“Like onsen?” Emi had asked her mother when they arrived, imagining the beautiful Japanese baths in the mountain towns outside Tokyo.
“Not as nice,” said Keiko. “And you have to wear clothes. You know the Americans.”
But, they admitted, the hotel was beautiful. All white and built in the classical revival style with four wide columns out front and long wings on each side. Emi approached it with much less trepidation than she had the Homestead.
The Germans were very happy to have the Japanese there, and Emi felt that suddenly their luxurious prison became mostly cocktail parties with the German diplomats, which her parents occasionally let her attend, especially if she had been babysitting the Shiga children the night before. Emi was surprised that many of the American wives of German diplomats were terrified to go to Germany. Some had never set foot in the country and weren’t fluent in German. Other wives were very pro-Hitler, which surprised Emi less. Those she avoided entirely, though she did spill a champagne cocktail on one particularly anti-Semitic woman, who was so drunk that she didn’t even notice.
“Why did the government decide to ally themselves with the Germans, again?” the eldest Shiga daughter, Anna, asked the next day. Though only fifteen, she had been at the cocktail party the night before, too, and had heard the drunk German woman call Jews “as disposable as table scraps.”
“Because the Germans don’t mind the fact that the Japanese are in Manchuria, unlike the U.S., and the two countries think they can protect each other against Russia. Plus, the fascism that Germany is touting appeals to some of Japan’s militarists. My father is not in line with them. Neither is yours, I hear,” said Emi, sipping her cold orange juice by the pool, which was helping to soothe the painful throat she’d woken up with. She hadn’t been feeling well since they arrived in West Virginia, but she chalked it up to a change of air, and to finally acting her age, out late at the diplomats’ parties.
“It was more of a rhetorical question,” said Anna, picking up her novel and rolling her eyes. “Are you a diplomat in training or something? Doesn’t all that political talk bore you?”
“Wouldn’t that be something,” said Emi coughing, the movement hurting her back. “There’s never been a female Japanese diplomat. I doubt there ever will be. I love Japan, but it’s a very sexist country. You’ll see. It’s not Canada.”
“Why couldn’t you be the first? You’re stuck up enough. And smart enough,” Anna added with a wide smile.
“Thank you, Anna,” said Emi, choosing to ignore her first comment. She coughed again, reaching for her chest. “I think I’m allergic to White Sulphur Springs,” she said, surprised to see a trace of blood splattered on her hand after she coughed.
“You are sick,” said Anna.
“Maybe. I don’t feel very well,” Emi said, reaching for her forehead. She tried to stand up, to find her mother, but her body crumpled to the ground, the back of her head hitting the slate tiles.
When Emi woke up, she was in a car lying flat in the backseat. She made out the silhouette of a man she didn’t recognize, reached for her mother, and, reassured that she was there, fell back asleep. When she finally woke up, she was in a hospital.
“You have tuberculosis,” said her mother, dabbing her daughter’s watering eyes. Keiko was wearing a medical mask over her nose and mouth and a cotton net over her hair. “You’re going to fight it, of course, and you’ll be fine, but we won’t be able to go back to Japan with your father in a few days. Everyone is leaving the Greenbrier and because you’re very contagious, they won’t let you on the boat. You’re too weak to travel and even if you weren’t, they don’t want you anywhere near the ambassador.”
Emi sat in bed, her eyes and head heavy, and tried to understand what her mother had said. After months of purgatory, she was still not going home.
“Can I say goodbye to father before they leave?” she asked hoarsely.
“Maybe from a distance,” said Keiko, fixing her daughter’s white bedding.
“But I can say goodbye to you here?”
“Emiko!” said Keiko, shocked. “I’m not leaving you. I’m going to stay here with you, of course. I would never leave my sick child. What a wild idea.”
“I’m twenty years old. I can be on my own,” Emi protested with a raspy, weak voice.
“You won’t get rid of me so easily,” said her mother, reaching for her hand. They both noticed a few specks of blood on Emi’s palm and Keiko cleaned it with her handkerchief.
“I suppose there are worse places to spend a few months than the Greenbrier,” said Emi, her body feeling heavy and hot. “It’s prettier than the last one. What was it called? I can’t think; I’m so tired.”
“No,” said Keiko, looking away from her daughter, at the stoic guard outside the hospital room. “We are not allowed to stay at the hotel without your father. We are being sent away.”
“To prison?” said Emi, her eyes closed, her mind drifting away with her pain.
“No,” said Keiko. “To Texas.”
CHAPTER 3
CHRISTIAN LANGE
JANUARY 1943
Christian had arrived at the Children’s Home without fanfare. Though he had left his River Hills house in the early morning, he had spent the day at the small FBI office in Milwaukee, alternating between filling out paperwork and sitting idly on a cracked green chair. He had finally been driven to the Home late at night, where a guard took him to a boys’ dormitory, told him to go to sleep, and said he would learn more in the morning. He was given a creaky metal bed in a corner and had climbed under the blankets with his clothes still on, afraid to turn on a light. But he slept deeply and undisturbed until he woke up with daylight flooding his eyes, sweat on his chest, and a pain in his abdomen.
He pointed his toes and lay still and quiet. The blanket over him was woolen and thick, the kind that would scratch painfully if not separated by a sheet. His mattress was thin yet lumpy, nothing like home, but at least it felt clean. Christian looked around at the other beds. He was in a room with five other boys. It smelled like it, he thought, putting his hand on his throat to keep himself from coughing from the acrid, sweaty stench of male teenage sleep.