None of us got any sleep that night, even though we were already exhausted from our long bus and train journey from Manzanar. We didn’t touch our suitcases, which Mrs. Tamura and Roy had placed in front of the fireplace of our one-bedroom apartment. We should have opened up the windows to let the night air cool the bedroom, but we didn’t have energy for that. Still in our street clothes, we lay on beds side by side, my parents in one and me in the other, exactly like in camp. Even though I was by myself, I stayed on the right side, careful not to cross over to where Rose was supposed to be. Was she really gone forever?
The next day I prepared to go to the coroner’s office to see Rose’s body. We didn’t have to; Roy had already identified her for the authorities. But I wanted to see her. Not that I needed to be convinced that Rose was dead, but as long as her body remained aboveground, I didn’t want her to be alone. And since I was going, my father decided that he should, too.
No one had witnessed exactly what had happened, only that someone had been run over at the Clark and Division subway station. The police had reached the scene fifteen minutes after the subway was stopped. The police had found Rose’s pocketbook down on the tracks. The contents were intact but the handle had been torn off by the incoming train.
My father and I were practically sleepwalking as we got into a taxi. I wasn’t aware of my environs until we walked into the morgue. The smell was wretched, both sour and chemical at the same time. A sheet covered Rose’s body, which was probably naked and broken. The sheet was pulled up to her chin, but the top of her shoulder was exposed, revealing that her arm had been severed. Pop also noticed how brutally mangled Rose’s body was and crumpled to the floor. I didn’t pull him up. We both were in shock.
I felt my whole body stiffening. Was that my sister’s face? All her beauty—the pink blush in her cheeks, the fullness of her lips, the playfulness in her eyes—was gone. Now this face I knew so well resembled animal hide stretched over a human skull. Even her black hair, always immaculately styled, seemed to have lost its sheen. Her beauty mark was still visible on her right cheek, confirming that this body had once been inhabited by the soul of Rose Mutsuko Ito.
I couldn’t move, even as Pop lurched to his feet and stumbled out of the room.
I don’t know how long I stood there, but the coroner’s voice finally broke through the noise of the revolving fan. He asked me if I had had enough, and I nodded. He covered Rose’s face with the sheet.
“May I talk to you, Miss Ito?” He led me to his office. Piles of manila folders loomed on the floor and on a desk in the middle of the room.
He directed me to a squeaky wooden chair with wheels, which rolled a few inches away from his desk when I sat. Nothing was stable or level in my life, even the floor of this government office.
He picked up a manila folder and licked his index finger to turn the pages of a form, but then got right to the point. “Your sister had an abortion. It was recent. Perhaps a couple of weeks ago.” His blue eyes were the color of marbles that a neighbor in Tropico had played with.
“You have made a mistake,” I said. My declaration surprised even me. I usually would not tell any authority figure, especially a hakujin man, that he was wrong. Why was he mentioning an unspeakable criminal procedure like an abortion when my sister was dead? “A train ran over her.”
“The evidence of an abortion is undisputable. I have to put it in my report. But it was not the cause of death, which was definitely suicide.”
That he could pronounce that Rose had taken her own life so definitively without even knowing her was unbelievable. I wanted to shout in his face, My sister didn’t kill herself. Not on the day before we were coming to Chicago.
The coroner looked at me silently, and I knew what he was communicating. She had taken her own life because we were coming—probably out of shame for her situation.
“Rose wouldn’t do that.” In my mind I had made the declaration at the top of my lungs, but the words from my mouth were barely audible.
“I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this,” he said. I could tell that there was no convincing him otherwise.
“I’d like her things.” I didn’t want the coroner’s office to hang on to anything that was Rose’s.
“The police have the contents of her purse.”
“Her dress—”
“We had to cut it off of her. There was a lot of blood.”
“I want her dress.”
“They have that, too.”
I stared at him. Was he telling the truth? I couldn’t tell. “I need the address of the police station.”
The station was located at 113 West Chicago Avenue—I made him write it for me on a slip of paper. After he did so, he stood up. “Well,” he said, “we’ll send the body to the mortuary as soon as we hear from them.”
Pop was waiting for me in front of the building, his hat flopped over his swollen eyes. It was obvious that we would never be the same again.
We took a taxi back from Ogden Avenue. I had to give the driver a big chunk of the money in my purse. The apartment Rose had secured for us on LaSalle was in a building with more than a hundred units, and the one vacancy was on the top floor. Mr. Tamura had apologized over and over for that when he’d let us in the day before. “Housing has been such a challenge with so many being released from camp.” But there were two rooms: a bedroom and dining room—a luxury when most people were living in studios, sometimes six to a room.
I had to jiggle the key in the lock to get the door open. The air was warm and stuffy. My and Pop’s suitcases were still in front of the fireplace. Roy, who had said that he’d be over after his work, sat alone at the table, which was made of wood, maybe walnut. Our beds and two chairs were the only other pieces of furniture. On the table were a couple of cans of beer, an open newspaper, three ration books and some brochures that Mr. Tamura had left for us. We didn’t have a full kitchen, merely a kitchenette with a sink, hot plate and a refrigerator that was in need of a block of ice. It wasn’t much, but it was more than we had in camp.
I didn’t bother to say hello to Roy. What was the point? “Where’s my mother?”
“She went to bed. The doctor gave her something to make her sleep.”
I wished that one of our Issei doctors from Southern California was in Chicago to look after us. But most of them were still in one of the ten concentration camps across America. There were more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans who needed their help there.
“I bought some sandwiches,” Roy said.
“Pop. Food,” I said to my father, who was still standing by the door as if he had entered a stranger’s home. “Roy bought us some sandwiches. You need to eat.”
Pop slowly made his way to the middle of the dining room. He bowed from his hip until the top of his head almost grazed the edge of the table. In Japanese he said, “Thank you for all you have done for us.”
“It’s nothing, Ojisan. I’m so sorry.” I thought I heard Roy’s voice crack.
I went to retrieve the box of sandwiches from the counter. When I turned back around, Pop was gone, as was one of the beer cans. I scowled and was going to go into the bedroom and scold him for drinking on an empty stomach, but Roy stopped me.
“Let him be, Aki. He needs some time alone.” He drained his last bit of beer. “It was bad, huh? To see her like that.”
I felt strangely protective of Rose in her deceased state. Why did Roy have to make a comment about how she looked? “What happened? Were you with her?”
Roy shook his head. “The police went by her apartment and one of her roommates called me at work. They told me that it was probably suicide.”
“You know that Rose would never have killed herself.”
“It must have been an accident then.”
I didn’t dare bring up the abortion with my parents in the next room. “Did Rose have a boyfriend?”
Roy frowned. “Not that I know of. What, did she mention something to you?”
I heard the bedroom door swing open and then my father’s footsteps in the tiled bathroom.
“I better get going.”
“I need to talk to you. Soon,” I said in a hushed tone.
Roy got the message that I didn’t want my parents to be part of the conversation. “Well, maybe we can have a drink sometime.”
“I’m not going to a bar with you, Roy.” In camp I had sometimes heard that Roy was a bit fast, getting too close to girls at dances.
“I’m working at the candy company tomorrow. There’s a diner nearby. Maybe there.” He recited the name and closest intersection, which I recorded in the notebook I kept in my purse.
We made arrangements to meet the next day.
Leaving the empty can on the table, he gestured toward the newspaper. “There’s an article in there about Rose. You might not want your parents to see it.” Those were his last words before he was out the door.
The article in the Chicago Daily Tribune was brief, the size of a matchbook: a woman had been fatally run over by a train car at the Clark and Division station. There was no name or physical description. The police were investigating the incident, which had occurred at six o’clock in the evening two days before.
For my family’s sake, I hoped that there wouldn’t be a follow-up article. But on the other hand, I couldn’t let Rose disappear in a two-inch box.
I felt like collapsing, but I knew that I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep in a bed next to my parents. It had been bad enough in camp, but now with all this grief surrounding us, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I had to do something.
It was only seven o’clock and still light outside. I took a pen from my purse and, using the edge of the newspaper, I wrote:
I went out. I’ll be back soon.
Aki
I folded the page with the story about Rose and put it in my purse, then took out Rose’s latest postcard, the one of the Mark Twain Hotel. On the postcard was her return address, an apartment on Clark Street. I went through the resettlement’s “Welcome to Chicago” brochures until I found a Triple A map of downtown.
I made sure that the door was locked behind me.