Garden of Stones

by Sophie Littlefield

  “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 awfu
l.

  * * *

  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 an
d 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.