Despite years of her mother pecking over her appearance, Emi cared very little about how she looked, a privilege granted to the beautiful. She let Keiko and her amah choose her clothes until she turned sixteen and, surprisingly, had never adopted the vanity they thought she would. But recently, she’d grown aware of how weeks on a crowded ship could make a person unsightly. She saw plainly how gaunt her body had become, how her cheekbones looked jagged and hollow, her breasts flat, her stomach concave. And she knew that she smelled like the boat, too, giving off the sharp scent of salt water and sweat with every step she took.
At the sound of thunder close by, Emi and the other passengers on deck craned their necks, imagining the storm clouds starting to collect overhead like a swarm of hungry birds. Emi looked at the other tired Japanese passengers around her, as pale and gaunt as she, and was glad that the whistling wind and increasingly choppy water drowned out their sounds. She didn’t want to focus on where she was at present, but where boats had taken her before—to London, Vienna, Berlin—the cities she had multiplied in.
It wasn’t just her cells that had expanded over the years; it was her spirit. In Europe, she’d shed the skin of a girl with finite possibilities and become one who spoke three languages, who was as happy out of her country as in, who could discover the world and fall in love with it, without the boundaries of her nation, or gender, getting in the way. She had managed to remain that girl until the war broke out and suddenly her future became uncertain, riddled with fear and anxiety.
“Wien,” she said out loud in German as the water started to splash onto the deck. She’d been speaking English for the last four years and the word sounded strange on her tongue.
Vienna. It was the place she missed the most.
The wind was starting to get too strong for her to stay on deck. A moment more, Emi thought, and laid her head down on her prime spot of railing, her left cheek cold against her intertwined hands. She was well aware that Vienna might not exist in a few years. And if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be her Vienna.
“But I lived there once,” she whispered, remembering the sweeping view of several ornate Gothic buildings from her family’s apartment windows. The St. Stephan’s Cathedral spires, the tarnished brass dome, the tower with its swinging bell cast from cannons—these were as familiar to her as her childhood home.
And Leo. The best part of Vienna was of course Leo Hartmann.
For two years, he was the fuel that fizzed inside her, racing through her electric blue veins like the most perfect disease. He had defined her adolescence in Vienna and helped keep the realities of what was happening in the city away. But even a love as new and rope-strong as Emi and Leo’s couldn’t push war away forever. In 1938, hate took over the gray city like a fire bathed in oxygen.
It was the year that the world started melting at the edges, tolerance receding through the cracks, unable to be saved.
Emi thought it couldn’t get worse than 1938, but two years later, her own Japan aligned themselves with the Third Reich, and with that decision came the culpability of Emi Kato.
It had nothing to do with her, Keiko had said countless times, helping her daughter into bed the night the news broke that Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and fascist Italy. They had done all they could to help the Hartmanns, and Leo’s fate was anything but her fault.
“But we are contributing to it!” she had yelled. “Father is! He works for the government. Our family—we are all complicit now!” Tears had swallowed her words as her mother had tried repeatedly to assure her that Leo would be safe.
“He won’t be,” Emi had moaned. “It’s 1940. No one is safe, especially not him.”
But despite the feverish guilt that Emi felt about Japan’s alliance with Germany, Leo didn’t blame her. He assured her in his letters that of course he was able to separate her from the machinery of the Japanese government. They were both victims of circumstance.
It had been four years since she’d lived in Vienna, since she’d seen Leo, but before she was forced to move from the East Coast, they had written to each other weekly. Now that was all she wanted. To be able to talk to him again, if only through ink stains.
But did she deserve to? The thought nagged at her as she shifted her feet on the slippery deck, bracing herself against the weather. Would her new shame be painfully apparent in her letters?
She shut her eyes, wincing with guilt.
Why had she done it? It was just the situation she’d been forced into, she told herself. Locked in like a prisoner, desperate for company, for some sort of happiness. And Christian was so much like her. He was American, not Japanese, but he was a German-American. Almost as hated as she was. Besides, he was just a child. Not even eighteen. It wasn’t serious, not like Leo.
Christian Lange was a fling that should have been avoided. She could have avoided it, she scolded herself. But she didn’t. Because, if she was honest, there was something about him that she was feverishly drawn to, something she needed in those painful months, locked inside their peculiar desert prison, that only he could give.
Emi looked out at the water, and despite the darkness engulfing the boat, felt certain that they were approaching South Africa. It had been days since they’d seen land. How far behind her Christian and Leo both were now. She was no longer buoyed by love or lust, the dual forces that had carried her through the uncertainty of the last four years. All she had were the wood and steel of the boat keeping her alive and the deep black water she hoped would deliver them safely back to Japan.
“And then what?” she asked her mother, finally inside the boat, safe from the carrying wind. “What happens once we’re home?”
“What else?” Keiko said, smiling sadly. “Survival.”
CHAPTER 1
CHRISTIAN LANGE
JANUARY 1943
River Hills, Wisconsin, boasted nights marked by silence, as if everyone inhabiting the curling streets was lying peacefully asleep, pink mouths slightly agape, breathing one collective breath. Villages and towns had sprung up all along Lake Michigan over the years, but only River Hills began with the promise that residents’ palatial homes would be concealed by the area’s wild verdancy. Houses were built on lots no smaller than five acres, hidden down winding driveways, behind a camouflage of trees. The village’s founders had reasoned that wealth and nature should exist in perfect tranquility, and the 560 inhabitants who had sunk their roots there agreed.
So when a sharp knock on the double front door jolted awake the three residents of 9000 River Road on a still January night, they never would have guessed that it wasn’t the pounding of dreams arousing them but rather something more: a tiny fracture in their reality.