The evening was a disaster.
Danny’s date, Janet, had shown up in a revealing dress, a firework of greenish chiffon held together by zigzags of aquamarine beads. Danny had told her that it looked like the nest of a satin bowerbird—“The most beautiful bird’s nest in the world,” he’d said. “It’s an agreed-upon fact.”
She had not looked pleased, and he in turn had been disappointed by her lukewarm response. After all, they’d only met because she’d bought one of his photographs at the local outdoor market—his prized shot of a woodpecker cracking a peanut. When he’d revealed himself as the photographer, she’d leaned in. Given him her number. Asked after his weekend plans.
It was his first date in thirteen months.
One glass of wine in, however, things took a turn for the better and Janet began asking all the right questions. What had gotten him into nature photography? Was it his upbringing? The answer was no. In families like his, children were never meant to have dreams—he’d been the fifth of six siblings, with an anti-union autoworker father and a died-young-of-cancer mother—yet he’d developed a dream nevertheless: to be a globe-trotting documentarian of the world.
“Tell me more,” she said, laying a hand on his.
He told her. About how, as a teenager, he’d saved the grease-coated quarters he’d earned junking cars to buy Life and Nat Geo. How at eighteen, when his father died, he’d begun supporting himself as a car salesman. How by twenty-two he’d saved enough money to take his first overseas trip to Vietnam and then Japan, and—
“And that was the beginning and end of many things,” he’d said somberly.
“Can we get another bottle of this?” Janet asked, removing her hand from his to hail the waiter. “Yeah? Uh-huh. Tell me more.”
Danny frowned, suddenly doubting Janet’s attention. But because of how cold and sad he had felt the moment she’d lifted her warm palm from his fingers, and because of how cold and sad he felt every day as the forty-three year-old manager of Arlington Auto, haggling daily with Tufts students over secondhand Toyotas, he decided to take a chance on Janet. He told her more. He told her all: his too-early marriage on that fateful trip to Japan, his divorce soon after, his daughter who lived in Tokyo with her mother, whom he never saw, hadn’t seen in six years, now already eighteen years old. She barely spoke English—such was the extent of the gap between father and daughter, in addition to the thirteen time zones that divided them.
Janet stroked the inside of his wrist with her thumb, tutting sympathetically.
The clock read 3:07 a.m. Danny was wide awake with the beginnings of blue balls. He’d faked the orgasm. He simply could not stay hard. Not with Janet’s theatrical moaning, not with the knowledge that she cared nothing for him—had probably forgotten his name by the time they got to his bedroom.
He shut the door gently and sank into the living room couch. He pulled up some porn on his phone and watched it on mute but to no avail. The trouble was that, ever since marrying and divorcing his ex-wife Tomoko sixteen years ago, Japanese porn was most efficient for him. Yet much of the porn made in Japan had a coercive plotline—woman teacher molested by male students, female student harassed by man on bus. Even in the consensual ones, the women so often made faces and sounds of agony. None of this was up Danny’s alley. When he recalled his most sensual moments with Tomoko, they were of her laughing, gyrating, pinning him down with her thighs that were taut as garden fruit.
He began to do some aimless Googling about Japanese life on his phone. Perhaps what he needed was some scenes of everyday intimacy, something to vivify the faded memories. He came across a blog post about a reality TV series called The Manor, about eight young Japanese people living as roommates and going on dates. The blog called it “wholesome” and “mesmerizing.”
He found the show. Deciding that pilot episodes never had anything juicy—juicy enough to jerk off to, at least—he started on the second episode. The eight Residents were good- and normal-looking, meaning nobody had oversized breasts bursting out of lacy shirts. One of the men looked half-black and two of the women looked half-white. At first Danny was irritated by their interruption of the Asian scenery, but after a few minutes, he began to find both the women pretty, one of them especially so. He reached between the flap of his briefs and began to rub.
The bedroom door opened. Danny tugged his briefs back in place and crossed his legs. “Whatcha up to?” Janet asked.
“Uh, just watching some TV. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Is that The Manor?” she plopped herself down next to him. “I’m totally addicted.”
It was the most enthused she’d sounded all night. “Oh yeah?”
“Oh my gosh, her, she’s my favorite. Reina. She’s like a living doll.”
Danny dropped his phone. The peppy sounds from the speakers continued to play into the carpet. Janet bent to pick it up.
“What did you say her name was?” Danny asked.
“Hm? Reina?”
“What’s her last name?”
She tapped pause. The show’s description and names of the cast members filled the screen. “Reina Kojima.”
◆
Kojima Tomoko was still not used to seeing her father in sick-person clothes. In normal life, he would have rather died than be seen in pastel blue. Yet here he was, dying in pastel blue.
At least it was not a gown, Tomoko thought, cubing a persimmon. He was still strong enough to use the toilet by himself and was thus permitted the dignity of a two-piece cotton kimono, though the waistband hung precariously from his shrunken hips. The only thing that stemmed his stream of grievances (bed higher, bed lower, more pillows, fewer pillows) was binge-watching The Manor. On-screen, Reina was having dinner with her fellow Residents. Tensions were high: one of the Residents had just accused another of never doing the dishes.
“See, that’s smart of her,” her father said, touching Reina’s cheek. “Hey, it broke again.”
“It’s never been broken. You just keep pausing it,” Tomoko said, tapping her daughter back into action.
“That’s smart, you see, because she’s not picking a side but she’s still in the action. Getting screen time without making enemies, see? It takes talent to do that. Some people are born with it. I was just like her when I was in the biz.”
Tomoko said nothing. She did not know what her father had been like in the biz. She’d been a toddler during his prime. She only knew that, whenever he visited the Daikanyama hair salon where she worked—a place that real celebrities frequented—he would saunter about, plainly waiting to be recognized, and never was.
“How small are you going to cut those?”
Tomoko started. The persimmons had become eraser-sized between her hands. She placed the plate in front of her father and went to wash her hands in the tiny en suite bathroom. At the sink, she drummed her fingers on the bags under her eyes, dried her hands, then checked her phone for a text from Reina. Nothing. For no reason at all, she washed her hands again.
“Any word from Reina today?” her father asked.
“Yes. She says she hopes you’re feeling better.”
“Tell her that she’s the only thing that makes me feel better,” he said, then grimaced suddenly. Tomoko reached toward him, only to have him bat her hand away. “It’s nothing. Stop fussing over me, I’m not about to croak yet. Go worry about yourself.”
“Me? What about me?” Tomoko turned away. He never looked so robust as when he was telling her about her flaws. He looked almost handsome again, and not at all like the cancerous has-been who had sung a few hit singles back in the seventies and spent the next four decades living off of the three-song repertoire. She could not stand to see him look so rejuvenated; it made her hate him, and she was determined to love him now that they were nearing the end.
“Well, for one thing, when were you going to bring up the fact that it’s your birthday?”
“Oh.” She counted his pills. “If you remembered, why didn’t you say something?”
“Because I made a bet with myself that you wouldn’t bring it up.”
“Well, who would remind other people of their own birthday?”
“I would. Reina would. Delicately, of course. She’s just like me, you see. And you, you’re just like your mother. You both have this supporting-character mentality. Even when she was sick, it was all, ‘Don’t look at me, don’t think of me.’ It was this mentality that killed her.”
“I’m pretty sure it was congestive heart failure that killed her.”
“You’ve got to be careful. You’ve inherited it, this mentality. And it’s going to take you before your time. Just look at how you live day-to-day without ever really living.”
“I raised a hotshot celebrity all by myself, didn’t I? Worry about Reina if you want to worry about someone. She’s way too young for all this attention.”
“No, she’s not—she’s got the main-character mentality, just like me.”
Tomoko checked her phone again. It was 6:48 p.m. “Dad, I’ve got to go.”
“Go?” Her father frowned. “But visiting hours don’t end until seven.”
“Well, I’ve got a dinner date at seven sharp. Isn’t that wonderfully main-character of me?”
“Being a main character doesn’t mean being unfilial.”
She exhaled with her back facing him. She’d visited him every single day since he’d been hospitalized two weeks prior. Last weekend, she’d run laps around Tokyo’s department stores hunting for the foreign moisturizer that he used exclusively. For the past ten years, ever since her mother died, she’d done his taxes, managed his royalties, and kept track of his utility bills. She’d earned leaving twelve minutes early.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
At seven sharp, she arrived at the Italian restaurant that she had chosen for its proximity to the hospital. A text from Hiroshi, her boyfriend: Sorry 5 min late.
And, at long last, a text from Reina: Happy birthday mama~~(´｡• ω •｡`) ♡
She dragged down on the screen, trying to scroll down. She closed and reopened the messaging app, certain that it would refresh. Nothing. She’d sent Reina a long paragraph about her day at work and her father’s latest condition. And this was all that she got in reply.
No matter what her father said, Tomoko knew that it had been rash to let Reina on the show, the country’s first to be broadcast on a major American streaming platform. First-round auditions now had a waitlist of thousands, but not for Reina. The executive producer had spotted her shopping in Shibuya and personally invited her. She was exactly what they were looking for: a college freshman with no prior exposure in the entertainment industry, and perfect ha-fu looks.
Ha-fu, half, halfie. The word followed Reina everywhere, was part of her brand. According to the producer, while people once wanted blue eyes on every ad, nowadays they wanted Japanese but better. Bigger-eyed, lighter-skinned, but foundationally Eastern. Reina had the ideal mix, they said, and even had a lovely Japanese name to balance out her exotic face.
“Hey.” Hiroshi was, to Tomoko’s dismay, wearing his usual office suit. Tomoko had gotten a manicure for the occasion. “Happy birthday.”
She thought he was handing her a present, but realized in time—she’d been on the verge of expressing gratitude—that he was giving her his briefcase to place in the storage basket under her seat. “Thanks,” she said nevertheless.
He sighed. “I had a horrific day.”
“What happened?”
As he proceeded to delineate the horrors, Tomoko’s thoughts drifted back to Reina. It was Tomoko’s father who took credit for the lovely Japanese name. You can’t send a child to school with a ridiculous name like バッビントン・レイナ, he’d said, back when Tomoko was enrolling Reina in elementary school. He swapped out the outlandish Babbington for 小嶋— Kojima—his own name, their name. He insisted, too, on shedding the characters レイナ, or Reina in the alphabet used for foreign words, and instead using れいな, the alphabet reserved for native words. They’d thus settled on 小嶋れいな—Kojima Reina—a fully Japanese name.
The show had offered Reina a titillating paycheck. Plus, all the Residents lived rent-free, liberating Reina from the shoebox apartment that she and Tomoko shared. No: for all practical purposes, Tomoko could not blame herself for letting Reina on the show. But how could she have known that Reina’s Instagram followers would skyrocket from one thousand to one hundred thousand within the first week? How could she have expected the full-fledged stalkers and the foul-mouthed haters? The paparazzi? And the show producers saying nothing to the families, nothing about how to protect these half-grown children who were playing house for the world to see?
Above all, how could she have anticipated that the enduring bond between mother and daughter, so frequently tested in their sixteen years alone together, would have frayed so quickly? So quickly that now, a mere two months after Reina left for the Manor, they could exchange little more than emoticon pleasantries?
“Tomoko? What do you think?”
Hiroshi was grinning at her.
“What?”
“I said, what do you think?”
“Um, I—I don’t know what to think.”
“Then say yes.”
She looked at him, gradually comprehending. He had good eyebrows and a strong jaw. But also big pores that left oil marks on his phone screen and her pillowcases.
“You—you really think it’s a good idea?” she asked.
“I know we’re not young, and we wouldn’t have kids, but why spend the rest of our lives alone? Come on. Marry me.”
She looked frantically at his hands and torso, searching for the ring. Was it in the briefcase? Was it in the cake? But they were only on the salad course.
“Okay,” she said, thinking of her father’s face. Be a main character. “Yes.”
◆
Danny had called a car for Janet at the crack of dawn, citing a fictional work emergency involving fraternity pledges stealing catalytic converters. After she left, he filled the bathtub with scalding hot water. He deserved to boil alive, he concluded. He was a monster, fiend, beast. He was a man who had masturbated to the image of his own daughter, whom he could not even recognize.
As the bath cooled and Danny’s fingers raisined, he began to reason away some of his guilt. He’d only been touching himself for a minute, maybe less, before Janet came out. And could he really be blamed for not recognizing his daughter, all done up with professional makeup, if her mother had not sent a photo in two years? And, above all, how could he be expected to think that his daughter would appear on international television without him being made aware ahead of time? Him, the father. Half of her was him. Every strand of her hair, every eyelash, every microscopic flake of shed skin was half-him. Half Danny. Half Babbington.
He toweled himself off and went to his computer, searching: “Reina Babbington.”
Kojima Reina (小嶋れいな) is a Japanese-American television personality and model known for her appearance on popular show . . . Born Reina Babbington in Rowley, Massachusetts . . . moved with her mother to Tokyo at the age of two . . .
So they really had exorcised his name. His one paternal claim. Danny felt like a golf ball had been lodged in his throat. They had known that he would never be able to read Reina’s Japanese name and connived to change it without informing him. Reina’s last name remained Babbington on American documents, he knew, but what use was that? When she turned twenty in two years, the Japanese government would make her choose between two passports, and Danny had no delusions about which she would choose. And thus the name Reina Babbington would truly become history.
Danny reread the entry, this time homing in on the word Japanese-American. As long as she clung to that hyphen, she clung to him still.
He pulled up the contacts on his phone and scrolled Tomoko’s name. But what would he say? Something angry? Apologetic? Congratulatory? Self-pitying? He shut his eyes.
His phone rang. Danny wondered if it was Tomoko calling; in the millisecond between wondering this and looking at his phone, he decided that if it was her, then he would book the next flight to Tokyo, his monthly budget be damned.
It was his kid sister, Denise.
“Danny, oh Danny,” Denise sounded even breathier than usual. “Something terrible’s happened—you won’t believe—”
“Slow down, kiddo. What’s wrong?”
“It’s Benjy.” Benjy was Denise’s son, a sophomore at one of Greater Boston’s lowest-ranked colleges, a forty-minute drive from Danny’s apartment. He had helped Benjy move in the first semester, and then they’d promptly forgotten each other’s existence. “He’s been—oh—he’s been suspended. They want him to move off campus, by today, but he—oh, but he’s just a boy!—I kept telling them!”
Denise spoke like that, in nervous little bursts of Victorian dashes.
“Why did they suspend him?”
“They said he’s been—” she was sobbing now, “—distributing drugs! I said, what would he know about drugs? He’s from Rowley! But they said—oh, Danny, I just can’t believe—”
Danny could believe it. Eighteen-year-old boys were capable of anything stupid.
“You want me to go get him?” He realized that he was grateful for the emergency. The tears, the high stakes—it all put a necessary pause on his descent down his personal abyss.
“Yes, please. We’ll come down to get him tomorrow—oh, no, we’d have to take Jim’s car, mine’s at—but, if you could put him up for the night, that’d be a massive help. Please.”
Benjy’s dormitory was a two-story converted townhouse that did not look like it had been refurbished for three or four decades. The doorbell was broken, but so was the lock, so Danny let himself in.
“Hello?” he called. At first he thought that he smelled dead skunk. Then he realized that it was, of course, bad weed.
“In here, dude,” a croaking voice called out from around the corner. Danny could hear a television on low volume.
The room was likely a living room, given the couch, but this was made ambiguous by the molehills of clothes and shoes that dotted the floor. There was no light other than from a large, slightly lopsided lava lamp. “Benjy?” Danny ventured.
A lump on the couch stirred. “What the fuck? Uncle Danny?”
Danny heaved a sigh of relief. “Your mom asked me to come get you. Are you packed?”
Benjy looked like shit. His face was so puffy that it had almost no contours. The rest of him was thin as a broomstick. Danny felt a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with the stink. His nephew was the same age as Reina. Not so many years ago, he’d played Legos with the kid.
“Fuck no,” Benjy said.
“Excuse me?”
“No way I’m going back there. The place is a shithole. I want a life, thanks very much.”
Danny approached his nephew, intending to drag him out, luggage or no. While sidestepping toppled red cups, however, he was distracted by a voice speaking what he recognized as Japanese coming from the first room down the hallway.
Danny stepped closer to the door, which stood wide open. He could see a small television perched on top of a short chest of drawers. On the screen, luminous despite the filthy surroundings, was his daughter. Below, there was someone watching the monitor from atop a twin XL bed. Danny took another step.
Reina was in a green bikini. She was helping another Resident grill corn on the cob.
The boy watching her, whose face was lit only by the glow of Reina’s smiling face, was wearing nothing but a Celtics jersey and, over his penis, a lone, white, half-mast sock.
Danny turned to look at Benjy. He looked back at the boy with the penile sock. “Benjy,” he said, pointing. “Do you know who that is?”
“Who? What?”
He grabbed Benjy by the front of his T-shirt. “On that show your little friend is watching in there. Do you know who the fuck that is?”
“Fuck, you’re tripping, Uncle Danny.”
Danny let him go.
“You’re on your own, kid,” he said.
On the drive home, shaking slightly, Danny readied the words that he would say to Tomoko.
◆
Tomoko and Hiroki went back to her apartment to have celebratory sex as fiancé and fiancée. When it came to bed, Hiroshi had something of a standard operating procedure. Once they were undressed, he worked on her from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head. He nibbled and rubbed and kneaded and sucked, and the ritual was more important to him, it seemed, than intercourse itself. She enjoyed it. Unlike other men she’d been with, he relished his own maneuvers more than being serviced, as though he were a car enthusiast and she a 1962 Ferrari that had been dissembled specifically for him to put back together.
Her necessary contribution came at the very end, after he’d parted her hair, pressed his tongue up and down her scalp, and at last penetrated her. She knew what she needed to do, and after a few thrusts was ready to do it: she bit down on his left earlobe. He came with a groan, then fell asleep in the interval when she went to pee.
Tomoko put on a T-shirt and sweatpants and searched for her phone. She looked at the picture of her and Reina on her lock screen. Surely an engagement and her birthday was enough of an excuse to call her daughter. But then there was their arrangement: that Reina would always be the one to initiate calls, since Tomoko might inadvertently interrupt filming. This was not a problem back when Reina would call every night. But these days—
Every morning and night, Tomoko went through the comments on Reina’s social media accounts. With the help of online translation engines, she read the messages written in all sorts of languages: fans bidding Reina good morning and good night, fawning kawaii, daisuki, omfg your so pretty you make me wna die~. Tomoko consumed these like daily vitamins. She diligently flagged and reported negative anomalies: she’s so stiff, is she okay she’s way too skinny, go kill yourself fake-ass bitch.
Tomoko noticed a red alert on her phone icon. Sometime between the taxi ride and copulation, she had missed a call. From—Danny.
Danny only ever called her once a year, when he wired the agreed-upon meager sum meant for “supporting” Reina. Tomoko thought perhaps he was calling to say happy birthday, but since he had not done so in the sixteen years since they divorced, this was an unfounded guess. She then thought that perhaps he’d heard about her father’s hospitalization, but this was only more impossible. Perhaps his father had died, and he wanted Reina to attend the funeral. Tomoko was not sure that Reina would be willing to leave the Manor for such an event, though of course it would bring viewer sympathy. This train of thought depressed her.
She glanced at Hiroshi. Even Danny’s proposal had been more romantic. They’d been at the foot of Tokyo Tower, on his last day in Japan. She had not thought of those days of her life in what felt like eons—at least not consciously. Half-formed scenes inevitably emerged at times, as garbage inevitably did in moving water: memories of Danny as he first appeared to her at a Golden Gai bar. He twenty-two and she twenty-one. He’d shown her his brand-new passport with its singular stamp: his first time outside the US of A. He’d also shown her his new Canon, a model that—he’d explained in painstakingly slow English—you could only buy in Japan. Tomoko remembered eying his compact, militaristic figure that made him a conceivable minor hitman character in a Hollywood blockbuster. She knew what her father would say—that this was what had buoyed her toward him, this supporting-character quality reminiscent of her own.
Yet, in her corner of the world at least, he had been a main character. The spotlights had flickered toward him. He stood out from the Japanese men: he who was pink when sober and pale when drunk, he who had a blonde beard but no hair on his head. That night, looking down at him while he labored over her crotch, she marveled at that alabaster forehead, that lack of color.
It had been a stupid impulse. Sure, she’d been eager to escape her preening father and long-suffering mother, but that did not make her decision any less nearsighted. He was not an expat businessman, or a foreign language teacher, or even a grunge musician who might be induced to stay. He was a summertime tourist, and Tomoko had consented to be a souvenir. For what was Massachusetts i.e. マサチューセッツ to Tomoko Kojima i.e. 小嶋とも子 but a boundless marsh of words she could not memorize, of never-on-time buses, of overpriced insurance, overpowering snow, and land, land, land—enough land to drown in?
She had failed to get a job as a hairstylist despite her beautician license from Japan, and the two hair salons in town had both inexplicably suggested that she try for the nail salon, though she’d never trained as a manicurist. Pregnancy had been the perfect excuse to stop searching for work, even though Danny struggled to support them with his sales job. They began to argue, but clumsily, lopsidedly. Tomoko never understood enough of Danny’s English woes and did not have the vocabulary to convey her own. Reina had been her only ally. Still was.
She tucked her phone back in her purse and looked at Hiroshi. In some ways, he was as different from Danny as could be. In other ways they were the same. Supporting-character men who could spot women who were even more self-diminishing to support them. Hiroshi, for instance, had spread himself across the entirety of the full-size bed so that she had to balance against the nightstand. She touched him on the shoulder.
“Huh?”
“Listen, Hiroshi, we can’t get married.”
“Whuh?”
“We can’t get married. You can sleep here tonight, though. But we’re not going to get married. I’m going to spend the night at the hospital. I’m really sorry.”
“But—”
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” she said, pulling on her coat. “I’m really very sorry.”
She begged the nurses to let her back in though it was past visiting hours. Her father was asleep. His snoring sounded more like a whirring. Asleep, he looked younger but also more dead. She noticed that he was clutching something in his hand, something velveteen and a deeper blue than his hospital garb. Tomoko slipped it out from between his fingers, careful not to upset the IV tube. It was a jewelry box. A piece of folded paper was sitting inside:
Happy birthday. These belonged to your mother.
How typical of him to assume that she would not recognize them. How atypical of him to remember—the Mikimoto pearls that her mother had worn to every wedding, every funeral.
Tomoko went out to the hall to better see the pearls. They shone alternatively blue and gold in the crossfire of the hospital’s clashing fluorescent lights. When she’d seen them from every possible angle, she snapped the box close, zipped it into the wallet compartment of her bag, and took out her phone.
“Hello?”
“Hallo, Danny?”
“Tomoko?”
“Yes.”
She could hear his breathing. “Why didn’t you tell me about Reina?” he asked.
She looked into her lap. “Reina?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Tomoko. About Reina being on TV.”
“I was—busy. It been only two months. I was gonna tell you—later.” Her father’s illness, her own doubts about the show—she did not want to make excuses to him. Besides, there was no guarantee that she had the grammar to make the excuses properly.
He took a deep breath, making static in her ears. “Look, that doesn’t matter now. I found out. I found out and it was—it’s been—look, I’m just going to be straight with you. You’re letting Reina ruin her life. She needs to be focusing on her studies, not on reality TV. Do you know what kind of people do that? People with no talent. People who air out all their dirty underwear for everyone to laugh at them. Only one in a million can make it and the rest become trash. The dregs of human society. Do you know what that means? The dregs of human society?”
Tomoko’s cheeks burned—not in response to the accusations (she understood just enough to know that they were accusations), but from the inability to understand every word in the charges laid out against her, to address every flaw in his self-righteous sentences, to demolish every half-baked nuance in his condemnation. No doubt Danny had assumed that The Manor was like the fake-tan, jacuzzi-sex affairs that played on American television. No doubt he had never watched a single episode. Even if she, Tomoko, had her qualms about The Manor, it was certainly not up to Danny to raise them. Countless retorts boiled inside her, but she did not have the dictionary to raise the lid; only a fraction of the steam escaped and took shape as:
“What do you know—how do you think about our feeling? Reina and me, when at first we move back to Tokyo, we have nothing. I have to working, working, working, Reina all the time being good, and now she famous, she is a star. You never there at all, not any time. Why now you think you know everything, but you never ask, or, or, visit?”
What was she saying? She did not want him to visit. Why did the treacherous sentences lead her there? And now he had seized on the irrelevant point:
“I’ve visited! You think I’m made of money? That I can just dump three thousand dollars on plane tickets and hotel rooms every other year? Besides, I’ve called, I’ve written, I’ve done my part financially, even though it for sure hasn’t been easy—”
“Money? Money?” She burst out at the ugliest F-word she’d learned from her American divorce: financially. Tomoko gave her most cruel laugh. “If,” she managed, “If you wanna be father with only financially, it take a lot a lot more money!”
He was silent. Had she done it? Had she managed to say exactly what she meant to say, had she thrown a dart in the dark and pierced the bullseye?
“Okay, I’m not saying—what I’m saying is,” he said eventually, “even if she needs a lucrative—a, a way to make good money, she doesn’t need to degrade herself and—”
“You thinking you know what Reina need, have you think about what Reina want? People love Reina, and she loving to have people love her. You say real TV no have talent. Reina have talent, she make people love her, she know how.”
She could picture Danny grabbing at the crown of his bald head, the way he used to when her English words made more sense than his and he knew it.
“You think people will keep on loving her when she starts getting wrinkles? If she gains weight? What will you do when she goes out of style, when she has nothing?”
“You think,” Tomoko breathed, “you think your daughter nothing, if she not pretty?”
Silence.
“If you want to be father, try thinking like father, Danny.”
She clicked the line dead.
◆
Danny stared at the unlit phone screen for what felt like an hour. He kept thinking that if he were to get any notification—Denise, Janet, ESPN game alert—then he would get up. But the screen stayed black.
When eventually he stood, his eyes landed on his camera shelf, on the far corner by the window where he kept his long-unused film cameras. He could see the case of the Canon he’d bought on the day that he met Tomoko. He extracted it and pressed his eye to the viewfinder. Somewhere in this room, beneath tax records and manuals from his short-lived flyfishing phase, were the photographs of Tomoko and baby Reina that he’d taken on this very camera. Through this very viewfinder. With this very eye. How had the years made him forget?
Keeping the camera to his face, he straightened and looked to the parking lot outside his window. The back of his Camry with its ARLINGTON AUTO decal. His eye traced the bumper, around the rim of the trunk, up to the chrome roof—
Danny almost dropped the camera. On the roof of his car was a pileated woodpecker, a flurry of red on its crown. He’d never seen one in real life. It was eating one of the greenish berries that he was forever scraping from his windshield, from a tree that he’d been petitioning to cut down for all the gunk that it shed onto his—and only his—parking spot. He adjusted the focus and clicked the shutter. He clicked a second time, to be safe. By the time he lowered the camera, the bird was gone.
An hour later, Danny was back in the dank dormitory. Benjy was still in the living room, apparently asleep. An empty Lunchables container perched on his chest, rising and falling with each breath.
“Benjy.”
Benjy jerked away from Danny so quickly that he almost fell off the couch. “Jesus! How do you keep getting in here?”
“Shh,” Danny said. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier. I can explain. But first, we need to get you out of here, or you’re really gonna get evicted.”
Benjy pressed a finger into the Lunchables packet, picking up a last stray cracker crumb and sticking it into his mouth. “Forget it. I’m not going home.”
“I know,” Danny said. “But here’s my proposal: what if you came to stay with me?”
Benjy eyed him skeptically.
“It’s not a trick question. I only have one bedroom, but you can sleep on the futon. You can get a part-time job until they let you go back to school.”
Benjy touched his own face gingerly. Danny could almost see the cartoon scales above his head, weighing his options. “Do I pay rent?”
“We can work that stuff out later. But you have to do one thing for me.”
“What?”
Danny squatted so that they were at eye level. “You have tell me everything you know about The Manor.”
◆
Tomoko snuck her father’s tablet out of the room, found a corner seat in the waiting area, and plugged in her earbuds. In the opening sequence, her daughter strode across the screen in a crisp white shirtdress that they’d picked out together before she moved out. Tomoko tapped on her daughter’s grinning face, pausing the video.
She looked, again, at the last text message from Reina.
She clicked on the name and double-tapped.
“Moshi-mosh,” Reina said. “Mama?”
“Moshi-mosh,” Tomoko said. Then, in English, “Hallo, my baby.”