She decided to go see Miyako at work, unannounced. Maybe that way she could see for herself what was happening, maybe she could solve the mystery of what was slowly draining the life from her mother. When Jessie’s practice was canceled one afternoon, she seized the opportunity to ask him if he would go with her.
“I’m worried about her,” Lucy confessed. So worried, in fact, that she had been afraid to visit alone, not because she feared getting in trouble, but because she didn’t know what she would find. Perhaps it would be nothing—and in some ways this was the most frightening possibility of all, for it meant that Miyako’s slow downward spiral was a product only of her own mind. And Lucy had no idea how to fix that.
But if something else was going on—and if Jessie was by her side, helping her figure out what to do—then maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe it could be fixed, and they could go back to that brief moment in time when there had been hope, when Miyako had been poised and beautiful and excited about her job, when Lucy had been able to imagine a future for both of them.
Jessie glanced at her carefully. “Is she sick?”
“Why do you ask?” Lucy said, too quickly. Her mother had been losing weight, and the circles under her eyes were deepening. Were people beginning to notice?
“No reason. Just...I heard my mother talking to some of the other ladies.”
“Talking? About what?”
“About your mom.”
Lucy could sense Jessie’s hesitation. “Just tell me!” she pleaded.
“It’s nothing, really, just—Mom knows a couple of the women who work with her. They say she doesn’t talk to anyone. That she’s standoffish.”
That, at least, Lucy understood—it was the reputation that her mother had always had. Still, she felt that she had to defend her mother to Jessie. “She’s just really shy.”
Jessie didn’t seem convinced, and Lucy knew there had to be more, but they had almost reached the dress factory.
“Listen, Jessie...it’s just, I think something might be going on at work. I just want to check on her.”
“You mean like they’re working them too hard or something?”
“I’m not really sure, but I don’t think they’ll let her take a break just to talk to me, so...see, I brought this.”
She dug in her pocket and pulled out her mother’s small pillbox and showed it to Jessie. “I’ll just say she forgot her asthma medicine.”
“I didn’t know your mom has asthma.”
“She doesn’t. I need an excuse that sounds important. What do you think?”
“I think it’ll work.” He gave her the smile he reserved for her alone, the quiet grin that seemed to promise she could depend on him, and Lucy’s trepidation lifted a little.
Lucy took a deep breath and tried the door to the building. It wasn’t locked, so she slipped inside, Jessie following right behind her. Inside, the air hummed with the sounds of the sewing machines and the chatter of the women working at the cutting tables. A plump, gray-haired woman wearing glasses on the end of her nose looked up from the nearest table and asked if she could help them.
“My mother is Miyako Takeda,” Lucy said. Several heads turned, the women clearly curious. Caught staring, they quickly returned to their work.
“I have her asthma medicine. She forgot it this morning, and if she doesn’t take it she’ll get sick.”
“I’m sorry,” the lady said, setting down her pinking shears and dusting off her skirt. “Miyako has been called away. You can leave the medicine with me.”
“Called away?” Lucy echoed. “Where?”
The lady glanced nervously down the service hallway at the end of the room. “She had an errand for Mr. Rickenbocker,” she said at last.
“Oh. I’ll just... Maybe I can come back a little later.”
“I really don’t mind giving it to her, dear.”
Lucy couldn’t give the woman the box, because it was empty. She hadn’t planned for this scenario. She thought either she would see her mother right away or, if she wasn’t in the main room, she could use the pillbox to gain access to wherever she was working. “No, she, she...” Lucy stammered, the woman staring at her curiously. “She’s very strict. She won’t let me give it to anyone else.”
She thanked the woman, averting her eyes from her appraising gaze, and turned to go. As soon as they were outside, she pulled Jessie toward the side of the building, her body trembling from a buildup of nerves.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Where would she have gone?”
“Do you want to wait for her to come back?”
Lucy hesitated, considering her options. “Maybe we could look around?” she finally asked. “That lady...she was looking down the hall. Maybe that’s where they went.”
“Where? You mean the other end of the building? That’s where the trucks pull up. I bet it’s just storage and shipping down there.”
“Yeah, but she acted like she knew where they were and didn’t want to say.”
“Okay.” Jessie touched her arm lightly. “If you want, I can stand out by the street and block the view so no one can see you by the window.”
Lucy couldn’t help thinking of the schemes Nancy Drew was always coming up with in situations like this. “You’ll be my distraction?”
“Sure. Whatever you need.”
Lucy gingerly approached the side of the building, treading carefully in the landscaping. The windows along the short wing were propped open to allow as much air as possible to circulate inside the hot rooms. Lucy rested her fingertips lightly on the sill of the closest window. Behind her she could hear Jessie’s tuneless whistling, and felt reassured; anyone passing by would focus on him, not her. But inside the room there was nothing but a pair of empty handcarts and a long metal bar against the wall, from which hung a row of finished garments, wrapped in paper and ready for shipping.
A flash of movement caught her eye. There—at the end of the room—a small anteroom, the door partway open. It took Lucy a moment to process what she was seeing, gray and white moving together until she realized it was two people she was looking at, not one, pressed up against a utility sink, partially obscured by the door. A man, his arms wrapped around a woman who seemed to be struggling silently, trying to extricate herself from the embrace, her blouse pulled free from her skirt, her hair falling from its carefully pinned chignon. Lucy heard a small grunt as the woman tried to push the man away.
Her mother.
Lucy gasped as she recognized her mother’s glossy hair, her tiny pearl earring, the near-white nape of her slender neck. She struggled harder, but the man was undeterred. His arms, roving across her back, came to rest on the curve of her buttocks and he squeezed and kneaded while his mouth traveled along her throat, burrowing into the V of her unbuttoned blouse. “Stop,” she heard her mother say, but it sounded more like a question. “Someone will hear you.”
“Let ’em,” he grunted, and abruptly he released her backside and seized her wrists, pushing them up above her head. He clasped them in one large hand and pressed them against a pipe that ran along the ceiling, mashing them against the metal, while his other hand groped the front of her blouse, tugging the fabric up.
Lucy covered her mouth with her hand to keep from making any further sounds and backed away from the window. The last thing she saw before she turned away was her mother’s face, completely empty of expression or emotion, eyes uplifted to the ceiling, as the man pushed the white cotton of her
blouse up above her breasts, exposing the thin cotton-lawn camisole that Lucy had watched her put on that morning.
She stumbled away from the building, her feet tracking through the gravel and crushing the flowers, almost falling as a wave of nausea passed through her. She choked down bile, the horrible taste burning her throat, and pushed her hair away from her eyes. No, no. No.
Jessie was tossing his baseball, throwing it high above him and seizing it on the way down with a swipe of the wrist, still whistling. “Hey,” he said when he caught sight of her. “See anything in there?”
Lucy sucked in a breath, composing herself as well as she could. She kept her face turned away so he couldn’t see how upset she was and fell in step beside him.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a couple of empty carts. Guess they went somewhere else.”
* * *
That night Lucy watched Miyako undress, holding a book in her lap and pretending to be reading in case Miyako looked in her direction. Her mother’s white blouse was wrinkled where Rickenbocker’s hand had crushed the fabric. One strap of the camisole was broken, the silken ribbon dangling from the metal clasp. Miyako’s hair had been repinned, but strands of it hung loose in the back, curving against her white neck. There was a faint purpling along the tender inside of her arms. Bruises. Lucy thought she could make out the imprint of individual fingers.
“Oh, Lucy, I almost forgot,” her mother said dully, after she had put on her nightclothes. Her speech was slow and thick, an effect which on recent evenings Lucy had chalked up to fatigue. “I brought you something.”
She opened her pocketbook and pulled out a tiny glass bottle and handed it to Lucy. There were real French words on the label, and the bottle was two-thirds full of straw-gold perfume. Lucy sniffed it: flowery, powdery.
“Where did you get this?”
Miyako shrugged. “Mrs. Driscoll, she says she no longer cares for it.”
“But why did she give it to you? Why not some other lady?”
“To reward me, I suppose. The other ladies make so many mistakes.”
Lucy sat so still it felt as though she was turning to stone from the outside in. She was sitting on the edge of her bed wearing her pajamas and a pair of socks knitted by an old lady from their block and traded for one of Miyako’s embroidered runners. Now that autumn had arrived, the nights were turning chilly.
You can’t say it out loud, she told herself miserably, as Miyako eased herself under her bed linens as though they weighed a thousand pounds. The tiny exhalation she made when her head finally rested on the pillow was like the puff of silken seeds when a milkweed boll bursts. You can’t let her know you know.
But Lucy closed her eyes and breathed in and betrayed herself. “Did he give it to you?”
The silence that followed was weighted with unbearable tension, and Lucy opened her eyes to see that Miyako had pushed herself up on her elbow, her cotton gown hanging off her bony shoulders.
“Who?” Miyako whispered.
“That man. Mr. Rickenbocker. At your work. I saw him. I saw you with him. In that room. His hands all over you and—”
Abruptly Lucy was sobbing, unable to get enough breath to continue. Miyako threw off her covers and rushed to kneel next to Lucy’s bed. She wrapped Lucy in her arms, and Lucy pressed herself against her mother’s warm skin, her beating heart. She let her mother hold her and imagined they were somewhere else, back in their house on Clement Street, sitting together on the red settee waiting for her father to come home.
After a very long time, Miyako pulled back from Lucy. Her face was pale, her skin so thin it looked as though you could tear it with a fingernail. “What you saw, Lucy. I didn’t want— If there was any way I could—”
But Lucy knew that already. Who could willingly go with a man like that, with a voice like gravel and grabbing, bruising hands? Obviously, the man had chosen her mother for two reasons—because she was the most perfect, the most beautiful—and because he could, because his power was great enough that she could not say no.
“But can’t you quit your job? Can’t Auntie Aiko ask Mr. Hamaguchi to talk to him?” she begged.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Miyako murmured, and she encircled Lucy again with her arms and rocked her. “I’ll find a way, suzume, there has to be a way.”
Within days it seemed that she had. Each morning, Miyako left for work before Lucy woke, and she returned home before Lucy got home from school. As the days went by, she seemed to regain some of the vitality she’d lost. Most nights she brought work home with her, and Lucy would find her hand-sewing a zipper in place or hemming the full skirt of a party dress.
The bruises faded.
Lucy brought plates of food back to the room after every meal and encouraged Miyako to eat as much as she could, a second piece of toast or a cold slice of potato. It seemed to be working. She was gaining back some of the weight she had lost, her clothes no longer hanging on her thin frame.
For weeks, Lucy saw little of Jessie. Other than school and her job, she spent all her time at home with Miyako. Her schoolwork suffered and she turned down invitations from the girls in her class. All her focus was on her mother. Miyako slipped silently through the days like a pale fish swimming far below the surface, a shadow among the lily fronds, and Lucy watched intently for the rainbow flash of brilliance that would signal her mother’s return.
* * *
The Indian summer days faded to the chilly, gray skies of November. Lucy was given a coat from a large box of winter clothes donated by a Sacramento church. A tag sewn into the lining was embroidered with the name Tabitha E. Davis. It was too large, the sleeves extending past Lucy’s wrists to her knuckles. Miyako promised to tailor it, but every night she was occupied with her piecework.
Baseball practice tapered off, the leagues between seasons, and Jessie met Lucy after school almost every day. She didn’t realize how much she had missed him, and she stole moments away from Miyako to be with him. They held hands on the porch of the mess hall after dinner; they kissed behind the recreation hall as the moon rose above the mountains. During the day, it was almost impossible to find privacy in the camp, not even a small patch of dirt where they could be alone without children playing, ladies talking, old men tossing stones. But at night it sometimes felt as if they were the only two people in Manzanar.
One night Lucy and Jessie stayed out late watching the reflection of the full moon shimmering in the creek, looking like a glittering disk of silver. Lucy said it was the most beautiful thing in the entire camp. Jessie pulled her close against him and whispered against her neck as he kissed her. “You are, Lucy. You’re the most beautiful, at least to me.”
Later that night, Lucy watched her mother sleep in the moonlight that streamed through the window. Her shoulder was so thin, her breathing impossibly shallow. Thoughts of Jessie got her through nights like these, when her worries about her mother threatened to crush her. Jessie was all she needed. As long as she had him, everything would be all right.
14
As winter blanketed the camp, Jessie began to pull away. At first it was just a sadness that shadowed his face, a bleakness that quickly disappeared when Lucy spoke his name. But one day he wasn’t waiting for her after school; then it was three times in one week. He said he needed to work on his fielding before the winter league started up, but when Lucy looked for him on the fields, he wasn’t there. He made plans with her and failed to show up; later he would apo
logize, but he never offered an explanation. When they did spend time together, he was preoccupied and silent.
“Please, just tell me what I did,” she pleaded one day after waiting for forty-five minutes outside his barrack for him to come home. “If you’re mad at me—”
“It’s not you, Lucy, I’ve told you that,” he snapped, sliding his bat bag off his shoulder. Then he added, more gently, “I had batting practice.”
“I looked for you at the fields.”
“I was there,” he insisted, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
One night after dinner, while her mother was sewing a row of tiny pearl buttons on a fitted bodice, Lucy went out for a walk with a vague plan to go by Jessie’s block and see if he happened to be around. The night was cold, but Lucy knew that Jessie was occasionally driven outside in the evenings by the noise and demands of his two little brothers. It was a long shot, and Lucy brooded as she walked the long stretch up C Street and over to D, zigzagging through the victory gardens, wondering what she could say that would get Jessie to open up to her.
It was her intense focus that kept her from noticing the figures approaching behind her. Footsteps crushing frost-dead plants startled her out of her thoughts, and suddenly two men appeared beside her. Lucy was astonished to see that one was Mr. Van Dorn, and the other was Reg Forrest.
Reg Forrest was something of a celebrity in the camp. Now a warehouse manager, he’d been an aspiring Hollywood actor before the war. He hadn’t landed any big roles yet, but he was even more handsome in person than he was in the publicity photo someone had posted in the general store above the rack of movie magazines. There were rumors that he’d been in a television ad for Swift meats, though no one had actually seen it aired. He had wavy blond hair and a cleft in his chin like Cary Grant’s, only not as big. He was tall and broad shouldered and he smiled a lot and many of the girls claimed to be in love with him. Reg was friendly enough, and he helped coach the junior high baseball league and had directed a performance by the drama club.
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