At nine o’clock, the phone rang. “Is this Mrs. Frank Miura?” A male voice that Helen didn’t recognize.
“Yes.”
“This is the sherriff’s department. There’s been an accident.”
Helen was surprised that Frank’s mother wanted to come with her to the coroner’s office. Helen told her to take care of Diana.
“Mama, it will be better if you stay behind.”
“This is your fault,” Mama said in Japanese.
Helen’s legs had been shaky to begin with, but now she felt like her knees would buckle underneath her.
“You told him that you wanted to move near the water. He only wanted to make you happy.”
The coroner had warned Helen that she might not recognize her husband. His body had been severely battered from the rocks. It had been a fifty-foot drop, after all.
His neck was twisted; his beautiful face now raw and torn. Helen thought that his nose was missing, but she saw that it was instead flattened into a pulpy mass.
His ears were still intact, and Helen checked behind his left earlobe, and sure enough, his mole was there. She studied his hands. His fingers were stiff but his nails were still well manicured, a little squarish at the top.
It was definitely Frank.
Later a police officer sat down with her and asked Helen what her husband was doing on a cliff in Malibu.
“I’m not sure. His secretary told me that he was there to look at a house. A new house that we were thinking of buying.” Helen’s voice shook. Should she mention Bob? She wasn’t sure it had been Bob. But it had to be him.
“Yes, we found the address in his pocket. The real estate agent, in fact, was the one who discovered your husband’s body. Do you know a man named Bob Burkard?”
The police car parked in front of their rented house and Helen got out, her hands still trembling.
She thanked the officer, and the car slowly disappeared down the street. Before she got to the stairs, someone pulled at her arm.
“How dare you come here?” Helen said to Bob.
He pulled her into some pine trees framing the side of the house.
“You killed him,” she declared.
Bob shook his head. “I didn’t even make it on time for our appointment. He had fallen by the time I arrived. I was the one who called the police.”
“I’m going to tell the police about us.” Helen was ashamed that she had not been more revealing during the police interview. All she mentioned was that Bob had been their agent. Purely business.
“That we were having an affair? What do you think that will do to your daughter? People will talk. You’ll be implicated, you know.”
Bob was right. Tongues would wag. Helen Miura was having an adulterous affair with a white man. Diana would be shunned by the parents of her peers. Her family shamed. And if something happened to Helen, who would take care of Diana? Mama couldn’t do it on her own. Helen’s parents were too old, and her siblings had their own children to raise. Helen knew what it was like to be one of many. She didn’t want that to happen to her Diana.
“I’ll wait for you. Even a year. In respect of your husband’s death.”
Respect? Helen felt like screaming, tearing Bob’s hair out. I know what you have done. She wanted to spit in his face, but she used all her rage to manage a slight smile on her lips.
That night Helen lay in their double bed by herself. The doctor at the Japanese hospital had dropped off some sleeping medicine for her. Something to stir into hot water. But Helen didn’t want to sleep. She didn’t deserve to sleep.
Helen reached out for the crumpled sheets Frank had slept in the night before. She planned to never wash them. Instead she would save them in a box so that she could periodically go and smell her late husband.
She wrapped the sheets around her legs and stared at Frank’s pillow. There were a few loose hairs coated with oil.
She felt now that Frank, in his death, could see everything. He could see her deception, the romantic trysts in Bob’s car and on the beach.
“I’m so sorry, Frank,” she whispered. And then she knew what she had to do.
Helen’s parents had an old family friend, Kaji-san. A Japanese immigrant like Helen’s father, Kaji-san had been a fisherman as well. He was rambo, rough. A lot of Terminal Islanders had been that way, cured in the sun and salt water. But Kaji-san had a callused face in addition to his callused hands.; a face with dried-up crevices like earthquake faults.
After the war, Helen’s relatives had taken in the old bachelor for a while before he got back on his feet and opened a Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo. To everyone’s surprise, Kaji-san succeeded, and before long he had even purchased a boat that was docked at Pierpoint Landing in Long Beach.
Kaji-san felt indebted to Helen’s family, so much so that they eventually stopped going to his restaurant because he never took their money. But Helen needed a favor now, and Kaji-san was, of course, more than willing to comply. Besides, he already had questions and concerns. Helen had lost some weight—she was thin to begin with, but now her high cheekbones were even more prominent and defined. Frank’s death had definitely taken a toll on her, but Kaji-san knew that Helen would never do anything rash. She wasn’t that type of woman.
Helen arrived at the empty restaurant three hours before her appointment and let herself in the back with Kaji-san ’s key. She needed the extra time to get ready.
Bob came early too, fifteen minutes early. Helen could tell from the flush in his cheeks that he was excited. She even let him give her a peck on her cheek. That much she could tolerate.
Helen had him sit at the wooden counter and served him a piping-hot cup of green tea.
“I’ve never had green tea before.” He sipped carefully and then grimaced. “Bitter.”
“You’ll get used to it. This tea is expensive; you’ll insult me if you don’t finish it.”
By the time the teacup was empty, Bob’s head rested on the wooden counter. Helen went to the kitchen and put on her rubber gloves. And then rolled out the wheelbarrow.
One time she had been out on the fishing boat when her father had caught a bluefin tuna. It had been a magnificent fish, almost six feet tall, almost three hundred pounds. It took three men to handle it. The fish first needed to be stunned. Helen’s father used one of her brother’s baseball bats. This time Helen used Frank’s.
The fishermen found the soft spot in the fish’s head and pushed a spike in its brain. Helen was amazed how easy it was to kill a huge fish like that. It shuddered as if it was hoping for another chance at life, then went limp.
There was a method to cutting a bluefin tuna. You first needed time to bleed the fish so that its sheen would still be maintained. And then go right to the internal organs in the gilling and gutting. Later you would cut the meat into chunks and sell them by the pound.
Helen could skip many of the steps she had learned as a child. The most important tools here were the knife and the mallet. She was thankful some family friends had watched over her father’s tools while they had been in Manzanar.
After Helen was done, she carefully packed different parts of Bob in three different suitcases and cleaned the cement floor of Kaji-san ’s kitchen. She had brought extra bottles of bleach for the task. She then drove to Pierpoint Landing and took Kaji-san ’s motorized fishing boat as far as she could, and dropped each suitcase into different parts of the ocean. The water was black as the ink of an octopus, and for a moment Helen imagined a huge sea monster emerging from the darkness and tearing her, too, into shreds. But her mind was only playing tricks on her. After closing her eyes hard and reopening them, she found that her fear had disappeared.