One block east of the bank, Drackman switched off the flashers and the siren, and at the end of the second block, as the truck and the van stopped for a red traffic light, my father got up from the bus-stop bench to which he had walked from the bank, and he joined Mr. Smaller in the second vehicle.
79
When Mrs. Nozawa finished recounting her confrontation with Dr. Mace-Maskil and laying out her suspicion that Lucas Drackman had killed the professor’s wife, Mr. Tamazaki, in good spirits after his holiday, knew that he had enough circumstantial evidence to ensure that Mr. Otani could open his case file and obtain a warrant.
He worried, however, that if Mace-Maskil had warned Drackman about the woman’s interest, both she and Mr. Yoshioka, and perhaps others, might be in danger.
“Another good reason for my written report,” she said, “and now a good reason to have it notarized so it will serve as evidence if anything happens to me, though nothing will. I’m a tough cookie.”
After commiserating with Mrs. Nozawa about Toshiro Mifune’s poor health, he called Mr. Otani at the homicide division of the central police command, only to be told that the detective had taken the day off. When he tried Mr. Otani’s home number, no one answered.
Mr. Tamazaki shivered with a presentiment of tragedy.
80
Unconscious all the way in the ambulance to Saint Christopher’s Children’s Hospital, I have no memory of being taken into surgery. I have one hazy recollection of the recovery room, when I came out of general anesthesia, although I was then, by way of intravenous drip, immediately on painkillers that fogged my mind. I remember only my mother beside the gurney, looking down at me, so very beautiful. She appeared to be terribly aggrieved, as I’d never seen her before. My thinking was so muddled, I worried that something awful must have happened to her. I tried to speak but lacked the wit and energy. I remember also turning my head toward her, whereupon I could see she was holding my left hand in both of hers, and I thought how odd it was that I could not feel her hands pressed around mine. But then, when I wished to feel them, I could. Her warm fingers. Although she clasped my hand tightly, I detected her tremors, and I saw that she was shaking badly, not just her hands but her entire body. She said something, her voice far away, like voices in dreams that sometimes call to us from some far shore, and I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me, and so I slept.
81
I was in the ICU for the first forty-eight hours, until they could be certain that all my vital signs were stable, but I remained in a painkiller haze—I don’t know what—maybe a morphine derivative. I slept more than not, and though my every dream should have been a nightmare, they were with one exception pleasant, although I barely recalled them when I woke. Nurses attended me from time to time, as did a man in a white smock with a stethoscope around his neck.
Although friends and family were usually restricted to short visits in the ICU, someone I knew seemed always to be there in a bedside chair when I rose from the slough of forgetfulness that was as real as the mattress on which I lay. I always knew who I was, of course, and approximately where I must be, and I knew these visitors and loved them, but the why of being there eluded me, or I eluded it, choosing amnesia over the intolerable truth. I think that I could have spoken there in the ICU, that my silence was not a consequence of either my injuries or the drugs. Perhaps I feared to speak because words mattered in our family—in the beginning was the Word—and when I spoke, thereafter would come conversation and with conversation the reality, the why. Mom was there, watching, sometimes putting cold wet compresses on my brow, sometimes giving me a sliver of ice with the admonition to let it melt in my mouth. In her absence, Grandpa Teddy appeared, and although I’d never previously seen him with a rosary—Grandma Anita, but not him—he always clung to one now, his fingers traveling from bead to bead, his lips moving and the words whispered. I should not have been surprised to see Donata Lorenzo, once our neighbor, my sitter, who in her widowhood had been counseled by my mother, heavier now than when I’d last seen her, wiping at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief prettily embroidered at the corners or twisting it into knots around her fingers. When I opened my eyes and saw Mr. Yoshioka in the chair, I thought of the photos of his mother and sister in the book about Manzanar, and I spoke for the first time since the bomb: “I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t know to what those words referred, but he came to the bed and took one of my hands and held it as my mother had held it. He said softly, “ ‘The summer storm / Hid in the bamboo grove / And quieted away.’ ” I thought I must be getting the hang of this haiku thing, because I understood that he was saying the worst had passed, that all would be better from now on. Something serious had happened to me, but nothing mortal yet.
Sometime in those hours after surgery, I came to realize that I couldn’t move my legs or feel them. I would have been afraid if my arms had also been unresponsive, if my hands refused to obey me. But I thought of what Mr. Yoshioka had lost in his life, of what Mrs. Lorenzo had lost, of Grandpa without his Anita, and I flexed my hands and played imaginary chords and melodies on the bedsheet, and I knew, no matter what, I’d be all right, though there was still the matter of the damper, sostenuto, and una corda pedals. Don’t think about that, not now, not yet. Even then, I held at bay the why of being in the hospital, held tenaciously to forgetfulness.
The one nightmare came, so they tell me, at nine o’clock the second night. In sleep, my mind approached what it couldn’t admit when I was awake: I am in the bank, under the airborne stampede of steel horses, following the golden feather to the briefcase. Fiona moves toward an exit. My father in business attire makes his escape. I turn to see Amalia and Malcolm. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” The blast. The sweet girl seems almost to take flight, angel that she is. But does not rise on white wings. Does not rise. Collapses and does not rise, a girl no more, a broken bird, a tangle of ragged clothes and torn flesh and lifeless bones.
I woke screaming and couldn’t stop, and the nurses rushed to my cubicle, and soon they brought my mother. “Amalia’s dead!” I told her as she sat on the bed and took me in her arms. “Amalia’s dead, oh, God, she’s dead, Mama.” Of course they knew that she had perished—and not she alone. The only revelation I had for them was what I said next: “I killed her! It’s me, I did it, I killed Amalia!” My mother held me and assured me that I had killed no one, but I refused to accept absolution so easily. “You don’t know, you don’t. I should have told you, you don’t know everything I should have told you.” She said that Mr. Yoshioka had explained everything to her, that nothing I’d done had been sinful or even wrong, that I’d done what any child my age might have done under those circumstances, that perhaps if I’d done anything differently, Fiona Cassidy might have killed me long ago. What happened at the bank was something else altogether, one of those terrible things that seemed to be happening more every year.
I couldn’t rely upon the
excuse that I’d done what any child my age would have done, for as I had once said to Mr. Yoshioka, I was not my age, an assertion to which he had agreed.
“But you don’t understand,” I insisted. “Maybe even Mr. Yoshioka doesn’t. They didn’t just steal all that jade stuff at City College. They did worse. It was them at the bank. Fiona … and Tilton. I saw them. They had briefcases. They put down the briefcases and left.”
She stiffened with shock, and I believed that she must realize what had become clear to me: that if she had never become pregnant with me, if my father hadn’t married her but instead had followed some other path in life, Amalia would be alive, Amalia and however many others had died at the bank. Because I was born, Amalia died.
From where I sit nearly half a century later, I understand the fallacy of that reasoning. But in the aftermath of the bank, in my grief, I believed that it must be inarguably true.
After a while, when I couldn’t be adequately calmed, a nurse injected a sedative into the IV port, and I fell into an unwanted sleep in my mother’s arms. I did not dream again that night.
In the morning, when Mom visited, I asked her if anyone knew what had happened to the Lucite pendant that I’d been wearing.
To my surprise, she said, “It was still around your neck when the paramedics found you, sweetie. They took it off you in the ambulance.”
She produced it from her purse and gave it to me. Within the shapen heart, the feather lay soft and white.
82
Wednesday, with all my vital signs stable, they moved me from the ICU into a private room. I didn’t need traction, or an orthopedic corset. Mine wasn’t what they called an “unstable injury” that needed time to heal. It was plenty stable, all right. My spinal cord had been severely impacted, and that was the end of the story. No surgeon in the world, then or now, could repair the damaged nerve tracts.
During the few days that I remained in the hospital, receiving treatment for my lesser wounds and undergoing tests to determine the extent of my disabilities, the nurses could do little more for me than turn me regularly in bed to prevent sores from forming as a result of my immobility and lack of sensation in my legs.
Physical therapy began on Thursday. The therapist worked my legs for me, flexing my ankles and my knees, which someone would have to do for me daily from now on, to prevent my joints from locking and my muscles from contracting as the result of paralysis.
I didn’t mourn the loss of mobility, didn’t lie abed in anguish over having become a cripple, which was a word used casually then, not one considered less sensitive than “disabled.” I felt that I had received what I’d earned and that enduring my condition without complaint might be my sole hope of redemption.
Fewer painkillers were now prescribed, and I could no longer retreat into a haze of medication. Neither did I continue to wrap myself in calculated silence. I spoke to everyone, although not in my former garrulous way. I felt that nothing I said could be worth anyone listening, not after the suffering that my presence in the world had caused; for the most part, I limited myself to responses, initiating few exchanges. I remained aware that my grief and acute sense of blame distressed my mother and Grandfather Teddy. But to pretend to feel other than I truly felt would have filled me with self-disgust.