In a matter of hours, the cherry blossoms had finally opened in full force, weighing their branches down with pink flowers. “They would have to open now,” Mari said.
“Thatsu the way it happen,” Mas said. “No control nature.”
“Do you believe in God, Dad?”
Mas paused. Decades, or even months, earlier he would have said no, that he believed only in Mother Nature. But there was something out there working hand in hand with trees and plants, he had to admit. “You orai?”
“I feel so terrible.” Mari pressed her wrists against her eye sockets. “I killed someone. Another human being. I mean, I know that it was to prevent her from hurting you-but still. How can I live with that?”
There were no answers. Mas remembered when he abandoned his friends after the Bomb fell. He felt as though he had killed them, too. And that guilt burned in his gut for close to a lifetime. “Day by day,” Mas said. “Just thinksu about Takeo. Thatsu best thing.”
The sides of Mari’s mouth turned upward, but Mas noticed a fluttering in her cheeks, as if it was difficult to keep a smile on her face.
The back gate opened and the two Ouchi siblings walked in. Becca was wearing a T-shirt at least a couple sizes too tight and a torn-up pair of jeans, while Phillip was in a tailored knit jacket. “Is it true?” asked Becca. “It was Miss Waxley?”
“Yes,” Mari said. “She killed your father, and she tried to kill mine.”
Phillip was a walking, talking skeleton. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured. “I can’t believe it. Why?”
“Sheezu gotta secret,” Mas said. “Secret she don’t want nobody to know. Dat her mama is not Mrs. Waxley but Kazzy’s mama.”
Phillip took a few steps back. “What are you saying?”
“That Miss Waxley was K- san ’s half sister.” For once, Becca was quick in connecting the dots. The realization hit hard, though, because afterward she didn’t speak for some time.
“Kazzy must have found out recently when he read Asa Sumi’s journal. She was a housekeeper who helped Emily at the Waxley House,” Mari explained. “I guess he wanted to tie up all the loose ends in his life before he died. He probably wanted to let you both know the truth.”
Mas pointed to the kanji on the side of the pond. “Kazzy’s daddy try to leave message. ‘Child lives.’ Asa Sumi wrote dat they tole him the baby died, but he knew the baby was alive.”
“What he probably didn’t know was that the baby’s father was Mr. Waxley,” Mari added.
They all remained quiet for minute, deeply affected by how family members could wound and sometimes even destroy each other.
“I knew that this damn garden was cursed, Becca,” Phillip finally said. He ran his hand through his graying hair and paced the length of the pond. “We should cover it over, like it was before.”
For once, Mas felt sorry for Phillip. Maybe he had misjudged him. Mas knew what it was like to be ignored, your work not fully appreciated. He probably had been struggling to keep Ouchi Silk, Inc., the family business, alive. It was on its last legs, and while his father was the one who had built it up, Phillip would be the one to watch it fall down.
Mas knew that it was his time to step in. He went back into the house and brought a plastic bucket from the laundry room.
“What are you doing, Mr. Arai?” Becca’s black makeup was smeared underneath her eyes.
Mas filled the bucket with water from an outside faucet and motioned for Becca, Phillip, and Mari to come to the far northern side of the pond, by the stone tsukubai.
Phillip knelt by the stone water basin. “What’s that? I never noticed that before.”
“ Tsukubai, ” Mas said. “Makes your hands clean.”
“I think they use it for the tea ceremony, right?” Becca said, wiping tears away on the back of her hand.
“It’s part of a purification rite,” Mari said. “That much I’ve learned from my husband.”
Mas didn’t know much about purification, but he knew that somehow the pond, with all its bloodstains and bad memories, needed to be made clean again. Although the police tape warded them off from disturbing any evidence, they at least could wash themselves of its curse.
Mas poured the water over the hands of Phillip, Becca, and finally his daughter. Mari took the remaining water from the bottom of the bucket and shook it off on Mas’s hands. The bandage had fallen off of Mas’s cut a day earlier, and Mas was surprised to see that the skin was already starting to fuse together again.
The back door opened and there emerged the neighbor, Howard Foster, who had completed his interview with the police. His hands on his hips, he made a strange noise with his tongue and teeth, as if he were calling chickens for their next feed. “I told you. I told you that this would end up a disaster,” he said, shaking his head. “You should have never unearthed this pond.” He walked up to Phillip. “I’ve been talking to my bank. I think that I can make you and your sister a fair offer. Once you’re ready, give me a call.”
Phillip stood above the tsukubai and folded his arms. “I won’t be making that call, Mr. Foster, because we are keeping the house.”
“And the garden,” Becca added with finality.
Before Becca and Phillip left the garden, Mas pulled Becca aside. “Youzu chase Anna Grady away,” he said.
“What?” Becca’s right eyelid fluttered like a butterfly trying to make its escape.
“Youzu don’t want her to marry your daddy.”
Becca swallowed and looked away. “I finally got K- san to myself, you know. After all these years. We shared the same passion for gardens, plants. I can’t tell you how many times we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden together. We even had pet names for each one of the bonsai in their collection. Do you know some are hundreds of years old?”
This woman has too much time on her hands, Mas thought.
“And then he tells me that he’s met someone. And it’s serious. He was talking about marriage, Mr. Arai, after only two months. I had to put a stop to it.” Becca explained that she had hired a private investigator to look into the background of Anna Grady, formerly Anna Miller, both in the U.S. and in Estonia. “She had been married once before, but that wasn’t a big deal, with K- san married three times. But what the investigator found out overseas was highly damaging: Anna’s family had aided the Nazis during World War Two. What if that news got out? K- san ’s reputation would be at stake.”
Mas wasn’t that sure of that. “Ova fifty years ago. Nobody care.”
“That’s what Phillip said. But K- san would have cared. I know it. He prided himself on helping teach military intelligence officers to help end the war. What if people found out his new wife was a Nazi? What kind of PR mess would that be?”
Mas shook his head. Anna’s country had been pulled apart by different world powers. The only reason her family probably had turned to one was to get away from the other.
“I threatened to tell K- san if she kept up the relationship. She refused to break it off, almost spit in my face. Before I could do anything more, K- san ended it. I was so happy at first. But then his mood became so dark. He must have known that he was dying then. I’m sure that’s why he decided to call it quits with Anna. He didn’t want her to feel that she had to hang around while his body wasted away.” Becca hid her face in her hands. “He must have really loved her.” She lowered her hands, black makeup smudges like ash around her eyes. “Do you think K- san would have forgiven me?”