Chapter Eighteen Ren
Chapter Eighteen
Ren
A baby squalls and I’m holding it.
I’m reinserted into my body. I’ve been somewhere else.
Maybe in the closet where Emi reads to me.
It’s the only safe place we know. She’s protecting me.
She wants to change the world around us and can’t, so she turns to other ones, ones inside books, and she finds a way to get me inside them, too.
She casts spells so strong as she reads to me that she saves me, over and over, so much so that the sound of drunken arguments, drunken screwing, drunken sobbing can’t touch me.
But there’s no closet.
Emi is gone.
A strange, red-faced, tiny, soft human is cradled in my hands because Mama won’t look at it and it’s a girl and I think I might vomit because Emi’s daughter is here, but she isn’t, and I can hear Emi saying, “Ren! Why are you holding my baby like a baseball glove?” only she never said it and never will because she’s…
she’s…My mind refuses the word in the way the stomach refuses food when it’s ill or the lungs refuse air when you’ve been punched.
Dead.
I make myself think the word. Make myself say it. Make myself know it.
But still, I don’t believe it.
Kai goes to the administration offices. Gets baby stuff.
Comes back with yellow cans of instantized powdered milk for the baby, three white cotton diapers, two glass nurser bottles, and two steel safety pins.
Everything is confusing. Too loud. I want to hear Emi’s voice one more time.
Mama lies in Emi’s bed. Won’t talk to anyone.
Mr. Nomura sits next to her. Mrs. Wozumi shows me how to swaddle the baby, Akiko perched on her hip and waving her arms.
“Be careful with the diapers. You only have three,” she says.
“I wash them in the laundry room. Don’t use the latrines.
They aren’t hygienic. Remember you need to have time for the diapers to dry between use.
Oftentimes, I must wait to change Akiko because I don’t have a dry diaper for her.
It causes rashes, though, so I try not to wait too long. Be careful with the pins.”
“All right,” I say.
“Now, you need to sterilize bottles between uses. You can go to the hospital or the laundry room to do it. Oh, and get a hot plate for heating bottles. If you have a baby, they let you have one in your room. You’ll unplug your overhead light and use the socket for it.
” She looks from me to the baby to Mama curled on the bed.
“Do you want me to take the baby for tonight?”
“No thank you.”
“Have you named her?”
Cosette. Emi wanted to name the baby Cosette, if it was a girl, because of the book.
The big one, Les Misérables. My eyes travel to Emi’s stack of novels, Les Misérables on top.
A piece of paper sticks out from the middle, showing where we left off.
How can Emi’s books be here when she isn’t?
Life has always been a bad joke to me, but Emi’s death has taken me somewhere I never knew existed.
I’m stupid with grief. It has stunned me, like I’ve been in an explosion and my ears are whining, my vision is bleached bright white, and my body is broken.
But, somehow, I’m walking. I’m talking. I’m holding a baby.
“Cosette,” I tell Mrs. Wozumi. “Her name is Cosette.”
“Collette?”
“No, Cosette.” Mr. Nomura speaks up from Mama’s side. “It’s French. From a book.”
“Ah, lovely. Well, I need to go put Akiko down for her nap. But come get me if you need me.”
I thank her again. She disappears behind the curtain.
At some point, I vaguely think about Akira and the divine favor.
A bitter laugh leaves my throat. What a joke.
Cosette fusses, so I start pacing. I don’t know how long I pace.
Her screeches are desperate. I think she’s looking for Emi.
Between squalls, she whimpers. After a while, with her snug against my chest and her sounds leaking into my shirt, I feel like there isn’t any difference between us.
We are searching for the same person. Cosette’s cries are mine. Nothing can comfort us.
We have a funeral for Emi. A Buddhist minister sings the sutras.
Mama is rigid. I rock back and forth, holding Cosette.
I’ve put the baby hat Mama made on her bald head and tied its strings under her soft, fleshy neck.
Mama hasn’t said a word since Emi died aside from when we were asked if we’d like her remains cremated or if we’d prefer to have her buried.
“Cremated,” she said. “It’ll release her soul.”
“Would you like to wait three days?” Mr. Nomura asked. We’ve never been devout, but it’s customary in Buddhism to wait a few days to cremate a loved one, because their spirit lingers close to their body. Once they’re cremated, they go. Leave. Don’t come back.
“Seven days,” Mama said, and I knew she didn’t want Emi’s spirit to leave, not yet. “We will wait seven days. But don’t bury her ashes here. When we go home, we will take her remains and bury them in a cemetery, not this place.”
For the funeral, we’re taken outside the camp to an old peach orchard.
The official who escorts us says a farmer planted the orchard two decades ago.
Then the city of Los Angeles took over the water rights to make an aqueduct, bought the land, and stopped watering the orchard, letting the trees die.
A single white flower grows on a branch.
Water redirected from the reservoir to Manzanar has given the trees their first drink in years.
I hold Cosette up to see the flower as the minister sings.
It’s the first time she’s been outside barbed wire.
My shoulder only twinges when I lift her.
It’s healing, and the gouge on my hand, without my relic to hold, is scabbing, mending itself.
People tell us the same thing about losing Emi. It’ll get better with time.
The vicious desire to punch something and reinjure my shoulder grips me because I need to prove it isn’t true. Because no matter how much my body heals or time passes, I’ve lost my sister. I can’t get it, won’t get it. It isn’t a wound. It’s a damn amputation, a part missing and always missing.
“Now for the Namu Amida Butsu,” the minister says. We’re supposed to chant this sutra together, but Mama has forgotten it, and I never learned it. We limp along, our voices dragging behind the minister.
There are only five of us: Mama, me, Cosette, the minister, and an official who watches from several feet away.
First funeral here was for an old man with no family and hundreds attended as he was buried, death setting him free from the fence.
But Mama has insisted it only be us. I glance worriedly at her.
She’s wearing every necklace and bracelet she owns, along with her pink jacket.
Sunlight streaks off the glossy fabric and the fake jewels, making it look like her outfit cries shiny tears.
But Mama doesn’t cry. She has the stiffness of someone who’s been stabbed and the blade hasn’t been pulled out yet.
Later, eventually, she’ll be angry. I already know.
Irrationally, I think that if Emi was here and standing next to me, we’d exchange glances and sigh and work together to manage Mama. But she isn’t.
Instead, I hold her daughter. It makes me want to let out a manic laugh.
It’s always been us three—Mama, Emi, and I.
Yeah, we’re three again. Cosette has remade our trio.
But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Emi’s death has split my life into two, like a snake cut through the middle.
Both halves bleed and wriggle. What a joke it all is.
Later that night, Kai knocks on our door. Cosette is sleeping. So is Mama. In the darkness, Kai’s eyes are red like he’s been crying, and he sniffs. But when he sees me, he struggles to hold back his emotions.
“Hey.” He has a baseball bat on his shoulder and a net of baseballs hanging from his hand. It’s startlingly familiar. I’ve seen him this way thousands of times after school as we headed to baseball practice, back when I went. Back home. Back when Emi was alive. “Let’s go.”
We go to the baseball field. The packed clay is springy beneath my feet.
I take the baseballs to the pitcher’s mound and Kai goes to home.
I grab one. Stop for a minute, the red stitching aligning with my sore palm.
Kai nods encouragingly. I wind up. Release it.
The pitch is a red-hot line between me and Kai. It cracks against the bat.
I send another. And another. And another.
Till all the balls are gone. Once they are, I think I might fall to my hands and knees or that I might punch the ground.
Sweat drips down my face. It stings my eyes, like my body is crying because I can’t.
Kai walks over to me. His face is pinched as he fights to hold back tears again.
“If only we had you pitching against Hollywood Hills,” he chokes out unexpectedly, and bizarrely it makes us laugh.
The next day, our barrack is busy. Mr. Nomura is there with Nurse Rose, Mrs. Wozumi, and Akiko.
Nurse Rose is worried about Cosette and thinks she’s allergic to powdered milk.
After Cosette eats, she screams and spits up.
Nurse Rose says she might do better on canned milk, but we haven’t been able to get any because of rationing, not even through special order at the cooperative canteen that has just opened on First Street, along with a barber and beauty shop and shoe repair shop, and the camp newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press.
Mrs. Aratani and Violet arrive. I didn’t expect them to visit. When I see Violet, the strange, confused, panicked feeling I had when I woke up in her barrack the night Emi died comes over me, like I’ve gone back in time. I blink, thinking she might disappear.
Instead, Violet comes to me. Touches the back of my hand. I feel the realness of her fingers against my skin. I want to shiver.