Twenty-Six (23 page)

“I’m going to hang up now. I’ve got to sit down and process some of this. If there’s any news, call me right away, will you?”

“I will. Are you going to be all right?”

“I’m okay. I’m okay. Just let me go now.”

Meta put the receiver down. She thought about Ziv and his family, pictured them huddled together in the living room, watching the
TV
, waiting for some news from underground. The sound of her own blood rushed through her head. Ziv had died and come back to life.

For the first day after the explosion, the
AP
Radio Network news featured stories about Eastyard on its hourly news broadcasts carried by American Forces Radio. In the ten-minute break between each class, Meta had rushed back to her office to listen. The draegermen were still underground, no survivors had been
located or returned to the surface. No bodies had been discovered. So with no immediate drama to report, the network dropped coverage back to once or twice a day.

She had made several attempts to call Ziv at his family’s number, but got busy signals each time, just as her mother had. It had been so long since they’d spoken, she was half-relieved not to have got through. She feared the awkwardness between them in spite of the circumstances.

Outside, cold rain had been pouring down. Meta stopped inside the door of the staff room, twisted her brown umbrella so it would fit in the rack, and stuffed it into a square in the wire mesh. Greg Ulesso’s desk was empty. She felt relieved.

She noted that her hands were steady as she poured herself a cup of coffee and walked with it to her desk, where she sat and looked at the planbook and the texts she was supposed to use to organize her day. This office was officially called the Foreign Languages Department by the college. But some of the more jaded long-term foreign teachers had dubbed it “The Gulag,” since it housed the desks and working space of almost exclusively foreign teachers, and, except for a few administrators who had private offices adjacent, it was almost two city blocks removed from any of the other faculty rooms. It got a decent amount of natural light from a bank of windows at the end of the room opposite to Meta’s desk, and the decor was bland office beige and grey and white. Most teachers were in the room at the moment, but it was close enough to class time that conversations were at a minimum, as last-minute preparations were being made.

“Good morning,” called a voice from behind a filing cabinet. She stiffened. “Good morning,” she said.

“How was your weekend?”

“This is Tuesday,” Meta said. “The weekend’s long gone.”

“But I don’t think I saw you yesterday.”

Should she tell him? She had no desire to be on personal terms with Ulesso, but found herself saying, “There was a disaster in my hometown. Did you see it on the news?”

Ulesso reached into his rear pocket and pulled out a rolled up copy of the
Daily Yomiyuri
. “It’s right here on the front page … Nova Scotia … Isn’t that where you’re from?”

“Yes.”

“I guess this hits pretty close to home.”

“It
is
home. It’s not pretty close. The explosion cracked a window in my parents’ house.”

Ulesso stopped for a moment, his face working to find an expression. “Coal mining is a dangerous business. When I was in Wales …”

“This isn’t Wales. It’s Nova Scotia. Can’t you see I’m upset?” She was starting to shake.

“Come on,” Ulesso said skeptically. “What are the chances you actually know someone underground?”

“Jesus, Greg! The chances are one hundred per cent!”

She turned away from him, scooped the books for her first class from the desk, and made for the door. Ulesso had turned his attention to another teacher who was at the photocopier, frantically doing some last-minute copying.

“Isn’t this smashing weather? This rain? All it does in this bloody country is rain. I’ve never seen a country with such appalling …”

Meta had had enough. She walked over to the photocopier and turned Ulesso around so he would listen to her. Not until she began speaking did she realize that she’d been unconsciously
preparing for this moment for months. She’d been writing a speech, a tirade, in her head, storing it away for the moment she would confront Greg Ulesso and tell him what she thought.

“Listen, Greg,” she said. At the sound of her voice the whole office hushed. She took a breath and continued. “If it didn’t rain so much here, the Kanto Plain would not be a good place to grow rice. If the Kanto Plain were not such a good place to grow rice, Ancient Japanese culture would never have developed. If Ancient Japanese culture had never developed, there would never have been a Shogunate. If there had never been a Shogunate, there would never have been a Meiji restoration or a Commodore Perry. Without them, there would not have been an economic boom and military buildup before the war, there would have been no Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would never have been defeated, there would never have been the postwar Economic Miracle, and you wouldn’t have your cushy job.” She was speaking very loudly now. People had come in from adjoining rooms to hear. “So every time it rains in this town, you’d better get down on your knees and thank God for the rain that’s making you rich and keeping you from having to do honest work!”

She turned around and stormed out the door. Behind her the room erupted in applause.

Meta left school at three thirty and arrived back at her apartment after four. There was a white envelope taped to her door. She removed the envelope and looked around the hallway for a clue as to who might have left it. On the address side of the envelope was carefully printed
Mrs. Meta
. The writing did not look like Yuka’s. The writer had to have been Kazuhiro, her son. The envelope was thin and flimsy; it obviously did not contain much.
She ran a thumbnail under the fold of the flap and extracted a single half-sheet of cream paper.

This brief message was followed by a telephone number and a room number. She knocked on Yuka’s door to see whether Kazuhiro could give her any further information, but there was no answer.

The note made the decision for her, the one she’d been avoiding making all day. The first call she made was to Korean Airlines, to use the second half of her L.A.-Tokyo return ticket, and to make the arrangement with Delta and Air Canada to get her to Halifax. She’d tell her principal in the morning that she was taking a couple of weeks off. Family emergency. She could explain it without straying too far from the truth. There was an article a day on Eastyard in the
Daily Yomiyuri
; it wouldn’t be hard.

The door of Yuka’s room was ajar and Meta paused in the gleaming hospital hallway outside it, closed her eyes briefly to compose herself before entering. She was relieved to see Yuka no more obviously injured than she’d been the last time she’d seen her. On her way to the hospital she had been steeling herself for lacerations, burns, traction, anything just short of death. All she could see poking out of the sheets was Yuka’s face, which had healed considerably since the last time she’d seen her. The swelling had gone down and some of the bruised flesh had
already gone through its darkest phase, was lightening to a yellowish brown.

Meta knew from experience that the only way to get information from Yuka was to grill her with questions. Otherwise, she could skirt a problem or issue indefinitely. She approached the bedside and sat in the chair there. Carefully she sought out Yuka’s hand, coaxed it from beneath the sheets, and held it.

“Yuka, what happened? Did he hit you again?”

Yuka smiled, an action that, in its context, sickened Meta’s stomach. “No,” she said. “It’s same. Same as other day. You saw.”

“He hasn’t hit you since the other day?”

She shook her head, no. “Something happens. I don’t know before.”

“You went to the doctor the other day. There was something wrong that he didn’t know about then.”

Yuka nodded. “Inside. I am broken inside.” She patted her stomach gently with her free palm. Meta held the other hand more tightly, careful not to squeeze too hard. “A thing inside me is broken.”

For a moment Meta could not understand. Her struggle to comprehend the words had momentarily blurred the meaning of the gestures to her.

“Is it a bone?” she asked. “Do you have a broken bone you didn’t know about?”

Yuka shook her head. “I wake up,” she began miming the actions of her discovery. Her mouth fell open and she pointed into it. “Blood is coming out.”

“Jesus Christ,” Meta said. “Internal hemorrhaging. Are you going to be okay? What have the doctors said?”

“They think okay,” Yuka said. “They will make a operation soon.”

Meta searched her brain for a way of saying
exploratory surgery
in simple vocabulary. “Is the operation for the doctors to find the problem?”

Yuka answered
yes
, but Meta was not convinced the meaning of her question was clear enough.

“Do the doctors know exactly what the problem is?”

Yuka was smiling and answered with another
yes
. Meta realized that with the combination of anxiety, pain, fear, language limitations, and the pain-killing drugs that Yuka had probably been given, she would not find out exactly what was wrong.

“Does your son know what happened?” Meta asked. Yuka shook her head, still smiling. “Does he know what your injuries are?” Yuka nodded. “Did he ask how you got them?” She shook her head.

Meta considered asking Yuka if her son needed to know why she was in the hospital. He obviously knew his mother had been assaulted. No one could have been in the same room with her and not come to this realization. Did it not occur to him to ask by whom? Did Yuka not think it important to tell him?

Meta had been wondering whether or not to tell Yuka about what was going on back in Canada, but that seemed impossible now.

Yuka’s energy seemed drained from the visit. Meta watched as she drifted off to sleep.

It was only a few blocks from the south end of the Red Row to the little bungalow that Jackie and Arvel rented, but Ziv noticed a change in the usual sparse traffic on the streets. Already, outsiders were flocking to Albion Mines in the wake of the explosion. He saw three four-door rental sedans go past with what looked like plainclothes Mounties in them. Up in the parking lot of the elementary school, two television news vans were parked side-by-side and facing opposite directions as the drivers conversed.

When Jackie opened the door and saw Ziv, she pulled him in through the doorway and hugged him, pushing her face into his chest. As he held her, he noticed there was luggage piled near the back door.

“We want to know how you and the kids are,” Ziv said. “My mother wants you to come to the house.” He could hear the children somewhere out of sight, one of the bedrooms probably, playing with a toy that made a rattling sound.

“I can’t go down there,” Jackie said. She was holding him so tightly that her words got muffled by his shirt and were difficult to understand.

“Jackie, don’t be so proud. It’s a time to be with family now.”

“I kicked him out,” Jackie said. “A lot of times. Look at this,” she pointed at the luggage. “I was going to Halifax today. Stealing away. Leaving. Without even telling him.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Ziv said. “Not now.”

Jackie stepped back from him. An angry look spread over her face. “How can it not matter?” she said.

“You’re family, Jackie,” Ziv said. “You’re married to my brother.”

“I can’t face anyone right now,” Jackie said. “I was sneaking out of here like some kind of criminal. I can’t face your parents. The kids … the kids are all mixed-up. I told them we’d be in Halifax today.”

“Jackie,” Ziv said. He hugged her against him again. “I won’t tell anyone about the luggage. Just come on down home. Bring the kids. Don’t do this to yourself.”

“I said no, Ziv.”

Ziv got home from Jackie’s and sat silently in the living room with his parents. It was as if the fear and panic that had enveloped them had dissipated, replaced now by a lifeless shock and numbness. The only sound in the room came from the television. They’d taken the phone off the hook to avoid the reporters who had been calling incessantly to ask them for a statement. They were uneasy about missing some important news, but the company had promised to update them in person about the status of rescue operations.

They sat silently before the television, waiting to see something happen, waiting for news of rescue to break.

Aside from speculation about what had caused the explosion, and whether it had been localized or had gone ripping through all the shafts, one of the first things the media reported was that the mining company did not know who had been working and who hadn’t at the time of the explosion. Within an hour of the mishap, many employees and their families received anonymous phone calls they later realized were from the company. Someone – in most cases it was a young woman on the other end of the phone – asked if the employee in the family had been working
the back shift. Ziv looked at his father, but except for a very slight shaking of his head, as though in disbelief, Ennis did not appear to respond to anything that was being said.