When All is Said and Done by Robby Matsui

Alice returned to California in the first week of December. It was almost surreal stepping onto the platform, only a cool breeze drifting past her cheeks. She was already acclimated to the bitter cold of the Arizona desert, and though she knew she was supposed to remember those California winters, the late autumn grass pressed against her feet, the soft glow of the old, dim Christmas lights draped along their house's facade, and the clammer of neighborhood gatherings during the New Years, the cool, temperate air still felt novel. It was as though spring had arrived early, sneaking in while she was fast asleep in the train car.

Her mother hurried her home, anxious to see what, if anything, was left. At the beginning, they had entrusted the house to their elderly neighbor Mr. Hayes. They had lived close. Alice often walked down the dirt road to play with his old dog, Billie, just a few yards away. She remembered being afraid of his kind but pained smile, watching the wrinkles bunch up like a bed of worms wriggling across his face. She had thought about him sometimes, back in Arizona. He must have been so lonely, his whole street emptied in a single night, reduced to nothing but a ghost town.

No one expected them to be away for long, yet as weeks turned into months, and eventually months into years, Mr. Hayes stopped writing back. She hoped that maybe he had just forgotten, or abandoned the small town he had lived his entire life in to return to some semblance of civilization, but deep down, she knew better. It worried her mother to no end; she spent countless nights fretting over the looters and robbers certain to have already ransacked everything. Would they pocket the jewelry that wouldn't fit into her bloated duffle bag? Haul out the television and break down the furniture? As the years passed, her hopes dwindled. Now, she only wanted to see the wreckage.

Though it was only midday when they arrived, the streets remained deafeningly silent. Doors were locked and windows drawn shut. For a second, Alice wondered if they were the first to arrive back, until she noticed the little face peeking down at her from an upper story window. She could remember playing along this same street with the neighbors' children, hearing from afar the adults pounding mochi, and smelling the boiling ozōni as they ran past her front yard. She thought back to Masao, the glimpse she caught through puffy eyes, as he left through the barbed wire, deployed to the front with her brother. It was such a vast distance, separated by two "yes"s hastily dashed on a slip of paper. She wondered where he was now –– where they all were. 

It was a crushing sight, to see their yard in utter disrepair. The koi pond, which her father had cleaned daily, meticulously picking the leaves and raking the detritus from the clear water's surface, was now overgrown with a dour coat of algae. The reeds ran wild, haphazardly sprouting from the pond bed like matted dog fur in desperate need of a trimming, tangled with burs and buzzing with insects. The koi, spotted, mottled and shimmering, in colors from white to red to orange, were nowhere to be found. She kept on expecting a ripple in the water, any sign of life or flash of color piercing through the muddy foliage, yet nothing came.

When she was young, Alice used to cry when the koi died. She would bawl her eyes out, watching the fish float on the water's surface, its lifeless body bobbing up and down with the gentle ripples. However, whenever she woke up the next morning, there would always be another koi, swimming in the pond, as though the first had never left at all. Her father would tell her that they never died, just got a little sick, and lost a little weight; he would assure her that he was nursing it back to health –– promise that it was quickly healing. She wanted desperately to still believe that they weren't truly gone, that they would all return the next morning. It was a childish notion, yet it was all she could scrounge together. 

They were her father's koi, and his fathers, all the way back to the Issei who arrived before the turn of the century. Even though they certainly died years ago, there was a sort of finality in peering down through the murky, stagnant water to find nothing but the muddy rocks, carefully arranged over generations. She was glad at least that she could cry in his stead. 

It was just a somber moment, however, as her mother quickly rushed her along. They needed to access the damage, and now that it was just the two of them, they didn't have any time to waste. She could only spare a glance towards the tall mango tree that she and James used to sit beneath, eating the fruit ripe during the summer time. She turned back towards the house, stepping around a rotted mango, blackened and chewed, on her way up to the patio. 

She remembered when her friends from school first came over. Though they oohed and aahed at the murals, and inspected the koi pond with an intent fascination, they still expected more from a Japantown. They wanted to see the panel doors, mat floors, low tables and cushions from those tacky brochures and friendship films. They wanted to hear that odd, alien language and funny, broken English from her parents. They wanted to smell the foreign food whose names they had no chance of pronouncing, rather than the same barbecue, set up in her backyard. They were let down then, but now, there would be nothing but sore disappointment. 

The lock on their front door was stuck, some thin strip or metal wire jammed into the keyhole, so they circled to the back of the house. It was a morose sight, as Alice looked out across the overgrown fields and empty pens, any crops long since choked out and the chickens long since robbed or eaten. Her mother was distraught. The store houses were essentially burned to the ground, wholly dismantled and stripped of any stock, and their orchard was plucked clean, the bushes wilted with some even ripped from the ground. 

There was no need for a key. The house's back window was already shattered, leading into the kitchen, where almost everything not bolted down was gone from the countertops. Drawers were loose, cabinets doors wrenched off their hinges. Everything from the silverware to the towels to the little trinkets above their sink was looted, leaving nothing but dust and debris. Scattered amongst the shards of glass littering the backyard, Alice found a small metal figurine in the shape of an American soldier. It was her brother's, part of an old birthday gift from her father. Even now, the set inexplicably seemed to be everywhere all at once. She'd find a little bayonet, or miniature cannon on random desktops, or almost step on a little general, dropped down the stairway. 

She buried the little toy. It was little consolation, her father's tuberculosis ridden body still hundreds of miles away, buried in that small plot outside Poston, and her brother's thousands of miles further. It felt childish, but she didn't know what else to do. 

The living room was more of the same. The walls were scrawled with obscenities, and any chair that couldn't squeeze through the backdoor was splintered to pieces. The paintings her father bought back from his trip to Japan were either dismounted or torn apart. It was difficult to remember the picturesque scenes, though she managed to piece together a good approximation from the scraps that remained. Her father was the first and last from their family to go back, and he would always wax poetic about the beautiful sights and old family friends. She wondered if it was still beautiful after the war, or if it too, like the America around her, had turned ugly. 

She climbed the stairs up to her bedroom. The mattress remained surprisingly intact, so she sat down, surrounded by bare, stripped walls and an uneasy familiarity. She dropped both her bag and her brother's bag onto the open floor. Her desk was gone, and her drawer too, along with most of the clothes inside of it. She began to unpack, placing her sparse belongings onto the single shelf up against a blank wall of white. Finally, she pulled out her notebook, the once sleek black cover page now nicked with scratches and scraps, and the crumpled pages filled with her pencil sketches, interspersed with schoolwork.

Alice flipped through the rough drawings, leafing through the pages to get to the back. Eventually, she stopped on a schoolyard. The makeshift barracks remained vivid in her mind. She could still imagine that one perfect angle where the barbed wire was barely visible, only a blur in the background. She could still see the dimly lit classrooms, with creaky desks and beat up textbooks, could still feel the beating sun as she walked home from the school house, and could still hear the snapping of the photographers as they took her graduation photos. The next page still felt unfinished. The lines were light and shaky, the baseball pitch uneven and disproportionate, yet she could still visualize the field. She remembered watching the white boys, fumbling their way through security to play in the desert heat. The memories clung to her, the shouts, the cheers, and each victory.

She flipped to the last page, a roughly drawn rock garden that her father had helped construct. It was clearly unfinished. With only a few days to work on it before her departure, there was only a rough sketch and guidelines. She gripped the page, delicately tearing it from the notebook. It only took a bit of jostling for the booklet to slot back into the bottom of her bag. She rested the loose sheet of paper on the top shelf before heading back downstairs.

Although it was going to be a long afternoon, she couldn't help but feel a bit of elation, with the cool air blowing in from the open windows. Passing through the empty hallways and barren walls, she was finally home.