Hiroshima Boy Read online

  Mas yelled in English, “Stop. Stoppu!” His voice seemed to carry throughout the whole bay. Obeying the command, Rei slowly ceased struggling in Tatsuo’s hands. She closed her eyes tight and gulped in air.

  Tatsuo steered her into shallower waters, and when her feet hit the ground, she focused on Mas. “Arai-san. Arai-san. You are too old to be in here.”

  “Then help me,” he said in Japanese. She placed her arm around his shoulders and the three of them walked to the shore.

  As soon as she was out of the water, she collapsed on a bed of sharp rocks. She didn’t react to the pain of that surface and again, like on the tatami at the home, she curled up in a fetal position.

  Mas was losing his breath. Putting his hands on his thighs, he bent down. “Where’s the boy?” he panted. Tatsuo pointed toward the car and walked over there to retrieve a blanket from the trunk. He wrapped the blanket around Rei, forcing her to stand up. Her teeth were chattering, and her face looked ghostlike underneath the moon. Dripping with water, her hair was clumped together like the fur of a wet white poodle. She looked pitiful, but then they all did. “She needs to be in a warm bath,” Tatsuo said, “as soon as possible.”

  Mas nodded, still trying to catch his breath. Before following them to the car, he noticed something shiny between two rocks and picked it up. A cell phone, one of those newfangled ones. Most likely Rei’s, he figured, and he placed it in his shirt pocket.

  As the boy was already in the front passenger seat, Mas and Rei rode in the back. There were hardly any streetlights, and Mas’s stomach lurched as Tatsuo sped along the curves of the island.

  When they arrived at the home, Mas and Tatsuo practically carried Rei into the building and set her into a wheelchair. Luckily, one of the night workers was a middle-aged woman who lived on the island and she took over Rei’s care without asking any questions. “After her bath, put her in Room 129,” Tatsuo told her, and she nodded.

  Tatsuo was still soaked from the seawater, while Mas was wet from the waist down. The boy was out of the car, retrieving his bicycle, which was lying by the road.

  Tatsuo stopped the boy before he could ride off. “You can’t be riding by yourself in the middle of night. I’ll drive you home.”

  “But my bike . . .”

  As the bicycle was too large for the trunk, Tatsuo attempted to stuff it into the back seat at various angles. During these attempts, Mas heard a familiar mewing—nyaa nyaa—around his ankles. Haruo had reappeared and was sniffing the brackish, fishy saltwater on the bottom of his pajamas.

  “Kora!” Mas picked the cat up by the scruff of his neck. Where have you been?

  “Aaaaah—” The boy came beside Mas and began scratching the cat’s chin. “Is this the same one that hangs out at the torii? What’s wrong with his eye?”

  “Probably lost it in a fight.”

  The boy lifted up his open palms, and Mas deposited the cat into his scrawny arms. “This is Haruo,” he said.

  The boy scrunched up his nose. “That’s a strange name.”

  When they were all back in the car, Tatsuo engaged the boy in conversation. “What was your name again?”

  “Chiba Kenta.”

  Tatsuo apparently knew the boys’ parents. “Do they know that you are out?”

  “I told them I was staying overnight at my neighbor’s house.” The boy cradled Haruo, while the frame of his bicycle bounced against his shoulder. He must have been uncomfortable in that position but he didn’t complain. “I was trying to find Sora’s mother.”

  “Why?” Mas asked. “And why come to me?”

  “I’ve seen you walking the island with her. You seem like friends. I hope you won’t tell them where I was, will you?”

  Neither Tatsuo nor Mas replied. The rest of the ride was dead silent, aside from occasional purring from the cat.

  They eventually turned down a narrow alley, the same one that Mas had walked through, and parked in front of a two-story house that was separated from the street by a cinderblock wall. Mas got out of the car to help pull the bicycle from the back seat but stayed back as Tatsuo and Kenta approached the front door.

  “What’s going on?” Mas heard a woman say. “Kenta, I thought you were doing a sleepover next door.” Mas figured she was probably the mother. Another silhouette, a large man, joined the woman in the doorway.

  Kenta mumbled something, which failed to satisfy either parent. “Kenta-kun, speak up,” said the father. “Where have you been all this time?” His voice was booming.

  “He actually saved the life of a woman,” Tatsuo said.

  “Heeeeh.” The parents responded with both incredulity and pride.

  “Yes, the mother of the boy who was found in the bay.”

  “Oh, the crazy one who disrupted today’s ceremony?” the father said.

  “She was trying to commit suicide by the oyster farm,” Tatsuo said.

  “What were you thinking, Kenta? And what dirty animal are you holding?” The mother was less impressed with her son’s actions once she learned who he rescued.

  “Isn’t that the blind cat that hangs out by the shrine?” the father asked. “It’s probably diseased.” He tried to wrestle Haruo out of Kenta’s arms, and Mas finally walked forward to take the cat.

  “Oh my goodness. Kenta-kun, go upstairs and take a bath. Take your pants off at the genkan,” the mother said. After he disappeared in the house, she turned back to Tatsuo before excusing herself. “He hasn’t been himself ever since that boy was found.”

  The father bowed. “Thank you so much for bringing him home,” he said to Tatsuo. “We are indebted to you.” He said nothing about being indebted to Mas.

  Tatsuo and Mas began to walk to the car, but the father called out, “Hey, American.” Mas turned around. “The police warned us about you. Stay away from my boy. He has enough problems as it is.”

  Even though Mas knew the criticism was baseless, it still stung. He recalled all those times as a child when his teachers complained about his behavior. He was the bad Arai, the troublemaker, the brat, the yogore. His brothers and sisters, both older and younger, were quiet and respectable. Mas didn’t know what happened with him. It was as if all the vinegar and brashness just stayed in the center of the line of siblings, to be manifested in him, the problem middle child. Ironically, this problem child was the last left standing.

  The heaviness of these feelings weighed Mas down.

  “The boy’s father was probably a little in shock.” Tatsuo tried to soften the man’s accusation when they were back on the road.

  Mas kept his eyes on the full moon. The tide had risen in the bay, and now the oyster racks were completely covered.

  After Tatsuo parked the car, Mas deposited Haruo on the ground and watched the cat scamper away into the bushes before he and Tatsuo reentered the nursing home. Mas didn’t quite understand the shifts of the workers, and Tatsuo explained that there was an extra room connected to the office where he slept after work hours on the island.

  “A strange life,” Mas commented without thinking, and Tatsuo nodded. “You can’t be a regular person with this kind of life. You are always out of step with the real world.”

  “Where is the room that Rei is staying in?” Mas asked.

  Tatsuo hesitated before answering. “Maybe it would be good for her to just rest tonight.” Message received, Mas thought. Stay away from her.

  They bowed their goodnights. Mas moved his packed suitcase to make room for his futon. He couldn’t leave as early as he had planned. He had to at least wait until he knew what was going to happen with Rei.

  While Mas was undressing in his room, he came across the cell phone he’d found on the shore. He should have turned it in to Tatsuo, but with all the excitement, he’d forgotten. The phone wouldn’t turn on, despite his attempts to press and manipulate all of its various buttons. It was a new phone, shiny and sleek, with a case depicting a female character with bare chichis. He had assumed the phone was Rei’s, but now he doubt
ed it based on the case’s image. Anyone who had lost such a fancy, expensive device would be missing it.

  Chapter Eight

  He was swimming. One moment the world was on fire, and the next he was in liquid darkness. He leapt off the bridge, following his classmate Kenji, who now had polka dots on his skin. Have you become a cheetah? Mas wanted to ask him. Or maybe a ladybug? Silly Kenji, where had he escaped to? There had been the four of them, Kenji, Riki, Joji, and Mas. But now there was only Mas.

  Something hit his shoulder as he swam. And then his stomach. It was solid, like the log from a tree. How did these trees end up in the water? Mas extended his arms to see if he could figure out what was underwater in this blackness. He grabbed hold of a hand. Hello, hello! I am a Hiroshima boy. The hand was attached to an arm, but that was all. He realized that he was in a sea of heads, legs, arms, and bodies, all dismembered, cut off from their humanity.

  When he awoke, Mas didn’t know if he’d been crying out for help, but he thought he’d probably been talking in his sleep. Drool was dripping from his nearly toothless mouth, and a pool of saliva was underneath his cheek, soaking the fitted sheet of the futon. Usually Genessee would have woken him up by now. Enduring his nightmares was a spousal hazard that both Genessee and Chizuko had had to navigate.

  He crawled over to the sink, cleaned his face, and stuffed his dentures into his mouth. His watch had fallen off his wrist, so he didn’t know what time it was. Judging from the intense light at the edges of the opaque curtains, it must be close to high noon. He finished off a bottle of green tea that he’d left on the counter and got dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and the cleanest shirt in his suitcase. Leaving his room to find Rei, he returned a few seconds later. He remembered something he had forgotten and stuffed it into his back pocket before resuming his search.

  Since the room numbers seemed to be organized almost haphazardly, it took Mas a little while to find where Rei was staying. Finally, oddly enough on the second floor, he found Room 129. She was hooked up to an IV machine and staring out the window. She had a view of the ocean, which wasn’t a good thing. If he pulled the cord to close the blinds on the window, he could eliminate this scene in real time, but probably not in the girl’s mind.

  “Hallo.”

  “Ohayo, Arai-san.”

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

  “You looking better. You have color in your face now.”

  Rei’s blond hair was a tangled mess, but somehow it seemed to suit her more than the smooth bob.

  “I’m feeling much better. But then I always feel better when the sun is out.”

  Mas sat in the chair beside the bed.

  “I feel like I’ve been on this island for years,” she said.

  Mas did, too.

  “I wonder if they felt that. The hibakusha who came for refuge. Did they believe they were going to die here, or did they really think they had a chance to survive?”

  “They believed they were going to live. The closer you are to death, the more you want to live.”

  “You sound like you know the feeling.”

  “I was in Hiroshima when the Bomb fell.”

  “But you are an American.”

  Mas frowned. Had he even mentioned that to her?

  “I saw the tags on your suitcase. And also your passport.” Rei dipped her head down. “I am so sorry. It was wrong of me to spy on you like that while you were sleeping. But you seemed different to me, even that first day I met you. You are like the grandfather I always wished I had.”

  Rei explained that she was from Hiroshima and most of her older relatives had died either during or shortly after the Bomb. Their fingernails grew like mini elephant tusks, their hair fell out, their skin become spotted. Babies were born with abnormally large heads and died soon after. Since the whole city had experienced the Bomb, the stories were not squashed or silenced; instead, the citizens raised their voices like a chorus. Back in America, such stories were swept into corners, known to the intellectually curious but hidden from people who wanted to believe in fairy-tale endings.

  “You’re right about people wanting to live,” she said. “I was going to do it. I was going to walk into that ocean like Sora did, my brave little boy. But I couldn’t do it. However much I hate to be in this world, I’m scared to leave it.”

  Mas clasped his hands together. His dark hands, callused and strong from decades of gardening, had lost some of their heft; his skin had become loose and pliable over his bones, like gloves that were too big.

  “Do you wonder where I was that night?” Rei asked. “The night that Sora walked into the ocean?”

  The detective had said something, but Mas had tried not to think about it. Through the slats of the blinds, he saw a colony of seagulls flying. He hadn’t seen seagulls until today and it made him homesick for California.

  Rei pressed the button to readjust her bed. Apparently, she was serious about her confession and wanted to look at Mas, eye to eye. “I was at a love hotel. I went with my boss. I had asked him for a raise, anything that would help us stay in our apartment.”

  She swallowed and Mas helped her reach for a plastic cup with a straw. “Sora was beside himself about the move. He would have to share a room with a seven-year-old in my cousin’s house.” She took a long sip of whatever was in her cup. “He wouldn’t be able to hide anymore. He would have to interact with people. I told him it would be a good thing for him, in the long run. But he didn’t believe me.”

  She ran her hand through her nest of hair, making it look even more like it was caught in a tornado. “At the love hotel, I couldn’t do anything with him. I locked myself in the bathroom and stayed there all night. Before my boss left he told me through the door that I shouldn’t bother to come back to work. I made everything worse. I went there for more money and ended up losing my job.”

  Oogoto, Mas thought. This was bad news. Without any income, how could the girl support herself?

  “I’ve failed in everything I’ve touched. Wife, mother to my son. I’ve even failed at killing myself. What is left to do?” She said all this without shedding a tear. She recited the list of failures like she was a cashier at a grocery store. Her lack of emotion worried Mas. She had given up on life but was still resigned to living.

  “You need to tell police,” he said.

  She tightened her jaw and looked back out the window.

  “My friend always talks to me about counseling. Maybe you should look into it.” Mas couldn’t believe what he was saying, but he was obviously grasping for straws.

  “Is your friend Japanese?”

  “Well, more or less. Like me. A Kibei Nisei. And a hibakusha.” Mas pushed himself forward in his chair. “He says that it helps him with his problems.”

  “Really.”

  “It works for him.”

  Mas didn’t mention that his friend, Haruo, was dead and now lost in Hiroshima.

  “Is that so?” she said, sucking in her cheeks.

  Not knowing what more to say, Mas pulled out the cell phone. “Here, I think this is yours. I found it last night.”

  Rei wrinkled her forehead and fingered the phone. “That’s not mine. It looks like Hideki’s. Where did you find it?”

  Mas didn’t want to say. He muttered something unintelligible and stuffed the device back in his pocket. If this was Hideki’s phone, that meant he had been back on the island recently. And if he was, what was he doing here?

  After telling Rei to continue resting and regain her strength, Mas headed north for Senbazuru. The phone now felt awkward and obtrusive in his pocket. He needed to get rid of it. He needed someone to look into the phone and find out exactly what Hideki had been up to these last few days.

  It wasn’t hard to locate Toshi. In spite of the humidity and heat, he was on the baseball field with a full team of boys and one or two girls. He was on the pitcher’s mound with two of the players and he seemed to be teaching them catcher signals to indicate the style
of pitch—fastball, curve, slider, changeup. He was dressed more casually, in T-shirt and jeans, and occasionally he pulled out a long towel from his pocket to mop up the sweat on his face.

  Mas couldn’t quite figure out whether or not he could trust Toshi. He’d been friendly enough at their first meeting, but even that had been strange. A dead boy, his best friend’s son, was lying on the jetty, and he could still exchange niceties. And then at the hostess bar, his countenance and attitude completely changed. His relationship with Thea was also a cause for concern. She was probably fifteen years his junior, only twenty, a few years older than the oldest children at his school. In some ways, Thea, being in Japan on her own, was mature beyond her years. In Mas’s eyes, though, she was still a kid, motivated by passion instead of reason. Had Toshi taken advantage of her?

  Toshi walked over to home plate and squatted down like a catcher, flashing signals by his thigh. He instructed one of the boys to take his position and nodded approvingly when the signals matched his intention.

  As he waited in the hot sun for the practice to finish, Mas was thankful that he had brought a cold bottle of water that he’d purchased from the vending machine at the home. It was now empty and to ease his tension, Mas had twisted the clear plastic into something unrecognizable. But at last, the practice was over and Toshi sent the children back to some far buildings—perhaps dormitories—and then waved at Mas.

  “Arai-san, how long have you been here?” After a few pleasantries, Toshi and Mas took the short walk to the director’s home. Toshi opened the door, abandoned his tennis shoes at the genkan, and went straight to the controls for the air conditioner. He even turned on a stationary fan. This time Mas also took off his shoes.

  Toshi brought a large container of barley tea with two glasses to the kitchen table. Mas didn’t think he’d ever drunk so much liquid during an entire week while he was in the US.

  “So, you will be leaving Japan today,” said Toshi, who had obviously heard the news from Thea, an oshaberi who apparently needed to unload information as soon as she had received it.