On the last day of September when my father came to the coffee shop to get me, he held under his arm a package wrapped in postal paper. I knew it was from Mariko even before he said a word. His smile was wide and bright, and he seemed a bit breathless, as though he had rushed from the post office after picking it up, to bring it to me.
With eager hands I took the package from him. I was sure that inside was not just one letter but more likely a tablet of thoughts, just like I had written her. I could not wait to get home to open it, so I tore off the packaging there in the shop. To my surprise it was not a tablet that made up the bulk of the package but the notebook in which Mariko had been writing Calista’s story. I flipped through it thinking maybe she had used the blank pages to write to me, but the story was still half-finished.
“What is that?” Papa asked, pointing to the notebook.
“It’s the story she was writing.”
Inside the front cover of the notebook was an ivory-colored envelope with my name written in Mariko’s hand. I felt for one of the chairs behind me and sat down at one of the little tables. The letter felt thin in my hands, as though few words were inside it. I was afraid to open it. After all this time didn’t she have more to say to me?
“Do you want to take it home to read it?” Papa said, correctly guessing the reason for my hesitation.
I didn’t want to entertain the thought that I would need to take this letter home to read it. I reached deep within me to that place of hope that Ralph had carved out.
“No,” I said. “I’ll read it here.”
Papa sat down across from me.
I turned the envelope over and slipped my fingernail under the triangle-shaped closure. The paper came away easily.
Dear Elise,
It is with such great sorrow that I send this letter and package to you. My grandmother has assured me that she will mail it. I can only hope and pray that she will. I have wanted to write to you so many times the last ten months. I’ve missed you more than I can say.
My father arranged a marriage for me after he learned of my plans to return to America with you when I turn 18. The man he works for, Mr. Hayashi, has a son, Yasuo, who was wounded in the war but has recovered and who has been working alongside my father in the clothing factory. He is twenty.
I was married to this man in a civil ceremony in January. There was nothing I could do; my father burned my passport and kept me locked in the house until the day of the marriage ceremony.
I know now I will never leave Japan, nor shall I be able to write to you again. I am sending you Calista’s story so that you might finish it for both of us. I want you to. I need you to. You are the finest person I have ever known. I will never forget you.
Mariko
For several long seconds I sat there with the letter in my hand, my eyes drifting over the words sorry, married, forget. It stung to picture Mariko a prisoner in her own house, her every move controlled by her father. Kenji Inoue was surely no longer the man I’d known in the orange groves. It was because of him that I’d received no letter from Mariko all these months—not because mail service was difficult to reinstate within the ruins of our two countries, and not because she didn’t miss me, but because surely she’d been denied paper and pen and stamps and access. And now she was married and obviously forbidden to stay in contact with me.
Our plans to meet in Manhattan would never materialize. I realized with a sickening thud in my soul that I would likely never see Mariko again. Ever. She’d been my friend for such a short while, but that short time had been unlike any other I’d experienced. I’d felt stripped of everything that made me who I was. Mariko understood this feeling because what had happened to me also happened to her. She was me, but a braver version of me. A version of me who could still look to the horizon of what was possible if only I could imagine it. As tears pooled, I saw in my mind’s eye a beautiful kite that I’d been tightly holding on to, and which a strong wind had been trying with all its might these many months to snatch out of my hand. It had finally done it, and now the kite was soaring away on gusts that were taking it up and up and up, until it was gone and not even a speck of it could be seen in the wide blue expanse. The kite was gone and all I had now was Calista’s notebook, the only real proof that the kite had been mine. If only Mariko had been a bird, I was thinking, she could have flown where she wanted instead of where others had made her go. If only she had wings. If only we both had wings . . .
“What does it say?” Papa said, in English, slicing my thoughts in two. He hardly ever spoke to me in English anymore. I don’t know why he did then. When I didn’t answer, he reached across the table and gently took the letter from me.
It did not take him long to read it. When he was done, he looked up quickly. “Oh, Elise,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“How could Kenji do that to her? How could he?” The pooling tears began to trail down my face.
“Let’s go home, Elise,” Papa said, in German now. He stood.
I made no move to get up out of my chair. “How could he do that to her?”
“Let’s go.” He reached for the notebook, put the letter back inside, and grabbed the packaging it had come in. Then he moved to my side of the table and, with his other hand, guided me to my feet.
“How could he do it?” I said louder now, to Papa.
“Come,” Papa said, ushering me to the door and saying good evening to Herr Bloch for both of us.
I could feel the eyes of a dozen people on me as we left, and it was only then I realized that Ralph had arrived and I hadn’t noticed him as I was reading Mariko’s letter. He was looking at me as if he’d witnessed the whole thing. Even as I glanced at him, and Papa and I left, I saw the familiar sympathy for me in his eyes.
The door closed behind us. Papa’s free hand was around my shoulders, propelling me forward. The tears were still streaming down my face. Everyone we passed stared.
“We had plans,” I said, in English, more to myself than to my father, as the fuller reality of my new situation became clear. “We were going to get an apartment in Manhattan. We were going to put this all behind us. We were going to go back to where we belonged!”
“Wir werden darüber zu Hause sprechen,” Papa said, reminding me that private conversations ought not to be aired on the street, and not in English. But I didn’t care who heard me or who stared at me. Kenji Inoue had stolen my future from me, and Mariko’s new family had stolen my friendship with her. I had lost both.
“How could they do this to us?” I said.
Papa must have realized he was fighting a losing battle. “Look. We don’t live in the same culture, Elise. I’m sure her parents believed they were doing what was best for her. The Hayashi family is wealthy, yes? Kenji and Chiyo probably didn’t want her to leave them. They probably thought a marriage to that family would mean she would stay in Japan and be well taken care of.”
“But that is not the reason you marry someone,” I said.
“It is for some cultures. It probably is for theirs.”
“How can she have been married all this time and not been allowed to write to me?”
Papa sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe her new husband thinks it is better if she has no ties at all to her former life.”
I knew what Papa meant, but my anger was getting the best of me.
“She can’t even write me a letter from time to time? That is cruel. She’s being treated like a captive.”
Papa said nothing.
“It’s not right what they did to her,” I said, a second later.
“I know,” he said.
We continued the rest of the way in silence.
When we got home, I took the letter and notebook from Papa and went straight to my room. Papa surely explained everything to Mommi and Max, because a few minutes later, Mommi came to my door with a cup of tea. I was sitting on the floor against my bed, staring at the letter and notebook on the rug next to me. My mother didn’t say anything; she just set the cup down on my nightstand, touched the top of my head in a tender caress, and left. She didn’t try to explain or excuse anything and I was glad she didn’t.
Sometime later I heard my parents talking in German through the thin walls of the flat.
“Maybe I can take her to Oma in Munich,” Mommi was saying. “She and I could stay there until you and Max come for Christmas. What is there here for her, Otto? What is here for any of us?”
“Perhaps,” Papa said. “Let me think on it.”
I appreciated Mommi’s wanting to take me away from Stuttgart, but I didn’t know what I wanted, where I wanted to go.
The empty sky where the kite had flown was beckoning to me, but I didn’t yet know how to embrace the wildness of that frontier, and I knew now that somehow I was going to have to figure it out on my own.
* * *