Garden of Stones (22 page)

Later, when she woke up, it was dark and he was gone.

26

On the first day Lucy was allowed to be up and out of bed, she spent all morning pacing back and forth, looking out each window at the Children’s Village across the road. She felt weak and her scars throbbed at the slightest exertion, but it felt good to be on her feet.

Lucy knew that soon they would be sending her to the village to be with the orphans. The
other
orphans. What was worse, there were rumors that the orphans were to be sent to the social services department in Los Angeles, that the Japanese orphanages that had been closed before the war would not be reopening. Lucy was terrified she would end up in a sanitarium like the Mercy Home for the Crippled and Deranged, not far from her old neighborhood. She suspected that Sister Jeanne was worried too; she had caught Jeanne staring at her with anxious speculation during her visits.

Sister Jeanne came to see Lucy one night after dinner, bringing a thick novel that had come in a donations box. Lucy thanked her and set the book carefully on top of the others on her nightstand. “Sister Jeanne, I need your help. Dr. Ambrose says I’m almost ready to leave the hospital. I can do the salve myself—I don’t need the nurses to do it.”

The familiar worried expression settled on Jeanne’s face. “Let’s not rush things. Everyone wants to be sure you’re fully recovered. There’s plenty of time.”

“But I have an idea,” Lucy said. “I was thinking that I could go work on the sugar-beet harvest in Idaho.”

Sister Jeanne’s eyes widened.

“Wait, don’t say no yet,” Lucy said quickly. “I’ve got it all figured out. We can change the papers so they say I’m eighteen. No one will ever know. I heard the nurses talking, they’re taking almost anyone who will go. They’re going to lose the crop if they don’t get enough volunteers. And I work hard, they wouldn’t regret it. I’m well, I hardly have any pain at all.” This was a lie, but Lucy told it gamely. “In the field, no one will have to look at me, no one except the other workers. And everyone keeps saying that I’ll heal more as time goes on, so when everyone comes back after the harvest I’ll look better.”

“Lucy, that’s preposterous, you can’t possibly—”

“Please.”
Lucy looked directly into Sister Jeanne’s kind eyes and willed her to understand. “There is nothing for me here. I can’t— My mother is gone, and every day here is a reminder. Let me go and do something useful. Let me start over.”

For a long moment, Sister Jeanne regarded her thoughtfully. Then she shook her head and sighed.

“Lucy, I need to think about this. I cannot promise you anything. I will absolutely not be a part of a plan to send you a thousand miles away to do hard labor after you’ve suffered so much. But let me see what I can come up with.”

“Oh, Sister, thank you!”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Jeanne said crisply, standing to leave, “because it’s entirely likely that I won’t be able to help.”

* * *

Sister Jeanne did not return for two days. Lucy tried to pass the time with reading and walking laps in the ward, trying to restore some strength to her muscles, but as time went by with no word, she began to lose hope. She struggled not to think about what waited for her in Los Angeles if she couldn’t escape her fate, but at night she tossed and turned, unable to shut off the memories of vacant-eyed patients staring out from inside the sanitarium’s fence back home.

After dinner the second night, Sister Jeanne arrived, her face full of misgivings.

“I am afraid I am going to regret this,” she said in lieu of a greeting, “but there is...an opportunity which has come to my attention. One with a lot of problems, I must be honest.”

“What is it?” Lucy demanded. “What kind of opportunity?”

“Certainly better than working in the fields,” Jeanne said. “And not far from here either. I might even be able to look in on you now and then.”

“Is it working for a family?” Lucy asked. She’d heard that men out east were working as houseboys for wealthy families—maybe there were opportunities for young women too. “Is it taking care of children?”

“Hush, before I change my mind,” Jeanne said. “This is far from a sure thing, and I’m not even sure it’s legal.”

“But there’ve been dozens of people who’ve left for jobs,” Lucy protested. “Hundreds. They say the camps will be half-empty by fall.”

This was only a slight exaggeration. Public outcry against internment had increased, especially after Roosevelt reversed himself and started letting Japanese Americans enlist. What began as a slow trickle of people leaving the camps was turning into a steady stream. Young men and couples who could prove they had a job and a place to live were heading for Chicago and New York.

“That’s enough, Lucy. You know as well as I do that nothing’s a sure thing until the WRA says it is.” Jeanne sighed. “Give me a little time, and I will see what I can do. All right?”

“Yes,” Lucy said, and for the first time in a long time a tiny ray of hope pierced the dark specter of her future.

* * *

Two weeks later, Lucy was sitting in the dusty parlor of the Mountainview Motel in Lone Pine, wearing a dress Sister Jeanne had found for her and a thick layer of foundation that made her scars itch. One of the younger nurses had applied the makeup with a soft brush, adding more and more until the sheen and redness almost disappeared. Unfortunately, nothing could be done about the pocked and bumpy landscape of the scars, or the malformation of her eye and mouth, which continued to worsen as the scars matured and tightened.

“She’s eighteen,” Mrs. Sloat said, scrutinizing Lucy. “If Sister Jeanne says she’s eighteen, then she’s eighteen. I would think you’d trust a nun to give it to you straight.”

Mary Sloat took a sip of the tea she had set out for the three of them. She was a stern but handsome woman built on a sturdy frame. Her arms were finely shaped, browned by the sun with faint freckling and pale undersides like dough on a second rising. Lucy guessed she was somewhere in her late thirties, though the lines etched in her face made her look older. Brackets around her mouth might have passed for dimples on another woman, one who smiled. Under her eyes the flesh pleated, and she seemed to recede behind her gaze, the bright embers of her eyes deep set and guarded.

Lucy was aware that she was staring openly, but one of the advantages of being a freak was that no one noticed if you stared, because they were too busy trying not to stare themselves. Her scars throbbed today. Sometimes now she could go an hour or two without pain. Today was not such a day.

Outside the picture window, separating the street from the front lawn, was a crumbling stone wall that reminded Lucy of the Robert Frost poem they’d read in class. Of course, there was no need for such a wall here. There would be no frozen-ground-swell, no spring mending-time. There was only the dusty, flat earth, the chaparral and scrub, the mountain views she already knew by heart.

Behind the parlor were the registration desk and dining room. The Sloats’ living quarters were upstairs. The old house loomed over the motel court next to it like a staggering old drunk about to collapse on a bench. The walls peeled and the porch sagged. A potted geranium sprouted small green leaves from among the winter-dead stalks. When Sister Jeanne described the Mountainview Motel, she had neglected to mention it was in complete disrepair, and Lucy wondered what other omissions she had made.

“She’s not eighteen,” Mr. Sloat said, regarding Lucy. His face was weathered, and he patted the pocket in the bib of his overalls as if he wanted to reassure himself its contents were still there. Tobacco, probably.

Mrs. Sloat squinted harder. “How old are you, dear?”

“Eighteen.”

She was still sixteen and there were plenty of records to say so, if anyone cared to look. That Sister Jeanne had lied on her behalf, Lucy appreciated; that the Sloats had not made careful inquiries was useful information too. They didn’t want to know.

“See?” Mrs. Sloat said, nodding. “And you’re caught up on your lessons?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“She speaks good, I’ll give her that,” Mr. Sloat said. “No Jap accent at all. Girl, say something for us.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know, don’t matter.”

Lucy was silent. She could recite all of the Frost poem, or her algebra theorems, or she could list the capitals. She doubted that was what Mr. Sloat had in mind. The challenge was to win them over, and she knew she had only this one chance. Mr. Sloat seemed dull, perhaps a bit slow, not especially kind. But Mrs. Sloat was a more difficult read.

“Sister Jeanne was not clear about your experience,” the woman said, her gaze roving across Lucy’s face, seemingly unembarrassed. “We were very specific with her that we wanted someone with experience.”

Lucy resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. Sister Jeanne had said the Sloats were having trouble keeping help; with the war on, there were other opportunities for young women, opportunities that paid better. An ambitious young woman with a lick of sense would not have to settle for a job as a maid at a run-down motel. But Mrs. Sloat seemed to be having trouble accepting the fact that she would be stuck with someone like Lucy, that she too would have to settle for life’s leftovers.

“I worked as a maid in Manzanar,” Lucy said, a lie that had just occurred to her. Why not—if the Sloats checked out any part of her story, all of it would collapse. “I cleaned for the staff.”

Mr. Sloat burst out with a loud bellow of laughter. “Hear that, Mary? She’s been cleaning for the WRA. If that ain’t good enough for you, I don’t know what is.”

Mrs. Sloat pursed her lips and refused to look at Mr. Sloat. Instead, she fixed her gaze firmly on Lucy. “This is not an easy job.”

“I don’t expect it to be, ma’am.”

“You’ll start at five because the guests will want their breakfast. You’ll take your meals in the kitchen with us and Garvey. You’ll start on the rooms as soon as the morning dishes are done. We have a girl in to serve on weekends, but you can help prepare meals for the family the rest of the time. Evenings, you can read to Garvey, maybe, since you’ve completed your primary studies.”

Mr. Sloat made a harrumphing sound, which, like his laughter, was unexpected. “Garvey don’t need anyone to read to him. Ain’t his eyes that’s wrecked.”

Lucy had no idea who Garvey was, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. And it wouldn’t make any difference, anyway. The duties outlined by Mrs. Sloat were what she expected; the only things she wasn’t sure of were how hard it would be to meet their standards and how harshly they would punish her when she failed. There’d been stories circulating in the camp; internees returning to the cities wrote of poor treatment by their employers. Anti-Japanese sentiment was as strong as ever in some places.

“So...does that mean I have the job?”

“You’ll have the room off the kitchen. It’s small but it does have a nice bed. You’ll receive eight dollars per week. Mind, you’re getting your room and board. Mr. Sloat will keep your account for you.”

“All right.” Lucy doubted she would ever see any of the money, but this was a start.

“Is that all your things?”

They all turned to look at Lucy’s battered suitcase. She didn’t have enough to fill it, small as it was. After her mother’s death, their room was reassigned and she never found out what happened to their belongings, which were long gone by the time she was well enough to ask about them. She owned two donated dresses besides the one she wore. A strange little book given to her by Jeanne as a going-away present:
The Little Prince,
written by a Frenchman. It was about a little boy in a desert but apparently it was supposed to be about the war. Two textbooks—science and math—that Jeanne said she could keep.

Mr. Sloat pushed himself away from the table and got up in stages, his knees making a popping sound loud enough to hear across the parlor. He cleared his throat as he went out the front door. He was a man of ungainly sounds and coarse habits; Lucy wondered how Mrs. Sloat had ended up marrying so far beneath her. Well, she’d have plenty of time to figure that out.

For a moment neither Lucy nor Mrs. Sloat spoke, and Lucy could feel the tension in the room.

“I don’t know if you’ll enjoy this job.”

“I don’t expect to enjoy it.”

“I won’t tolerate laziness.”

“I’m not lazy.” Lucy suspected that Sister Jeanne had exaggerated her industry, but she’d work as hard as was required here.

Mrs. Sloat nodded. “You’ve been told, I expect, that Mr. Sloat and I have no children.”

Lucy had been told, more precisely, that Mrs. Sloat could not bear children, gossip that Sister Jeanne had managed to pick up somewhere. She suggested to Lucy that Mrs. Sloat might be sympathetic toward a young girl—might even, in time, become a surrogate mother figure. Half an hour with the woman convinced Lucy that would never happen.

“It’s good that you’re nearly grown,” Mrs. Sloat went on. “Eighteen—well, that’s more of a woman than a girl, isn’t it? I don’t care for children.”

She lifted the delicate teacup to her lips and took a dainty sip, closing her eyes and inhaling the tepid brew. In that moment Lucy realized that she might have underestimated Mrs. Sloat’s capacity for cruelty.

When she rose from her chair to take Lucy on a tour of the premises, Lucy saw that there was something wrong with her legs. Mrs. Sloat walked with a distinct limp, though Lucy could tell that she was attempting to hide it. Her hips made a sort of rolling swivel with each step, the foot coming down as though she was about to turn an ankle. Was one foot smaller than the other? One leg shorter? She touched the chair rail lightly with her fingertips as Lucy followed her down the hall. Her left foot made a percussive clack on the wood floors, followed by a much softer landing of the right foot.
Clack
drag,
clack
drag.

Lucy was reminded of a lame duck she’d seen at her father’s warehouse one day. One of his distributors kept the poor thing as a pet. It rode on the bed of the truck that was being loaded with crates of apricots, and it had a small dish of corn from which to peck. As her father and the merchant talked, the men loading crate after crate onto the truck, the duck jumped down and walked about in circles. Her wing had been damaged, practically sheared off, its quills broken and jagged at the ends. Without use of the wing, she seemed unable to walk a straight line. The workmen had laughed at the spectacle, but Lucy had cried.