Garden of Stones

by Sophie Littlefield

  There was a clanking sound from the hallway, the sound of metal on metal, a jagged scrape. After a moment Miyako returned, rubbing her hands on her skirt. Her shoulders were stooped, her face drawn and hopeless. She took Lucy’s hand and tugged it, no longer looking at her. “Come with me,” she murmured.

  “What? Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere.” Miyako sighed wearily and added, “Somewhere safe.”

  Lucy allowed her mother to lead her out of the room, and the two of them walked barefoot into the empty corridor. The rough planks were cold and dusted with grit under Lucy’s feet. Outside, the shouts of the crowd escalated and a truck rolled by. Miyako pulled her along, her grip tightening. Lucy wondered if they were going to look after the crying baby, but her mother passed by their neighbors’ room without a glance.

  Miyako finally stopped in front of the oil heater at the end of the hall. She murmured something Lucy could not hear and bent down behind the hulking metal box, and when she stood up again, she was holding a black dish in her hand. She flung her arm and liquid arced from the dish, flashing rainbows in the air, like spray sent up from a wave off Ocean Beach on a hot day.

  Lucy had time to put out her hand, as if she were trying to catch raindrops. In the next second, her face exploded with pain so fierce she thought it had been cleaved in two.

  22

  She could not later say who picked her up and carried her to the hospital. A man—someone with a broad, bony chest against which she remembered bumping as he ran.

  Lucy eventually pieced together what had happened from fragments she heard from her hospital bed. They said that she never stopped screaming, that her eyes were open while the right half of her face cracked and blackened. Lucy did not remember seeing anything at all.

  She had many weeks to imagine what the dawn sky must have looked like that morning, the path her rescuer would have taken to the hospital. She would have seen guard towers, the spindly branches of elms, electric poles, perhaps a few birds circling over the commotion. The last thing she would have seen would have been the overhang of the hospital entrance, then Dr. Ambrose’s face as he bent over her. It was a stroke of luck that he was there at all—he’d been in Rickenbocker’s apartment moments earlier, pronouncing him dead, and had just returned to the hospital.

  Lucy did not know any of these things at first. What she knew was the pain, which consumed her.

  Lucy forced her eyes open—the left first, and then, with a mighty effort, the right, though it took several tries and light flickered before she was able to keep them open. But it was bright, so bright, and the shapes and patterns made no sense. Lucy tried to lift her hands but she couldn’t.

  “Mama,” she cried, but her voice came out a broken whisper and the effort of speaking hurt. Her mouth—her mouth was wrong, it was a searing, jagged tear. But it didn’t matter. “Mama—” she tried again.

  There was a whoosh of movement and then a shadow over her. Something touched her hair, softly. A face blurred and then slowly resolved, the soft and wrinkled face of an old woman floating above her, her head surrounded by the fabric of a wimple. It must be one of the nuns.

  “Lucy,” the woman said gently. Lucy focused on the woman’s lips. She had uneven teeth, a bit yellow, but her smile was kind. Lucy tried to speak but evidently she wasn’t up to the task.

  Lucy hurt and she wanted her mother. She tried to sit up to look for Miyako, but she could not move.

  “No, no, these are for your own good, these are to keep you from hurting yourself,” the nun said.

  It took a moment for Lucy to understand that the nun meant her hands, her wrists. Something was keeping them fastened down. Lucy thought she might ask, but it suddenly seemed like a very good time to take a rest, and her eyes fluttered closed.

  * * *

  The next time she woke up, Lucy found that her voice came to her more easily, though it was no less agonizing and her mouth was dry and sticky. On one side of her bed a curtain hung from a pole, but on the other the curtain had been pushed back and she could see another bed—in fact, an entire row of them.

  “Hello,” she croaked. She realized she didn’t know the name of the nun. “Are you there?”

  “I’ll get her for you,” a voice said somewhere down the row, a boy’s voice. “Nurse!” he called, and a moment later a woman arrived, a stranger. She was dressed in a nurse’s white dress and cap.

  It was dizzying, trying to follow the nurse’s face as she moved in and out of Lucy’s vision. “Please don’t move,” the nurse said as her hands adjusted something near Lucy’s face, sending sharp blades of pain through her. Lucy could feel layers of bandages covering her face; they shifted slightly at her smallest movement, adding to the pain. “I will get the doctor for you.”

  “No.” The word dredged more pain, but Lucy pushed at her teeth with her tongue and managed one more scorched syllable: “Nun.” She didn’t want yet another stranger touching her. The nun’s hands had been soft when she touched Lucy’s hair, her voice gentle, her smile kind and unafraid.

  “You mean Sister Jeanne? She’s not here right now, but she might come by again later. Now you’ll see the doctor.”

  Lucy breathed shallowly as she waited. Speaking had loosed a sharp new pain around her lips, and by the time Dr. Ambrose pulled a chair over to Lucy’s cot and sat down, tears had pooled in her eyes. She was afraid that if they spilled onto her skin they would hurt, but she couldn’t lift her hands to dab them away.

  Lucy knew who Dr. Ambrose was. He’d been in charge the day she got her vaccinations. It seemed so long ago, but he looked exactly the same, an old man with a rounded back and white eyebrows that seemed to go in whatever direction they pleased. He pressed his hands together and regarded her with milky-blue eyes.

  “Lucille,” he said gravely, “you have suffered severe burns on your face, which we are treating to the best of our ability. These restraints are temporary, to assure that you don’t injure yourself, but you may expect a full recovery in time.”

  He stopped and sighed, allowing his gaze to drift to the corner of the room for a moment. He seemed nervous or uncomfortable, patting his knees with his palms and clearing his throat. “There will be pain as you heal, but we will do our best to keep it under control. How does that sound?”

  Lucy tried to speak but was hampered by the pain. The challenge of forming the sounds she needed—the “p” in please, the “m” in Mama—seemed insurmountable.

  The doctor seemed to shrink back from her broken sounds, and Lucy was afraid he was leaving.

  “Mother.” She forced it out using all her stores of endurance, though it escaped as barely a whisper.

  “Lucy, I am afraid I have some very sad news for you.” He took off his glasses, cleared his throat again and put them back on. “You see, your mother, she... It’s just that, after...well... We are all so very sorry, Lucy, but your mother... I’m afraid that she has taken her own life.”

  23

  San Francisco

  Friday, June 9, 1978

  Patty slept poorly, plagued by fitful dreams of which she could only remember bits and pieces—walking beside a razor-wire fence that never ended, searching for her mother, a stack of torn photos in her hands.

  Yesterday’s talk with her mother had exhausted her. She had been moved to tears as Lucy talked about her time in Manzanar, especially when she spoke of her friend Jessie, her first love, and the abuse he had suffered at
the hands of Reg Forrest.

  Patty was stunned by this revelation, and by her mother’s display of emotion as she recounted the story. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her mother cry, and she realized how deeply her time in the camp had wounded her. Here was reason for her mother to resent Reg Forrest—enough to wish him dead. But why now? Why wait all these years?

  “I hated him,” her mother said quietly, as if reading her thoughts. “Sometimes I’d think of him, getting to live out his life like he hadn’t done anything, like he was innocent. You asked me if I knew he lived in the neighborhood, Lucy, and I admit I didn’t tell you the truth. I did know, probably for the last eight or ten years, since he was listed in the newsletter. I can’t even stand to walk by that place.”

  She shuddered—convincingly, Patty had to admit. “But you never told Jessie?”

  “Of course not. We lost touch.”

  “And the newsletter...”

  “It doesn’t list everyone, Patty. How could it? There were ten thousand of us, scattered everywhere now.”

  She returned to the story of her camp years, talking about the teasing she suffered at the hands of the Caucasian girls, the academic prizes she won despite a textbook shortage. Patty was having trouble reconciling the solitary, taciturn woman she knew now with the spirited girl in the school photos. It was as though her mother had once been an entirely different person, and Patty faulted herself for never having seen far enough into her depths, for not being curious enough to coax out the story until now.

  But once Lucy started, she didn’t stop.

  When evening came, and neither of them had touched the lunch they brought home, Patty threw out the ruined meal and offered to make dinner. As she boiled spaghetti and opened a jar of sauce, she made a mental list of questions and wondered how she might apologize to her mother for not asking them sooner. But by the time she had the food on the table, her mother had fallen asleep on the living room couch. Patty covered her up, ate a few bites of spaghetti, scraped the rest down the drain and was in bed herself by ten.

  By the time she woke up, her mother had already left for work. After her shower, Patty put on the silky robe that Jay had given her for Valentine’s Day and dried her hair with her new round brush, the one that was supposed to give her waves like Jaclyn Smith’s. She’d been planning to work on the wedding favors, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the box of photos her mother had managed to keep secret all these years. She checked on the coffee table where she’d last seen it, but her mother must have put it away when she woke on the couch in the middle of the night and went to bed.

  Patty hesitated only for a moment before deciding to search for the box. She had a pretty good idea where to start looking. Lucy wasn’t sentimental, but she did keep a shelf full of things from the past in her bedroom closet, mostly her old taxidermy equipment, the tools of a trade Lucy had practiced when Patty was still a baby. Patty had always found it gruesome—embarrassing, even, during her adolescence—and she hadn’t looked in that closet in years.

  She padded barefoot to her mother’s room and opened the door carefully, though she was alone in the house. The closet door squeaked when she opened it, startling her. The wooden and metal implements from her mother’s long-ago taxidermy practice shared shelf space with boxes bearing incomprehensible labels like “Stuffers” and “Merlins wheels.”

  Lucy found the soap tin behind a cardboard box of paints and glues. For a moment she stared at the dark, dusty corner of the closet, thinking about her mother moving the little cache of memories from one cramped apartment to another. She pushed the box of paints back into place and shut the closet door, then took the tin to her own room. She crawled back into bed, pulling the sheet up over her lap, then set the tin in her lap and looked at it for a moment. Finally she took a deep breath and pried off the lid. She took out the first few photos, the ones she’d already seen, and laid them facedown. Her plan was to view everything in order, so that if her mother checked, she wouldn’t know the contents had been disturbed.

  The next item was a letter, written in a blocky hand on unlined paper, folded in thirds. It was worn along the creases and edges, as though it had been read many times. Patty unfolded it carefully, barely breathing, and read it through. Then she read it a second time.

  Lucy:

  It is almost three o’clock in the morning, and I think you are asleep. You are only ten or fifteen feet away from me, but it might as well be a thousand miles. Now that you know everything I can teach you, I have nothing more to give. I wish for so many things, but most of all I wish for your happiness. I have had so many long nights to wonder why things happen the way they do, why people get hurt and dreams and plans disappear in a single second, and I am no closer to understanding now than I have ever been. But one thing has changed. I used to believe I could never be happy again, but then you taught me that life continues, even after it seems that everything has ended.

  May angels watch over you as you sleep.

  Your G., always

  Patty read the letter again, and then once more before setting it gently on the stack. Who was G.? Was it possible it was the boy from the picture, the boy who helped out at the motel? But this letter didn’t sound like it had been written by a boy at all. What did Lucy mean to him? Could the letter have been written by Patty’s father? If so, who had he been and what had he taught Lucy?

  The doorbell rang, making Patty jump. She set the letter down carefully and raced to the front door, pulling the robe tighter and adjusting the sash. She opened the door without undoing the safety chain, just far enough to see that Inspector Torre waited on the porch, accompanied by a uniformed police officer.

  “Miss Takeda,” he said, nodding.

  “My mother isn’t here.”

  “Yes, we know. She’s at the police station.”

  “What? Why is she there? Did you arrest her?”

  “No, we asked her to come in and answer some questions. We can call her in a few minutes if you like. But first, Officer Grieg and I would like to come in and take a look around.”

  “In—in here? My mother’s house?”

  “Yes, Miss Takeda. We have a warrant.” Torre pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, and handed it to her through the narrow opening.

  Patty scanned the single page quickly, then forced herself to slow down and read. There—her mother’s address. The date. A bunch of legalese.

  She fumbled with the chain, her fingers shaking, then stepped back from the door. The men walked past her, Torre murmuring a polite thank-you as he passed, Grieg already pulling a pair of disposable gloves out of a bag. The situation felt like it was getting away from her, as though she had made a fundamental error from which it would be impossible to recover.

  “I think I should talk to my mother. And I wasn’t... I just got out of the shower.” Her more pressing concern was the box of papers sitting on her bed. She winced as she realized she was doubting her mother’s innocence—but it wasn’t that, not really, was it? She just wanted to have a chance to make sure there wasn’t anything in the box that could be misconstrued, that could give a wrong impression.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Takeda. Why don’t you go take a minute for yourself and I’ll call the station. May I use your phone?”

  Patty showed him where the phone was, then hurried to her bedroom and shut the door behind her. She scooped up the letter and photos and jammed them back into the tin box and mashed the lid back on. But whe
re to put it? Patty looked frantically around the room for a hiding place. She yanked open the nightstand drawer and shoved aside a stack of old Reader’s Digests, a tube of hand lotion and a wadded Kleenex. The tin barely fit, and she had to shove hard to get the drawer to close again.

  She had a better hiding place for the albums. She swung open the closet door, unzipped the garment bag that held her wedding dress, and slipped the albums under the square piece of satin-covered cardboard that formed the base of the bag. Their weight made the bag droop a little, but that was all.

  Patty grabbed a few things out of her suitcase—a pair of slacks and a work blouse. The floor around the suitcase was covered in laundry, and after quickly changing, she gathered up all the clothes and her robe and tossed them into the case and closed it. It seemed like ages since she’d moved out of her old apartment, but it had only been a week.

  By the time she returned to the kitchen, she was perspiring. Down the hall, she could hear Officer Grieg moving things around.

  Torre was talking on the phone. “Oh, here she is. Go ahead and put Mrs. Takeda on.”

  Patty grabbed the phone. “Hello? Mom?”

  “Patty, it’s me. I’m at the police station.” There was talking behind her, men’s voices, their words indistinguishable.

  “Mom, the police are here. They’re searching the house.”

  She waited, certain that now her mother would tell her something that would explain it all, why she was in the DeSoto the other day, a coincidence, an explanation, something. But Lucy said nothing.