Garden of Stones (14 page)

But Lucy closed her eyes and breathed in and betrayed herself. “Did
he
give it to you?”

The silence that followed was weighted with unbearable tension, and Lucy opened her eyes to see that Miyako had pushed herself up on her elbow, her cotton gown hanging off her bony shoulders.

“Who?” Miyako whispered.

“That
man
. Mr. Rickenbocker. At your work. I
saw
him. I saw you with him. In that room. His hands all over you and—”

Abruptly Lucy was sobbing, unable to get enough breath to continue. Miyako threw off her covers and rushed to kneel next to Lucy’s bed. She wrapped Lucy in her arms, and Lucy pressed herself against her mother’s warm skin, her beating heart. She let her mother hold her and imagined they were somewhere else, back in their house on Clement Street, sitting together on the red settee waiting for her father to come home.

After a very long time, Miyako pulled back from Lucy. Her face was pale, her skin so thin it looked as though you could tear it with a fingernail. “What you saw, Lucy. I didn’t want— If there was any way I could—”

But Lucy knew that already. Who could willingly go with a man like that, with a voice like gravel and grabbing, bruising hands? Obviously, the man had chosen her mother for two reasons—because she was the most perfect, the most beautiful—and because he
could,
because his power was great enough that she could not say no.

“But can’t you quit your job? Can’t Auntie Aiko ask Mr. Hamaguchi to talk to him?” she begged.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Miyako murmured, and she encircled Lucy again with her arms and rocked her. “I’ll find a way,
suzume,
there has to be a way.”

Within days it seemed that she had. Each morning, Miyako left for work before Lucy woke, and she returned home before Lucy got home from school. As the days went by, she seemed to regain some of the vitality she’d lost. Most nights she brought work home with her, and Lucy would find her hand-sewing a zipper in place or hemming the full skirt of a party dress.

The bruises faded.

Lucy brought plates of food back to the room after every meal and encouraged Miyako to eat as much as she could, a second piece of toast or a cold slice of potato. It seemed to be working. She was gaining back some of the weight she had lost, her clothes no longer hanging on her thin frame.

For weeks, Lucy saw little of Jessie. Other than school and her job, she spent all her time at home with Miyako. Her schoolwork suffered and she turned down invitations from the girls in her class. All her focus was on her mother. Miyako slipped silently through the days like a pale fish swimming far below the surface, a shadow among the lily fronds, and Lucy watched intently for the rainbow flash of brilliance that would signal her mother’s return.

* * *

The Indian summer days faded to the chilly, gray skies of November. Lucy was given a coat from a large box of winter clothes donated by a Sacramento church. A tag sewn into the lining was embroidered with the name Tabitha E. Davis. It was too large, the sleeves extending past Lucy’s wrists to her knuckles. Miyako promised to tailor it, but every night she was occupied with her piecework.

Baseball practice tapered off, the leagues between seasons, and Jessie met Lucy after school almost every day. She didn’t realize how much she had missed him, and she stole moments away from Miyako to be with him. They held hands on the porch of the mess hall after dinner; they kissed behind the recreation hall as the moon rose above the mountains. During the day, it was almost impossible to find privacy in the camp, not even a small patch of dirt where they could be alone without children playing, ladies talking, old men tossing stones. But at night it sometimes felt as if they were the only two people in Manzanar.

One night Lucy and Jessie stayed out late watching the reflection of the full moon shimmering in the creek, looking like a glittering disk of silver. Lucy said it was the most beautiful thing in the entire camp. Jessie pulled her close against him and whispered against her neck as he kissed her. “You are, Lucy. You’re the most beautiful, at least to me.”

Later that night, Lucy watched her mother sleep in the moonlight that streamed through the window. Her shoulder was so thin, her breathing impossibly shallow. Thoughts of Jessie got her through nights like these, when her worries about her mother threatened to crush her. Jessie was all she needed. As long as she had him, everything would be all right.

14

As winter blanketed the camp, Jessie began to pull away. At first it was just a sadness that shadowed his face, a bleakness that quickly disappeared when Lucy spoke his name. But one day he wasn’t waiting for her after school; then it was three times in one week. He said he needed to work on his fielding before the winter league started up, but when Lucy looked for him on the fields, he wasn’t there. He made plans with her and failed to show up; later he would apologize, but he never offered an explanation. When they did spend time together, he was preoccupied and silent.

“Please, just tell me what I did,” she pleaded one day after waiting for forty-five minutes outside his barrack for him to come home. “If you’re mad at me—”

“It’s not you, Lucy, I’ve told you that,” he snapped, sliding his bat bag off his shoulder. Then he added, more gently, “I had batting practice.”

“I looked for you at the fields.”

“I was there,” he insisted, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

One night after dinner, while her mother was sewing a row of tiny pearl buttons on a fitted bodice, Lucy went out for a walk with a vague plan to go by Jessie’s block and see if he happened to be around. The night was cold, but Lucy knew that Jessie was occasionally driven outside in the evenings by the noise and demands of his two little brothers. It was a long shot, and Lucy brooded as she walked the long stretch up C Street and over to D, zigzagging through the victory gardens, wondering what she could say that would get Jessie to open up to her.

It was her intense focus that kept her from noticing the figures approaching behind her. Footsteps crushing frost-dead plants startled her out of her thoughts, and suddenly two men appeared beside her. Lucy was astonished to see that one was Mr. Van Dorn, and the other was Reg Forrest.

Reg Forrest was something of a celebrity in the camp. Now a warehouse manager, he’d been an aspiring Hollywood actor before the war. He hadn’t landed any big roles yet, but he was even more handsome in person than he was in the publicity photo someone had posted in the general store above the rack of movie magazines. There were rumors that he’d been in a television ad for Swift meats, though no one had actually seen it aired. He had wavy blond hair and a cleft in his chin like Cary Grant’s, only not as big. He was tall and broad shouldered and he smiled a lot and many of the girls claimed to be in love with him. Reg was friendly enough, and he helped coach the junior high baseball league and had directed a performance by the drama club.

Lucy was mystified and a little frightened. Lots of people used the victory gardens as a shortcut, especially now that the soil was turned under and frozen, but at the moment there was no one else about. The afternoon had turned cold and the air damp, and people were keeping inside. The oil heaters had been cranking around the clock for several weeks now, and tendrils of greasy smoke wound up out of the barracks roofs.

“Hello there,” Reg said, in a friendly enough voice. Van Dorn said nothing, keeping his hands jammed in his pockets.

Lucy wondered if something terrible had happened—an accident, someone in the block, her auntie Aiko, even her mother. But would they send these two to tell her? More likely it would be someone from the block.

“We have a message for your mother,” Reg continued. “I’m hoping you’ll deliver it for us. Tell her George misses her.”

Lucy’s heart was pounding so hard in her chest that she didn’t trust herself to speak. All around her were neat rows of turned earth, a few winter lettuces and the tops of radishes showing above the soil. The melons and beans and sunflowers had all been turned under after the first frost, and here and there a few dead stalks poked out of the earth.

Night had blanketed the camp, and lights burned in the windows of the barracks all around them, but they seemed very far away. Too far to call out; too far to summon help. Lucy’s hands ached with cold because she’d left her mittens somewhere, and hadn’t got up the nerve to tell her mother yet. Van Dorn stared silently out across the broad avenues toward where the mountain’s shape was visible, the bright snow a beacon above the horizon. Reg put his hand lightly on her shoulder. For a moment it rested there and Lucy held her breath; then he squeezed.

“This is very important,” he said, his fingers finding the tendon that ran along the base of her neck and digging in. “I’m going to ask you to repeat it. Tell your mother, ‘You have a lovely daughter. George looks forward to your next visit.’”

“I don’t...” Lucy whispered, blinking tears. Her legs felt weak and a small amount of urine dampened her panties.

“I would like you to repeat that back to me,” Reg said kindly, but his fingers continued their pressure. Lucy’s arm twitched.

“You have a lovely daughter,” she whispered. “George looks forward to your next visit.”

Immediately the pressure was released and Reg was patting her coat gently. Lucy felt a tear roll down her cheek, splashing to the ground, where she imagined it would freeze by morning. She wanted to rub her nose on her sleeve, but didn’t dare move.

“You’ll tell her,” Reg said softly, and he and Van Dorn began backing away. “Go on home now.”

Then they were gone. She heard their footfalls behind her but did not dare turn around to see which way they went. She waited until it was silent, the only sound the rushing of the wind, and then she walked home as fast as her trembling legs could carry her.

* * *

Miyako’s face, when Lucy repeated the message, went blank.

Lucy could see the toll the past few months had taken on her mother, the fine lines and dark smudges around her mouth and eyes. It was as though she were no longer living, but a life-size porcelain figurine.

She cupped Lucy’s face in her hand, just firmly enough to force her to meet her gaze. “Did they touch you?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, remembering the astonishing force of Reg’s forefinger and thumb digging into her flesh through her coat and sweater. “I mean no.”

Miyako stared at her for a long time but asked no further questions. When she finally let go of Lucy’s face, she touched her three times: on the bridge of her nose, on her lips and on her chin; and then she drew several strands of Lucy’s hair through her fine fingers. Lucy, unaccustomed to such tender gestures, stood frozen.

“You’re cursed, just like me,” Miyako whispered. “But I will fix this.”

After a final caress she went back to her side of the room and began to undress. Within moments she was in her bed, the covers pulled up over her head, while Lucy wondered where in her body the curse was hidden and when it would fight its way out.

15

December came. There was trouble in the camp between the older Issei—those born in Japan—and the next-generation Nisei. Many of the old people still wore the stunned expressions that they’d arrived with, unable to speak enough English to communicate with the Caucasian staff. Some of the younger men were anxious to join the service, to prove their loyalty—but others were driven by darker impulses: resentment over their incarceration, over the loss of their property and livelihood, over educations interrupted and voices ignored. There were clashes over loyalty and duty, fights and accusations and simmering tempers.

Lucy, increasingly lonely, immersed herself in her schoolwork. It came easily to her, and it helped her to ignore the chaos around her, to temper the loss of Jessie and her worries about her increasingly distant and frail mother. Her marks were high; her teacher often singled her out for praise, holding her papers up for the other students to see, but Lucy’s pride was dampened by the distraction of the turmoil all around the camp.

Nothing got resolved. Tempers flared and fights broke out and one night the military police surged inside the gates to quell a riot. Lucy stayed inside her room with her mother, while outside the shouting grew deafening and something—a stone, an ax—struck the side of the building. Their neighbors were out there, the men and boys from their block, while inside the women comforted the children and clutched broomsticks and paring knives and prayed the conflict would not reach inside. Lucy pressed her hands over her ears, shut her eyes and wondered what Jessie was doing, if he was outside in the melee, if he would have the sense to stay out of the worst of it or if he would welcome the chance to fight.

By the next morning, one young man had been killed, and an eerie sense of calm descended on the camp. The wind kicked up and dust blew through the abandoned streets. Finally, it was time for breakfast, and people ventured from their barracks, heads down and hurrying. The staff were already out in force, patrolling the streets, posted at the auditorium and rec halls to prevent another round of fighting from breaking out. News traveled slowly at first, building to a crescendo inside the mess halls.

Lucy ate by herself amid the din. When a sudden hush fell, she looked up from her cereal and saw that Reg Forrest had entered the room. He’d evidently been pressed into service to help keep the peace, and he wore one of the MP’s pressed uniform shirts. A baton hung from his belt. He walked around the perimeter of the room, hands behind his back, saying nothing, a strange smile fixed on his face. Lucy put down her spoon, her appetite lost. A few hundred feet away, in the guard towers that loomed over the camp, soldiers watched every inch of the fence, their fingers never far from the triggers of their guns—but somehow Reg’s presence was even more chilling.

Lucy slid closer to the family whose table she was sharing, hoping that she could escape Reg’s notice by pretending to be one of their children. But Reg had already spotted her. He walked directly toward her table and Lucy felt the filament that connected them grow taut. She sat up as straight as she could and forced herself to meet his gaze.