Garden of Stones by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online Page B

Aiko would tell her to leave her mother be. Slipping noiselessly into the room, she let her eyes adjust to the dark for a moment. But her mother wasn’t asleep. She was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows, with her arms folded across her chest and the blankets drawn neatly up over her lap.
    “We’re to be evacuated,” she said to Lucy. “Come sit.”
    It was the second time in recent weeks that Miyako had invited Lucy into her embrace, and Lucy slipped off her shoes and clambered up onto the bed. She realized that her mother still slept in the same spot that she had when her father was alive, and that, as she crawled under the covers next to her mother, she was on his side of the bed. She wondered if it was true, what the pastor had said when he’d come to the house to pay his respects, that her father was able to look down from heaven and see them. She hoped so. Just in case, she fixed a smile on her face so that he would see she was taking good care of Miyako.
    “Auntie Aiko says we can store our things.”
    Miyako frowned. “Maybe some of them. But, suzume, I have been thinking, we don’t need so many things anymore. All this big furniture...all those clothes...”
    She gestured at the heavy oak armoire, which was just a bulky outline in the darkened room. Lucy had always loved her parents’ furniture, a matched set purchased when they had married. Another of the stories her father loved to tell: taking his young bride-to-be to the best department stores in Los Angeles—how shy she was!—and telling her to pick out anything she liked. She had never been inside Bullock’s before that day, and the sales clerks were practically falling all over themselves to wait on her, assuming she must be someone important, dressed in the finely tailored clothes she had made for herself.
    “But you can’t give all of our things away,” Lucy whispered. The neat row of dresses, the drawers full of silken camisoles and slips, the bottles of perfume and the mirrored tray that held her cosmetics—what would her mother be without these things? “We can take them with us. The sign said. You just pack and the government...”
    But Lucy wasn’t at all sure what the government would do for them. On the sign it had said something about storing household possessions if they were “crated and clearly marked.” But this was the voice of the same force that broke down doors in the middle of the night, that cut slits in people’s sofas looking for evidence of treason, that broke treasured records in half just because the labels bore Japanese words. How could they possibly be expected to care for Lucy and Miyako’s possessions?
    “We have a little time,” Miyako said. “We will start tomorrow.”
    She raised her arm, making room for Lucy against her side. It was easy to fall asleep, listening to her mother’s breathing. And when Lucy woke again—many hours later, in the middle of the night—she found that her mother had curled around her, holding her in the curve of her body, making a cocoon with her thin arms.
    * * *
    In the confusion and panic surrounding the evacuation order, Miyako and Auntie Aiko somehow managed to learn what goods could be packed to be sent along later, and what would have to be stored until after the war, and began to prepare. They were to report to the Methodist church on Rosecrans Avenue on March 22, bringing only what they could carry, but it wasn’t clear what was to happen after that. The newspaper reported that the newly formed War Relocation Authority had secured land in the Owens Valley near the Sierra Mountains, and even now workers were building quarters for the thousands of Japanese Americans being ousted from their homes. But there were also rumors of people being sent to racetracks and fairgrounds all over California and forced to sleep in horse stalls, and no one could say for sure where anyone would be going on the twenty-second.
    What was immediately clear was that the process would