The Third Son (37 page)

“It smells like rotten eggs,” Kai-ming said. “When’s the eruption? I’m tired.”

“A
LL THESE HOTELS!”
Yoshiko exclaimed, throwing our keys onto the bed that night. “We can’t even afford
one
room at these places, much less an extra one for your father, too.”

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“Don’t worry, what? We don’t have any more money, and he has a big fat bank account! Why do you think he’s bringing the money to Japan? You think your little brother will be footing the bill like us? Why doesn’t he contribute here, too?”

The same thoughts had occurred to me. But hadn’t my father gotten me the money to come here in the first place? And wasn’t it a sign of my father’s high regard for me that he thought I could afford to board him? Asking for money would be an admission that I was still a child, not my father’s equal at all.

A
T NIGHT, IN
a motel on the Lincolnway, Yoshiko lay down on the bed and tucked the pillows around her belly. “My back is killing me. Let’s take a rest tomorrow. Kai-ming needs a rest, too. He felt warm to me tonight.”

“
Hou
,” I said. I sat beside her and lay my hand on the taut side of her belly. “Mama and baby will rest.” The baby kicked under my hand, and even through my fatigue and frustration and in the blandness of our motel bed, I smiled, thinking that this child of mine would grow up speaking English, eating hamburgers, and arguing about what was fair. And I would love this child no less than I loved his number one brother. No matter what.

T
HE REST OF
the night was long and miserable. Kai-ming’s temperature shot up and he spent much of the night vomiting in the tiny bathroom. Yoshiko and I took turns washing his face and pajamas and giving him sips of water until finally he slept. When the sun peeked through the holes in the curtains, we stayed in our beds.

A knock at the thin plywood door roused me from dreams of an air raid. “Saburo! Saburo!”

Yoshiko opened her eyes. We looked at each other for a moment, listening to my father’s gruff voice.

“Saburo! Get up!”

She glanced at the door, frowning. “He’ll wake Kai-ming.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

Yoshiko turned her face to me and touched my cheek with the soft tips of her fingers. Her hair was squished flat over her forehead, and she looked as young as a girl, her eyes as radiant, frank, and full of compassion as when I had first told her that no one cared whether I came home. I closed my eyes, breathing in deeply, taking in her flowery warmth. And then she gave me a pat and closed her eyes, turning her swollen belly over onto her other side.

“Saburo! Saburo!” The thin door rattled in its frame, the chain swinging in its little arc.

I glanced at Kai-ming. He slept with a child’s abandon, arms flung wide, legs on top of the covers, feet hanging over the side of the bed. He wore a Superman T-shirt and a swimsuit in place of his soiled pajamas, and he looked as though he were doing a swan dive against gravity.

The knocking stopped.

I got up and dressed quickly. My father did not give up that easily.

I slid open the chain and stepped out the door. My father sat, fully dressed, on a peeling green bench between his room and ours. In his bow tie and bowler hat he looked incongruously formal against the exterior of the motel, which was painted brick red with white trim to make the rooms look like homey little cottages. He had a dark expression on his face that I knew all too well. I hastily closed the door behind me.

He jumped up, surprisingly nimble for all his corpulence, his bowler hat like an immovable fixture on his head. “Why do you sleep so late!” he said angrily. “I’m hungry, and I can’t go anywhere to eat without you! Are you so lazy that you can’t wake before nine? I want to see places. I don’t want to spend my mornings in lousy motels! Did you forget who made it possible for you to come here?”

A good son should bow in front of his father, should swallow his pride. The trip was almost over; an apology might bring me the approval that I had always craved.

But I was no longer that boy in the rice paddies.

I stepped forward, through the American air that hung, cool and crystalline and smelling of newly cut grass, between us. As I moved, the molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide tumbled over my skin, spinning off and crashing into more molecules that in turn careened into others. The waves of invisible molecules rippled across the parking lot, bouncing off the red cottage facades of the motel rooms and, warmed by the sun, up into the layers of the atmosphere. I stepped toward my father, towering over his ample figure, over the round face that never smiled, over the tongue that never spoke a tender word, over the bow tie that was knotted even now, in Wyoming, around his neck.

“Yoshiko is pregnant,” I said. My tongue stuck to the sides of my mouth and made clicking noises. My whole body shook. The air molecules vibrated around me, cushioning me. “She is tired, and Kai-ming is sick. They needed to rest.”

He waved his hand and turned away. “Don’t give me any excuses.”

My ears burned at the memory of the blows that had followed these words. But as the gust of air from his hand reached me, the air molecules parted and tumbled off, tumbled away.

I took another step forward, shifting the air around me, air now mixed with the leftover essence of filial piety and the aftertaste of disappointment. My voice was rough in my throat. “I’m driving five hours a day to entertain you,” I said. “I’ve fed you and hosted you and housed you for four months.”

He barked at me over his shoulder. “Complaining about hosting your father? How many years do you think I—”

“That’s worth at least as much money as you got for me from your brothers,” I continued, “and the least a decent father could do is let us sleep in for one day.”

He whipped back to face me. “Such disrespect! You speak to your father this way?”

“I do,” I said. “I should have a long time ago.”

I met his glare. The eyes were fearsome—black, unwavering. I had never stared back at them before. I had been too afraid. I realized now how completely at his mercy I had felt my whole life. At any time he could have saved me at will or let me die. He had meted out fates to his children as he saw fit. He had played his cards shrewdly, and we had all survived. As far as survival was concerned, he was the undisputed master.

“Personal freedom,” I said.

“What?” His eyebrows scrunched together.

“Personal freedom,” I said again. “In America, it’s valued higher than life.”

“Stupid,” he said. “You’re a fool.”

And then he stormed into his motel room and slammed its plywood door shut. The air molecules burst into the air and bounced off my body, dispersing into the atmosphere.

I
N THE REMAINING
days, he spoke little.

The morning of his departure, I went to withdraw the money he had asked me to put in the bank for him. For his visit to my brother.

When I returned home, he was buckling up his suitcase. I walked up to him with the bundle of cash.

“We ran out of money,” I said. “We had to tap into your account, a couple hundred. This is the rest.”

My father looked up incredulously. “You took my money?”

“Here’s a check for the difference,” I said. “By the time you cash it in Japan, I’ll have gotten my next paycheck.”

He snatched the cash and the check out of my hands. “Unbelievable,” he said.

I did not apologize.

And then my father’s imitation-leather suitcases were stuffed full of presents for my sisters and brothers. And then he was onboard, the jet roaring down the runway and lifting into the air.

The plane’s nose rose into the stratosphere, blasting through my little-boy dreams of parental love. They streamed in shreds over the birdlike body of the plane and swirled in the eddies of its steel wings, which glinted, smaller and smaller, farther and farther away, in the clear South Dakota sky.

42

T
HE MONITOR BEEPED.

“Can’t they stop it? Make them stop it!”

“They can’t. It’s too late.”

Tears spilled out of Yoshiko’s eyes. “I felt the waters coming. I shouldn’t have reached up for the clothesline—” She wiped her eyes. The intravenous line in her arm got caught on the siderail of her stretcher, and I reached over her to untangle it, smelling iodine and rubbing alcohol. The blood on the hem of her hospital gown caught my eye and I turned away.

“It has nothing to do with that,” I said. “You heard the doctor.”

“Ah, what do they know? They aren’t doing anything. I thought medical care was so good in America! Tell them to stop it, because I can’t because of my English . . .”

“Yoshiko. They can’t stop it.” I put my hand on her belly. Our American baby was still.

I felt her contracting. She closed her eyes, bracing.

Her belly relaxed. Her eyes opened again and tears fell out. “It’s only twenty-eight weeks,” she whispered. “Do you think if we were in a big city—”

The doctor came bustling in, wearing a scrub suit.

I stood. “Do you think maybe it’s ready early?” I asked him. “Maybe the dates were wrong. Maybe—”

He gave a shake of his head.

“No,” Yoshiko said in English. “I know why. Because I have to get in and out of a car, all over everyplace.”

Her words hit me in the chest.

“ . . . not a primary cause of preterm labor,” the doctor said.

“I’m mother, I know,” Yoshiko said bitterly. “Backseat all the time. Squeeze a bag, it break.”

“It’s not your fault,” he told her. He released the stretcher’s brake.

As he wheeled her away, Yoshiko turned her face to me, her eyes spilling tears. “I miss Toru,” she whispered.

43

I
LOOKED OUT THE
waiting room window, watching clouds blow in over the Huron River. The maple trees on the riverbank, just beginning their autumn transformation, blew in the wind, their golden tips ruffling.

It began to rain.

A thin stream of water poured down from the roof over the window, dripping onto the low roof below. It dripped, dripped, in regular rhythm like a temple
muyu
, like the clacking of a steam engine on its tracks, like the syllabic chant of a childhood schoolroom:

Bo po mo fo

De te le ne

Ge ke he

Zhi chi shi ri

The rhythm calmed me, imposed external order on the desperate chaos in my mind. This was the way of the Old World—thoughtless repetition, relieving a person of the burden of reflection, self-examination, and free will.

Bo po mo fo

De te le ne

Breaking my rhythm, the doctor’s voice:
It’s not your fault.

No, it was not her fault; it was mine.

I had stood up to my father. But it was too late.

44

W
E TOLD EVERYONE THAT
Yoshiko had had a miscarriage. It wasn’t true. Our baby boy lived for a day, tiny and gasping, a ghastly translucent pink, the size of a trembling kitten. We didn’t have the heart, or the money, for a funeral.

T
HE SNOWS SWEPT
in over Ann Arbor, blanketing the town with white cold, weighing down the roof of our duplex. I shoveled a path from the front door, heaving aside the drifts of snow that trapped us in our little house of grief and devastation.

I had heard nothing from my father. From my sister I received news of the recent death of my fourth uncle’s eldest son, who had been left in charge of Taikong while my father vacationed in America.

My fourth uncle’s family blamed my father for their loss. “He was too harsh and critical, and this is what caused our brother to die.” Why else would someone so young have a brain hemorrhage?

“So,” Yoshiko said, “now your father will blame it on us.” She sat on our green flowered couch, putting neat stitches into a hole in Kai-ming’s winter jacket.

I ran my fingers along the parallel razor marks in the armchair. “It had nothing to do with us,” I said. Though I wondered if she was right. My father’s silence greatly distressed me. I did not know whether he would ever talk to me again.

“Of course. He would have died, anyway. That’s what doctors always say. Isn’t that what you told me?”

She repositioned the little jacket. She had been terribly moody since losing the baby, and I hadn’t known how to help her except to realize that I would never understand how it could feel to carry a child for so many months and then lose him.

D
ESPITE EVERYTHING, I
worked on my thesis and prepared for the December launch. There was no possibility of my taking time to mourn. My father’s little tour of America had completely depleted our finances, and I would have to have some kind of income at the end of the academic year, whether or not I received my PhD. If I did not receive my PhD by the end of the year, I would have to abandon it, as Tom Reynolds had, and retreat to the School of Mines, having wasted years of my life and thousands of dollars. All that studying and last-minute driving for naught—the conflicts with my father, the baby’s death, completely, utterly gratuitous.