“Didja get a good look at him?” Mas asked Tug.

“Little bit. Hakujin. Young. Wore a beanie cap.”

“I’ve knowsu dat guy.”

Mari almost swerved the car into the next lane. “What?”

Tug also seemed surprised.

“Riley,” Mas sputtered out.

Tug took out his notebook, his pen stuck in the spiral. “You sure, Mas?”

“Who the hell is Riley?” Mari demanded.

Mas knew that he couldn’t keep things from Mari any longer. He told her about following Riley to the factory with the red door, the gun, and the boy’s threats.

“Phillip’s behind this,” Mari announced. “He thinks we know something that we obviously don’t, or at least don’t realize it. But one damn thing is for sure”-both Tug and Mas cringed as Mari let loose a string of foul words-“he picked the wrong people to tangle with.”

When they finally got into Brooklyn Heights, Mari stopped the car in the hospital parking lot. Leaving the engine on, she got out. Both Tug and Mas got out as well to stretch their aging limbs, change seats, and say good night to Mari.

Mari hugged Tug first, her small body swallowed up in Tug’s grizzly bear one, and then surprisingly went to Mas and hugged him, too. “Thanks, Dad,” she whispered in his ear. “You did good.”

As he watched his daughter enter the hospital, Mas was amazed by her resilience. Her husband a suspect in a murder, her son hospitalized, and her life even on the line, yet she still had the presence to give two broken-down old men an embrace.

“I did nutin’,” he said out loud.

“What, Mas?” Tug waited in the driver’s seat.

“Nutin’,” Mas said. “Nutin’ at all.”

chapter ten

The next day the sun was out, causing the daffodils in Mari and Lloyd’s pitiful backyard to stand as straight as chopsticks. It was as if Tug’s Kamisama knew that today Takeo was coming home. Mas took an extralong shower, even dragged a disposable razor across his chin and the sides of his face. After getting dressed in a fresh shirt and jeans, Mas cracked open a new plastic container of Three Flowers oil. A fingerful of grease, two swipes of a comb, and he was ready.

At the hospital, he, Lloyd, and Mari met with the East Indian doctor again. She spoke as if Mari and she were old friends-for all the time Mari spent in the hospital, they might as well have been short-term sisters. Mas was continually amazed at how much the world had changed. Now so many girls Mari’s age or even younger (attorney Jeannie Yee, for example) seemed to be vital members of the working world. He supposed that the hakujin men were still on top and would always be, but now the number two man could be black, Latino, or even a woman.

“It’s such a beautiful day; you should take a short walk in the sun on your way home,” said Dr. Bhalla.

“Won’t that be too much for him?” Mari clutched at Takeo, cocooned in a pure-white blanket.

“He’s been cooped up long enough in here. Isn’t there a park or something where you can go for half an hour?”

Lloyd unhinged the collapsed stroller and expanded it like an accordion. “I know exactly where we can take him.”

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden felt comfortable to Mas even though he had never been there before. The bare wisteria trees twisted around the wood-framed archways like frayed rope, their branches bent like arthritic fingers. But they held the promise of what was to come in a few months. L.A., on the other hand, barely showed any signs of seasons. Sure, every spring the lavender blooms of the jacaranda trees popped open, spreading sap and petals on luxury cars, to their owners’ dismay. Around the same time, the flowers of the long-stemmed agapanthus plants exploded like white and purple hanabi, fireworks, in freeze-frame. But perhaps the biggest seasonal rite of passage was the summer forest fires eating dried-up hills surrounding Los Angeles. Mas remembered one time a fellow gardener’s truck came close to becoming molten metal when flames jumped the Glendale Freeway in search of more dead brush. That summer, flakes of ash like crushed dried seaweed covered Mas’s driveway and got stuck in the dandelion heads on his lawn. And everywhere, there was the scent of smoke.

No fragrance, either good or bad, was coming out of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this early in spring here. They passed the herb garden, and Mas noticed a cement planter with a sign, MUGWORT. Mugwort was used to make moxa, cigar-shaped sticks that Japanese used to burn against their skin to relieve their aches and pains. But instead of the leafy plant, there was only a blanket of brown pine needles and weeds underneath the plant’s name.

Down the path was the familiar construction of a Japanese-style fence, simple planks of wood assembled without any signs of nails. And then, as if the fence slid across to make way for the view, Mas walked into the world of Takeo Shiota. Beyond the seven-foot stone lantern and an open wooden house along the kokoro -shaped pond was the torii gate, bright persimmon orange and wading in the green water. Of course, it wasn’t as grand as the gateway Mas remembered at Miyajima. The New York version looked like an oversized toy, yet it still made its impact. Mas stood still, his hands balled up inside his pockets. He remembered going to Miyajima on a train and then a boat with his mother and his two oldest brothers one time when he was seven. The fog had first hidden the tree trunk posts of the torii, and then, like a curtain, the mist lifted. Had a giant placed the torii there in the water? he had asked his mother. “ Bakatare, baka, ” his brothers spit out, spinning their black school caps on the ends of their fingers. His mother said nothing, but Mas could feel her hand faintly squeezing his shoulder.

“Not bad, huh, Arai- san?” Lloyd said. He then pointed to the rectangular sign at the top of the gate and read the Japanese characters. “ DAI-MYO-JIN. Great bright God. Enlightenment, right?”

Mas shrugged his shoulders. Here again, the sign, like the message left by Kazzy’s father on the bottom of the concrete pond, was hard to understand. But what Mas could appreciate was the sweeping arch of the top crossbar and the straight line of the bottom bar right underneath it. The arch seemed to lift the whole gate out of the water, clearly transporting people to another place and time.

“What happen to this Shiota?” Mas had never heard of the landscaper before he stepped foot in New York.

“Died in an internment camp. Actually, I haven’t been able to verify his exact year of death. Some say 1943, but his relatives back in Japan think it’s 1946. But either way, he didn’t spend his last days in New York.”

“No camp ova here, desho?”

“Yeah, the Nisei in New York were safe, but some of the Issei pioneers, even diplomats, were taken away. There were these State Department internment hotels, I guess you can call them. One was in North Carolina, where I think Shiota might have been.”

Mas frowned. A man who created this would be viewed as a threat? Didn’t make sense.

“He even had a hakujin wife. But no kids. That’s probably why no one knows anything about him. She sent her in-laws care packages after the war, but we don’t really know what happened to her later in life, either.”

As Mari bent over the stroller, Mas and Lloyd made their way to the wooden house by the pond. It reminded Mas of a similar structure in a botanical garden not far from his house in Altadena. They sat on a bench, their faces shaded by the extended roof. Next to them were a couple of hakujin women in nuns’ habits who spoke softly in a language Mas couldn’t make out.