Rina brings us tea as we talk and fill the gap of sixty-plus years. Surprisingly enough, I find that being with Mariko at age eighty-one is like being with her at fourteen. The years have not changed us all that much. I had been so certain that the girl I knew as Mariko was gone, and that I was so very different from the Elise Sontag who survived the war, but sitting with Mariko now I see that girl is still me. We do not become different people as we age; we just add layers of experience onto who we already are. All that I was at fourteen I had brought with me into the years that followed.
I ask about Mariko’s siblings—the twins, who stayed in America—and about her parents. She tells me that Tom, who’d been assigned to the all-Japanese 442nd, had late in the war been tasked to help rescue the “Lost Battalion”—nearly 300 soldiers from the 141st Regiment who’d been surrounded by German troops. Four hundred members of the 442nd had died attempting to rescue the 275 trapped soldiers of the 141st. Tom had later been honored for his extraordinary bravery and valor.
He met a nurse in the army, a woman from Nevada, whom he married in 1947. After the war he became a mechanical engineer. He and his wife lived in Seattle for six decades, where they raised four children. He died four years ago of heart disease.
Kaminari returned to Los Angeles after college and became an art teacher. She married a fellow Japanese American and they and their two children eventually moved to San Jose, where she lived until her death two years ago.
Chiyo and Kenji never sought to reimmigrate to the United States.
I tell her that Papa and Mommi flew to heaven within a year of each other two decades ago, and that Max is a successful businessman in Munich with a wife, three grown children, and seven grandchildren. I tell her that my sister-in-law, Irene, who never learned how to love herself, died of an overdose of barbiturates when the children were twenty-one and nineteen. I tell her that it had been Hugh’s and my joy to become for them the parents their own mother and father had not been.
“And Hugh?” Mariko asks.
“Hugh died too soon, like all wonderful husbands do,” I reply, “but he lived longer than he thought he would, longer than his doctors thought he would, and he liked to say it was because I made him feel young and happy and healthy. He died when he was seventy-two and I was sixty. It’s because of you that I met Hugh. I never would have known him if you and I hadn’t met. I’ve always been grateful to you for that.”
A weak smile breaks across her face. “You almost make it seem like it was a good thing, what I did to you.”
“Good came from it, Mariko.”
She seems to need to hold on to these words. For a few seconds it’s like she’s holding them to her chest, pressing them to her heart.
“We were both happy, weren’t we?” Mariko says a moment later, and her voice is threaded with both weakness and strength.
“Yes.”
“And we never really said good-bye to each other, did we?”
I cannot help but smile. She is right. So very right.
Mariko is exhausted, but she notices now the notebook lying on the carpet by my feet.
“Oh!” she murmurs. “You finished the book?”
I look down at the notebook and then back at my weary friend, my good friend, who, long ago, showed me where the sky was.
“I did,” I tell her.
Mariko’s tired eyes brighten a fraction. “Tell me,” she whispers. “How did Calista get out of the tower?”
I lean in close to her, with the conclusion of the story so obvious to me now. “Well, here’s the thing,” I say. “Calista suddenly realized she had wings. They were there all along; she just didn’t know it. And so she flew out.”
Mariko grins, and when a tear slides down her cheek it looks like a thin strand of diamonds. “And where did she go?”
“Wherever she wanted,” I whisper as Mariko’s eyes close in sleep.
* * *
? ? ?
Rina asks if I would like to stay with her and her husband here at the house rather than at the hotel, so I might have more time with Mariko. I do not need to be asked twice.
While Mariko sleeps, Rina arranges for a hotel employee to bring my suitcase to me. Rina asks how long I will be able to visit with them and I wonder if she is asking me if I might be able to stay until the end. But Agnes is crawling around inside my skin like a clawed reptile, wanting so very badly to burst out of me.
“How long does your mother have?” I ask.
“The doctor doesn’t know for sure,” Rina replies, her words breaking apart as she speaks them. “He thinks not long. A week or two at the most.”
“To be honest, I don’t know if I can stay that long,” I tell her, not adding that I do not know if Agnes will let me. “Let’s just give it a couple of days and see?”
“Of course,” Rina says.
But early in the morning, just as the day is breaking, I hear Rina crying on the other side of my guest-room door. I know before I open it that Mariko left us during the night.
She found she had wings.
* * *
? ? ?
I ask for a taxi to be called before the hearse arrives. Rina tells me she would love for me to stay so that I can be here for the funeral, but Mariko and I aren’t the kind of friends who say good-bye. We said what we needed to say, did what we needed to do. And I am feeling loose and untethered to time in this strange house today. As Mariko’s daughter is talking to me, I forget her name. In tears she thanks me for coming and tells me to please, please come again sometime soon. She so very much would like for me to meet Mariko’s grandchildren. I tell this woman that I will try to come, even though I know I won’t remember that she invited me.
I walk out of the house after hugging her and her husband good-bye, but by the time my taxi pulls away from the curb, I have forgotten who they are.
“The airport, then, ma’am?” the driver says.
“Yes.”
“Which airline?”
I look inside my purse and check for a ticket folder of some kind. There is none. I look at my useless driver’s license. I see my name, Elise Dove. And my Los Angeles address.
I can’t quite remember what is waiting for me in Los Angeles, besides Pamela and Teddy. I think they are upset with me and I don’t recall why. I am so tired from yesterday. So very tired. I don’t think I want to go to Los Angeles today.
Mariko and I had a plan to go to New York once. She wanted to see Times Square.
Maybe I’ll go for the both of us and then I can tell her about it.
Yes.
“United,” I tell the driver.
“All right.”
“United goes to New York, right?”
“Huh?”
“United Airlines goes to New York, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, I suppose all the big airlines go to New York.”
“Okay. United, then.”
I see him shake his head slightly as he peers at me in his rearview mirror. He’s looking at me like I’m an old, feebleminded woman who doesn’t know how to travel. Like I don’t know how to get on an airplane and go where I want to go. Like I don’t know how to fly.
I know how to fly.
I love to fly.
All you need is a ticket and the sky.
And wings.
Acknowledgments
No work of historical fiction is ever produced solo. I am so very grateful for the many people whose insights, advice, assistance, and affirmation allowed and empowered me to write this book.
My editor at Berkley, Claire Zion, and literary agent, Elisabeth Weed from the The Book Group, have been my champions from day one, when this book was just an idea I had. I am especially grateful for their keen editorial eyes and unflagging support. To the rest of the family at Berkley—Ivan Held, Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Craig Burke, Danielle Keir, Roxanne Jones, Fareeda Bullert, and so many others—I am enormously grateful for all of you and your expertise and care. And to my mother and only early reader, Judy Horning, thanks for the careful proofreading and all the cheerleading from the sidelines.
I am unable to adequately thank all the former Crystal City internees who let me pepper them with questions for months. I am especially grateful to Werner Ulrich and John Schmitz—both sons of formerly interned mothers and fathers—who answered my every e-mail with such patience and detail. My thanks are also extended to former internees Arthur Jacobs, Anneliese “Lee” Krauter, Frances Ott Allen, and John Christgau.
Special thanks are also extended to fellow novelist and Iowa native Katie Ganshert, as well as to her mother and aunt, Betty Willers Glynn and Dorothy Willers Plagmann, who were so kind to answer all my questions about life as a teenager in Davenport, Iowa, during World War II. To Karen Mills Kosgard, who lives in the Quad Cities and made many visits to the local library on my behalf to look at the reference material on Davenport in the 1930s and ’40s, I owe a debt of thanks I can probably never properly pay. If I could, I would provide her with a year’s supply of Iowana ice cream. Special thanks are extended to the Davenport Public Library and their excellent World War II/Korean War Oral History Project, and to Renate and Hans Mesch for helping me with the German language translations.