“I'm sorry,” he said, and she gave him some money and walked back outside with Toyo, feeling dead inside. Everyone was gone. She had no one left…. Yuji, her parents …Ken …Takeo …even poor Peter … It wasn't fair. They were all such decent people.
“Where do you want to go now?” the man with the car asked her, and for a minute, she just stood there. There was nowhere to go. Except back to Kyoto. But after that, she had no idea. She had traveled four thousand miles to find no one, for nothing.
She got back in the car, and they drove slowly back to the train station, but there was no train for the next two days, and there was nowhere for them to stay in Ayabe, and now that she knew what had happened, she didn't want to. She just wanted to go home again, wherever that was. And sensing her mood, Toyo started to cry, and the driver looked unhappy.
In the end, Hiroko offered him a hundred dollars to take them back to Kyoto. He accepted gratefully, but the trip back was a nightmare. There were obstacles, and bombed-out areas, and detours, and dead animals on the road. There were soldiers and roadblocks, and people milling everywhere, some with nowhere to go, and some obviously crazy from what had happened to them. It took them almost two days to get back and she gave him another fifty dollars when he dropped them at the house in Kyoto. She brought him inside, and gave him some food and water, and then he went on his way again, and she and Toyo stood there, alone at last. And all Hiroko could think of was that they had come all this way for nothing.
“Where are they, Mommy?” he asked insistently. “They're still not here.” He looked disappointed, but not as much as she was. She fought back tears as she explained it.
“They're not coming back, Toyo,” she said sadly.
“Don't they want to see us?” He looked crestfallen.
“Very much,” she said, as the tears spilled onto her cheeks, “but they had to go to heaven, to be with all the other people we love.” But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't bring herself to say “like your daddy.” She just couldn't say it. But when he saw her face, he cried with her anyway. He hated it when his mother was unhappy. And she sat on the floor holding him as they both cried, and she heard a knock at the gate and wondered who it was. She hesitated, and then went out to see an M.P. at her parents' front gate. He said he was the new sentry for their street, and he wanted to know if they needed any assistance. He had been told the house was empty, and he had seen her and Toyo go into it, but she said they were fine, and explained that it was the house of her parents.
He was a nice man, with kind eyes, and he handed Toyo a chocolate bar, which delighted him, but Hiroko was very cool with him. She remembered what everyone had said. They had all warned her about the soldiers.
“Are you alone here?” he asked, looking at her with interest. He was a handsome boy, with a Southern drawl, but she didn't want any soldiers bothering them. She wasn't sure what to answer.
“I …yes …no …my husband will be back later.”
The soldier glanced at Toyo then. It was easy to figure out the rest. And here, the implications were even worse than they were in San Francisco. It made it look like she'd been sleeping with enemy soldiers.
“Let us know if there's anything we can do for you, ma'am,” he said, and for the next several days she and Toyo hid in the house and the garden. She let the neighbors know that they were back so they wouldn't be frightened if they saw activity in the house, and she told them what had happened to her parents, and they were desolate for her. They even invited her and Toyo to dinner. And the night they went, the sentry spotted them again, and he came to chat with Toyo. He gave him another chocolate bar, and Hiroko thanked him coolly.
“You speak very good English. Where did you learn?” he asked, trying to be friendly. She was one of the prettiest women he'd seen, and he had not seen her husband. He doubted there even was one.
“In California,” she answered vaguely.
“You been there recently?” he asked, surprised.
“I just came back, last week,” she said, hating to start a conversation with him. She just didn't want that. She had no idea what she and Toyo were going to do. She didn't know if they should stay here, or go back to the States. And even if she wanted to return to America, it seemed foolish to rush back right away. She had to decide what she wanted to do with her parents' house in Kyoto. And this would be no time to sell it. The sensible thing would be to stay here for a month or two, and then go back to the States, or maybe she had no reason to go there at all now. It was all a jumble in her head, but having soldiers at her gate was not going to make life any easier for her, if they stayed there. It was a complication she would have gone far to have avoided. But the man seemed to be crazy about Toyo.