The Wishing Trees (4 page)

THE MATTRESS FELT LIKE A BOARD BENEATH Mattie. She stirred, turning away from her father, who was wearing his plaid pajamas and had finally fallen asleep. Their first full night in Japan hadn’t been a restful experience, especially for Mattie, who had never been overseas and who wasn’t used to such a drastic time change. She felt physically exhausted, yet her mind raced, churning with a speed that she couldn’t control, try as she might.

Even though the hotel room didn’t appear much different from what might be found back home, the small space made Mattie anxious. The writing on the door was strange—ancient and unknown. The toilet, she’d discovered in the middle of the night, had a heated seat. A sliding, frosted-glass door separated the bathroom from the sleeping area. Two steel stools sat in the corner. Mattie thought that the entire room, except for the toilet, couldn’t have been more uncomfortable.

Careful not to wake her father, Mattie moved out of bed. She unzipped his immense traveling backpack, picked out her jeans and an old soccer T-shirt, and dressed. Upon entering the miniature bathroom, she slid shut the door and turned on the light. Her hair, which fell well below her shoulders, was a tangled mess. She picked up a plastic hotel comb and began to pull at the knots. Within seconds, she was reminded of how her mother had brushed her hair. They’d sit outside when the weather was nice and look for things for Mattie to sketch. And as they looked, her mother would run a damp comb through Mattie’s hair until each strand was untwisted from its neighbor.

Mattie gazed into the mirror, longing to glimpse her mother behind her, but seeing only the white bathroom wall. Her eyes started to tear and she set down the comb, turning from her reflection. She didn’t want to see herself standing alone, crying in a strange place, and so she left the bathroom. Noticing that her father was still asleep, Mattie opened her blue backpack—a smaller version of what he carried. She removed a piece of paper the size of a playing card, which she’d drawn on several years before. Her sketch was done in colored pencils and showed a little girl in a dress holding hands with her mother. Mattie had written “I love you, Mommy” beneath the image. Her mother had taken the drawing to a store and had it laminated. She’d carried it with her until she’d become ill. Then it had lain on a table beside her hospital bed. Mattie had kept the picture ever since her mother’s death. Sometimes she put it under her pillow. Sometimes she used it as a bookmark. It was never far from her.

Thinking about the happy faces on her drawing, Mattie looked around the stark room and began to cry. With her forefinger, she traced the outline of her mother, trying to remember how she had looked with a comb in her hand. But instead of seeing her mother’s comforting grin, Mattie saw her in the hospital bed, with tubes running into her nose and wrists. Her mother’s face was pale and pained, her arms thin and weak. And her smile was a mirage, containing neither joy nor hope, but suffering, sorrow, and despair.

Mattie didn’t want to remember her mother in the hospital bed, to think about her steady decline, how her strength vanished, how the light faded from her eyes when painkillers were pumped into her system. Continuing to stare at the picture she’d drawn, she sought to recall her mother during a happy time—when they went camping or played Monopoly. But no matter how hard Mattie sought to remember those moments, she always ended up picturing her mother at the end, with the tubes in her nose.

Pressing the picture against her lips, Mattie closed her eyes, unable to stop crying, tears racing down her cheeks, falling near a stain on her soccer shirt. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if her mother were giving her a hug. Rocking back and forth, she wept, still trying to imagine her mother during joyful times.

Suddenly her father knelt before her, pulling her close, kissing the tears on her cheeks.
“Sssh,”
he said softly. “It’s all right now.”

“No.”

“Let me hold you.”

“It’s not all right.”

“I’m here.”

“But, Daddy . . . I can’t remember. I don’t want to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Her face. I only remember the tubes. At the end.”

Ian kissed her forehead, her eyes. He silently assailed himself for letting Mattie see Kate during her last day. That had been a mistake. Mattie had wanted to say good-bye but had erupted in tears at the sight of Kate’s nearly lifeless body. It hadn’t been a farewell, but a session of horrors for everyone present. The tubes and needles were the instruments of a torturer.

“I don’t want to think about her like that anymore,” Mattie added, still clinging to her drawing.

“Easy on, luv,” Ian said. “Easy on.”

“I can’t think like that!”

“And you don’t have to,” he replied, wiping away her tears, lifting her onto his lap.

“But that’s all I see! She’s in the bed, with the tubes, and her eyes are so red and tired.”

Ian held her close to his chest, trying not to let his own misery surface, wounded by the sight of his weeping daughter. Nothing hurt him more than the spectacle of Mattie in tears. A young heart, he often thought, shouldn’t endure such pain—better that he take her pain and somehow make it his own. But he didn’t know how to steal her misery, and so he continued to simply hold and comfort her.

“Let me show you something,” he said, lifting her, stepping toward the desk where his wallet lay. He sat down on one of the steel stools and opened the wallet, sorting through it until he produced a dog-eared photo of Kate lying on their hammock. He’d taken the photo just a few weeks before Mattie was born, and Kate’s belly rose from beneath her sundress. Her face, in so many ways like Mattie’s, was dominated by a wide smile. Her eyes were locked on Ian, and her hands cradled her belly.

Ian handed the photo to Mattie. “Your mum loved being pregnant with you. Most of her friends, to be honest, weren’t so keen on the experience. But she adored it.”

“She did?”

“She fancied your kicks, which were so strong. That’s why I nicknamed you ‘Roo.’ I’d seen so many kangaroos down in Oz. And you reminded me of them.”

“But, Daddy, I don’t remember Mommy looking like that. Looking so happy. All I see are the tubes.”

“You have to try and—”

“I do try.”

Ian kissed her forehead, his thumb making its back-and-forth motion on a BlackBerry that he no longer carried. His stomach ached as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He wished he knew what to say, the way Kate had always seemed to. “Sometimes that happens to me,” he said, kissing Mattie again. “I see those tubes. But then I take out this photo, and I look at it, and then that’s how I remember her.”

“You do?”

“I remember how, on that day, she was knackered and needed a rest. It was a warm spring day. A real beaut. And I got out the hammock, put it on our little deck, and she lay down for a spell of reading. I surprised her with the camera, and when she smiled and wrapped her arms around you, I took the shot. And whenever I want to remember what she was really like, I take out that photo and have a good gander.”

“But I don’t have a—”

“Take that one, luv. We’ll tape it to the back of your drawing. That way you can look at them both.”

Mattie shook her head. “But then you won’t have it.”

“We’ll share it, Roo. You and me. Like everything else.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Not a bit.”

She hugged him, resting her chin on his shoulder. “Sorry for waking you up. I was cold. And that bed’s too hard. I can’t sleep on it.”

“No worries, luv, about waking me up. I needed to get off my backside anyway. I’m going to take you on an adventure today. A real Captain Cook.”

“Promise?”

“Absobloodylutely.”

“Should I bring my pencils?”

“Aye, aye, First Mate,” he replied, kissing her on the forehead and standing up, drained from the acting, wondering if either of them could manage this trip, wishing that Kate hadn’t sent them on it. He went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and thought about Mattie’s tears and shudders. He had to make her laugh today, he told himself time and time again, his eyes tightly shut, his fists squeezing so hard that his fingernails left imprints on his palms. If she didn’t laugh, then he would have failed her once again. She needed him, needed to hope for better days, even if he could not.

Turning on the shower, he tried to keep his own tears at bay until the water fell on him. When it did, he leaned against the tiled wall, his strength ebbing, flowing down the drain, disappearing from light. For a while it felt as if he were drowning, suffocating in a millimeter of water. He longed for help, but no one could help him. He yearned for tomorrow, yet the day had just begun. His every plea seemed to rebound from the nearby walls, to reenter him unanswered. Cursing himself for once working like a madman, for being gone so much of Mattie’s life, he wondered how he might meet her needs and repress her fears. He wanted to lift her above the muck and misery of life but felt incapable of such a task. To lift her, he had to be a part of her, as Kate had been. But he didn’t feel a part of her. Sometimes she was like a foreign language on his tongue.

Afraid that Mattie might knock, he willed himself to stand up straight, his legs trembling, his fingers reaching for the soap. He started to hum, pretending to sing, bubbles forming on his skin. He scrubbed harder, as if soap might purge him of memories, of failings, of weakness.

Thinking more about Mattie, about what she needed from him, he continued to scrub and hum, formulating a plan. Today he would make her laugh. That was a start.

AFTER A LATE BREAKFAST AND AN HOUR of studying Mattie’s math workbook, adding fractions, Ian and Mattie left the hotel. They were dressed the same, in colorful T-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes. He wore a green and black baseball cap that she and her mother had bought for him during a trip to the Statue of Liberty. He had braided Mattie’s long hair, and secured the ends with purple bands.

Stepping out of the lobby was like moving into a flooded river. The wide sidewalk appeared incapable of holding any more people. Businessmen and businesswomen wearing dark suits walked briskly, inches from one another. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, most carrying umbrellas even though the sky was only partly cloudy. Many of the pedestrians headed toward a discreetly marked subway entrance, vanishing into it like water being sucked down a drain. The water was without end.

“Ready, First Mate, for our walkabout?” Ian asked, holding Mattie’s hand, determined to put a smile on her face and keep it there.

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Then let’s have a go at it.”

He led her forward, noticing that she practically disappeared into the people around her. Mattie wasn’t used to walking alongside hundreds of others. If Ian moved too quickly, she bumped into the people in front of her. If he slowed down a little, her heels were stepped on. She looked up at him, her face flushed, and without a word he bent down, lifted her up, and set her on his shoulders. “There you go, luv,” he said, heading toward the subway entrance. “It’s time you had a proper view.”

The stairway, perhaps twenty feet wide, seemed ready to burst from the presence of so many people. Ian had to stoop with Mattie atop him, which caused his back to ache. But he wasn’t about to put her down. “How’s my lookout?” he asked, wondering how far down they would descend.

“It’s a lot better up here.”

“I reckon you’ll be ready to trade places in a tick. Just let me know when.”

“No way, Captain.”

They finally reached the bottom of the stairs, emerging into an underground world. Mattie gasped, having never seen anything like it. She might as well have been Alice falling into the rabbit’s hole, for she found herself in the middle of a subterranean city. Though the ceiling was only about twelve feet high, this city stretched as far as she could see. There were restaurants, banks, shops, movie theaters, and what she thought was a supermarket. And the people—she spied tens of thousands of them: schoolchildren in blue-and-white uniforms, college students wearing fashionable attire, and legions of businesspeople.

“I feel like an ant in an anthill,” Mattie said, as Ian walked steadily.

“You reckon? I don’t think even ants are jammed together like this. See those numbers ahead?”

She looked into the distance and noticed a row of numbers that ran from one to forty. “What are they for?”

“Well, each of those stairways leads to a train platform. And each of those trains is going somewhere different in the city. I want you to pick a number. We’ll get on that train and see where it takes us.”

“Any number? Are you sure?”

“Ever met an Aussie who wasn’t sure about everything?”

Mattie smiled. “Mommy would have liked this.”

“She did like it. She invented the game.”

“Twenty-three. Let’s take number twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three it is,” Ian replied, walking toward the number. He descended a flight of stairs, emerging into another level, this one full of platforms and trains. Platform number twenty-three was crowded with people. “Our train must be almost here.”

“Why?”

“Look at all these blokes. They’re waiting for it, all in their own little worlds.” Ian moved to a large electric sign that displayed a departure schedule. The information was written in both Japanese and English. After glancing at their platform number on the schedule, he found the next departure time and then looked at a digital clock. “I’ll wager you an ice-cream cone to a kiss that our train will be here in about . . . two minutes and five seconds.”