and the car door snapped back against my legs after I’d pushed it open. The sea was flowing rapidly into dips between dunes below the cliff, as if there were empty vessels to fill all along the beach. By nightfall, the trailer was shaking so badly I wondered if we were experiencing the tail end of a hurricane that had swept up the Atlantic coast from Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas, and was now blowing out to sea. There was no radio in the place, no phone, no warning system. We were a mile from Albert’s farmhouse and the nearest human.
While being tucked in at bedtime, Greg looked up, white-faced but with small, perfectly round patches of red on his cheeks, the telltale sign of excitement—and worry.
“Are mobile homes stable enough to withstand hurricanes?” he asked. His voice was thin and earnest, but trusting, always trusting.
Lena and I came out of his room together. She whispered, “He
Greg called us back to his room. “I don’t like the way the cottage shakes when you both walk down the hall at the same time,” he said. “It frightens me.”
We bundled him up and brought him out to sit with us in the narrow living room, and looked outside—though all we could see was blackness—and told stories while the arms of the wind battered at the long sides of the trailer, which felt so fragile from within, the place might as well have been made of tin. Lena brought out a lamp from our bedroom and tried to find a place to plug it in, but the power went out and we had to light candles. We told stories about bravado and trickery and good humour. By the time the worst part of the storm had passed, Greg was asleep. Shadows flickered behind me as I carried him down the hall to his room and tucked him in for the second time. And heaped blankets overtop so he wouldn’t be cold in the night.
In the morning, we woke to a strong breeze, this time from the northwest. Puffs of clouds, plump and grey, hung from a line above the horizon. A far-off haze made the sky look as if a triangular chunk had been removed. The rain stopped, and from the window, we could see surf crashing in sideways. Humps of sand-covered seaweed shaped the outline of the beach for miles. I suggested that we give the sea a chance to calm down, that we drive inland, away from the wind and in shelter of the woods, a trail walk along the river. Lena said she would stay at the cottage because she wanted to read for a while. Later, she would prepare a picnic supper to take to the beach in the evening, if the wind had died down by then. Easy foods that we could carry over the dunes. Island corn, sandwiches, marshmallows to roast. We made a plan to collect driftwood high up on the sand later in the afternoon so that we could make a night bonfire at the base of the cliffs. If the wood was too wet, we’d use the supply of dry wood that Albert had left under a shelter. The weather turned quickly on the island, and we hoped for a calm sea by nightfall.
I had been working with watercolours, trying something new, wanting to capture sea, sky, shore; tough marram grasses that bound the sand; the shadow of a hawk that hunted in the afternoons along the edge of the field; a mix of quick and dramatic changes. The light around me altered every time I looked up. I had already begun to move away from my early work, and now every stroke I made was stretching towards some new form. Here, it was stretching against the threatening bulge of dark sea. “Sombre,” Lena said when she came up behind me one morning. “Moody, moody.” I wondered what she saw, but I didn’t ask. She was right, though. A sombre tone was creeping in from underneath. The only other comment she made was after we had returned home. “There’s been a change,” she said. “Almost as if the sea left its mark on you. The shapes seem to disappear into the painting itself, and yet some part of them is still there—if you know what I mean.”
I did. I understood what she was telling me, and it
Greg and I returned to the cottage that day, after our inland river walk, and we stood on the cliff looking out over a long stretch of surf that was now somewhat diminished because the winds had lowered. The waves were still white-tipped but safe for leaping, and exciting for a small boy. There were four people in the water below, two of them children. We watched as they waited for the exact moment a wave peaked to dive headfirst into the foam. From where we stood, we could hear their voices drifting up as if from an old recording, bumpy and muffled, only the odd-pitched cry getting through.
Greg raced to get his bathing suit, and we changed and hurried down to the beach and into the cold water. Tiny smooth stones were being tossed pell-mell at the edge of shore. We swam, and jumped waves to get ourselves out deeper, and rode larger waves back to shore, and fought against them to wade out, and rode them in again. I couldn’t keep from laughing aloud while Greg shrieked his delight. When I finally persuaded him to come in, his slim body was hard and blue with cold. I rolled a big towel around him and sat him down so that I could massage his legs.
That evening after our picnic supper, we sat below the dunes around the fire and we were rewarded with a moving-picture show of the aurora borealis against a dark wall of sky: vivid, miraculous, an infinity away. Great vertical sheets of light. The breeze had dropped completely; the sea was calm, its bulge ominous as ever. Foam slid in over sand that had been pounded flat. The red blink-blink of a buoy flashed and bobbed far out. We listened to the slow wash of waves and watched in awe as the sky’s colours rushed past on their way to somewhere else. Shades of deep green to lighter shades and back again swept over the huge stage of the night. There were greens I have never seen before and have never seen since.
Greg told Lena, “All that moving colour in the sky makes me feel like shouting, Mom. It makes me feel like running underneath.” And then he shrank into himself. “It makes me feel like a tiny speck.” He started to drop off to sleep and, barefoot, I carried him over hard-packed sand and up steps that had been dug out of the dunes but managed to change shape in every weather. I tried to be careful of my footing, but it wasn’t a smooth climb and Greg woke before I could brush the sand off his legs and feet and get him into bed.
“You know, Dad, when I grow up,” he said, looking straight up at me, “I’m going to be all Japanese like you, instead of just half.” He snuggled deep into the covers, and then he added, “This has been the happiest day of my life.” In an instant, he was asleep.
When I told Lena, she said, “It’s because you went in with him. You could be bothered. You went into the sea, which he loves, and you jumped those fabulous white waves alongside him, and he’ll never forget.”
But I was thinking of the mirror, of the reflection that had stared back at me, the one I could not escape as a child or a young man. The hope that by the time I grew up, somehow, in some miraculous way, the mirror would turn me into someone else.
CHAPTER 17
“Follow,” said Father.
It was mid-morning when we left the shack for our end-of-summer picnic, our big outing before school started up again in the fall. We walked single file, Hiroshi behind Father, then Keiko, then me. Mother was last in line, keeping an eye on us from behind. We waved, called out to Ba and Ji, and fell silent after we crossed the dirt road. We walked past the communal tomato gardens, past rows and rows of eggplant and radish, carrot and cucumber, melon and squash. We skirted the edge of the cliff and made our way through foliage and undergrowth, and found the zigzagged trail that descended the embankment. Down and down we went, always in shadow of the mountain, the sounds of our progress echoing back as we stumbled over gravel and root. The day’s heat pressed against the earth; the air was still. Sun poked through slits in the treetops and planted blotchy patterns of shadow and light over the trail. The lower parts of the path were hot and dry and sandy, and shifted each time a foot touched down. At the bottom, there was river, only river. That, and a small island in the midst of rushing water.
The moment we reached the chosen spot, Mother began to clear a space for our picnic. Father set down the bundles he had carried and he stood, hands on hips. We fell silent while he examined the river with a fisherman’s eyes.
“I thought the banks would be more exposed,” he said. “This water is dangerous and high. Higher than it should be so late in summer.”
He looked out again and I had a moment’s worry that he might lead us back up the trail without the picnic happening at all. But he did not look tense or angry, and it was clear that he, too, enjoyed being here, close to the
