Garden of Stones

by Sophie Littlefield

  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...”

  Lucy felt cold fingers of dread creep down her neck. She turned away without reading the rest; Aiko had been predicting this day for a while now. Whenever she brought up the subject, Miyako blanched and begged her to stop. Now it was up to Lucy to finally make her understand.

  She ran all the way home, and by the time she arrived, her lungs were burning and her feet pinched against the leather of her shoes. Somewhere, she’d dropped the coins without even noticing. She had not bought the tea that her mother had wanted. There would not be enough for tomorrow. But what did it matter?

  Lucy burst through the front door and nearly collided with Aiko, who was standing in the parlor. For a moment neither said anything; Lucy could see from Aiko’s eyes that she already knew.

  Aiko knelt down and took Lucy’s hand in hers. “I’ve already told her. Lucy... It’s going to be okay. We’ll put our things in storage. It’s not forever. It’s... It’ll be like an adventure.”

  Lucy allowed Aiko to caress her arms, to keep speaking. The words blurred together as she nodded; what she most wanted was for Aiko to leave. She had to get to her mother. Had to see for herself what damage this latest onslaught had done.

  At last Aiko released her and went to the kitchen, where Lucy could hear her rattling pots. Her mother had started the dinner before Lucy had left; Lucy supposed that Aiko would now finish it. The two worked well together that way. How many times had they cooked together in one or the other’s kitchen? How many times had they taken the sun on balmy afternoons in the backyard, pruned the crape myrtles lining the street in front of both their houses, looked through magazines, listened to the radio, mended and darned and embroidered together?

  But her mother needed her now. She crept down the hall to her mother’s room, certain Aiko would tell her to leave her mother be. Slipping noiselessly into the room, she let her eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. But her mother wasn’t asleep. She was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows, with her arms folded across her chest and the blankets drawn neatly up over her lap.

  “We’re to be evacuated,” she said to Lucy. “Come sit.”

  It was the second time in recent weeks that Miyako had invited Lucy into her embrace, and Lucy slipped off her shoes and clambered up onto the bed. She realized that her mother still slept in the same spot that she had when her father was alive, and that, as she crawled under the covers next to her mother, she was on his side of the bed. She wondered if it was true, what the pastor had said when he’d come to the house to pay his respects, that her father was able to look down from heaven and see them. She hoped so. Just in case, she fixed a smile on her face so that he would see she was taking good care of Miyako.

  “Auntie Aiko says we can store our things.”

  Miyako frowned. “Maybe some of them. But, suzume, I have been thinking, we don’t need so many things anymore. All this big furniture...all those clothes...”

  She gestured at the heavy oak armoire, which was just a bulky outline in the darkened room. Lucy had always loved her parents’ furniture, a matched set purchased when they had married. Another of the stories her father loved to tell: taking his young bride-to-be to the best department stores in Los Angeles—how shy she was!—and telling her to pick out anything she liked. She had never been inside Bullock’s before that day, and the sales clerks were practically falling all over themselves to wait on her, assuming she must be someone important, dressed in the finely tailored clothes she had made for herself.

  “But you can’t give all of our things away,” Lucy whispered. The neat row of dresses, the drawers full of silken camisoles and slips, the bottles of perfume and the mirrored tray that held her cosmetics—what would her mother be without these things? “We can take them with us. The sign said. You just pack and the government...”

  But Lucy wasn’t at all sure what the government would do for them. On the sign it had said something about storing household possessions if they were “crated and clearly marked.” But this was the voice of the same force that broke down doors in the middle of the night, that cut slits in people’s sofas looking for evidence of treason, that broke treasured records in half just because the labels bore Japanese words. How could they possibly be expected to care for Lucy and Miyako’s possessions?

  “We have a little time,” Miyako said. “We will start tomorrow.”

  She raised her arm, making room for Lucy against her side. It was easy to fall asleep, listening to her mother’s breathing. And when Lucy woke again—many hours later, in the middle of the night—she found that her mother had curled around her, holding her in the curve of her body, making a cocoon with her thin arms.

  * * *

  In the confusion and panic surrounding the evacuation order, Miyako and Auntie Aiko somehow managed to learn what goods could be packed to be sent along later, and what would have to be stored until after the war, and began to prepare. They were to report to the Methodist church on Rosecrans Avenue on March 22, bringing only what they could carry, but it wasn’t clear what was to happen after that. The newspaper reported that the newly formed War Relocation Authority had secured land in the Owens Valley near the Sierra Mountains, and even now workers were building quarters for the thousands of Japanese Americans being ousted from their homes. But there were also rumors of people being sent to racetracks and fairgrounds all over California and forced to sleep in horse stalls, and no one could say for sure where anyone would be going on the twenty-second.

  What was immediately clear was that the process would be neither easy nor orderly. By the second day after the sign was posted, the local stores ran out of twine and luggage. Entire blocks in Little Tokyo were vacated, and speculators swooped in offering cents on the dollar for the ousted merchants’ inventories. Soon, other men began going door-to-door, making offers for entire housefuls of family possessions. At first these offers were rebuffed, but before long frantic families began to realize that an insulting offer was the best they would receive.

  After several days shuffling their belongings among ever-changing piles, Miyako and Auntie Aiko decided to be practical about what to store and what to ship. Into their boxes went bowls and pencils and writing paper, scissors and Father’s gooseneck lamp and extra lightbulbs, pillowcases and serving spoons. For a long time, Mother did not pack her embroidery box. It sat next to a stack of dessert dishes on the table, waiting for her to decide, the thimbles and packets of needles and skeins of colorful floss arranged neatly in the lacquered box, the co
ntents of which Lucy knew by heart even without opening the lid. She understood her mother’s dilemma, because while the embroidery was beautiful, it was also useful; her mother only embroidered things one could use, like pillowcases and towels and bedcovers and tablecloths. In the end, the box was packed, which was only a fleeting comfort.

  Lucy went across the street the morning they were to leave to return a hammer her mother had borrowed from Aiko to seal their crates, and found Aiko in tears.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Oh, oh. Lucy. I’m sorry.” Aiko turned away from her and swiftly dried her eyes on a handkerchief. “I can live without all of this. But...Bluebell and Lily...”

  Her cats. Of course. Bluebell and Lily trusted only Aiko; despite Lucy’s patient efforts, they never warmed up to her enough to allow her to pet them.

  “I’m sorry about your cats,” Lucy said softly. She touched the hem of Aiko’s skirt. The fabric was stiff with starch and smelled like Aiko’s familiar perfume.

  “Oh, don’t be silly.” Aiko cleared her throat and forced a smile. “Mrs. Marvin down the street will take good care of them for me. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  But the men with the truck were late, and Aiko and Miyako were nearly frantic with worry by the time they finally pulled up to the curb. The bed of the truck was already so laden down with other people’s belongings that Lucy didn’t see how they could add any more, but the men lashed their boxes on top of the heap and drove away.

  Lucy was wearing her best school dress and her good coat, and Aiko was wearing a suit and a hat with a small, glossy feather fanned out along the brim, but it was Miyako who people stared at as they walked through the neighborhood with their suitcases. Lucy knew that her mother took comfort in making up her face when she was feeling anxious; by painting and powdering her face, it was as if she created an extra layer to hide behind. Today she wore a simple olive serge dress with a matching coat, and had fixed her hair in an elaborate pompadour on top of her head. She was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses with pearly frames; they were too large for her face, but they made her look mysterious, unapproachable even, and Lucy knew that was the point.

  It was chaos at the church. Caucasian volunteers sat at desks with long lists of names, and uniformed servicemen tried to organize the milling families and their belongings, but it seemed to take hours for their turn. They were given tags for their luggage and one for Lucy to wear around her neck, since she was still a child. Each family’s tags bore their name, and Lucy thought it was sad that Auntie Aiko’s suitcase was the only one bearing the name NARITA. Better that she should have been part of their family; better that she be a TAKEDA, at least until the war was over and they could come home.

  At last, the assembled crowd was directed aboard buses, and the buses took them to the train station downtown. There were so many people, so many faces. Lucy searched the crowd for people she knew, but everyone from her neighborhood had become separated in the vast, milling throng. The string around her neck that held the tag pulled and itched, but she said nothing. The other children she saw were silent, their eyes wide. Even the adults spoke quietly, lapsing into silence whenever soldiers walked among them.

  Lucy had never ridden on a train before, and as they pulled out of the station and everything familiar disappeared behind them, it did not seem possible that the boxes that her mother and Aiko had packed would be able to find them. How would their belongings find their way beyond the Santa Monica Mountains to the flat valley beyond, places Lucy had never seen? As the hours passed, she kept her face pressed to the train window, while her mother and Auntie Aiko talked in quiet voices. She saw orchards that looked like the pictures in her father’s advertising brochures, and fields of strawberries and corn, little towns and ranches and children with no shoes waving madly as the train raced past.

  At times, it almost felt like an adventure, except that the other passengers were silent and glum. Some cried, some slept, some talked in low voices. When a young soldier with acne freckling his cheeks told the passengers sitting next to the windows to pull down the blackout shades—even though it was bright afternoon—people complied without a word, and they were all plunged into darkness. Later, they were allowed to put the blinds up again, and someone had brought a box of oranges into the car, enough for everyone, and soon the air was full of the bursting scent of citrus.

  Plump orange segments, bright and sharp on Lucy’s tongue, a treat. Was this what life was to be like from now on? Monotony and confusion, other people’s sadness and fear making it hard to breathe, punctuated by these small and unexpected pleasures?

  * * *

  In Bakersfield, they transferred from the train to waiting buses. Lucy clutched her tag and her mother’s hand, as she had promised, and tried not to look at the watchful soldiers with their billed caps shielding their eyes, their gleaming guns. The bus was crowded and smelled of exhaust; people coughed and the soldiers in the front struggled to keep their footing as it rolled out of town and onto a road that followed a twisting mountain gorge. As the bus took steep climbs and hairpin turns, Lucy peering out at the breathtaking drop-offs outside her windows, there were quiet moans and the sound of retching from those afflicted with motion sickness. It wasn’t long before the bus was filled with the stink of vomit.

  It was night when they finally pulled off the road that bisected the flat valley between two mountain ranges. Somehow, in the miserable, fetid bus, Lucy had fallen asleep with her head in her mother’s lap, an indulgence Miyako would not have allowed even six months ago.

  When the bus groaned to a halt, a buzz of excited conversation rose all around them. Lucy pressed her face to the window. In the distance a mountain peak rose up into the night, illuminated by moonlight, snow topped and impossibly vast. It was the biggest thing Lucy had ever seen, bigger than anything she had ever imagined.

  And laid out in either direction along the wide dirt avenue where the bus had stopped were long, low buildings like dominoes arranged on a table. Above them the sky was bigger than it ever was in Los Angeles, and dusted with so many stars that it looked like talcum powder had been spilled across it.

  “Last stop,” the driver said, perhaps joking; but after he cranked the doors open, it was several moments before anyone made a move. The air was cold here; while Lucy slept, her mother had covered her with a wrap taken from her valise. But the air that rushed into the bus was far colder. The soldiers, barking orders, made clouds with their breath.

  “Are you sure this is it?” Lucy whispered, but her words were lost in the hubbub as people began to file off the bus.

  “Wait,” Miyako said, her free hand clutching Lucy’s coat collar. The passengers exited and formed a milling crowd outside Lucy’s window, illuminated by spotlights coming from two tall wooden towers. She searched for Aiko’s familiar coat, but there were too many people, too many unfamiliar faces.

  Eventually there were only a few stragglers on the bus. “Come on,” the young soldier said impatiently, gesturing with the rifle he held in both hands. “Hurry up.”

  Miyako held both their suitcases in front of her, grunting with the effort of maneuvering them down the aisle. Lucy clutched her mother’s coat and inhaled the smell of the wool. Descending the steps, Miyako accepted the help of a stranger in a jacket and tie, and Lucy couldn’t help feeling sorry for the man, who apparently owned no warm coat. Once on the ground, she tested the soil with the toe of her shoe and found it sandy. The cold ru
shed under her skirt and the wind lifted her hair and swirled it around her face. It was as though the place was claiming her for its own, and Lucy stood rigid and fearful, not knowing how to resist.

  8

  San Francisco

  Wednesday, June 7, 1978

  For a moment after Inspector Torre left, the house echoed with the sound of the closing door. Lucy stared thoughtfully at the cream-and-gray-plaid Formica table.

  “What the hell was that about?” Patty asked, when she was certain Torre was well out of earshot.

  Lucy shrugged. “You were here. You heard the same things I did.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You know that’s not what I mean. Who is this guy Forrest? Obviously, you knew him well enough to remember him after all this time. Who was he?”

  “Just one of the staff, Patty. And I hadn’t thought of him in ages.”

  “You didn’t go see him the other morning?”

  “No,” Lucy said, but she didn’t meet Patty’s eyes.

  “Not just the other morning, but ever. I mean, isn’t that kind of a strange coincidence, that he lived a few streets over all this time?”