Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,42

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 apologize, 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