“Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes. Not like before. It’s getting better.”
He pulled her hand away from her face, and she could feel him looking at her and it was almost all right.
“Can I sit with you?” Jessie asked. “I mean, in the bed? Is there room?”
Lucy blushed, the sensation of warmth stealing over her scars unfamiliar and prickly. “Okay.” She wiggled over in her bed and patted the space she had made.
Jessie got under the blankets with great care, as though he was afraid of hurting her. He kicked off his shoes before sliding his legs under the covers, and they echoed on the wooden floor. The last of the sun lit his face softly as he pulled the blankets back up, his body touching hers at the shoulders and hips.
“Will I get in trouble?” he asked, staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t know. Probably, if they see you.” After a moment, she added, “Thank you for coming.”
He nodded. Under the sheet his hand found hers, holding it lightly at first, and then weaving his fingers through hers and hanging on hard. “I just wanted to tell you—he quit, Lucy. He quit coming for me. They say he’s getting transferred.”
For a moment she thought about telling him the truth, about how her mother had led her into the hall, the way she had looked at her one last time before she reached behind the stove. But she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
Once, not that long ago, she and Jessie had spoken of the future as though they might share it. “When the war’s over,” they would say, or “When we’re in college.” Now that future was lost. Jessie might not even realize it yet, but the truth lodged in Lucy’s heart like a pebble in a shoe, impossible to ignore.
If she was lucky, he would remember her the way she had been before, when all the girls in their class envied her and all the boys wished they were the one walking with her after school. Someday, when Jessie had a wife and children of his own, he might think of her sometimes when he was alone. Lucy hoped he would think of the first time he kissed her, the way their hearts pounded as they ran, laughing, from the creek that day, too fast and too clever ever to be caught.
Jessie put his arms around her and pulled her close. She pressed her face into his shoulder and breathed his smell. She whispered his name and he whispered hers and she cried a little and he didn’t say anything when her tears dampened her shirt. I love you, she thought, and though she had lost the right to say it out loud, though that privilege was reserved now for some other girl, some girl with smooth skin and a beautiful smile, Lucy thought the words with all her might and hoped that somehow he understood.
Later, when she woke up, it was dark and he was gone.
26
On the first day Lucy was allowed to be up and out of bed, she spent all morning pacing back and forth, looking out each window at the Children’s Village across the road. She felt weak and her scars throbbed at the slightest exertion, but it felt good to be on her feet.
Lucy knew that soon they would be sending her to the village to be with the orphans. The other orphans. What was worse, there were rumors that the orphans were to be sent to the social services department in Los Angeles, that the Japanese orphanages that had been closed before the war would not be reopening. Lucy was terrified she would end up in a sanitarium like the Mercy Home for the Crippled and Deranged, not far from her old neighborhood. She suspected that Sister Jeanne was worried too; she had caught Jeanne staring at her with anxious speculation during her visits.
Sister Jeanne came to see Lucy one night after dinner, bringing a thick novel that had come in a donations box. Lucy thanked her and set the book carefully on top of the others on her nightstand. “Sister Jeanne, I need your help. Dr. Ambrose says I’m almost ready to leave the hospital. I can do the salve myself—I don’t need the nurses to do it.”
The familiar worried expression settled on Jeanne’s face. “Let’s not rush things. Everyone wants to be sure you’re fully recovered. There’s plenty of time.”
“But I have an idea,” Lucy said. “I was thinking that I could go work