almost as though she was afraid to open it.
“I haven’t looked at any of this stuff in years,” she said softly, prying off the lid. Inside was a stack of yellowed papers and photographs curling with age. A faint dusty scent rose from the box as Lucy dug through carefully and took out a small square photo.
“This is my school picture, the year I went to Manzanar. I was fourteen.”
Patty took it carefully, touching only the edges with her thumb and forefinger. “You always said you didn’t have any pictures of yourself.” Then, catching her breath: “Mother...”
The girl in the photograph was perfect. Her smile was serene yet mischievous, her glossy hair falling perfectly around the curve of her jaw. Her eyes sparkled beneath long lashes and her teeth were even and white. Her velvet hairband and round-collared blouse were suitable for a child, but already there were unmistakable signs of impending womanhood in the swell of her cheekbones, the curve of her lips.
Patty glanced from her mother to the photograph and back. There...in the profile of her mother’s good side, in the shape of her eyes, she could see the shadow of this girl.
Lucy sifted through the papers in the box. “Here’s one from Manzanar. I’d won a prize, for history.”
In this one, Lucy posed with a plain, skinny woman in front of a map tacked to a white wall. She stood with her hand on her hip, grinning at the camera with an expression that could only be described as provocative. Her hair was longer and curled in the style of the forties. She wore a simple skirt and cardigan, rolled socks and black shoes, and she was turned slightly away with one foot pointed toward the camera, her chin tilted flirtatiously. She was a girl on the cusp of womanhood, and her resemblance to the photographs of Miyako was startling.
“You were...gorgeous.”
“Yes,” Lucy said, without a trace of self-consciousness. “It was a long time ago.”
“What’s this one?” Patty lifted a snapshot from the box. In it, her mother, a little older, stood between two lanky, blond teenagers, a boy and a girl. But this was her mother after the accident; the transformation was astonishing. Her scars were dark and jagged, her hair cut short and badly. She was wearing a shapeless dress that was too big for her. No one in the picture was smiling.
Lucy took the photograph from her. “They worked at the motel in Lone Pine too. They came with their mother on weekends. I don’t remember their names, but the girl and her mother cooked, and the boy worked on the grounds.”
“Were they your friends?”
Lucy shrugged noncommittally. “They were the only other young people I ever saw, so I spent a little time with them.”
A connection clicked in Patty’s mind. Her mother had always said that Patty’s father was a boy from Lone Pine, someone she didn’t know well, someone who didn’t matter. She refused to say more about him, and Patty had always secretly assumed that her mother had been taken advantage of in some way, that her conception had been against her mother’s will.
Could this be the boy? She looked closely at the picture, at the boy’s sunburned, broad face, his worn overalls, his somber expression.
Lucy took the photo back and placed it carefully in the box. Then she fitted the lid back in place. “It was so long ago, Patty, I doubt they even remember me anymore.”
“I wish...” But what did Patty wish, exactly? Of course, she wanted to settle this business with the police as soon as possible, to clear her mother’s name. But there was more. She wished Lucy had shown her these pictures long ago. She wished she’d met her grandmother before she died. And now that she had seen the wholly unsettling image of the girl her mother had once been, she wondered if she really knew her mother at all, and it seemed that discovering that truth was a dangerous thing to wish for.
“I don’t know if I can tell it right after all these years,” Lucy said, as though reading her thoughts. “Sometimes things get mixed up in my memory. But I’ll tell you the best I can.”
19
Manzanar
February 1943
Lucy went to school early on Monday and waited, shivering in the cold, outside Jessie’s classroom. She had gone to his baseball game on Sunday afternoon and watched the whole thing, standing up against the chain-link fence, gripping the links so hard they left red marks on her