Chapter 22

Then there were his parents, who were getting old and would need his help. That added to the pressure.

This on top of his job and trying to keep the marriage together. Making a go of it with someone from the other side of the world isn’t easy. There’s a force that seems centrifugal, apt to send everything hurling apart if you don’t devote a constant effort, keep up with the motion. Akemi did her part too, no question.

And there were the stresses of daily life in the city, people trying to get along with each other or at least get along.

Mitchell went to the dentist with Akemi. When her name was called (they almost missed it at first, the pronunciation was wrong), Mitchell stood up with her and said, “I’ll head in with you.”

The receptionist blocked his way. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“This is the way we usually do it,” Mitchell explained. The dentist let him accompany Akemi to help in the event of communication trouble. “I provide English-to-English translation,” was how Mitchell put it the first time he made the request. He too didn’t know Japanese, of course, but he knew how to put things in English in a way Akemi would understand.

The receptionist was having none of it. A caramel-colored thick-set yet not unattractive young Hispanic woman, she made a physical barrier with her body. She wore a cream-colored cashmere sweater, thick soft wool making a wide cowl low on her neck.

“The dentist will see you one by one,” she said in a voice with which you might address a difficult child, pronouncing each word slowly as if Mitchell himself spoke no English.

Another New Yorker with an attitude, Mitchell thought. Why’d he—and especially Akemi—have to deal with that in a place like this? No one wants to go to the dentist, but the least you can expect was that people would be nice there.

Approval from the dentist reached the front desk, and the receptionist reluctantly guided Mitchell and Akemi to the examining room through narrow hallways blocked along the way by equipment left there. Her manner remained stern, making clear that though the doctor had overridden her authority, the two patients were still in her charge and she would brook no nonsense from them.

Mitchell didn’t know that Akemi was in fact in a real prison now—a detention center anyway—and that most of those detained there with her were from that receptionist’s part of the world, South or Central America, even further from Japan than the U.S., at least where culture was concerned.