“Who’s that from?” Mae asked one day, glimpsing her brother with a letter.
“Ava,” he replied. “It’s to all of us . . . or Father, really. She’s been keeping us updated as to how the ranch is doing, how the orchards are faring . . .”
Mae frowned.
“If it’s from Ava, why don’t you look more pleased?”
Harry blinked, not sure what his sister was getting at, not sure how to respond. Mae giggled.
“C’mon. It’s obvious that you love her,” Mae said now.
Harry made a face.
“I never said anything along those lines.”
“You didn’t have to,” Mae said. “So why aren’t you happier to have a letter from her?” Mae squinted at Harry as though looking for an answer. “Oh!” she gasped, her face lighting up with sudden comprehension. “Is it that you wanted to hear from Louis?”
Harry didn’t say anything. Mae understood she had hit upon an unexpected truth.
“When was the last time Louis wrote?” Mae asked.
“He hasn’t.”
“At all?”
Harry shook his head, and with that, he turned on his heel and walked out of the bungalow they shared with the Akimotos.
58
Yamada property * November 30, 1942
Louis was at odds with himself, rattling around on the Yamadas’ property, and especially when he found himself alone in their house. Summer had come and gone, and autumn had begun to leave a telltale frost on the ground first thing in the mornings. He had remained loyal to the Yamadas by working hard in the orchards and on the ranch, but he couldn’t bring himself to write to the family, and especially not to Harry. He heard their news through Ava, who exchanged letters with Harry and Mae and sent little care packages to all of the Yamada family members. Lately, the care packages had included homemade scarves and quilts; evidently it was cold at Tule Lake, and they had no heat.
Louis had registered for the draft but hadn’t been called up—yet. The truth was, Louis couldn’t get his brother Guy’s last words to him out of his head: I’d have more respect for you if you did something useful—like enlisting yourself—but I can already tell, you ain’t gonna do anything of the sort. Louis wouldn’t have minded fighting in France or Italy; the adolescent boy within him who still loved comic books knew all the best heroes fought the Nazis. But if he was sent to the Pacific, he wasn’t sure how he’d feel. Or perhaps he knew he would feel too much. He was so damn angry at Harry. And he also felt a little sick to his stomach when he pictured the things Ava told him about in Harry’s letters: the Yamadas living behind barbed wire, in a shack with tarpaper for walls, white guards looking on from watchtowers, prepared to shoot anyone who tried to escape. Picturing it made Louis feel something, too—something less easy and straightforward than anger.
And so Louis found himself working and waiting, wondering what his role might eventually be in this war.
Then, one day, it came to him as he was sitting on the Yamadas’ front porch. He was gazing out over the property as the sun was setting, and his eyes fell upon the airplane hangar off in the distance. Louis realized: He had his pilot’s license. And he wasn’t just some old crop duster; Hutch and Buzz had trained him to perform some of the trickiest maneuvers they knew. Louis might in fact be considered an experienced pilot.
He knew there was an airfield in Lincoln where the U.S. Army Air Force trained pilots. He woke up early the next morning and signed up to work as a civilian pilot, training new recruits. Glad to have his help, they put him to work the very next week.
* * *
Louis quickly discovered he enjoyed teaching young men to fly, to earn their wings. Harry had always been the better stuntman; Louis had always been acutely—and sometimes painfully—aware of that fact. But now it dawned on Louis that he was a damned good pilot and a natural teacher. He had a helpful way of explaining piloting procedures to the recruits, of breaking the whole business down into a series of logical steps, of instilling confidence in even the most nervous young man.
It was gratifying to finally feel truly good at something.
Of course, it was not a profession that came without its own fraught complications. Late at night, sometimes, Louis wondered where his former pupils might be and how they might be faring. He wondered how many of them were still alive. And he thought, too, of the enemy soldiers and civilians they possibly had killed. The majority of his students were dispatched to the Pacific, to fight the Japanese. What would Harry—or any of the Yamadas, really—think of that? Had Ava told them what Louis was doing with his time now? Louis wanted to ask Ava exactly what she wrote in all those letters she scribbled to Harry; she wrote one almost every day.
Louis wanted to ask her, but he didn’t dare.
“Move into the house,” he continued to urge Ava. “The Yamadas wouldn’t mind; I’m sure of it.”
He was urging again one evening when Ava had come inside to deposit fresh groceries in the icebox. Ava shook her head. “It isn’t that I think they would mind.” She looked at Louis, holding him in a long, meaningful stare. “When was the last time you wrote to any of the Yamadas?” she asked.
Louis didn’t say anything.
“I don’t need to live here in the house to know, Louis: Harry writes to you every single day. I see you putting the envelopes in the china cupboard. Do you even bother to open them?”
Louis still didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. Ava stopped waiting for a reply. She dismissed him with a sigh and turned to go. Suddenly, Louis felt a ripple of hot anger welling up. He couldn’t tell who he was angriest with anymore—Harry, Ava, or maybe even himself, for allowing himself to seem so small and petty. A meanness sprang up in his heart.
“You’re never gonna be able to make a life with him,” Louis blurted out. “He’s a Jap.”
Ava froze. Louis realized he was waiting for her to say something. He wanted her to look embarrassed or deny she loved Harry. But she only stood there, silent and glaring.
“He’s a Jap,” he repeated, frustrated. “You know that, don’t you?”
She continued to glare at him until finally Louis had to look away.
Ava didn’t answer. Louis watched her go and heard the back door to the kitchen slam shut with a loud bang.
59
Newcastle, California * September 23, 1943
When he arrives back at the boardinghouse, Bonner finds a bundle of brown parchment tied up with string waiting for him on the entry hall table: miscellaneous documents forwarded over from the sheriff’s office. Deputy Henderson likely dropped them off and Rosalind left them here. Bonner recognizes the hand of Sheriff Whitcomb in the thoughtful delivery, too—the sheriff’s not-so-subtle way of suggesting Bonner work the case from some location other than Whitcomb’s office from here on out.
Bonner takes the bundle upstairs, unwraps it, and begins laying out each item on the bed. The majority of the documents are items sent from the Yamadas’ barracks in the Tule Lake Relocation Center. There are keepsakes, letters, and other documents. There are photographs, too, of the Yamada family throughout the years. And a photograph that includes Louis and Harry, along with all the members of the barnstorming act from the time when it was still “Earl Shaw’s Flying Circus.”
Bonner sets the image apart from the others and stares intently at it. He picks out Harry on the far left, standing next to Louis. Next is Ava . . . and then the two men he guessed were the circus’s original pilots, Buzz and Hutch. Earl Shaw is in the shot, too, standing on the far right, dressed in a colorful red-and-black suit, as though he were the ringleader of a more traditional circus. In the photo, Earl has one arm around his wife, Cleo, the other angled in the air as though to showcase the two biplanes parked behind them. Bonner can read CASTOR painted in gold lettering on one plane, and POLLUX on the other. While everyone in the photograph is smiling, it seems to Bonner th
at there is a suggestion in their expressions and postures signifying a shared dislike of Earl, which lends the photograph a slightly amusing air.
After staring at the photograph for several minutes, Bonner slips it back into a file folder and returns his attention to the other photographs and documents. He reaches for the folder that contains all the Yamadas’ official records: birth certificates, internment papers . . . death certificates, too.
As Bonner looks these over, contemplating all the tragedy the Yamada family has had to endure, he begins to reconsider the possibility that the crash was an act of suicide after all. There were plenty of reasons Kenichi and Harry would be tempted to die by their own hands. Perhaps Louis’s strange, abrupt reaction—as though something had clicked in his brain—and the faint traces of guilt Bonner was sure he’d detected in Louis’s demeanor were merely the grief any man feels upon discovering his friend has chosen death over life. Could that be the truth of the matter all along? Throughout the entire investigation, Bonner had been so focused on Louis Thorn—Was he capable of murder? Did he ever really intend to return that land? What sort of people were the Thorns, anyway?—that Bonner neglected to really delve into the Yamadas’ experience and whether or not it would make sense for Kenichi and Harry to have a role in the crash after all.
Bonner realizes he didn’t want to know that much about the Yamadas’ time in the camps because he did not want to have to imagine their struggle or dwell on their pain.
Now, looking at one document, letter, and photograph at a time, Bonner allows himself to let it all in: the Yamadas’ lives in internment; the hardship, humiliation, and grief they had to put up with; the reasons Harry and Kenichi might have decided on death during those last moments, soaring high in the air.
60
Tule Lake, California * February 11, 1943
When she was young and newly married, Shizue Yamada had harbored one fear above all others: that she would be unable to bear children. Once she was pregnant, that fear transformed itself into the fear that her epilepsy would jeopardize the baby—that a seizure would cause a miscarriage or a terrible birth defect. Shizue felt nauseated at the very thought—not of an impaired child, but of the guilt she would suffer knowing she was to blame for the child’s deformity.
In the years after her children were born, her primary fear went through another transformation. Shizue buried it deep within her own heart, perhaps believing if she never named it and told no one about it, it would have no power over her.
She watched her first child, Haruto, closely, and when he passed through adolescence without showing any signs of her affliction, she breathed a sigh of relief. It had been during her teen years when she had the first seizure; the doctors had told her the disease almost always made itself known then. The day Haruto turned twenty, Shizue had only one thought in her head: Healthy—my son is healthy! She began to relax. Mai was still growing but showing every sign of following in Haruto’s footsteps. Little Mai was healthy and hearty, if a little unruly.
So when the Yamada family was shuttled off to Tule Lake, Shizue developed a subconscious confidence in her children, and believed they would easily manage to endure camp conditions, unpleasant as they were.
* * *
When Mai had her first seizure, Shizue was horrified. She was certain the reason her daughter was suffering was her fault. She had let down her guard, growing complacent, and the fates had pounced on her daughter while Shizue’s back was turned.
The first seizure was mild; Shizue hadn’t witnessed it and Haruto had reported it, so she had only his description to rely upon.
“We were sitting outside, Mae was eating an apple, and her face suddenly went slack,” Haruto said. “I think she sort of passed out there for a second or two. Or maybe not. I don’t know. Her eyes were open but not seeing, moving strangely . . . I was speaking to her and she wasn’t responding. She doesn’t remember any of it now.”
Shizue’s heart lurched and a sudden chill gripped her body. She knew all too well what had happened.
“But it’s nothing . . . right, Ma?” Haruto asked. His voice indicated that he, too, was unconvinced of the event’s insignificance.
“Yes,” Shizue said, trying to keep her voice calm.
* * *
That afternoon Shizue went to the infirmary and demanded to see a doctor. Two weeks later, after she had made a proper pest of herself, the nurse finally relented and she was able to talk to an elderly man in a white lab coat who was, he claimed, only a part-time government employee and otherwise ran a small family practice across the border in Oregon.
“There are medications,” Shizue insisted, “that would help my daughter get through these episodes.”
“Anti-seizure medication?” The doctor frowned.
“Yes.”
“That’s complicated stuff. I’m afraid we don’t have access to those drugs here,” he said. “And anyway, it’s expensive.”
“She needs it,” Shizue continued to insist.
“I’m sorry. We can’t provide you with such things.”
“But . . . how can that be? If it is a necessity . . .”
“Those medications are luxuries,” the doctor corrected her. His tone had turned snippy. “There are quite a lot of people in need these days: Think of our American soldiers, all the things those boys need nowadays, and all because your countryman General Tojo took it upon himself to attack innocent people.”
He dragged the syllables out, spitting out the name “Tojo” while an ugly sneer moved across his face. Shizue was taken aback. She abruptly realized just how little help she could expect from the doctor standing before her. Without another word, she gathered her things and left.
* * *
From that moment, Shizue carried a ball of dread in the pit of her stomach. And it was just as she feared: After her daughter’s first seizure, the episodes increased in frequency. What was worse, however, was the fact that they increased in intensity until Mai was suffering from terrible, convulsing seizures that were unlike any Shizue herself had ever experienced.
Shizue found a man in the camp who tried the old kampo art of placing needles on the body, and for a time it seemed to help—until it didn’t. The man shook his head, apologetic. “There are herbs, but even if your husband can afford them, they’ll never let me get my hands on everything I need in here. They are convinced we’re all cooking up bombs.” Mai’s seizures eventually returned.
The worst was when one happened in the middle of the schoolroom, in front of other children. Mai was mortified and began to withdraw into herself. Shizue anguished as her daughter grew more introverted. Mai smiled less and less as summer approached, and the heat made it all worse; Mai’s laughter dried up along with the rainfall. She reminded Shizue of herself back in Japan, when Shizue thought of herself as nothing but a freak and a failure. Now her daughter was an exile among the exiled. And Shizue could do nothing.
This wounded Shizue in a way she had always feared, a way that went far deeper—and, she was sure, she deserved. Shizue was highly adept at blaming herself for anything that pained her children, and now she was convinced she had poisoned her own daughter by passing along her epilepsy. Every day Mai suffered, Shizue took another portion of guilt and blame into her heart, as though her heart were a stomach and she were consuming a never-ending sickly cake. She wanted her family to know she would never forgive herself for the pain she had passed along to her child. As it would turn out, she was too skilled in this manner.
* * *
Shizue had just returned from stitching bandages at the camp’s community workshop. When she walked in and saw Mai, she knew exactly what had happened. Mai was draped awkwardly across the bed—not Mai’s own bed, but the bed Shizue shared with her husband. She wouldn’t lie there on purpose, Shizue knew. But there Mai was, facedown, her head turned to the side, her eyes open, her tongue covering her teeth in a strange manner
.
She had suffered a terrible seizure, alone in their horrible single-room bungalow. Books were knocked off a makeshift shelf and a chair was turned over; it looked as though she had thrashed about quite a bit, convulsing violently before choking on her own tongue, her complexion turning blue from a lack of oxygen.
Thirty minutes passed where Shizue did not dare to move or speak. She barely drew breath.
At first, all she could think was I must be thankful I am the one to find her now, not one of the Akimotos.
The Akimotos were fine enough people. That was not the issue. But, being fine people, they did not deserve the horror and shock of finding a dead body in their home, any more than Mai deserved the dishonor of having her lifeless corpse discovered by virtual strangers.
Shizue stood there, memorizing her daughter’s vacant eyes, until eventually Shizue’s body began to react to the pain. She could not stop herself; she began to wail. She wailed like a wild creature, alarming people around their barracks. Still wailing, Shizue curled her own body around her daughter’s on the bed. Together they made a forlorn sort of snail shell, tears soiling the bed like a wet snail’s trail. Internees poked their heads into the bungalow to see what was wrong. Eventually, Haruto came walking along, puzzled to see a small throng of people gathered as he returned home.
“Oh, God,” Haruto exclaimed when he broke through the crowd around the open door and found his mother and sister. He tried to say more but his voice broke. Among her son’s unique attributes was a bold lack of fear, but Shizue remembered hearing his voice that day and thinking, Finally, in my fearless son’s voice . . . there is fear there . . . All those times she had wanted Haruto to have the good sense to be afraid of things as a child—for his own safety, so he wouldn’t touch the hot stove or try to swim in the river when the current was dangerous—his voice had never adopted a single tremor of fear. Now that it had, she was sorry to hear it.
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