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