Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,65

passed, there is nothing more to be done. But people talk. There are rumors...all kinds of rumors. The note didn’t give any reasons, just your mother’s confession, and her body was laid to rest without any further investigation.”

Lucy wondered if Sister Jeanne was alluding to the baby inside her mother. But no one knew about the baby, no one but Auntie Aiko and her. And Rickenbocker, but he was dead too. And now the baby was buried inside her mother, and they would always be together, in the little cemetery at the edge of the camp.

“He was so mean to her,” Lucy whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Jeanne said. “So very sorry, for everything. For your mother’s suffering.”

Lucy saw how it would be; people would learn that Miyako had been hurt, and maybe they would forgive her, at least a little. The story would swell up with all their guessing and gossiping, but eventually it would fade away, and people would remember how beautiful she was, and be glad that she died without ever having to know what happened to her daughter. Maybe they would curse Rickenbocker and be glad he was dead. Maybe the pretty girls would stop going to the parties in the motor pool. Maybe the soldiers and the staff would be more careful now, even a little bit afraid.

Maybe Reg would leave Jessie alone.

“Lucy, I want you to know something else,” Jeanne said. “In a case like this, where someone has suffered, as your mother suffered, God can be...compassionate. I believe forgiveness is possible, even for the gravest of sins. Even for taking a life.”

It took Lucy a second to understand that Jeanne meant God’s forgiveness, not her own.

“You mean she won’t have to go to hell.”

Jeanne nodded. “I have been praying for her soul, Lucy, and for the intervention of the Holy Spirit.”

Sister Jeanne was kind, but Lucy knew, without even a hint of doubt, that her mother was finally at peace, that all she ever wanted was to be safe. In death, no one could ever hurt Miyako again. Lucy wasn’t sure she even believed in hell, at least not for someone like her mother. Someone who’d done her best all her life, whose failures were never for a lack of trying.

Before she died, Miyako had made sure no one would ever try to hurt Lucy either. If her mother’s gift had been bound up with suffering, Lucy knew it was also a gift of mercy.

She would never tell anyone what her mother had done to her. Miyako was past suffering, but people would never understand. Lucy couldn’t even tell Jeanne, which made her sad: already, she was learning how lonely it was to be a keeper of secrets.

But she would manage. That would be her gift to Miyako.

25

Weeks passed, and the pain receded. The bandages were gone now, and sometimes in the dark Lucy snuck her fingertips over the landscape of her scars. She begged the nurses to give her a mirror, but they said it was too soon. “Just a little while longer,” they always promised. “So you can see how you are healing.”

So you don’t see how ugly you are now, Lucy imagined them thinking. It was disturbing to think that next time she saw her reflection, it would be a new face, a stranger’s face. But she still wanted to know.

In a few weeks the risk of infection had passed and Lucy was allowed to have guests. Auntie Aiko and Mr. Hamaguchi were the first to come visit her, and Lucy was sitting up in bed when the nurse led them into the room one Saturday, her breakfast tray barely touched at her bedside. Mr. Hamaguchi was wearing a suit that was too large for him, the cuffs overhanging his wrists and the shoulders sitting awkwardly on his thin frame. Lucy thought that if Miyako were alive, she would have insisted on helping Aiko tailor his suit. She would never have allowed Lucy’s father out of the house in such badly fitting clothes.

Aiko was dressed up as well, like the privileged woman she once was. The dress she wore was one Lucy remembered from before—a green bouclé with three-quarter sleeves—but the privations of camp life showed in the way the dress hung on her. She and Mr. Hamaguchi were like a matching pair of scarecrows.

Aiko clutched her purse and a neatly folded paper bag tightly at her abdomen, smiling stiffly. “Lucy...it is so good to see you.” She held out the paper bag.