And of course I understood why Mrs. Wilson had taken her daughter north to Seattle, why she had removed her daughter’s changing shape from the prying eyes of gossiping neighbors, just as I understood why it was that she did not want me to mention a word of it to my grandmother. Who knows what excuse she gave at the time? Perhaps she simply said she was off to visit her sister. And would anyone have paid a scrap of attention to such a claim? It was a time not unlike that in which I sat later with Chiggers on my grandmother’s back porch, when the names of local boys appeared in the newspaper with regularity, and with them a slowly twisting feeling that death had come with his scythe to waltz among the oaks.

And so why would anyone have paid the slightest attention to Helen Wilson and her mother traveling north to Seattle or even staying there for eight or ten months? In 1943 the county felt as if it had been drained down to its bare skeleton: the Japanese gone, the boys gone, and with them both of the Wilson children, Jimmy off to the army (I would learn this soon enough), and Helen to the great Pacific Northwest. And to think that Ray Takahashi did not know that he had, while interned at Tule Lake, become a father at the age of twenty, just days before he had been allowed at long last to sign up for the army himself, that he had a child who was, even in that moment, being looked after by the Sisters of Mercy in that rain-soaked forestland at the edge of the cold, churning Pacific.

Of course I did not even know that much at the time. The rest would begin to come after Mrs. Wilson appeared at the filling station a second time, pulling up to the pump much as she had weeks earlier. By then I had finished reading Styron’s book about Nat Turner and had returned, in the interim, to Look Homeward, Angel, a book which I had already read twice before, once in Vietnam, its sentences consuming me. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

I had heard the car but had not yet seen it as I left the hot shadows of the office and stepped into the bright heat of the direct sun. Then the Pontiac and there, framed in the window, the face of my aunt, her eyes already trained on mine.

“Mrs. Wilson,” I said.

“Good morning, John,” she replied, not smiling—she never really seemed to smile—but at least nodding in a way that I thought was intended to be amiable, her stark angular features once again framed by a gauzy scarf that fanned out over the rounded mass of her hair.