The next morning, Stevie still didn't want to change out of his clothes.
"I'm happy like this," he said, crossing his arms over his chest, making his hands absolutely unavailable for taking the offered shirt from me.
"Okay," I said. "I don't care what you wear. I just don't want Mom and Dad to yell at you." Not that they would have yelled at him after what they'd just been through. He was back. That's all that mattered. He was still quite hung over from the drugging he'd been given. His pupils still shone like tiny bowling balls in the deep brown of his nearly-crowded out irises.
"They won't yell at me for not changing my shirt, Mikey," he said echoing my thought, making me wonder why I'd even thought it in the first place. Anyone else would have been more astonished at the apparent mind reading. Not me. Eerie mind-reading was something he'd always done with me. But it was always with small things like not changing his shirt. At least he'd never done the big one like he had with our mom years ago, an unequaled shocking blurt out seven years ago, the evening he spoke his first sentence ever. In my case, it would have no doubt involved outing me to my family before I had a chance to work up the courage to tell them myself. Since I never had a chance to meet guys anyway, I wasn't in a rush. If the Bruce Lee poster I'd put up a few years ago in our room at Jiji's wasn't already a clue, and they continued to think it was there in hero worship and not fantasy material, then I wasn't pushing it.
I sighed. "I guess you're right. Are you hungry?" Normally I'd urge him to have breakfast so we could get to the library. Today was one of our library days. Ever since regular school had not been an option, I'd taken naturally and gladly to home schooling. One day a week I spent hidden among the stacks of one of Berkeley's many libraries. I spent most library days in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, my favorite. Today, though, the prospect of going somewhere in public felt… scary.
Stevie shrugged. "I guess."
"It's probably a good idea to eat something. Let's go."
Stevie followed me docilely to the kitchen. My parents weren't in the room. I didn't know where they were. Grandma was in the kitchen setting places at the table. Jiji was at the counter, preparing a pot of tea.
"Hi, Grandma. Hi Jiji."
"Hi, honey," Grandma answered. Her face was pale, her eyes red. She must have been in her room when Stevie came back and didn't know yet.
"Don't forget Stevie's place," I reminded her. "I guess you didn't know yet. He came back late last night."
She turned quickly. "Yes, Makoto told me!" Her eyes filled. She sighed. "My boys. My boys." She stared in Stevie's direction. I expected her to comment on his hung over state but she didn't. Nor would she have expected Stevie to greet her since he never spoke to anyone else but me. "Tell my Stevie Grandma says hello and I love him," she whispered, but didn't move. She often gave me messages to relay to him that way and it seemed effective. When she did that, he'd wave at her, which he did now.
"Sit down," I told him. "I'll get you a bowl."
He did as I said and I poured each of us a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and poured the milk in. He let me do it which was good because he always overfilled his bowl and caused milk to spill all over the table. I even set the spoon into the bowl, nestling it carefully among the golden puffs. "Be careful not to spill it," I told him, then poured a bowl for myself.
Grandma poured two mugs of coffee and added milk into one of them, stirred sugar into the other as Jiji brought the tea to the table and proceeded to pour me a cup. "I'll be right back," she said. "I'll bring these to your parents." She went in the direction of my parents' bedroom. They must have been sleeping late after the exhausting experience of worrying about Stevie.
"Okay," I said and stuffed a spoon full of increasingly soggy cereal into my mouth. Honestly, I didn't really like cereal anymore and my stomach was still tight, not wanting food, but I wanted Stevie to eat and he'd always refused to eat anything but this stuff for breakfast. So I tried to prompt him by appearing enthusiastic. I drained the last of my milk, tilting my bowl to my lips. Stevie had not yet taken a spoonful.
"C'mon, Stevie, eat," I urged. "After breakfast, you can pick your color for the day." He'd forgotten to do that, the first time ever since he'd started, but today was no doubt, unusual because of what had happened. We'd get back on schedule soon enough.
I got up and rinsed my bowl, putting it into the dishwasher, along with my spoon. Grandma came back and sat down at her place. I went back and sat by Stevie, thanking Jiji for the tea.
‟Michael-chan," Jiji said, "I'd like you and Stevie to come stay with me for a few days. I could use your help around the house and we have lessons to do. Would you mind?"
"Sure." I actually liked that idea since the prospect of going to the library made a weird sick feeling in my stomach.
He nodded. "Good. After…yesterday, your parents and grandmother and I are worried about you going around on your bikes. It's not safe. I can take you to the library if you really need to go."
I glanced at Grandma. Her face was pale and she looked unwell. Then I understood. My family needed her to rest quietly after yesterday. Not to mention the way my mom had spoken to her had pained her so badly. Besides, Stevie and I loved staying with Jiji. "That would be great."
Next to me, Stevie was toying with his cereal. From the corner of my eye I saw him gingerly push another spoonful of cereal into his mouth.
"Do you want to go stay with Jiji?" I asked him.
"Yeff," he said around a mouthful of cereal.
"I'll pack our stuff after breakfast." I took a sip of tea as my insides began to unclench a bit. Staying with Jiji always was good. Since we didn't go to regular school, Jiji, who'd been a schoolteacher and also had run his own karate dojo for years, was a wonderful teacher who did academic work with us often but also taught us to cook, grow roses, practice karate and Japanese calligraphy. So many things we'd not been able to learn had we been imprisoned in school all day, every day.
Jiji lived in a beautiful old house in what had been Japantown before World War Two, when Japanese-Americans had undergone persecution, expulsions and imprisonment in the internment camps set up by the Roosevelt administration after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sadly, Mom's mother, Baba, had passed away when I was small, before Stevie was born so he'd never known her and I didn't remember her that well either.
Jiji was also a great cook and his kitchen always had delicious smells coming from it at all hours of the day and evening. The sound of liquids bubbling and butter sizzling to make omelets, vegetable gyoza and tempura-battered vegetables – Stevie and I both had an innate repulsion of meat and fish, vegetarians from birth it seemed and Jiji accommodated us with a lot of great stuff- were as present as the sound of his clippers on his prize rose garden. Jiji was as much a good friend and ally as he was a grandparent.
Grandma's eyes looked sad. Even though Stevie was back, the guilt she'd felt at his having disappeared while she was on the phone inside obviously overshadowed any joy she could have felt. Mom's words to her the day before no doubt still stung. I could hear them echo in my own mind every time I looked at Grandma.
~
The first thing we did on getting to Jiji's was what we always did, bring our backpacks into our room – Mom's old room growing up – and unpack our stuff. There was a large, low chest of drawers that Jiji had built with his own hands against one wall, next to what had been my mom's desk, and I immediately busied myself with pulling my clothes out and placing them into my customary drawers on the left. Stevie and I always made a point to keep our sides of storage in accord with the side of the room we slept on. Our mom had had a low wooden platform bed – also built by our grandfather's skillful hands – on which rested a futon mattress, a sort of compromise between Japanese and Western-style sleeping styles. After Stevie was born and got big enough to use a regular bed, Jiji built a matching platform bed for him with a small nightstand between them for a clock and my books and Stevie's Spiderman comics.
Both beds faced the wall with the chest of drawers and desk, above which a poster of Bruce Lee was proudly displayed, one of my first purchases as a teenager at Tower Records. I glanced at the poster each time I made a trip over to the drawers. It was that famous movie still of him from Enter the Dragon, shirtless, in a ready-to-fight pose, his sweaty torso also covered with what looked like bloody scratch marks from an opponent's raking claw strikes.
Next to the poster, above the chest of drawers, was a dressing mirror, onto which were taped a few photographs of Mom and her parents from various vacations, smiling together on the beach, Mom in a prom dress, and another of her in one of those 1960s shorts and halter top sets women used to wear, a wide headband on her long straight hair, lazing on the perfectly tended grass Jiji took such painstaking care of next to my dad with his longish hippie hair, his arm draped across Mom's shoulders. Both smiling and in-love happy. I'm attached to those photos so I never took them down.
I caught a glance of Stevie in the mirror. He was sitting on his futon and simply watching me unpack, hands in his lap as if politely waiting his turn at the doctor's office. I stopped and turned to him. "Why aren't you unpacking?"
He shrugged. "I don't feel like it. Would you do it for me?"
I returned his shrug with one of my own. If I showed him how upset I was, he would probably respond with equal upset and I wanted him to remain calm. "Sure." I still felt painfully beholden to him after yesterday and so as soon as I'd finished putting away my own things, did his as well. Those first soul-wrenching moments of realizing he was missing and the fruitless frantic search around the house next door were still haunting me. Each moment, vividly sharp, played over and over in my mind, superimposed over the present, so that no matter what I was doing, yesterday was what I heard and saw before anything else.
The intensity made a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. I'd thought having Stevie back and unharmed would have healed that feeling, but it didn't. Within that neverending torment loop was the awareness of the surrounding world. A world in which a child playing on the lawn of his house had become a place where he could be grabbed, thrust into terror, ripped away…
I raked a hand through my hair. I'd thought we were alone in the yard but I'd been wrong. Like I'd explained to Officer Petersen, someone had been there. A person had to have grabbed Stevie. He wouldn't have gone off on his own, not when the ice cream truck was coming and not away from me.
Fire from the sky! Take cover! The words kept echoing through my head. A tormenting broken record. "Stevie?"
"Yeah?"
"Did you see anyone yesterday, you know, when you yelled about fire from the sky?"
He looked at me. "I said that?"
"You don't remember?"
He shook his head. "No."
"What do you remember?" I doubted the wisdom of probing him about yesterday but I couldn't stop myself.
He thought a moment. "I remember playing catch. I remember hearing the ice cream truck. I remember your terrible throw and the ball going into the neighbor's yard. That's all. The next thing I remember is coming home, feeling all weird and tired."
"I see." I let it go, not wanting to push at him.
In truth, Stevie never remembered his weird outbursts. He'd say what would pour out of him, his eyes would roll back then forward again, and he'd go on as if nothing had happened. I'd try asking him about it and he'd blank about it, just like today. The first words he'd ever said had been his first outburst.
~
Stevie didn't speak at all until he was four. His lack of speech and overall unresponsiveness to them naturally worried my parents who, of course, took him to specialists at the university for evaluation. No one seemed able to get a handle on what was going on in him and ended up tagging him as intellectually disabled. The same thing happened after my parents dragged Stevie to a number of child psychologists in private practices who often recommended special schools, schools where he'd live away from home I'm not sure what part of Stevie's inability to be separated from me the professionals didn't get, but that's how it was. As long as he was near me, he seemed happy and interacted with me all the time, even though it was obvious he was not going to fit what my parents wanted to be a normal child.
At first my parents were reluctant to consider that option but then, when Stevie reached four and nearly three-quarters of the way toward his fifth birthday without a word, they started to discuss it in earnest. I overheard them in their room one night so I knew they were seriously planning to bring him to one particular place and forcibly separate us. The day after I'd eavesdropped, we'd all gone over to Jiji's for supper. Suddenly, with no indication he was about to, Stevie uttered his first words, a complete sentence once night, at the supper table with my parents, me and Grandma, just as we'd finished eating.
"Otou-san said, 'no! no!" Stevie blurted out.
I saw Jiji pale a bit and stiffen. He and my mom looked at each other.
"Otou-san said, no! no!" Stevie yelled the phrase a bit louder, and then as if the ensuing silence at the table was encouragement, he began yelling it, over and over.
I jumped up and grasped his hand. "Stevie, what's wrong?"
"Otou-san said, 'no! no! Otou-san, where are you? Why did you leave me here? I want my flowers! The dirt is so hot and it hurts! Because you said no-no!" He began crying, an inconsolable sob that threatened to escalate into wailing.
I tugged him gently and he slid off his chair to his feet. "Stevie, it's okay."
That's when his eyes rolled back, showing the whites. My blood chilled. "The dirt is so hot and it hurts," he ground out. "Otou-san where are you?" He continued sobbing and fell against me, one hand clutching my sleeve.
Mom looked at Jiji, her eyes wide, as if she were watching a horror film in progress. "Dad, what did you tell him?" The skin of her face seemed to tighten into a pale mask.
"Nothing, Mi-chan. He's a child. I don't speak of it, ever. I wouldn't, especially not to him."
"Then how did he know? You must have spoken to Michael. How could you? You know Stevie will hear and absorb anything you say."
"Speak to me about what?" I asked, interrupting the denial Jiji was about to make. Thankfully, Stevie had suddenly fallen quiet, what should have been joy at his finally-spoken first words lost completely in some sort of darkness.
Neither of them would answer.
Stevie pushed away from me, his eyes back to normal. "Mikey, let's watch Spiderman, please?" he begged, as if he'd been speaking for years.
I looked from Jiji to Mom and back, losing my patience for their reticence. "What's going on?" I demanded. Their behavior was equally as distressing in this moment as Stevie's, yet more so since they were supposed to be the adults here. "What does no no mean? And why was he saying 'Father said no, no'?" Stevie sounded as if he'd been addressing someone directly. But he didn't call our dad Otou-san. He didn't even refer to our dad as Dad. It was Mom who used to call her father Otou-san when she was younger and then later started calling him Dad in English as an adult.
A sudden shiver of understanding had traveled up my spine in that moment. "Jiji, was Stevie talking about you?"
He heaved a sigh, his eyes misted. "I think so," he said, although he sounded like he knew it for sure but was hedging. The lines in his face seemed to have deepened in just those few moments.
My dad got up and ushered both me and Stevie into the living room and sat us down.
"Why are they so upset?" I asked Dad. "Can't you tell me? Please?"
He sighed. "I would, Mikey, really. You deserve to know. But I need to let Jiji tell you when he feels it's the right time." Dad looked at Stevie and his brow furrowed. "Stevie? You all right, buddy?"
But to my dad's disappointment, Stevie didn't answer him. In fact, it turned out that even though Stevie began speaking after that day, he only spoke to me, just as before, he'd only interacted with me.
"Are you all right, Stevie?" I asked.
"Please put on Spiderman," he said.
"Spiderman's not on now, Stevie. It's evening. Spiderman's in the afternoon. You already watched it."
"Okay." He sat quietly next to me while my mom's and Jiji's voices drew closer.
"You must have spoken about it, Dad," Mom's voice cut in. "How does he know I said that? I was barely a kindergartner. Only you knew about that. And Mom." She and Jiji now stood in the doorway of the living room. Mom's eyes were red-rimmed.
"Miya, I swear to you I have said nothing," Jiji answered. "There are no photographs out he could have seen. They're all hidden away. I don't know how he could have known."
Mom stared at her little boy, mystified. Her eyes were red. "That's impossible. Somehow, he knows." She looked at Dad then. "I think it's time."
"Time for what?" I asked, though I already knew based on what I'd overheard. My heart started pumping.
Dad squeezed my shoulder. "Mikey, you know already your brother really does need extra care. We can't do it at home."
Though I was only eight, I jerked away from his hand and jumped to my feet. "No, he doesn't. He's fine with me, at home."
"Michael." Mom came toward me.
But I turned on her, my heart racing. Something about her moving toward me, her determination to carry out such an unspeakable act as forcing Stevie away from his home where he felt safe whipped up my panic. "If you and Dad make Stevie go away, I'll take him and move in here with Jiji. We'll leave you forever!"
My parents both stared at me, their shock palpable. "Mikey," Dad began, but I didn't let him go further, based on the tone in his voice that was about to negate what I'd just said.
"You cannot make him leave home!" My fists were clenching and unclenching. My chest was heaving. My vision was getting blurred. "You'll hurt him!"
"Okay, okay." Dad knelt in front of me, hands on my arms again. "Okay, Mikey, calm down. We won't make him go anywhere."
"Promise, right now. Promise."
Dad glanced at my mom's now tearstained cheeks. I saw her surrender. "Okay, we promise." He grabbed me into a hug and rubbed my back, willing me to calm down. Over his shoulder I saw Stevie off to the side, his face calmer, relieved, as if he'd known Mom and Dad had been planning to send him to that place and had just been released from a torment. How he could have known, I have no idea since they were so careful not to discuss it in front of him, but he seemed to know, in the same mysterious way he knew about Mom's childhood pain.
For several years after that day, I remained on guard that my parents might try to revisit the possibility of sending Stevie to a special school, but they didn't.
Instead, years later, Jiji finally told me his and Mom's whole story, the one that Stevie's outburst had ripped the covering off that day.
Jiji had put on Spiderman cartoons for Stevie, turned the volume up to mask our voices and pulled me aside, not too far away but far enough to speak more privately. "You're old enough now to understand the truth," he said, "about Stevie's first words and why your mother was so upset that day."
My heart thumped but I nodded. "Okay."
Jiji was Nisei, the first generation born in America. His parents were Issei, the generation that had emigrated from Japan. His father had been a highly-respected figure in the Japanese-American community, a business owner and active member of benevolent organizations that formed to help other immigrants from Japan to settle and build their lives in the Berkeley area.
His magnanimity served the family well. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the ensuing persecution of Japanese-Americans, his family had not lost their house when they were interned at Tule Lake Segregation Camp. Jiji had been working toward a doctorate in English literature at Berkeley when the war happened and his education was derailed and the deportations began. But an organization made up of faculty and wealthy benefactors had come to my grandparents' aid, ensuring that their home was protected and not seized and given to a white family in their absence.
He paused and took a deep breath. "Tule Lake was different from the other camps where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned," he said. "Tule Lake was where people especially suspected of disloyalty to the United States were held and sorted through."
"Oh." I looked at Jiji, studied his deeply lined face. He'd always been a standup loyal American citizen. He worked hard and obeyed the laws of his country. He'd also ended up serving in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the Japanese-American regiment in the European theater of World War Two. He'd been one of the first Americans to see inside one of Hitler's death camps when his unit had stumbled across it and liberated it. Jiji was still haunted to this day by what he'd seen there. A part of him had remained back there in his mind and heart, unable to completely readjust to civilian life. Which made his incarceration even more confusing. From the beginning of the United States' involvement in the war, he'd voluntarily signed up to serve his country, to fight for the preservation of democracy and the destruction of fascism.
"I don't understand. Why would you have been sent there?"
Jiji's eyes saddened, revealing a burden he'd been carrying his whole life. "I was young then and hot-headed. I was newly married and your mother was a baby when the war broke out. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans had to answer a questionnaire about our loyalty to the United States government. The questions were worded awkwardly. Many misunderstood their meaning and answered other than they normally would have.'
'I did understand the questions but I was deeply offended at having my patriotism questioned. As you know, my parents had settled in this country decades earlier and had helped build the community we lived in. We were loyal, patriotic law-abiding citizens who helped to build a thriving economy in this area. I was disgusted. The two questions that were asked required a 'yes' answer in order to be considered loyal. In my anger, I refused to say yes. I answered 'no' to both. Hence, we were rounded up with others who'd answered 'no' to both.
"Otou-san said, 'no! no!'" I said in a low voice. I looked at Jiji. "That's what he meant."
He nodded. "I don't see how it could be anything else. And how I made your mother play in the dirt. Your mother hated the dusty, dirty ground the camp was set on. There was no grass. The children had to play in a dirt yard where the school house was. She used to cry and say she missed our flowers. She loved the roses even though I made her be careful not to touch the thorns." Sadness weighed down his face, remembering. "She used to say exactly what Stevie said: 'I want my flowers! I hate the dirty lawn without flowers.'"
"But how could Stevie know? It doesn't make sense." I glanced at Stevie who sat, engrossed in Spiderman. The cartoon sounds droned on, hypnotizing him with his love of Spiderman.
Jiji sighed. "I cannot imagine. The world is full of wonders… and horrors…beyond human comprehension." He was silent a moment. "If I had it to do over, I would have put my pride aside and marked 'yes' to both questions, for your mother's and grandmother's sakes. Because of me, they were subjected to Tule Lake and to decades of difficulty afterward. In spite of the circle of good people who helped us, we were haunted for a long time." He looked sad. "People forget the right things much more quickly and completely than they do the wrong things people do in their youthful foolishness."
I looked at him. Jiji had always been our loving, kind grandfather. After what he'd been through, he'd judged himself enough. I didn't know what to say in that moment. I just reached out and hugged him.
He squeezed me back and I heard him choke back a sob. "You're so kind and wise, my beautiful grandson."
I was glad when Jiji told me the truth, although the mystery remained: why at that particular moment did Stevie channel our mother's childhood pain? I often wondered if he had somehow been triggered by my parents' discussing sending him away from home. I don't see how it could be a coincidence, yet at the same time, that wouldn't explain how he knew about either thing, though. Nor would it didn't explain the other two times before yesterday that had happened in the years following, with total strangers.
~