mere days ago, she found that, with Liam sitting between them, her tongue was tied.
They watched television for a little while, an English-language show that Yoko found exhausting and overly emotional.
When she looked over at Lily and Liam, they were both on their phones, not paying attention to the show in the first place.
Something about the scene they built was profoundly sad.
After a little while, Lily confessed she was exhausted.
“We’re staying in my old bedroom, second floor, third door on the right,” Liam told her firmly. “There are spare towels in the closet on the left-hand side. Make yourself at home.”
Lily thanked them both, kissed Liam on the cheek, and disappeared. Yoko listened until she heard her future daughter-in-law disappear into Liam’s room. And then, she switched back to Japanese, grateful that she could melt into herself and her language with only Liam around.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” she told her son, overwhelmed with memories. In her mind’s eye, she could still see toddler Liam, stumbling across this very floor.
But something was cold and off about Liam just now. It was as though she’d done something wrong. Staying in English, he said, “How could you let him do this to you?”
Yoko flinched, as though she’d been smacked. She knew exactly who her son was talking about and still couldn’t fully fathom what he’d said. In Japanese, she muttered, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” he said in English. “You let him leave. You let him go to Miami. You let him embarrass himself and our entire family with some woman down there.”
“Your father has always done what he wants,” Yoko said.
She felt world-weary. “He probably started cheating on me before we got married. I’m sure he cheated on me in the first month of our relationship.
He was still at Princeton, and I was here, training with your grandfather.
I never really knew what he was up to. He wanted it to be that way. ”
She remembered how Emilia had first told her about Kendall’s cheating after her fourth Wimbledon Championship, how she’d pushed Emilia’s friendship away in order to support her hope that Kendall loved her more than anyone.
She imagined that Emilia was off somewhere now, reading the tabloids about Kendall’s exploits and laughing at Yoko.
That, or pitying Yoko. Yoko wasn’t sure what was worse.
But I have my son, she thought. I have Liam, even if he’s being a brat right now.
“But you must have done something,” Liam shot back at her. He was on his feet, pacing the living room, his hands in fists behind his back. “You must have made him fall out of love with you.”
Yoko couldn’t help but laugh at that. “If I did, I hope he’ll tell me what it was,” she said.
“Did you ask him yourself? Maybe he’ll tell you what it was.
Perhaps he’ll say that I got old. Maybe he’ll say that I gained or lost weight.
Maybe he’ll say I’m not the tennis champion he married. Or maybe he’ll say he got bored.”
Liam’s cheeks were enflamed, just as they used to get when he was coming down with a cold.
Maybe he actually was sick. Yoko imagined nursing him back to health, making him miso soup and other Japanese recipes, just as she had when he was her little boy.
She couldn’t understand why he was acting like this right now, why he was blaming her, unless he was trying to find meaning within his own life.
Unless he was trying to understand himself and his actions.
She remembered that gossip column she’d read about Liam and his co-star. Something in the back of her mind clicked, although she didn’t want it to.
“Can I ask you a question?” Yoko asked.
Liam tugged at his black hair and gave her a look that reminded Yoko of her own father, who’d died so long ago now. “Yeah? What?”
“Do you love Lily?” she asked, remaining in Japanese so that Lily couldn’t eavesdrop from the stairs. (Yoko herself had eavesdropped often when she’d been living with Kathy and Kendall.)
This time, Liam switched to Japanese as well. “Of course I love her,” he stammered. He looked irate. “She’s my fiancée. She’s my bride. She’s my everything.”
Yoko sensed something jagged about how he spoke, as though he were trying to convince himself of something he’d once understood.
She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t a bad thing to fall out of love with someone, especially in your twenties, before you’d made any big commitments.
She wanted to point out that Lily and Liam hadn’t picked out anything wedding-related yet.
They hadn’t found the venue. They hadn’t tried any cake.
Lily hadn’t fallen in love with a single wedding dress, either, despite the fact that she’d looked downright lovely in more than half of the ones she’d tried on.
Yoko felt that Lily didn’t want to marry Liam, just as much as Liam didn’t want to marry Lily.
But she couldn’t say it aloud. She didn’t want to be accused of projection.
Suddenly, Liam stormed toward the front door.
Yoko hurried after him, her heart thudding as she watched him pull on his winter hat, gloves, and coat.
She knew he wasn’t used to the winter weather after months in Los Angeles and was worried he’d freeze out there.
But in Japanese, he said, “I need to take a walk. I need to think.” Yoko knew better than to hold him back from all that necessary thinking.
Maybe he’d make a breakthrough. She hung back as the door cut open, bringing in swirling snowflakes and a blanket of frost. The entire mansion seemed to shake when he slammed the door behind him.
Yoko returned to the living room and sat for a long time, watching the snow rush past the window.
Back in Osaka, she couldn’t remember ever getting snow, not even deep in her childhood.
What she did remember was the surrounding mountains, blanketed in white, the ancient trees, the old-world cemeteries, and the sense of spirits swirling in the sky overhead.
Now that she’d been in the United States since 1995 (thirty years!), she’d come to terms with the fact that Americans didn’t believe in “spirits” the way some Japanese mountain people did.
Her own parents hadn’t believed either. But Yoko liked to open herself up to magic.
She wanted to believe in something bigger than herself.
And if she believed in God—which she did—she wasn’t sure why a spiritual world was so hard to fathom.
There were so many more forces at work than anyone could guess. But what sorts of forces had brought Yoko to this grotesque marriage, where she mostly lived alone?
When her mother and father passed away, three weeks apart, as though they hadn’t been able to live without the other, Yoko had traveled with Liam back to Japan for their funerals.
They’d buried them in an old cemetery next to her maternal grandparents and performed all the necessary Japanese rituals associated with death, many of which mystified Liam.
To her relatives and friends, Liam had seemed like such an American little boy: loud and funny and unwilling to follow all the rules.
Yoko had experienced a strange mix of embarrassment and pride.
She hadn’t wanted her son to uphold rules that canceled out his amazing personality.
She hadn’t wanted her son to be tied to all the things that had held her back, emotionally and mentally, when she’d been a girl.
But she’d always wanted her son to understand and appreciate Japanese culture. Had she done enough to secure that?
When Liam came home a half hour later, he was blue in the face.
Without talking, he removed his coat and hat and made them both tea.
Afterward, he put on one of her favorite Japanese films from many decades ago and watched it with her, sipping his tea slowly.
Yoko loved the movie immensely and was touched he’d remembered.
She’d only just watched it with Lily, but it meant far more to watch it with her son.
That was the way things were. She couldn’t help it. Liam was her greatest love.