Miyuki Nakano Walsh sighed with relief and fatigue as she walked through the lobby of her building in Azabu. It had been a long day of meetings about new projects at the bank, an early evening workshop on security procedures, and then late dinner with clients.
She drank too much at dinner, and had two more at the nijikai, but begged off staying out later. Everyone else, all men, were probably happy to go drinking at a hostess club, where she’d be less than welcome.
It was later than she’d been out in years. She rode up in the elevator, tipsy, but sober enough to get her daughters’ stuff ready for their “enjoy nature” field trip. She needed to run down the school’s checklist carefully. Their requirements were more exacting than bank compliance measures. Maybe she could get a few hours of sleep too.
She kicked her low heels off in the genkan. She didn’t hear Taiga, the babysitter, but his shoes were there. Maybe he’d slipped into the outdoor sandals and gone out for ice cream. He was addicted to the stuff, and so was she now, and so were the girls.
Miyuki slung her bag on the kitchen island, checked her two cellphones, set her iPad to silent mode, and tucked them all into her bag. She threw out her mask, she was so sick of wearing one, and washed her hands. The checklist was right where she left it. She got some water from the in-wall fridge. But where was Taiga?
She walked back to the genkan, Taiga’s designer high-tops were in their usual place to the left, but a plastic bag of cartons dripped onto the tile beside them. Strange. He sometimes forgot the girls’ appointments, homework, or bath time, but dropping ice cream on the floor was a new one. She picked up the plastic bag and walked it to the sink cupping her hand to catch the drips.
She started on the checklist for the “enjoy nature” school trip—bento lunchbox, outdoor clothes, butterfly nets, bug boxes, sketch pads, and mosquito spray. She couldn’t trust Taiga with all that and her mother was next to worthless for anything other than complaining or watching TV.
If Jenna and Kiri woke up sleepy, it would be torture to get them moving. Once they got cranked up by videos and lit up with sugar, it could take half the night for them to get to sleep. Two weeks ago, the teacher called her to come get Jenna after she fell asleep in class. With the tuition they paid, surely there should be someplace for the girls to rest during the day. She couldn’t leave work because her daughter was sleepy.
Miyuki went into the bathroom and flopped down for a much-needed pee. She pulled on shorts and washed her face. Where were the cats brushing against her to reprimand her for coming home so late?
She went to Jenna’s room. Socks, shorts, and T’s were tossed everywhere, but no Jenna. After Patrick left, they often migrated to one or the other room during the night, or to hers.
Stepping across the hall, Miyuki pushed open Kiri’s door. The girls were not there, either. She tried her own room, but the bed wasn’t touched.
They must be with Grandma in the tatami room. They stopped sleeping with her years ago, complaining of the cigarette smell, but maybe they fell asleep watching TV, which was supposed to be against the rules.
She slid open the door to her mother’s room beside the living room.
Taiga lay twisted with his hands tied behind him, blood wetting his hair, his face horribly smashed. Her mother was under her futon with a sheet tied around her. Miyuki slipped the knot and pulled the futon cover back. Her mother’s head flopped to the side.
She shook her, checked for a pulse and breathing, closed her eyes, tried again, and sank to the tatami. Her mother’s face was haggard and pale, nearly white, the wrinkles smooth again like when she was young.
She crawled to Taiga to make sure he had a pulse. Bubbles of blood popped from his nose and she could feel his pulse.
Miyuki ran to the kitchen for her phone and called 110. She got scissors to clip the plastic ties around Taiga’s wrists and ankles, setting the phone down on speaker. The dispatcher said an officer would be there right away and she hung up.
Was this a break-in? A kidnapping? The building was supposed to have good security. Did someone push in behind Taiga? Did her mother let someone in?
A call came from Taiga’s phone, which was wedged in the pocket of his jeans. She took the phone, but didn’t know his passcode. A call came on her cellphone, but she ignored it. The police would be there soon.
After she filed for divorce, her lawyer advised her to change the locks, but she never got around to it. There was nothing else amiss. The girls would go willingly with Patrick, but would have fought anyone else, little as they were. Patrick wouldn’t do this and besides, he was in Wyoming.
Her filing for divorce, after photos of him cheating on her were sent to her anonymously, must have been a blow. They talked about it in tight, angry phone calls, but Patrick had never been violent and in his few messages had said nothing about coming back to Tokyo.
They argued like any couple, and he used strong, angry language during their worst shouting matches, but he had never been physically violent. They didn’t fight often, but when they did, she exploded first. She cried, he stormed around, and then they made up. She missed that catharsis.
She closed her eyes, one hand on her mother and the other on Taiga, rocking gently, waiting for the police and the ambulance. Where were they? She picked up her phone to call Patrick, but set it down again on the tatami.
When they decided to get married, Patrick came to her family’s home in Tochigi. She coached him for weeks on how to act and what to say. They rode the Shinkansen Line to her hometown, nibbling on bento lunchboxes from the station. Patrick loved the small local lines they transferred to.
The valley around her small hometown stretched over level fields below a range of steep, rocky mountains. Her home was a long walk from the bus stop with manicured rice fields on either side of the simple blacktop road. Her father made the best tatami in the entire region and his attached workshop made the entire house smell like igusa and rice straw.
She made a reservation at a nearby onsen hot springs resort to celebrate after Patrick asked her parents for her hand in marriage. Her father spoiled her when he had money and no one ever expected her to marry a local boy. She was too pretty, too driven, and too Tokyo.
The plan was for Patrick to ask her father for her hand, a quaint but common custom. She told him it wasn’t necessary, but Patrick insisted. Even though his Japanese was weak, he took it as a point of pride.
She helped Patrick memorize the long, complex phrases and demonstrated how to kneel and bow and avoid eye contact. He stumbled over the humble phrases of polite keigo, and she’d laughed as they practiced in their apartment in Tokyo.
In the small tatami room at the front of her childhood home, Patrick knelt down and recited the memorized speech. Patrick, usually so calm, was very nervous. His nervousness seemed a cute expression of his true feelings, in contrast to his usual joking around about “getting hitched” or “living in sin,” as they had been for a year.
Her father sat in a tatami chair across a low table from Patrick and listened quietly. Her mother bustled in with tea and senbei rice crackers before kneeling at the table. Miyuki sat to the side, a little behind Patrick.
After Patrick stumbled through his request, getting most of it right, they both waited for her father to speak. There in front of her father, Miyuki felt proud at Patrick’s efforts. After going to a woman’s college in Tokyo, finding a job in a bank, and living on her own, she knew she didn’t have to beg for her parents’ approval. She just wanted her father to be pleased, and her mother too, if that was possible. She wanted to give them one last gesture of respect before she started her new life.
Her father’s response was as flat and tight-woven as a tatami mat: “My daughter will never marry a foreigner.”
Miyuki got up and gathered their things without another word. She whisked Patrick out the door without translating or explaining. She dragged him down the steps. She was too angry to speak. She waved a car down, an old neighbor, and they rode in silence to the station.
The onsen wasn’t the celebration they planned, but making love with Patrick on the wood platform beside the private rotenburo bath, she realized that she had to make a choice—and she chose Patrick.
They made love outside in the cool mountain air that night, the steam rising off their bodies from the private outdoor bath, and she felt at home for the first time. It was a new feeling, one she never had at her parents’ place, nor at any of the apartments she shared with college friends.
She didn’t talk with her parents again until she was pregnant with Jenna three years later. She sent a birth announcement to them by mail and her father called, secretly, wanting to see his grandchild.
With a granddaughter on the way, her father forgave her. He came twice to Tokyo to see Jenna, then died of a heart attack in Tochigi before her first birthday. He had always smoked as much as her mother, but it got him quicker.
It wasn’t until Kiri was born that her mother moved in with them. As they talked in the new big apartment, Miyuki realized it was her mother, not her father, who had opposed her. She never said it directly. She was too clever for that. But it became clear she was the one against every decision in Miyuki’s life going back to joining the English club in junior high.
She let her mother stay with them in Azabu anyway. And now she was dead. So it didn’t matter anymore. It was just sad. She hoped Taiga would be all right. It looked like a lot of blood. The police were on their way. She should call Patrick, but she didn’t.
It was the girls that panicked her. It had better turn out to be Patrick who took them or she didn’t know how she could survive until they were in her arms again.
She would have to stop crying when the police arrived. The tatami was already wet with her tears.