We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

  Today, she removes it when she’s ordered to, the wig dangling limply from her hand as a nurse inspects her scalp for lice.

  In the cubicle, I disrobe beneath the impersonal stare of my nurse. As I look away, embarrassed, I spy Keiko Kimura across from me. Her parents were teachers at Soko Gakuen, one of the Japanese schools, before they were taken by the FBI the same night as my father.

  She and I are the same age, but we went to different schools, joined different clubs, had different friends. I’d see her around, of course, but we rarely spoke to each other. Through a gap in the curtains, I can see her bare shoulder, her hip, the length of her thigh.

  Unlike with Hiromi, or anyone else in the examination room, we lock eyes. For a second, her gaze flicks over me, almost carelessly, and she grins, mouthing something I cannot hear even in the stifled quiet.

  “What?” I whisper.

  She does it again, but her words are still unintelligible.

  “What?”

  Exasperated, Keiko rolls her eyes. “I said, ‘Nice kabochas’!”

  I gasp. Everyone—the women, the nurses, the guards—they all turn to glare at me.

  “Keiko!” someone says sharply.

  “Shitsueri!” Rude!

  “Sukebe!”

  Then Hiromi Nakano snorts. Someone else starts giggling. Mortified, I try to cover my breasts, my face, my everything. I bury my face in my shoulder, but there’s nowhere to hide.

  Nowhere to run.

  * * *

  After our examinations, we’re reunited with Fred and assigned to our new home.

  Except it isn’t home.

  I lean against the splintering doorframe. Home was our San Francisco apartment—its carved banisters, Mom’s fine china, the worn velvet cushion where I used to practice at my piano for hours, the music drifting out over the busy street below. Home smelled of wood polish and fermenting tsukemono and Dad’s cigars.

  This is a horse stable—a twenty-by-nine-foot stall stinking of manure, sweat, and lime. Besides our army-issue cots, there’s no other furniture, no running water, no source of heat. Fred and I are to share the front half of our stall; Mom will have the back.

  A stable meant for a single horse will now house a family of three.

  It would have housed four, if Dad had been with us.

  If he had been with us, I think, he would have tried to find hope in the cobwebs and the dirty floors. He would have looked around and said, Adversity is the crucible of the spirit.

  So I try to do as he would have done. I cajole Fred into sweeping while I fetch straw for our mattresses. We spend the day cleaning and dusting and trying to appear chipper, but as soon as evening roll call is over, we climb into our cots, cold and weary and heartsick.

  Still, I can’t sleep.

  I try playing one of Chopin’s nocturnes on the edge of my blanket, but I stop after twelve measures. The sounds here are all wrong: I should be hearing cars passing on the street and foghorns in the distance, not our new neighbor snoring next door and worried snippets of Japanese from the far end of the stables.

  Sighing, I turn onto my side. In the light from our narrow window, I can see shapes whitewashed into the wall: protruding nails, bits of straw, petrified carcasses of spiders, trapped before they could run away.

  Mom shifts in her cot, coughing. The last time she was sick, she had to be hospitalized. Dad and I barely held it together the month she was gone, and I’ll be the only one left if she falls ill again.

  Please, not here. Not now.

  As if in response, she coughs again.

  Abruptly, I get up. Across the room, Fred is curled under his covers with his teddy bear, Kuma. The stuffed animal took up half his suitcase, but Kuma is Fred’s most precious possession, and he’d never leave him behind.

  Shoving my feet into my boots, I sneak into the open air, toward the bathrooms. At this hour, the latrines are empty. Bare electric bulbs illuminate our toilets—a long board with a row of circular holes cut into it.

  I decide I don’t have to go after all.

  Turning away, I find Keiko Kimura sitting on the stoop of a barrack. My cheeks grow hot again. “Oh,” I say, as coolly as I can. “It’s you.”

  “Well, if it isn’t Kabochas.” Her voice is low and velvety, like a viola.

  Defensively, I pull my coat closer around my chest. “My name’s Amy,” I correct her, “but my friends call me Yum-yum.”

  She smirks. “I’m Keiko . . . and my friends call me Keiko.” After a moment, her expression softens. “They took your dad too, right?”

  I nod.

  She pats the stair next to her, and I sit. “You know the last thing my dad said to me before they took him?” she asks. “He told me to be a good girl.”

  “How’s that going?”

  She winks. “It isn’t.”

  I can’t help but smile.

  Keiko is staying with her aunt and uncle here in Tanforan—it was that, or go with the other orphans to Manzanar. But Keiko isn’t an orphan—her parents would be with her now, if our government hadn’t imprisoned them.

  I wonder if she still feels like an orphan, though. If she still feels alone.

  For a moment, we’re silent. Overhead, the moon flits in and out of the clouds. “Mine told me to look after the family,” I say finally.

  No I love you. No I’ll miss you. No goodbye. Just, Take care of them, Amy.

  And I will, I promise myself. Because he believes in me. Because he’s counting on me.

  Because they’re all counting on me.

  DAY 4

  We’re finally settling in, learning the new addresses of our old friends and neighbors, when we get a letter from our father, who tells us he’s taking a carpentry class from another of the Missoula inmates. Self-edification is important, he reminds us, especially in these uncertain times.

  He asks how we are, but I don’t know what to tell him.

  Dear Father, I wish you could make us some furniture.

  Signs of construction are everywhere in camp: work crews, half-finished barracks, piles of leftover lumber continually scavenged to make tables and shelves for the bare stalls. We need something to put our belongings in so we don’t have to keep living out of our suitcases, but we don’t have any tools, and even if we did, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  “How hard can it be?” Keiko says one morning while I sift through Fred’s clothes, trying to determine which are dirty and which are clean. “Saw, saw, hammer, hammer. Just borrow some tools and figure it out.”

  “Yum-yum?” Hiromi laughs and fluffs her blond wig. “Make furniture? Your dad wouldn’t like it.”

  No, he wouldn’t. He would tell me he didn’t pay for a piano and ten years’ worth of lessons for me to ruin my hands with woodworking.

  But he’s not here.

  And with my mother’s cough worsening every day, it falls to me to do it. So I trek across the infield to my boyfriend Shig’s barrack to ask if he’ll teach me to make some furniture. He smiles crookedly when he says hello, his gaze falling briefly to my lips before lifting back up to my eyes.

  I blush and clear my throat. “You can use a hammer, right?”

  He grins. “Yeah, you hit stuff with it.”

  I roll my eyes and explain my dilemma to him. Of course, he agrees to help. I’ve seen him carry groceries for his neighbors, fix our fence when my dad was away on business, wash a dirty word from a Japanese business without anyone asking. That’s the kind of guy Shig is.

  When I leave, and no one’s looking, I give him a quick peck on the cheek.

  * * *

  An hour later, Shig and his older brother, Mas, arrive with tools and discarded planks. While Mom lies in the back room, resting, the boys show Keiko and me how to draw up a plan, how to use a saw, how to fasten two boards together.

  Eventually, Fred wanders back from wherever he’s been, bearing new scratches on his knees. Seeing Keiko, he darts up to her. “Tickle me, Keiko! Tickle me!”

 
; With a cry, she abandons her tools to chase him around the front room. When she catches him, she pins him to the floor, tickling him until he’s shrieking with laughter.

  For a while, he joins us, and the boys let him hammer in a couple of nails, but he quickly grows bored. “Can I go play with my new friends?” he asks me.

  “What new friends?”

  “From Barrack Twelve.”

  “What are their—”

  “Thanks. Bye!” Before I can stop him, he scampers off.

  Shig glances up from the table he’s sanding. “Want me to go after him?”

  I almost say yes. Dad would want Fred to learn. Dad would want me to know exactly where Fred is at all times.

  But Dad isn’t here, and if Fred’s stuck with us, moping and complaining that he’s bored, it will only slow down our progress, so I just sigh and pick up a saw. “He knows to come back before dinner.”

  Through the open door, I can see Dad’s letter sitting unanswered on my cot. Dear Father, do you really want to know how we are? I drive the blade into a piece of wood. Fred is wilder than ever.

  Mom is sick again.

  I wouldn’t have to do this alone if you were here.

  DAY 12

  For a while, I try to be the daughter my father wants me to be.

  I brush my teeth in a horse trough and tell myself I’m “roughing it” like we did on our vacation to Yosemite last year.

  I walk the perimeter with Keiko and Fred, watching the cars on El Camino Real. To pass the time, we invent lives for the motorists: jobs as bank tellers and shipping clerks, trips to Monterey. Sometimes I picture myself driving down Highway 1, surrounded by the whisper of the tires, the purr of the engine, the hiss of the wind . . . until Fred starts pestering me again, and I realize I’m not going anywhere.

  I finish up my studies of chemistry and civics with Hiromi, who’s determined not to be left behind whenever school starts up again.

  From an old textbook, we learn how wonderful we are, how lucky, how endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

  Because we’re American citizens.

  Because we’re free people.

  Not like my father, or Keiko’s parents. They’re not wonderful, lucky, endowed Americans like me, here behind the barbed wire.

  The days pass. I stand in line for the mess hall, for the canteen, for the post office, where I collect letters from Dad. He writes to us about his victory garden, his Bible study, his work thinning sugar beets, his instructions for us to keep busy and be good.

  For him, for all of us, I try to hold it together as best I can: I help Mom to the latrine. I bring her soup and warm compresses. I do the laundry at four a.m. before the hot water is all gone. I try to keep track of where Fred is when he’s not at home, which is more and more often as our mother’s condition worsens.

  At mealtimes, I glare at Fred while he pushes cubes of liver around his plate.

  “Eat it,” I tell him.

  He sticks his tongue out. “You eat it.”

  “I did.”

  It made me gag. They’ve fed us beef innards for three days in a row—our last passable meal was watered-down stew from a can, a special feast the white administrators held to prove to the International Red Cross how good we have it here. But it’s my job to set a good example for Fred, even if it makes me sick.

  “Liver-eater! Liver-eater!” he chants, his voice growing louder and louder in the crowded hall. “Liver-eater!”

  People turn to glare at us. Nearby, one of the Issei bachelors mutters, “Gasa-gasa.” I look away, red-faced with shame.

  “Liver-eater!”

  The days pass. My composure flakes. I yell at Fred for spilling his juice. I threaten to throw Kuma in the garbage if Fred leaves him on the floor one more time.

  Screaming, he snatches the bear from my hands. “I hate you!”

  From the back room comes Mom’s faint voice—“Fred, listen to your sister”—followed by a long spell of thorny, hacking coughs.

  Suddenly quiet, Fred sits down on the edge of his cot, clutching Kuma to his chest. I sit down opposite him, head in my hands. Between my feet, I can see streaks of dirt on the linoleum floor I just swept yesterday.

  I imagine my father’s disapproval.

  I hate my father’s disapproval.

  Or maybe, I think, I’m just beginning to hate my father.

  DAY 19

  On May 24, we get a letter from Dad, addressed to all of us, as usual. He writes that he’s proud of me, that I’m a good girl, and I almost laugh.

  I almost cry.

  I want to say, It’s been over five months since you’ve seen me. You don’t know me at all.

  For the first time, I don’t write back.

  DAY 26

  One night while I’m with Fred at dinner, one of our neighbors checks our mother into the camp hospital. When we arrive, she’s lying beneath the blankets, skeletal and pale. In the harsh infirmary lights, her eyes seem sunken; her skin, fragile as paper.

  As soon as he sees her, Fred backs away, clinging to the waistband of my pants.

  Mom tries not to look hurt, but I know she is. While I stand awkwardly at her bedside, she coaxes Fred into a nearby chair, where he sits, squirming, as she combs his cowlick with her fingers until he turns to me and says, “Can we go home now?”

  * * *

  This isn’t home, I think as I tuck Kuma under the blanket beside Fred later that night. I try to ignore the darkness and the silence in the back of the stall, where my parents should be.

  “Does Dad know about Mom?” Fred asks, interrupting my thoughts.

  “How could he? She just checked into the hospital today, and he’s all the way in Montana.” I try to mask the sour note in my voice. “Someone needs to write to him.”

  Someone who isn’t me.

  “Can you show me where Montana is again?”

  I sigh. How do you explain three states and a thousand miles to someone who’s never been out of California? After digging out a textbook I never bothered to return to the camp library, I flip to a map of the United States. “We’re here.” Pointing to the San Francisco Peninsula, I begin tracing a diagonal line across the page. “If you go northeast, over the Sierras, you reach Nevada . . . then Idaho . . .”

  He watches my finger intently, like it’s really traveling the mountain roads, the high, flat desert, to our father.

  “. . . then Montana.”

  “That’s far,” Fred says.

  “It took him three days to get there by train.”

  He frowns. “There are train tracks outside the fence.”

  I nod. Sometimes, when Keiko and I walk by, I imagine I’m sitting on the velvet cushions of a luxury car, with the plaintive sounds of a string quartet playing in the background. There are no mess-hall lines, no stinking latrines, no one to tell me they hate me. Just me, the rhythm of the rails, and amber waves of grain rolling past the windows.

  “But we can’t get to them,” I say. This time, I can’t keep the bitterness out of my words.

  When Fred finally falls asleep, I climb into my cot and try to play Chopin on the edge of my blanket, but it’s like I’ve forgotten the notes, the music drained out of me in Mom’s absence.

  Take care of them, Amy.

  In the darkness, the walls seem to close in around me. The smell of horse grows fouler. I’m being pressed, gasping, into my cot by an invisible weight, and if I don’t do anything, I’m going to be crushed.

  Lurching to my feet, I grab my boots and stumble for the door, staggering out into the night air, where I collapse, shivering.

  I don’t know how long I sit there, but eventually I hear a voice: “Is that you, Kabochas?”

  I blink. “Keiko? What are you doing out here?”

  “Nothing good.” Winking, she sits beside me. “What’s the matter?”

  I tell her everything. How Mom is in the infirmary. How I stopped writing to Dad. How I’m the only one left.

  “I’m
sorry.” She puts her arm around me. “You want to get out of here?”

  I draw back. “What?”

  “Not beyond the fences or anything.” She grins. “But who wants to be cooped up in the barrack all night?”

  “Won’t we get in trouble?”

  “Not if they don’t catch us.”

  I hesitate even as she pulls me to my feet. I shouldn’t leave the stall. I shouldn’t leave Fred. I should be good, obedient.

  But what did obedience ever do for me?

  * * *

  Someone should have told me. Breaking the rules is wonderful. We’re sneaking between the barracks and the showers and the recreation centers, and at any moment we could be caught.

  But we aren’t.

  Out here, darkness shrouds the fences and the sentries with their rifles, watching the perimeter, and if you don’t look closely, you can pretend you’re somewhere else. Someone else.

  I laugh as we reach the edge of the racetrack. I’m sprinting across the infield, unchecked, the wind cool in my hair and the grass wet on my ankles, and I’m dancing, twirling under a black, star-spangled sky.

  Then I trip. A man grunts. I tumble forward and feel flesh, warm and moist, under my hands. A woman squeaks in surprise.

  And I’m me again, obedient and meek. My cheeks go hot as I realize what they’re doing out here together. “Sumimasen!” I gasp. Excuse me!

  I don’t hear if the couple answers. Keiko’s fumbling for my elbow, hauling me up. We’re tearing across the field, the hems of our nightgowns wet with dew.

  We don’t stop until we reach my barrack, where she doubles over, laughing.

  “Shhh!” I whisper. “That was so embarrassing!”

  “For who? They don’t care. I wouldn’t, if I were . . .” She waggles her eyebrows.

  “You—” For an instant, I imagine her on the infield with a boy on top of her. “You mean you would—”