I reach inside my carry-on for the fabric-bound notebook that had been Mariko’s, brushing my hand against the iPad, my purse, a package of Fig Newtons, and the latest issue of House Beautiful. The yellowed pages of the ancient notebook contain the half-finished, untitled book Mariko had been writing at Crystal City. It’s the tale of a warrior princess named Calista who lives in a fantasy land called Akari, which Mariko told me is the Japanese word for “light.” In the story, courageous Calista had set out to free her three sisters from an evil sorcerer who had kidnapped them and taken them to his enchanted castle.
Mariko, who had loved writing and imagining worlds that don’t really exist, had started to write this story when her family still lived in Los Angeles, just before Pearl Harbor was bombed, before her world—and mine—was turned upside down. After we became friends at the camp, we’d spent many hours thinking up new scenes to move the story forward. Toward the end of our stay Mariko had gotten stuck and didn’t know how to get unstuck. Calista had already made it past several harrowing obstacles on her journey to save her sisters but was now imprisoned herself in the sorcerer’s highest tower. She’d learned that her sisters, jealous of her beauty, brains, and bravery, had faked their abduction and then paid the sorcerer to capture Calista when she came to save them.
I was no whiz at storytelling, but Mariko allowed me to dream and ponder with her the best way for Calista to defeat the sorcerer, escape the tower, and take her revenge on her cruel sisters. Though I lacked Mariko’s creativity and imagination, she never made me feel stupid for suggesting scenarios that couldn’t possibly work and had no literary merit. Before Mariko could find a way to get Calista out of the tower, though, my family and I were sent to Germany, and then Mariko and hers to Japan. A year would go by before I heard from her again.
We had exchanged only two letters from our separate lands of exile when she wrote her final note and included the notebook, in which no new words had been written. A marriage with the son of a still-wealthy Japanese businessman, Yasuo Hayashi, had been arranged for Mariko—she had just turned seventeen—and she told me she couldn’t write to me anymore. Neither would she be joining me back in the States when we both turned eighteen, as we’d planned. She told me to take the book and please, please get Calista out of the locked tower and finish the story, because she would not be able to.
I had cried to think I would never see or hear from Mariko again, and I knew she had wept writing that last letter to me; I saw the blotches in the ink, the crinkles in the folds, the unmistakable mark salt-laden tears leave on linen paper. I wrote Mariko several letters after that anyway, telling her that no matter where she and I lived, we could continue to write to each other, and that maybe someday her new husband would allow her to come visit me. Or he would allow me to come visit her. But those letters to Mariko came back to me undeliverable. I never heard from her again.
The binding on the notebook is threadbare, despite my having carefully stored it over the decades. It has been sitting at the bottom of a cedar chest in the blue guest room, wrapped in plastic, safe from mildew and silverfish and the breath of time. I never wrote so much as a word inside it, even though Mariko had sent it to me thinking I would finish the story. But I couldn’t. It was not my book to finish. And yet even now I wonder how Calista got out of the tower. How did she defeat her enemy? How did she get justice for what her sisters had done to her? How did she live the rest of her life?
Perhaps this is the real reason why I sense this overwhelming need to see Mariko before I die, before I disappear: so that I can give this book back to her and find out at last how the story ends.
We have reached cruising altitude, and the attendants will be serving us refreshments now. I slip the notebook back inside my bag and zip it shut.
Where are we going? I hear Agnes saying in the back of my mind.
Back to the beginning, I tell her.
3
Davenport, Iowa, 1943
The day my father was arrested was the same day Lucy Hobart skipped her second-period class to run away with a fellow she’d met at the soda fountain in the basement of Petersen’s department store the day before. Lucy was fourteen and a grade ahead of me at Sudlow Intermediate, but I knew because she’d confided in a couple of friends in first-period geometry just before she’d snuck away. Those two friends had confided in a couple more in second-period composition, who had confided in a couple more in third-period biology, so that by noon, my circle of thirteen-year-old friends also knew Lucy Hobart had taken off with a nineteen-year-old man. His name was Butch, he had a beat-up Oldsmobile, and he’d been in town to visit a friend but was headed back over the river to Illinois and then Canada so that he could ditch the draft. And now Lucy was with him. In his car. On their way to Chicago and then Toronto.
Some of the girls laughed and tittered at our lunch table about what would happen that night when Lucy and Butch arrived at his place and it was time for bed. Those who laughed did so nervously, their cheeks slightly aflame. Others shook their heads in collective disapproval because surely Lucy would be caught and brought back, shamed and with her reputation ruined. Others, such as my best friend, Collette, were worried for Lucy’s safety, not to mention her immortal soul. And then there were the ones like me who wanted to say, Shouldn’t we tell someone? but didn’t, because we knew that whoever did would lose the trust of the girlhood at school. People who snitched on a classmate wound up friendless.
“It’s not your problem,” I’d told myself at lunch, and during gym class and history, and then as I left the school to head home. “Not your problem,” I’d said when I started to walk past Lucy Hobart’s house and then stopped in front of it.
It was February and a frosty wind was swirling about me as I looked at the windows of the Hobart house, shuttered against the cold. All seemed quiet and serene inside. Lucy’s parents probably hadn’t known yet that their oldest daughter had run off that morning with a man she’d known for less than twenty-four hours. In another hour or so, when she didn’t show up after school, they would begin to wonder where she was. Mrs. Hobart would call Lucy’s friends and ask if Lucy had come home with them. Her closest pals had been directed to respond that Lucy said there had been a family emergency, and so she’d had to leave school early. This was so that Lucy’s disappearance wouldn’t be reported as an abduction. The police would treat her as a runaway, not the victim of a kidnapping, and therefore she’d be not so much their problem as her parents’.
As I stood there, I imagined walking up those glistening porch steps and telling Mrs. Hobart where Lucy was. I could hear Collette whispering to me that Lucy would hate me for it. But I could also hear another voice whispering that Lucy was making a terrible mistake and that her parents, whom I knew to be nice people, didn’t deserve to have their hearts broken like this. The second little voice was my own. I walked up the steps before I could change my mind and rang the bell. No one answered. Mr. Hobart was likely still at work at the front desk of the Hotel Blackhawk. Mrs. Hobart was apparently out. My best opportunity to tell someone had been when I was still at school, and I had missed it.
I was still pondering what I could have done or still could do when, fifteen minutes later, I rounded the corner to my street and my house. Ours was a white and gray two-story with window boxes all ready for their geraniums as soon as winter was over. Papa kept our yards, front and back, in perfectly trimmed condition, which he said was simply what those of German descent did. We took care of what was ours. We took care of it so that we could enjoy it and so could everyone else.
I didn’t notice the shiny black cars—two of them—parked in front of our house.
I came in through the side door like I usually did, to drop off my schoolbag in the little laundry room off the kitchen and to hang up my coat. I knew that when my mother asked about my day, I wouldn’t be able to keep this from her. Nor did I want to. My mother was a tender soul, my father used to say, whose gentleness and honesty made you want to be gentle and honest. I had never lied to her. She was going to ask me how my day was, and I was going to spill it all to her. I would tell her that I tried to tell Mr. and Mrs. Hobart what Lucy had done, and she would ask why I didn’t tell someone at school hours ago. She would make a phone call and then I’d instantly become the girl no one could trust to keep a secret, and I’d likely get in trouble for not speaking up sooner. Telling my mother was the right thing to do, I knew, but my heart was pounding with the knowledge that my life was about to change.