by Monica Hesse
In the crowd, I see a few people nodding that yes, they had heard Ruriko say she was going to play hopscotch, and then more people are nodding, and then I am nodding, too. Like if enough of us agree the girls were never supposed to be at the pool, then we can go back in time and make it so they never drowned.
It’s only now that I notice someone in the crowd who isn’t doing any of that. A brittle, birdlike German woman standing a few feet from Mrs. Ginoza. She has weathered skin drawn tight around her cheekbones, and she’s in traditional German clothes, with her hair pulled into a braid crown like some of the conservative German women do. She watches my mother and the lifeguard with her arms wrapped tightly around her thin body, swaying in place, her eyes glassy and unfocused.
“Her mother,” Margot whispers next to me. “Oh God. Oh God, no.”
Twenty-nine Mississippis. Thirty. Thirty-one.
Something has twisted in Margot’s voice. It’s filled not only with horror, but with dread. I want to ask Margot if she knows the small, brittle woman. But I can’t pull away from the scene in front of me, from my mother, so professional, not even noticing that her white coat is now covered in water and splotches of dust.
The artificial respiration isn’t working, I can tell from here. Ruriko’s mouth hangs open, slack like a fish. The other girl’s lips are cold and purple. Mrs. Ginoza is crying.
My mother whispers something to the lifeguard. He looks panicked for a second, shaking his head and trying to go back to his compressions. My mother puts her hand on his arm, gently but firmly, and tells him something with her eyes.
And slowly, in a way that makes this seem like a dream, he stops. They both sit back on their heels. The girls’ bodies are still on the ground. My mother reaches out and gently rolls them over. They are small enough she can do it by herself. Then she closes the girls’ eyes.
A million Mississippis. Mississippis to infinity.
“No! No, my daughter. Keep going. You have to keep going.” Mrs. Ginoza starts to collapse, and the woman in the towel holds her up under the arms, all the while making the same cooing noises.
“They’re stopping. They’re stopping instead of saving her.”
“Shhh,” the fat woman says. “Shhhh.”
“Ginoza-san,” my mother says, calmly but with compassion at the devastated woman in front of her. The mother of the German girl is standing a few feet away, but I don’t think my mother realizes who she is. “Ginoza-san, we tried for several minutes to revive your daughter. We were not successful. I am so sorry. There is nothing more to be done.”
The fat woman lets go of Mrs. Ginoza, and she runs over to her daughter at last, collapsing to her knees, gathering Ruriko’s body to her chest. The little girl’s hair is still wet; it tangles between her mother’s fingers in long, stringy pieces. For a minute, in the crowd there is stunned silence and muffled sobbing. We are not going to cry louder than Mrs. Ginoza. We are not going to draw attention to ourselves by pretending in any way that our horror belongs on the same level as the mothers’.
And then in the middle of this silence, the lifeguard, wild-eyed, rises from the ground. My mother reaches up, as if to try to stop him, but he doesn’t seem to see her. He’s looking around at all of us uncertainly, and when his eyes land on Mrs. Ginoza he takes a hesitant step toward her. “It wasn’t my fault,” he says. “I want you to know that—”
She isn’t paying attention to him; she is crying too hard. “Did you hear me?” he asks. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Shut up,” a voice says, but it’s not Mrs. Ginoza, it’s the fat woman who was holding her up. “Shut up with your excuses. Why weren’t you watching them?”
The lifeguard turns to her, uncertainly. He wasn’t expecting to be addressed by another person. He raises his palms. “I couldn’t get there in time.”
“You should have been watching them.”
“Listen. This could have happened anywhere,” the lifeguard protests.
“Yes, it could have.” Now another woman has joined in, a woman with blue veiny legs poking out from under her bath towel. “It could have happened when this family was home in Los Angeles instead of in this prison, but it didn’t happen there, did it? She’s not at home, is she?”
“No, she’s not,” calls someone else.
We’re packed together densely on the concrete pool deck, and there’s no room to go anywhere. An angry buzz rises in the crowd. Because he hasn’t apologized. Because he hasn’t fallen to his knees in front of Mrs. Ginoza and the other mother and begged for forgiveness. Their daughters are dead and all this lifeguard has done is try to say that it’s not his fault.
“You should have been watching them,” the man behind me says, and then it’s something everyone is saying, like they were all saying the girls were supposed to be playing hopscotch, and over all of it is the sound of Mrs. Ginoza wailing.
I look at Margot, who looks to me at the same time. Should we leave? her face is asking. Is it a bad idea for us to be here?
I can’t, I tell her. My mother is still there, in the middle of the clearing.
I stare at Mama hard, until at last she looks up, melting in relief at seeing me. She shakes her head a little and then looks meaningfully toward the pool’s gate.
Go, Mama mouths, and I’m about to, when another figure comes through the pool gate, dressed in olive drab, with a shock of blond hair.
Mike. My body fills with relief. He’ll know what to do, how to calm everyone down. I try to catch his attention when he passes but he doesn’t see me as he works through the circle to where the lifeguard is still standing in his swimming trunks. Mike puts his hand on the lifeguard’s shoulder and leans in while they quietly consult. He doesn’t talk to my mother; she’s still on the ground with the girls.
He clears his throat and raises his hands, about to make an announcement. When his eyes travel across the crowd, I think he finally sees me. I give him a small nod of encouragement just in case, but I can’t tell if the nod in response is directly to me.
Mike will make the lifeguard apologize. He will tell us all that the lifeguard will be fired; he’ll at least take him away so that people can grieve on their own.
He clears his throat. “Folks, this is a terrible thing that happened,” he says, in the official voice he usually only uses when other guards are around. “It sounds like the lifeguard had already given those girls several warnings to stay away from the deep end,” Mike continues. “But they kept ignoring him. They waited until he was busy attending to something else before they snuck under the lane line.”
A confused murmur rises in the crowd. This isn’t the version I heard from the boy next to me. He didn’t say it was the lifeguard’s fault, exactly, but he did say it was the lifeguard’s mistake, the mistake of everyone at the pool because nobody realized the girls were drowning. Mike’s version makes it sound like the girls were deliberately disobedient.
“That’s not what happened,” the boy next to me calls out. “That’s not what happened at all.”
Mike opens his mouth in surprise; he glances quickly back at the lifeguard again and I can’t see what passes between their faces.
“It—it is what happened,” Mike continues. “I saw it myself from the guard tower. The lifeguard warned the girls several times. So all of you need to disperse now, so we can allow some stretchers to come through.”
I saw it myself from the guard tower.
But could he have? Mike’s tower does not have a real sight line to the swimming pool. It’s too far away.
And he couldn’t have heard the lifeguard warning the girls not to go in the deep end, like he says he did. Margot and I didn’t hear him, from the school, near the tower. Mike is partially deaf. That’s why he’s here to begin with instead of fighting on the front lines with all the other boys his age.
“I’m telling you, that’s not what happened. I was right there,” says the boy next to me.
“Why don’t you talk to more of us,” someone else yells, “inst
ead of just asking what your friend saw?”
“Mike,” I call out before I can help it. My voice is a plea. His face snaps toward mine. It softens when he realizes it’s me. Why are you lying? I mouth the words so others can’t hear me. He needs to say that he was mistaken. That he doesn’t know what happened.
But then his face hardens again. “Look, everyone needs to settle down and back up,” he says, trying to control the crowd.
The crowd is restless. I’m jostled from behind. People shift their weight, edging forward.
“Back up!” Mike calls out. “Give us some room,” he says.
I try to take a step back but I can’t. There are too many people behind me, and people behind them, and not everyone has heard Mike’s instruction.
“I said to back up,” he repeats, but we can’t move. There’s nowhere for us to go; we’re blocked between the pool and the fence. “I can’t keep giving you warnings.”
“We’re trying to back up.” My voice gets lost in the din.
“Tell the truth,” the crowd yells. “Say what really happened!”
He reaches to his shoulder for his rifle. I have never seen a guard here draw a rifle. “I said to back up,” he yells again. The lifeguard next to him looks terrified.
“He is lying,” some people are still calling out, and others are yelling, “Calm down, calm down,” even while their own voices get higher and louder. Mike looks scared, but he is the one with the gun.
Now we’re all trying to move, but I can’t tell where. Are we trying to run? To jump in the pool or climb the fence? Are we trying to charge at Mike, standing with his rifle above the lifeguard and my mother? There is a sharp metallic click.
A woman in the crowd screams, “He’s going to shoot us!” and then that travels through the crowd. A man who I know is a Methodist minister cries out, “O Father in heaven,” and then to Mike he says, “It’s all right, son. It’s all right.”
Next to me, Margot has grabbed my sleeve, the way she did that day in the dust storm, telling me we need to leave. But my mother is still there. My mother is still there.
This is Manzanar. This is what Ken told me would happen, and what I never wanted to believe. Our Manzanar is not coming because of camp employees selling food on the black market, but because of dead girls on the pavement beside the swimming pool. A guard will shoot into a crowd of unarmed people, and it’s a guard I know, who I could have been friends with at home.
There are too many bodies, I can barely breathe. “Oh!” Next to me Margot’s face freezes in pain and she doubles over.
“Are you all right?” I yell. “Margot, are you all right?”
“I’m fine, someone just—” She’s gasping, someone must have jabbed her in the stomach.
“We need to leave.”
“I’m trying, it’s too crowded.”
“Grab my hand, Margot. Not my sleeve, grab my hand.” Seeing her folded over and in pain fills me with a sudden visceral panic that I can barely explain. Like someone has hit me, too, and I need to get her out of here, and I will claw and elbow if I need to. “Do not let go.”
“I’m not,” she says, but she is, because everything is moving too fast and her fingers are sliding out of mine. “Margot!” I shriek.
“Just go!”
I’m closer to the gate, she’s closer to Mike and the gun. I fight against the crowd until I am close enough to grab her hand again, and then I yank hard until she crashes toward me, and we’re standing in the crowd with my arms around her and our hearts beating against each other’s.
She opens her mouth to say something, but suddenly, the air is split by a whistle.
Three sharp blasts in a row. It’s a lone figure, half a head taller than everyone else. Mr. Mercer. Behind the camp director are guards, four of them, carrying two stretchers.
My heart is still beating so fast, but the stretchers wake us up. They make us stop. Around us, the rush toward the gate is not as fervent. Because we are not animals. We need to let the stretchers through.
Mr. Mercer carries something folded, a pile of white sheets. He walks ahead of the stretchers. When he gets to the little clearing, he meets the eyes of Mrs. Ginoza, still huddled by Ruriko, and the eyes of the German mother, who hasn’t yet come forward to her daughter.
After a few minutes, Mr. Mercer unfolds the sheet and hands one to Mrs. Ginoza, who wraps it around her daughter, and the other to my mother, who wraps the little German girl while her mother kneels nearby.
When that last piece of quiet agony is over, Mr. Mercer stands up. He gestures somewhere behind my head, and the men carrying stretchers appear.
My mother helps place the little German girl on the stretcher. As the two little girls are carried away, their mothers and mine following, Mr. Mercer finally turns to the lifeguard, huddled near him in a miserable heap.
“Go wait in my office, Jimmy,” he says quietly. “Officer Branwell, put down your rifle. Hand it to me.” Mike looks at him. I realize his last name is Branwell. This whole time, he only ever told me his first name. Mike keeps looking back and forth between Mr. Mercer and the rest of us. He’s scared, I realize. He’s scared to walk past all of us now that he no longer has a weapon.
Mr. Mercer clears his throat. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I don’t even—I can’t even—we’ll investigate what happened here. I promise. I’ll personally interview everyone here if I have to. And we’ll close down the pool while we do it. It will be closed until further notice.”
His voice cracks a little on the word closed, keening into a high falsetto. I think that it’s this small, human sound that puts the tiniest fissure in my anger. I’m overtaken by sadness and hopelessness, and a sick kind of shock, at what happened and what almost followed it.
“Let’s go,” Margot says. “I need to get out of here. Let’s go now.”
Mike still hasn’t left. He looks back at Mr. Mercer for guidance.
Mr. Mercer, now holding Mike’s rifle in one hand, motions for Mike to go ahead. And resting one firm hand on Mike’s shoulder, he steers him through the crowd and back to the pool gate.
Mike looks up at me when he passes, but I can’t even begin to imagine what he thinks I can give him. No matter how many pieces of gum he gave me, Mike made a terrible choice. He was allowed to make choices in the first place, while the rest of us are not. At the end of the day, Mike gets to leave.
Nobody clears a path for him and Mr. Mercer like they did for the stretchers. They make Mike worm his way through, turning sideways, muttering, “Excuse me,” as he passes, brushing against our shoulders, tripping over our feet.
TWENTY-ONE
MARGOT
WE’RE SHAKING. ALL OF US, PROBABLY, EVERYONE WHO WAS AT that pool. Some of the people in the leaving crowd have tearstains down their cheeks, some of them are still talking angrily. Some are stunned.
“She was on my train,” Haruko says again, as streams of people walk alongside us. We’d all started by following the van with the girls’ bodies in it, and then when it moved out of sight, walking in the direction of its destination, the hospital. German and Japanese prisoners alike, all talking about what we’d seen. People who somehow missed the news keep coming over to this sad procession to find out what happened. “Her family was brought here because her father kept a portrait of the emperor in their study. Mrs. Ginoza told us that on the first day.”
“Where should we go now?” I ask.
“She said they had put up the portrait to make her mother happy when she came to visit, and then they never took it down and didn’t notice it after a while.”
“We’ll just go to the icehouse.”
“I want to get to the hospital first. And Mike lied. Did you notice how he lied? He’s always so nice to me.”
“He’s a guard.”
“He could have incited a riot. He could have gotten you killed.”
“Let’s keep walking.”
I know I’m being short with her, but what happened in the pool h
as filled me with dread and I want to get away from this mass of people.
As we come within sight of the hospital, we see a crowd already gathered, made up both of people who have just learned what happened, and of people who were at the swimming pool and didn’t feel like they could go home. As we’re passing, someone calls Haruko’s name.
“Haruko! Haru-chan!” Dr. Tanaka jogs out of the employee entrance down the little path to meet us.
She asks something that I can tell is a question, and Haruko responds in Japanese, nodding, halfway through the sentence, in the direction we were planning to walk.
Dr. Tanaka shakes her head, nodding in a different direction, reaching up to smooth Haruko’s hair behind her ears.
“She says she wants me to come home now,” Haruko translates. “She says you should go home, too, that all mothers will want to hug their daughters tonight.” Haruko looks back quickly at her mother and lowers her voice when she talks to me again. “I can try to get away. I’ll find out if she has to go back to work.”
“Go. Mutti will have heard what happened by now and she’ll want to see me. Let’s meet tonight if we can get away. Tomorrow if we can’t.”
I want her to stay. I want us to go back to an hour ago at the school. I want us to go back to four days ago when she told me my lips were blue and I had to feel her fingers to believe it. I want to think about what it meant that she grabbed me at the pool, that her face filled with terror when she thought something might happen to me.
I watch as she leaves with her mother, and then I try to figure out what I should do next.
What I didn’t tell Haruko, because she wouldn’t have immediately understood what it meant and I didn’t have the time or privacy to explain, was that one of those girls was Heidi Kruse.
Heidi, sweet Heidi, with her sticklike brown braids, who clung to my hand when our bus got to Crystal City, asking me whether I thought her toys from home would be there.
I hate myself for not stopping to talk to her longer the last time I saw her, at the bakery.
I hate myself for not going over and holding her mother’s hand at the swimming pool. I recognized her standing there; she had come by herself and she had nobody to talk to. I bet that, like the Japanese mother, she didn’t even realize Heidi was going to be at the pool today. I can’t imagine how Heidi and Ruriko would ever have become friends.