But she doesn’t.
“Your mother and I met at the internment camp in Texas when we were both teenagers,” I continue. “We wrote to each other a few times after our families were repatriated, mine to Germany and hers to Japan. But then she . . . we lost contact with each other.”
“Oh my goodness!” Rina Hammond blinks and then stares at me without saying anything else.
“I am very much hoping to see Mariko again, if I may? That’s why I’m here. I believe she lives with you?” My voice is trembling a bit. I’m afraid she is going to turn me down.
Rina continues to gape, seemingly needing to concentrate solely on absorbing this amazing news, and then a bit of a smile pulls at her mouth. “You’re Elise Sontag.”
And now it is my turn to look at her in awe and say nothing for several seconds. “Yes,” I finally say.
Rina’s smile widens and she directs me to retake my seat. She sits down next to me on the sofa. “How did you find us?”
I tell her about the Google, and looking up Mariko’s name, and finding the newspaper article from five years ago.
“I didn’t know it would be so easy to find her,” I say. “If I had known, I might have tried sooner.”
“She used to talk about you,” Rina says, more to herself than to me.
“Used to?”
Rina shakes her head to perhaps uncork the memory of the last time she heard my name. “When I was a little girl, sometimes she would look at your picture and there would be a faraway look in her eye and she would tell me something about her life before the war. I think you were America to her. She missed you. She’d look at that photo and she’d miss you.”
I swallow hard. “The family photo where I’m in the background? That one?”
Rina smiles. “Yes. That one.”
I lean against the sofa’s back. I sense Agnes hovering nearby and I want to kick her in the shins. “I missed your mother, too, Rina. Very much.”
A few seconds of silence hover between us. “You and your family were from Germany?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Iowa.”
She waits, silently beckoning me to continue.
“My parents were born in Germany, but they’d been living in America nearly two decades when my father was arrested.”
“My grandparents had been in Los Angeles for that long, too.”
A vision of Kenji and Chiyo Inoue, Mariko’s parents, fills my mind. I see Kenji tending the beehives at the internment camp, and Chiyo in her little kitchen making Japanese dishes I loved but couldn’t pronounce. “Did your grandparents ever come back to America?”
Rina shakes her head. “They stayed in Tokyo.”
“My parents didn’t return, either,” I tell her. “Nor did my brother. I was the only one.”
Again, we are quiet for a moment.
I reach into my bag, pull out Mariko’s book, and hand it to her daughter. “This is hers. This is the book your mother was writing when we became friends at Crystal City. She sent it to me from Tokyo when she married your father, but it has never been mine. It has always been hers to finish. I very much want to give it back to her. Please? And there’s something I want to thank her for. Will you let me see her?”
Rina opens the book with trembling hands, fingering the English words of her Japanese mother, written a lifetime ago. She looks up. “I think my mother would like that very much.”
Relief floods me.
Rina hands me the book and then squeezes my hand. “I’ll take you to her, Elise. I will. But there’s something you need to know.” Her voice sounds hesitant.
“Yes?”
Rina seems to need a moment to steel herself. She inhales deeply and then exhales. “My mother has stage four breast cancer. She’s receiving hospice care. She’s dying.”
These words fall on me first like a suffocating, leaden drape, but then just as quickly they are a curtain of snowflakes: cold, but also calm and quiet. And gentle. Mariko and I, separated by years, by men and miles, by demands and forces outside of us, will join hands in the last great dance of life. Together.
Tears are sliding down Rina’s cheeks. She is sad for me, at the cruelty of fate that after all these decades, I should find Mariko in the waning hours of her existence. I withdraw my hand from Rina’s curled fingers so that I can pat her arm like a mother would, that ages-old, tender touch that assures all will be well in the end.
“It’s all right, my dear,” I tell her. “It’s all right. I’m dying, too.”
8
Crystal City, Texas, 1943–45
There is no heat on earth like Texas heat.
In my four decades of married life, I summered in many faraway places where no doubt the temperature was hotter than Crystal City in July of 1943. But over the years when someone who knew my story would ask what the internment camp had been like, my first response was always to recall the punishing heat.
Perhaps it’s merely because the heat was the most intense detail to stab at my senses when we arrived after two days on a train. There were other aspects that stood out among my first impressions of day one of our confinement: the odor of warm sand and mesquite; the two dozen shades of brown and no other color, no matter which direction I turned; the strange mix in the air of English, German, Japanese, and even Spanish; and the feel of grit in my mouth that lingered even after I’d brushed my teeth. But it was the heat that was pervasive and relentless and unforgettable.
I’d begun to feel the brazier-like atmosphere when we got off the train in Dallas, where at last we’d been reunited with Papa. He’d arrived the day before and he stood waiting for us in a guarded group of a dozen other immigrant fathers—and some mothers—who’d also been sentenced to spend the duration of the war under lock and key. Some were German; some were Japanese. Papa was wearing plain brown pants and a blue chambray shirt, clothes I’d never seen before, and which smelled foreign when he hugged me.
He was already sweating through them. Mommi, Max, and I wanted to stand on the platform and kiss and hug and just look at Papa after six months of his being apart from us, but we were hustled along by uniformed officials onto another train bound for Crystal City. Our suitcases would find their way to us, we were told. Move along, move along. Keep moving!
We must have made quite a visual tableau, a dozen happy families speaking different languages, crying tears of relief into each other’s necks, and being led by local police and armed INS agents from one platform to a second one. Other travelers gaped at us. Some clearly understood who we were and rewarded us with cold stares; others appeared unsure and therefore were warily curious. The window shades had been lowered on this other train, to keep out the scorching sun, but also to remind all of us in our car—it was full of other families bound for the internment camp—that we were not vacationers on a pleasure trip. We were detainees who could not be trusted to see where we were headed or to be seen. As we settled into our seats, Max tried to fiddle with the window shade and was told by an armed guard standing at our connecting door to leave it alone.
It was at first a niggling thing, how the temperature inside our car kept rising as we continued ever south. Papa had Mommi’s hand clasped tightly in his as he shared with us a million little details about what life had been like for him since we’d last seen him. With his other hand, he kept mopping his brow and neck with his handkerchief. But soon sweat was dripping down our faces, too. Mommi made a fan out of a magazine. She held on to that with one hand and to Papa with the other.
“Why can’t we open the windows?” Max moaned, an hour into what would be an eight-hour train ride. He was nine, but not above resorting to childish whining when something wasn’t going his way. “It’s so hot!”
“It is, son,” Papa said. “But we’re together now and soon we’ll get off this train and be at our new place. Just be patient.”
Our new place. That’s what Papa called it. It would be new. It was a place. But I didn’t see how it could be ours. How could it be ours?