I entered the kitchen, and my first thought when I saw my parents seated at the kitchen table—and a man in a suit standing over them with his arms crossed over his chest—was that they already knew. They knew about Lucy Hobart running away and that I’d been privy to this information since noon and had said nothing.
My father looked up at the man towering over them. “This is our daughter, Elise.” Papa’s voice sounded strange, as though he was nervous but trying to sound calm. Or scared but trying to sound brave. His German accent, usually so subtle as to be barely noticed, seemed more pronounced. My parents were fair-haired, too, like my little brother and me, though more honey brown than blond, and their eyes were gray-blue like mine. They were of average build and stature. Papa wore wire spectacles. They looked like ordinary Americans, and on most days sounded like them. But not today.
“Have a seat,” the man said to me, nodding to one of the empty chairs at the table.
“What’s happening?” I said, though I knew. I knew what was happening was that Lucy Hobart had run away and I’d had every opportunity to tell a teacher at school and I’d said nothing.
“Sit,” said the man, not unkindly, but not nicely, either.
“Do as you’re told, Elise,” Papa said.
My hands were shaking as I pulled out a chair. Mommi’s eyes were glassy as she looked at me, a fake little smile on her lips. She was probably already thinking of how to tell the policeman—for surely that’s who this man was—that I was not yet fourteen. Only a child.
It wasn’t until I sat down that I heard scraping and toppling and shoving in other rooms of the house. Sounds of furniture being thrust about. Of drawers being opened and shut. Of heavy shoes on the upper-story floorboards above my head. I glanced toward the ceiling.
“Who is upstairs?” I said. Surely they weren’t looking for Lucy Hobart in my bedroom. She was a grade above me. We weren’t even good friends. Acquaintances at most.
The man in the suit said nothing.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Papa said, in that same voice he had used to tell the policeman my name.
At that moment I realized with sudden clarity that Papa was home from work at three o’clock in the afternoon. Perhaps this wasn’t about Lucy Hobart after all.
Maybe this man wasn’t a cop.
Maybe we were being robbed. Fear gripped me like a vise.
“Who is upstairs?” I said again, and I felt two tears start to tumble down my cheeks. We were being robbed. Whoever was upstairs was going through our bureau drawers and closets and chests looking for jewelry and other valuables. They wouldn’t find much. We weren’t wealthy. Papa was just a chemist at Boyer AgriChemical. Mommi took in sewing. The other robbers would come downstairs in a minute or two, asking where our loot was, and Papa would say we didn’t have any. They would be mad and would shoot all three of us, right there at the kitchen table.
Max would come home from school in a few minutes and find us dead in our chairs, blood all over the place.
“It’s all right,” Papa said, as though he could read my terrible thoughts. “We’ll be fine.” He reached for Mommi’s hand next to him.
I didn’t see how Papa could know this. Robbers didn’t leave alive the people they’d hoped to rob, in broad daylight no less. Unless this man and whoever was upstairs weren’t robbers.
“Is this about Lucy Hobart?” I whispered.
“This is a misunderstanding,” Papa said, without so much as a pause. Lucy Hobart’s name hadn’t meant anything to him, or to the man standing above him, for that matter. “This will all be cleared up shortly, I’m sure.”
Papa looked at Mommi and squeezed her hand.
A second later the footfalls from above our heads moved to the staircase. And then four men also in dark suits were in our kitchen, their arms laden with our photo albums and family pictures still in their frames and books and papers and letters. One man stepped forward. He held Opa’s black velvet case of military medals. He snapped it open.
“Are these yours?” the man said to Papa.
“They were my father’s,” Papa replied, looking from the medals to the man. “He’s deceased. He left them to me.”
The man closed the box, passed it to another man, and then held up a book. I couldn’t see the title.
“Is this your book?”
I saw fear rise in Papa’s eyes. “No! No, it belongs to a friend—I mean, just someone I knew a long time ago. He loaned it to me. I meant to give it back. It’s not mine!”
“Do you deny that in August of 1939 you spent two weeks in Germany?”
Papa’s eyes widened. “To bury my father. To attend his funeral!”
The man seemed not to have even heard my father’s answer. “Do you recall a conversation with your neighbors’ boy, Steven Winters, in which you told him you were constructing an explosive device?” the man continued.
“What?” Papa’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
“Otto?” Mommi whispered, in a tiny, fairylike voice.
“Do you recall it, Mr. Sontag?”
“That is not what I told him!”
The man handed the book he’d been holding to another man and pulled handcuffs out of his pocket. He told my father to stand up. When Papa didn’t do it fast enough, another man took Papa by the shoulders and brought him to his feet.
“Otto Sontag, under Executive Order 9066, you are hereby under arrest as an enemy alien suspected of subversive crimes against the United States of America . . .”
He said other things, but I would never be able to remember what they were. I seem to vaguely recall that he was telling my father where they would be taking him and that he would have a chance to address the evidence against him. The man might have told him at this point that Papa’s assets would be frozen, his passport seized, and his mail censored, for all these things happened in short order, too. But there was such a loud humming in my ears that had started when my father was hauled to his feet and those cuffs chinked around his wrists. Plus, Mommi had started to wail Papa’s name, and Papa was saying, over and over to her, “It’s all right, Freda. I’ve done nothing wrong.” It was hard to make out everything the man was saying over Mommi’s cries.
The men started to lead my father toward the front door to take him away. Mommi jumped out of her chair to grab hold of Papa, and one of the men pulled her away from him and sat her back down.
Papa called out to me. “Go to your mother, Elise. Go to her!”
I’d been sitting dazed in my own chair, but I rose like someone hypnotized and went to my mother, the humming in my ears like a raging storm. My heart was pounding in my chest.
I watched as the men took Papa through the living room and out into the milky winter sunshine. Mommi sprang from her chair to chase after them and I ran after her. One of the men stood at the doorway so that she could not step outside. We watched from around his torso as Papa was placed in the backseat of one of those black cars, and all our photo albums and family portraits and the other things they had taken were put inside the trunk. Mrs. Brimley, who lived across the street, and who’d come out to get her mail, was standing openmouthed at her mailbox, watching the spectacle.
When Papa was in the car and the door was shut, the man who had been blocking our way turned from us and made his way to one of the vehicles. Mommi started to run for the cars, and through the backseat window I saw Papa pleading with me to stop her. I dashed after Mommi and grabbed her and she let me hold her back. As the two black cars eased away from the curb, their tires crunching on dead leaves and shards of ice, Mommi crumpled to our frozen lawn. I knelt next to her. I didn’t know what else to do. The grass, ice covered and brown, prickled my kneecaps through my wool skirt.
Mrs. Brimley waited a couple of moments and then crossed the street. She was a widow who’d lived in Davenport her whole life. Her late husband had owned a barbershop, and he’d died a few years back of a massive heart attack barely a year into his retirement. Mrs. Brimley was known in our neighborhood for making the best molasses cookies anywhere. Her children and grandchildren lived in Tennessee and Missouri, and I’d asked her once why she stayed in Davenport when her family was so far away. And she’d said, “Well, it’s hard to leave home, Elise. You’ll see one day.”
“Is everything all right, Freda?” Mrs. Brimley said when she reached us, her mail still in her hand. Everything was not all right, of course. Mrs. Brimley knew that. But I suppose it wouldn’t have sounded neighborly to ask the obvious, which was “Did Otto just get taken away in handcuffs?”
Mommi rose to her feet, tears still streaming down her face. I stood, too. “I have to call someone. I . . . There must be someone I can call.” She wasn’t looking at Mrs. Brimley. She was looking in the direction the cars had gone. “They’ve made a horrible mistake.”
“What has happened? Who were those people?” Mrs. Brimley asked.
“They said they were from the FBI,” Mommi said, her voice breaking. She brought a hand up to her mouth and it shook as if electrified.