My fourteenth birthday arrived a week after we moved to the cottage. Collette was the only friend who remembered, or who was brave enough to wish me a happy birthday. She gave me a present, too—a necklace with my initial on a dangling pendant. Mommi made an apple strudel as my birthday cake and she somehow managed to scrape up enough extra money to buy me new pajamas and furry cat-shaped slippers. Papa sent me a deck of playing cards, each card having been signed with a birthday message from the other men in the camp.
The day was better than I thought it would be, but I was so lonely for friendship, anyone’s friendship. I decided I would shove that isolation out of my mind by taming the cottage yards so that they’d be beautiful when Papa came home. Somehow, I would get ivy to trail up those decrepit walls and teacup roses to bloom under the windows.
I went into town and begged Mrs. Brimley to let me wash her windows so that I could earn money to buy flower seeds. She ended up giving me cuttings from her own yard, as well as paying me to wash her windows.
Hope began to rise within me as spring leaned into summer and the two yards began to look like someone cared for them. The end of school was nearing, which meant I wouldn’t have to be alone in a sea of people. At the cottage, we were far enough from the main city streets to avoid prolonged contact with people who didn’t really want to be seen with us. There was a swimming hole with a diving rock a mile from the cottage and I planned to spend the summer months perfecting my dive. When Papa came home and we could go to the Natatorium again, I’d show him how much I had improved.
Papa’s appeal would be coming before the officials who had the power to parole him and he felt good about his preparations for it. As each seed I’d planted bloomed in the soft brown dirt of the cottage flower beds, expectation rose. This terrible time in our lives would be over. Maybe when Papa had at last been returned to us, vindicated and cleared of all suspicion, he’d get his job back at Boyer and we could buy this sad little cottage, scrape it off its foundation, and build a new house in its place. With a wraparound porch.
At the end of June, an official document came to the house: the results of Papa’s appeal. Mommi opened the envelope with shaking hands and then crumpled to the floor as she read it.
The appeal hearing hadn’t changed the disposition of Papa’s case. He’d been cleared of nothing. He was not coming home.
The next few days were thick with heat and humidity and the nearest thing to despair I’d ever felt. Mommi barely spoke a word to Max or me, and when she did, the vacant look in her eyes made me wonder if there was someone else in the room she was speaking to. She’d spend hours just sitting on her bed looking out the window at those poultry barns. They smelled something terrible, especially in the moist heat of summer, and the stench wafted into our rooms through the open windows like it had been invited. Mommi sat there as if she wanted to know why those birds had to smell so bad. They were just chickens.
Papa must have known Mommi could not continue to live this way, without him, for who knew how long. He told me many weeks later, after we’d been reunited, that he had petitioned to be relocated to the family internment camp in Texas. His wife was in delicate health, he’d said, and he needed to take care of her. His absence was doing irreparable harm to his family. Joining Papa at the family camp, however, would mean Mommi, Max, and I would be detainees for the duration of the war, just like Papa. We’d be voluntarily giving up our freedom. But, of course, what is freedom when you can’t be with the people you love, and when you are hated and feared just because you’ve a German last name?
Papa’s request that we all be sent to the family internment camp was granted. A letter came from my father less than a week after we learned he’d lost his appeal. The letter was addressed to all of us. Mommi read it aloud.
We’re all going to be together again! my father had written.
We’re going to an encampment in Texas just for families. There’s a new house there waiting for us, and everything we could possibly need will be right there. There will be many other German American families there, too. And we will be together! Pack your things, dear ones. Max, I think you will soon be able to see real cowboys! All the documents and train tickets will be sent to you. I will meet you at the station in Dallas and we will travel the rest of the way to Crystal City together. I can’t wait to see you. I love you all so much.
See you so very soon,
Papa
“Crystal City,” Mommi said softly, when she was finished reading the letter.
She said crystal like the word itself was made of glass—delicate and easily broken if handled too harshly.
Sometimes what you want is given to you in a way that is so very different from how you had pictured getting it. I’d never imagined living outside the confines of Iowa. Not once. My view of the world and my place in it was so small then, and I didn’t have a cowboy book to challenge myself to consider that there was more to living than the little bit I’d been content with. In the weeks to come I would meet Mariko and I would realize, as she and I looked out over the colorless desert wilderness, that I didn’t know yet what I wanted out of life or what I wanted to give back to humanity in return.
I wasn’t aware of it, but the great, spinning world was opening its doors to me as I packed my suitcases for Texas, even though I was headed for a postage-stamp-sized parcel of desert bounded by barbed wire.
PART TWO
7
San Francisco, 2010
The trouble with writing information you don’t want to forget on the inside of your wrist and then concealing it with your sleeve is you might well forget you wrote it there. I spent my flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco peeking every twenty minutes at the words I had penned on my skin; yet even so, in the shuffling to get off the airplane, and with too many distractions from well-meaning people who offered to help me with my carry-on bag, and having fallen asleep just before we landed, I forgot where I was as soon as I stepped from the plane onto the Jetway. Just like that, like a shooting star you see one second and don’t see the next, I couldn’t remember why I was stepping off an airplane.
Panic is cold, not hot like you might think. That moment when I couldn’t recall why I was there took me right back to the bombing raids in Germany the last year of the war. That fear, too, was cold and gripping, as though an icy vise had encircled my chest. As we had huddled in my Oma’s cellar, listening to the Allied warplanes buzzing over the house, I couldn’t help but wonder if death was coming for us with an axe made of ice.
To a lesser degree, I stood frozen to the spot where plane and Jetway met, and I couldn’t move. I failed to remember that I’d written down key words on my wrists. I knew it was important to me, the reason I was there, and I also knew that if I didn’t pull it together and keep moving, authorities would be summoned and I’d be carted away. I would be asked why I was there and I wouldn’t even know where there was. Strangers would go through my purse to find out who I was and who I belonged to. Pamela or Teddy—maybe both—would be called.
The next moment, an airport worker waiting to escort someone from my flight in a wheelchair asked me if I was all right. From somewhere deep inside I felt a surge of strength. I thanked the man and said I was fine. I took a step. And then another. And then I was walking forward again. You’re here for Mariko, a voice from within whispered to me. “I don’t know where she is,” I mumbled aloud, and a man who got off the plane before me glanced back and then quickly turned around again.
Yes, you do, the voice said.
Agnes was there, too, poised to ask where her umbrella was. I made my way to the women’s restroom just on the other side of the gate’s seating area and closeted myself in the first stall. I breathed in and out, deep and long, and then plunged my hand inside my carry-on bag for anything that might give me a clue as to where I was and why. When I did, my right sleeve inched upward on my arm, and I saw Rina’s name and the name of her hotel inked on my skin, in my own handwriting. And then beyond my fingertips I saw the binding of Mariko’s book. Agnes at last loosened her hold on me. I felt her floating away like a balloon on a string, gone but not for good.
My fingers also brushed against an airline ticket folder and a baggage claim stub, flattened against Mariko’s book. Yes. I had a suitcase. I remembered packing it. I remembered why I’d packed it. I was going to the Ritz-Carlton. I was going to ask to meet Rina Hammond, Mariko’s daughter. I was going to beg her to let me see her mother. I was going to tell her that Mariko and I are old friends. Very old friends, who met each other during the war, when we were just teenagers.
And now, ten minutes later, I am standing at the circling carousel of bags, waiting for mine to appear, trusting I will recognize it. The one I think is mine, a smart Gucci on wheels, has just emerged from the conveyor. I take a step toward it and then hesitate. I think it’s mine. Is it?
A gentleman next to me speaks. “That one yours?”