us went to look at the epicenter of the bomb, a fenced-off area with an old building that remained standing. There were cement benches surrounded by planters looking into this fenced-off area, and sycamore trees with mottled trunks dropping leaves that curled like hands on the asphalt around the benches.
I bought a tray of unagi on rice from a mini-mart nearby and sat on one of the benches. Inside was a plot of land covered in scrub grasses. The land around the building was more expansive than other plots of land I’d seen in Japan, except at the temples. It reminded me of the empty lots between buildings around Palo Alto off El Camino Real, weeds sticking up in the dirt.
In the middle was an old see-through structure, a curved dome made of only panels of steel, like scaffolding, or a dressmaker’s form. This was a building standing on the morning the bomb was dropped that had been reduced to its skeletal structure below paint and plaster, like a dry leaf worn away to a system of brown veins. It remained because, given the physics of the bomb, the place at the epicenter of where the nuclear bomb was dropped was not destroyed.
We left Hiroshima and went to a town in the countryside where we stayed in a low, flat building with a meeting room in the middle. We’d already been to many temples in the mountains, green and smelling of peat and rain. We’d been on the bullet train, so smooth it hardly felt like we were moving.
I’d been thinking about my mother and our fights. It was a relief to be away from her. I knew that when I returned the fights would continue.
On the second day in the countryside, near the end of our trip, a man walked through the door and into the meeting room. It took me a moment to realize who it was: my father, barefoot, flipping the hair out of his face.
“Steve?” I said.
“Hey, Lis,” he said, smiling. The whole class looked. “I was nearby on a business trip. I thought I’d come find you.”
“But how did you know I was here?” We were far from Tokyo and Kyoto, where he went on business trips.
“I have my ways,” he said.
I looked at Lee, who winked.
How young and handsome he was. I felt the same zing I would feel when I saw his face on the cover of magazines.
That afternoon, I was not required to participate in regular activities. We were left alone in a room with a rice paper screen, a window, and pillows on the tatami floor. I drew my hands across the shiny reeds woven in a herringbone pattern with cloth seams. Being with him was awkward at first, the way it was with boys, when it was clear we liked each other and yet there was nothing to say.
“I’m so glad you came,” I said.
“Me, too, Lis. I wanted to spend some time with you.”
At some point I was sitting on his lap. I was too old to sit on laps—I’d just turned fourteen—but I was small for my age and sometimes sat on my mother’s lap too. When I sat on my mother’s lap, I accidentally dug my ischial bones into her thigh, but I didn’t want to do that to him, I didn’t know him well enough, so I sat as carefully as possible, curving my spine.
I was shaking a little. Was it fear? Excitement? I couldn’t tell. I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love. I hoped he didn’t notice how red and hot my cheeks were: to have a father now, the way I’d hoped for so long. Having a father, as far as I understood, felt not like being ordinary but like being singled out. Our time together was not fluid but stuttered forward like a flip book.
How close are you supposed to be with your father? I wanted to collapse into him, to be inseparable. In his presence I wasn’t sure how to hold my hands, how to arrange my limbs. Other daughters would have known this by now.
In the cool, quiet enclosures of the temples, I’d felt as if I were more than just myself, part of some larger and benevolent system or plan. I wondered what I would do when the trip was over and life resumed with my mother. Would my father say I could live with him?
“Do you believe in God?” I