Chapter Eight
“Wakey, wakey.” The next Saturday morning Mika stood over Hana’s bed, holding two cups.
Hana groaned. “Go away.”
“Get up, lots to do today,” she chirped. “I’ve got a whole life to fake and only”—Mika checked her wrist where there was no watch—“eight days to do it. I. Am. Freaking. Out. Also, your boob is out.”
Hana grumbled and sat up, adjusting her shirt to cover herself. “I’m putting a lock on my door. Are you wearing overalls?”
“You like?” Mika posed.
“I do not. We need to do something about your wardrobe before Penny comes. I don’t think your Walmart chic is going to cut it.”
Mika handed Hana a cup. “Not to worry. Charlie is going to outfit me in her best I-am-a-kindergarten-teacher business casual clothing—aka my Ann Taylor nightmare. Clothes make the woman. Or unmake her. Let’s go. We’re about to embark on a no-expenses-paid trip to cleaning the house.”
Hana took a drink and spit it back into the cup. “What the fuck?”
“It’s tepid apple kombucha. I got it from the goat yoga studio down the street.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“It’s what Mika 2.0 is drinking now. She is very into probiotics and healthy living. She cannot get enough bicycling, especially the tiny seats that implant themselves in your rear end. She enjoys those the most.” Mika set her cup down, squeezing it between a bread maker in a box and four dead plants. She stooped and picked up a T-shirt, shaking it out. “This shirt smells like smoke and bad decisions.” She tossed it to Hana. “Put it on.”
“Please stop referring to yourself in the third person.” Hana threw an arm over her eyes.
“Hana,” Mika said mock-seriously. “Let’s take life by the short and curlies.”
“Oh my god, never use that term again.”
“C’mon, I have donuts in the kitchen.”
That got Hana moving. She wandered from her room, shirt sans pants. She leaned against the counter and nibbled on a maple bar. “What’s the plan?”
“Charlie and Tuan are on their way over with a truck. And so is Hayato because he doesn’t have anything better to do. We’re going to start by—” Mika searched for the correct phrase. Performing an exorcism? Burning everything to the ground? “Decluttering. Then this afternoon, we’ll work a bit in the yard. We won’t get it all done today.”
Hana put her maple bar down on a saucer she’d purchased from an estate sale across the street. She touched a box, curled her hands over a stack of Architectural Digest magazines. They had her ex-girlfriend Nicole’s name on them. “I don’t know,” she said, a stubborn edge to her voice.
Mika gently pried Hana’s fingers from the magazine stack. “Maybe we start small, like with the shoes in the oven?”
Hana inhaled through her nose. “Okay. Okay.”
Mika coaxed Hana into putting on pants, and twenty minutes later, Charlie and Tuan arrived in a bright green truck: b.j.’s junk and haul. Hayato appeared around that time too, saying something about moving and how it was the worst. They didn’t correct him. Hana had been living in the house for years.
They worked through the day. Cleaning out the fridge of petrified meatloaf, chunky milk, and congealed kimchi. Opening boxes, unpacking them. Placing items to keep on the cleared kitchen table and items to discard in the truck Tuan had borrowed. It was more of a mess than when they started. Tuan installed a bicycle rack, and Charlie brought clothes for Mika to wear, plus some bike outfits.
“Penny isn’t going to go through my drawers,” Mika said as Charlie stuffed jerseys and Lycra shorts into her dresser.
Charlie held up a handful of garments. “This is confidence spandex.”
When the house grew too warm and stifling, they moved outside to the lawn. Charlie slapped on a pair of garden gloves and started weeding. Tuan and Hayato pruned the giant oak in the front yard—each fall, it dropped so many dead and dirty leaves, the neighbors complained.
Mika wandered to the backyard to find Hana. “Charlie wants to run to the garden store and pick up some annuals? At least, I think that’s what she said. I’m assuming she meant flowers. Want to come with? What are you doing?” Hana had her back to Mika and a hose in her hand. Mika circled around to Hana’s front, dehydrated grass crunching underfoot. “I’m pretty sure that tree is dead.” Hana was showering a small, brown, malnourished maple.
“Nicole and I planted it. It was the first thing we did when we moved in.”
Mika eyed it warily. “I don’t know if it’s salvageable.”
Hana shook her head. A tiny crease between her eyebrows. Sadness. “I’m going to love it back to life.”
Charlie tromped toward them. “Forget the garden store.” She pulled off her gloves. “I’m beat. Anyone ready for a drink?”
Hana dropped the hose. “I’ll get the glasses.”
At the end of the day, muscles Mika didn’t even know she had ached. She lay in bed, watching her ceiling fan turn in lazy circles, didn’t even have the energy to take off her shoes—her mother would die. The kitchen and family room were a mess, but all the boxes were gone. Progress. Her phone chimed. She fished around her bed for it. Two texts. The first from Leif. An address followed by: Stanley is cool with you displaying his work, but he’s working in there this week, so you won’t be able to get into the space just yet.
The other message was from Penny. So excited to see you, just over a week to go! FaceTime tomorrow?
Mika replied, Yes, FaceTime tomorrow. Super excited too. Spent today getting my place ready for you to see. Mika’s eyes fluttered closed. Her phone beeped. Penny again. I hope you’re not going to any trouble. All Mika could do was laugh.
* * *
Five excruciating days later, Hana, Charlie, and Mika gathered for dinner in the newly cleaned house. The floors had been scrubbed. The walls painted. The lawn had been mowed, and little flowering plants bordered the walkway to the front door. Tuan had even repaired the crack in the ceiling. They’d arranged the furniture around the fireplace and set pictures on the mantle of Mika all over the world—doctored by the tech guy at Charlie’s school. There was a cozy armchair you could imagine reading books in on a rainy day. Her bedroom had a fresh white duvet and a little crystal lamp with a dish for jewelry on the nightstand.
The kitchen counters were cleared, and it was airy and light, with a big window overlooking the backyard. They’d strung the fairy lights up again and sprayed down an old picnic table, setting it with hurricane vases and white candles, re-creating Mika’s Instagram picture. New gleaming small appliances graced the granite countertop. All thanks to Hana’s late-night QVC purchases. I was making Nicole a home, she’d said as they plugged them in. A delicate green fern and a white orchid adorned the middle of the dining table. It was all fresh-baked bread and nights by the fire and sunny days making jam. Mika’s heart lifted into a smile when seeing it. She could have raised a baby here. Could have come here after traveling the world or a hard day at work in her gallery. The process reminded Mika of when she’d been in high school. She used to buy paintings from the thrift store because she couldn’t afford new canvases. She’d strip them down or paint over them. Create something new. Something better.
“Not bad, not bad at all.” Charlie slumped back against the couch. Tonight, they were having pad thai and pho. One last hurrah before Penny came.
In between bites of noodles, Mika glued pictures into a scrapbook for Penny. Charlie and Mika had spread out photographs on the coffee table to pick through them. Hana had been oddly distant the last hour, focusing on her wine, opting to drink her dinner.
“Oh! Definitely put this one in.” Charlie handed Mika a picture.
The glossy snapshot was of her at Penny’s age. Sixteen and in front of an easel, a charcoal sketch behind her. Now, Mika rubbed her fingertips together, remembering the gritty charcoal between her fingers. How good it felt to create. That burst as if you were going to come out of your skin. Mika placed the photo back on the table. At the portrait, Hiromi had brought her eyes close to the paper and sniffed. You drew this? You didn’t trace it? Mika had spent a good portion of her childhood convincing her mother she could draw, then her first college year persuading Hiromi she deserved to. “Not this one.”
Charlie frowned. “Okay . . .” she said carefully. To Charlie, it was a mystery—why didn’t Mika paint anymore? Only Hana knew the truth. “You were so good.”
Were. The operative word. All that, the painting, the traveling, was a ghost life now. Something that could have been but wasn’t ever meant to be. “Is there one of my parents?” Mika asked.
Hana refilled her wine.
“Here.” Charlie handed over another photograph. This one of Mika, age six, with Hiromi and Shige, posing around a brand-new box television. Shige had bought it to watch Kristi Yamaguchi skate in the Olympics. Three years later, they would watch the Supreme Truth terrorist attacks in Japan on it—Hiromi stayed up all night calling relatives, weeping with them. Mika’s hands were folded neatly in front of her in the photograph, and her hair sported the classic Asian kid bowl cut. Behind her, Hiromi wore a pair of acid-wash mom jeans and gold glasses with a rose-colored tint, her hand clutching Mika’s shoulder like a warning—Do not go far from me.
Mika placed the snapshot in the scrapbook. “Perfect.” Penny might ask about her biological grandparents. Mika would make up some excuse—They’re on a cruise, maybe you’ll meet them next time. Except Mika knew that, despite what Penny might believe at this moment, there would be no next time. Her daughter was coming to meet her biological mother, get answers, and then she would become caught up in her real life again and leave Mika behind. Mika knew enough about herself to know she was only to be loved for a season, not a lifetime.
There were many photographs of Hana and Mika in high school. Mika stared at one. Of the two downtown. Hana’s arm slung around Mika, protesters behind them, hands clutching a sí se puede sign. They’d skipped school to attend a farm worker demonstration. Mika wasn’t sure what they were protesting—it was more Hana’s thing—but it felt good to yell. To chant. To make a scene. Hana had helped Mika find her voice. It was loud and powerful. She stuck the photo in the album.
Next, Mika picked up a Polaroid Hana had snapped of her. It was her first day of college, and she was smiling as if it were Christmas morning. Hiromi thought Mika would major in business and live at home, but art and the dorms had always been her intention.
Hana and Mika had filled out their financial aid and housing paperwork together and received Pell Grants. The night before she moved into the dorms, Mika had watched the clock, waiting for nine p.m. to strike, the hour Hiromi usually turned in. When her mother was the most tired. The least likely to be up for a fight. As her father shut off the television, Mika steeled her nerves and announced that she was moving out and majoring in art. Hands balled into fists, she’d been ready to set her life down for her dream.
Ungrateful, Hiromi had called her. She was in her house robe. Shige wouldn’t look at Mika. This girl thinks she’s going to be a painter, Hiromi had spat out to Shige. Then turned her wrath on Mika. You’ll never be an artist. You’ll waste your life. Go. Hiromi had flicked a hand at Mika, the vibration of her mother’s anger so heavy it might have knocked the teeth from Mika’s mouth. You hate it here so much, then leave. Maybe I’ll finally get some sleep. Mika had packed and spent the night at Hana’s. It had rained. Mika swiped away tears and comforted herself that she didn’t want to stay at home anyway, waste another moment living with a woman who wished to annihilate her. She had aspirations of grandeur. A girl broken and breaking out.
The dorm room was the first time Mika felt like a real artist, the dingy walls, the hissing radiator, the wardrobe bursting with black clothes. She was always five minutes early for everything. God, she remembered always watching the clock, unable to wait for her real life to begin. She paid so much attention to the minutes and hours. In fact, she knew the exact time Penny was conceived. Had turned her head and seen the clock on the nightstand. 12:01 a.m. The digital numbers the same color red as the dot a sniper uses to mark their target. But Mika didn’t pay too much attention to time anymore. She let it happily pass by. She pressed the photo into the album, casting a thumbprint over her shining face with a sigh.
The last photograph they included was of Mika, seven months pregnant with Penny. She was smiling and curled into an armchair like a small animal, hair swept up into a pair of space buns.
Hana swirled the wine in her glass, something percolating in her facial expression. “Excuse me,” she said, then disappeared out the back door.
Of course, Charlie and Mika raced to follow her. They watched Hana through the window as she stomped to the sad malnourished maple, the one she had planted with Nicole. She bent, grabbed the trunk with both hands, and pulled. It didn’t budge.
“Do you think we should get her a shovel?” Charlie whispered.
“No, I think she’s having a moment,” said Mika.
Hana let out some sort of weird, sad, half battle cry. She placed her hands around the trunk again and pulled and pulled until finally, the dead roots snapped and gave way. Hana tumbled back with the force of it, landing on her ass. She sat for a moment, chest heaving, cheeks flushed, and eyes wild. Then she glanced up, connecting eyes with Mika and Charlie through the window.
Charlie held up her wineglass. So did Mika. They clinked them together, a silent cheers. “To new beginnings,” Charlie said.
“To high hopes,” Mika added.