TWENTY

America, Present Day

In the Midwest, the rapid swings in temperature can quickly explode into a storm. I knew better than to drive through one, but once I remembered my father’s storage unit, a category five twister couldn’t have kept me away.

The Cadillac’s wipers fought a losing battle with the torrential downpour. To make matters worse, the wheels hydroplaned on the standing water and the flashes of lightning created afterimages. I should have pulled over, but I was determined to press forward.

By the time I reached the self-storage facility, the storm had abated to a steady drizzle. I leaned out the window to punch in the gate code, then flipped on my brights, trying to find row H and unit 101, but the markers were hard to see. I crawled down one aisle after the next until I found it, then parked alongside it.

I sussed out the key from the others and stepped through a river of rainwater to reach the lock. Threading it in and with a turn it clicked. I reached down and hoisted up the roller door, beads of collected water sprinkling over my head. As the light flickered on, I moved inside, pushed wet hair from my face and looked around.

Where to begin?

Pops had a specific system for how he wanted things stacked. It didn’t seem so long ago that we had moved the attic boxes here, and yet the drop cloths were coated with a thin layer of dust. I yanked one off, and in an instant, the stagnant air took on the texture of forgotten years.

As I moved through the aisle between boxes, my shoes left prints across the dusty concrete floor. At least the unit hadn’t leaked.

The first box held my great-grandmother’s handmade quilts—heirloom quality, painstakingly crafted and heavily used. I pulled out the one that had sat on the foot of my bed. It was a simple patchwork of pink and white squares, but every eight-by-eight block displayed the colors in a different pattern. The blanket hid me from monsters as a child and comforted heartaches as a teenager. Now it would keep out the chill. I draped it over my shoulders and peeked in another box.

My mother’s silver-edged china. An eight-piece collection that had been her mother’s, and then became mine—although I’d never used it. I closed up the box, knowing I most likely never would.

Several plastic bins held Christmas decorations. I popped the latch and riffled through the one that held the tree ornaments in muted grays, pinks and whites. Mama was obsessed with French decor and preferred the softer hues to the garish greens and reds. I admit, the nontraditional shades were lovely. Before Mama died they’d colored every Christmas, a part of our family’s tradition, but Pops hadn’t decorated since she’d passed. I moved the bin near the storage door, deciding to take them and use them myself.

I worked through more Christmas decor, stored magazines, another set of dishware and an old luggage set. I popped the gold metal clasps of each suitcase but found them all empty.

Behind the luggage sat a box wrapped with shipping tape in both directions. It was heavy, but I tugged it to the center to sit under the light. I picked at the tape corners to peel it back, then ripped them free.

I opened the flaps to find a newspaper lined the top of the box, but it wasn’t crumpled to add padding or protection. Rather, it was folded and saved with intention.

The facing article, titled “The Girl with Red Shoes,” featured a photo of a bronze statue of a little girl with braids. She held a single stemmed flower and looked over the ocean as though waiting for someone. I skimmed through the text.

San Diego and Yokohama, sister cities located on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, now have another link, thanks to Yokohama’s gift of friendship. The Girl with Red Shoes sits on the tip of Shelter Island, near the US naval base in San Diego, and portrays a Japanese orphan who was adopted by a loving American couple. Her touching story became first a poem, and then a well-known song in Japan.

The rest of the article talked mostly of how the statue was a symbol of alliance between countries, but when I took out my phone and searched “The Girl with Red Shoes,” I found a different story. The real one.

The famous poem and song, “Red Shoes,” was inspired by the girl’s life but took creative liberties. The lyrics placed the mother on the Yokohama pier, hidden and watching as her little girl—clad in red shoes—left to board the ship with blue-eyed foreigners. In the song, the mother cries out how she will think of her daughter every time she sees red shoes and she wonders if one day her daughter will look back across the sea and yearn for home.

The real-life child was born in a small village at the foothills of the old Shizuoka Prefecture. The unmarried mother, finding life difficult with an illegitimate child, moved, and when the opportunity presented itself, she married.

To ensure a better life for the child, the woman’s new father-in-law arranged for mercenaries to adopt the little girl and take her to America. However, the child contracted tuberculosis—then incurable—before setting sail, and was turned over to a nearby orphanage instead, where she remained until she died at the age of nine.

The child’s mother and husband never knew.

Theories suggest the father-in-law had fabricated the mercenary story for the mother and delivered the little girl directly to the orphanage himself.

I pocketed my phone, confused, eyeing the photo of the statue in the paper. Why would she give her up? I understood that an unmarried woman with a child would find life difficult back then, but after she married, the child wouldn’t have been considered illegitimate anymore. They could have moved, and no one would have known.

But then I understood. Maybe the child was mixed-race just like Pops’s daughter would be. Was that why he saved the article, because it resonated with him? Carefully, I refolded the newspaper, set it aside and looked in the box.

A folded garment bag took up the remaining space. I pulled it out and placed it flat over the other boxes. In white letters it said US NAVY. I dug under the zipper panel and pulled it open. His navy dress whites. Separating the hangers, I removed just the dinner jacket. Was Pops ever that small? I smiled to myself, trying to imagine him so young. Seventeen.

My father wasn’t an officer, but the style of the uniform was close in style. Silver navy-eagle buttons, with a narrow, pointed lapel, and three white stripes over black on the upper sleeve. It looked good despite being stored incorrectly. I smoothed out the deep creases across the front, but something bumped inside.

I ran my hand along the lining, then hooked a finger into the interior pocket and poked around. A balled-up handkerchief? I tugged it out. Not a handkerchief. A white silk pouch beaded with metallic, silver thread. The kind with a ribbon drawstring hidden within the hem. My father’s words floated from memory.

And inside, a single seed from the majestic tree with a small scrolled message.

Heart pounding, I held my breath and pushed at the fabric. The contents crinkled.

It couldn’t be. With trembling fingers, I pried at the bunched part, then tipped the bag. A small scroll shook free. I carefully worked it open. Dumbfounded, I stared at the words. At my magic words.

TO KNOW YOUR DIRECTION, YOU MUST KNOW BOTH YOUR ROOTS AND YOUR REACH.

It, too, was real. Which meant the photo of the woman in the white kimono was possibly the bride in his story. She had to be. But Pops said the silk pouch was given instead of rings. That’s what he said, right? Why would he have the pouch?

I looked at it, turning it over in my hands. Were they passed out like wedding favors? The magic tree story I knew by heart. Pops added the wedding part at the hospital. Now I questioned what I’d heard. It didn’t make sense.

I checked the pockets of the slacks that hung within the garment bag. Nothing. But I caught sight of something at the bottom of the box.

There was an envelope. It wasn’t as tattered as my father’s letter, nor was it as creased, but with the familiar red-inked Asian symbols, I sensed it was just as important.

I took a deep breath, opened the flap and wiggled the contents free. It was a form written entirely in Japanese except for my father’s signature and the title.

AFFIDAVIT TO MARRY

I looked at the silk pouch, the one he said was exchanged instead of rings, then gazed at my father’s name on the marriage document. His name listed on a marriage document.

I shook my head, refusing to believe. Tears welled up. He said he attended a wedding under a giant tree. He attended one. That’s where he’d received the magic words.

He didn’t say it was his wedding.

He was married before Mama? Did she know that, too? The tears slid down my cheeks. To learn there was a child left behind, combined with a wife and coupled with grief was...a lot. I kept replaying my father’s words.

Before that life, I lived another.

It’d be easier if you just read my letter.

It wasn’t easier. Because the letter didn’t tell me he’d been married or where his daughter was or what happened. It didn’t explain anything. There was nothing easy about any of this.

I thought of the photo of the woman in the white kimono, how I’d found elements of truth in all his stories, then I stared again at his signature on the marriage document and the one underneath. The last name was smudged, so only a handful of symbols to make up the first remained.

Wait. Didn’t Japanese write their last name first? Yoshio did. I wiped at my eyes and looked again at the symbols. There were three and then a defined space before the illegible others. Oh, my God. Was that her last name? Did I just find her name? I reached for my phone, snapped a photo and attached it to an email to Yoshio, asking for translation. I held the document and stared at the marks.

“Abracadabra,” I whispered, because, like magic, I’d finally found the key that could unlock my father’s “other life.”

Her name.