The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto

in.
    “They’re waiting for the police to catch the man so they can come back.”
    I laid her down, slipping her under my faded covers, seeing through her eyes the dowdiness of my room, smelling the musty lifelessness, the meagre stillness. I sat down on the edge of the bed. She kept her eyes open for the longest time, staring at the ceiling as she nattered on with her ideas, seeming not to notice any details of my decor.
    “See, Miss Saito? All we have to do is wait.”
    This was how she was holding on. I was so used to her being taciturn, in spite of what churned below; it was like another person here with me. But it was Sachi after all, no one else.
    “Miss Saito, Miss Saito.” Her hand was stirring beneath the covers. She’d quietened down now, her nervous energy almost spent.
    “Yes?”
    “Tell me the story about Eiji.”
    “Which one?” I was taken aback, and touched that she should think of my brother at a time when only Tam could be in her head. It brought her comfort to hear about me with Eiji. I suppose she liked to imagine the two of us as not that different from her and Tam, though Tam was nothing like Eiji, nothing at all.
    “You know, during the war,” she persisted.
    “It’s not really a story.”
    “I know.” She smiled.
    “It’s nothing.”
    Her wise smile, the smile I hadn’t seen since we’d heard about Chisako, about Tam and Kimi gone missing, fell away as she surrendered to her exhaustion. That smile made me pour myself out. We’d spent so little time together lately.Being with her like this, it was almost the way it had been before anything happened. Her eyes fluttered shut.
    “When we got there, Mama and I…,” I started to say, never knowing quite where to begin.
    “Where? Got where?”
    “Hastings Park, the exhibition grounds in Vancouver.” Already I recalled how dizzy I’d felt from the ferry ride over, my first; sick from being inside a hulk that moved against the current while you stayed still. There was the smell in the livestock building that made me more sick—a disinfectant used on the stalls where we slept, and the musty stink of cows and their business lurking under it. It almost hurt to smell, a sharp but burning sweet that made me press my nose to the floor the first night and sniff until my head ached.
    Sachi’s eyes stayed shut, but she wasn’t asleep. I felt her hand rustle under the cover next to my leg, urging me on. “Papa and Eiji had been there for weeks already.” Eiji was on the baggage crew, taking in everyone’s shabby bags and boxes, settling us in for the months we would be there, before they sent us to the camps. I could tell he was glad to be busy, to not be thinking about what he was missing. How strange it was to say Eiji’s name aloud to someone other than Stum or Papa. It made me realize how rarely I did say it, how much I kept him to myself. I was grateful Sachi’s eyes were shut. I didn’t care to be watched.
    “We’d been there a month or two when a fair came to the grounds,” I told her. “With rides and all kinds of games and candy floss.” I watched her lids flicker at that but they didn’t open.
    “One night, after his shift, Eiji took me through thegates.” There had been no Mounties, no gatekeeper, no pass-taker to check on us or stop us. Only an open field between the gates and the fair, passing quickly as we ran. I had seen the livestock building left behind in the distance, and coloured lights turning in the sky in front. I had seen tickets, pink, in Eiji’s hand. I saw it now like a dream, his hand, his long straight fingers with the tickets held in them. It was his face I couldn’t quite see. It was like seeing through his eyes, because there I was, a girl Sachi’s age, waiting by the ticket booth, in line for the ride. It was growing dark. We were the only nihonjin there, as far as I could tell, yet nobody looked twice at us.
    “What was it called? The ride?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, startled. It was