something he was good at. He bought a small truck stop, expanded the diner and turned it into an excellent business. He couldn’t wait to retire and had told me over the phone that he’d earned his retirement. I wasn’t sure how he would spend his extra time. Travelling a bit, perhaps. Or driving back and forth between Alberta and B.C. Most of my relatives kept their heads down, stayed below the radar, as far as I could figure. Whole lives spent with their heads down.

As for Mother, we’d had visits with her at Kay’s home several times, because Kay had arranged for her to be there whenever we’d visited Edmonton. But now, Mother was gone. I did not attend her funeral. Kay sent the ritual photo, Japanese funereal style, of family members standing around Mother’s coffin. First Father, taller than the others, stared grimly into the camera eye. I couldn’t bear to look at that photo. It disappeared, and is probably mixed in with other family photos and papers.

But even though I had seen Mother from time to time, for me she had always remained as she was during the last evening we spent in the camp in 1946. The image I carried around had scarcely altered with time, both before and after Mother’s death. It was always Mother with black hair and bangs, a curl on each side of her forehead, wearing her yellow cotton dress and taking me by the hand to walk back and forth on the path at the edge of the cliff that looked down over the Fraser River. I could still call up the sensation of her hand pressing down on my shoulder when we paused so that she could shake out the grit from her homemade sandals.

The truth was, I had never really said goodbye, not even when we were all still living in the camp. She was the one I had missed the most, ever since the day of the picnic, when I was given away. The memories of her were the ones buried deepest, but that had happened while she was alive, not after her death, when I was an adult. I had hunkered down, buried the connection—perhaps to protect it—and I rarely brought it to the surface.

But I had done what artists do. I had painted. There was one canvas I had never put in a show or offered for sale. I used acrylics and mixed my own colours to create deep indigos and browns. It was an abstract that contained a heaviness of feeling but with a single fine edge running along one side, an edge of the palest yellow. And a mass of white that took up a third of the canvas, and that I could hardly define. Lena loved the painting when she saw it, but I did not tell her how it had come about. I could scarcely articulate the genesis to myself.

And First Father, well, apart from the photograph that Kay sent after Mother’s funeral, I had not actually seen him since the day in 1946 when he left in the back of Ying’s truck. Lena and Greg had never met him and I did not consider him to be Greg’s grandfather. He was never at Kay’s in Alberta because he refused to leave British Columbia, the province that had once tried so hard to remove him. Perhaps he still held the suspicion that if he were to leave, even this long after the war, he would not be allowed back in. As for me, I was the only one in the family who had not re-entered B.C.

Maybe First Father was the most stable one of us all. He was the one who had staked out his territory. But the years went on and distances stretched farther and farther. After the Redress Agreement was signed in the fall of 1988, after the public apology was made by the prime minister, First Father received his cheque, as we all did. Mine was banked and invested for Greg’s education. First Father’s payment, Kay had let us know, was put towards buying the bungalow he and Mother had rented for years, on the outskirts of Kamloops. But Mother was no longer alive to enjoy the fact of ownership. Nor did she live long enough to hear the Apology.

I had been going over all of these things in my mind and had turned away from Lena after our conversation about moods. I was lying on my side with my back to her. I knew she was not asleep; I could tell by her breathing. But I had nothing to offer.

“Listen to me,” she said into the dark, and she brought me back. “You and I started a new chapter. Our own chapter. One that has nothing to do with war. A chapter that began with love and opened enough space to let in hope.”

I turned to face her. “You know I haven’t forgotten those years, Lena. But I don’t waste time feeling sorry for myself.”

“I know you don’t,” she said. “But there are those moments that rear up every once in a while.”

I did not say what I was thinking: that those moments were about the threat of chaos, the threat of loss.

“Everything happened a long time ago,” I told her. “I know I’m blessed to have what I have now, to have the family we have. I’m blessed to be able to practise my art. And tell me, what was that about you playing piano— when we were at Miss Carrie’s tonight? You’ve never said a word about that before. What about the silence around that?”

“You’re just trying diversionary tactics,” she said. “As usual. Anyway, it wasn’t really a silence. There wasn’t anything to say. Piano was something I studied as a child, that’s all. How could that measure up to your stories of Okuma-san and the keyboard of ponderosa pine?”

“Well, I never learned to play,” I said. “In fact, for me, Beethoven was first learned in silence. Not exactly silence. Silence shaped by rhythm. Hands, fingers, tapping, rapping. Long before I knew what the actual music sounded like. Except for Minuet in G. Grandfather Minuet.”

I had already told Lena about the music from Missisu’s piano entering our kitchen the morning we were uprooted from the coast.

“Would you be able to identify music if I tapped it out?”

“Maybe. As long as it’s Beethoven. Who knows?”

“Turn on your side again,” she said. “There. I don’t know every note, but I can do part of this by ear. It will be awkward, but stretch your imagination. Don’t move, now.”

I waited. Tried to push the memories away.

Fingertips on my naked back. A moment of stillness while she thought, and then rapid pulsing, very rapid. And steady, from the left. Movement, sudden and light, from the right. Both hands, even and quick. More rapid movement, melody on the right, quickly up and down the scale, a pause, steady pulsing again.

She stopped.

“Again,” I said, and she repeated the pattern in exactly the same way.

“Waldstein Sonata,” I said. “No. 21, first movement. The entire sonata lasts close to twenty-five minutes.”

“Incredible. I can hardly believe it.”

The camp, the shack, the cold. Sitting at the table with a piece of cream-coloured paper in front of me, paper that had been slit from one of Okuma-san’s best books. Indigo ink, a fine nib, a corner of blotter. The clock on the cupboard. His head nodding forward just before his hands came crashing down on ponderosa pine. The mottling of the skin afterwards. The dryness. The splitting of his thumb and the way he sewed it back together with black thread. Me, with my eyes scrunched, looking, but trying, at the same time, not to see.

“Okay, here’s another. From the beginning.”

One chord on bare skin. Both hands. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four …

I knew it at once, but she continued.

“Piano Concerto No. 4, first movement,” I said. Hearing every note in my mind, as she was.

“A symphony, then.”

“Maybe I can guess which one before you start.”

“Do you realize that we could go on the road?” Lena said. “Side-show—I could be your manager. We could make our fortune this way. I could quit teaching.”

“Play.”

“Light touch, playful, steady beat, non-stop, bit of melody, steady, steady, rock-rock, rock-rock, tah-tah, tah- tah, tah-tah.”

“Easy. Maelzel had invented the metronome and I think Beethoven was having a bit of fun. Symphony No. 8, second movement. Tah-tah, tah-tah. He fought with Maelzel, one of the feuds that lasted. Maelzel, the inventor, even made several mechanical hearing aids, but Beethoven said they didn’t work. Any collaboration between the two was not a happy event. Beethoven considered the man ill-bred, someone who was trying to infringe on his rights.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Okuma-san. The stories he told. All those nights in the chicken coop after we left the camp. He bought an

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