Unending Nora

Chapter 31

Unending Nora 272 Chapter 31 At night, the names circled like ravens overhead and Elinore fell asleep counting: Melissa and her parents Asako and Bob Hori, Nora and her parents Yukari and Yujitaka Yano, Caroline Noguchi and her parents Teru and Tom Ikeda, and now Caroline’s baby Nora. She’d brought Naoko to the Valley so that her daughter could be surrounded by family, yet maybe what she thought Naoko needed she’d needed for herself—a great gathering of names to siphon her back from the dead. “Your father and Asako Hori began dating when they were both sixteen,” Hideko had said. “Bob Hori, Tom Ikeda, and Yujitaka Yano were all friends.” But Hideko’s cursory musings, told without context, were not enough. Elinore had become insatiable, the way someone who’d lived for thirty years without answers to the most basic questions would be, for Hideko’s initial disclosure, rather than offering answers, had given her license to question. Sitting with her mother in front of the television after Naoko had gone to bed, she wanted to know: What had Jun been like? Had he loved Asako? Or, even if he hadn’t, how had he gotten up the nerve to leave her? Did Hideko ever think of Jun’s other life? Why didn’t she go to church? Did she believe in God? Had she been close to her mother? “Why do you pester me?” Hideko complained, wanting to be left alone with her nightly orange, relenting one sentence at a Julie Shigekuni 273 time. “Yukari’s family, the Fujimotos, they always thought they were a cut above the others.” And the list of names was appended to include the Fujimotos. Hideko accepted the demands of her daughter for information as compliantly as she took on any of her obligations. She did not mean to be cryptic; rather, the truth had not magically granted Hideko access to stories that had lain for so long submerged. “I think people can only embrace change if they haven’t been excluded,” she said one night, in response to nothing in particular, and her statement, in addition to seeming oblique and mysterious, recalled for Elinore similar statements Hideko had made throughout her childhood. As a child, Elinore received frequent quizzes about the children in her classes, their aptitudes and backgrounds. At the mention of a newcomer, Hideko would straighten her spine like a cat, her attention piqued. Once, when a child had a particularly hard time adjusting, Hideko had gone so far as to confer with Elinore’s teacher and extend an invitation via the child’s mother for a play date. Put out by her mother’s strange and intrusive gesture, Elinore had at first ignored the child. “You need to be nice to your company,” she’d pulled Elinore aside with a pinch, not caring that her daughter had allowed the child into her room only in deference to her mother. “Think how you’d feel if you were the new child. Try being a good friend.” But Elinore had not thought of the taciturn child as her friend. She’d had no experience living outside the home where she’d grown up in the Valley, no way to know why Hideko should have been so concerned for the welfare of strangers. A full twenty years later, Hideko still made it her business to see to the despondent, along with the injured. A pair of newborn kittens, abandoned by their mother in a crawl space under the house, had been Hideko’s latest save. Their mewling began in the middle of the night, and in the morning Hideko had found them pressed up against the hot water pipes. They were blind and furless, more like rodents than felines, when Hideo carried them inside. Naoko had helped make them a warm bed with cotton Unending Nora 274 and newspaper shavings, and Hideko had brought home from the veterinarian’s at considerable expense a newborn feline milk formula, along with a feeding bottle and a half dozen nipples. Even so, one kitten had not lived twenty-four hours while the other had thrived. Hideko could be heard in the kitchen in the middle of the night warming formula, and evenings while she and Elinore sat together on the couch, Hideko would hold the kitten on her lap, cooing to it while she offered it milk. The kitten provided...