“Mrs. Hammond?” I ask. Who in the world is that?
He blinks at me. “I’m . . . I’m waiting to take you out to the curb when she brings her car around. I . . . uh . . . I believe I’m just seeing it now.” He looks tentatively toward the gleaming front doors a few feet away from us, happily revolving like kaleidoscope pieces. Beyond the glass I see a white sedan in the pull-around driveway, a Mercedes, and a black-haired woman at the wheel.
I look at the key in my hand and try to figure out why this man is asking me such ridiculous questions, and I see the ink on my arm. Mariko’s name. Rina’s name. The reason I’m here slides back into place, out of Agnes’s clutches and back into mine.
The bellhop is waiting, clearly at a loss as to what to do with me. Oh, the things I want to say to Agnes at this moment but cannot or I’ll surely be on my way to a mental unit. “Is that her, then?” I ask, as though I hadn’t been acting like a doddering fool the moment before.
“Uh, yes. Yes, it is,” he says, the relief falling off him in waves.
“Well, let’s go, then.”
As I start to walk toward the doors, I see the bellhop grab something that had been near my feet. My purse. And the bag that carries Mariko’s book. I would have left them there.
“Oh, thank you for getting those,” I say, as if I’d planned it all along that he would carry my things for me. Probably happens to him all the time.
Rina smiles at me as the bellhop opens the passenger-side door and assists me with getting inside her car. He hands me my purse and carry-on bag. “Thank you so very much,” I tell him, sweetly, like an old lady would.
“My pleasure, of course,” he says, and he shuts the door and waves us off.
Rina eases out into traffic as busy as that in Los Angeles. Worse maybe. I always hated driving in it. By the time I got my driver’s license I was nearly thirty. It took me a while to summon the courage to learn to drive in LA.
“I’m afraid there’s just no good time to be out in downtown traffic in San Francisco,” Rina says apologetically.
“I’m used to it,” I tell her. “Los Angeles isn’t any better.”
“Is that where you live, then? Have you always lived there?”
“Yes. Well, since 1947. I lived other places before then, of course.”
Rina is thoughtful for a moment. “I took my mother to Los Angeles when she first came to live here with me. She wanted to see Little Tokyo again. To think you were right there. It’s a big city, of course, but still. To think you were surely only a few miles away.”
This thought makes me ache, that a decade ago, Mariko had been so close to me and I’d had no sense of it at all. I’d been to Little Tokyo a few times when I was much younger, looking for Mariko in the faces of the people I saw there, but I’d stopped going a long time ago.
“It wasn’t the way she remembered it,” Rina continues. “We ended up not staying very long. She never wanted to go back.”
“I never wanted to go back to where I was born, either,” I tell Rina, sensing the need to defend Mariko’s decision. I, too, wanted to remember Davenport as it had been before the war changed everything.
We are quiet for a moment.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened between you two? How did you lose contact with each other?”
I look up at her, surprised that she doesn’t know her own family forbade it. “It wasn’t by choice, I assure you,” I reply.
Rina glances at me, wanting to know more.
“I was forbidden to keep writing to your mother after she married your father.”
Rina frowns. “Forbidden?”
“Yes. Your mother told me her parents and her new family insisted that I stop. But I did anyway. I guess your grandparents moved and didn’t leave a forwarding address. I didn’t have your mother’s married address, so after a while my letters came back to me. Then I got married and moved to the States. My husband eventually convinced me to let her go and move on. It seemed like the only thing I could do.”
Rina is still frowning. “I’m just surprised my father wouldn’t allow letters from you. That . . . that just doesn’t sound like him. My mother’s parents suffered tremendously because of the war and were never quite the same afterward; at least that’s what my mother says. But I don’t understand why they would not pass on your letters.”
“Your grandfather thought I was a bad influence on your mother. I was too American. He didn’t even let me say good-bye to her in Crystal City.”
“What? Really?” Rina says, incredulous.
That sad morning I left Crystal City is etched in my mind, shining as clearly as if it happened hours ago and not decades. “Yes. Really.”
Rina blows out a breath of air. “I don’t know what to make of this. Mom never wanted to talk about the war and having to go back to Japan. No one in my family who lived through the war ever wanted to talk about it.”
Again we are quiet for a few moments.
“So, you didn’t try to find her again until just now?” Rina continues.
“Decades ago my husband offered to pay for a private detective to look for your mother. But I was too afraid whoever he paid might find Mariko and I’d again be told I was not welcome to see her or talk to her. I didn’t think I could handle that.”
Rina nods.
“Do you know if your mother ever tried to find me?”
“I think she might have once. But she never liked to talk about that time, either.”
A heaviness is starting to creep over me. It feels like the weight of too many lost years. Rina must sense my sudden sadness.
“You know, I don’t think it matters now what happened in the past, Mrs. Dove,” she says. “What’s important is what happens now. Today. Today you and my mother will finally see each other again.”
I had been told something like that before. That the past is nothing you can make friends or enemies of. It just is what it is. Or was. It is this day you are living right now, this very day, that is yours to make of it what you will. So make it beautiful, if you can.
“Yes,” I say to Rina.
And I ask her to please call me Elise.
She smiles at me and I notice the traffic has eased and we are no longer in the city center but close to salt water. I can smell it. We are in a residential area, with tall Victorian houses on either side of the street.
“We’re almost there,” Rina says. “Just around the corner.”
In a few moments we are pulling into the drive of a quaint yellow and white Craftsman with stonework on its pillars and foundation. The wide wooden porch boasts white rockers with gray-striped seat cushions. Salmon-colored begonias are blooming in painted clay pots.
“Let me help you out,” Rina says, as she puts the car in park and sets the brake.
“Thank you, dear, but I can do this.”
I open the car door and step out, my eyes on the house.
Rina walks ahead of me and has her hand on the knob of the front door. I move toward it with the old notebook clutched to my breast, taking the steps with care.
Mariko’s daughter opens the door wide and I cross the threshold.
18
Southern Germany, 1945–47
We entered Switzerland on the coldest day I had ever known. Even the most frigid night in Iowa, in the deep of winter, had not felt as intensely cold as this.
After so many months in Texas, with hundreds more sweltering days than chilly ones, I’d lost my ability to withstand true winter weather. When we stepped off the train in Geneva, the air was a creature with teeth, ice and snow lay everywhere, and I huddled next to Max in a coat not meant for such extreme temperatures. We were led by armed escort to waiting buses that took us to hostels for the next several nights. The Swiss had been entrusted with getting all of us—there were more than eight hundred repatriates on the train—safely across the border into Germany. But even I could see they were not happy to be doing us this service.
I wanted to see the city, a museum maybe, or cows on a distant hill with bells on their necks. But a close watch was kept on us and we were never allowed to venture farther than the street corner. Four icy-cold days later we were back on the train, heading to the German border.