Dolls of Hope (6 page)

The song ended. The koto’s last notes became the fading wind. Then it, too, fell silent.

For a long moment, no one made a sound. Chiyo couldn’t look at the class.
It was all wrong,
she told herself.
They are from the city. I should have thought of city sounds. But I don’t know them yet.

H
eadmaster Hanarai broke the silence. “Is she good enough for the Tsuchiura Girls’ School chorus?” Amusement sounded in his voice as he looked from the music teacher to the girls who had come in so silently.

Approval hummed through Watanabe-sensei’s voice. “Raw but trainable, with exceptional purity.”

Turning to the class, the music teacher asked, “Did you hear the notes in her upper register? They were as fluid as birdsong. That is what I have been trying to teach you.” He turned back to Headmaster Hanarai. “I welcome the chance to work with this girl.”

“Miss Miyamoto,” Headmaster Hanarai warned with a light in his eyes that made Chiyo wonder if he appreciated Hoshi as much as was thought. “You may be in danger of losing your position of first voice in our vocal group.”

Hoshi didn’t answer. She was perfectly still.
The way a snake is still,
Chiyo thought,
until it strikes.

Even so, pleasure made her steps light. Sensei had liked her singing. So had the headmaster. She felt sure they would give good reports of her to Yamada-san.

She wasn’t as certain when Watanabe-sensei kept her after class to test her on the welcome song for the dolls everyone was learning. “You have an excellent voice,” he told her, “but you have a great amount to learn.”

“I’ll help.” Hana, who had waited in the doorway, came forward to stand beside Chiyo. “I know the welcome song and will be happy to teach it to Chiyo.”

“Very good.” Watanabe-sensei closed his lesson book. “Welcome to the vocal group, Miss Tamura.”

Moments later, as Chiyo and Hana cut across the courtyard toward the dining hall, Hana frowned. “Where is she going?”

Chiyo saw Hoshi hurrying along the far walkway and wondered why Hana had pointed her out.

“Hoshi always eats lunch with her friends near the koi pond in front,” Hana explained. “She’s going the wrong way.” Giggling, she added, “Maybe she is going off to sulk now that you are Watanabe-sensei’s new favorite.”

“Not favorite,” Chiyo protested quickly. “Just new.” But pleasure wouldn’t be buried under modesty. Watanabe-sensei heard many voices. That he liked her singing gave her a burst of confidence, and the good side of her imaginary scale gained weight.

“She deliberately tricked you into a misstep in dance,” Hana exclaimed.

Chiyo hesitated. “It may have been an accident.”

“Chiyo! Don’t make excuses for the general’s daughter. You’re thinking like a peasant observing a landowner. That’s how she wants you to think. She’s wrong. You are as good as she is. Better! Remember that!”

Trying to keep her expression sober, Chiyo tucked her hands at her waist and bowed, teasing Hana while agreeing with her.

Kaito-sensei’s classroom was just ahead, and with a jolt of conscience, Chiyo remembered her sister’s doll. “Hana, I need to get Momo. I’ll meet you in the dining hall.”

“I’ll find seats together,” Hana agreed, while Chiyo hurried to the empty classroom. How different it felt with no students inside, as if the room expanded in their absence. Her steps echoed when she crossed to Sensei’s desk.

Masako’s doll was not there.

Chiyo stared at the empty space, trying to see a doll where there was none. Momo had to be here! She lifted a paper, then shifted a book. Maybe the teacher had put the doll away. Did she dare open a drawer?

As she hesitated, Kaito-sensei said from the doorway, “Miss Tamura. What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for my doll.” A chill ran through her, carrying an awful truth. “It isn’t here.”

“I left it on the desk,” Sensei said. “One of your friends must have taken it for you. Ask them.”

The chill Chiyo felt inside spread to the ends of her fingers. Only one girl might have taken the
kokeshi,
one who didn’t want a country girl in the school and meant to make her miserable.

“Sumimasen,”
she murmured, asking the teacher’s pardon for rushing from the room.

Hoshi was no longer in sight. Chiyo looked one way, then the other, the sense of dread urging her to hurry. She ran through the school and out to the koi pond in front, where several girls sat on a stone bench with their
bento
box lunches. “Have you seen Hoshi?”

They shook their heads. “She isn’t here.”

One of the girls looked toward the school roof. “Is that smoke?”

“Just the gardener burning trash,” another answered.

Chiyo’s heart leaped into her throat. “Where? Behind the buildings? How does he get there?”

The first girl shrugged. “There’s a gate where the walkway meets the far corner of the building.”

Where Hoshi was headed!

“Arigato!
” She threw the thank-you over her shoulder as she ran into the school and across the courtyard. She wrenched open the gate.

At the back of the yard, a gardener tended a small pile of burning trash. Chiyo rushed to the pile and grabbed for the ends of dead branches.

“Miss!” the gardener exclaimed. “You’ll be burned!”

“My doll! A girl threw my doll in!”

“Come away. Let me see.” He kicked the fire apart, scattering burning branches.

Chiyo saw the little
kokeshi
in the coals and lunged forward, but the gardener caught her arm and pulled her back. “Stop! It’s hot!”

“Momo!” Chiyo shouted. “She’s right there!”

“I see her.” He swung his rake forward. In the same moment, the fire flared. Flames licked over the doll, hungry and orange.

“No!” Chiyo screamed.

The gardener raked the burning doll from the fire. He caught the
kokeshi
into his gloved hands and closed them. When he opened his hands again, the flames were extinguished, but the doll’s head was badly charred. Only her sweet smile remained.

“I’m sorry, miss,” the gardener said gently. “She can’t be saved. Shall I put her back in?”

Chiyo gasped, and he added quickly, “Or I can dig a nice little grave . . . near the small shrine there. Would you like that?”

“No.” She gasped for air enough to force words past anger and anguish. “I’m going to keep her.”

The gardener looked troubled, but he let her take the doll from his glove.

She cradled Momo close, uncaring that the charred head smeared ash over her uniform blouse. Now she knew why she was here at this school where everything was so different.

“Chiyo!” Hana shouted, running across the yard. “You didn’t come to lunch. I was looking for you. Kimiko said you went to see the gardener’s fire. What . . .” Her voice trailed off as she saw the charred doll in Chiyo’s hand. “Oh, no! Oh, Chiyo! I’m so sorry!” Understanding darkened her eyes. “Hoshi.”

Chiyo blinked hard. “I can’t accuse her. Who would believe me? All I know is that I saw her walking this way and wondered why.”

Hana looked at the gardener. “Maybe . . . ?”

“He didn’t see her.” Hana’s stricken expression made Chiyo touch her hand, wanting to offer comfort. “Momo was sacrificed for a reason. Now I understand why I am here at Tsuchiura Girls’ School.”

“Why?” Hana looked as if she might not wish to hear the answer.

Chiyo smiled, but her mouth felt wrong, as if the smile might be a grimace. “I’m here to protect the American doll that will be coming to this school.” She felt the rightness of it throughout her entire body. “I will never let Hoshi hurt a doll again.”

C
hiyo couldn’t accuse the general’s daughter of burning her doll, so she brought the charred
kokeshi
to class in the morning and set it on a corner of her desk. By then, many of the girls had heard the story.

Hoshi’s step faltered when she came into the classroom. The sweet smile on the eyeless doll looked as if it were hiding a secret. Kaito-sensei looked from Hoshi to Chiyo with her eyebrows rising.

“My doll must have fallen into the trash, Sensei,” Chiyo explained. “I rescued her from the gardener’s burn pile.”

It could have been that way. Janitors were careful to remove the trash from classrooms even between classes. Everything at the school was kept immaculate.

But understanding came into the teacher’s eyes. Maybe she was remembering the cushion thrown on the floor. Maybe she had also heard of the faked step in dance class. Chiyo could see Sensei’s reasoning on her face. Kaito-sensei said nothing, but she did not order the doll removed from the desk.

At first, the
kokeshi
faced front. When Hana passed Chiyo’s desk, she turned it to face Hoshi, as if the doll watched her with its silent, eyeless face. Chiyo met Hana’s eyes and they both hid smiles.

Word flew like startled quail until everyone knew what had happened. Hana was not the only one who paused when passing Chiyo’s desk to turn the burned
kokeshi
more squarely toward Hoshi.

Throughout the morning, the eyeless doll faced the general’s daughter, whether she was at the corner table sharpening her slate pencil, working on the blackboard, or at her desk in back. Hoshi said nothing, but satisfaction warmed Chiyo whenever she saw the girl look away.

At the end of class, Kaito-sensei said quietly, “We have seen enough of the burned doll, Miss Tamura.”

“
Hai,
Sensei.” Gently, Chiyo placed the doll in a pocket of her uniform skirt. “Now she can rest.”

Chiyo expected an attempt at revenge from Hoshi during dance class, but word must have reached Oki-sensei as well. Chiyo was placed in a different group of girls, where no one tried deliberately to confuse her.

In music class, Watanabe-sensei led them through singing “The Blue-Eyed Doll.” “The song was written six years ago,” he explained, “by a composer who wrote many songs, poems, and rhymes for Japanese children. He based the song on a doll from America.”

As Sensei talked, Chiyo pictured the doll he described, a celluloid doll arriving on a ship with tears in her blue eyes. The doll didn’t know the language and feared being lost. The song begged warmhearted Japanese girls to be her friends and play with her.

Chiyo cradled the burned
kokeshi
in her pocket, imagining how the celluloid doll felt, how all the dolls recently arriving in Yokohama must feel. She would be one of those warmhearted girls and welcome any American doll given to the school. General Miyamoto was mistaken. To welcome the dolls was not weakness. She would do her best to see that no harm came to the new doll.

As she sang with the others, inviting the dolls to be her friends, she imagined the ship steaming across the rough sea. She knew that five ships had made room among their cargo for the dolls, each in her own crate with her suitcase, passport, and visa. In January, there must have been rain and wind, even lightning and crashing thunder. The brave dolls had survived all of that.

Chiyo put her heart into the words she sang, particularly through the line that said Japan, the land of Flowers, was now the doll’s home.

How could Hoshi sing those words yet wish harm to the dolls?

When Sensei had led them through the song several times, he clapped his hands for attention. “Because the dolls arrived on a sad day in our history, the welcome in Yokohama was quieter than planned. Soon the dolls will enjoy a grand welcome in Tokyo.”

Chiyo tried to imagine the ceremony, wishing she could see it.

Another girl with the same thought said aloud, “I wish we could be there.”

“Ah.” Sensei was not upset with the girl for speaking out of turn. His eyes glowed as he leaned forward. “Six of you will!”

The girls looked at one another. Whispering broke out. How could this be?

“Vocal groups will sing ‘The Welcome Song’ to the American dolls during the celebration in Tokyo.” Sensei paused, letting anticipation build as the entire class appeared to hold its breath. “It is my great pleasure to announce that Tsuchiura Girls’ School will send six girls to join the others.”

The held breath let out at once. Now all the girls were whispering. No one could sit still. Some even spoke aloud. Who would be selected? Everyone believed that Hoshi would go, but all their faces glowed with the hope of being among the other five.