She called his name but he was already gone and she was alone again. She pulled out one of the chairs and sat at the edge of the table, one callused hand on its surface, the other in the lap of her worn dress. August. They had only been in the camp for three months, three months in which she had tried to grow accustomed to the fence and the shared toilets and meals in the dining hall, her life suddenly part of a communal whole with women she hardly knew or did not know at all, the dividing wall not reaching the ceiling so that every conversation of the neighboring family, the Hosokawas, could be heard, word for word, every argument, every discussion, even those rare moments of their lovemaking late at night. In the toilets she had to do what her body demanded seated next to whomever happened to be there, divided only by a flimsy cloth sheet hung on a drooping line so that the sounds and smells from the woman beside her mingled with her own. Each time the experience was horrifying and demeaning. Once she heard the sound of weeping from beyond the cloth sheet and through the gap could see an elderly woman whose name she did not know, her stained underwear pooled around her heels as her naked buttocks strained against the seat. Kimiko said nothing, for what could she say, instead moving past that woman and past another and lowering herself in disgust and shame.

She tried, a few days later, to talk to her husband about the shade that seemed to have entered their oldest child and which, as the days and weeks and months continued, would darken and coalesce into a kind of half-light, grim and silent. She did not actually believe Hiro might affect some change in the boy, or even that he was capable of discovering exactly what was on Ray’s mind. She simply did not want to feel so wholly alone.

When she first introduced the topic, Hiro answered her with a proverb, a tactic he employed whenever he wanted to avoid a real conservation, and which never failed to irritate her. This time it was, “The caged bird dreams of clouds.”

“Please be serious,” she said in response.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Just talk to him,” she said, an edge to her voice now. “Find out what’s wrong. Maybe there’s something we can do.”

Hiro did not look at her but instead cast his eyes out toward the little window with its uneven sheet of glass. “It’s going to be sundown soon,” he said, another evasion.

“Will you?”

For a long moment he did not move, but even in his stillness she knew he had heard her and when he nodded at last the action was so slight, so bare, that it was almost as if he had not moved at all.

“Good,” she said. “Now go smoke your pipe.”