“I have something for you,” he said.
“What, Papa?”
Her father pulled a small package wrapped in shiny white paper from his pocket. Lucy unfolded it carefully, revealing a mound of sugared almonds. Sometimes he brought candied lemon peel or crystallized ginger. He owned a business packing and shipping dried apricots, and he purchased treats for Lucy and her mother from the merchants and ranchers who brought their goods to the bustling business district.
“Don’t eat them now.” Her father’s voice was teasing. “You’ll have no appetite for dinner and then Mother will be angry with me.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Lucy carefully rewrapped the package. Then she took a breath. She had to talk to him now, when her mother wasn’t listening. “Something happened today in school.”
He laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “You discovered you are actually a princess?” he pretended to guess, wiggling his eyebrows. “With a crown and a kingdom to rule?”
When Lucy was younger, her father would tell fantastical stories of apricots delivered by teams of white horses pulling wagons with silver fittings that sparkled in the sun, apricots so plump and perfect that each had a single green leaf attached to its stem, and he had to hire a pretty lady just to pluck the leaves and drop them into a basket, all day long. Lucy pretended to believe her father’s stories long after she understood that they were invented. She knew they pleased her mother. More precisely, Lucy knew that her own happiness pleased her mother, that the tableau they made, the three of them, prosperous and modern in their kitchen with its sleek metal cabinets and green tiles, was an achievement Miyako could never bring herself entirely to believe in.
Already her father was moving toward the hall. Lucy knew he was anxious to greet her mother; he kissed her each evening as carefully as if she were made of spun sugar, and the smile he gave her was different from the one he had for Lucy. It was almost shy, if a father could ever be said to be shy. Usually, Lucy liked watching her father kiss her mother, but tonight she had to talk to him first.
“Papa, be serious. I want to ask you about something. About the war.”
That got his attention. Renjiro Takeda’s shoulders went rigid, and he turned slowly to face his daughter. His skin was stretched tight across his face; the lines around the corners of his mouth and under his eyes looked even deeper. “There is no war,” he said quietly. “Not in America.”
“But there’s going to be.”
“Who told you that?” His voice hardened, and Lucy was afraid. Not of her father—he was never angry with her, he was always kind—but of what the shift in his mood signified. “Who have you been talking to?”
“Nobody. I mean, the kids at school talk.”
“President Roosevelt will keep us out of the war. You don’t need to worry.” But he didn’t sound as certain as Lucy would have liked.
“But Papa...I was supposed to be lunch monitor today.”
Her mother’s steps echoed in the hall; she was coming to see what the delay was. Lucy put a hand on her father’s arm and spoke quickly, lowering her voice. “Papa, I was supposed to be lunch monitor but Nancy was instead, and Yvonne said it’s because I’m a Jap and her father says things are changing and—”
But her father was cupping a hand to his ear and frowning, and she knew he was about to tell her to slow down and not talk so fast, to speak up so he could hear her. He was becoming hard of hearing; her mother teased him about it and threatened to buy him one of the new Dictograph hearing aids that were advertised on the radio.
“Dinner’s almost ready!” her mother said, sweeping into the room. She’d touched up her lipstick as she always did before Renjiro came home, a slash of stark red against her fine, pale skin. “I made marble cake. And there’s ham.”
Lucy watched her father’s expression change; neither of them had missed the faint edge to Miyako’s voice, the fact that her smile was a little too brittle and her words a little too breathless. But the biggest giveaway was the cooking. Miyako was a good cook, but she rarely had the energy for more than a cursory effort. She was having one of
those
days, and Renjiro’s outward calm faltered before he recovered and went to kiss his wife.
Many afternoons when Lucy came home and let herself into the house with the key she wore on a chain around her neck, her mother would be lying down, her room darkened, the drapes closed. On her bedside table would be a glass of water and a folded cloth. Occasionally her mother would wet the cloth and drape it over her forehead. Lucy no longer went into her parents’ room on afternoons when the door was closed; her mother had asked her not to.
“You’re thirteen,” she’d said shortly after Lucy’s birthday the prior year, before closing the bedroom door gently on Lucy’s face. “Old enough to take care of yourself for an hour or two while I rest.”
But sometimes, every week or two, there would be a day when Miyako’s mood would swing in the other direction. She would have energy to spare. She cleaned and rearranged furniture, even though a lady came to clean every week. She tried new recipes and produced more courses than the three of them could eat. She met Renjiro at the door in her nicest apron and sat with him after dinner, talking breathlessly, her words chasing each other, instead of working on her embroidery by herself in the kitchen as she usually did. Nights like these were likely to end with the muffled sounds of Miyako crying in her bedroom, her father’s voice a smooth blanket, his words unintelligible through the wall their bedroom shared with Lucy’s. Long after they were finally silent, Lucy would lie awake in the dark, wondering what had made her mother so sad.
She’d missed the signs today, so preoccupied was she with what had happened at school. Now she saw her opportunity slipping away, the chance to ask her father what to do about it. Renjiro was ever solicitous of Miyako, and Lucy knew—without jealousy, with calm acceptance—that she was the lesser planet in her father’s orbit.
She felt more and more discouraged as they worked their way through her mother’s elaborate dinner. Miyako kept up a steady conversation, her sentences breaking off and starting over on entirely new subjects. She talked about a neighbor who had had something delivered in a large truck and a forecast she had heard on the radio that mentioned the possibility of hail and an article she’d read in a magazine about the first lady’s social secretary, and a dozen other things, too many to keep track of. Renjiro seemed even quieter than usual, answering in Japanese as often as he did in English, something he usually worked hard to avoid. Several times he set his fork down without eating the food he’d lifted halfway to his lips.
After dinner, Lucy stayed in the kitchen, pretending to read again, as her mother cleaned up and her father fussed with the pipe that he smoked each night to help him digest his dinner, and finally her mother’s stream of words began to slow down, like a music box that would soon need to be wound again.
Suddenly, a plate fell to the floor, causing Lucy to jump. In seconds, her mother was on her knees, and her voice broke as she scrambled for the fractured pieces.
“I’m so clumsy, I can’t even hold a plate right—”
“No, no, it’s all right, it’s nothing, let me help you.” Her father rose, setting his pipe down carefully. Then he paused, and slowly lowered himself back into his chair. “Oh. I’m sorry. Just a moment... Just give me a moment.”
Lucy looked at him in alarm. His face looked grayish, his eyes wide and glassy. “Papa, are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, of course, I’m just... Help your mother,
suzume
.”
“Yes, Lucy, get the dustpan.”
Lucy obeyed, breathing a sigh of relief. Her mother was fine; she had managed to bring herself back from the brink to which her mood had driven her, and her father was simply tired. He worked so hard at the factory, with all the employees for whom he was responsible, all the trucks bringing the apricots, the crates carrying them away, beautifully wrapped and packed and bearing her father’s name, all over the country. And she was her parents’
suzume,
their little sparrow, and as she knelt to help pick up the broken pottery, she tried to hold on to the warm feeling that came from knowing that here in her home, she was the center of something.
* * *
The week passed slowly. Nancy took her place at the head of the class each day at noon, and Lucy pretended not to care. The boys on the playground found someone else to taunt. Miyako’s mood steadied, and when Lucy came home each day she found her mother embroidering in the parlor. She finished a rose-patterned scarf for her dresser and began a matching one for Lucy.
On Saturday Renjiro wasn’t feeling well. The next morning, he stayed in his dressing gown to read the paper, and Miyako told Lucy that if she liked, she could go to church with the Koga family from down the street.
Lucy welcomed the chance to sit in one of the pews up front between the young Koga children, her hands folded on her lap as she stole glances around the congregation, knowing she was being admired. Rarely did a week go by without someone stopping her family outside the church to tell her parents how beautiful and well-mannered Lucy was, how much she resembled Miyako. And Lucy knew that she would receive even more compliments than usual after she spent the service seated between the squirming Koga boys, helping their mother keep them quiet.
She wore her navy coat with frog closures and her patent shoes and combed her hair until it shone. Lucy knew she was a beautiful girl, but for some reason this impressed adults even more than the other children in her class. Maybe it was because she had grown up with many of them, seeing each other every day. Now that she was fourteen, Lucy thought she could see signs of maturity in her face when she looked in her mother’s vanity mirror—a narrowing of her cheeks, an arch in her brow that more closely echoed her mother’s. Lucy wasn’t particularly vain, but she had observed her mother carefully enough to know that beauty was a tool that could be used to get all sorts of nice things. The best fish in the case at the market, say, or a seat on the trolley on days when it was crowded.
As the reverend came to the end of one of his long and boring sermons and the congregation stood to sing the hymn, Lucy kept her eyes downcast as though she were praying. In reality, she was staring at Mrs. Koga’s brown pump, noting smugly how dowdy the plain, unadorned shoe was compared to the dressy high-heeled pairs in her mother’s closet. Lucy’s feet were still smaller than her mother’s, but soon they would be able to share—if she could convince Miyako that she was old enough for heels. By the age of fifteen, surely? These were the thoughts she was entertaining when the doors at the back of the church creaked open and two anxious figures burst inside, interrupting the listless singing of “Faith of Our Fathers.”
Later she would remember the unfamiliar words repeated over and over by the adults all around her,
Pearl Harbor
and
torpedo
and
casualties
—but in the confusion inside the church, all Lucy could think about was that some unknown disaster had taken place and she was here, daydreaming, thinking selfish thoughts while her parents were over a mile away by themselves, her father ill and her mother barely able to take care of either of them. It was the first time Lucy understood that it would fall to her to help them if something bad had happened, the first time she realized that in some ways, her childhood was already far behind her.
* * *
Somehow, in the confusion following the news, Lucy ended up walking home alone. She imagined the Kogas realizing that she was missing, and feeling terrible about it—“How could we let that poor girl out of our sight?”—but even that was small comfort. She had a sense of foreboding, and though her shiny shoes pinched her toes, smashing them together, she hurried, almost running, her breath ragged in her lungs.
When she turned down Clement Street and saw the ambulance in front of her house, she was horrified but not surprised. She’d known from the moment the strangers burst into the church that tragedy had come for her—that no matter what other cyclones of disaster had swept the world that morning, one was bearing down directly on Lucy. Everything that led up to this day had been a portent: her mother’s moods, the children’s cruelty, the glassy look in her father’s eyes—disaster.
Two men emerged from her front door as she ran toward her house. Between them they carried a stretcher bearing a figure covered with a blanket. Behind them, a woman came out onto the porch, holding the door—Aiko Narita, her mother’s best friend.
Lucy ran to the stretcher and threw herself upon it. Her father’s shoe jutted out underneath the blanket. If she could just get to him quickly enough, before they took him to the ambulance, there was a chance she could bring him back. If she touched his face, he might feel her hands and choose not to go. If she called his name, he might hear her, and understand that he couldn’t leave them behind, not like this.
The two men didn’t see her coming, and they were startled. One of them said a bad word. Lucy’s fingers barely brushed the blanket when she was seized from behind and held in strong arms. She fought as hard as she could, but Auntie Aiko held her more tightly, and the men carried her father to the back of the ambulance, where the doors stood wide to receive them.
“No, no, no, Lucy,” Aiko’s familiar voice crooned in her ear. Lucy kicked as hard as she could, connecting with Aiko’s shin; she tried to bite Aiko’s arm but couldn’t quite reach. She heard her own voice screaming, couldn’t get enough air. “It’s going to be all right,” Aiko gasped, struggling to contain her. “It’s going to be all right.”
Auntie Aiko was a liar. Lucy knew that she wanted to help, but everything was wrong and Aiko wouldn’t let go, and she saw her chance slipping away as the doors to the ambulance closed and after a moment it started slowly down the street. Aiko tried to carry her back up the steps into the house, but Lucy twisted savagely and almost managed to slip away. Aiko caught the hem of her coat and dragged her back. The coat’s buttons popped off and went rolling down the sidewalk. One went over the curb, through the grate, and disappeared into the blackness below the street.