Sophie Littlefield - Garden of Stones

“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 rushed 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.