Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

A pop burned in Mas’s ear, and then a smell ten times stronger than burning incense. Mas opened his eyes and Miss Waxley was screaming, tumbling toward him like a crazy bird trying to land. Mas rolled to his left, and Miss Waxley fell headlong on the concrete bottom, the gun clattering nearby. Mas looked up and saw the outline of his daughter standing at the rim of the pond. “You okay, Dad?” she asked.

Mas felt his chest, his shoulders, even his head. There was no blood, no holes, no missing parts. He was completely intact, whole.

The wayward bullet, this time, had not landed on the dirt floor of the shed, but in the trunk of one of the cherry blossom trees. It was indeed Mari who had saved him, cracking Miss Waxley’s head with one of the garden rocks and then pushing the old woman four feet down onto the concrete floor. Luckily, the busybody neighbor had seen Mari run into the garden; curiosity had gotten the best of him. He had witnessed Miss Waxley brandishing the gun and spouting out her confession, thereby becoming Mari’s ticket out of jail.

“Howsu you know I’m here?” Mas was resting on the back stairs, his hands still trembling.

“I was worried when you never came back to the hospital with my things,” Mari explained. She had gone to the apartment, found the fax, and promptly called Haruo, who gave her a quick translation of the fax. He was the one who suggested that Mas might be at the garden. “He told me that you would need to be around plants to really think.”

Like always, Haruo was watching his back, more than three thousand miles away.

In minutes the police arrived. If Mari hadn’t saved Mas, the police would have been investigating a murder-suicide. Mas figured that after he was shot, Miss Waxley would have turned the gun on herself. The point wasn’t that she escape prosecution but that her secret end where it started, at the Waxley House.

Paramedics checked out Miss Waxley’s broken body and confirmed that she was indeed dead, her skull cracked, with her sticky blood settling underneath her. She was a tough baba -an old woman with a single-minded purpose-to hide the fact that her father had had relations, most likely forced, with an Irish maid. And that union had resulted in her, a woman whose perceived family lineage was so revered and precise. The Waxley family ended with her, but the irony was that the extended family tree would continue on, with the Ouchis.

Mari and Mas took turns sitting in the dining room of the Waxley House, telling their stories to Detective Ghigo, his bald partner, and their attorney, Jeannie. Mari went first, because she was considered the main suspect. After her turn, Mas was called in. He kept his eyes on the attorney as he told them about reading the journal and putting two and two together. Seeing the words on the bottom of the pond had sealed it, and then he had come face-to-face with Miss Waxley and her gun.

“But how did she know that you knew anything?” the bald detective asked. “She could have just let your daughter take the fall and kept out of it.”

Mas said nothing. If you attempted to hide something, you had a sixth sense about who was going to rat you out. Miss Waxley had had that feeling about Mas.

After Mas was released from their interrogation, he joined Mari in the living room. She was on the cell phone, talking to Lloyd, no doubt. “Everything’s okay,” she was saying. “Yeah, Dad’s fine.”

The front door opened, and it was J-E, Miss Waxley’s driver. Instead of a suit and tie, he wore a faded sweatshirt, shiny blue exercise pants, and, of course, the red-soled shoes. Also, another addition-a beanie cap that hid his eel-like hair. “I saw all the cop cars. Is everything okay?” he asked.

Mas pointed his finger at J-E’s head. “Youzu the one in Seabrook. Impala, desho?”

J-E turned quickly to leave, but Mari, dropping her cell phone, wrapped her arm around his. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Okay, okay.” J-E tried to shake Mari off. “I followed you guys. But I wasn’t going to hurt you. ‘Just scare them,’ Miss Waxley said. I didn’t know what the hell this was all about. She told me that she would fire me if I didn’t follow through. She didn’t want you to find something at that museum. That’s all I know. I couldn’t go through with what she wanted. It was bullshit, and I told her so. And then she fired me.”

“When?” Mas asked.

“Four days ago.”

Before Seiko Sumi was thrown off her balcony. Mas didn’t think that the driver would commit such a bloodthirsty crime, but you never knew. Sometimes the most harmless-looking ones were the most dangerous. After J-E was fired, Miss Waxley had to find another henchman. And that most likely came in the form of the sumo wrestler, Larry Pauley.

“You better talk to the police,” Mari said, leading the driver to Detective Ghigo.

Mari and Mas sat on the back stairs outside the Waxley House. It was like a replay of Kazzy’s death. The coroner’s office arrived, and so did the detectives and police officers. The body was wrapped and carted away. New police tape was affixed onto two pine trees across the concrete pond.

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.