“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...”