AND YET SHE HAD never been free of those hills with their rows of peach and plum and pear trees and the golden grasses and olive-colored oaks and the blaze of summer heat coming up from the earth. For twenty-seven years she would be away from that landscape but her memories of her son would be forever entangled in that same topography so that she could not think of him without thinking of the oaks and the orchards and their little house on its hill and the big white Victorian of the Wilsons’ on the hill opposite and the little town with its fruit sheds and the tumbledown buildings of the little Japantown that nestled in the draw at the foot of Chantry Hill. Her boy. Her beautiful boy. There he had been and then the war came and then Tule Lake and Raymond had gone to war as a soldier then had simply vanished, gone so completely that it sometimes felt as if his entire existence had been a kind of hallucination or vision. For a long while she had felt in her heart that he yet lived and had decided, for reasons she could not fathom, to remain apart from his family—from his mother and father and sisters—but the years passed and then it was 1950 and 1955 and she knew that her son was dead, knew it and had even come to accept it in the warm beating center of her heart.

And then she understood something she had not even asked of herself, knew that Evelyn Wilson too was a survivor, that she too was a mother of the dead.

“Help me, Evelyn,” she said now. “Please, help me.”

I had drawn myself up to the edge of my seat and a quick glance to my grandmother confirmed that she had as well, the two of us suspended there in anticipation of Evelyn Wilson’s response. Evelyn Wilson herself betrayed nothing of her own thoughts, her face emotionless, seeming to suspend our expectation not out of malice but out of utter indifference.

When at last she spoke her voice seemed to come from that same indifference, her words uttered as if they were the only answer possible. Only later did I come to understand that she did it not out of the goodness of her heart but out of a sincere desire for control, assuming as she did—and rightly—that Mrs. Takahashi would not simply return to San Jose unappeased.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Of course I’ll help you, Kim. Of course I will.”

Chapter 10

10