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
