The other letter was to me. She told me she loved me, and always would, and she hoped I could understand and forgive her someday. I never could, and I never did.
I don’t know how Mother afforded the train tickets, but two possibilities occurred to me years later. Maybe she embezzled the money from the hotel where she worked. Or maybe the man she abandoned me for gave her the money.
I don’t know whether she actually went to South America with the man. She might have just said that to throw us off the scent. Maybe she and her man settled down in Schenectady or Cincinnati. For that matter, I don’t even know if there really was a man; maybe she made that up, too, as a plausible reason for turning her back on a child. All I know is that I never saw or heard from her again.
Aunt Rachel helped me get an after-school job in a Wool-worth’s five-and-dime in Brooklyn. It didn’t pay much, but my little paychecks helped me feel like I was less of a burden to them. The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a job at the Grumman aircraft factory on Long Island. Grumman built fighter planes for the navy—the Wildcat and the Hellcat, which became famous for their toughness against the Japanese—and I helped build the instrument panels for them.
Aunt Rachel never said so, but I could tell I’d long since worn out my welcome, so as the summer went on, I mentioned that it might be time for me to get out on my own. New York was expensive, though, so I worried about how I’d manage. She mentioned her other brother—my father’s brother, the one my mother had never liked. This uncle, Uncle Jake, lived in Knoxville, and he’d written Rachel to say that every girl in Tennessee was being hired for war work near Knoxville.
I stepped off the train in Knoxville in September of 1943, and a week later I started helping build the bomb, atom by atom.
CHAPTER 24
I WALKED INTO THE BONE LAB AND SAW MIRANDA bent low over a lab table in concentration. It was a posture I’d seen her in so many times, for so many hours on end, that it sometimes surprised me to see that she was capable of standing, or even sitting up straight, rather than bending over bone fragments.
“Crap,” she said. “I’m too stupid and klutzy for this.”
“What are you working on?” I leaned around, expecting to see tiny bone fragments and a bottle of Duco cement. The skull of the North Knoxville skeleton had been crushed into dozens of pieces, some the size of rock salt. Instead of the drabness of bone, though, I saw a splash of vivid color: a small piece of fuchsia paper, creased into a bristling profusion of small triangles. “Is that origami?”
“It’s supposed to be, but it’s not. Dammit!” In frustration, she crumpled the paper and tossed it at a waste can beside the table. It missed, landing on the floor atop a heap of other wads of fuchsia.
“This might be a dumb question—” I began.
“Wouldn’t be the first,” she said.
“But if this is so frustrating, why are you doing it?”
“Because of a girl named Sadako,” she said. “And a friend named Eddie.”
“Sadako,” I said. “Neighbor? Daughter of a neighbor?”
“No. Sadako was a two-year-old living in Hiroshima in August of 1945. She was a mile and a half from the epicenter of the bomb blast. Sadako survived, but when she was twelve, she was diagnosed with leukemia.” Miranda slid another square of paper from the package on the table and folded it into a triangle. “Someone who came to visit her in the hospital told her that if she folded a thousand paper cranes and made a wish, her wish would come true. She made it to six hundred and forty-four, and then she died.”
Miranda folded the triangle in half again and again, into smaller triangles, and then gave the paper an angry yank that almost created wings, but not quite. I was formulating a logical response to her story about the girl—I thought of the dead in Pearl Harbor, the hundreds of thousands raped and slaughtered in China, the million projected to die in the assault on the Japanese home islands—when I noticed the misshapen wings begin to flutter. Miranda’s hands were shaking, and as I looked at them, I noticed that three of her fingertips, the three that had touched the iridium pellet in the morgue, were red and blistered. “Jesus, Miranda, we need to get you to the ER and get your fingers examined.”