Chapter Ten
The next morning Mika waited for Penny and Thomas in their hotel lobby. She stood by a velvet couch that probably cost more than Hana’s mortgage and became acutely aware of her chipped fingernails and her hair that hadn’t been trimmed in who knows how long. The elevators dinged, the doors opened. Penny and Thomas emerged.
“Hey,” Penny said brightly, skipping toward her.
“Morning.” Thomas shuffled over. He and Penny both wore sweatshirts, jeans, and tennis shoes.
“You ready?” Mika buttoned up her coat and headed for the door. “I thought we’d walk. Rain isn’t forecast until this afternoon,” she said, but mostly it was because she couldn’t afford the gas and didn’t want to pay twice for parking. “The museum is only a few blocks from here.” As she slipped through the revolving door, her phone buzzed. Mika checked the caller. Hiromi. She declined, sent her mother to voicemail, and slipped the phone back into her pocket.
A few steps from the hotel, Penny said, “It’s so pretty here.” A grating wind swooped by from the Willamette River, and all three of them hunched, letting it roll over their backs. “I wandered around a little bit last night, and there are all these lights wrapped around the trees in the square.”
Thomas furrowed his brow. “You left the hotel?”
“Just to go to the mall across the street,” Penny said breezily.
“Penny—” Thomas started.
“I bought these socks.” Penny stopped in front of an art deco building with a set of mythical-looking iron gates. She pulled up her pant leg. Blue socks with cat faces adorned her delicate ankles. “Cute, right?”
“Very cute,” Mika said with a smile.
Thomas glowered at Mika but spoke to Penny. “I would appreciate it if you would tell me the next time you decide to leave the hotel.”
Penny was unfazed. She tucked her pant leg back down and said, “Aye-aye,” giving Thomas a salute, which made him peer up at the sky in a god-give-me-patience sort of way. They started off again. The red brick of the Portland Art Museum came into sight.
A little farther down the Park Blocks was a college, Mika’s alma mater. She could just make out the art building. It wasn’t much to look at. A gray cube. But it was a place where beautiful things happened. And Mika had wanted to be a part of it so badly she physically ached. The weather had been similar—static gray sky, moist air—the day she met Marcus Guerrero, a fine arts professor. She’d knocked on his door, yellow slip in hand. He’d answered, paint flecks on his light blue T-shirt, a red bandana holding back his dark hair, a miasma of smoke and coffee clinging to him.
The registrar says I need permission to skip Painting I and II. She thrust the form at him, shifting back and forth on her feet. She’d been braver then. Headstrong. Willing to do anything. Whatever it took.
He stared at her so long and hard she started to turn away. His hand fell from the knob, and he ambled back to his desk to sit in an old office chair with green leather and wooden arms—it had probably been around since the college’s inception in the forties. He leaned back, way back. Alright, he said. Show me what you’ve got.
Mika swallowed. What?
Your portfolio, he said, the slightest accent carving his speech. Marcus was a legend among the art students. Rumors swirled about him. He was a Gulf vet and kept a Purple Heart in his desk drawer. His father was a famous shipbuilder, and he’d grown up in the Mediterranean on yachts. But really, he had been poor, the son of migrant fruit farmers. He grew up in Florida and spent his youth picking bananas.
I don’t have one.
Then paint something. He nodded to the corner of his office. An easel had been crammed between two shelves bursting with palettes, tubes of paint, jars of brushes, turpentine.
Right now? Mika remembered flexing her fingers, feeling queasy.
He stretched, laced his fingers together, and cradled the back of his head. Right now.
“Wow.” Penny’s voice brought Mika back to the present. “You interned here?” she asked, gazing at the building, awestruck.
Mika made a noncommittal noise in her throat that passed for affirmation. Then she added, “Right after college. Not for very long. And it was years ago. I’m sure everyone I’ve worked with has moved on.”
“So, you had me freshman year of college,” Penny said, piecing together Mika’s fake timeline. “Then graduated and went on to work at the museum. That’s pretty impressive. This girl in my class, Taylor Hines, had mono freshman year of high school and had to repeat it. But you had a baby and managed school and a career still.”
Mika flushed at the compliment. What would Thomas and Penny think if they knew the truth? It had taken Mika eight years to graduate. She flunked freshman year and lost her Pell Grant, then had to go crawling back to her parents for help. Good news, she said shortly after everything had happened, I’ve switched my major from art to business. Can I have some money? Society applauded doing the impossible. Trying hard. Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s the American way. But Mika couldn’t reach her feet. Plus, there was an expectation that Mika’s life was better without Penny. That the sacrifice had been worth it.
At the ticket booth, Mika and Thomas both reached for their wallets. “You bought lunch yesterday, and you’re having us over for dinner tonight. I insist.” He paused, waiting, staring Mika into compliance. This didn’t work on Penny, Mika had observed, but worked on Mika rather well.
“Um, sure, I guess. Thank you.” She tucked her wallet away, a little relieved. She still didn’t have a job.
Thomas purchased tickets, and they were given a map of the galleries, though Mika didn’t need it. Inside, she inhaled, finding comfort in the smell, which she couldn’t quite place but was endemic to buildings this large. She visited the museum regularly. It was so quiet. No place to hide from her thoughts, but it felt safe too. Somewhere she might mourn or dream, then leave it all behind. Having Penny beside her now in this sacred space made Mika feel complete.
They wandered up the marble steps to the European galleries, bypassing the Asian galleries, which, as always, had been stuffed to the sides—museums usually favored dead white men.
She guided Thomas and Penny on a mini-tour, passing a painting of Icarus. Mika often contemplated the mortal who flew so close to the sun that his wax wings melted away. She wondered, if Icarus had known his fate, would he have still done it, flown so high? Would the climb have been worth the fall?
As they paused in front of a Monet, Mika described Impressionism. “See the small, thin, and slightly visible brushstrokes? That’s a hallmark of Impressionism. Monet painted outdoors—plein air, it’s called, a method to capture the light and essence of the landscape in a single moment.” Her arts curriculum in college had included art history courses. Talent wasn’t enough. To be an artist, you had to be a sort of keeper too. Had to have studied the greats, learned their techniques. It was a lot like jazz, mastery before improvisation. And like Hiromi in her garden after the last winter frost, Mika had dug in, only to abruptly quit halfway through Impressionism, before she’d even known she was pregnant with Penny.
“It’s cracked.” Penny scrunched her nose up.
Mika smiled. “Craquelure. It’s from the varnish drying out. It happens with age.”
Penny wandered off and stopped in front of a Degas. Head tilted up, she gazed at the pastel on paper, sniffled, wiped her nose. Thomas was still entranced with the Monet. Mika wandered to Penny’s side. “You okay?” she asked quietly.
Penny kept her head bent. “Yeah. I’m fine. It’s just my mom . . . she used to have a lot of silly nicknames for me. She’d say: ‘Hey, sugar plum fairy’ or ‘baby turkey’ or ‘little dancer.’ This reminded me of that.” The Degas was of a singular ballet dancer, nimble fingers adjusting the tulle skirt at her waist.
“That’s nice.” Degas was where Mika had left off in her studies; “little dancer” was what Caroline had called Penny. Mika wondered at the significance of that. An ending and a beginning. If it was all meant to be. Or if she was just searching for a sign . . . grasping at air, like Icarus as he’d fallen.
Penny’s smile was faint. “It’s a stupid thing for me to cry over.”
“I don’t think so,” Mika whispered. “You can talk about her.” Caroline, she meant. “Don’t be afraid to. You can talk to me about anything.” I’ll always listen. I’ll always be here. I’ll always believe in you.
“Thanks.” Penny stepped away and found a bench to sit on around the corner. Mika joined her. To passersby, they looked like mother and daughter, Mika thought. Guilt stabbed at her insides. Caroline and Thomas had run the marathon with Penny, while Mika had been on the sidelines. “She was really amazing. She liked Kahlil Gibran and E. E. Cummings. Her wedding band is inscribed with: ‘I carry your heart in my heart.’” Penny twisted off the ring she wore so Mika could see the inside of it, the Edwardian font. She shoved the band back on her finger. “But it was hard not having a parent who looked like me, and I feel like I can’t say that around my dad because he’s still so sad about it all.”
Mika’s stomach bottomed out. Thomas and Penny were still grieving. “It was hard being adopted by white parents?” Mika asked, focusing on the former rather than the latter.
Penny sat back and swung her legs up, so she sat cross-legged on the bench. “I dunno. My parents tried to do Japanese things with me. They enrolled me in some classes, and we went to festivals in Dayton. But there was always a disconnect. I think they were uncomfortable when people asked questions about us. Like, ‘Where’d you get her from?’” Penny paused, picked at one of her nails. “Kids used to make fun of my eyes in elementary school. They’d sing that song from Lady and the Tramp, ‘We Are Siamese,’ and pull their eyes up.”
The ache inside Mika grew worse. It was a kind of beautiful agony, having a child. Feeling their emotions as well as your own. “Assholes.”
Penny half smiled. “Sometimes Dayton feels so small, and I feel so big in comparison. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” Mika answered right away. She saw herself superimposed on this young person, her daughter. Mika had felt that way in high school too. Bursting at the seams to go to college and live on campus, out from under her mother’s thumb, away from Hiromi’s destructive perfectionism. Now, she wanted to caution Penny. Move forward slowly. Don’t take such big steps. It’s not a race. You don’t have to have it all figured out right now.
“Plus,” Penny said, “everywhere I go in Dayton, there is a reminder of her, of them, of us as a family. But we’re not a family anymore, or we are, but it’s so different, and I’m confused about what it all means. I don’t know.” Penny scuffed her feet against the shiny floor. A flock of women wearing purple hats passed by, chattering about a Picasso in the next gallery over. “I heard he was a terrible womanizer,” one said. Mika watched them go, watched as Thomas rounded the corner.
“Hey. You disappeared,” he said, stopping in front of them. “You okay, kiddo?” His brow dipped.
“Fine.” Penny’s face, her smile, was bright and blinding. Convincing. “Better than fine,” she added. “Great.” She flashed her grin to Mika. And Mika’s heart thudded against her chest.
Penny gazed at her with such tenderness, such gratefulness, that something fractured inside of Mika and melded together. Something that had maybe been broken for a long time. If only she could tell the scientists in the world, Stop studying, I’ve found the key to fusion. It lay in the bond between parent and child.