Meanwhile, while Toshi’s presence gave her an excuse to avoid discussing the night Donald’s father was taken, he was also a child, and Lillie had to learn how to be a mother. The volunteer nurses at the clinic gave her some useful advice but she also learned by example, watching how young mothers at the canteen treated their children, practicing certain lullabies or different positions to soothe a crying infant in the flimsy privacy of their barracks. They all seemed to understand so naturally what needed to be done; she didn’t want to ask questions, because she was afraid they would think her peculiar.
Every day she longed for her mother. Lillie wondered for the first time precisely how old she had been when she was left on her parents’ doorstep—it was only now that she understood how much of her life her foster mother might have missed if she’d arrived just a few weeks later. Every smile, every wild, pumping kick, even the sight of her son’s closed, pouting lips when he slept was so precious. She should be with her mother, sharing it. Her mother should be with her, showing her how to keep a baby quiet at night. Her parents had assured her that she was capable. That she was lucky. But that luck had run out, though now she wondered if it had run into Toshi in her womb. Perhaps he was now the one who would bring the luck.
When Toshi was two months old, the internees were given a loyalty questionnaire that asked them to forswear allegiance to the Japanese Emperor and volunteer for military service. She answered yes to the questions easily, truthfully. She was, and always had been, a good American girl.
The answers were not so easy for everyone. The questionnaire divided the internees once again, raising the specter of the riots. There were those who felt it was a trap. Could you forswear allegiance to the Emperor if you had none in the first place? Were the questions designed to trick them into saying that they were foreign agents or spies? To others, it was an insult. How could a country that had stripped them of their citizenship now ask them to sign up to fight for it and quite possibly be killed? And who would take care of their parents and children left in the camps if they did so? It was complicated, and further complicated for Lillie when she learned that Donald had answered no. Twice.
That was not the worst part. Some of the “no-no boys” were being segregated and prepared to be moved to another camp. Donald had been staying up late, writing letters challenging the legality of the questionnaire, though Lillie had no idea who he was sending them to. One day, he came back to their room with great news: There was a Swedish exchange ship, the Gripsholm, taking diplomats and businessmen and a few hundred other fortunates back to Japan, and Tateishi-sama had been able to get them on the passenger list. Even while he was being held somewhere in custody for the riots that he’d had nothing to do with, her father-in-law still had enough sway with the Japanese Embassy to have his entire family labeled disloyal so they could be “repatriated” back to Japan.
Donald was ecstatic—with the help of his letters, his father had traded who-knew-what favors for what remained of his family and finagled their freedom—and Lillie was stunned. How could she be sent to Japan with his family, even if it was her family, if it was against her will? How could she go back to a place where she’d never been?
It was wrong. Whatever world Donald had thought she belonged to when she married him, he was wrong. She was American. The preacher’s daughter. California was her home. Toshi was nine months old—born in the camp, true, but still a U.S. citizen. He wasn’t even on the ship manifest. He should be able to stay.
Then she realized what he had just told her. “You sent those letters to your father?”
Her husband had schemed with his father to deport her to a foreign country. She had to stop it somehow, so she went to the director of the camp to petition to stay in America and have her citizenship reinstated.
The director didn’t know her; why would he? But she got a few minutes with him by reminding one of the administrators that her son was the first child born after he took over at Manzanar. She didn’t mention that her mother-in-law’s was similarly the first death, if you didn’t count the two men who were shot in the back by the MPs with machine guns and gas masks, which she was sure he wouldn’t. It was a strange thing to be notable for, but she was here to speak for Toshi, and she couldn’t be shy about using whatever she had to stay in America.
She was on the passenger list, the director pointed out, even if her child wasn’t. And wasn’t Toshi a Japanese if her husband was? And if not, didn’t he belong to her husband anyway? Wouldn’t he be better off being raised in Japan with his own kind? Regardless, the director couldn’t do anything unless she had a sponsor to vouch for her and make sure she and Toshi weren’t going to be burdens on America.
A burden? she’d asked. She was American. But she understood, in retrospect, that her voice had been too strident. He liked only the good Japs, without a blemish on their records, and the family she had married into was full of them.
She assured him that she could get a sponsor. Her parents would help. They were her only hope; neither she nor Toshi had a birth certificate. She didn’t even have a marriage certificate, though that would only have placed her more firmly under Donald’s family’s control. She had dictated a telegram, a hasty message about their grandson so different from the announcement she’d imagined. So far, there had been no reply.
When Donald learned about her petition, he slammed the door to the barracks so hard it split.
—What is wrong with you, woman? he screamed. “This is America!”
He didn’t care that his son was crying, nor how his voice carried through the pieces of fabric that separated them from the others. Had Lillie failed to notice that they were surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns? Their homes were taken from them. His father was in jail. Did she not remember the night he’d staggered home after the riot, eyes puffed and streaming, snot all over his face, barely ahead of the military police? All the protesters had wanted was an answer about where their food was. They were unarmed, and only asking. And now America wanted to throw him in front of the German army to be shot.
Lillie sat frozen beneath him, watching his spittle fly over her head. She prayed he wouldn’t strike her with Toshi hugged to her chest. Donald slammed back out of the barracks and didn’t come home that night, so Lillie was left alone to repair the door as best she could. But she couldn’t erase his questions.
How could she want to stay here? How dare she try to steal his son?
As the days stretched on without an answer from her parents, Donald seemed to understand he’d won. Lillie begged the camp director to send a second telegram, this one marked URGENT. She could not believe her parents would abandon her. Japs, she thought. What kind of Jap did they now think she was? That couldn’t be the answer, but surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns, how could she be sure? She thought of her mother, and the quilt that was waiting for her on the farm. She should have taken it, even if it hadn’t left her enough room for her coat or a second pair of shoes. She should have done what she had secretly longed to: worn it wrapped around her on the train. Promise me you won’t forget, her mother had said, and she must have thought her daughter had broken that promise.
Even if you never come home.
There was no response to the second telegram, either. That was what the director told her. Instead, he handed her a tin box. She had first thought this was a bit of guilt that he hadn’t been able to change Lillie’s status, though now she wondered if he had sent either of her messages at all. She looked at his face and imagined she found sadness in it, but whether he was sad for her, or regretting his own lies, she couldn’t tell. Or maybe it had nothing to do with her; maybe when he looked at her, he saw enemy aliens to get rid of, not a desperate mother and her innocent child. Whatever the truth, blaming him wouldn’t change anything. Nor would blaming her husband, who was full of his victory but smart enough to know not to point it out.
It was too late. There were no days left to receive mail.
She had been careful
to keep their belongings separate just in case—hers and Toshi’s in one bag, Donald’s in the other—but now, it no longer mattered. In the morning, Lillie, Donald, and Toshi would leave the camp with a handful of the “special others” and board the train to cross the country. In a week or two, they would be reunited with his father in New York. There, they would board the Swedish mercy ship together: the Gripsholm, bound for Japan. Donald had packed nothing for his absent father—he said whatever his father had with him now would just have to hold him until they arrived. He imagined Japan as a land of plenty, where their family had property and connections.
The only thing Lillie would bring for Tateishi-sama was the tin box, which now held his wife’s ashes. She has seen the pages of black redactions in enough letters to guess that he still had no idea that the old woman had died. Would he even know he had a grandson?
The tin box was light and the lid fit tightly. Lillie would have brought it for her own mother, and she owed her mother-in-law that much, though she would have to remove more of her own clothes. She’d already set aside her summer things to make room for Toshi’s clothing, though he would outgrow them quickly. One season, this season, was all she could manage for either of them.
All she had left of her childhood was the indigo bowl she had refused to give to Donald’s mother, and the handkerchief her mother had embroidered of the snow she would never see. And in that lost life, too, was the husband she had given up her home for. She once looked into his eyes and thought he knew her.
It seemed so long ago.
Hana
We were five. Two little girls spread out on the pune’e in the living room cutting patterns for paper dolls that Arnie had brought especially for us the previous evening. It was still afternoon, and the sky was low, unsettled—it wasn’t raining, and it would not, but a skin of moisture still formed on us, even in the house. My legs were tucked under my skirt; Kei’s extended. Kei was trying to make snowflakes.
Snow was a vision from Arnie, a substance we’d never seen. Mama didn’t like snow and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but Kei was captivated by his description: as fragile as thread, balanced as a ripple, brief as a blink.
“Girls?” Mama stood in the doorway of her bedroom in her gardening clothes—a long-sleeved blouse and baggy pants made from bleached cotton rice bags turned inside out, and denim tabis. “It’s time to stake the peas.”
We had planted the peas together and had been checking them daily to watch the progress of the light green curls. This was an invitation, then, not a demand, but as I watched Kei tuck the scissors into the bottom of a shoebox, I couldn’t help thinking we would rather she stay with us inside. There was a time when the three of us were always together. Now, though, Arnie came at night, and Mama had a different orbit. Even on those rare occasions when it was just us, now her attention wandered and she would drift away.
While Kei swept the paper scraps from the floor, I went into our bedroom and took out our own gardening outfits. Kei looked through the window at the thick cotton batting that was the sky.
“Do we have to wear hats?” Our hats were woven from lauhala. The fronds had been stripped and softened, but they were still stiff and they itched.
My mother had moved back into her bedroom. She pulled a small hand mirror out of her drawer and looked into it, touching her hair. It was loose, looped on itself in a simple knot. She had begun wearing it this way since Arnie appeared; she had given herself permission to be young. She dipped into her closet and brought out a dark blue hat, a round cloth bubble that hugged her head tightly with a thin, turned-up brim. Then she ushered us out.
“First, let’s turn the manure.”
Once a week, Mama lifted the round wooden lid beside the house and stirred the manure with her shovel. It was not merely dung—although we did get an annual flatbed full of that—it was her secret recipe: a striated, subterranean cauldron of compost, lime, and seaweed. As the year progressed, the mix became something richer and better than its parts, and when spring came, it crumbled like a moist cake between my fingers.
Mama had filled a metal bucket with the mixture and tucked a tied bundle of stripped twigs under her arm. Her garden was planted in three curving terraces, and now she walked along the top of one of the squat lava rock walls that held the plots in place and acted like paths in between them. Kei and I were happy to be strung out behind her, stepping off into the plots of vegetables from time to time to check for aphids and white moths. When we reached the peas, near the edge of the property, she bent to look at them, barely the length of a finger.
“Which one of you wants to help me stake?”
I would have rather sifted the black compost into a blanket for the new plants once the staking was finished. When my sister didn’t move, though, I raised my hand.
“Ah, Hana,” Mama said. “Good girl.” She began to show me where to sink the twigs: placing two fingers between the stem and the twig to space them, then tucking the tendrils around the twigs so they would hug each other as they grew. I knew I should be grasping this crucial information as it floated by me, but instead, I was basking in my name.
Before Arnie arrived, we were merely the “girls.” He used to tease Mama that she couldn’t recognize us, but since all three of us were always together, why would she need to single one out? Now Mama had begun to do just that—calling us “Kei” and “Hana”—not often, and somewhat indiscriminately, though usually it was when she had a strong word of scolding or praise.
My sister heard the name, too. I could feel it in the stillness and the square of her shoulders. I knew I should reach out to her, to remind her that we were Koko, but I didn’t.
Instead, I felt Mama’s hands plunge into the mixture in the pail as if they were my own, felt the cool, crushed velvet of the compost against her bare palms. We never wore gloves when we were planting. Mama said it was too easy to break things, and that a little cornmeal could get our fingers cleaner than gloves ever could.
The plot was long and sat beneath the pool of still air that collected along the base of the wall. It was narrow enough so Mama could stretch to reach the innermost peas. Her hands were firm as she speared the twigs into the ground, gentle when she guided the young peas to embrace them.
I mimicked her, though my rows were not as neat and I could reach only half as far as my mother. Kei put the bucket between us, mashing the ground flat so it wouldn’t tip. She waited, shaking about an inch of compost in a snug skirt around each plant when I was done. The ground was dense and resisted the twigs, so I worked more slowly than Mama, but I was happy.
I was Hana.
“How are we doing, girls?” Mama had worked in the other direction, and a crisp half of the peas had been staked. “Trade?”
I nodded. I would do anything Mama wanted me to. I handed the twigs to my sister. There was one bucket—Mama and I could share it—but first, she sat back and watched while Kei selected a twig and I sprinkled the compost around the stalk when she was done.
“Make it lighter. Not so heavy on the ground.”
I rubbed my thumb against my fingers, so aware of my mother’s eyes that I probed for even the tiniest clumps before I let the crumbs fall. It was right this time; I could tell by her smile. I did it again, marveling at the height and size of the halo I could create with even the smallest fistful.
“Koko!” A warning, from Kei.
I looked down at the stem I’d just surrounded and saw there was no stick there. There were four plants waiting for me, but this was not one of them. Kei sighed—extravagantly, to highlight my mistake.
Kei and I had been short with each other all week. Not angry, just missing our cues, especially when our mother wasn’t there. Mama was the one we counted on to untwist our knots and fit our pieces together. We missed her.
Kei had staked the peas I fertilized and was only two plants ahead of me now. Mama and I were working together. Instead of sprinkling the manure palm down, the way I did, she h
eld her hand palm up and sifted it with her thumb, then let it fall through the cracks between her fingers. I flipped my hand over, too, and she gave me the “good girl” smile.
For a moment, we had fallen into an old rhythm—the rhythm of a stream, of water that rushes forever over a sentinel rock, running to and away at the same moment. Then the sound changed; the bottom note dropped out, and I knew Kei had finished staking, and that she was watching me now. Watching us, me and our mother, and the twin falls of life pouring from our hands.
Mama signaled for Kei to help. I shifted the bucket to make room.
We missed our cues.
Maybe I didn’t move the bucket far enough behind me. Maybe there was a rock lurking, submerged just beneath the surface of the grass, or maybe I’d forgotten to account for the hill. Whatever the reason, when Kei extended her hand, the bucket tipped.
I reached for it. So did our mother.
“Ow. Itai.” Kei began shaking her head: She’d drawn her hand over one eye, leaving a black bandit streak from her nose to her cheekbone. “Auwe! Itai! My eye! My eye!”
Mama grabbed Kei’s hands, trying to keep her from rubbing more dirt and manure into her eye. “Let me see. Hold still. Let me see.”
Kei held herself away, her eyes squeezed shut. Her lips trembled, bewildered, as if someone else had done this to her—one of us—and now she could not trust even Mama.
“Let me see. Open your eye. How can I see if you don’t open your eyes?”
Mama’s logic wasn’t getting through. Finally, she released Kei’s hands and put her thumbs on the top and bottom of Kei’s lids to pry them open.
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