I could see it in her eyes then, Mrs. Takahashi’s, the dawning of understanding. First disbelief and then the whole of those years flooding out before her from those days of simple distrust in Newcastle to the night of the stillborn child to the buses on that May afternoon to this moment in her own living room twenty-seven years later, a life I did not even know or understand yet, but which would remain with me in the years to follow, the pieces sometimes coming unbidden and filling in the gaps and details until the whole of it seemed to rest upon my heart: the seeping slats of their barracks room in Tule Lake, the peaches and plums and pears, the long days she had spent in Oakland and finally San Jose, her daughters growing, marrying, her husband still working at the grocery where he had worked since the days just after the war, all of time shifting and moving and turning under her, and that one thing, that one event seeming to rush in across that great spinning disc all at once. She had not said his name in years and years, not out loud, instead keeping it like a soft warm sphere inside her body, intoning it when she chanted with the other practitioners at the church—Namu Amida Butsu Namu Amida Butsu—and which she sometimes heard ringing in her heart. Now it felt as if it had simply been rotating upon time’s great disc all the while and now had come to swing in under her, the name rising through her feet and legs and belly and heart so that when it came to her voice at last it exhaled out of her in a long, quiet breath, its sound seeming to come independent of her throat but alive unto itself: “Raymond.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“Raymond’s child. With Helen?”

“Yes.”

“And you—” She felt the room tightening now, its walls seeming to draw inward even as her breath caught in her throat, her own room, her own living room with its furniture, with its plastic fruit on the coffee table and the block print of Mount Fuji upon the wall. “You gave the baby away?”

“To the nuns at the Catholic orphanage. In Seattle. But that’s why I came, Kim. That’s why I came here. Because I need you.” Evelyn’s voice had risen now, not becoming emotional but simply becoming louder, clearer, like a bell ringing in the empty sky.

But when Kimiko spoke next, her own voice was almost silence itself. “Please leave my home,” she said simply.

“Kim . . .”

“Get out of my home,” Mrs. Takahashi said.