Rickenbocker! He’s been killed!”
Lucy pushed at her blankets, struggling to sit up. Her mother was already out of bed, standing motionless in the center of the room. Her hair fell around her face in mussed waves, and her skin was as pale as a paper parasol.
Miyako turned slowly and gave Lucy a look she would never forget, and she knew her life had changed forever.
The building resounded with the clatter of feet hitting the floor and people talking over one another. Shouts echoed up and down the building as they pulled on jackets and shoes or, in some cases, bolted outside barefoot to find out what was going on. The door slammed over and over again as everyone raced out into the streets, and in almost no time at all the building was silent save for the wheezing of an old asthmatic woman and the whimpering of an infant.
“Mama...” Lucy whispered, her heart pounding.
“Get up now.” Miyako’s voice was calm.
She pulled back the curtain and headed into the hallway, where she opened the door a few inches and peered through for a moment. When she returned, tears glistened in her eyes, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away.
Lucy had managed to sit up and was pulling up her socks, which had gotten twisted during the night. Miyako crouched down in front of her at the edge of her bed, and placed her hands gently on either side of her face. Lucy closed her eyes and concentrated on her mother’s hands and pretended for a second that everything in the world was different.
After a moment, Miyako released her. “Someday you will understand. Everything I do, I do for you, suzume.”
She walked into the corridor, and Lucy touched her face where her mother’s hands had been. There was a humming inside her head, a cottony thrum. There had to be a way to undo all the things that had happened, all the grief that had settled in like veins of ore in stone. The baby her mother carried. The memory of Rickenbocker’s hands on her flesh. The jagged place in her heart where memories of her father were secreted away.
There was a clanking sound from the hallway, the sound of metal on metal, a jagged scrape. After a moment Miyako returned, rubbing her hands on her skirt. Her shoulders were stooped, her face drawn and hopeless. She took Lucy’s hand and tugged it, no longer looking at her. “Come with me,” she murmured.
“What? Where are we going?”
“Nowhere.” Miyako sighed wearily and added, “Somewhere safe.”
Lucy allowed her mother to lead her out of the room, and the two of them walked barefoot into the empty corridor. The rough planks were cold and dusted with grit under Lucy’s feet. Outside, the shouts of the crowd escalated and a truck rolled by. Miyako pulled her along, her grip tightening. Lucy wondered if they were going to look after the crying baby, but her mother passed by their neighbors’ room without a glance.
Miyako finally stopped in front of the oil heater at the end of the hall. She murmured something Lucy could not hear and bent down behind the hulking metal box, and when she stood up again, she was holding a black dish in her hand. She flung her arm and liquid arced from the dish, flashing rainbows in the air, like spray sent up from a wave off Ocean Beach on a hot day.
Lucy had time to put out her hand, as if she were trying to catch raindrops. In the next second, her face exploded with pain so fierce she thought it had been cleaved in two.
22
She could not later say who picked her up and carried her to the hospital. A man—someone with a broad, bony chest against which she remembered bumping as he ran.
Lucy eventually pieced together what had happened from fragments she heard from her hospital bed. They said that she never stopped screaming, that her eyes were open while the right half of her face cracked and blackened. Lucy did not remember seeing anything at all.
She had many weeks to imagine what the dawn sky must have looked like that morning, the path her rescuer would have taken to the hospital. She would have seen guard towers, the spindly branches of elms, electric poles, perhaps a few birds circling over the commotion. The last thing she would have seen would have been the overhang of the hospital entrance, then Dr. Ambrose’s face as he bent over her. It