Chapter 10: Mikaela Yakamura

The lawyer Kenzo retained was a silver-haired woman named Patricia Henley who had been practicing family law in Los Angeles for twenty-three years and had never lost a termination of parental rights case. She came to the Yakamura house on a Tuesday evening, sat at the dining room table with a leather portfolio and a cup of green tea, and listened to the situation with the practiced stillness of someone who charges four hundred dollars an hour and doesn’t waste a minute of it.

She asked Mikaela direct questions. When did you last see your mother. Where have you been living. How long at the current shelter. Who has been your emergency contact at school. Mikaela answered everything plainly, hands folded on the table, and Patricia Henley wrote without looking down, watching the girl’s face with professional attention.

Afterward she spoke to Kenzo privately for twenty minutes. When she came out her expression hadn’t changed but something in her bearing had settled.

“File Thursday,” she said. “Ex parte emergency guardianship. Judge Reyes handles minors in this district and she moves quickly when the facts are clean. Your facts are clean.”

She was right on both counts.

The ex parte hearing was held four days later in a small wood-paneled courtroom that smelled of old paper and institutional carpet. Patricia Henley presented the documentation with the calm efficiency of someone laying cards face up on a table — shelter intake records spanning fourteen months, school attendance files showing perfect consistency, a sworn statement from the shelter director confirming no parental contact in over a year, Mikaela’s birth certificate, her mother’s last known address in Nevada, two prior reports to child protective services that had gone nowhere for lack of follow-through.

The opposing chair was empty. There was no one to oppose.

Judge Reyes was a compact Filipino woman in her fifties who read every page of the filing before she looked up. She had seen a great many of these cases and could usually tell within the first minute whether she was looking at genuine circumstance or manufactured convenience. She looked at the documentation, looked at Patricia Henley, looked at Mioki sitting straight-backed in the gallery with her hands folded, and made her assessment.

“Where is the minor?” she asked.

“Waiting in the hallway with my associate, Your Honor.”

“Bring her in please.”

Mikaela had worn the white blouse Mioki laid out for her that morning. She walked in with her shoulders back and her eyes forward and sat in the chair across from the judge’s bench feeling very small and very visible simultaneously. Judge Reyes looked at her for a moment without speaking, the way adults sometimes did when they were deciding whether to treat you like a child or a person.

She apparently decided on person.

“I’m going to ask you some questions,” she said. “I need honest answers. Not what you think I want to hear — what’s actually true. Can you do that?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“How long have you been living at the shelter on Figueroa?”

“Fourteen months.”

“When did you last have contact with your mother?”

Mikaela held the judge’s gaze. “The night she left; almost two years. I was twelve.”

“Have you tried to reach her since?”

“Three times in the first month. The number stopped working.”

Judge Reyes made a note. “Tell me about the Yakamura household. How did you come to know them.”

So Mikaela told her. Not everything — not the collar sitting cool against her throat, not the heart-shaped tag currently resting in her jacket pocket per the morning routine she had already made her own. But the truth underneath all of that, which was also true: that Mioki had seen her, had learned her situation, had brought her to dinner and listened to her whole story and then said I want you to stay. That she had eaten a meal at a table with a family for the first time in three years. That she had slept in a real room with a door that locked and woken up and it was still real.

“Do you feel safe in that home?”

“More than I’ve felt anywhere.”

“Do you want to live there permanently?”

Mikaela’s throat tightened. She kept her voice level. “Yes ma’am. More than anything I’ve ever wanted.”

Judge Reyes looked at her for another moment, then made a final note and closed the folder.

“Temporary guardianship granted. Mr. Yakamura assumes immediate custody pending full hearing. Minor is to be removed from shelter enrollment today.” She looked over her reading glasses at Patricia Henley. “Schedule the full hearing for six weeks out. I want a home study completed in three.”

She looked back at Mikaela one last time with an expression that wasn’t quite warmth but was adjacent to it — the professional satisfaction of someone who occasionally gets to do the right thing efficiently.

“You’re going home,” she said.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, before they reached the doors, Mikaela paused. Reached into her jacket pocket. Clicked the heart-shaped tag back onto the O-ring at the base of her throat.

Property of Mioki Yakamura.

She straightened it with one finger and walked out into the light.