“I don’t understand where he might have gone.”

“He didn’t go anywhere,” Mrs. Takahashi said, turning to face her now.

“No, no,” my aunt said. She had stepped forward and now stood in the center of the room, her breath coming fast. “You mean you never saw him?”

Mrs. Takahashi said nothing, only stared in silence.

“He came back,” my aunt said. “He did come back, Kim. He was in town. In Newcastle. In his uniform.” And, after a moment: “Maybe you should sit down. We don’t need anything to eat. Kim? Kim? Are you all right?”

For a moment the woman looked as if she had turned completely to stone, even her flesh seeming to tilt gray, and when she sat at last, in a curved vinyl-padded chair that she jerked from beneath a small table, she did so as an act of crumbling decay. My aunt’s presence must have felt a kind of tidal wave set to wipe clean everything she had built for herself in San Jose, only a few hours from Newcastle and yet a world away, a world better and more secure and more like home than any she had experienced before the war.

At long last Mrs. Takahashi’s voice came from her seat at the little table: a dry sound, like paper rubbing against sand, a sound as unfriendly and pained as any I have ever heard in my life. “Tell me what you know of my boy,” she said.

Like her narrative of the birth of her daughter’s child, Mrs. Wilson’s account of Raymond Takahashi’s return to Placer County was faltering and confused. Only later, just before the summer faded into the chill of fall, would I learn just how ­incomplete her account was, the narrative she spun disjointed because she was, at every step, erasing herself and her family from its shape. In Mrs. Takahashi’s kitchen we were (Mrs. ­Takahashi and I) offered a tale told out of order, so that it seemed at first that Raymond returned and immediately departed again. Mrs. Takahashi finally had to stop her and ask, “How long?” and even then Mrs. Wilson seemed to dissemble, her bearing rigid even as her head jerked and twitched like that of a distressed bird. “Well, I don’t know exactly. He was there and then one day he was just gone. I don’t know when he left.”

“But how long do you think he was there?”

“I don’t really know—”

“Mrs. Wilson—”

“It might have been a month. Six weeks maybe.”

“Six weeks?” Mrs. Takahashi said now, her amazement plain in her voice. “He was in Newcastle for six weeks?”

“Well, like I said, it’s difficult to say.”