MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE PEOPLE I spoke to in town would tell me that something changed in Evelyn Wilson after that black night in which Kimiko Takahashi delivered Mrs. Wilson’s dead son into the world. The Japanese midwife, Mrs. Matsuda, arrived a moment afterwards and thumped up the stairs to bark at the hakujin woman in Japanese as the afterbirth came, pushing her back to the sweated-through pillow and bringing her some kind of tea that smelled like hell itself, bidding to her drink, but she could not or would not and finally retched what she had managed to swallow to the floor before at last passing into an exhausted sleep, so that her last view of that night was of the two Japanese women standing near the doorway like specters from the land of the dead, staring back at her as if she were soon to be among them.

The funeral was held in the little plot of land in the Catholic section of the town cemetery, both families there, the Wilsons and the Takahashis, and around them the members of the local Catholic parish and an assortment of citizens from the orchards and the town, all of them standing around that small hole in the earth, the damp air of late February drifting in mist about them. It was an image that would return to Kimiko’s memory at various times in her life, none more intensely than in the days slightly less than eight years later in the wake of Pearl Harbor when it became clear that the brightness of their lives would be extinguished with such ferocity that it would come to feel as if the brief respite between one kind of suffering and the next was but a fever dream. In those winter days, the earth once again slaked with rain, what came to mind was the image of Evelyn Wilson’s face, the gray hard intensity of her gaze as she stared down into the hole, a rigidity that was, Kimiko thought, as thin and frangible as a paper mask. She had said nothing that day, nor for many days thereafter, her lips drawn and tight even as her husband’s period of mourning lessened and finally was gone, he and Hiro back to their old camaraderie out in the trees and sunlight, planting a new line of plums on the edge of the south-facing hillside. But Evelyn Wilson was much slower to recover. Perhaps she never did or had. Perhaps she never forgave any of them for what had happened to her, although of course she was cordial and friendly when their paths crossed—this was what you did, regardless if the person was friend or enemy—and this was how it would be until 1942 when the buses came and the whole Takahashi family disappeared from their lives, only Raymond returning, returning as if to wreak one final act of destruction upon her heart.