others.
She might not be able to protect her mother. She might not be able to help Jessie. But her mother was wrong about one thing: Lucy would find a way to protect herself. The night in the frozen garden, when Reg had dug his fingers into her flesh, she had still been a child. But something had changed. She could feel her strength coiled inside her, tense and ready to spring. She was tough and she was clever. She could be stronger than her fears. All this was true even if none of it was apparent on the outside yet. With Jessie she had taken the first steps toward womanhood, but now it loomed like a branch of a tree that for the first time she found herself tall enough to touch as she walked by.
She would not make the same mistakes again. She would not walk alone at night, would not go with strangers. If Rickenbocker or Reg or any of the others tried to talk to her, she would ignore them, and show them that she wasn’t afraid. Someday, the war would be over and George Rickenbocker and Reg Forrest would be gone, and then nothing could stop her.
“Don’t worry about me, Mother,” she said.
Miyako’s bitter, crazy laughter filled the room. “Worry is all I have left, suzume.”
* * *
That night Lucy dreamed of a dress Miyako had once owned, long ago in Los Angeles. It was blue rayon with a tiny flowered print and puffed short sleeves. In the dream, Miyako’s face and limbs were so thin that her bones protruded. Only her torso remained plump and full, the silky fabric stretched tight across her belly, her breasts. Worry. She was made of worry, her skin stretched with it, her body stuffed with it, like one of those olives stuffed with bright red pimento.
In the morning, Lucy heard her mother moan softly and then get out of bed and hurriedly dress, and she knew Miyako was about to be sick. It had happened twice before. Once she hadn’t made it to the latrine, and even after Lucy scrubbed the floorboards, the smell lingered.
Mrs. Miatake, the mother of a girl in the third grade, had declined this way, spending several months in agony in her family’s cramped quarters before being finally transferred to a hospital in the town of Independence, fifteen miles to the north, to be treated. But her stomach cancer was too advanced, and her family had not even been allowed to go see her before she died a week later. Now she was buried in the Manzanar cemetery, under an arrangement of rocks and a thin white wooden cross. Lucy could not stop thinking of her.
When she finally gathered the courage to ask her mother if she was going to die, Miyako only laughed bitterly and turned over in her bed, muttering that dying might be better. Lucy lay awake for a long time, trying to guess how much pain it would take before you would prefer death. She pinched her skin as hard as she could, first her thigh, then the sensitive skin under her arm, which brought tears to her eyes, and finally the soft flesh under her chin. That hurt terribly, but Lucy could still not imagine longing for death.
But maybe her mother knew things that Lucy didn’t. It was clear that Miyako was not going to part with any of her secrets. Lucy could think of nothing else; she stopped doing her homework at night, and told Mrs. Kadonada she couldn’t work because she was so far behind on her schoolwork. But the extra hours meant only that she watched and worried and came no closer to understanding the dark cloud that had lodged over her and Miyako.
One morning a few days later, her mother got up only long enough to go to the latrine. When she returned, her skin was ashen and she had vomit in her hair, but she went back to bed without attempting to clean herself.
“Go by the factory on your way to school, please, suzume,” she murmured, already half asleep again. “Tell them I’m too sick to work today.”
Something had to change. Lucy would go to the factory as her mother asked—but then, instead of going to school, she would find someone who could help.
20
There was far more commotion at the net-making operation than there had been at the dress factory. Dozens of workers streamed into each of the three long buildings, the women’s hair tied