Akiko
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Winter came early in 1952, and with it, the ice.
The storm hit in mid-January, three weeks before Akiko’s due date. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in two hours, the kind of cold that turned breath to crystals and made the world feel brittle enough to shatter. Freezing rain coated everything—trees, roads, power lines—transforming the familiar landscape into something alien and treacherous.
By evening, the lights flickered once, twice, then died. The phone line went dead an hour later.
Akiko had been feeling contractions since mid-afternoon—irregular at first, easy to dismiss as the false labor Dorothy had warned her about. But by eight o’clock, they were coming with purpose, gripping her belly like a fist that wouldn’t release.
Steven tried the truck. The engine turned over, coughing in the cold, but the wheels spun uselessly on the glazed driveway. The roads beyond were sheets of ice under falling sleet—impassable, deadly.
“I’ll walk to town,” Steven said, already pulling on his coat. “Get the doctor.”
“You’ll kill yourself on that ice,” Dorothy said flatly, her voice carrying the authority of someone who’d survived too many Oklahoma winters to indulge foolish heroics. “We do this ourselves.”
Akiko’s first real contraction came at midnight. She gripped the edge of the kitchen table, breathing through the pain the way she’d learned in the cave hospitals—in through the nose, out through the mouth, focus on something beyond the body’s rebellion.
Dorothy boiled water on the wood stove, gathered towels, moved with the grim efficiency of someone who’d birthed three children in this same house decades ago, when doctors were a luxury and women simply handled what needed handling.
“How far apart?” Dorothy asked, her hands already busy preparing.
“Ten minutes,” Akiko managed through clenched teeth.
Steven reached for the phone again, uselessly, his face pale in the lamplight. “There has to be something—”
“There isn’t,” Dorothy interrupted. “So you’re going to calm down, keep that stove fed, and boil more water. Your wife needs you steady, not panicking.”
But at two in the morning, headlights swept across the kitchen window. A truck, moving slowly, chains on the tires, pulled into the yard. Dr. Callahan climbed out, black bag in hand, ice coating his hat and shoulders like armor.
He was the same doctor who’d muttered “enemy” under his breath the first time Akiko came to his clinic. The man who’d made her wait in a separate room, who’d written her prescriptions without looking at her face. The man who’d stood in the general store and listened to Earl’s comments without objection.
Now he stood in the Sims’ kitchen, shaking ice from his coat, and said simply, “Someone called about a baby?”
Steven stared at him. “The phone’s been dead for hours.”
“Mrs. Patterson walked to my house,” Callahan said, setting his bag on the table. “Two miles in this ice. Said Dorothy Sims’ daughter-in-law was in labor and would need help.” He rolled up his sleeves. “So here I am.”
Akiko felt tears sting her eyes—not from pain, but from the image of elderly Mrs. Patterson walking two miles through an ice storm for someone the town had barely accepted a year ago.
Dr. Callahan washed his hands in the basin by the stove, where Steven had heated water in every pot they owned. Steam rose in the lamplight, and the house had no electricity, no phone, no connection to the world beyond the ice-coated roads. Just kerosene lanterns casting shadows that danced across the walls.
“How far apart are the contractions?” Callahan asked, his tone professional, impersonal.
“Seven minutes,” Dorothy answered. “Strong. She’s been in labor about eight hours.”
Callahan nodded and moved to the bedroom doorway where Akiko lay on the bed, gripping the quilt Dorothy had made when Steven was born—faded blue squares patched with white.
When the next contraction passed, Akiko looked up and saw Dr. Callahan standing there. Their eyes met. She remembered the clinic. The way he’d turned away. The way he’d muttered under his breath. Enemy. War bride. The words that had cut deeper than any scalpel.
He remembered too. She could see it in the way he hesitated, just for a second, before stepping into the room.
“Mrs. Sims,” he said quietly. “I’m going to help you through this.”
She nodded, unable to speak, and he got to work.
The labor stretched through the darkest hours of the night. Steven paced the kitchen, helpless, while Dorothy moved between the bedroom and the stove, boiling more water, bringing clean towels, whispering reassurances that Akiko barely heard over the roar of her own body doing what bodies had done since the beginning of time.
Dr. Callahan worked by the light of two kerosene lanterns, his hands steady, his voice calm.
“You’re doing fine,” he said during one contraction. “Breathe through it. That’s right. You’re stronger than you think.”
Akiko wanted to laugh—or scream. She’d survived four years of war, starvation, bureaucratic detention, and the slow death of waiting for cruelty that never came. Of course she was strong. But strength didn’t make the pain less real.
At four in the morning, when the ice had stopped falling and the world outside had gone silent and crystalline, Akiko’s daughter entered the world with a wail that shook the lamplight.
Dr. Callahan caught her, cleared her airways, and held her up—tiny, red-faced, furious at the cold. He wrapped her in a clean towel and placed her on Akiko’s chest.
“Strong lungs,” he muttered, almost to himself. Then he said it again, louder, to the room. “Strong lungs. She’s perfect.”
It was the kindest thing he’d ever said to her.
Dorothy appeared in the doorway, tears streaming down her face. Steven pushed past her, stumbling to the bedside, staring at his daughter as if she were something conjured from prayer and stubbornness both.
Akiko held the baby against her skin, feeling the small heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings. The baby’s eyes were closed, her fingers curled into fists no bigger than walnuts. She had Steven’s nose and Akiko’s dark hair, already thick and black.
“She’s perfect,” Steven whispered, his voice breaking. “Akiko, she’s perfect.”
“Yes,” Akiko said, laughing and crying at once. “She is.”
Dr. Callahan washed his hands again, slowly, methodically. When he finished, he stood by the window, looking out at the ice-glazed world, the dawn just beginning to break over the frozen plains.
“Roads won’t be clear until noon at the earliest,” he said. “I’ll stay until then. Make sure there are no complications.”
“Thank you,” Steven said, the words inadequate but sincere. “Thank you for coming. For helping.”
The doctor turned, meeting Steven’s eyes, then Akiko’s. Something passed between them—an acknowledgment, an apology without words, the beginning of something that might eventually become forgiveness.
“You’re welcome,” he said simply.
By mid-morning, the sun broke through the clouds, turning the ice into a field of diamonds. The power stayed out, but the roads began to thaw. Dr. Callahan packed his bag, paused at the door, and looked back at the bed where Akiko held her sleeping daughter.
“What are you naming her?” he asked.
Akiko and Steven exchanged a glance. They’d argued gently over this for months, trying to find something that honored both their worlds.
“Grace,” Akiko said softly. “Grace Emiko Sims. It mean blessed child.”
Dr. Callahan nodded slowly. “That’s a good name. A strong name.” He tipped his hat to Dorothy. “Mrs. Sims. Take care of them.”
“I will,” Dorothy said, and meant it.
After he left, his truck crunching over the icy driveway, Dorothy began making breakfast—real breakfast, eggs and bacon and biscuits, the kind of meal reserved for celebrations.
Word spread faster than the thaw. By afternoon, Mrs. Patterson appeared with a quilt she’d been working on in secret—pink and yellow squares, stitched with care. The neighbor boy and his grandfather brought a basket of eggs and a hand-carved wooden rattle. Miss Hodges from the library came with a stack of children’s books, their spines worn soft from decades of small hands.
Even Earl from the general store showed up with a tin of tea and a mumbled congratulation before retreating quickly to his truck.
The house filled with voices, offerings, the quiet hum of a community beginning to shift. Not all at once, not with fanfare, but like ice melting in sunlight—inevitable, irreversible.
That evening, after everyone had gone and the house had settled into silence, Steven sat in the rocking chair by the wood stove, holding Grace against his chest. She slept with her mouth slightly open, her tiny hand curled around his finger.
He thought about the gulch at Honuliuli, the red dirt and barbed wire, the moment he’d caught Akiko as she fell. The words that had tumbled out of him without permission: You’re mine now.
He’d meant protection. Custody of care. A promise to fight every fence, every form, every law that tried to keep them apart.
Now, holding his daughter in a farmhouse in Oklahoma while his wife slept in the next room and the wood stove crackled softly, he realized the promise had grown into something larger than either of them. Not just survival, not just love, but a future—messy and uncertain and rooted in soil that had once felt hostile.
Grace stirred, made a small sound, settled again. Steven whispered to her in the lamplight, words she couldn’t understand but might remember in the way children remember warmth and safety.
“Your mother crossed an ocean for you. I crossed every rule I could find. And you’re here anyway. That makes you the stubbornest person in this family.”
Behind him, Akiko laughed softly. He turned. She was awake, propped on pillows, watching them.
“She your daughter,” Akiko said, her accent still careful around certain words. “Of course she stubborn.”
Steven grinned. “Fair point.”
Akiko held out her arms and Steven brought Grace to her. Mother and daughter, backlit by kerosene glow, looking like something painted—fragile and fierce and absolutely real.
Dorothy appeared in the doorway with tea, set the cups down quietly, and kissed Akiko’s forehead before leaving them alone. It was the first time she’d done such a thing, and the gesture carried more weight than words.
Outside, the ice continued to melt. The power lines would be repaired by morning. The roads would clear. Life would resume its ordinary rhythms—farm work, town errands, church on Sundays.
But something fundamental had shifted. A baby born during an ice storm, delivered by a doctor who’d once refused to see her mother as human, welcomed by a town that had spent two years learning to look past its own fear.
Three years later, Michael was born on a mild spring morning with no drama beyond the usual. Dr. Callahan delivered him too, and this time there was no hesitation, no moment of reckoning. Just a doctor doing his job and doing it well.
“Another strong one,” he said, handing the squalling infant to Akiko. “You make sturdy children, Mrs. Sims.”
Michael had Steven’s build and Akiko’s eyes, and from the moment he could walk, he followed his sister everywhere, determined not to miss whatever adventure she was inventing.
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