She paused her eyeliner swooping and turned to the surfboard in the corner. “I mean, this is home, too. But I miss the ocean. I surfed every day there. Every single day I was in the water.”

“You’re on an island in the ocean!”

She snorted. “Salish Sea. The Sound has no waves; I have to drive almost three hours for decent surf, through the Olympics and up into vampire territory.”

“Do you get to very often?”

“Sometimes. Not as much as I’d like, but…” She started pulling dresses from her closet.

“You really made all those paintings in the living room?”

“Yeah. Not the birds—those are my great-grandmother’s.”

“Artistic lineage.”

She went to a shelf in her closet and brought out a battered shoebox, which she put in my lap, then went back to the mirror. The lid was smashed in, a word, maybe a name, written in faded pencil across the top. Gaman.

Inside, in wads of white tissue, lay one more carved bird. A thick, flat piece of wood carved in sort of 3-D relief; delicate wire legs; black, white, and gray paint: a black-capped chickadee.

“She made them in prison, at Manzanar. They found a set of Audubon bird identification cards in an old National Geographic and carved them from scrap wood. She made paint from plants and berries; the legs are wire from screens over bars on the windows. They’re brooches. Something pretty to wear around the detention camp.” On the flat back of the bird, a safety pin was glued, still holding on even now.

A grandma. Making jewelry in a concentration camp.

The only grandma I had met personally was Zola’s. She was slow-moving and soft. Entire families, Kira’s family, imprisoned by their own American government for being born not white.

The familiar burn flared in my stomach. I wrapped the bird in its nest of tissue and tucked it safely beneath the lid, replaced the box on the shelf, and sat back on the bed to work the tangled chain in my left hand. The exhaustion of working overtime all your life to prove you are worthy of human dignity, just because the people in charge are ignorant and suspicious of the circumstances of your birth.

Kira held up dresses and blouses and tossed them on the bed beside me.

I pocketed the chain and ran my hand over a black silk slip dress. “Did she make more birds when she came home?”

“No,” Kira said. “Nothing. She wasn’t an artist before the internment, and not after.”

“But…they’re beautiful. She was so talented.”