When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka Page B

Once, when she thought no one was looking, we even saw her put it into her mouth and close her eyes with delight. It was spring, and the air smelled of sage, and she was reading a letter from our father. We turned our heads away. The key had become a part of her. It was always there, a small, dark shape, dangling—visibly and sometimes invisibly, depending on the light, and what she was wearing, and even, at times, it seemed, on her mood—just beneath the surface of her clothes. If she took it off, surely terrible things would happen. Our house—that faraway speck on the map—would fall down, or go up in flames, or simply disappear. The war would last forever. Our mother would cease to be.
    But now we watched as she pulled the chain up over her head—she did this effortlessly, naturally, as though it were something she did every day—and slid the key into the lock. Her hands were steady. Her fingers did not tremble. The wind was blowing through the branches of the trees and in the yard next door a man we did not know was slowly raking leaves. Our mother had not waved to him. She turned the key once in the lock. She turned the key twice. We heard a click and then the door swung open and she took off her hat and stepped into the foyer and after three years and five months we were suddenly, finally, home.
    THE HOUSE DID NOT smell good. We did not care. The paint was peeling away from the walls and the window frames were black with rot. Shreds of lace curtain dangled in front of the soot-covered panes and the floor was littered with empty food tins and shards of broken glass. Against the far wall where the piano had once stood we saw our mother’s felt-covered card table beneath a pile of old newspapers. Nearby, in the corner, three folding chairs. A metal stool. A broken gooseneck lamp. The rest of our furniture was gone. It did not matter. We were home. We were lucky to be home. Many of the people who had come back with us on the train had no homes to return to at all. Tonight they would be sleeping in hostels and churches and on cots at the YMCA.
    We put down our things and ran from one room to the next shouting out, “Fire! Help! Wolf!” simply because we could. We flung open the windows and doors. The smell of the sea blew through the empty rooms of the house and soon the other smell, the smell of people we did not know (they drank milk, they ate butter, they ate cheese, all these things our mother claimed she could tell from their smell) began to fade away.
    We had not smelled the sea in years.
    In the kitchen we turned on the faucet and watched the water come pouring out of the pipes. At first the water was brown with rust and then it ran clear. We lowered our heads to the faucet and drank. Our throats were dry from the long ride back and our clothes were covered with dust. Our mother let the water run over her hands and then she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on the front of her dress and walked out the back door and into the yard and stood on the tall weedy grass in the shade of the trees as the leaves fell all around her.
    This was a strange and unfamiliar sight: our mother, in shade, beneath trees. We watched as she caught a falling leaf in her hand and held it up to the light. We watched as she let the leaf go. In the place we had come from there was sun but no shade and the only time we ever saw trees was at night, in our dreams.
    MANY PEOPLE HAD LIVED in our house while we were away but we did not know who they were, or where they had gone, or why we had never received a single check in the mail from the man who had promised to rent out our house. This man was a lawyer, his name was Milt Parker, he had shown up at our door the day after the evacuation orders had been posted and offered our mother his services. “I’ll take care of everything,” Mr. Parker had said. But where was he now? And where was our money? And why had our mother been so quick to open the