Garden of Stones (13 page)

“Why?”

“Because it was getting dark.”

“People walk in the dark all the time.”

This was true; the path to the latrines was lit through the night, both by the bulbs wired to the buildings and by the searchlights that regularly swept the streets from the guard towers. But it wasn’t even dark yet. The last glow of twilight still came through the window.

“I didn’t ask him to,” Miyako said tensely. “But he is our boss. I work for him, Lucy. I cannot refuse his offer to see me home.”

Lucy remained silent as Miyako got up and began removing the pins from her hair, dropping them into a little dish on the dresser, her hands flitting with manic energy. Then she examined herself in the mirror, inspecting her flawless skin as though looking for a blemish only she could see. There was something unsettled about her appearance, but Lucy couldn’t put her finger on it. Her lipstick was faded but still in place; her stockings had no runs, a small triumph in this time of scarcity, and yet something seemed out of place.

“Does he walk other ladies home too?” she asked in a small voice.

“How would I know?” Miyako asked grimly. “I don’t have time to watch them all day.”

“To watch
who
all day?”

“Mr. Rickenbocker and the others.” Miyako glanced at Lucy. Her eyes were bright, her expression brittle. Her mood was shifting again, right before Lucy’s eyes. “The other men. His friends.”

“What friends? You mean, in the dress shop?”

Miyako
tsk
ed with annoyance. “No,
suzume
. Why would there be men in the dress shop? Mr. Rickenbocker has friends on the security staff, and they gather at the end of the day near our building. Sometimes, outside in the afternoon, to smoke.”

Lucy thought of the men she and Jessie had spied on down by the creek, their drunken laughter carrying through the hot afternoon. She’d seen them a few other times after their shifts were over, playing cards in folding chairs pulled into the shade or driving around in the command truck, whistling at pretty girls. They’d never given her a second look, and Jessie’s words echoed in her head:
We all look alike to them.

“He spends a lot of time with that section-two supervisor. Tall man with a neckline like this, from fat.” Miyako drew her hand across the back of her neck and Lucy knew instantly who she was talking about. Supervisor Van Dorn, from the creek. He wasn’t fat so much as overdeveloped, with muscular arms and a massive chest. Lucy had seen him throw packets of Life Savers into the crowd of boys playing baseball, laughing when the candies fell to the dusty ground.

That night, the anxious flutter of her mother’s hands and the memory of the red-faced soldiers scrambling after Jessie kept Lucy awake long into the night, wondering how they would escape the notice of the camp staff until the war finally ended and everything went back to the way it was supposed to be. George Rickenbocker. Benny Van Dorn. Lucy had no way of knowing, at that moment, that someday those names would be seared into her memory.

* * *

Miyako started coming home late several nights a week, missing dinner and smelling like cigarettes and the whiskey Lucy’s father used to drink. On these nights she would say little and go straight to bed, pulling the covers up over her shoulders even though the room was stifling. By morning she would disappear entirely, hidden in a cocoon of sheets. She never went to the mess hall for breakfast anymore, saying that the ladies made tea at work.

Lucy’s courier services were only required a couple times a week now that the deputy chief had hired a second assistant. Lucy took over all the household tasks—the washing and ironing and cleaning that her mother seemed too exhausted to do herself. Lucy didn’t mind the work; it kept her at home where she could keep an eye on Miyako and monitor her comings and goings. But she missed spending her free time with Jessie. She went to his baseball games whenever she could, and he came by early to walk her to school, but they hadn’t been able to be alone together since the afternoon they’d kissed behind the equipment shed. Lucy felt torn—her feelings for Jessie were stronger than ever. But so was her worry about her mother.

She decided to go see Miyako at work, unannounced. Maybe that way she could see for herself what was happening, maybe she could solve the mystery of what was slowly draining the life from her mother. When Jessie’s practice was canceled one afternoon, she seized the opportunity to ask him if he would go with her.

“I’m worried about her,” Lucy confessed. So worried, in fact, that she had been afraid to visit alone, not because she feared getting in trouble, but because she didn’t know what she would find. Perhaps it would be nothing—and in some ways this was the most frightening possibility of all, for it meant that Miyako’s slow downward spiral was a product only of her own mind. And Lucy had no idea how to fix that.

But if something else was going on—and if Jessie was by her side, helping her figure out what to do—then maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe it could be fixed, and they could go back to that brief moment in time when there had been hope, when Miyako had been poised and beautiful and excited about her job, when Lucy had been able to imagine a future for both of them.

Jessie glanced at her carefully. “Is she sick?”

“Why do you ask?” Lucy said, too quickly. Her mother had been losing weight, and the circles under her eyes were deepening. Were people beginning to notice?

“No reason. Just...I heard my mother talking to some of the other ladies.”

“Talking? About what?”

“About your mom.”

Lucy could sense Jessie’s hesitation. “Just tell me!” she pleaded.

“It’s nothing, really, just—Mom knows a couple of the women who work with her. They say she doesn’t talk to anyone. That she’s standoffish.”

That, at least, Lucy understood—it was the reputation that her mother had always had. Still, she felt that she had to defend her mother to Jessie. “She’s just really shy.”

Jessie didn’t seem convinced, and Lucy knew there had to be more, but they had almost reached the dress factory.

“Listen, Jessie...it’s just, I think something might be going on at work. I just want to check on her.”

“You mean like they’re working them too hard or something?”

“I’m not really sure, but I don’t think they’ll let her take a break just to talk to me, so...see, I brought this.”

She dug in her pocket and pulled out her mother’s small pillbox and showed it to Jessie. “I’ll just say she forgot her asthma medicine.”

“I didn’t know your mom has asthma.”

“She doesn’t. I need an excuse that sounds important. What do you think?”

“I think it’ll work.” He gave her the smile he reserved for her alone, the quiet grin that seemed to promise she could depend on him, and Lucy’s trepidation lifted a little.

Lucy took a deep breath and tried the door to the building. It wasn’t locked, so she slipped inside, Jessie following right behind her. Inside, the air hummed with the sounds of the sewing machines and the chatter of the women working at the cutting tables. A plump, gray-haired woman wearing glasses on the end of her nose looked up from the nearest table and asked if she could help them.

“My mother is Miyako Takeda,” Lucy said. Several heads turned, the women clearly curious. Caught staring, they quickly returned to their work.

“I have her asthma medicine. She forgot it this morning, and if she doesn’t take it she’ll get sick.”

“I’m sorry,” the lady said, setting down her pinking shears and dusting off her skirt. “Miyako has been called away. You can leave the medicine with me.”

“Called away?” Lucy echoed. “Where?”

The lady glanced nervously down the service hallway at the end of the room. “She had an errand for Mr. Rickenbocker,” she said at last.

“Oh. I’ll just... Maybe I can come back a little later.”

“I really don’t mind giving it to her, dear.”

Lucy couldn’t give the woman the box, because it was empty. She hadn’t planned for this scenario. She thought either she would see her mother right away or, if she wasn’t in the main room, she could use the pillbox to gain access to wherever she was working. “No, she, she...” Lucy stammered, the woman staring at her curiously. “She’s very strict. She won’t let me give it to anyone else.”

She thanked the woman, averting her eyes from her appraising gaze, and turned to go. As soon as they were outside, she pulled Jessie toward the side of the building, her body trembling from a buildup of nerves.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Where would she have gone?”

“Do you want to wait for her to come back?”

Lucy hesitated, considering her options. “Maybe we could look around?” she finally asked. “That lady...she was looking down the hall. Maybe that’s where they went.”

“Where? You mean the other end of the building? That’s where the trucks pull up. I bet it’s just storage and shipping down there.”

“Yeah, but she acted like she knew where they were and didn’t want to say.”

“Okay.” Jessie touched her arm lightly. “If you want, I can stand out by the street and block the view so no one can see you by the window.”

Lucy couldn’t help thinking of the schemes Nancy Drew was always coming up with in situations like this. “You’ll be my distraction?”

“Sure. Whatever you need.”

Lucy gingerly approached the side of the building, treading carefully in the landscaping. The windows along the short wing were propped open to allow as much air as possible to circulate inside the hot rooms. Lucy rested her fingertips lightly on the sill of the closest window. Behind her she could hear Jessie’s tuneless whistling, and felt reassured; anyone passing by would focus on him, not her. But inside the room there was nothing but a pair of empty handcarts and a long metal bar against the wall, from which hung a row of finished garments, wrapped in paper and ready for shipping.

A flash of movement caught her eye. There—at the end of the room—a small anteroom, the door partway open. It took Lucy a moment to process what she was seeing, gray and white moving together until she realized it was two people she was looking at, not one, pressed up against a utility sink, partially obscured by the door. A man, his arms wrapped around a woman who seemed to be struggling silently, trying to extricate herself from the embrace, her blouse pulled free from her skirt, her hair falling from its carefully pinned chignon. Lucy heard a small grunt as the woman tried to push the man away.

Her mother.

Lucy gasped as she recognized her mother’s glossy hair, her tiny pearl earring, the near-white nape of her slender neck. She struggled harder, but the man was undeterred. His arms, roving across her back, came to rest on the curve of her buttocks and he squeezed and kneaded while his mouth traveled along her throat, burrowing into the V of her unbuttoned blouse. “Stop,” she heard her mother say, but it sounded more like a question. “Someone will hear you.”

“Let ’em,” he grunted, and abruptly he released her backside and seized her wrists, pushing them up above her head. He clasped them in one large hand and pressed them against a pipe that ran along the ceiling, mashing them against the metal, while his other hand groped the front of her blouse, tugging the fabric up.

Lucy covered her mouth with her hand to keep from making any further sounds and backed away from the window. The last thing she saw before she turned away was her mother’s face, completely empty of expression or emotion, eyes uplifted to the ceiling, as the man pushed the white cotton of her blouse up above her breasts, exposing the thin cotton-lawn camisole that Lucy had watched her put on that morning.

She stumbled away from the building, her feet tracking through the gravel and crushing the flowers, almost falling as a wave of nausea passed through her. She choked down bile, the horrible taste burning her throat, and pushed her hair away from her eyes. No, no.
No
.

Jessie was tossing his baseball, throwing it high above him and seizing it on the way down with a swipe of the wrist, still whistling. “Hey,” he said when he caught sight of her. “See anything in there?”

Lucy sucked in a breath, composing herself as well as she could. She kept her face turned away so he couldn’t see how upset she was and fell in step beside him.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just a couple of empty carts. Guess they went somewhere else.”

* * *

That night Lucy watched Miyako undress, holding a book in her lap and pretending to be reading in case Miyako looked in her direction. Her mother’s white blouse was wrinkled where Rickenbocker’s hand had crushed the fabric. One strap of the camisole was broken, the silken ribbon dangling from the metal clasp. Miyako’s hair had been repinned, but strands of it hung loose in the back, curving against her white neck. There was a faint purpling along the tender inside of her arms. Bruises. Lucy thought she could make out the imprint of individual fingers.

“Oh, Lucy, I almost forgot,” her mother said dully, after she had put on her nightclothes. Her speech was slow and thick, an effect which on recent evenings Lucy had chalked up to fatigue. “I brought you something.”

She opened her pocketbook and pulled out a tiny glass bottle and handed it to Lucy. There were real French words on the label, and the bottle was two-thirds full of straw-gold perfume. Lucy sniffed it: flowery, powdery.

“Where did you get this?”

Miyako shrugged. “Mrs. Driscoll, she says she no longer cares for it.”

“But why did she give it to you? Why not some other lady?”

“To reward me, I suppose. The other ladies make so many mistakes.”

Lucy sat so still it felt as though she was turning to stone from the outside in. She was sitting on the edge of her bed wearing her pajamas and a pair of socks knitted by an old lady from their block and traded for one of Miyako’s embroidered runners. Now that autumn had arrived, the nights were turning chilly.

You can’t say it out loud,
she told herself miserably, as Miyako eased herself under her bed linens as though they weighed a thousand pounds. The tiny exhalation she made when her head finally rested on the pillow was like the puff of silken seeds when a milkweed boll bursts.
You can’t let her know you know
.