Chapter 9

Gathering himself, Hugh got out of the car. He walked up the cracked asphalt driveway to the garage. Above the garage door, a rusted basketball hoop framed a well-trafficked cobweb. A dozen insects slept in the fine mesh.

Hugh lifted his hands to shape a basketball. He shot.

“Air ball,” shouted Takumi.

“Extend your wrist, Dad,” advised Hitoshi.

Here they had lived. Rushed out that green door into a thousand fiery mornings. Hammered that Spalding into their dark court. Sprang on impossibly smooth strong legs to shoot and block and pass. Never pass in the air. Protect the ball. Head fake.

Their first home. Their only home.

Setsuko and Hugh had moved into the house when the boys were still infants. It was not an easy time. The boys were colicky and refused to sleep on the same schedule, leaving one always awake. One time this went on for four days. Setsuko did not sleep, not any sleep that Hugh had seen. She spurned Hugh’s offers of help. He couldn’t feed them anyway, and they cried in his arms. Setsuko never complained. Not once had she even sighed at these impossible responsibilities. After four days, the babies settled back into their normal sleeping patterns, which was for both to sleep for two to three hours. Now Setsuko slept, Takumi nestled on one side of her, Hitoshi on the other. How still and silent all three were, like moonlit winter snow. When the babies woke to be fed, it took nothing else than their stirring to wake her from her first sleep in one hundred hours. She sat up and fed Hitoshi first, singing to Takumi to conciliate him.

She had a beautiful singing voice, but Setsuko only sang for their sons.

Hugh peered over the side gate. The valley oak had grown enormous, its branches formed an umbrella over the entire yard. Deep into the north end of the property remained the stump of the mulberry tree, which Hugh had cut down, holding his boys’ shoulders as they took turns using the chain saw to reduce the fallen limbs to firewood.

“I do not want to pick up their fingers,” Setsuko had said as she watched in stony dismay.

“They’re fine,” said Hugh, who in actuality controlled their every movement. But they had to be taught, and this is what Setsuko could not quite grasp. To teach them about the world required going out into the world, chasing its mysteries, following the stream to its source, the owl into its cave, that will-o’-the-wisp into its swampy domain.

Hugh leaned over the gate, tempted to lift the latch, four inches beneath his fingers. He wondered if the old hay bales remained. Perhaps a weathered arrow sticking out of the painted target. He craned his neck.

Weeds grew tall. Junk and plastic storage boxes of various sizes, the largest the length and shape of a coffin, were visible like islands among the sea of weeds.

From the backyard, his sons called out to him.

“Hold on, guys,” whispered Hugh, tapping his hand on the rusted metal gate and feeling for the latch. So simple, but . . .

Sighing, Hugh stepped away from the gate and walked to the front steps. Planters on either side once held stunning arrangements of flowers, but now housed only weeds and a few gladioli. In the dirt by one of the sad plants, a small American flag, discolored and tattered, no doubt left by a real estate agent on some distant Fourth of July, fluttered. Hugh looked for the doorbell but it had been torn out. The blinds were drawn. It was possible that the house was unoccupied, but equally possible that some frightened elderly person was peering out through a crack in the blinds.

As he stood on the step, the house seemed to recede.

He understood clearly why he had not previously returned to the neighborhood and home. There was nothing here for him, nothing to be derived, no sons to be found. He turned to walk away, but glanced once more at the little American flag. Hugh bent down and plucked up the flag by its stem. Beneath the faded red, white and blue, he read:

Nakamura Realty. Beneath the name was a phone number.

Hugh turned his head toward the loud rumble of a muffler. The old primed Camaro was stopped halfway down the block. The car did a slow K turn and drove away. Even through the tinted rear windshield, the driver’s long black hair shone.

Was he being followed? It seemed like it, felt like it. He remembered other times, distant times, when he thought someone was tracking him. A stranger seen at too many places during the course of a day. A woman at a bar smiling too generously. Intense eyes in the rearview mirror, eyes looking for his eyes.

Hunted like game. But no one ever took him down.

Well, who doesn’t have their run-in now and then with paranoia?