Garden of Stones
Garden of Stones
Sophie Littlefield
In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor.Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp. Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp.Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever…and spur her to sins of her own.Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love."Littlefield has a gift for pacing…page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions." —Publishers Weekly
In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice
Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp.
Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp. Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever...and spur her to sins of her own.
Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love.
Garden
of
Stones
Sophie Littlefield
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Julie
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u345d5123-9900-540e-bf9d-98edbe91767a)
Chapter 2 (#ucffd6689-fa5c-5f7e-be1c-d84c0b2835a1)
Chapter 3 (#u4fe4e765-0f28-5eb0-aafb-5b0293122115)
Chapter 4 (#ub683d533-0c9d-57bb-8bf2-b5a9f38a4c34)
Chapter 5 (#ufe8007bd-e307-5041-b15c-d5eed84052d9)
Chapter 6 (#uc1d6f272-1deb-5c75-8d47-727b3512d56e)
Chapter 7 (#uaf18f781-e927-55f4-ab2c-73d7dc576776)
Chapter 8 (#u0acd548e-facc-5b4a-89a3-06d565b827ab)
Chapter 9 (#u233fd245-9882-5365-9a8d-40a4854b8bb1)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Sophie Littlefield (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
1
San Francisco
Tuesday, June 6, 1978
Reg Forrest lowered himself painfully into his desk chair, which was as hard, used and creaky as he was. The dark brown leather was cracked and worn, the brass nails missing in places. When he found the chair in the alley, he thought it had a certain masculine appeal, like something a hotshot lawyer might own. But it hadn’t taken long for the thing to seem as shoddy as the rest of his office.
Reg flipped the corners of the stack of papers on his desk and sighed. The coffee wouldn’t be ready for a few minutes yet.
Dust motes swirled in the first rays of morning sunlight, causing Reg to blink and then to sneeze. He had positioned his desk under the only window in the room, a filthy pane of glass at ceiling level that looked out into a corrugated-aluminum well half-filled with garbage and dead leaves. Above the window well was the same alley where he’d found the chair, a narrow, stinking passage between the DeSoto Hotel and the building next door. Still, early in the morning, depending on the season, an errant sunbeam or two found its way down into the room, and for that small grace, Reg occasionally remembered to be grateful.
Beyond the office door, there was silence. The gym opened at seven, which was still a half hour away. He’d already unlocked the doors, but the half-dozen men who’d gather by seven would wait for him to come prop them open. They knew each other’s habits. Early morning drew the shift workers, the boys getting in a few rounds on the bag after clocking out. Night security, deliverymen, dockworkers—they were quieter, as a rule, than the ones who came later. Other than the occasional grunt or curse, they had little to say as they worked through their circuits.
It had been several years since Reg himself had taken to the practice ring. He’d broken the same hand three times, and his shoulder was never right anymore. The ligaments in his back were for shit, and there was a scar like a zipper running over his left knee. He was fifty-nine years old and he’d spent three of his six decades here, in the basement of the DeSoto Hotel, building Reg’s Gym up from nothing. Reg had paid in rough coin, but he wasn’t complaining; the sounds and smells of this place were all he knew anymore, and if he spent more of his time locked up in this office with a calculator than on the floor these days, he supposed that was all right. A man slows down, in time.
A knock at the door. Raphael, his day manager, sometimes came in early and drank a cup of coffee with him. On days like this, when his aches and pains were more troublesome than usual, Reg could do without the conversation—at least until he’d had a chance to work the kinks out of his joints and was feeling more sociable. The only reason he came in to work this early was his insomnia: often stark-awake by three or four, Reg had nowhere else to go.
“Yeah. Come in.”
He didn’t turn. The only sound was the gurgling of the coffeepot. Reg squinted at the sheet on top of the stack and wondered if he needed to go to the eye doctor again. What had it been, two years, three, and it seemed like they were printing everything smaller all the time.
“Hey, Raphael, look at this invoice, will you, I can’t make out the damn numbers—”
He jerked with surprise when warm hands covered his eyes. For a moment he was frozen, remembering the way his sister used to sneak up on him, half a century ago. She loved to put her small hands over his eyes and make him guess, little skinny Martha who died of scarlet fever before her seventh birthday; he hadn’t thought of her in years. The hands pushed gently, tilting his head back, one of them cupping his chin to hold it in place. Reg squinted, trying to see who was standing above him, but he was blinded by the sun streaming in the window. Something cold and hard pressed against his forehead, and the last thing Reg saw was a face surrounded with a brilliant, glowing corona, like Jesus in the picture his mother had hung above Martha’s bed.
2
San Francisco
Wednesday, June 7, 1978
Patty Takeda was having the nightmare again.
In it, she stood at the back of the church as the organist finished the last few measures of Franck’s “Fantaisie in C,” watching her maid of honor approach the altar and execute a perfect turn in her pink high heels. There was a pause as the entire congregation waited breathlessly. Then the first triumphant notes of the wedding march rang out, and everyone rose in their pews and turned toward the back, expectant smiles on their faces. Patty emerged from behind the latticed anteroom divider. Step–pause, step–pause, a smile fixed on her face.
But something was wrong. Audible gasps filled the chapel and Patty looked down and discovered that she had forgotten to put her dress on. Or her slip, for that matter, or her panties or strapless bra. She was completely naked other than her white satin pumps. She tried to cover herself with her hands, but everyone was watching, staring, pointing, and she turned to run back to the dressing room but the ushers were standing shoulder to shoulder, blocking her way, gaping.
Patty woke, shoulders heaving, sweat gluing her T-shirt to her neck, the sheets knotted around her body. She was breathing hard, but at least she was awake. Sometimes, when she had this dream, she ran around the church for what seemed like hours, never finding an exit.
The sound of the doorbell jarred her fully awake. Was that the sound that had broken through the dream? Patty groped for the clock on the bedside table, knocking the tissue box to the floor before she found it. Almost nine. Patty lay still and listened as her mother answered the door. She heard her mother’s voice, and a man’s, back and forth a few times—and then footsteps, through the house, down the hall past Patty’s door, into the kitchen.
“...can offer you tea, if you like, Inspector,” Patty heard her mother say clearly as they passed, and then the voices became indistinguishable again.
Inspector? Patty untangled the sheets from her legs and sat up in bed, rubbing her face. Why would a detective be visiting her mother’s house? She pulled on the nylon running shorts she’d tossed on a chair the night before and was halfway to the door before she changed her mind and went back for her bra. It took a little searching—the bra had disappeared halfway under the bed—but Patty eventually found it and yanked it on, then exchanged the T-shirt she had been sleeping in for a fresh one from the suitcase on the floor. She sniffed under her armpits—not terrible. She really needed to unpack. She’d moved out of her apartment last week and she was staying here with her mother until the wedding, but it was only her third day off and she was still enjoying being lazy.
She peeked out the bedroom door, craning her neck to peer into the kitchen, and saw a man’s polished brown shoe under the kitchen table. The rest of him was just out of sight. Patty grimaced and tiptoed across the hall to the bathroom. She washed her face and brushed her teeth in record time, pulling a comb through her hair and settling for a quick swipe of lip gloss.
When she entered the kitchen, she was feeling presentable, if self-conscious about her bare legs. The man stood and greeted her with a nod.
“Patty,” her mother said. “This is Inspector Torre.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“You too,” Patty said automatically, taking the hand he offered, finding his grip surprisingly tentative. He was at least six, six-one, with the sort of beard that looks untended by lunchtime and thick, black sideburns encroaching on his jaw. Handsome, some women would no doubt think.
“I’m here to talk to your mother about the death of an acquaintance of hers.”
“Who?” Patty quickly cataloged everyone in her mother’s circle, a very short list. Besides work, Lucy Takeda went almost nowhere.
“Reginald Forrest. He was the proprietor of a commercial gym in the basement of the DeSoto Hotel.”
Patty knew the hotel—a once-grand stone edifice about a quarter mile away, on Pine or Bush or one of those streets. A pocket of the neighborhood that had seen the last of its glory days. But she had never heard the man’s name.
Lucy tsked dismissively. “Someone I knew a long time ago, in Manzanar. I haven’t seen him in thirty-five years.”
“But—” Patty looked from the inspector to her mother, confused. Lucy never spoke about her time in the internment camp. “Why on earth would you want to talk to my mother?”
Torre cleared his throat, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Someone claims to have seen someone resembling your mother in the vicinity of the gym around the time he died. We’ve got a time of death between five and seven yesterday morning, and this person places your mother there between seven and seven-fifteen.”
“But that’s—” Patty struggled to clear the morning haze from her thoughts. “My mom doesn’t ever go over there.”
“This person said...” Inspector Torre seemed to be searching for the right words. “That is to say, he described certain characteristics.... We asked around the neighborhood and several people mentioned Mrs. Takeda.”
Now Patty understood his discomfort. “Characteristics...” Yes, people didn’t quickly forget her mother’s face. The pocked and shiny pink scars took up most of the right side of her face, extending from her right eye down to her jawline. They encroached upon her lower eyelid, pink and puffed and vertically clefted; the eye itself was milky and gave the impression of both blindness and acute vision, which was unsettling and put the observer in the uncomfortable position of having to find another place to focus his own eyes.
“The inspector talked to Dave Navarro,” Lucy said indignantly. “And the Cooks!”
The faint beginning of a headache stirred between Patty’s temples. Her mother had never had a great relationship with the neighbors—she could only imagine how those conversations went. “I’m sorry, but this is, well, I don’t get it,” Patty said. “I mean, you weren’t at the hotel yesterday morning, were you, Mom?”
“Of course not. And besides, Inspector Torre said it could also be a suicide,” Lucy said. “It probably was.”
“Why would you say that?” Torre asked.
“You said that. You said the stun gun or whatever it was—”
“Captive bolt pistol,” Inspector Torre said. “Often used with livestock, but it has other uses. What I meant was, was there something about Mr. Forrest that makes you think he might have been suicidal?”
“How would I know?” Mrs. Takeda asked. “Reginald Forrest is an old man now. I’m sure he had his reasons.”
“Was,” Torre interjected. “Was an old man.”
Lucy shrugged. She was in an odd mood, both irritable and nervous, Patty thought. “Wait,” she said. “Can you just back up a little for me, Inspector? I’m sorry... I haven’t had my coffee. I’m not sure I’m following what you’re saying.”
Lucy frowned, an expression that distorted her scars, and folded her arms over her chest.
“Sure.” Torre reached for a notebook in his breast pocket, licked his thumb and started turning pages. “Janitor was buffing the lobby floor at about seven, seven-fifteen yesterday morning,” he said. “He described you pretty accurately. Said you appeared flustered, that you were walking faster than normal.”
“He doesn’t know me,” Lucy said. “How does he know how fast I walk?”
“Mother. Please.”
“Your mother’s neighbors, Mr. David Navarro and Cindy and Tom Cook, did say that she takes frequent walks around the neighborhood.”
“How would they know where I walk? They’re not my friends,” Lucy said. “They’ve never liked me. Dave Navarro had a tree whose roots were choking the sewage pipes under my house, and we argued over it until he finally cut it down. And the Cooks have a daughter who spreads her legs for every boy who comes around.”
“Surely my mother isn’t the only person you’re interviewing,” Patty said hastily, painfully aware of how caustic Lucy could sound to someone who didn’t know her. She was a loner, but that certainly didn’t mean she’d killed anyone, a point Patty feared might be lost on Torre.
He shrugged. “Sure, we’ve got a few people we’re talking to. Forrest had a son from a first marriage—he’s disturbed or retarded or something, lives in a group home. There’s also a girlfriend. I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about either of them.”
“Of course not,” Lucy snapped. Patty tried to telegraph be nice. “I told you I haven’t talked to him in three decades.”
“All right.” Torre tucked the notebook back in his pocket. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a chance to think about Forrest, see if you remember anything that might help us out.”
“From thirty years ago?” Damn, now she was doing it too—Patty instantly regretted snapping.
Torre turned his gaze on her. “So you live here with your mother, Patty?”
Patty resisted the urge to glare. “Only for a couple of weeks. I’m getting married. The wedding’s on the seventeenth.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, congratulations.”
He stood and adjusted his jacket, his eyes traveling up to the shelf that ran the length of the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, and Patty cringed inwardly. This was the moment that marked every newcomer’s first visit to the house, the moment Patty had learned to dread so much that eventually she’d stopped bringing friends home at all.
Patty let her gaze follow Torre’s, and tried to see what he saw, from his perspective—the gruesome tableau was as familiar to her as her mother’s Corelle dish pattern or the fake-brick design of the kitchen linoleum.
All those eyes: wide and shiny, staring into every corner of the room at once. It probably seemed like there were dozens of them, but in reality there were only six or eight animals—squirrels and chipmunks and a pale little desert mouse, all of them stuffed and mounted so that they seemed to perch at the edge of the shelf, tiny claws curled around the edges of the painted board, hunching and crouching and tensed to jump, mouths open and leering, like so many gargoyles about to come to life.
3
Los Angeles
December 1941
Every day when the noon bell rang, it was the lunch monitor’s job to stand at the front of the class and choose rows of students to line up, the quietest and most attentive first.
The teacher, for whom the ritual had lost some of its appeal over time—understandably, because she was at least a hundred years old—attended to her own tasks: gathering her purse and her lunch in its wicker pail, removing her glasses and placing them in the desk drawer, straightening stacks of papers. Unless the lunch monitor was utterly devoid of any sense of drama, she would drag out the selection, taking her time surveying the rows of eighth graders, and only after building sufficient suspense would she announce her choice.
Row three, you may line up.
And then the process would be repeated until everyone had lined up for lunch.
Each Monday morning, new recess and lunch monitors took up the yoke of duty, the schedule having been posted the first day of school. Lucy had waited more than three months for her turn. She had asked her mother to press her best blouse, the one with the tiny pleated ruffles around the Peter Pan collar. She had worn her favorite headband, the navy velvet with the small folded bow, and new snow-white socks. Lucy looked her best this Monday morning, and because she was Lucy Takeda, that meant she looked splendid indeed.
All through the morning she waited impatiently, forcing herself not to slouch in her seat. At last it was nearly noon. The teacher glanced up at the clock, and then looked thoughtfully at Lucy. She did not smile. Instead she closed her eyes and pinched the flabby skin between her eyebrows, frowning as though she had a headache. Then she opened her planner and ran her finger down the page. “The new hall monitor this week shall be Samuel McGinnis,” she said without inflection. “The new lunch monitor shall be Nancy Marks.”
For a second, Lucy was sure that she had heard wrong, that the teacher had made a mistake. Lucy had certainly not made a mistake—the date had been circled on the calendar at home for months.
Nancy Marks turned in her seat and gawped at Lucy, but she scrambled to her feet when the teacher snapped that she didn’t have all day. It seemed that Nancy’s voice held a note of apology as she chose Lucy’s row to go first, but as the students filed to the front of the room, Nancy did not look at her.
* * *
“It’s because you’re a Jap,” Yvonne Graziano said, not without sympathy. Yvonne and Lucy had been best friends since second grade. They huddled in the corner of the playground under an arbor covered with the canes of climbing roses gone dormant for the winter. Lucy had learned not to stand too close, or her angora coat would get stuck on the thorns.
Yvonne spoke with authority, since her eldest brother was in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at March Field, but Yvonne’s mother was worried that he would be sent to the front lines as soon as the United States entered the war.
“My dad says if there was ever a war with Japan, he’d sign up if they let him,” Lucy said, fighting back tears. She’d managed to stay proud and aloof all through lunch, though she had little appetite for the boiled egg and apple her mother had packed. “He says he’d go fight if he could.”
Yvonne nodded sympathetically. “My dad says your dad is one of the good ones. But he’s too old.”
It was true—Lucy’s father was astonishingly old. His teeth were long and yellow, and his mustache was more silver than black. Behind his shiny round spectacles his eyes—though kind, always kind—were nested in wrinkles.
“But still, he’s as American as anyone else.” On this point Lucy was less certain, because her father still spoke Japanese occasionally. He read the Rafu Shimpo, a newspaper printed only in Japanese, and conducted much of his personal business in the shops along First Street in Little Tokyo. On their anniversary, her father took her mother to dinner at the Empire Hotel; he often brought her flowers wrapped in white paper from Uyehara Florist. Even their church, Christ Community Presbyterian, was mostly filled with Japanese families on Sundays.
Still, Lucy had no doubts about her father’s patriotism. On the Fourth of July he studded the yard with tiny American flags, and he stood proudly for the national anthem at Gilmore Field when he took Lucy to see the Stars play.
Yvonne looked at her sympathetically. “That’s good. But my dad says it’s not going to matter much longer, if Japan keeps invading. He says things are bound to change.”
Yvonne’s words were as chilling as they were vague. Change was unimaginable. Lucy had grown up in the same house her parents lived in before she was born, a white two-story on Clement Street with black shutters and a porch with flowers spilling out of baskets hanging from the eaves, a nicer house than most of her friends lived in. Lucy had always had the same bedroom, the same bathroom with its pink-and-black tile and ruffled curtains in the window. The same walk to school—down Clement to the corner, crossing Normandie, and then three blocks to 156th—since the first day of kindergarten. The only changes in her life were the coverlets her mother made for her bed, the dresses hanging in her closet and the height of the two little twisty-branched trees in the front, which her mother had planted when she and her father were first married. Each year, they grew a few more inches, and Lucy knew that someday the tallest branches would reach the eaves.
Lucy knew that her father was worried too, though he refused to speak of the war while Lucy was in the room; when her parents listened to the radio after dinner, she was sent to her room to study. Of course, she snuck out and listened, anyway. And there were the newspapers: she couldn’t read a single word of the Rafu Shimpo, but the headlines at the newsstand on the way to the market were impossible to miss. Hidden Tank Army Protects Moscow. Seven Vessels Sunk Off Italy. Still, how could the events unfolding in these far-off places possibly affect Lucy and her family a million miles away in California, where even now, in the middle of winter, the air was scented with citrus blossoms?
Two boys kicked a ball past them, coattails flapping. When they saw Lucy and Yvonne, the shorter of the two skidded to a halt. “Thought you were supposed to be lunch monitor this week,” he said, sticking a finger into his ear and scratching vigorously.
Lucy couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead, she pretended to rub at a bit of dirt on the lid of her lunch pail.
“Thought you were supposed to be running home to your mama,” Yvonne snapped. “I heard her calling you. She said you wet the bed again.”
Lucy, buoyed by her friend’s loyalty, blinked and smiled shyly. But as the boy ran off and Yvonne linked an arm through hers, Lucy knew that the changes had already started, and nothing in her power could stop them.
4
That day after school, Lucy installed herself in the front parlor to wait for her father to come home.
She was tired of her parents trying to protect her from things they thought she was too young to understand. Lucy supposed that had been all right when her world was limited to the bright-colored illustrations in her picture books, the elaborate tea parties she held for her dolls and stuffed toys, the swings and the slide at the playground in Rosecrans Park.
But she was in the eighth grade now, and her world had been growing steadily for a long time. She’d read all the books in her classroom and begun on the ones on her parents’ shelves—the ones in English, anyway, most of which belonged to her mother. Some were a little melodramatic for her taste, but Lucy preferred to be bored and occasionally confused by Edna Ferber and Daphne du Maurier than by Madeline and Caddie Woodlawn.
Consulting her mother about the future was out of the question. Miyako Takeda wasn’t like other mothers: she was quieter, prone to spells and moods. Withdrawn much of the time. Easily upset. And, of course, far more beautiful, which only made her seem more delicate, somehow.
Renjiro Takeda, on the other hand, would know what to do. He was a businessman, well respected, important. Lucy pretended to read—a book called The Rains Came that had been made into a movie that she was too young to see, in which a lot of people appeared to be falling in love with each other. The book was so confusing that she didn’t intend to finish it, but it was as good as any, since she had too many things on her mind to pay attention to the words.
At last, when dark had fallen and Lucy could hear her mother moving about the kitchen getting dinner ready, the front door opened. Her father’s face lit up when he spotted Lucy reading in the wing chair, but his smile didn’t disguise his weariness. He had been looking tired much of the time lately.
“Hello, little one,” he said, removing his hat and placing it on a high peg of the coatrack. He was a natty dresser and his hat was made of fine wool, smooth to the touch, its edges turned up slightly. Next he hung his topcoat, brushing invisible specks off its tight-woven surface. Lucy liked to watch this ritual, and she waited patiently until he finished. Only then did he turn to her and hold his hands out. Lucy leapt off the chair and put her hands in his, and he swung her gently around, something she suspected she was too old for, but couldn’t bear to give up yet.
“I have something for you,” he said.
“What, Papa?”
Her father pulled a small package wrapped in shiny white paper from his pocket. Lucy unfolded it carefully, revealing a mound of sugared almonds. Sometimes he brought candied lemon peel or crystallized ginger. He owned a business packing and shipping dried apricots, and he purchased treats for Lucy and her mother from the merchants and ranchers who brought their goods to the bustling business district.
“Don’t eat them now.” Her father’s voice was teasing. “You’ll have no appetite for dinner and then Mother will be angry with me.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Lucy carefully rewrapped the package. Then she took a breath. She had to talk to him now, when her mother wasn’t listening. “Something happened today in school.”
He laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “You discovered you are actually a princess?” he pretended to guess, wiggling his eyebrows. “With a crown and a kingdom to rule?”
When Lucy was younger, her father would tell fantastical stories of apricots delivered by teams of white horses pulling wagons with silver fittings that sparkled in the sun, apricots so plump and perfect that each had a single green leaf attached to its stem, and he had to hire a pretty lady just to pluck the leaves and drop them into a basket, all day long. Lucy pretended to believe her father’s stories long after she understood that they were invented. She knew they pleased her mother. More precisely, Lucy knew that her own happiness pleased her mother, that the tableau they made, the three of them, prosperous and modern in their kitchen with its sleek metal cabinets and green tiles, was an achievement Miyako could never bring herself entirely to believe in.
Already her father was moving toward the hall. Lucy knew he was anxious to greet her mother; he kissed her each evening as carefully as if she were made of spun sugar, and the smile he gave her was different from the one he had for Lucy. It was almost shy, if a father could ever be said to be shy. Usually, Lucy liked watching her father kiss her mother, but tonight she had to talk to him first.
“Papa, be serious. I want to ask you about something. About the war.”
That got his attention. Renjiro Takeda’s shoulders went rigid, and he turned slowly to face his daughter. His skin was stretched tight across his face; the lines around the corners of his mouth and under his eyes looked even deeper. “There is no war,” he said quietly. “Not in America.”
“But there’s going to be.”
“Who told you that?” His voice hardened, and Lucy was afraid. Not of her father—he was never angry with her, he was always kind—but of what the shift in his mood signified. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Nobody. I mean, the kids at school talk.”
“President Roosevelt will keep us out of the war. You don’t need to worry.” But he didn’t sound as certain as Lucy would have liked.
“But Papa...I was supposed to be lunch monitor today.”
Her mother’s steps echoed in the hall; she was coming to see what the delay was. Lucy put a hand on her father’s arm and spoke quickly, lowering her voice. “Papa, I was supposed to be lunch monitor but Nancy was instead, and Yvonne said it’s because I’m a Jap and her father says things are changing and—”
But her father was cupping a hand to his ear and frowning, and she knew he was about to tell her to slow down and not talk so fast, to speak up so he could hear her. He was becoming hard of hearing; her mother teased him about it and threatened to buy him one of the new Dictograph hearing aids that were advertised on the radio.
“Dinner’s almost ready!” her mother said, sweeping into the room. She’d touched up her lipstick as she always did before Renjiro came home, a slash of stark red against her fine, pale skin. “I made marble cake. And there’s ham.”
Lucy watched her father’s expression change; neither of them had missed the faint edge to Miyako’s voice, the fact that her smile was a little too brittle and her words a little too breathless. But the biggest giveaway was the cooking. Miyako was a good cook, but she rarely had the energy for more than a cursory effort. She was having one of those days, and Renjiro’s outward calm faltered before he recovered and went to kiss his wife.
Many afternoons when Lucy came home and let herself into the house with the key she wore on a chain around her neck, her mother would be lying down, her room darkened, the drapes closed. On her bedside table would be a glass of water and a folded cloth. Occasionally her mother would wet the cloth and drape it over her forehead. Lucy no longer went into her parents’ room on afternoons when the door was closed; her mother had asked her not to.
“You’re thirteen,” she’d said shortly after Lucy’s birthday the prior year, before closing the bedroom door gently on Lucy’s face. “Old enough to take care of yourself for an hour or two while I rest.”
But sometimes, every week or two, there would be a day when Miyako’s mood would swing in the other direction. She would have energy to spare. She cleaned and rearranged furniture, even though a lady came to clean every week. She tried new recipes and produced more courses than the three of them could eat. She met Renjiro at the door in her nicest apron and sat with him after dinner, talking breathlessly, her words chasing each other, instead of working on her embroidery by herself in the kitchen as she usually did. Nights like these were likely to end with the muffled sounds of Miyako crying in her bedroom, her father’s voice a smooth blanket, his words unintelligible through the wall their bedroom shared with Lucy’s. Long after they were finally silent, Lucy would lie awake in the dark, wondering what had made her mother so sad.
She’d missed the signs today, so preoccupied was she with what had happened at school. Now she saw her opportunity slipping away, the chance to ask her father what to do about it. Renjiro was ever solicitous of Miyako, and Lucy knew—without jealousy, with calm acceptance—that she was the lesser planet in her father’s orbit.
She felt more and more discouraged as they worked their way through her mother’s elaborate dinner. Miyako kept up a steady conversation, her sentences breaking off and starting over on entirely new subjects. She talked about a neighbor who had had something delivered in a large truck and a forecast she had heard on the radio that mentioned the possibility of hail and an article she’d read in a magazine about the first lady’s social secretary, and a dozen other things, too many to keep track of. Renjiro seemed even quieter than usual, answering in Japanese as often as he did in English, something he usually worked hard to avoid. Several times he set his fork down without eating the food he’d lifted halfway to his lips.
After dinner, Lucy stayed in the kitchen, pretending to read again, as her mother cleaned up and her father fussed with the pipe that he smoked each night to help him digest his dinner, and finally her mother’s stream of words began to slow down, like a music box that would soon need to be wound again.
Suddenly, a plate fell to the floor, causing Lucy to jump. In seconds, her mother was on her knees, and her voice broke as she scrambled for the fractured pieces.
“I’m so clumsy, I can’t even hold a plate right—”
“No, no, it’s all right, it’s nothing, let me help you.” Her father rose, setting his pipe down carefully. Then he paused, and slowly lowered himself back into his chair. “Oh. I’m sorry. Just a moment... Just give me a moment.”
Lucy looked at him in alarm. His face looked grayish, his eyes wide and glassy. “Papa, are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, of course, I’m just... Help your mother, suzume.”
“Yes, Lucy, get the dustpan.”
Lucy obeyed, breathing a sigh of relief. Her mother was fine; she had managed to bring herself back from the brink to which her mood had driven her, and her father was simply tired. He worked so hard at the factory, with all the employees for whom he was responsible, all the trucks bringing the apricots, the crates carrying them away, beautifully wrapped and packed and bearing her father’s name, all over the country. And she was her parents’ suzume, their little sparrow, and as she knelt to help pick up the broken pottery, she tried to hold on to the warm feeling that came from knowing that here in her home, she was the center of something.
* * *
The week passed slowly. Nancy took her place at the head of the class each day at noon, and Lucy pretended not to care. The boys on the playground found someone else to taunt. Miyako’s mood steadied, and when Lucy came home each day she found her mother embroidering in the parlor. She finished a rose-patterned scarf for her dresser and began a matching one for Lucy.
On Saturday Renjiro wasn’t feeling well. The next morning, he stayed in his dressing gown to read the paper, and Miyako told Lucy that if she liked, she could go to church with the Koga family from down the street.
Lucy welcomed the chance to sit in one of the pews up front between the young Koga children, her hands folded on her lap as she stole glances around the congregation, knowing she was being admired. Rarely did a week go by without someone stopping her family outside the church to tell her parents how beautiful and well-mannered Lucy was, how much she resembled Miyako. And Lucy knew that she would receive even more compliments than usual after she spent the service seated between the squirming Koga boys, helping their mother keep them quiet.
She wore her navy coat with frog closures and her patent shoes and combed her hair until it shone. Lucy knew she was a beautiful girl, but for some reason this impressed adults even more than the other children in her class. Maybe it was because she had grown up with many of them, seeing each other every day. Now that she was fourteen, Lucy thought she could see signs of maturity in her face when she looked in her mother’s vanity mirror—a narrowing of her cheeks, an arch in her brow that more closely echoed her mother’s. Lucy wasn’t particularly vain, but she had observed her mother carefully enough to know that beauty was a tool that could be used to get all sorts of nice things. The best fish in the case at the market, say, or a seat on the trolley on days when it was crowded.
As the reverend came to the end of one of his long and boring sermons and the congregation stood to sing the hymn, Lucy kept her eyes downcast as though she were praying. In reality, she was staring at Mrs. Koga’s brown pump, noting smugly how dowdy the plain, unadorned shoe was compared to the dressy high-heeled pairs in her mother’s closet. Lucy’s feet were still smaller than her mother’s, but soon they would be able to share—if she could convince Miyako that she was old enough for heels. By the age of fifteen, surely? These were the thoughts she was entertaining when the doors at the back of the church creaked open and two anxious figures burst inside, interrupting the listless singing of “Faith of Our Fathers.”
Later she would remember the unfamiliar words repeated over and over by the adults all around her, Pearl Harbor and torpedo and casualties—but in the confusion inside the church, all Lucy could think about was that some unknown disaster had taken place and she was here, daydreaming, thinking selfish thoughts while her parents were over a mile away by themselves, her father ill and her mother barely able to take care of either of them. It was the first time Lucy understood that it would fall to her to help them if something bad had happened, the first time she realized that in some ways, her childhood was already far behind her.
* * *
Somehow, in the confusion following the news, Lucy ended up walking home alone. She imagined the Kogas realizing that she was missing, and feeling terrible about it—“How could we let that poor girl out of our sight?”—but even that was small comfort. She had a sense of foreboding, and though her shiny shoes pinched her toes, smashing them together, she hurried, almost running, her breath ragged in her lungs.
When she turned down Clement Street and saw the ambulance in front of her house, she was horrified but not surprised. She’d known from the moment the strangers burst into the church that tragedy had come for her—that no matter what other cyclones of disaster had swept the world that morning, one was bearing down directly on Lucy. Everything that led up to this day had been a portent: her mother’s moods, the children’s cruelty, the glassy look in her father’s eyes—disaster.
Two men emerged from her front door as she ran toward her house. Between them they carried a stretcher bearing a figure covered with a blanket. Behind them, a woman came out onto the porch, holding the door—Aiko Narita, her mother’s best friend.
Lucy ran to the stretcher and threw herself upon it. Her father’s shoe jutted out underneath the blanket. If she could just get to him quickly enough, before they took him to the ambulance, there was a chance she could bring him back. If she touched his face, he might feel her hands and choose not to go. If she called his name, he might hear her, and understand that he couldn’t leave them behind, not like this.
The two men didn’t see her coming, and they were startled. One of them said a bad word. Lucy’s fingers barely brushed the blanket when she was seized from behind and held in strong arms. She fought as hard as she could, but Auntie Aiko held her more tightly, and the men carried her father to the back of the ambulance, where the doors stood wide to receive them.
“No, no, no, Lucy,” Aiko’s familiar voice crooned in her ear. Lucy kicked as hard as she could, connecting with Aiko’s shin; she tried to bite Aiko’s arm but couldn’t quite reach. She heard her own voice screaming, couldn’t get enough air. “It’s going to be all right,” Aiko gasped, struggling to contain her. “It’s going to be all right.”
Auntie Aiko was a liar. Lucy knew that she wanted to help, but everything was wrong and Aiko wouldn’t let go, and she saw her chance slipping away as the doors to the ambulance closed and after a moment it started slowly down the street. Aiko tried to carry her back up the steps into the house, but Lucy twisted savagely and almost managed to slip away. Aiko caught the hem of her coat and dragged her back. The coat’s buttons popped off and went rolling down the sidewalk. One went over the curb, through the grate, and disappeared into the blackness below the street.
One more loss, and finally Lucy gave up and allowed herself to be dragged, limp in Aiko’s arms. The button had been etched with the design of an anchor. They would never find another to match. The button would disappear in the muck and rotting leaves in the sewer, as the ambulance carrying her father’s body was disappearing out of view.
5
The doctor had given her mother something to help her calm down, which seemed to make her mostly sleep. Aiko had moved into the house and slept in Lucy’s parents’ bed. Lucy could hear her during the night, getting up to go to the bathroom or to get a glass of water. She missed the sound of her father’s snoring. She missed everything about her father.
The funeral would take place tomorrow. Mrs. Koga had taken her yesterday to buy a suitable dress. She and Aiko had had a whispered conference in the parlor, and Lucy had taken the opportunity to slip into her parents’ bedroom to check on her mother, something Aiko had discouraged her from doing.
Miyako had been sleeping with her hands folded under her chin, the covers pulled up neatly, almost as though she too were dead. Her face was smooth, her lips dry and pale, her eyelashes fluttering slightly as she exhaled. The flutter of the lashes was proof that she was still alive, at least. Lucy watched her for a moment and then tentatively touched her hand. It was warm. After a moment, Lucy went around to the other side of the bed and got in, lifting the covers carefully and inching slowly across until she was pressed up against her mother.
She burrowed her face into her mother’s arm. She could smell her mother, an unwashed smell that was both unfamiliar and welcome. Usually, her mother smelled like perfume and hair spray and the cloud smell from the laundry. Lucy burrowed deeper, inhaling as much as she could, and wished that she could stay here, that Mrs. Koga would go away and Aiko wouldn’t notice. She wished that she could stay here all night with her mother and maybe, in the morning, her mother would wake up and the first person she would see would be Lucy. She would look into Lucy’s eyes that were so much like her own and decide to be brave for her. She would stop taking the medicine that made her so sleepy and send Aiko home, and she and Lucy would decide together what to do next.
But of course that wasn’t what happened. Lucy had gone downtown with Mrs. Koga. She had nodded numbly when Mrs. Koga asked if the dress, the hat, the slip were all right, and when she got home Aiko had made a pot of bad-smelling soup with vegetables and thick noodles. Aiko’s own husband had been dead since almost before Lucy could remember, and she was closer to Lucy’s father’s age than her mother’s. Lucy supposed she might end up staying forever, now that her father was dead, and she wondered what would happen to Aiko’s house and her two fat cats, one white and one tabby, who were never allowed outside because they killed the birds that came to the feeder Aiko had hung from a tree. The cats, the birds—Lucy supposed they would have to learn to fend for themselves now that Aiko had moved here.
A man arrived with a load of dishes and napkins and silver for tomorrow. Another brought a stack of funeral programs from the printer. They had a picture of her father on the front, one Lucy knew well since it sat in a silver frame on her mother’s dresser; in the photograph, his hair was still dark and he wore a suit he no longer owned. The program was in both English and Japanese, and Aiko said that the readings had been her father’s favorite. Lucy doubted that was true—she’d caught him napping in church more than once, and she was certain he only went to please her mother.
People would be coming to the house after the funeral. Lucy had attended two funerals already, so she knew what to expect: people would talk in quiet voices, and the ladies would make trips in and out of the kitchen, even though there would be hired help to do all the serving. The men would drift farther and farther from the women, until eventually some of them would be outside, huddled and smoking and shivering in the cold. Her mother would be required to talk to everyone, but at least she would be allowed to sit down, and a few words would suffice. No one ever wanted to talk to the grieving widow for very long. It was one of those things that grown-ups did that they obviously didn’t want to do. There seemed to be so many of those, the more Lucy understood about growing up.
Aiko said that Lucy needed to stay at home for a while, that she could miss some school. Next week would come soon enough, she said. Lucy had asked if she could call Yvonne, but Aiko frowned and shook her head.
Something else was bothering Lucy. Aiko had moved the radio into Miyako’s bedroom, where they listened to it after dinner, the sound turned down too low for Lucy to hear, even with her ear pressed to the closed door. Also, the newspaper was nowhere to be found. Lucy kept meaning to get up early enough to go out and get it from the drive, but each day she woke to find Aiko already up and busy around the house, the paper hidden away.
She thought of sneaking out, waiting until Aiko was in with her mother and slipping out the front door. She could walk to the newsstand; she had an entire piggy bank full of coins. She could buy a chocolate soda at the drugstore and read the paper. Only someone was sure to see her and insist on bringing her home. Everyone knew her father was dead; there was no way she could escape the eyes of the neighborhood.
Lucy filled the long and restless hours reading pages from her mother’s books, the words lost to her as soon as she’d scanned each page. Instead, her mind turned over the words shouted in the church, the ones that had seemed to put in motion the terrible events that followed—and the words printed on the neat stack of programs on the dining room table.
Pearl Harbor. Torpedo. Casualties.
Renjiro Takeda, 1879–1941.
* * *
On the day of the funeral, Aiko never left Miyako’s side. In the church, Lucy squeezed between them in the pew; at the graveside she allowed herself to be pressed against Aiko’s wool coat, but she never let go of her mother’s hand. Back at the house, though, they were separated. Someone had moved the red couch to the center of the parlor, and there was only enough room for Aiko and Miyako to sit.
Lucy stationed herself near the front door and gave herself the job of answering it. By doing so she could avoid going into the parlor with all the flowers surrounding her father’s picture. His photo somehow made it seem like he was not only dead but fading from the house, memories and all, slipping away a little more each day.
Late in the day, when people were already beginning to leave, the doorbell rang one last time. Lucy opened it to discover two Caucasian men dressed in fedoras and black coats standing on the porch. They did not remove their hats. Neither smiled. For a moment Lucy thought they must be men her father knew from his business, perhaps other merchants from Banning Street, but surely they would have come sooner if they meant to pay their respects.
“Please get an adult,” the shorter of the two men said. He had a large nose the color of an eraser.
Lucy said nothing, backing away from the door, and when the men followed her inside, she wondered if she should have asked them to stay outside. It wouldn’t do to bother her mother or Auntie Aiko. This was the sort of thing a father should handle, but who could she ask? Lucy turned and hurried to the kitchen, where some of the men had been smoking and talking earlier, but they had dispersed and were standing in groups of two and three, collecting their wives and their coats, preparing to take their leave. There were only twenty or twenty-five guests left, perhaps a quarter of those who had filled the home earlier, and of those who remained, none were familiar to Lucy. Her father was not in the habit of bringing friends and associates home.
But the two strangers followed her into the parlor, and the one who had spoken earlier put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Lucy was astonished, both by the sheer volume the man was able to produce and by his audacity. But before she could respond, the other one, a tall, thin man nearly as old as her father, clapped his hands and began to speak.
“Martin Sakamoto and Kenjiro Hibi. Please identify yourselves.” Lucy saw Mrs. Hibi step forward uncertainly, searching the room for her husband.
“Martin and his wife left,” someone said from the back of the room, and there was nodding and a murmur of agreement. The taller Caucasian scowled and muttered something to his partner.
They were holding something in their hands, small wallets containing badges that flashed gold. Lucy heard whispers of “FBI,” and the worry that had had taken hold of her when she’d opened the door bloomed into full-scale fear. She edged along the perimeter of the room, trying to get to the red couch; her mother looked dazed, leaning against Auntie Aiko for support.
“See here, you can’t come in here.” One of the mourners, a man Lucy thought she recognized from one of her visits to see her father at work, stepped toward the FBI men. “This is a funeral. It isn’t decent.”
“Are you Mr. Hibi?”
The man hesitated, glancing over to Miyako’s piano, where Mr. Hibi was standing with a plate in his hand. There was a half-eaten slice of cake on the plate, the pale green pistachio cream cake that someone had brought from the bakery. Mr. Hibi slowly lowered the plate to the shiny black surface of the piano. Lucy was shocked—no one ever set anything on the piano; her mother would not allow it.
“You’ll come with us, sir,” the shorter FBI man said.
“Where are you taking him?” Mrs. Hibi looked like she was about to cry. She hurried to her husband’s side and took his arm, as though to hold him back. “Where are you taking my husband?”
“We just need to ask him some questions, ma’am.”
Lucy had reached the other side of the room, and she made a run for it, dashing to the couch and crawling up into her mother’s lap. She was trembling; she hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. Aiko had been too busy with her mother to make Lucy eat, and she hadn’t felt like it. Now she felt as though she might faint. Her mother patted her back absently, and her hands were cool and dry.
Aiko stood. She was a small woman, but her arms and legs were thick and her hands were strong. “You must go now.” Her voice trembled, but she took a step toward the FBI men.
“I’ll come with you.” Mr. Hibi pulled his arm away from his wife and didn’t look back. “Leave this widow in peace.”
But even this did not seem to shame them. Everyone watched in silence as they escorted him through the house. He looked back, once, and then they were gone.
Mrs. Hibi made a small mewling sound. Lucy’s father, in his photograph, seemed to watch in sorrow.
* * *
Mr. Hibi did not return. Within days, other men had been rounded up and taken somewhere to be interrogated. No one knew where they were. None came home. The phone rang throughout the day and Lucy could hear Aiko’s urgent voice; by eavesdropping carefully she learned that windows had been broken at the drugstore and several of the warehouses along East Second Street, only blocks from her father’s building. Aiko asked Lucy to go to the store for her and then immediately changed her mind, and they went together instead. There was almost no one in the streets; the barbershop window held a large hand-painted sign that read, I Am an American. Lucy read the headlines as they passed the newsstand: 4,000 Japanese Die in Submarine Raid. Hong Kong Siege Is Begun.
The following Monday, Lucy was dressing for school when Auntie Aiko came into her room. Her face was pale and her eyes were red. Lucy knew she had been crying, which seemed strange to her because her mother had not cried since her father died. She’d barely spoken, barely eaten; she was like a shadow in the house, coming out when Aiko insisted she try to eat, bathing when Aiko led her to the bathroom.
“No school today,” Aiko said. “We have work to do.”
They went through the house room by room, taking everything that Lucy’s father had brought with him from Japan, all the beautiful things that had belonged to his family: photographs, dishes, lacquer boxes, mother-of-pearl hair clips that had belonged to his mother, tiny ornamental dolls. There was a Bible printed in Japanese that Lucy had never seen him read, silk ribbons marking certain passages. There was an old set of calligraphy brushes and inkstones that Lucy had always wanted to play with but her mother had never allowed her to touch.
It took two days to find everything that had come from Japan, was printed in Japanese, or even hinted at Lucy’s father’s ties to the Japanese community. “They think we are sending messages,” Aiko fumed, as she opened boxes containing old kimonos in gorgeous silks and added them to the growing pile in the parlor.
“Messages to who?”
“Whom,” Miyako said. She barely spoke, and wasn’t much help with the sorting and assembling. Her embroidery gathered dust in the basket, the hoops left too long on the linen leaving permanent circles that would not block out. Occasionally she would take an interest in some object, holding and examining it until Aiko gently took it back from her. Lucy was beginning to wonder if her mother was going crazy, since her conversation was limited to a few lucid sentences in the mornings as she picked at the toast Aiko forced her to eat. By evening she was almost entirely silent, and most nights she went to bed as soon as the sun went down.
“To whom,” Lucy acquiesced.
“The emperor, I suppose. The Japanese army.”
“But we’re at war with them now. Why would we be sending them messages?”
Aiko’s expression turned more bitter than Lucy had ever seen it. “It seems that some people have forgotten that we’re Americans too.”
“Well, I haven’t,” Lucy said fiercely.
But later, when the sun had set and the sky was slowly purpling over the rooftops, Aiko asked her to help carry the big pile of precious belongings into the backyard. She’d built a fire in the center of the sidewalk that led from the back door to the detached garage, and already Renjiro’s old sheet music was burning.
“We have to burn it all?” Lucy asked, horrified. She had assumed the heirlooms were to be stored somewhere safe until after the war.
“Yes, and quickly too. The FBI has been to half the houses in Little Tokyo. It’s only a matter of time before they come looking here.”
“But they were already here. When they took Mr. Hibi away.”
Aiko gave her a grim look. “At least they can’t take your papa now. But we don’t want to give them any reason to think we’re not loyal.”
The dolls, in the end, took the longest to burn, and as they did, they gave off thick, noxious smoke. The dishes had to be smashed with a hammer Lucy found in the garage, and the paint curled and flaked from the shards as they burned. When it was finally finished, she and Aiko came inside the house to wash and change out of their smoky, dirty clothes, tears mixing with sweat and soot on her face.
Lucy gasped when she saw Miyako sitting in a chair she’d pulled near the back window. She hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights as night fell, and her face was pale and almost luminous in the flickering glow of the dying fire. Miyako said nothing as Aiko pressed a hand to her shoulder and sighed, and Lucy wondered if her mother had ever even blinked as she watched the treasures burn.
6
The holidays came and went. There was no Christmas tree, no tinsel, no candles in the windows as they had been in the past. Aiko moved back into her house on New Year’s Eve, but she still visited almost every day. Lucy helped Aiko burn her own mementos from her childhood in Japan, and all the things from her husband’s family. After that, Aiko’s house seemed as bare and joyless as their own.
Miyako seemed to come out of her funk. “Time for you to go back to school,” she said briskly the Monday that classes were to resume after the Christmas break. “No sense sitting inside forgetting everything you’ve learned.”
The morning she was to return to school, Lucy tucked some money from her allowance into her pocket, planning to buy some iced cookies from the bakery on the way home. But as she walked past it, she was startled to see that the windows had been soaped and a sign read Lost Our Lease. The bakery was gone.
At school, Lucy ran to find Yvonne. She hadn’t spoken to her friend since before her father died. It seemed like months had gone by, not weeks. There was so much to tell. Lucy didn’t realize how much she had missed Yvonne until she spotted her hanging up her coat.
“Hi,” she said, as nonchalantly as she could manage.
Yvonne looked at her, then quickly away. A red flush stole over her face. “I have to go,” she muttered, and went to her seat. Lucy thought about following her, but the bell rang, and besides, Yvonne had made it clear: she no longer wanted to be friends.
The rejection stung. Lucy was wearing the same clothes the other girls did, carrying the same schoolbooks, bringing the same foods for lunch. She could say fewer than a dozen words in Japanese, and she couldn’t read any at all.
At lunch, she walked uncertainly along the edges of the playground, her finger marking the spot in a book she’d borrowed from the library. She planned to sit under the arbor and read. She had no illusions that Yvonne would come find her there—none of the girls had even looked at her, much less spoken to her, all morning.
The boys were a different matter. “Dirty yellow Nip,” one of them had whispered earlier, when she got up to sharpen her pencil. After that, Lucy had stayed in her seat, her face burning with embarrassment. Now, three boys—two from her class and one from seventh grade—approached her, and Lucy suddenly realized that the arbor was hidden from view. The teacher on recess duty would not be able to see her if anything bad happened. Hastily she gathered up her thermos and the waxed paper her sandwich had been wrapped in and tried to shove it quickly back into her lunch pail.
“Where you going?” one of the boys said. “Need to get back to your submarine?”
Lucy had heard the rumors about the Japanese submarines said to be patrolling the coast. Aiko said it was ridiculous, that Roosevelt would never allow them to get so close. Lucy hoped it was true. “I’m just reading,” she mumbled.
“I heard your dad dropped dead. Was he a spy? Did he commit hara-kiri?”
“What?”
“You know—” The boy made a pantomime of stabbing himself in the gut.
Lucy felt tears well up in her eyes. She missed her father so much. Men had come by with papers for Miyako to sign—someone was buying the company, a man her father had done business with in the past—and Miyako had refused to answer the door until Lucy called Aiko and asked her to come over to the house. After that Lucy was afraid to mention her father, afraid of the effect it might have on her mother.
Lucy refused to let the boys see her cry, so she pushed past them, holding her book and the remains of her lunch. She had to shove against one of the boys with her shoulder to get around him, but to her surprise, he yielded easily.
“Ahondara,” she said, under her breath. It was one of the few words she knew, something her father had said when he was angry about something. She’d asked him the meaning of the word long ago, but he’d only chuckled and said that maybe it was a good thing Lucy hadn’t learned any Japanese.
Walking away from the boys, she hoped it meant something truly awful.
* * *
The odd rebalancing of Lucy’s relationship with her mother continued as the weeks passed. Aiko was busy with her own affairs—she had a sister near the Oregon border whose twin sons were in their first year of college at UC–Berkeley, and there was confusion over whether Japanese students would be forced to leave school.
Miyako made an effort: she began bathing, dressing and wearing makeup regularly again and wrote letters to all Renjiro’s distant relatives to let them know of his passing. But when Lucy tried to tell her about the teasing she was enduring at school, she seemed to shrink from the news. “Oh, suzume,” she said, laying her face in her hands and taking a shuddering breath. And so Lucy took back her words, swore she had exaggerated, and finally took to lying and saying that everything at school was fine.
With Aiko gone to see her sister, Lucy was able to come and go freely from the house. When her father was alive, she hadn’t been much of a wanderer. Now she used the excuse of doing her mother’s shopping to walk past Japanese-owned businesses, to see which were still occupied and which had boarded-up windows. She loitered near groups of men talking outside the barbershop, the drugstore, the tobacconist, and she heard the talk: Japanese were to be herded up like cattle, jailed, deported, tortured... No one seemed to know, but everyone had an opinion.
Late in February, she passed the newsstand and saw headlines screaming Japs to Be Sent Inland. With pounding heart, she bought a paper and read it on the way home. President Roosevelt had signed an executive order that excluded people from military areas. There were a lot of things in the article that Lucy didn’t understand, but from the anxious buzz of people on the street, she knew it was bad.
This was one piece of news she could not keep from her mother. She handed the newspaper to Miyako and watched her mother read, her lips pressed together, a hand over her heart. She didn’t move until she had read the entire article, and then she sighed and looked up to the ceiling. Lucy waited, hardly daring to breathe, until at last her mother spoke. “It’s just me and you, suzume. Come here.”
Lucy hesitated. She hadn’t sat on her mother’s lap since she was a baby. She knew her mother cherished her; Miyako knelt and kissed her before school each day and loved to comb and style Lucy’s hair, patting her face when she finished. But Miyako was not the sort of mother one read about in books: she wasn’t soft or round, she didn’t wear an apron and she didn’t invite embracing.
“Come,” Miyako repeated, motioning Lucy to her lap with both hands. Lucy went. She climbed up carefully, afraid of hurting her mother’s thin skin, her pale limbs, but her mother held her close with surprising strength. For a second Lucy remained rigid in her arms, and then she relaxed against her mother’s breast and tucked her head under her chin, inhaling deeply, getting as close as she could. She felt tears well up in her eyes and was afraid she might cry—tears would stain the silk of her mother’s blouse.
“My little Lucy,” Miyako crooned, rocking Lucy slowly in her arms. “Just you and me. Your father has left us and now we must leave our home.”
“No,” Lucy whispered, frightened by the despairing words. She pressed more tightly against her mother. “They can’t make us. This is our house.”
Her mother laughed, a light, lilting sound that belied her mood. “Oh, my little suzume, you have the spirit of your father. He always promised me that everything will be fine. He said he would always protect me, that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me ever again.”
Miyako pulled away gently, and Lucy saw that she had gotten tears on the blouse, despite her best effort—the pale blue was stained dark in two tiny spots. But her mother either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She held Lucy’s hands in hers and brought her face close. “I want to tell you that. That I can protect you. But the truth is, no one can. The war has come to us. If President Roosevelt says we must go, then we will have to go.”
“But...where?”
Miyako shrugged her delicate shoulders. “What does it matter? Gone is gone.”
* * *
Aiko was back in two days, bringing tins of walnuts from an orchard near her sister’s house. Lucy cracked them on the back porch, sneaking bits of the sweet nutmeats as she worked, while the women talked in the kitchen. This time, they made it clear she wasn’t to come inside until they were finished: they were taking no risks that she would hear.
The afternoon had been unseasonably warm—late February and already the thermometer edged close to sixty degrees—but as evening approached the sun dipped low in the sky and Lucy began to shiver with the cold. She was glad, for her mother’s sake, that Aiko had returned, but she also felt a little resentful. When Aiko was around, Lucy had to concede the job of looking after Miyako, and the truth was that, now that she had no friends at school, being Miyako Takeda’s daughter was the most—perhaps the only—special thing about her.
Lucy had always known that her mother was beautiful. Miyako Takeda’s beauty was so remarkable that it was not considered improper to comment on it. “Your mother should be movie star,” the fish man said as he wrapped their mackerel in paper. “Star in movie with James Cagney.”
But it was only after Lucy started seventh grade last year that she had realized what should have been obvious: she looked exactly like her mother. Maybe her childish features had hidden the resemblance for a while, but when Lucy walked down the street with her mother now, she knew that the double takes and catcalls were meant for both of them. Her mother would not allow her to roll her hair or wear lipstick, but the resemblance could no longer be disguised.
Lucy knew that she still had some maturing to do before her transformation was complete. Where her mother’s lips were sensually full, her own were still the bow shape of a child’s. Her mother’s eyes narrowed and tilted, elongated at the outer corners in a manner that suggested mischief, while Lucy’s retained the wide-open look of youth. Miyako’s fine cheekbones sculpted the planes of her face exquisitely: Lucy’s had yet to become pronounced.
But there was no hint of her father in her face. Despite his success, his breeding—his father’s father had been an important man in Japan, a respected merchant with several homes—Renjiro’s appearance had been coarse, his skin pocked underneath his beard, his nose flat and his brow jutting. Lucy was proud to be his daughter, to be a Takeda. But she was very pleased that she resembled her mother.
Lucy knew little about the years between her mother’s birth and her arrival, at the age of seventeen, at Renjiro Takeda’s factory, where she applied for a job packing apricots into crates. She knew that Miyako was the daughter of farm laborers, and that her mother had died giving birth. Miyako had managed to stay in school until the tenth grade, had learned to sew and embroider and had earned money with her needlework. Something had happened when she was fourteen or fifteen—something terrible, something that had acted as a turning point in Miyako’s life. She had left her father behind and gone to the city, where it had taken several more years—and these she never spoke of, so Lucy did not know how her mother had supported herself or where she’d lived—before she found herself in Renjiro Takeda’s factory looking for work. Her father had loved to tell stories of how unsuited Miyako was to the noisy, backbreaking work on the line, how he promoted her to a position in the office after a week because he could not bear to see her distress. And then he had married her only a few months later.
Lucy sensed that life had punished her mother for her will to survive, that she had been tested and marked repeatedly, the scars cutting deeper each time they were opened. Lucy, and to some pale extent her father, were her respite and, on the very best days, her fleeting joy. But they were not her central truth. The core of her mother was fraught and dread-drenched, and Lucy feared that the loss of her father and the threat of upheaval were beginning to erode the fragile peace Miyako had molded from the ashes of her early years.
Lucy finished shelling the walnuts. The nutmeats filled the small bowl her mother had given her, the shells rustling in the tin. Lucy took a handful of shells and squeezed, harder and harder until their sharp edges cut cruelly into her palm, before flinging them onto the remains of the backyard fire, which winter rains had reduced to a lumpy, blackened scar on the sidewalk. For a moment Lucy thought she might throw the rest, the bits she’d worked so hard to pry from their shells, the delicate bowl, part of a matched set. Let them be lost, broken, ruined—what did it matter?
But inside the house was her mother, and no matter how fragile the strands that linked them, Lucy would do nothing to further erode her peace. She would endure and she would wait, and she would be ready when Miyako needed her.
7
On a chilly Tuesday a couple of weeks later, Lucy walked to the store with coins in her fist, thinking about the Nancy Drew book she was currently rereading. She’d discovered the series when she was ten, but the first time she read The Secret of Shadow Ranch, she’d missed all the clues. Now as she walked along, she thought about the way Carolyn Keene constructed the mystery, the clues layered in among Nancy’s adventures. Nancy was brave, but she was also lucky, with her friends and her clothes and car and her handsome, dependable father. And she got to go to such interesting places, and war never intruded into her world, and she and her friends stopped the bad guys from getting away with the terrible things they’d done. Lucy thought she might like to be a detective herself, peeling away the layers of a crime until she figured out who the guilty person was. It was always a surprise, always someone you never would have guessed.
Lucy passed the boarded and broken windows, no longer sensitive to the ravages being inflicted on the neighborhood, but when she spotted a cluster of people around a lamppost in front of the movie theater, she stopped to see what the fuss was. The movie theater was one of the few places Japanese still went without fear; perhaps it was the darkness inside that made them feel safe. Had this too been taken away? Were they no longer welcome here?
Coming within a few feet of the crowd, Lucy saw that a sign had been pasted on the pole.
INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY
She craned her neck to read the smaller print below:
“All Japanese persons, both alien and nonalien, will be evacuated from the above designated area....
“The Civil Control Station will provide services with respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage or other disposition of most kinds of property....
“...transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to their new residence...”
Lucy felt cold fingers of dread creep down her neck. She turned away without reading the rest; Aiko had been predicting this day for a while now. Whenever she brought up the subject, Miyako blanched and begged her to stop. Now it was up to Lucy to finally make her understand.
She ran all the way home, and by the time she arrived, her lungs were burning and her feet pinched against the leather of her shoes. Somewhere, she’d dropped the coins without even noticing. She had not bought the tea that her mother had wanted. There would not be enough for tomorrow. But what did it matter?
Lucy burst through the front door and nearly collided with Aiko, who was standing in the parlor. For a moment neither said anything; Lucy could see from Aiko’s eyes that she already knew.
Aiko knelt down and took Lucy’s hand in hers. “I’ve already told her. Lucy... It’s going to be okay. We’ll put our things in storage. It’s not forever. It’s... It’ll be like an adventure.”
Lucy allowed Aiko to caress her arms, to keep speaking. The words blurred together as she nodded; what she most wanted was for Aiko to leave. She had to get to her mother. Had to see for herself what damage this latest onslaught had done.
At last Aiko released her and went to the kitchen, where Lucy could hear her rattling pots. Her mother had started the dinner before Lucy had left; Lucy supposed that Aiko would now finish it. The two worked well together that way. How many times had they cooked together in one or the other’s kitchen? How many times had they taken the sun on balmy afternoons in the backyard, pruned the crape myrtles lining the street in front of both their houses, looked through magazines, listened to the radio, mended and darned and embroidered together?
But her mother needed her now. She crept down the hall to her mother’s room, certain Aiko would tell her to leave her mother be. Slipping noiselessly into the room, she let her eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. But her mother wasn’t asleep. She was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows, with her arms folded across her chest and the blankets drawn neatly up over her lap.
“We’re to be evacuated,” she said to Lucy. “Come sit.”
It was the second time in recent weeks that Miyako had invited Lucy into her embrace, and Lucy slipped off her shoes and clambered up onto the bed. She realized that her mother still slept in the same spot that she had when her father was alive, and that, as she crawled under the covers next to her mother, she was on his side of the bed. She wondered if it was true, what the pastor had said when he’d come to the house to pay his respects, that her father was able to look down from heaven and see them. She hoped so. Just in case, she fixed a smile on her face so that he would see she was taking good care of Miyako.
“Auntie Aiko says we can store our things.”
Miyako frowned. “Maybe some of them. But, suzume, I have been thinking, we don’t need so many things anymore. All this big furniture...all those clothes...”
She gestured at the heavy oak armoire, which was just a bulky outline in the darkened room. Lucy had always loved her parents’ furniture, a matched set purchased when they had married. Another of the stories her father loved to tell: taking his young bride-to-be to the best department stores in Los Angeles—how shy she was!—and telling her to pick out anything she liked. She had never been inside Bullock’s before that day, and the sales clerks were practically falling all over themselves to wait on her, assuming she must be someone important, dressed in the finely tailored clothes she had made for herself.
“But you can’t give all of our things away,” Lucy whispered. The neat row of dresses, the drawers full of silken camisoles and slips, the bottles of perfume and the mirrored tray that held her cosmetics—what would her mother be without these things? “We can take them with us. The sign said. You just pack and the government...”
But Lucy wasn’t at all sure what the government would do for them. On the sign it had said something about storing household possessions if they were “crated and clearly marked.” But this was the voice of the same force that broke down doors in the middle of the night, that cut slits in people’s sofas looking for evidence of treason, that broke treasured records in half just because the labels bore Japanese words. How could they possibly be expected to care for Lucy and Miyako’s possessions?
“We have a little time,” Miyako said. “We will start tomorrow.”
She raised her arm, making room for Lucy against her side. It was easy to fall asleep, listening to her mother’s breathing. And when Lucy woke again—many hours later, in the middle of the night—she found that her mother had curled around her, holding her in the curve of her body, making a cocoon with her thin arms.
* * *
In the confusion and panic surrounding the evacuation order, Miyako and Auntie Aiko somehow managed to learn what goods could be packed to be sent along later, and what would have to be stored until after the war, and began to prepare. They were to report to the Methodist church on Rosecrans Avenue on March 22, bringing only what they could carry, but it wasn’t clear what was to happen after that. The newspaper reported that the newly formed War Relocation Authority had secured land in the Owens Valley near the Sierra Mountains, and even now workers were building quarters for the thousands of Japanese Americans being ousted from their homes. But there were also rumors of people being sent to racetracks and fairgrounds all over California and forced to sleep in horse stalls, and no one could say for sure where anyone would be going on the twenty-second.
What was immediately clear was that the process would be neither easy nor orderly. By the second day after the sign was posted, the local stores ran out of twine and luggage. Entire blocks in Little Tokyo were vacated, and speculators swooped in offering cents on the dollar for the ousted merchants’ inventories. Soon, other men began going door-to-door, making offers for entire housefuls of family possessions. At first these offers were rebuffed, but before long frantic families began to realize that an insulting offer was the best they would receive.
After several days shuffling their belongings among ever-changing piles, Miyako and Auntie Aiko decided to be practical about what to store and what to ship. Into their boxes went bowls and pencils and writing paper, scissors and Father’s gooseneck lamp and extra lightbulbs, pillowcases and serving spoons. For a long time, Mother did not pack her embroidery box. It sat next to a stack of dessert dishes on the table, waiting for her to decide, the thimbles and packets of needles and skeins of colorful floss arranged neatly in the lacquered box, the contents of which Lucy knew by heart even without opening the lid. She understood her mother’s dilemma, because while the embroidery was beautiful, it was also useful; her mother only embroidered things one could use, like pillowcases and towels and bedcovers and tablecloths. In the end, the box was packed, which was only a fleeting comfort.
Lucy went across the street the morning they were to leave to return a hammer her mother had borrowed from Aiko to seal their crates, and found Aiko in tears.
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Oh, oh. Lucy. I’m sorry.” Aiko turned away from her and swiftly dried her eyes on a handkerchief. “I can live without all of this. But...Bluebell and Lily...”
Her cats. Of course. Bluebell and Lily trusted only Aiko; despite Lucy’s patient efforts, they never warmed up to her enough to allow her to pet them.
“I’m sorry about your cats,” Lucy said softly. She touched the hem of Aiko’s skirt. The fabric was stiff with starch and smelled like Aiko’s familiar perfume.
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Aiko cleared her throat and forced a smile. “Mrs. Marvin down the street will take good care of them for me. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
But the men with the truck were late, and Aiko and Miyako were nearly frantic with worry by the time they finally pulled up to the curb. The bed of the truck was already so laden down with other people’s belongings that Lucy didn’t see how they could add any more, but the men lashed their boxes on top of the heap and drove away.
Lucy was wearing her best school dress and her good coat, and Aiko was wearing a suit and a hat with a small, glossy feather fanned out along the brim, but it was Miyako who people stared at as they walked through the neighborhood with their suitcases. Lucy knew that her mother took comfort in making up her face when she was feeling anxious; by painting and powdering her face, it was as if she created an extra layer to hide behind. Today she wore a simple olive serge dress with a matching coat, and had fixed her hair in an elaborate pompadour on top of her head. She was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses with pearly frames; they were too large for her face, but they made her look mysterious, unapproachable even, and Lucy knew that was the point.
It was chaos at the church. Caucasian volunteers sat at desks with long lists of names, and uniformed servicemen tried to organize the milling families and their belongings, but it seemed to take hours for their turn. They were given tags for their luggage and one for Lucy to wear around her neck, since she was still a child. Each family’s tags bore their name, and Lucy thought it was sad that Auntie Aiko’s suitcase was the only one bearing the name NARITA. Better that she should have been part of their family; better that she be a TAKEDA, at least until the war was over and they could come home.
At last, the assembled crowd was directed aboard buses, and the buses took them to the train station downtown. There were so many people, so many faces. Lucy searched the crowd for people she knew, but everyone from her neighborhood had become separated in the vast, milling throng. The string around her neck that held the tag pulled and itched, but she said nothing. The other children she saw were silent, their eyes wide. Even the adults spoke quietly, lapsing into silence whenever soldiers walked among them.
Lucy had never ridden on a train before, and as they pulled out of the station and everything familiar disappeared behind them, it did not seem possible that the boxes that her mother and Aiko had packed would be able to find them. How would their belongings find their way beyond the Santa Monica Mountains to the flat valley beyond, places Lucy had never seen? As the hours passed, she kept her face pressed to the train window, while her mother and Auntie Aiko talked in quiet voices. She saw orchards that looked like the pictures in her father’s advertising brochures, and fields of strawberries and corn, little towns and ranches and children with no shoes waving madly as the train raced past.
At times, it almost felt like an adventure, except that the other passengers were silent and glum. Some cried, some slept, some talked in low voices. When a young soldier with acne freckling his cheeks told the passengers sitting next to the windows to pull down the blackout shades—even though it was bright afternoon—people complied without a word, and they were all plunged into darkness. Later, they were allowed to put the blinds up again, and someone had brought a box of oranges into the car, enough for everyone, and soon the air was full of the bursting scent of citrus.
Plump orange segments, bright and sharp on Lucy’s tongue, a treat. Was this what life was to be like from now on? Monotony and confusion, other people’s sadness and fear making it hard to breathe, punctuated by these small and unexpected pleasures?
* * *
In Bakersfield, they transferred from the train to waiting buses. Lucy clutched her tag and her mother’s hand, as she had promised, and tried not to look at the watchful soldiers with their billed caps shielding their eyes, their gleaming guns. The bus was crowded and smelled of exhaust; people coughed and the soldiers in the front struggled to keep their footing as it rolled out of town and onto a road that followed a twisting mountain gorge. As the bus took steep climbs and hairpin turns, Lucy peering out at the breathtaking drop-offs outside her windows, there were quiet moans and the sound of retching from those afflicted with motion sickness. It wasn’t long before the bus was filled with the stink of vomit.
It was night when they finally pulled off the road that bisected the flat valley between two mountain ranges. Somehow, in the miserable, fetid bus, Lucy had fallen asleep with her head in her mother’s lap, an indulgence Miyako would not have allowed even six months ago.
When the bus groaned to a halt, a buzz of excited conversation rose all around them. Lucy pressed her face to the window. In the distance a mountain peak rose up into the night, illuminated by moonlight, snow topped and impossibly vast. It was the biggest thing Lucy had ever seen, bigger than anything she had ever imagined.
And laid out in either direction along the wide dirt avenue where the bus had stopped were long, low buildings like dominoes arranged on a table. Above them the sky was bigger than it ever was in Los Angeles, and dusted with so many stars that it looked like talcum powder had been spilled across it.
“Last stop,” the driver said, perhaps joking; but after he cranked the doors open, it was several moments before anyone made a move. The air was cold here; while Lucy slept, her mother had covered her with a wrap taken from her valise. But the air that rushed into the bus was far colder. The soldiers, barking orders, made clouds with their breath.
“Are you sure this is it?” Lucy whispered, but her words were lost in the hubbub as people began to file off the bus.
“Wait,” Miyako said, her free hand clutching Lucy’s coat collar. The passengers exited and formed a milling crowd outside Lucy’s window, illuminated by spotlights coming from two tall wooden towers. She searched for Aiko’s familiar coat, but there were too many people, too many unfamiliar faces.
Eventually there were only a few stragglers on the bus. “Come on,” the young soldier said impatiently, gesturing with the rifle he held in both hands. “Hurry up.”
Miyako held both their suitcases in front of her, grunting with the effort of maneuvering them down the aisle. Lucy clutched her mother’s coat and inhaled the smell of the wool. Descending the steps, Miyako accepted the help of a stranger in a jacket and tie, and Lucy couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man, who apparently owned no warm coat. Once on the ground, she tested the soil with the toe of her shoe and found it sandy. The cold rushed under her skirt and the wind lifted her hair and swirled it around her face. It was as though the place was claiming her for its own, and Lucy stood rigid and fearful, not knowing how to resist.
8
San Francisco
Wednesday, June 7, 1978
For a moment after Inspector Torre left, the house echoed with the sound of the closing door. Lucy stared thoughtfully at the cream-and-gray-plaid Formica table.
“What the hell was that about?” Patty asked, when she was certain Torre was well out of earshot.
Lucy shrugged. “You were here. You heard the same things I did.”
“That’s not what I mean. You know that’s not what I mean. Who is this guy Forrest? Obviously, you knew him well enough to remember him after all this time. Who was he?”
“Just one of the staff, Patty. And I hadn’t thought of him in ages.”
“You didn’t go see him the other morning?”
“No,” Lucy said, but she didn’t meet Patty’s eyes.
“Not just the other morning, but ever. I mean, isn’t that kind of a strange coincidence, that he lived a few streets over all this time?”
“Worked. He worked near here. I have no idea where he lived. And after the war, lots of people from the camps went to the cities. Those newsletters that come here, half those people are living in San Francisco.”
Patty knew the newsletters her mother was talking about—stapled, folded affairs that her mother threw away without reading, the efforts of a group of former Manzanar internees who were trying to get what was left of the relocation center made into a memorial or a national monument. But Patty knew that Lucy would never seek those people out. She was a loner, content with her own company. It didn’t matter that they’d shared an experience, a moment in history. It seemed as though Lucy would much prefer to erase the past completely.
“Mother, we have to figure this out. Someone thinks they saw you there.”
For a moment Lucy looked as though she was going to say something—she bit her bottom lip and drew herself up in her seat—and then she merely got up and went to pour more tea. “It wasn’t me. I was here, getting ready for work. Like always.”
Like always, except that Patty had been asleep in the next room. She should have told the inspector that—that she had been here with her mother, that she’d confirm that at six o’clock Lucy’s alarm had gone off as it always did, that she couldn’t have been anywhere near the DeSoto because she’d been in the kitchen making tea.
Only she couldn’t actually say for certain what had happened in her mother’s little house until nearly ten, when she’d finally awoken to a throbbing headache and the sticky, foul taste of a hangover in her dry mouth. It had been the morning after her bachelorette party, scheduled midweek because that was when everyone could make it. Patty had had three glasses of champagne before switching to tequila and losing count—she may have still been a little drunk when she’d finally gotten up, honestly. A train could have barreled through her mother’s house and she would never have noticed.
“Just tell me this,” she said. “This man, Reginald Forrest, how did you know him?”
Lucy finished with her tea, pouring in the sugar and stirring until it was lukewarm, the way she liked it. “He had a job in the warehouses. All the supervisor positions—all the bosses—they were from the WRA. The War Relocation Authority. He was white, of course. He must have had a couple hundred men working for him, loading and unloading. The trucks came in every day—we used to watch them, us kids. We didn’t have a whole lot else to do.”
“That’s how you knew him? Just from hanging around the camp?”
Lucy shook her head impatiently. “No. There were ten thousand of us living there, a few hundred staff. It was like a small city. It was impossible to know everyone. But he was different. He was good-looking back then. He wanted to be an actor, before the war, and when they put on shows in camp, he would help out, direct and guest star. He coached baseball too. Everyone knew him.”
“Look, Mom...” Patty tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. “Maybe this is nothing, maybe they’ll go talk to his son or his girlfriend or whatever and figure out who did this. Or declare it a suicide or something. But we have to be ready in case they come back.”
It was the face, of course. There was simply no way to argue with someone who could describe Lucy’s face. Either her mother had been there or the janitor was lying. Both possibilities seemed absurd, but one had to be true. It was that simple. And Patty had to find out which—and why—before the detective did.
Maybe she could find this janitor, ask him questions. But as soon as she had the thought, Patty dismissed it. Why would a total stranger invent such a story?
Which left the other, far more uneasy possibility: that for reasons Patty couldn’t begin to fathom, Lucy not only knew Reginald Forrest worked nearby but had gone to see him on the morning he died. If someone really had killed the man, her mother likely knew something about it.
Patty watched Lucy unload clean dishes from the drainer and put them away. How could she think her own mother could have killed someone? She could not recall a single moment of violence or even uncontrolled anger—never a spanking, never an altercation with a stranger or at work, barely a raised voice during all Patty’s teen years.
But there was the dark history Lucy carried inside her and never shared. The horrors of the war years—being forced from her home and imprisoned, and then orphaned. Patty had never blamed her mother for trying to forget, but her secrecy had created a gulf between them nonetheless. It wasn’t her mother’s external scars that kept her outside Patty’s reach, but the ones on the inside. What if they’d finally scratched their way to the surface? What if, after all these years, her mother’s history had come back to haunt her?
* * *
After Lucy left for the grocery store, Patty rescheduled her appointment at the salon for the following week. The menu, flowers, place cards—all these details had been taken care of long ago. A chronic overplanner, Patty could coast all the way to the wedding if necessary, and everything would still run smoothly.
But none of that mattered anymore, anyway. She wanted to call Jay and tell him about the detective’s visit, but he was in Atlanta for business, some important client the firm was pitching, and the last thing he needed right now was for her to drag him into a mess that might well resolve itself in a day or two. He’d taken the red-eye Sunday just so he could take her and her mom to dinner to talk about wedding details, like how the ushers would seat the guests since his family was so much larger than hers, and who would walk Patty down the aisle since she had no one to give her away. He’d been so sweet that night—she couldn’t bear to interrupt his trip. It would wait until he was home.
With Lucy out of the house, Patty had a chance to collect her thoughts. She knew she wouldn’t get anywhere with her mother; anything she wanted to know about Reginald Forrest she would have to find out for herself.
She got the phone book from the hall table. Forrest, Reginald R.—there he was, plain as day. On Oliver Street, number 225½; Patty pulled out a map and discovered that he lived only eight blocks to the west, dipping into the Outer Sunset, not the best neighborhood. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and put on her running shorts and shoes. She was just going for a jog, she told herself; what could it hurt to just take a quick look at his house from the outside?
When she found the address, she was out of breath and perspiring. The lot was overgrown, fronted by a row of palms shedding dusty brown fronds all over the sidewalk. The house itself was half hidden behind misshapen shrubs and overhanging branches. She located the house numbers, the metal 5 upside down on its nail, and figured Forrest’s apartment must be in back.
Patty slowed to a walk and looked around; the street was empty. No one would notice, and she’d just duck in for a moment. The gate had lost its latch, but it squeaked as Patty pushed past, her feet crunching on dried leaves and pods.
A cracked and broken sidewalk led around the side of the house. Patty shoved branches aside and tried to be quiet. Someone could be home in the front of the house, despite its neglected appearance. She wondered if there ought to be police tape somewhere, draped across the door perhaps, or strung between tree trunks, but then again this was only where Forrest had lived, not where he died.
The backyard was tiny, a patch of dead grass separating the house from a leaning detached garage. Broken glass littered the garage window’s sash and glittered on the ground below. A trio of disintegrating beach chairs was arranged around a rusted hibachi. A bony cat streaked past with something twitching in its mouth.
She tried the back door and found it locked. Peering through a grimy window, she saw a small kitchen with an old-fashioned fridge, a neat row of empty beer cans on a short strip of countertop, a healthy-looking houseplant trailing leaves from a macramé hanger in the corner.
“You the girl?”
The voice came from the side of the house. Startled, Patty whipped around and saw a pair of old, cracked-leather brogues, no socks, skinny legs. A figure emerged from behind the untamed oleanders: an old lady with gray hair clouding around her shoulders. She wore a man’s work shirt and a skirt that hung on her hips. “You that girl?” she repeated. “Kinah’s friend?”
Patty’s heart had begun pounding the second the old woman spoke, but now she saw that there might be an opportunity. Maybe she could find out something about Forrest from his landlady.
“Uh...” she said, stalling.
“’Cause I expected you yesterday.” A bit of spittle arced from the woman’s mouth. Patty stepped back.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“I found his boxes in the garage yesterday,” the old woman continued, as though Patty hadn’t spoken. “I called Kinah and I told her, you come get these or I’m going to throw them out. She acted like she was doing me a favor. The trouble he caused me, police coming around here—and he still owes me two hundred and sixty dollars. I suppose I won’t ever see that money. You got a car?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re gonna need a car for the boxes. They’re heavy. I don’t want that junk on my porch.”
Patty thought of Jay’s car, his beloved red TR7. Its tiny trunk was already full of his soccer gear, and besides, he’d driven it to the airport and left it in long-term parking. “I thought I’d just take a look first, maybe, see what was there?”
The old woman frowned. “I told her I’m going to throw it out. I’m going to leave it on the porch, and if it isn’t gone by tomorrow I’m going to put it in the can. Don’t be knocking later when you come back—I got my bridge ladies coming.”
“All right. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to trouble you. Can I just take a look for now?”
“Okay, but I have to get ready. I don’t have time to stand around. You come back and take all that stuff, you hear? And tell Kinah to quit calling me.”
The old woman stumped back up the path, and Patty raced to help her, holding back branches as best she could. Around front, the landlady made her way up the steps to the cracked and peeling porch, pausing at each step to drag her leg up, holding on to the rail with both hands. Next to the front door, Patty could see two water-stained cardboard boxes overflowing with junk.
“I don’t know what’s even in there,” the old woman said, steadying herself with a hand on the doorjamb and breathing hard. “He had it down the cellar six, maybe eight years. I forgot it was there when the cops were here. I’m just glad he did it at work instead of in my house. I’d never get the blood out of the carpets.”
“You think it was suicide?” Patty asked, sifting through a tangle of electric cords, a trophy, a metal stein with a beer logo etched on its surface.
“Mmm-hmm, that man was unstable. Him and Kinah, and before that, the other one. I forget her name. Besides, I don’t know who’d take the trouble to kill him. He didn’t have anybody else besides that simple boy of his, and he hasn’t been around in a long time.”
Patty wasn’t really listening. She’d sifted through the first box and found nothing interesting, but in the second, stacked neatly along one edge, were two old photo albums. She lifted them out carefully, brushing off spiderwebs and dust, and turned them over on her lap. 1939–1940 was inked in neat block letters in Magic Marker on the cloth cover of the first.
On the second was written “MANZANAR.”
9
Manzanar, Inyo County, California
March 1942
The first night in their new home, Lucy learned that the camp had a thousand different sounds.
Back in their house on Clement Street, night was the music of a small ensemble. The ticking of the furnace, the groaning of the old walls settling on their foundation, branches from the cherry tree scratching her window when the wind blew, and the squeaking of the floorboards and flush of the toilet when her parents got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. All these sounds blended together in a familiar way, soothing Lucy back to sleep whenever she woke.
But underneath the scratchy, unfamiliar blanket, Lucy shivered from the cold as noises intruded from every direction. A baby in the room next to theirs cried almost the whole night through, and Lucy heard every one of its mother’s desperate, hushed whispers through the flimsy wall. She heard murmured conversations farther down the barrack. Her mother sighed in her sleep, and when she turned, the metal cot squeaked. Several times during the night, people went to the latrine, and then Lucy heard the door opening and closing, and muffled coughing as the night air filled lungs unaccustomed to such cold.
Deep in the night, the wind picked up, and sand flung itself against the barrack’s walls and windows, the sound like an angry waterfall. Lucy could feel the rush of cold wind through gaps in the boards and then—shocking and sudden—grains of sand against her cheek. It blew up from the floor, from between the rough boards.
Lucy didn’t think she would ever sleep. But somehow, she woke with sun streaming in on her face, her eyelashes stiff with tears.
Everything was terrible at first: there were long lines for every meal, and even when a two-shift system was put into place, there was always a wait. The food seemed merely unappetizing to Lucy, but for those accustomed to a traditional Japanese diet—especially the Issei, those born in Japan—it was practically inedible. One of the first meals featured canned peaches over rice, a combination many could not force themselves to eat, to the consternation of the Caucasian cooks, who could not understand that to the Issei the combination was as incongruous as ketchup on cake.
There was also the matter of vaccinations. Everyone was required to receive a typhoid vaccine. Done assembly-line style, the dosages given the children were so high that many were sick and feverish for days. Lucy lay in her cot, fading in and out of awareness, while her mother made repeated trips to the latrine to dampen a cloth for her forehead.
Every few days, a dust storm would pummel the camp. Fine grains swept through the cracks that had formed between the floorboards as they’d cured, and came in through the rough window casings and the gaps between the roof and timbers. The dust was cagey and relentless, and the evacuees scrambled to beat it back, stuffing the cracks with straw and strips torn from rags and anything else they could find. The more enterprising took to nailing lids from food cans in overlapping rows over the cracks. But these measures seemed only to renew the storm’s efforts to find them. The fine grains felt like boulders when they found their way into one’s eyes; they were gritty in one’s teeth, sandy in one’s ears and nostrils.
At night the sound of coughing filled Lucy’s building. Everyone struggled to breathe, from the baby in the next room, whose condition was worsening by the day—her mother waited outside the temporary hospital most mornings to beg the harried doctors for medicine—to the old man at the other end of the hall who sounded like furniture being roughly pushed across a floor.
But by far, the worst of the privations was the public latrine.
On the morning after their arrival, Miyako took Lucy’s hand and they ventured out of the barrack. There were sounds of conversation up and down the row of rooms, but Miyako waited until she was sure no one else was in the hall before they left their own room.
“I will not meet my new neighbors before I have had a chance to freshen up,” she vowed fiercely, gripping Lucy’s hand so tightly that it hurt. She had a folded cloth, their toothbrushes, a comb and a tiny cake of soap in a small box that she’d had the foresight to bring for that purpose, and she had wrapped a scarf around her head and donned her dark sunglasses. Privately, Lucy thought she looked even more like a movie star in this getup, but she doubted her mother would take the observation as a compliment.
They walked the short distance to the latrine with sand blowing up under their skirts. The dust storm of the night before had settled, but sand still blew and the wind was cold on their faces. Though it was late March, the temperature had fallen below freezing the night before, and there was a rime of ice on a puddle leaking from the plumbing pipes leading into the latrine.
And there was a line. As they got close, they heard the intense, agitated conversation among the women already waiting.
“Wait, suzume,” Miyako murmured, holding Lucy back. Lucy knew her mother was loath to intrude on others’ conversation; her reticence was more imperious than shy, but she was not a naturally outgoing person. This was a subject to which Lucy had already devoted a fair amount of worry: how would her mother make friends here, if in all their time on Clement Street she’d made only one? Yesterday, after they were processed at the main office, they discovered that Aiko would be living far from their block, nearly three quarters of a mile away, sharing a room with an elderly woman and her unmarried grown daughter. The entire camp was a square mile with thirty-six blocks, and they said that ten thousand people would be living there by summer. Lucy was afraid they would never see Aiko. If her mother did not make new friends, she would be all alone.
The ladies at the door of the latrine ranged in age from a young mother with a baby on her hip to a hunched, elderly crone being supported by a younger woman—a daughter, perhaps, or a daughter-in-law. Lucy strained to hear what they were saying, but the wind prevented her from making out the words.
“Mother, I have to go,” she whispered urgently.
Miyako frowned as the door abruptly opened and two women came out, their faces downcast, and hurried down the road in the other direction. Those waiting gave them a wide berth.
A second later the smell hit Lucy. The women near the door took a step away from it, before one of them resolutely walked up the steps. A moment later, the others followed.
“Mother,” Lucy pleaded. She was afraid that she couldn’t control herself much longer, that she might urinate right here outside for everyone to see.
“All right.” Miyako’s voice was thin and worried. They went inside, Miyako never letting go of her hand.
Inside, the stench was overwhelming, and Lucy’s stomach roiled. On the floor, dark runnels of murky liquid and sewage flowed freely from the toilets, all but one of which had overflowed. The line to use the remaining toilet was a dozen women deep, all of them trying to avoid the waste that seeped across the floor and through the cracks. They stood with their backs to the last working toilet, giving the only privacy they could.
Sitting on the toilet, an elderly woman was crying, tears running down her cheeks while she tried to shield her face. Her shame was palpable, her misery absolute. Next to Lucy, Miyako gasped.
Lucy would never forget what her mother did next. Miyako, who couldn’t bring herself to speak to a stranger, who walked past the greeters at church without a word, who never attended a tea or a card game or a club meeting, took the folded cloth and handed Lucy the toiletry box. She walked across the foul-smelling room, ignoring the row of curious strangers, and handed the cloth to the old woman, not meeting her eyes, unable to avoid stepping in the waste. The woman murmured a few words and took the cloth, unfolding it and draping it over her head, obscuring her face completely.
After that, Lucy and her mother waited their turn with the others. No one spoke; everyone bore the shame of the lack of privacy in silence. When it was their turn, Miyako allowed Lucy to go first. Her relief was immense. Afterward, she washed her hands and waited with her back to her mother. She had never seen Miyako unclothed—even last night her mother had waited until Lucy was in bed to undress. It was dawning on Lucy that all their privacy and modesty was to be taken from them in this place, but she was determined to give her mother all the dignity she could.
* * *
The wave of evacuees that swept Lucy and her mother into Manzanar was among the first, but within days, the earliest to arrive felt as though they had been there forever. Each day brought busloads of dazed families. Lucy learned to read in their faces the cycle of emotions as they came to understand what their new life entailed. Astonishment, dismay, horror, desperation...and slowly, slowly, the deadening of the features that signaled acceptance.
Six families to a barrack, each in a room that measured twenty by twelve feet. Surplus cots and scratchy blankets from the first war. Instead of walls, raw wood dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling. Curtains instead of doors. Tar paper, unfinished wood, gaps and cracks in walls, floors, roofs. Freezing desert nights, impossible blowing sandstorms. Plumbers were recruited from within the ranks of the interned to work on the latrines, but problems persisted, and soon there was a grapevine among the women about which blocks’ latrines were working.
There were toilet-paper shortages. Food shortages. Staff shortages. Still, as the days wore on, bits of scrap started turning up from the construction going on all over the camp. Boards were turned into shelves. Packing crates were turned into dressers and tables and even chairs; curtains were fashioned from bedsheets; men whittled and women knitted, anything to pass the time.
In Manzanar, words took on new meanings. Lucy learned to use the word doorway when what she was describing was the curtain that separated each family’s room from the hallway that ran the length of the drafty barrack building. In short order they developed the habit of stamping on the floor to announce a visit, since there was no door to knock on, but they still called it knocking. Even building did not mean what it did back on Clement Street. At first the evacuees thought the barracks were unfinished, with their tar-paper walls and unpainted window casings and plywood floors, but it turned out that these humble edifices were what the government meant for the internees to live in for as long as the war raged on.
The dirt avenues filled with people, the crowds extending all the way to the razor-wire-topped fence that encircled them. Already Lucy had lost her way to her barrack several times, finally learning to orient herself by the mountain in the distance and the guard towers, entirely too close, in which soldiers peered down at them all day long, and from which searchlights projected at night, crisscrossing the bare dirt streets in dizzying patterns.
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Sophie Littlefield
In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor.Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp. Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp.Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever…and spur her to sins of her own.Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love."Littlefield has a gift for pacing…page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions." —Publishers Weekly
In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice
Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp.
Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp. Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever...and spur her to sins of her own.
Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love.
Garden
of
Stones
Sophie Littlefield
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Julie
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u345d5123-9900-540e-bf9d-98edbe91767a)
Chapter 2 (#ucffd6689-fa5c-5f7e-be1c-d84c0b2835a1)
Chapter 3 (#u4fe4e765-0f28-5eb0-aafb-5b0293122115)
Chapter 4 (#ub683d533-0c9d-57bb-8bf2-b5a9f38a4c34)
Chapter 5 (#ufe8007bd-e307-5041-b15c-d5eed84052d9)
Chapter 6 (#uc1d6f272-1deb-5c75-8d47-727b3512d56e)
Chapter 7 (#uaf18f781-e927-55f4-ab2c-73d7dc576776)
Chapter 8 (#u0acd548e-facc-5b4a-89a3-06d565b827ab)
Chapter 9 (#u233fd245-9882-5365-9a8d-40a4854b8bb1)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Sophie Littlefield (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
1
San Francisco
Tuesday, June 6, 1978
Reg Forrest lowered himself painfully into his desk chair, which was as hard, used and creaky as he was. The dark brown leather was cracked and worn, the brass nails missing in places. When he found the chair in the alley, he thought it had a certain masculine appeal, like something a hotshot lawyer might own. But it hadn’t taken long for the thing to seem as shoddy as the rest of his office.
Reg flipped the corners of the stack of papers on his desk and sighed. The coffee wouldn’t be ready for a few minutes yet.
Dust motes swirled in the first rays of morning sunlight, causing Reg to blink and then to sneeze. He had positioned his desk under the only window in the room, a filthy pane of glass at ceiling level that looked out into a corrugated-aluminum well half-filled with garbage and dead leaves. Above the window well was the same alley where he’d found the chair, a narrow, stinking passage between the DeSoto Hotel and the building next door. Still, early in the morning, depending on the season, an errant sunbeam or two found its way down into the room, and for that small grace, Reg occasionally remembered to be grateful.
Beyond the office door, there was silence. The gym opened at seven, which was still a half hour away. He’d already unlocked the doors, but the half-dozen men who’d gather by seven would wait for him to come prop them open. They knew each other’s habits. Early morning drew the shift workers, the boys getting in a few rounds on the bag after clocking out. Night security, deliverymen, dockworkers—they were quieter, as a rule, than the ones who came later. Other than the occasional grunt or curse, they had little to say as they worked through their circuits.
It had been several years since Reg himself had taken to the practice ring. He’d broken the same hand three times, and his shoulder was never right anymore. The ligaments in his back were for shit, and there was a scar like a zipper running over his left knee. He was fifty-nine years old and he’d spent three of his six decades here, in the basement of the DeSoto Hotel, building Reg’s Gym up from nothing. Reg had paid in rough coin, but he wasn’t complaining; the sounds and smells of this place were all he knew anymore, and if he spent more of his time locked up in this office with a calculator than on the floor these days, he supposed that was all right. A man slows down, in time.
A knock at the door. Raphael, his day manager, sometimes came in early and drank a cup of coffee with him. On days like this, when his aches and pains were more troublesome than usual, Reg could do without the conversation—at least until he’d had a chance to work the kinks out of his joints and was feeling more sociable. The only reason he came in to work this early was his insomnia: often stark-awake by three or four, Reg had nowhere else to go.
“Yeah. Come in.”
He didn’t turn. The only sound was the gurgling of the coffeepot. Reg squinted at the sheet on top of the stack and wondered if he needed to go to the eye doctor again. What had it been, two years, three, and it seemed like they were printing everything smaller all the time.
“Hey, Raphael, look at this invoice, will you, I can’t make out the damn numbers—”
He jerked with surprise when warm hands covered his eyes. For a moment he was frozen, remembering the way his sister used to sneak up on him, half a century ago. She loved to put her small hands over his eyes and make him guess, little skinny Martha who died of scarlet fever before her seventh birthday; he hadn’t thought of her in years. The hands pushed gently, tilting his head back, one of them cupping his chin to hold it in place. Reg squinted, trying to see who was standing above him, but he was blinded by the sun streaming in the window. Something cold and hard pressed against his forehead, and the last thing Reg saw was a face surrounded with a brilliant, glowing corona, like Jesus in the picture his mother had hung above Martha’s bed.
2
San Francisco
Wednesday, June 7, 1978
Patty Takeda was having the nightmare again.
In it, she stood at the back of the church as the organist finished the last few measures of Franck’s “Fantaisie in C,” watching her maid of honor approach the altar and execute a perfect turn in her pink high heels. There was a pause as the entire congregation waited breathlessly. Then the first triumphant notes of the wedding march rang out, and everyone rose in their pews and turned toward the back, expectant smiles on their faces. Patty emerged from behind the latticed anteroom divider. Step–pause, step–pause, a smile fixed on her face.
But something was wrong. Audible gasps filled the chapel and Patty looked down and discovered that she had forgotten to put her dress on. Or her slip, for that matter, or her panties or strapless bra. She was completely naked other than her white satin pumps. She tried to cover herself with her hands, but everyone was watching, staring, pointing, and she turned to run back to the dressing room but the ushers were standing shoulder to shoulder, blocking her way, gaping.
Patty woke, shoulders heaving, sweat gluing her T-shirt to her neck, the sheets knotted around her body. She was breathing hard, but at least she was awake. Sometimes, when she had this dream, she ran around the church for what seemed like hours, never finding an exit.
The sound of the doorbell jarred her fully awake. Was that the sound that had broken through the dream? Patty groped for the clock on the bedside table, knocking the tissue box to the floor before she found it. Almost nine. Patty lay still and listened as her mother answered the door. She heard her mother’s voice, and a man’s, back and forth a few times—and then footsteps, through the house, down the hall past Patty’s door, into the kitchen.
“...can offer you tea, if you like, Inspector,” Patty heard her mother say clearly as they passed, and then the voices became indistinguishable again.
Inspector? Patty untangled the sheets from her legs and sat up in bed, rubbing her face. Why would a detective be visiting her mother’s house? She pulled on the nylon running shorts she’d tossed on a chair the night before and was halfway to the door before she changed her mind and went back for her bra. It took a little searching—the bra had disappeared halfway under the bed—but Patty eventually found it and yanked it on, then exchanged the T-shirt she had been sleeping in for a fresh one from the suitcase on the floor. She sniffed under her armpits—not terrible. She really needed to unpack. She’d moved out of her apartment last week and she was staying here with her mother until the wedding, but it was only her third day off and she was still enjoying being lazy.
She peeked out the bedroom door, craning her neck to peer into the kitchen, and saw a man’s polished brown shoe under the kitchen table. The rest of him was just out of sight. Patty grimaced and tiptoed across the hall to the bathroom. She washed her face and brushed her teeth in record time, pulling a comb through her hair and settling for a quick swipe of lip gloss.
When she entered the kitchen, she was feeling presentable, if self-conscious about her bare legs. The man stood and greeted her with a nod.
“Patty,” her mother said. “This is Inspector Torre.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“You too,” Patty said automatically, taking the hand he offered, finding his grip surprisingly tentative. He was at least six, six-one, with the sort of beard that looks untended by lunchtime and thick, black sideburns encroaching on his jaw. Handsome, some women would no doubt think.
“I’m here to talk to your mother about the death of an acquaintance of hers.”
“Who?” Patty quickly cataloged everyone in her mother’s circle, a very short list. Besides work, Lucy Takeda went almost nowhere.
“Reginald Forrest. He was the proprietor of a commercial gym in the basement of the DeSoto Hotel.”
Patty knew the hotel—a once-grand stone edifice about a quarter mile away, on Pine or Bush or one of those streets. A pocket of the neighborhood that had seen the last of its glory days. But she had never heard the man’s name.
Lucy tsked dismissively. “Someone I knew a long time ago, in Manzanar. I haven’t seen him in thirty-five years.”
“But—” Patty looked from the inspector to her mother, confused. Lucy never spoke about her time in the internment camp. “Why on earth would you want to talk to my mother?”
Torre cleared his throat, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Someone claims to have seen someone resembling your mother in the vicinity of the gym around the time he died. We’ve got a time of death between five and seven yesterday morning, and this person places your mother there between seven and seven-fifteen.”
“But that’s—” Patty struggled to clear the morning haze from her thoughts. “My mom doesn’t ever go over there.”
“This person said...” Inspector Torre seemed to be searching for the right words. “That is to say, he described certain characteristics.... We asked around the neighborhood and several people mentioned Mrs. Takeda.”
Now Patty understood his discomfort. “Characteristics...” Yes, people didn’t quickly forget her mother’s face. The pocked and shiny pink scars took up most of the right side of her face, extending from her right eye down to her jawline. They encroached upon her lower eyelid, pink and puffed and vertically clefted; the eye itself was milky and gave the impression of both blindness and acute vision, which was unsettling and put the observer in the uncomfortable position of having to find another place to focus his own eyes.
“The inspector talked to Dave Navarro,” Lucy said indignantly. “And the Cooks!”
The faint beginning of a headache stirred between Patty’s temples. Her mother had never had a great relationship with the neighbors—she could only imagine how those conversations went. “I’m sorry, but this is, well, I don’t get it,” Patty said. “I mean, you weren’t at the hotel yesterday morning, were you, Mom?”
“Of course not. And besides, Inspector Torre said it could also be a suicide,” Lucy said. “It probably was.”
“Why would you say that?” Torre asked.
“You said that. You said the stun gun or whatever it was—”
“Captive bolt pistol,” Inspector Torre said. “Often used with livestock, but it has other uses. What I meant was, was there something about Mr. Forrest that makes you think he might have been suicidal?”
“How would I know?” Mrs. Takeda asked. “Reginald Forrest is an old man now. I’m sure he had his reasons.”
“Was,” Torre interjected. “Was an old man.”
Lucy shrugged. She was in an odd mood, both irritable and nervous, Patty thought. “Wait,” she said. “Can you just back up a little for me, Inspector? I’m sorry... I haven’t had my coffee. I’m not sure I’m following what you’re saying.”
Lucy frowned, an expression that distorted her scars, and folded her arms over her chest.
“Sure.” Torre reached for a notebook in his breast pocket, licked his thumb and started turning pages. “Janitor was buffing the lobby floor at about seven, seven-fifteen yesterday morning,” he said. “He described you pretty accurately. Said you appeared flustered, that you were walking faster than normal.”
“He doesn’t know me,” Lucy said. “How does he know how fast I walk?”
“Mother. Please.”
“Your mother’s neighbors, Mr. David Navarro and Cindy and Tom Cook, did say that she takes frequent walks around the neighborhood.”
“How would they know where I walk? They’re not my friends,” Lucy said. “They’ve never liked me. Dave Navarro had a tree whose roots were choking the sewage pipes under my house, and we argued over it until he finally cut it down. And the Cooks have a daughter who spreads her legs for every boy who comes around.”
“Surely my mother isn’t the only person you’re interviewing,” Patty said hastily, painfully aware of how caustic Lucy could sound to someone who didn’t know her. She was a loner, but that certainly didn’t mean she’d killed anyone, a point Patty feared might be lost on Torre.
He shrugged. “Sure, we’ve got a few people we’re talking to. Forrest had a son from a first marriage—he’s disturbed or retarded or something, lives in a group home. There’s also a girlfriend. I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about either of them.”
“Of course not,” Lucy snapped. Patty tried to telegraph be nice. “I told you I haven’t talked to him in three decades.”
“All right.” Torre tucked the notebook back in his pocket. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a chance to think about Forrest, see if you remember anything that might help us out.”
“From thirty years ago?” Damn, now she was doing it too—Patty instantly regretted snapping.
Torre turned his gaze on her. “So you live here with your mother, Patty?”
Patty resisted the urge to glare. “Only for a couple of weeks. I’m getting married. The wedding’s on the seventeenth.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, congratulations.”
He stood and adjusted his jacket, his eyes traveling up to the shelf that ran the length of the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, and Patty cringed inwardly. This was the moment that marked every newcomer’s first visit to the house, the moment Patty had learned to dread so much that eventually she’d stopped bringing friends home at all.
Patty let her gaze follow Torre’s, and tried to see what he saw, from his perspective—the gruesome tableau was as familiar to her as her mother’s Corelle dish pattern or the fake-brick design of the kitchen linoleum.
All those eyes: wide and shiny, staring into every corner of the room at once. It probably seemed like there were dozens of them, but in reality there were only six or eight animals—squirrels and chipmunks and a pale little desert mouse, all of them stuffed and mounted so that they seemed to perch at the edge of the shelf, tiny claws curled around the edges of the painted board, hunching and crouching and tensed to jump, mouths open and leering, like so many gargoyles about to come to life.
3
Los Angeles
December 1941
Every day when the noon bell rang, it was the lunch monitor’s job to stand at the front of the class and choose rows of students to line up, the quietest and most attentive first.
The teacher, for whom the ritual had lost some of its appeal over time—understandably, because she was at least a hundred years old—attended to her own tasks: gathering her purse and her lunch in its wicker pail, removing her glasses and placing them in the desk drawer, straightening stacks of papers. Unless the lunch monitor was utterly devoid of any sense of drama, she would drag out the selection, taking her time surveying the rows of eighth graders, and only after building sufficient suspense would she announce her choice.
Row three, you may line up.
And then the process would be repeated until everyone had lined up for lunch.
Each Monday morning, new recess and lunch monitors took up the yoke of duty, the schedule having been posted the first day of school. Lucy had waited more than three months for her turn. She had asked her mother to press her best blouse, the one with the tiny pleated ruffles around the Peter Pan collar. She had worn her favorite headband, the navy velvet with the small folded bow, and new snow-white socks. Lucy looked her best this Monday morning, and because she was Lucy Takeda, that meant she looked splendid indeed.
All through the morning she waited impatiently, forcing herself not to slouch in her seat. At last it was nearly noon. The teacher glanced up at the clock, and then looked thoughtfully at Lucy. She did not smile. Instead she closed her eyes and pinched the flabby skin between her eyebrows, frowning as though she had a headache. Then she opened her planner and ran her finger down the page. “The new hall monitor this week shall be Samuel McGinnis,” she said without inflection. “The new lunch monitor shall be Nancy Marks.”
For a second, Lucy was sure that she had heard wrong, that the teacher had made a mistake. Lucy had certainly not made a mistake—the date had been circled on the calendar at home for months.
Nancy Marks turned in her seat and gawped at Lucy, but she scrambled to her feet when the teacher snapped that she didn’t have all day. It seemed that Nancy’s voice held a note of apology as she chose Lucy’s row to go first, but as the students filed to the front of the room, Nancy did not look at her.
* * *
“It’s because you’re a Jap,” Yvonne Graziano said, not without sympathy. Yvonne and Lucy had been best friends since second grade. They huddled in the corner of the playground under an arbor covered with the canes of climbing roses gone dormant for the winter. Lucy had learned not to stand too close, or her angora coat would get stuck on the thorns.
Yvonne spoke with authority, since her eldest brother was in the Army Air Corps. He was stationed at March Field, but Yvonne’s mother was worried that he would be sent to the front lines as soon as the United States entered the war.
“My dad says if there was ever a war with Japan, he’d sign up if they let him,” Lucy said, fighting back tears. She’d managed to stay proud and aloof all through lunch, though she had little appetite for the boiled egg and apple her mother had packed. “He says he’d go fight if he could.”
Yvonne nodded sympathetically. “My dad says your dad is one of the good ones. But he’s too old.”
It was true—Lucy’s father was astonishingly old. His teeth were long and yellow, and his mustache was more silver than black. Behind his shiny round spectacles his eyes—though kind, always kind—were nested in wrinkles.
“But still, he’s as American as anyone else.” On this point Lucy was less certain, because her father still spoke Japanese occasionally. He read the Rafu Shimpo, a newspaper printed only in Japanese, and conducted much of his personal business in the shops along First Street in Little Tokyo. On their anniversary, her father took her mother to dinner at the Empire Hotel; he often brought her flowers wrapped in white paper from Uyehara Florist. Even their church, Christ Community Presbyterian, was mostly filled with Japanese families on Sundays.
Still, Lucy had no doubts about her father’s patriotism. On the Fourth of July he studded the yard with tiny American flags, and he stood proudly for the national anthem at Gilmore Field when he took Lucy to see the Stars play.
Yvonne looked at her sympathetically. “That’s good. But my dad says it’s not going to matter much longer, if Japan keeps invading. He says things are bound to change.”
Yvonne’s words were as chilling as they were vague. Change was unimaginable. Lucy had grown up in the same house her parents lived in before she was born, a white two-story on Clement Street with black shutters and a porch with flowers spilling out of baskets hanging from the eaves, a nicer house than most of her friends lived in. Lucy had always had the same bedroom, the same bathroom with its pink-and-black tile and ruffled curtains in the window. The same walk to school—down Clement to the corner, crossing Normandie, and then three blocks to 156th—since the first day of kindergarten. The only changes in her life were the coverlets her mother made for her bed, the dresses hanging in her closet and the height of the two little twisty-branched trees in the front, which her mother had planted when she and her father were first married. Each year, they grew a few more inches, and Lucy knew that someday the tallest branches would reach the eaves.
Lucy knew that her father was worried too, though he refused to speak of the war while Lucy was in the room; when her parents listened to the radio after dinner, she was sent to her room to study. Of course, she snuck out and listened, anyway. And there were the newspapers: she couldn’t read a single word of the Rafu Shimpo, but the headlines at the newsstand on the way to the market were impossible to miss. Hidden Tank Army Protects Moscow. Seven Vessels Sunk Off Italy. Still, how could the events unfolding in these far-off places possibly affect Lucy and her family a million miles away in California, where even now, in the middle of winter, the air was scented with citrus blossoms?
Two boys kicked a ball past them, coattails flapping. When they saw Lucy and Yvonne, the shorter of the two skidded to a halt. “Thought you were supposed to be lunch monitor this week,” he said, sticking a finger into his ear and scratching vigorously.
Lucy couldn’t bear to look at him. Instead, she pretended to rub at a bit of dirt on the lid of her lunch pail.
“Thought you were supposed to be running home to your mama,” Yvonne snapped. “I heard her calling you. She said you wet the bed again.”
Lucy, buoyed by her friend’s loyalty, blinked and smiled shyly. But as the boy ran off and Yvonne linked an arm through hers, Lucy knew that the changes had already started, and nothing in her power could stop them.
4
That day after school, Lucy installed herself in the front parlor to wait for her father to come home.
She was tired of her parents trying to protect her from things they thought she was too young to understand. Lucy supposed that had been all right when her world was limited to the bright-colored illustrations in her picture books, the elaborate tea parties she held for her dolls and stuffed toys, the swings and the slide at the playground in Rosecrans Park.
But she was in the eighth grade now, and her world had been growing steadily for a long time. She’d read all the books in her classroom and begun on the ones on her parents’ shelves—the ones in English, anyway, most of which belonged to her mother. Some were a little melodramatic for her taste, but Lucy preferred to be bored and occasionally confused by Edna Ferber and Daphne du Maurier than by Madeline and Caddie Woodlawn.
Consulting her mother about the future was out of the question. Miyako Takeda wasn’t like other mothers: she was quieter, prone to spells and moods. Withdrawn much of the time. Easily upset. And, of course, far more beautiful, which only made her seem more delicate, somehow.
Renjiro Takeda, on the other hand, would know what to do. He was a businessman, well respected, important. Lucy pretended to read—a book called The Rains Came that had been made into a movie that she was too young to see, in which a lot of people appeared to be falling in love with each other. The book was so confusing that she didn’t intend to finish it, but it was as good as any, since she had too many things on her mind to pay attention to the words.
At last, when dark had fallen and Lucy could hear her mother moving about the kitchen getting dinner ready, the front door opened. Her father’s face lit up when he spotted Lucy reading in the wing chair, but his smile didn’t disguise his weariness. He had been looking tired much of the time lately.
“Hello, little one,” he said, removing his hat and placing it on a high peg of the coatrack. He was a natty dresser and his hat was made of fine wool, smooth to the touch, its edges turned up slightly. Next he hung his topcoat, brushing invisible specks off its tight-woven surface. Lucy liked to watch this ritual, and she waited patiently until he finished. Only then did he turn to her and hold his hands out. Lucy leapt off the chair and put her hands in his, and he swung her gently around, something she suspected she was too old for, but couldn’t bear to give up yet.
“I have something for you,” he said.
“What, Papa?”
Her father pulled a small package wrapped in shiny white paper from his pocket. Lucy unfolded it carefully, revealing a mound of sugared almonds. Sometimes he brought candied lemon peel or crystallized ginger. He owned a business packing and shipping dried apricots, and he purchased treats for Lucy and her mother from the merchants and ranchers who brought their goods to the bustling business district.
“Don’t eat them now.” Her father’s voice was teasing. “You’ll have no appetite for dinner and then Mother will be angry with me.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Lucy carefully rewrapped the package. Then she took a breath. She had to talk to him now, when her mother wasn’t listening. “Something happened today in school.”
He laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “You discovered you are actually a princess?” he pretended to guess, wiggling his eyebrows. “With a crown and a kingdom to rule?”
When Lucy was younger, her father would tell fantastical stories of apricots delivered by teams of white horses pulling wagons with silver fittings that sparkled in the sun, apricots so plump and perfect that each had a single green leaf attached to its stem, and he had to hire a pretty lady just to pluck the leaves and drop them into a basket, all day long. Lucy pretended to believe her father’s stories long after she understood that they were invented. She knew they pleased her mother. More precisely, Lucy knew that her own happiness pleased her mother, that the tableau they made, the three of them, prosperous and modern in their kitchen with its sleek metal cabinets and green tiles, was an achievement Miyako could never bring herself entirely to believe in.
Already her father was moving toward the hall. Lucy knew he was anxious to greet her mother; he kissed her each evening as carefully as if she were made of spun sugar, and the smile he gave her was different from the one he had for Lucy. It was almost shy, if a father could ever be said to be shy. Usually, Lucy liked watching her father kiss her mother, but tonight she had to talk to him first.
“Papa, be serious. I want to ask you about something. About the war.”
That got his attention. Renjiro Takeda’s shoulders went rigid, and he turned slowly to face his daughter. His skin was stretched tight across his face; the lines around the corners of his mouth and under his eyes looked even deeper. “There is no war,” he said quietly. “Not in America.”
“But there’s going to be.”
“Who told you that?” His voice hardened, and Lucy was afraid. Not of her father—he was never angry with her, he was always kind—but of what the shift in his mood signified. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Nobody. I mean, the kids at school talk.”
“President Roosevelt will keep us out of the war. You don’t need to worry.” But he didn’t sound as certain as Lucy would have liked.
“But Papa...I was supposed to be lunch monitor today.”
Her mother’s steps echoed in the hall; she was coming to see what the delay was. Lucy put a hand on her father’s arm and spoke quickly, lowering her voice. “Papa, I was supposed to be lunch monitor but Nancy was instead, and Yvonne said it’s because I’m a Jap and her father says things are changing and—”
But her father was cupping a hand to his ear and frowning, and she knew he was about to tell her to slow down and not talk so fast, to speak up so he could hear her. He was becoming hard of hearing; her mother teased him about it and threatened to buy him one of the new Dictograph hearing aids that were advertised on the radio.
“Dinner’s almost ready!” her mother said, sweeping into the room. She’d touched up her lipstick as she always did before Renjiro came home, a slash of stark red against her fine, pale skin. “I made marble cake. And there’s ham.”
Lucy watched her father’s expression change; neither of them had missed the faint edge to Miyako’s voice, the fact that her smile was a little too brittle and her words a little too breathless. But the biggest giveaway was the cooking. Miyako was a good cook, but she rarely had the energy for more than a cursory effort. She was having one of those days, and Renjiro’s outward calm faltered before he recovered and went to kiss his wife.
Many afternoons when Lucy came home and let herself into the house with the key she wore on a chain around her neck, her mother would be lying down, her room darkened, the drapes closed. On her bedside table would be a glass of water and a folded cloth. Occasionally her mother would wet the cloth and drape it over her forehead. Lucy no longer went into her parents’ room on afternoons when the door was closed; her mother had asked her not to.
“You’re thirteen,” she’d said shortly after Lucy’s birthday the prior year, before closing the bedroom door gently on Lucy’s face. “Old enough to take care of yourself for an hour or two while I rest.”
But sometimes, every week or two, there would be a day when Miyako’s mood would swing in the other direction. She would have energy to spare. She cleaned and rearranged furniture, even though a lady came to clean every week. She tried new recipes and produced more courses than the three of them could eat. She met Renjiro at the door in her nicest apron and sat with him after dinner, talking breathlessly, her words chasing each other, instead of working on her embroidery by herself in the kitchen as she usually did. Nights like these were likely to end with the muffled sounds of Miyako crying in her bedroom, her father’s voice a smooth blanket, his words unintelligible through the wall their bedroom shared with Lucy’s. Long after they were finally silent, Lucy would lie awake in the dark, wondering what had made her mother so sad.
She’d missed the signs today, so preoccupied was she with what had happened at school. Now she saw her opportunity slipping away, the chance to ask her father what to do about it. Renjiro was ever solicitous of Miyako, and Lucy knew—without jealousy, with calm acceptance—that she was the lesser planet in her father’s orbit.
She felt more and more discouraged as they worked their way through her mother’s elaborate dinner. Miyako kept up a steady conversation, her sentences breaking off and starting over on entirely new subjects. She talked about a neighbor who had had something delivered in a large truck and a forecast she had heard on the radio that mentioned the possibility of hail and an article she’d read in a magazine about the first lady’s social secretary, and a dozen other things, too many to keep track of. Renjiro seemed even quieter than usual, answering in Japanese as often as he did in English, something he usually worked hard to avoid. Several times he set his fork down without eating the food he’d lifted halfway to his lips.
After dinner, Lucy stayed in the kitchen, pretending to read again, as her mother cleaned up and her father fussed with the pipe that he smoked each night to help him digest his dinner, and finally her mother’s stream of words began to slow down, like a music box that would soon need to be wound again.
Suddenly, a plate fell to the floor, causing Lucy to jump. In seconds, her mother was on her knees, and her voice broke as she scrambled for the fractured pieces.
“I’m so clumsy, I can’t even hold a plate right—”
“No, no, it’s all right, it’s nothing, let me help you.” Her father rose, setting his pipe down carefully. Then he paused, and slowly lowered himself back into his chair. “Oh. I’m sorry. Just a moment... Just give me a moment.”
Lucy looked at him in alarm. His face looked grayish, his eyes wide and glassy. “Papa, are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, of course, I’m just... Help your mother, suzume.”
“Yes, Lucy, get the dustpan.”
Lucy obeyed, breathing a sigh of relief. Her mother was fine; she had managed to bring herself back from the brink to which her mood had driven her, and her father was simply tired. He worked so hard at the factory, with all the employees for whom he was responsible, all the trucks bringing the apricots, the crates carrying them away, beautifully wrapped and packed and bearing her father’s name, all over the country. And she was her parents’ suzume, their little sparrow, and as she knelt to help pick up the broken pottery, she tried to hold on to the warm feeling that came from knowing that here in her home, she was the center of something.
* * *
The week passed slowly. Nancy took her place at the head of the class each day at noon, and Lucy pretended not to care. The boys on the playground found someone else to taunt. Miyako’s mood steadied, and when Lucy came home each day she found her mother embroidering in the parlor. She finished a rose-patterned scarf for her dresser and began a matching one for Lucy.
On Saturday Renjiro wasn’t feeling well. The next morning, he stayed in his dressing gown to read the paper, and Miyako told Lucy that if she liked, she could go to church with the Koga family from down the street.
Lucy welcomed the chance to sit in one of the pews up front between the young Koga children, her hands folded on her lap as she stole glances around the congregation, knowing she was being admired. Rarely did a week go by without someone stopping her family outside the church to tell her parents how beautiful and well-mannered Lucy was, how much she resembled Miyako. And Lucy knew that she would receive even more compliments than usual after she spent the service seated between the squirming Koga boys, helping their mother keep them quiet.
She wore her navy coat with frog closures and her patent shoes and combed her hair until it shone. Lucy knew she was a beautiful girl, but for some reason this impressed adults even more than the other children in her class. Maybe it was because she had grown up with many of them, seeing each other every day. Now that she was fourteen, Lucy thought she could see signs of maturity in her face when she looked in her mother’s vanity mirror—a narrowing of her cheeks, an arch in her brow that more closely echoed her mother’s. Lucy wasn’t particularly vain, but she had observed her mother carefully enough to know that beauty was a tool that could be used to get all sorts of nice things. The best fish in the case at the market, say, or a seat on the trolley on days when it was crowded.
As the reverend came to the end of one of his long and boring sermons and the congregation stood to sing the hymn, Lucy kept her eyes downcast as though she were praying. In reality, she was staring at Mrs. Koga’s brown pump, noting smugly how dowdy the plain, unadorned shoe was compared to the dressy high-heeled pairs in her mother’s closet. Lucy’s feet were still smaller than her mother’s, but soon they would be able to share—if she could convince Miyako that she was old enough for heels. By the age of fifteen, surely? These were the thoughts she was entertaining when the doors at the back of the church creaked open and two anxious figures burst inside, interrupting the listless singing of “Faith of Our Fathers.”
Later she would remember the unfamiliar words repeated over and over by the adults all around her, Pearl Harbor and torpedo and casualties—but in the confusion inside the church, all Lucy could think about was that some unknown disaster had taken place and she was here, daydreaming, thinking selfish thoughts while her parents were over a mile away by themselves, her father ill and her mother barely able to take care of either of them. It was the first time Lucy understood that it would fall to her to help them if something bad had happened, the first time she realized that in some ways, her childhood was already far behind her.
* * *
Somehow, in the confusion following the news, Lucy ended up walking home alone. She imagined the Kogas realizing that she was missing, and feeling terrible about it—“How could we let that poor girl out of our sight?”—but even that was small comfort. She had a sense of foreboding, and though her shiny shoes pinched her toes, smashing them together, she hurried, almost running, her breath ragged in her lungs.
When she turned down Clement Street and saw the ambulance in front of her house, she was horrified but not surprised. She’d known from the moment the strangers burst into the church that tragedy had come for her—that no matter what other cyclones of disaster had swept the world that morning, one was bearing down directly on Lucy. Everything that led up to this day had been a portent: her mother’s moods, the children’s cruelty, the glassy look in her father’s eyes—disaster.
Two men emerged from her front door as she ran toward her house. Between them they carried a stretcher bearing a figure covered with a blanket. Behind them, a woman came out onto the porch, holding the door—Aiko Narita, her mother’s best friend.
Lucy ran to the stretcher and threw herself upon it. Her father’s shoe jutted out underneath the blanket. If she could just get to him quickly enough, before they took him to the ambulance, there was a chance she could bring him back. If she touched his face, he might feel her hands and choose not to go. If she called his name, he might hear her, and understand that he couldn’t leave them behind, not like this.
The two men didn’t see her coming, and they were startled. One of them said a bad word. Lucy’s fingers barely brushed the blanket when she was seized from behind and held in strong arms. She fought as hard as she could, but Auntie Aiko held her more tightly, and the men carried her father to the back of the ambulance, where the doors stood wide to receive them.
“No, no, no, Lucy,” Aiko’s familiar voice crooned in her ear. Lucy kicked as hard as she could, connecting with Aiko’s shin; she tried to bite Aiko’s arm but couldn’t quite reach. She heard her own voice screaming, couldn’t get enough air. “It’s going to be all right,” Aiko gasped, struggling to contain her. “It’s going to be all right.”
Auntie Aiko was a liar. Lucy knew that she wanted to help, but everything was wrong and Aiko wouldn’t let go, and she saw her chance slipping away as the doors to the ambulance closed and after a moment it started slowly down the street. Aiko tried to carry her back up the steps into the house, but Lucy twisted savagely and almost managed to slip away. Aiko caught the hem of her coat and dragged her back. The coat’s buttons popped off and went rolling down the sidewalk. One went over the curb, through the grate, and disappeared into the blackness below the street.
One more loss, and finally Lucy gave up and allowed herself to be dragged, limp in Aiko’s arms. The button had been etched with the design of an anchor. They would never find another to match. The button would disappear in the muck and rotting leaves in the sewer, as the ambulance carrying her father’s body was disappearing out of view.
5
The doctor had given her mother something to help her calm down, which seemed to make her mostly sleep. Aiko had moved into the house and slept in Lucy’s parents’ bed. Lucy could hear her during the night, getting up to go to the bathroom or to get a glass of water. She missed the sound of her father’s snoring. She missed everything about her father.
The funeral would take place tomorrow. Mrs. Koga had taken her yesterday to buy a suitable dress. She and Aiko had had a whispered conference in the parlor, and Lucy had taken the opportunity to slip into her parents’ bedroom to check on her mother, something Aiko had discouraged her from doing.
Miyako had been sleeping with her hands folded under her chin, the covers pulled up neatly, almost as though she too were dead. Her face was smooth, her lips dry and pale, her eyelashes fluttering slightly as she exhaled. The flutter of the lashes was proof that she was still alive, at least. Lucy watched her for a moment and then tentatively touched her hand. It was warm. After a moment, Lucy went around to the other side of the bed and got in, lifting the covers carefully and inching slowly across until she was pressed up against her mother.
She burrowed her face into her mother’s arm. She could smell her mother, an unwashed smell that was both unfamiliar and welcome. Usually, her mother smelled like perfume and hair spray and the cloud smell from the laundry. Lucy burrowed deeper, inhaling as much as she could, and wished that she could stay here, that Mrs. Koga would go away and Aiko wouldn’t notice. She wished that she could stay here all night with her mother and maybe, in the morning, her mother would wake up and the first person she would see would be Lucy. She would look into Lucy’s eyes that were so much like her own and decide to be brave for her. She would stop taking the medicine that made her so sleepy and send Aiko home, and she and Lucy would decide together what to do next.
But of course that wasn’t what happened. Lucy had gone downtown with Mrs. Koga. She had nodded numbly when Mrs. Koga asked if the dress, the hat, the slip were all right, and when she got home Aiko had made a pot of bad-smelling soup with vegetables and thick noodles. Aiko’s own husband had been dead since almost before Lucy could remember, and she was closer to Lucy’s father’s age than her mother’s. Lucy supposed she might end up staying forever, now that her father was dead, and she wondered what would happen to Aiko’s house and her two fat cats, one white and one tabby, who were never allowed outside because they killed the birds that came to the feeder Aiko had hung from a tree. The cats, the birds—Lucy supposed they would have to learn to fend for themselves now that Aiko had moved here.
A man arrived with a load of dishes and napkins and silver for tomorrow. Another brought a stack of funeral programs from the printer. They had a picture of her father on the front, one Lucy knew well since it sat in a silver frame on her mother’s dresser; in the photograph, his hair was still dark and he wore a suit he no longer owned. The program was in both English and Japanese, and Aiko said that the readings had been her father’s favorite. Lucy doubted that was true—she’d caught him napping in church more than once, and she was certain he only went to please her mother.
People would be coming to the house after the funeral. Lucy had attended two funerals already, so she knew what to expect: people would talk in quiet voices, and the ladies would make trips in and out of the kitchen, even though there would be hired help to do all the serving. The men would drift farther and farther from the women, until eventually some of them would be outside, huddled and smoking and shivering in the cold. Her mother would be required to talk to everyone, but at least she would be allowed to sit down, and a few words would suffice. No one ever wanted to talk to the grieving widow for very long. It was one of those things that grown-ups did that they obviously didn’t want to do. There seemed to be so many of those, the more Lucy understood about growing up.
Aiko said that Lucy needed to stay at home for a while, that she could miss some school. Next week would come soon enough, she said. Lucy had asked if she could call Yvonne, but Aiko frowned and shook her head.
Something else was bothering Lucy. Aiko had moved the radio into Miyako’s bedroom, where they listened to it after dinner, the sound turned down too low for Lucy to hear, even with her ear pressed to the closed door. Also, the newspaper was nowhere to be found. Lucy kept meaning to get up early enough to go out and get it from the drive, but each day she woke to find Aiko already up and busy around the house, the paper hidden away.
She thought of sneaking out, waiting until Aiko was in with her mother and slipping out the front door. She could walk to the newsstand; she had an entire piggy bank full of coins. She could buy a chocolate soda at the drugstore and read the paper. Only someone was sure to see her and insist on bringing her home. Everyone knew her father was dead; there was no way she could escape the eyes of the neighborhood.
Lucy filled the long and restless hours reading pages from her mother’s books, the words lost to her as soon as she’d scanned each page. Instead, her mind turned over the words shouted in the church, the ones that had seemed to put in motion the terrible events that followed—and the words printed on the neat stack of programs on the dining room table.
Pearl Harbor. Torpedo. Casualties.
Renjiro Takeda, 1879–1941.
* * *
On the day of the funeral, Aiko never left Miyako’s side. In the church, Lucy squeezed between them in the pew; at the graveside she allowed herself to be pressed against Aiko’s wool coat, but she never let go of her mother’s hand. Back at the house, though, they were separated. Someone had moved the red couch to the center of the parlor, and there was only enough room for Aiko and Miyako to sit.
Lucy stationed herself near the front door and gave herself the job of answering it. By doing so she could avoid going into the parlor with all the flowers surrounding her father’s picture. His photo somehow made it seem like he was not only dead but fading from the house, memories and all, slipping away a little more each day.
Late in the day, when people were already beginning to leave, the doorbell rang one last time. Lucy opened it to discover two Caucasian men dressed in fedoras and black coats standing on the porch. They did not remove their hats. Neither smiled. For a moment Lucy thought they must be men her father knew from his business, perhaps other merchants from Banning Street, but surely they would have come sooner if they meant to pay their respects.
“Please get an adult,” the shorter of the two men said. He had a large nose the color of an eraser.
Lucy said nothing, backing away from the door, and when the men followed her inside, she wondered if she should have asked them to stay outside. It wouldn’t do to bother her mother or Auntie Aiko. This was the sort of thing a father should handle, but who could she ask? Lucy turned and hurried to the kitchen, where some of the men had been smoking and talking earlier, but they had dispersed and were standing in groups of two and three, collecting their wives and their coats, preparing to take their leave. There were only twenty or twenty-five guests left, perhaps a quarter of those who had filled the home earlier, and of those who remained, none were familiar to Lucy. Her father was not in the habit of bringing friends and associates home.
But the two strangers followed her into the parlor, and the one who had spoken earlier put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Lucy was astonished, both by the sheer volume the man was able to produce and by his audacity. But before she could respond, the other one, a tall, thin man nearly as old as her father, clapped his hands and began to speak.
“Martin Sakamoto and Kenjiro Hibi. Please identify yourselves.” Lucy saw Mrs. Hibi step forward uncertainly, searching the room for her husband.
“Martin and his wife left,” someone said from the back of the room, and there was nodding and a murmur of agreement. The taller Caucasian scowled and muttered something to his partner.
They were holding something in their hands, small wallets containing badges that flashed gold. Lucy heard whispers of “FBI,” and the worry that had had taken hold of her when she’d opened the door bloomed into full-scale fear. She edged along the perimeter of the room, trying to get to the red couch; her mother looked dazed, leaning against Auntie Aiko for support.
“See here, you can’t come in here.” One of the mourners, a man Lucy thought she recognized from one of her visits to see her father at work, stepped toward the FBI men. “This is a funeral. It isn’t decent.”
“Are you Mr. Hibi?”
The man hesitated, glancing over to Miyako’s piano, where Mr. Hibi was standing with a plate in his hand. There was a half-eaten slice of cake on the plate, the pale green pistachio cream cake that someone had brought from the bakery. Mr. Hibi slowly lowered the plate to the shiny black surface of the piano. Lucy was shocked—no one ever set anything on the piano; her mother would not allow it.
“You’ll come with us, sir,” the shorter FBI man said.
“Where are you taking him?” Mrs. Hibi looked like she was about to cry. She hurried to her husband’s side and took his arm, as though to hold him back. “Where are you taking my husband?”
“We just need to ask him some questions, ma’am.”
Lucy had reached the other side of the room, and she made a run for it, dashing to the couch and crawling up into her mother’s lap. She was trembling; she hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. Aiko had been too busy with her mother to make Lucy eat, and she hadn’t felt like it. Now she felt as though she might faint. Her mother patted her back absently, and her hands were cool and dry.
Aiko stood. She was a small woman, but her arms and legs were thick and her hands were strong. “You must go now.” Her voice trembled, but she took a step toward the FBI men.
“I’ll come with you.” Mr. Hibi pulled his arm away from his wife and didn’t look back. “Leave this widow in peace.”
But even this did not seem to shame them. Everyone watched in silence as they escorted him through the house. He looked back, once, and then they were gone.
Mrs. Hibi made a small mewling sound. Lucy’s father, in his photograph, seemed to watch in sorrow.
* * *
Mr. Hibi did not return. Within days, other men had been rounded up and taken somewhere to be interrogated. No one knew where they were. None came home. The phone rang throughout the day and Lucy could hear Aiko’s urgent voice; by eavesdropping carefully she learned that windows had been broken at the drugstore and several of the warehouses along East Second Street, only blocks from her father’s building. Aiko asked Lucy to go to the store for her and then immediately changed her mind, and they went together instead. There was almost no one in the streets; the barbershop window held a large hand-painted sign that read, I Am an American. Lucy read the headlines as they passed the newsstand: 4,000 Japanese Die in Submarine Raid. Hong Kong Siege Is Begun.
The following Monday, Lucy was dressing for school when Auntie Aiko came into her room. Her face was pale and her eyes were red. Lucy knew she had been crying, which seemed strange to her because her mother had not cried since her father died. She’d barely spoken, barely eaten; she was like a shadow in the house, coming out when Aiko insisted she try to eat, bathing when Aiko led her to the bathroom.
“No school today,” Aiko said. “We have work to do.”
They went through the house room by room, taking everything that Lucy’s father had brought with him from Japan, all the beautiful things that had belonged to his family: photographs, dishes, lacquer boxes, mother-of-pearl hair clips that had belonged to his mother, tiny ornamental dolls. There was a Bible printed in Japanese that Lucy had never seen him read, silk ribbons marking certain passages. There was an old set of calligraphy brushes and inkstones that Lucy had always wanted to play with but her mother had never allowed her to touch.
It took two days to find everything that had come from Japan, was printed in Japanese, or even hinted at Lucy’s father’s ties to the Japanese community. “They think we are sending messages,” Aiko fumed, as she opened boxes containing old kimonos in gorgeous silks and added them to the growing pile in the parlor.
“Messages to who?”
“Whom,” Miyako said. She barely spoke, and wasn’t much help with the sorting and assembling. Her embroidery gathered dust in the basket, the hoops left too long on the linen leaving permanent circles that would not block out. Occasionally she would take an interest in some object, holding and examining it until Aiko gently took it back from her. Lucy was beginning to wonder if her mother was going crazy, since her conversation was limited to a few lucid sentences in the mornings as she picked at the toast Aiko forced her to eat. By evening she was almost entirely silent, and most nights she went to bed as soon as the sun went down.
“To whom,” Lucy acquiesced.
“The emperor, I suppose. The Japanese army.”
“But we’re at war with them now. Why would we be sending them messages?”
Aiko’s expression turned more bitter than Lucy had ever seen it. “It seems that some people have forgotten that we’re Americans too.”
“Well, I haven’t,” Lucy said fiercely.
But later, when the sun had set and the sky was slowly purpling over the rooftops, Aiko asked her to help carry the big pile of precious belongings into the backyard. She’d built a fire in the center of the sidewalk that led from the back door to the detached garage, and already Renjiro’s old sheet music was burning.
“We have to burn it all?” Lucy asked, horrified. She had assumed the heirlooms were to be stored somewhere safe until after the war.
“Yes, and quickly too. The FBI has been to half the houses in Little Tokyo. It’s only a matter of time before they come looking here.”
“But they were already here. When they took Mr. Hibi away.”
Aiko gave her a grim look. “At least they can’t take your papa now. But we don’t want to give them any reason to think we’re not loyal.”
The dolls, in the end, took the longest to burn, and as they did, they gave off thick, noxious smoke. The dishes had to be smashed with a hammer Lucy found in the garage, and the paint curled and flaked from the shards as they burned. When it was finally finished, she and Aiko came inside the house to wash and change out of their smoky, dirty clothes, tears mixing with sweat and soot on her face.
Lucy gasped when she saw Miyako sitting in a chair she’d pulled near the back window. She hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights as night fell, and her face was pale and almost luminous in the flickering glow of the dying fire. Miyako said nothing as Aiko pressed a hand to her shoulder and sighed, and Lucy wondered if her mother had ever even blinked as she watched the treasures burn.
6
The holidays came and went. There was no Christmas tree, no tinsel, no candles in the windows as they had been in the past. Aiko moved back into her house on New Year’s Eve, but she still visited almost every day. Lucy helped Aiko burn her own mementos from her childhood in Japan, and all the things from her husband’s family. After that, Aiko’s house seemed as bare and joyless as their own.
Miyako seemed to come out of her funk. “Time for you to go back to school,” she said briskly the Monday that classes were to resume after the Christmas break. “No sense sitting inside forgetting everything you’ve learned.”
The morning she was to return to school, Lucy tucked some money from her allowance into her pocket, planning to buy some iced cookies from the bakery on the way home. But as she walked past it, she was startled to see that the windows had been soaped and a sign read Lost Our Lease. The bakery was gone.
At school, Lucy ran to find Yvonne. She hadn’t spoken to her friend since before her father died. It seemed like months had gone by, not weeks. There was so much to tell. Lucy didn’t realize how much she had missed Yvonne until she spotted her hanging up her coat.
“Hi,” she said, as nonchalantly as she could manage.
Yvonne looked at her, then quickly away. A red flush stole over her face. “I have to go,” she muttered, and went to her seat. Lucy thought about following her, but the bell rang, and besides, Yvonne had made it clear: she no longer wanted to be friends.
The rejection stung. Lucy was wearing the same clothes the other girls did, carrying the same schoolbooks, bringing the same foods for lunch. She could say fewer than a dozen words in Japanese, and she couldn’t read any at all.
At lunch, she walked uncertainly along the edges of the playground, her finger marking the spot in a book she’d borrowed from the library. She planned to sit under the arbor and read. She had no illusions that Yvonne would come find her there—none of the girls had even looked at her, much less spoken to her, all morning.
The boys were a different matter. “Dirty yellow Nip,” one of them had whispered earlier, when she got up to sharpen her pencil. After that, Lucy had stayed in her seat, her face burning with embarrassment. Now, three boys—two from her class and one from seventh grade—approached her, and Lucy suddenly realized that the arbor was hidden from view. The teacher on recess duty would not be able to see her if anything bad happened. Hastily she gathered up her thermos and the waxed paper her sandwich had been wrapped in and tried to shove it quickly back into her lunch pail.
“Where you going?” one of the boys said. “Need to get back to your submarine?”
Lucy had heard the rumors about the Japanese submarines said to be patrolling the coast. Aiko said it was ridiculous, that Roosevelt would never allow them to get so close. Lucy hoped it was true. “I’m just reading,” she mumbled.
“I heard your dad dropped dead. Was he a spy? Did he commit hara-kiri?”
“What?”
“You know—” The boy made a pantomime of stabbing himself in the gut.
Lucy felt tears well up in her eyes. She missed her father so much. Men had come by with papers for Miyako to sign—someone was buying the company, a man her father had done business with in the past—and Miyako had refused to answer the door until Lucy called Aiko and asked her to come over to the house. After that Lucy was afraid to mention her father, afraid of the effect it might have on her mother.
Lucy refused to let the boys see her cry, so she pushed past them, holding her book and the remains of her lunch. She had to shove against one of the boys with her shoulder to get around him, but to her surprise, he yielded easily.
“Ahondara,” she said, under her breath. It was one of the few words she knew, something her father had said when he was angry about something. She’d asked him the meaning of the word long ago, but he’d only chuckled and said that maybe it was a good thing Lucy hadn’t learned any Japanese.
Walking away from the boys, she hoped it meant something truly awful.
* * *
The odd rebalancing of Lucy’s relationship with her mother continued as the weeks passed. Aiko was busy with her own affairs—she had a sister near the Oregon border whose twin sons were in their first year of college at UC–Berkeley, and there was confusion over whether Japanese students would be forced to leave school.
Miyako made an effort: she began bathing, dressing and wearing makeup regularly again and wrote letters to all Renjiro’s distant relatives to let them know of his passing. But when Lucy tried to tell her about the teasing she was enduring at school, she seemed to shrink from the news. “Oh, suzume,” she said, laying her face in her hands and taking a shuddering breath. And so Lucy took back her words, swore she had exaggerated, and finally took to lying and saying that everything at school was fine.
With Aiko gone to see her sister, Lucy was able to come and go freely from the house. When her father was alive, she hadn’t been much of a wanderer. Now she used the excuse of doing her mother’s shopping to walk past Japanese-owned businesses, to see which were still occupied and which had boarded-up windows. She loitered near groups of men talking outside the barbershop, the drugstore, the tobacconist, and she heard the talk: Japanese were to be herded up like cattle, jailed, deported, tortured... No one seemed to know, but everyone had an opinion.
Late in February, she passed the newsstand and saw headlines screaming Japs to Be Sent Inland. With pounding heart, she bought a paper and read it on the way home. President Roosevelt had signed an executive order that excluded people from military areas. There were a lot of things in the article that Lucy didn’t understand, but from the anxious buzz of people on the street, she knew it was bad.
This was one piece of news she could not keep from her mother. She handed the newspaper to Miyako and watched her mother read, her lips pressed together, a hand over her heart. She didn’t move until she had read the entire article, and then she sighed and looked up to the ceiling. Lucy waited, hardly daring to breathe, until at last her mother spoke. “It’s just me and you, suzume. Come here.”
Lucy hesitated. She hadn’t sat on her mother’s lap since she was a baby. She knew her mother cherished her; Miyako knelt and kissed her before school each day and loved to comb and style Lucy’s hair, patting her face when she finished. But Miyako was not the sort of mother one read about in books: she wasn’t soft or round, she didn’t wear an apron and she didn’t invite embracing.
“Come,” Miyako repeated, motioning Lucy to her lap with both hands. Lucy went. She climbed up carefully, afraid of hurting her mother’s thin skin, her pale limbs, but her mother held her close with surprising strength. For a second Lucy remained rigid in her arms, and then she relaxed against her mother’s breast and tucked her head under her chin, inhaling deeply, getting as close as she could. She felt tears well up in her eyes and was afraid she might cry—tears would stain the silk of her mother’s blouse.
“My little Lucy,” Miyako crooned, rocking Lucy slowly in her arms. “Just you and me. Your father has left us and now we must leave our home.”
“No,” Lucy whispered, frightened by the despairing words. She pressed more tightly against her mother. “They can’t make us. This is our house.”
Her mother laughed, a light, lilting sound that belied her mood. “Oh, my little suzume, you have the spirit of your father. He always promised me that everything will be fine. He said he would always protect me, that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me ever again.”
Miyako pulled away gently, and Lucy saw that she had gotten tears on the blouse, despite her best effort—the pale blue was stained dark in two tiny spots. But her mother either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She held Lucy’s hands in hers and brought her face close. “I want to tell you that. That I can protect you. But the truth is, no one can. The war has come to us. If President Roosevelt says we must go, then we will have to go.”
“But...where?”
Miyako shrugged her delicate shoulders. “What does it matter? Gone is gone.”
* * *
Aiko was back in two days, bringing tins of walnuts from an orchard near her sister’s house. Lucy cracked them on the back porch, sneaking bits of the sweet nutmeats as she worked, while the women talked in the kitchen. This time, they made it clear she wasn’t to come inside until they were finished: they were taking no risks that she would hear.
The afternoon had been unseasonably warm—late February and already the thermometer edged close to sixty degrees—but as evening approached the sun dipped low in the sky and Lucy began to shiver with the cold. She was glad, for her mother’s sake, that Aiko had returned, but she also felt a little resentful. When Aiko was around, Lucy had to concede the job of looking after Miyako, and the truth was that, now that she had no friends at school, being Miyako Takeda’s daughter was the most—perhaps the only—special thing about her.
Lucy had always known that her mother was beautiful. Miyako Takeda’s beauty was so remarkable that it was not considered improper to comment on it. “Your mother should be movie star,” the fish man said as he wrapped their mackerel in paper. “Star in movie with James Cagney.”
But it was only after Lucy started seventh grade last year that she had realized what should have been obvious: she looked exactly like her mother. Maybe her childish features had hidden the resemblance for a while, but when Lucy walked down the street with her mother now, she knew that the double takes and catcalls were meant for both of them. Her mother would not allow her to roll her hair or wear lipstick, but the resemblance could no longer be disguised.
Lucy knew that she still had some maturing to do before her transformation was complete. Where her mother’s lips were sensually full, her own were still the bow shape of a child’s. Her mother’s eyes narrowed and tilted, elongated at the outer corners in a manner that suggested mischief, while Lucy’s retained the wide-open look of youth. Miyako’s fine cheekbones sculpted the planes of her face exquisitely: Lucy’s had yet to become pronounced.
But there was no hint of her father in her face. Despite his success, his breeding—his father’s father had been an important man in Japan, a respected merchant with several homes—Renjiro’s appearance had been coarse, his skin pocked underneath his beard, his nose flat and his brow jutting. Lucy was proud to be his daughter, to be a Takeda. But she was very pleased that she resembled her mother.
Lucy knew little about the years between her mother’s birth and her arrival, at the age of seventeen, at Renjiro Takeda’s factory, where she applied for a job packing apricots into crates. She knew that Miyako was the daughter of farm laborers, and that her mother had died giving birth. Miyako had managed to stay in school until the tenth grade, had learned to sew and embroider and had earned money with her needlework. Something had happened when she was fourteen or fifteen—something terrible, something that had acted as a turning point in Miyako’s life. She had left her father behind and gone to the city, where it had taken several more years—and these she never spoke of, so Lucy did not know how her mother had supported herself or where she’d lived—before she found herself in Renjiro Takeda’s factory looking for work. Her father had loved to tell stories of how unsuited Miyako was to the noisy, backbreaking work on the line, how he promoted her to a position in the office after a week because he could not bear to see her distress. And then he had married her only a few months later.
Lucy sensed that life had punished her mother for her will to survive, that she had been tested and marked repeatedly, the scars cutting deeper each time they were opened. Lucy, and to some pale extent her father, were her respite and, on the very best days, her fleeting joy. But they were not her central truth. The core of her mother was fraught and dread-drenched, and Lucy feared that the loss of her father and the threat of upheaval were beginning to erode the fragile peace Miyako had molded from the ashes of her early years.
Lucy finished shelling the walnuts. The nutmeats filled the small bowl her mother had given her, the shells rustling in the tin. Lucy took a handful of shells and squeezed, harder and harder until their sharp edges cut cruelly into her palm, before flinging them onto the remains of the backyard fire, which winter rains had reduced to a lumpy, blackened scar on the sidewalk. For a moment Lucy thought she might throw the rest, the bits she’d worked so hard to pry from their shells, the delicate bowl, part of a matched set. Let them be lost, broken, ruined—what did it matter?
But inside the house was her mother, and no matter how fragile the strands that linked them, Lucy would do nothing to further erode her peace. She would endure and she would wait, and she would be ready when Miyako needed her.
7
On a chilly Tuesday a couple of weeks later, Lucy walked to the store with coins in her fist, thinking about the Nancy Drew book she was currently rereading. She’d discovered the series when she was ten, but the first time she read The Secret of Shadow Ranch, she’d missed all the clues. Now as she walked along, she thought about the way Carolyn Keene constructed the mystery, the clues layered in among Nancy’s adventures. Nancy was brave, but she was also lucky, with her friends and her clothes and car and her handsome, dependable father. And she got to go to such interesting places, and war never intruded into her world, and she and her friends stopped the bad guys from getting away with the terrible things they’d done. Lucy thought she might like to be a detective herself, peeling away the layers of a crime until she figured out who the guilty person was. It was always a surprise, always someone you never would have guessed.
Lucy passed the boarded and broken windows, no longer sensitive to the ravages being inflicted on the neighborhood, but when she spotted a cluster of people around a lamppost in front of the movie theater, she stopped to see what the fuss was. The movie theater was one of the few places Japanese still went without fear; perhaps it was the darkness inside that made them feel safe. Had this too been taken away? Were they no longer welcome here?
Coming within a few feet of the crowd, Lucy saw that a sign had been pasted on the pole.
INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY
She craned her neck to read the smaller print below:
“All Japanese persons, both alien and nonalien, will be evacuated from the above designated area....
“The Civil Control Station will provide services with respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage or other disposition of most kinds of property....
“...transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to their new residence...”
Lucy felt cold fingers of dread creep down her neck. She turned away without reading the rest; Aiko had been predicting this day for a while now. Whenever she brought up the subject, Miyako blanched and begged her to stop. Now it was up to Lucy to finally make her understand.
She ran all the way home, and by the time she arrived, her lungs were burning and her feet pinched against the leather of her shoes. Somewhere, she’d dropped the coins without even noticing. She had not bought the tea that her mother had wanted. There would not be enough for tomorrow. But what did it matter?
Lucy burst through the front door and nearly collided with Aiko, who was standing in the parlor. For a moment neither said anything; Lucy could see from Aiko’s eyes that she already knew.
Aiko knelt down and took Lucy’s hand in hers. “I’ve already told her. Lucy... It’s going to be okay. We’ll put our things in storage. It’s not forever. It’s... It’ll be like an adventure.”
Lucy allowed Aiko to caress her arms, to keep speaking. The words blurred together as she nodded; what she most wanted was for Aiko to leave. She had to get to her mother. Had to see for herself what damage this latest onslaught had done.
At last Aiko released her and went to the kitchen, where Lucy could hear her rattling pots. Her mother had started the dinner before Lucy had left; Lucy supposed that Aiko would now finish it. The two worked well together that way. How many times had they cooked together in one or the other’s kitchen? How many times had they taken the sun on balmy afternoons in the backyard, pruned the crape myrtles lining the street in front of both their houses, looked through magazines, listened to the radio, mended and darned and embroidered together?
But her mother needed her now. She crept down the hall to her mother’s room, certain Aiko would tell her to leave her mother be. Slipping noiselessly into the room, she let her eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. But her mother wasn’t asleep. She was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows, with her arms folded across her chest and the blankets drawn neatly up over her lap.
“We’re to be evacuated,” she said to Lucy. “Come sit.”
It was the second time in recent weeks that Miyako had invited Lucy into her embrace, and Lucy slipped off her shoes and clambered up onto the bed. She realized that her mother still slept in the same spot that she had when her father was alive, and that, as she crawled under the covers next to her mother, she was on his side of the bed. She wondered if it was true, what the pastor had said when he’d come to the house to pay his respects, that her father was able to look down from heaven and see them. She hoped so. Just in case, she fixed a smile on her face so that he would see she was taking good care of Miyako.
“Auntie Aiko says we can store our things.”
Miyako frowned. “Maybe some of them. But, suzume, I have been thinking, we don’t need so many things anymore. All this big furniture...all those clothes...”
She gestured at the heavy oak armoire, which was just a bulky outline in the darkened room. Lucy had always loved her parents’ furniture, a matched set purchased when they had married. Another of the stories her father loved to tell: taking his young bride-to-be to the best department stores in Los Angeles—how shy she was!—and telling her to pick out anything she liked. She had never been inside Bullock’s before that day, and the sales clerks were practically falling all over themselves to wait on her, assuming she must be someone important, dressed in the finely tailored clothes she had made for herself.
“But you can’t give all of our things away,” Lucy whispered. The neat row of dresses, the drawers full of silken camisoles and slips, the bottles of perfume and the mirrored tray that held her cosmetics—what would her mother be without these things? “We can take them with us. The sign said. You just pack and the government...”
But Lucy wasn’t at all sure what the government would do for them. On the sign it had said something about storing household possessions if they were “crated and clearly marked.” But this was the voice of the same force that broke down doors in the middle of the night, that cut slits in people’s sofas looking for evidence of treason, that broke treasured records in half just because the labels bore Japanese words. How could they possibly be expected to care for Lucy and Miyako’s possessions?
“We have a little time,” Miyako said. “We will start tomorrow.”
She raised her arm, making room for Lucy against her side. It was easy to fall asleep, listening to her mother’s breathing. And when Lucy woke again—many hours later, in the middle of the night—she found that her mother had curled around her, holding her in the curve of her body, making a cocoon with her thin arms.
* * *
In the confusion and panic surrounding the evacuation order, Miyako and Auntie Aiko somehow managed to learn what goods could be packed to be sent along later, and what would have to be stored until after the war, and began to prepare. They were to report to the Methodist church on Rosecrans Avenue on March 22, bringing only what they could carry, but it wasn’t clear what was to happen after that. The newspaper reported that the newly formed War Relocation Authority had secured land in the Owens Valley near the Sierra Mountains, and even now workers were building quarters for the thousands of Japanese Americans being ousted from their homes. But there were also rumors of people being sent to racetracks and fairgrounds all over California and forced to sleep in horse stalls, and no one could say for sure where anyone would be going on the twenty-second.
What was immediately clear was that the process would be neither easy nor orderly. By the second day after the sign was posted, the local stores ran out of twine and luggage. Entire blocks in Little Tokyo were vacated, and speculators swooped in offering cents on the dollar for the ousted merchants’ inventories. Soon, other men began going door-to-door, making offers for entire housefuls of family possessions. At first these offers were rebuffed, but before long frantic families began to realize that an insulting offer was the best they would receive.
After several days shuffling their belongings among ever-changing piles, Miyako and Auntie Aiko decided to be practical about what to store and what to ship. Into their boxes went bowls and pencils and writing paper, scissors and Father’s gooseneck lamp and extra lightbulbs, pillowcases and serving spoons. For a long time, Mother did not pack her embroidery box. It sat next to a stack of dessert dishes on the table, waiting for her to decide, the thimbles and packets of needles and skeins of colorful floss arranged neatly in the lacquered box, the contents of which Lucy knew by heart even without opening the lid. She understood her mother’s dilemma, because while the embroidery was beautiful, it was also useful; her mother only embroidered things one could use, like pillowcases and towels and bedcovers and tablecloths. In the end, the box was packed, which was only a fleeting comfort.
Lucy went across the street the morning they were to leave to return a hammer her mother had borrowed from Aiko to seal their crates, and found Aiko in tears.
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Oh, oh. Lucy. I’m sorry.” Aiko turned away from her and swiftly dried her eyes on a handkerchief. “I can live without all of this. But...Bluebell and Lily...”
Her cats. Of course. Bluebell and Lily trusted only Aiko; despite Lucy’s patient efforts, they never warmed up to her enough to allow her to pet them.
“I’m sorry about your cats,” Lucy said softly. She touched the hem of Aiko’s skirt. The fabric was stiff with starch and smelled like Aiko’s familiar perfume.
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Aiko cleared her throat and forced a smile. “Mrs. Marvin down the street will take good care of them for me. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
But the men with the truck were late, and Aiko and Miyako were nearly frantic with worry by the time they finally pulled up to the curb. The bed of the truck was already so laden down with other people’s belongings that Lucy didn’t see how they could add any more, but the men lashed their boxes on top of the heap and drove away.
Lucy was wearing her best school dress and her good coat, and Aiko was wearing a suit and a hat with a small, glossy feather fanned out along the brim, but it was Miyako who people stared at as they walked through the neighborhood with their suitcases. Lucy knew that her mother took comfort in making up her face when she was feeling anxious; by painting and powdering her face, it was as if she created an extra layer to hide behind. Today she wore a simple olive serge dress with a matching coat, and had fixed her hair in an elaborate pompadour on top of her head. She was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses with pearly frames; they were too large for her face, but they made her look mysterious, unapproachable even, and Lucy knew that was the point.
It was chaos at the church. Caucasian volunteers sat at desks with long lists of names, and uniformed servicemen tried to organize the milling families and their belongings, but it seemed to take hours for their turn. They were given tags for their luggage and one for Lucy to wear around her neck, since she was still a child. Each family’s tags bore their name, and Lucy thought it was sad that Auntie Aiko’s suitcase was the only one bearing the name NARITA. Better that she should have been part of their family; better that she be a TAKEDA, at least until the war was over and they could come home.
At last, the assembled crowd was directed aboard buses, and the buses took them to the train station downtown. There were so many people, so many faces. Lucy searched the crowd for people she knew, but everyone from her neighborhood had become separated in the vast, milling throng. The string around her neck that held the tag pulled and itched, but she said nothing. The other children she saw were silent, their eyes wide. Even the adults spoke quietly, lapsing into silence whenever soldiers walked among them.
Lucy had never ridden on a train before, and as they pulled out of the station and everything familiar disappeared behind them, it did not seem possible that the boxes that her mother and Aiko had packed would be able to find them. How would their belongings find their way beyond the Santa Monica Mountains to the flat valley beyond, places Lucy had never seen? As the hours passed, she kept her face pressed to the train window, while her mother and Auntie Aiko talked in quiet voices. She saw orchards that looked like the pictures in her father’s advertising brochures, and fields of strawberries and corn, little towns and ranches and children with no shoes waving madly as the train raced past.
At times, it almost felt like an adventure, except that the other passengers were silent and glum. Some cried, some slept, some talked in low voices. When a young soldier with acne freckling his cheeks told the passengers sitting next to the windows to pull down the blackout shades—even though it was bright afternoon—people complied without a word, and they were all plunged into darkness. Later, they were allowed to put the blinds up again, and someone had brought a box of oranges into the car, enough for everyone, and soon the air was full of the bursting scent of citrus.
Plump orange segments, bright and sharp on Lucy’s tongue, a treat. Was this what life was to be like from now on? Monotony and confusion, other people’s sadness and fear making it hard to breathe, punctuated by these small and unexpected pleasures?
* * *
In Bakersfield, they transferred from the train to waiting buses. Lucy clutched her tag and her mother’s hand, as she had promised, and tried not to look at the watchful soldiers with their billed caps shielding their eyes, their gleaming guns. The bus was crowded and smelled of exhaust; people coughed and the soldiers in the front struggled to keep their footing as it rolled out of town and onto a road that followed a twisting mountain gorge. As the bus took steep climbs and hairpin turns, Lucy peering out at the breathtaking drop-offs outside her windows, there were quiet moans and the sound of retching from those afflicted with motion sickness. It wasn’t long before the bus was filled with the stink of vomit.
It was night when they finally pulled off the road that bisected the flat valley between two mountain ranges. Somehow, in the miserable, fetid bus, Lucy had fallen asleep with her head in her mother’s lap, an indulgence Miyako would not have allowed even six months ago.
When the bus groaned to a halt, a buzz of excited conversation rose all around them. Lucy pressed her face to the window. In the distance a mountain peak rose up into the night, illuminated by moonlight, snow topped and impossibly vast. It was the biggest thing Lucy had ever seen, bigger than anything she had ever imagined.
And laid out in either direction along the wide dirt avenue where the bus had stopped were long, low buildings like dominoes arranged on a table. Above them the sky was bigger than it ever was in Los Angeles, and dusted with so many stars that it looked like talcum powder had been spilled across it.
“Last stop,” the driver said, perhaps joking; but after he cranked the doors open, it was several moments before anyone made a move. The air was cold here; while Lucy slept, her mother had covered her with a wrap taken from her valise. But the air that rushed into the bus was far colder. The soldiers, barking orders, made clouds with their breath.
“Are you sure this is it?” Lucy whispered, but her words were lost in the hubbub as people began to file off the bus.
“Wait,” Miyako said, her free hand clutching Lucy’s coat collar. The passengers exited and formed a milling crowd outside Lucy’s window, illuminated by spotlights coming from two tall wooden towers. She searched for Aiko’s familiar coat, but there were too many people, too many unfamiliar faces.
Eventually there were only a few stragglers on the bus. “Come on,” the young soldier said impatiently, gesturing with the rifle he held in both hands. “Hurry up.”
Miyako held both their suitcases in front of her, grunting with the effort of maneuvering them down the aisle. Lucy clutched her mother’s coat and inhaled the smell of the wool. Descending the steps, Miyako accepted the help of a stranger in a jacket and tie, and Lucy couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man, who apparently owned no warm coat. Once on the ground, she tested the soil with the toe of her shoe and found it sandy. The cold rushed under her skirt and the wind lifted her hair and swirled it around her face. It was as though the place was claiming her for its own, and Lucy stood rigid and fearful, not knowing how to resist.
8
San Francisco
Wednesday, June 7, 1978
For a moment after Inspector Torre left, the house echoed with the sound of the closing door. Lucy stared thoughtfully at the cream-and-gray-plaid Formica table.
“What the hell was that about?” Patty asked, when she was certain Torre was well out of earshot.
Lucy shrugged. “You were here. You heard the same things I did.”
“That’s not what I mean. You know that’s not what I mean. Who is this guy Forrest? Obviously, you knew him well enough to remember him after all this time. Who was he?”
“Just one of the staff, Patty. And I hadn’t thought of him in ages.”
“You didn’t go see him the other morning?”
“No,” Lucy said, but she didn’t meet Patty’s eyes.
“Not just the other morning, but ever. I mean, isn’t that kind of a strange coincidence, that he lived a few streets over all this time?”
“Worked. He worked near here. I have no idea where he lived. And after the war, lots of people from the camps went to the cities. Those newsletters that come here, half those people are living in San Francisco.”
Patty knew the newsletters her mother was talking about—stapled, folded affairs that her mother threw away without reading, the efforts of a group of former Manzanar internees who were trying to get what was left of the relocation center made into a memorial or a national monument. But Patty knew that Lucy would never seek those people out. She was a loner, content with her own company. It didn’t matter that they’d shared an experience, a moment in history. It seemed as though Lucy would much prefer to erase the past completely.
“Mother, we have to figure this out. Someone thinks they saw you there.”
For a moment Lucy looked as though she was going to say something—she bit her bottom lip and drew herself up in her seat—and then she merely got up and went to pour more tea. “It wasn’t me. I was here, getting ready for work. Like always.”
Like always, except that Patty had been asleep in the next room. She should have told the inspector that—that she had been here with her mother, that she’d confirm that at six o’clock Lucy’s alarm had gone off as it always did, that she couldn’t have been anywhere near the DeSoto because she’d been in the kitchen making tea.
Only she couldn’t actually say for certain what had happened in her mother’s little house until nearly ten, when she’d finally awoken to a throbbing headache and the sticky, foul taste of a hangover in her dry mouth. It had been the morning after her bachelorette party, scheduled midweek because that was when everyone could make it. Patty had had three glasses of champagne before switching to tequila and losing count—she may have still been a little drunk when she’d finally gotten up, honestly. A train could have barreled through her mother’s house and she would never have noticed.
“Just tell me this,” she said. “This man, Reginald Forrest, how did you know him?”
Lucy finished with her tea, pouring in the sugar and stirring until it was lukewarm, the way she liked it. “He had a job in the warehouses. All the supervisor positions—all the bosses—they were from the WRA. The War Relocation Authority. He was white, of course. He must have had a couple hundred men working for him, loading and unloading. The trucks came in every day—we used to watch them, us kids. We didn’t have a whole lot else to do.”
“That’s how you knew him? Just from hanging around the camp?”
Lucy shook her head impatiently. “No. There were ten thousand of us living there, a few hundred staff. It was like a small city. It was impossible to know everyone. But he was different. He was good-looking back then. He wanted to be an actor, before the war, and when they put on shows in camp, he would help out, direct and guest star. He coached baseball too. Everyone knew him.”
“Look, Mom...” Patty tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. “Maybe this is nothing, maybe they’ll go talk to his son or his girlfriend or whatever and figure out who did this. Or declare it a suicide or something. But we have to be ready in case they come back.”
It was the face, of course. There was simply no way to argue with someone who could describe Lucy’s face. Either her mother had been there or the janitor was lying. Both possibilities seemed absurd, but one had to be true. It was that simple. And Patty had to find out which—and why—before the detective did.
Maybe she could find this janitor, ask him questions. But as soon as she had the thought, Patty dismissed it. Why would a total stranger invent such a story?
Which left the other, far more uneasy possibility: that for reasons Patty couldn’t begin to fathom, Lucy not only knew Reginald Forrest worked nearby but had gone to see him on the morning he died. If someone really had killed the man, her mother likely knew something about it.
Patty watched Lucy unload clean dishes from the drainer and put them away. How could she think her own mother could have killed someone? She could not recall a single moment of violence or even uncontrolled anger—never a spanking, never an altercation with a stranger or at work, barely a raised voice during all Patty’s teen years.
But there was the dark history Lucy carried inside her and never shared. The horrors of the war years—being forced from her home and imprisoned, and then orphaned. Patty had never blamed her mother for trying to forget, but her secrecy had created a gulf between them nonetheless. It wasn’t her mother’s external scars that kept her outside Patty’s reach, but the ones on the inside. What if they’d finally scratched their way to the surface? What if, after all these years, her mother’s history had come back to haunt her?
* * *
After Lucy left for the grocery store, Patty rescheduled her appointment at the salon for the following week. The menu, flowers, place cards—all these details had been taken care of long ago. A chronic overplanner, Patty could coast all the way to the wedding if necessary, and everything would still run smoothly.
But none of that mattered anymore, anyway. She wanted to call Jay and tell him about the detective’s visit, but he was in Atlanta for business, some important client the firm was pitching, and the last thing he needed right now was for her to drag him into a mess that might well resolve itself in a day or two. He’d taken the red-eye Sunday just so he could take her and her mom to dinner to talk about wedding details, like how the ushers would seat the guests since his family was so much larger than hers, and who would walk Patty down the aisle since she had no one to give her away. He’d been so sweet that night—she couldn’t bear to interrupt his trip. It would wait until he was home.
With Lucy out of the house, Patty had a chance to collect her thoughts. She knew she wouldn’t get anywhere with her mother; anything she wanted to know about Reginald Forrest she would have to find out for herself.
She got the phone book from the hall table. Forrest, Reginald R.—there he was, plain as day. On Oliver Street, number 225½; Patty pulled out a map and discovered that he lived only eight blocks to the west, dipping into the Outer Sunset, not the best neighborhood. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and put on her running shorts and shoes. She was just going for a jog, she told herself; what could it hurt to just take a quick look at his house from the outside?
When she found the address, she was out of breath and perspiring. The lot was overgrown, fronted by a row of palms shedding dusty brown fronds all over the sidewalk. The house itself was half hidden behind misshapen shrubs and overhanging branches. She located the house numbers, the metal 5 upside down on its nail, and figured Forrest’s apartment must be in back.
Patty slowed to a walk and looked around; the street was empty. No one would notice, and she’d just duck in for a moment. The gate had lost its latch, but it squeaked as Patty pushed past, her feet crunching on dried leaves and pods.
A cracked and broken sidewalk led around the side of the house. Patty shoved branches aside and tried to be quiet. Someone could be home in the front of the house, despite its neglected appearance. She wondered if there ought to be police tape somewhere, draped across the door perhaps, or strung between tree trunks, but then again this was only where Forrest had lived, not where he died.
The backyard was tiny, a patch of dead grass separating the house from a leaning detached garage. Broken glass littered the garage window’s sash and glittered on the ground below. A trio of disintegrating beach chairs was arranged around a rusted hibachi. A bony cat streaked past with something twitching in its mouth.
She tried the back door and found it locked. Peering through a grimy window, she saw a small kitchen with an old-fashioned fridge, a neat row of empty beer cans on a short strip of countertop, a healthy-looking houseplant trailing leaves from a macramé hanger in the corner.
“You the girl?”
The voice came from the side of the house. Startled, Patty whipped around and saw a pair of old, cracked-leather brogues, no socks, skinny legs. A figure emerged from behind the untamed oleanders: an old lady with gray hair clouding around her shoulders. She wore a man’s work shirt and a skirt that hung on her hips. “You that girl?” she repeated. “Kinah’s friend?”
Patty’s heart had begun pounding the second the old woman spoke, but now she saw that there might be an opportunity. Maybe she could find out something about Forrest from his landlady.
“Uh...” she said, stalling.
“’Cause I expected you yesterday.” A bit of spittle arced from the woman’s mouth. Patty stepped back.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“I found his boxes in the garage yesterday,” the old woman continued, as though Patty hadn’t spoken. “I called Kinah and I told her, you come get these or I’m going to throw them out. She acted like she was doing me a favor. The trouble he caused me, police coming around here—and he still owes me two hundred and sixty dollars. I suppose I won’t ever see that money. You got a car?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re gonna need a car for the boxes. They’re heavy. I don’t want that junk on my porch.”
Patty thought of Jay’s car, his beloved red TR7. Its tiny trunk was already full of his soccer gear, and besides, he’d driven it to the airport and left it in long-term parking. “I thought I’d just take a look first, maybe, see what was there?”
The old woman frowned. “I told her I’m going to throw it out. I’m going to leave it on the porch, and if it isn’t gone by tomorrow I’m going to put it in the can. Don’t be knocking later when you come back—I got my bridge ladies coming.”
“All right. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to trouble you. Can I just take a look for now?”
“Okay, but I have to get ready. I don’t have time to stand around. You come back and take all that stuff, you hear? And tell Kinah to quit calling me.”
The old woman stumped back up the path, and Patty raced to help her, holding back branches as best she could. Around front, the landlady made her way up the steps to the cracked and peeling porch, pausing at each step to drag her leg up, holding on to the rail with both hands. Next to the front door, Patty could see two water-stained cardboard boxes overflowing with junk.
“I don’t know what’s even in there,” the old woman said, steadying herself with a hand on the doorjamb and breathing hard. “He had it down the cellar six, maybe eight years. I forgot it was there when the cops were here. I’m just glad he did it at work instead of in my house. I’d never get the blood out of the carpets.”
“You think it was suicide?” Patty asked, sifting through a tangle of electric cords, a trophy, a metal stein with a beer logo etched on its surface.
“Mmm-hmm, that man was unstable. Him and Kinah, and before that, the other one. I forget her name. Besides, I don’t know who’d take the trouble to kill him. He didn’t have anybody else besides that simple boy of his, and he hasn’t been around in a long time.”
Patty wasn’t really listening. She’d sifted through the first box and found nothing interesting, but in the second, stacked neatly along one edge, were two old photo albums. She lifted them out carefully, brushing off spiderwebs and dust, and turned them over on her lap. 1939–1940 was inked in neat block letters in Magic Marker on the cloth cover of the first.
On the second was written “MANZANAR.”
9
Manzanar, Inyo County, California
March 1942
The first night in their new home, Lucy learned that the camp had a thousand different sounds.
Back in their house on Clement Street, night was the music of a small ensemble. The ticking of the furnace, the groaning of the old walls settling on their foundation, branches from the cherry tree scratching her window when the wind blew, and the squeaking of the floorboards and flush of the toilet when her parents got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. All these sounds blended together in a familiar way, soothing Lucy back to sleep whenever she woke.
But underneath the scratchy, unfamiliar blanket, Lucy shivered from the cold as noises intruded from every direction. A baby in the room next to theirs cried almost the whole night through, and Lucy heard every one of its mother’s desperate, hushed whispers through the flimsy wall. She heard murmured conversations farther down the barrack. Her mother sighed in her sleep, and when she turned, the metal cot squeaked. Several times during the night, people went to the latrine, and then Lucy heard the door opening and closing, and muffled coughing as the night air filled lungs unaccustomed to such cold.
Deep in the night, the wind picked up, and sand flung itself against the barrack’s walls and windows, the sound like an angry waterfall. Lucy could feel the rush of cold wind through gaps in the boards and then—shocking and sudden—grains of sand against her cheek. It blew up from the floor, from between the rough boards.
Lucy didn’t think she would ever sleep. But somehow, she woke with sun streaming in on her face, her eyelashes stiff with tears.
Everything was terrible at first: there were long lines for every meal, and even when a two-shift system was put into place, there was always a wait. The food seemed merely unappetizing to Lucy, but for those accustomed to a traditional Japanese diet—especially the Issei, those born in Japan—it was practically inedible. One of the first meals featured canned peaches over rice, a combination many could not force themselves to eat, to the consternation of the Caucasian cooks, who could not understand that to the Issei the combination was as incongruous as ketchup on cake.
There was also the matter of vaccinations. Everyone was required to receive a typhoid vaccine. Done assembly-line style, the dosages given the children were so high that many were sick and feverish for days. Lucy lay in her cot, fading in and out of awareness, while her mother made repeated trips to the latrine to dampen a cloth for her forehead.
Every few days, a dust storm would pummel the camp. Fine grains swept through the cracks that had formed between the floorboards as they’d cured, and came in through the rough window casings and the gaps between the roof and timbers. The dust was cagey and relentless, and the evacuees scrambled to beat it back, stuffing the cracks with straw and strips torn from rags and anything else they could find. The more enterprising took to nailing lids from food cans in overlapping rows over the cracks. But these measures seemed only to renew the storm’s efforts to find them. The fine grains felt like boulders when they found their way into one’s eyes; they were gritty in one’s teeth, sandy in one’s ears and nostrils.
At night the sound of coughing filled Lucy’s building. Everyone struggled to breathe, from the baby in the next room, whose condition was worsening by the day—her mother waited outside the temporary hospital most mornings to beg the harried doctors for medicine—to the old man at the other end of the hall who sounded like furniture being roughly pushed across a floor.
But by far, the worst of the privations was the public latrine.
On the morning after their arrival, Miyako took Lucy’s hand and they ventured out of the barrack. There were sounds of conversation up and down the row of rooms, but Miyako waited until she was sure no one else was in the hall before they left their own room.
“I will not meet my new neighbors before I have had a chance to freshen up,” she vowed fiercely, gripping Lucy’s hand so tightly that it hurt. She had a folded cloth, their toothbrushes, a comb and a tiny cake of soap in a small box that she’d had the foresight to bring for that purpose, and she had wrapped a scarf around her head and donned her dark sunglasses. Privately, Lucy thought she looked even more like a movie star in this getup, but she doubted her mother would take the observation as a compliment.
They walked the short distance to the latrine with sand blowing up under their skirts. The dust storm of the night before had settled, but sand still blew and the wind was cold on their faces. Though it was late March, the temperature had fallen below freezing the night before, and there was a rime of ice on a puddle leaking from the plumbing pipes leading into the latrine.
And there was a line. As they got close, they heard the intense, agitated conversation among the women already waiting.
“Wait, suzume,” Miyako murmured, holding Lucy back. Lucy knew her mother was loath to intrude on others’ conversation; her reticence was more imperious than shy, but she was not a naturally outgoing person. This was a subject to which Lucy had already devoted a fair amount of worry: how would her mother make friends here, if in all their time on Clement Street she’d made only one? Yesterday, after they were processed at the main office, they discovered that Aiko would be living far from their block, nearly three quarters of a mile away, sharing a room with an elderly woman and her unmarried grown daughter. The entire camp was a square mile with thirty-six blocks, and they said that ten thousand people would be living there by summer. Lucy was afraid they would never see Aiko. If her mother did not make new friends, she would be all alone.
The ladies at the door of the latrine ranged in age from a young mother with a baby on her hip to a hunched, elderly crone being supported by a younger woman—a daughter, perhaps, or a daughter-in-law. Lucy strained to hear what they were saying, but the wind prevented her from making out the words.
“Mother, I have to go,” she whispered urgently.
Miyako frowned as the door abruptly opened and two women came out, their faces downcast, and hurried down the road in the other direction. Those waiting gave them a wide berth.
A second later the smell hit Lucy. The women near the door took a step away from it, before one of them resolutely walked up the steps. A moment later, the others followed.
“Mother,” Lucy pleaded. She was afraid that she couldn’t control herself much longer, that she might urinate right here outside for everyone to see.
“All right.” Miyako’s voice was thin and worried. They went inside, Miyako never letting go of her hand.
Inside, the stench was overwhelming, and Lucy’s stomach roiled. On the floor, dark runnels of murky liquid and sewage flowed freely from the toilets, all but one of which had overflowed. The line to use the remaining toilet was a dozen women deep, all of them trying to avoid the waste that seeped across the floor and through the cracks. They stood with their backs to the last working toilet, giving the only privacy they could.
Sitting on the toilet, an elderly woman was crying, tears running down her cheeks while she tried to shield her face. Her shame was palpable, her misery absolute. Next to Lucy, Miyako gasped.
Lucy would never forget what her mother did next. Miyako, who couldn’t bring herself to speak to a stranger, who walked past the greeters at church without a word, who never attended a tea or a card game or a club meeting, took the folded cloth and handed Lucy the toiletry box. She walked across the foul-smelling room, ignoring the row of curious strangers, and handed the cloth to the old woman, not meeting her eyes, unable to avoid stepping in the waste. The woman murmured a few words and took the cloth, unfolding it and draping it over her head, obscuring her face completely.
After that, Lucy and her mother waited their turn with the others. No one spoke; everyone bore the shame of the lack of privacy in silence. When it was their turn, Miyako allowed Lucy to go first. Her relief was immense. Afterward, she washed her hands and waited with her back to her mother. She had never seen Miyako unclothed—even last night her mother had waited until Lucy was in bed to undress. It was dawning on Lucy that all their privacy and modesty was to be taken from them in this place, but she was determined to give her mother all the dignity she could.
* * *
The wave of evacuees that swept Lucy and her mother into Manzanar was among the first, but within days, the earliest to arrive felt as though they had been there forever. Each day brought busloads of dazed families. Lucy learned to read in their faces the cycle of emotions as they came to understand what their new life entailed. Astonishment, dismay, horror, desperation...and slowly, slowly, the deadening of the features that signaled acceptance.
Six families to a barrack, each in a room that measured twenty by twelve feet. Surplus cots and scratchy blankets from the first war. Instead of walls, raw wood dividers that didn’t reach the ceiling. Curtains instead of doors. Tar paper, unfinished wood, gaps and cracks in walls, floors, roofs. Freezing desert nights, impossible blowing sandstorms. Plumbers were recruited from within the ranks of the interned to work on the latrines, but problems persisted, and soon there was a grapevine among the women about which blocks’ latrines were working.
There were toilet-paper shortages. Food shortages. Staff shortages. Still, as the days wore on, bits of scrap started turning up from the construction going on all over the camp. Boards were turned into shelves. Packing crates were turned into dressers and tables and even chairs; curtains were fashioned from bedsheets; men whittled and women knitted, anything to pass the time.
In Manzanar, words took on new meanings. Lucy learned to use the word doorway when what she was describing was the curtain that separated each family’s room from the hallway that ran the length of the drafty barrack building. In short order they developed the habit of stamping on the floor to announce a visit, since there was no door to knock on, but they still called it knocking. Even building did not mean what it did back on Clement Street. At first the evacuees thought the barracks were unfinished, with their tar-paper walls and unpainted window casings and plywood floors, but it turned out that these humble edifices were what the government meant for the internees to live in for as long as the war raged on.
The dirt avenues filled with people, the crowds extending all the way to the razor-wire-topped fence that encircled them. Already Lucy had lost her way to her barrack several times, finally learning to orient herself by the mountain in the distance and the guard towers, entirely too close, in which soldiers peered down at them all day long, and from which searchlights projected at night, crisscrossing the bare dirt streets in dizzying patterns.
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Sophie Littlefield
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In the dark days of war, a mother makes the ultimate sacrifice Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor.Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up—along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans—and taken to the Manzanar prison camp. Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp.Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever…and spur her to sins of her own.Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield weaves a powerful tale of stolen innocence and survival that echoes through generations, reverberating between mothers and daughters. It is a moving chronicle of injustice, triumph and the unspeakable acts we commit in the name of love."Littlefield has a gift for pacing…page-turning action and evocative, sensual, harrowing descriptions." —Publishers Weekly