He was silent after that, and eventually he turned back to his work, but throughout the long afternoon, Lucy felt him watching her. When evening approached and the light grew too dim to keep working, she had done all but the wall above his desk. Her arms ached and her back hurt, but as she pushed the cart out the door, she took a final look around the room and felt a sense of accomplishment. “I’ll finish the rest soon,” she said.
“I really wish you wouldn’t bother,” Garvey sighed.
But some of the vitriol had left his voice, as though the effort of despising Lucy had softened him.
* * *
Despite her weariness, Lucy felt unaccountably buoyed, and after dinner she set about cleaning her own room.
After pulling nails and clearing cobwebs and sweeping, Lucy looked around the tiny space and wondered if there was any hope for it. In Manzanar she learned to be on the lookout for spiders and mice and rats and lizards, even scorpions that found their way through cracks in the floors and walls. Somehow, the threat in this old house seemed even worse. In the night, it seemed likely that things were hiding behind the wall. Things that skittered and slithered and beat their papery wings, things with claws and teeth and hairless tails, tiny ears and gaping mouths and a dozen legs and slimy tongues.
The last thing she did before turning in was to take the pile of nails and broken lath and plaster out to the fence, stumbling in the darkness. She tossed it on top of the junk pile and turned back to the house. A light was on in Garvey’s apartment and she stared at the window for a moment, seeking his silhouette through the shade.
At the back door, Mrs. Sloat waited, bracing herself with one hand against the frame, watching Lucy approach. She smelled like liquor even from several feet away, and Lucy wondered where she’d gone all afternoon. Yesterday’s errand to see the fish man had taken far longer than a forty-mile round-trip ought to require.
“Now, how would you have gotten back in if I locked the door?” Mrs. Sloat said mockingly, holding up her ring of keys. They made a pretty tinkling sound.
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“You coming from Garvey’s? Having a little fun?”
“No!”
They stared at each other, Lucy shivering under Mrs. Sloat’s drunken scrutiny. Finally the woman sighed and pushed away from the door. “Well, come on, now. I don’t have all night.”
Inside, the house still smelled of frying. Mrs. Sloat staggered toward the stairs, and Lucy headed for her room, finding her way in the dark.
30
In the morning she found a tin picnic chest in the kitchen sink. Inside, a string of fish, silver scaled and gape mouthed, lay on a bed of melting ice.
“Mr. Dang caught smallmouth bass yesterday,” Mrs. Sloat said blandly. She was sitting at the table, a glass of water resting on top of the folded newspaper. Lucy wondered if she even remembered their exchange of the evening before. “We can do these with cornmeal tonight.”
Lucy started to gather the breakfast things, but Mrs. Sloat stopped her.
“I’ll take care of breakfast this morning,” she said, getting up slowly, her hand to her temple. She went to the counter and poured coffee into a thermos. “You take this to Garvey. Spend a little time with him. Keep him company.”
“I don’t think I should,” Lucy said carefully. “I was there all day yesterday—I’m not sure he wants to see me again so soon.”
“We’ve spoken. He understands that your responsibilities include attending to him,” Mrs. Sloat said impatiently. “You shouldn’t have any more trouble from him.”
“But I don’t...”
“You’re here to make his life easier,” Mrs. Sloat said shortly. “He should be grateful. Besides, you’re still a woman, despite—” She waved her hand in the direction of Lucy’s face. “And he’s still a man, though not much of one, unfortunately.”
Lucy left the kitchen, her face flaming with embarrassment. She needed a moment to think. Outside, the morning was cool, dew on the grass and wild poppies opening to the first rays of sun.
Mrs. Sloat wanted her to wait on her brother, to serve him—but why? Only to humiliate him further, to underscore her limitations? It was as if she wanted to taunt him, to taunt them both. You’re still a woman, and he’s still a man.
Lucy felt the flush creeping across her face. No man would want Lucy, not even a man like Garvey.
She stood at the bottom of the ramp, debating with herself. She could refuse, she could defy Mrs. Sloat. And Mrs. Sloat could send Lucy back to Manzanar with no notice. There would be no second chance after that; Sister Jeanne had made it clear that this was her one opportunity.
But if Lucy could save enough, she could set out for the east, some busy city where a strong back and a little luck would be all she needed to start a life. She just had to endure long enough.
She’d endured worse, hadn’t she?
Lucy walked past the oleander, up the ramp. She didn’t bother knocking, but fitted her key to the lock. It was warm from being carried in her pocket. The door swung open and she stepped inside.
Garvey was sitting at his worktable, as usual. “Why the hell can’t you just leave me the fuck alone,” he muttered, wheeling himself around.
Lucy set the thermos down on a small table in the bay window and reached for the broom and dustpan that were leaning next to the door, blushing furiously as she tried not to meet Garvey’s eyes.
“Mrs. Sloat wanted me to bring your coffee,” she said, not knowing what to say next. Another girl would know what to do. Even she would have known what to do, before. She thought of Jessie, those first sweet kisses. Lucy had marveled at the knowledge that lay inside her, dormant until the day he took her hand in his: how to walk with her hips gently swaying, how to turn and smile over her shoulder, how to lean into his neck so they fit together perfectly.
“The floors must be hard for you. I can have that done in no time. I can sweep today and then if you want, one day later this week I can wax. I’ll have to move the furniture but I can do half at a time, I don’t mind—”
“I don’t need you,” Garvey said, his voice hoarse and ragged. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”
Lucy took a small step closer. So he wasn’t going to make this any easier for her. “But I have to. Mrs. Sloat said she talked to you, she said...”
“Oh, God,” Garvey said, and turned back to his table. The pelt he’d been working on all week was now stretched over a wood-and-wire form, only its mouth still rolled back on itself. He stared at the thing’s gruesome, gaping face. “Oh, God.”
There was such revulsion in his voice. Was it so painful to look at her? She knew that her face twisted something inside him, provoked him. It had never been because she was Japanese—she saw that now as he clutched the edge of his worktable with both hands, the skin of his knuckles whitening at the power of his grip.
They were both damaged. Both unwanted. Was it the reflection of his own misery that Garvey saw when he looked at her? Couldn’t they forge some sort of alliance—the kindness of silence, the knowledge of kinship? Couldn’t some small bond be knitted from the strands of the terrible things that had happened to each of them?
But if the answer was no, she would not let Garvey intimidate her. She watched his quaking shoulders, his agonized face, and hated him for finding her wounds uglier than his.
“Please,” she said carefully. “Your sister sent me....”
Garvey’s fist crashed down ont
o the worktable, causing objects to jump and skitter. Something fell to the floor, and Lucy knelt to retrieve it. A small, pale, round thing, it rolled away from his chair and out of sight, into the small space between the cabinet and the floor.
“Don’t,” Garvey said sharply. But Lucy was already crawling after it on her knees.
As Lucy lowered her face to the floor, she saw the spinning spokes of the chair’s wheels out of the corner of her eye, catching the sunlight. There—all the way against the wall—the little object glowed milky-white.
Lucy’s dress had been clean this morning. She had done her own laundry on Friday, pressing her three dresses with care. The neat pleats and crisp collars mattered to her the way the sparkling mirrors and perfectly made beds and orderly kitchen cupboards mattered, as proof that Lucy was better than any task life put in front of her. But the dress could be laundered and pressed again.
She lay flat on her chest and extended her arm as far as she could under the cabinet. No good. Her fingers grasped at nothing as she strained against the lip of the cabinet, her shoulder blocking her reach.
“Stop it. Stop it,” Garvey said roughly. “Use this, for God’s sake.”
Lucy backed out, aware of how she must have looked, prone on the floor. Her skirt had ridden up, and she tugged it back down, embarrassment flooding her face. Something touched the top of her hand. A long stick with a metal hook at the end. Its point was dull, but it looked like a miniature version of Blackbeard’s arm, an image that came from an illustrated copy of Peter Pan that she had once owned.
“Use it.”
Lucy accepted the tool Garvey was holding out to her. She pushed it under the cabinet and hooked the end around the white object and coaxed it forward. It rolled easily over the floor, and in seconds it was in her palm, smooth and cool against her skin.
It was an eye. Made of glass, only half an inch across, perfectly colored with a blue iris, a coal-black pupil. Like the eyes that belonged to the beautiful doll Lucy had received for her eighth birthday, the doll that had been given away as they prepared for evacuation.
But without the benefit of long-fringed lashes, without the closing plastic lid, the eye looked naked, almost...obscene. Lucy didn’t want to touch the thing. She held it out to Garvey, brushing his fingers with hers. He seized it and jerked away from her as though even that slight touch repulsed him.
“What is it for?” she asked.
He didn’t respond, but began moving things around on the worktable. He found a little ceramic dish and dropped the glass sphere into it; it made a tiny ping. A pleasant sound.
“Are you almost finished with your...squirrel?” It was a guess, based on what she could see of the creature taking shape on the fragile form.
Garvey turned on her, his fury unabated. “Does it look finished?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I just thought...”
He picked up the animal by the wooden base to which it was clamped, and thrust it at Lucy with the mouth facing up. The teeth were set into some sort of clay or modeling compound, and the rough outline of a tongue and the roof of the mouth had been sculpted inside the form. Over that assemblage, the creature’s lips were peeled back wider and farther than Lucy would have thought possible—a nightmare scream, with the snout bunched up under wrinkled flesh.
“There’s ten, twelve hours left on this, easy.”
Lucy felt nauseous, and wondered what would happen if she were to vomit here in this room. The odor would get into the floorboards. Garvey would hate her even more. She swallowed down hard.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, whispering.
“You don’t even know why she sent you over here, do you?” Garvey said, placing the thing gently on the worktable. “You have no idea what she means for you to do.”
Lucy stared at the floor, the distance between her shoes and his chair. She felt her pulse in her throat. Her fingers touched the key in her pocket.
“My sister...”
More time passed. The smell in the room held a very faint, odd note, mostly unpleasant, the smell of meat left out in the sun. But Lucy’s stomach had settled back down and her breath came more easily.
“Look at me.”
She did, briefly. Garvey’s expression was hard, but Lucy couldn’t help noticing that his hair was soft and silky, his face smooth from his shave.
“Look at me, I said.”
Lucy forced herself to keep her gaze on him. She focused on the space between his nose and mouth.
“Do you think any woman could want this? Could want me?” Garvey demanded. “Do you?”
Lucy ground her teeth against each other, hard enough to make her head pound. What was she supposed to say? Did he not see her standing in front of him, wrecked and ravaged?
“You want to know about what happened to me? How I ended up like this? There isn’t much to tell, unfortunately. Boom. A shell blew up, they fired on us. I didn’t feel anything. I just knew I couldn’t move. I figured I was dead or almost dead. Guy next to me, he went down with his guts hanging out of his stomach. I watched him trying to stuff them back in. He was two feet away, his hands covered with blood, he kept pushing at himself, trying to talk. After a while it was just me and him, everyone else was dead or went on ahead. It was so...quiet.”
“Did he die?”
Garvey shook his head slowly. “What—what the hell kind of question is that? A shell took out half his guts. The rest were—it was like at the butcher. Picture a string of sausages. Can you do that? Lucy? He. Died. With. His. Hands. In. His. Own. Bowels.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered again, but she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. Did he think she had never seen anything horrifying? “But you lived.”
Garvey’s eyes narrowed and his lips thinned. “You’re done here. Get out—I’m not asking again.”
“Or what?” She was trembling, her insides hot with shame and anger and emotions she couldn’t name.
He snatched something from his workbench, metal glinting, and brandished it at her. A knife—curved, wicked, at home in his hand. Lucy jumped, more from surprise than from any real threat. And then she backed away. Two paces, three, all the way to the door. Her hand groped for the knob behind her; she never took her eyes off Garvey.
He would never cut her, she was sure of it. But something dangerous had showed itself nonetheless, and its energy arced between them like lightning on a lake.
31
It was Lucy’s job to clean the downstairs bathroom in the big house every day, since nearly every guest used it when checking in, a practice made necessary by the long drive to Lone Pine from Fresno or Bakersfield. Lucy knew every inch of the room by heart. Each day she wiped down the mirror, faucet and sink. She placed the cake of soap on the windowsill while she cleaned the porcelain soap dish that jutted from the wall. She swabbed out the toilet and wiped every surface.
Still, as she sat in the tub full of water as hot as she could stand it, she imagined that every surface teemed with germs and filth. Bacteria were oddly harmless-looking things in the textbook photos—little tubes like so many Mike and Ike candies—but Lucy knew they could poison you. Who knew what bacteria were waiting to burrow down your neckline or into your eyes and ears, to tunnel through your pores into your organs, your brain?
Only in the water did she feel safe, despite the heat making sweat trickle down the back of her neck. She washed with a rough rag and the lye soap Leo used to remove m
otor oil from his hands, scrubbing until her skin stung and turned the red of an overripe tomato. It took a long time for her to feel clean enough, and then she stayed as still as she could in the water, trying to feel nothing at all. At one point Mrs. Sloat knocked on the door, but after Lucy ignored her long enough she finally went away.
Lucy drowsed, the bathwater lapping gently over her stomach, her breasts. Her arms floated, her hair swirled around her face. She sank lower, her ears under the surface; only her nose, lips and eyes remained exposed, and she listened to the groaning of the house, magnified by the water. Only when every bit of heat had left the water, and her knees, bobbing above the surface like pale islands, were pocked with gooseflesh, did Lucy finally get out of the tub.
She put on clean clothes and used her damp towel to pick up the dirty clothes, and took them to the laundry. Sharon and Ruby had arrived and the aroma of fried onions filled the air, but Lucy avoided the kitchen, slipped out the front door, fetched the cleaning cart and got to work.
Lucy welcomed the ache in her muscles from washing Garvey’s walls the other day. By the time she finished the last room, she was out of breath, sweat dampening her dress and dripping in her eyes. She hadn’t bothered with gloves, and her hands were raw and itching. Her scars throbbed, her whole face pulsing with the rhythm of her shame. But at least she had managed to keep her thoughts at bay.
It reminded her of something Sister Jeanne had told her when her pain was at its worst, when she’d stopped screaming only because she lost her voice. Jeanne told her she had known a wounded soldier who described his pain as a burning sheet of foil, a thousand degrees, curling from the heat. When the pain was greatest, the foil glowed as though the sun was shining down directly on it. When the pain lessened the surface seemed to dull, like tin or tarnished silver. Jeanne said this was as good a way to think about it as any, and that Lucy should practice envisioning her pain this way, folding this sheet of foil into a tiny square using only her mind. That she should fold it over, and over again, and over and over until she made it small enough to bear.
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