LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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