She did not know where the Takahashis were going, her father’s answer to her question vague, without a place name or locator of any kind, nothing with which she might consult the Rand McNally. Their departure, not just of the Takahashis but of other of her classmates at the high school in Auburn, felt as if directed into a mystifying fog. If only she knew where they were going she might study it and think on it and investigate it in the library and so then she would know something and could tie one end of that shining rope around that place so that it would be held there in her heart like a stone.

But of course that moment behind the fruit sheds had really been the beginning of its end. That her heart would turn in the weeks and months and years to follow, that it would turn away from Raymond Takahashi and toward closer, more immediate possibilities would be surprising only in a novel, for how long could we expect a teenage heart to stay true across the waters of some unknown sea? Helen would pine for her first love for a few months and then she would be gone for much of the rest of the year. That part of the story I have already told. By the time Ray Takahashi appeared in Placer County in 1945 she had long since returned and had been seeing a local boy, the son of a machinist, for eleven months. She would not marry that boy and I do not think she had yet come to the conclusion that she had to leave the county altogether, had to find someone to marry who would take her away. That conclusion, I think, came later, when Ray happened upon her at a diner in Auburn and she understood at last that the carefully constructed artifice that had become her life was not her own work at all but was and had always been the work of her mother, and were she to live she would need to flee everything she had ever known for some brighter future elsewhere upon the globe.