Inside, he presses the top button (so strange to think that Charlie’s fingers have pressed this very button many times before). The elevator heaves upward with a groan. Charlie has been in here thousands of times. Are there molecules of her breath still lingering? He closes his eyes, inhales deeply.
The elevator doors open.
There are only two apartments on this floor, each on either end of the long hallway. He walks to the nearer door. The family nameplate has been scrubbed off and in its place a brass covering with German words.
He presses the doorbell. He is expecting a chime. Instead an ungainly buzzing sound comes from inside. No response. He presses the doorbell again, holding it down. No one comes.
He is about to turn away when he notices something. Tucked in the upper right corner, discreet, is a small mezuzah. Exactly how Charlie described it in her letters.
He feels his heart beat faster. With a trembling finger he presses the doorbell again. Then he starts pounding on the door, heavy thumps over and over. Approaching footsteps.
He cannot breathe. Charlie? Charlie?
The door swings open.
A large rotund woman with a broom in one hand and a garbage bag in the other scowls at him. “Qui êtes-vous?” she demands. “Que voulez-vous, monsieur?” Her breath hot and full of garlic.
He doesn’t understand. The words are coming too quickly. He tries to look over her shoulder into the apartment, but she steps forward, not afraid to use her ample bosom to push him backward.
He retreats two steps. He’s drawing a blank, can barely recall even a single French word. “Madame Lévy? Are you … êtes-vous Madame Lévy?”
“Non. Je suis la concierge.” The woman blinks at him. As if for the first time taking in his American military uniform, his Asian face. Her eyes suddenly widen with realization. “Monsieur Maki?” she stammers. “Êtes-vous Monsieur Alex Maki?”
* * *
She brings him into the apartment. It is stuffy inside, even with many windows opened. Furniture has been pushed off to the side, bookshelves emptied, the walls stripped bare of any paintings. All the smaller household items—plants, vases, lamps, anything remotely decorative—are missing. Perhaps stored away. Or stolen.
The apartment does not look lived in. Not for at least a few months.
He looks around for evidence of Charlie. A woman’s jacket or scarf draped over the sofa, her favorite books, a well-thumbed copy of Jane Eyre lying around. But there is nothing.
The concierge is trying to explain something to him. Rapidly in French, something about coming up here to air out the place once a week, and clean it up a little—
He ignores her, looks around. On a bureau against the wall he sees a small photo frame, lying facedown and apparently forgotten. He walks over, picks it up. He is momentarily confused. It is not the portrait of Charlie’s family he was expecting, but a photo showing a family of four sitting before a church, the two boys grinning. In the background, street awnings hang with German words.
He turns the frame over. Undoes the small metal latches on the back. When he pulls away the backing, he finds another photograph tucked behind the displayed one. This portrait is of a dignified-looking man with his wife. Both in their forties, perhaps. And standing between them, their teenage daughter.
Charlie.
He gasps.
His first time seeing her. And she is as he imagined her. She is the Charlie of his visions. The trinity of moles at the corner of her eyes. Except here she is radiant with life, her hair long, her eyes burning with a ferocity undimmed even in this black-and-white photograph. A small smile threatening to leak out of her lips. A sparkling, healthier Charlie than the one in his visions. But the same one.
He doesn’t understand how this can be. He doesn’t understand anything anymore. He flips the photo over. On the back, cursive handwriting he recognizes as Charlie’s: L’amour d’une famille est quelque chose de merveilleux. He turns to the concierge. “La famille Lévy. Où sont-ils?”
She sets down the bag of trash, the broom. When she speaks it is with simple words, with gesturing hands. Even then Alex understands perhaps only a quarter of what she says. But it is enough. It is too much. The concierge does not know the whereabouts of Monsieur and Madame Lévy. She has heard little since that night of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, she tells him. They simply vanished into thin air. She says that this apartment was afterward requisitioned by the Germans. High-ranking soldiers lived in this apartment, drank in here, slept in here, spoke their filthy German in here.
Alex stares at the concierge. She has spoken only of the parents. “Et Charlie Lévy. Savez-vous où elle est?”
She shakes her head. Lowers her eyes. “Je ne sais pas.” She is lying. She knows something. He can see it in her tightened grip on her meaty forearm. The white imprints it leaves there.
I have been looking for her for a long time, he wants to tell her but can’t. I have thought about her every day during this war. In the Vosges Forest. In every slit trench at night, shaking with cold. In the French Alps staring at snowcapped mountains. I have worried over her. I have ached for her. I have been looking for her for a very long time and now you are my last hope.
But he does not know how to say this. “S’il vous plaît,” he simply whispers, his voice the rasp of sandpaper. “S’il vous plaît.”
She hesitates; her eyes avert down to the floor.
“Je suis désolée,” she finally says. She looks up at him and her eyes are big and soft. She has heard things from the other tenants in this building, she tells him. And from the other concierges in the neighborhood. Rumors about Charlie—no, more than just rumors, these were eyewitness accounts that Charlie … Her words drift away. She will not look at him.
He feels himself pitching forward, the floor canting left and right. He grips the top of a dining chair. “She did not survive?” he says. “Charlie didn’t make it?”
The concierge frowns, not understanding. So he has to ask it in French, and these three simple words are like razors on his tongue. “Est-elle morte?”
The concierge pauses; she laces her fingers across her apron. And then she nods. Just once. The shortest, and most decisive and most obscene motion humanly possible.
He pulls back the dining chair, sits down. On the table are large scrolls of paper, some tubed, some simply rubber-banded. Maps and diagrams, all written in German. His heart turning to chalk, crumbling.
“Vous êtiez de si bons amis,” she says quietly as if to comfort him. “Chaque fois que je lui donnais une de vos lettres, elle rayonnait de bonheur.”
He isn’t really listening. It’s all noise to him now. Nothing matters anymore.
She falls silent. Outside, the faint hum of Paris traffic.
He gets up to leave. His legs unsteady, his face numb. There is nothing more to see or say or do. He starts walking to the door. Then stops, remembering the reason why he came. Promise me, Alex, Charlie had written, that you will one day come and visit my room. I have much to show you there.
He turns to the concierge. “Puis-je voir la chambre de Charlie, s’il vous plaît,” he says. “Où est-elle?”
“Sa chambre?”
“Oui.”
She leads him down the hallway. Outside the closed door she tells him Charlie’s room has been unused for years now. Paris suffered three harsh winters, colder than any in recent memory; and with coal shortages, it was difficult to keep large, airy apartments warm. So the German soldiers did what most wealthy Parisians did in these apartments: they permanently closed off entire rooms, never opening them. Including Charlie’s.
The door is unlocked, she tells him, walking away.
* * *
It takes him a minute to finally put his hand on the knob. He turns it, pushes open the door.
It swings open with a loud screech, the hinges creaky with winters-long hibernation. He steps into the room. Charlie’s room.
It is dark inside, and musty. He sees very little apart from
the rims of light from drawn curtains across the room. He treads carefully over to the window, slowly getting used to the darkness. His fingers touch the thick heavy cloth of the curtains, and he flings them wide open.
A rush of light, blinding, floods his eyes. He blinks. Outside her window, Paris in all her glory. The Eiffel Tower looming over him, the gardens spread below. Charlie had spoken of this view often in her letters, but he never imagined the tower to be this close. He brushes away a spider’s web wrapped around the window handle. The window opens with a rusty protest. A flue of fresh air whistles in, the first air in years.
Sounds of traffic drift in. Children playing in the nearby park, sounds of a popping cap pistol, laughter. He opens the window wider. More air gusts in.
And now a different sound, from within the room, comes from all sides: the whisper-rustle of fluttering papers.
He turns.
There are sheets of paper taped all over the room. On every wall, from floor to ceiling. Dozens of them, some small, some larger, all flapping like the wings of baby birds taking flight for the very first time.
They are his drawings. All the illustrations, portraits, cartoons he sent her over the years. Aglow now in the sunlight, fluttering softly in the breeze. From his very first hesitant drawings when he was only nine to later, more accomplished portraits and drawings and illustrations and cartoons he never dared show anyone else. He always thought she tossed them away, maybe not immediately but eventually.
But now he knows. She kept them all.
He sees cartoons of odd turtles with elongated heads; portraits of his brother, Frank, throwing a football. Of their strawberry farm. Of himself, punching a French Métro conductor.
One sheet, taped onto the bed headboard, glows whiter than the others. A more recent drawing. He goes to it now. He’d drawn it on the train to Manzanar: of Charlie and him standing worlds apart on separate shores but with a string strung between them, connecting them. I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.
He feels his legs giving way. He pulls out the desk chair, sits down. A film of dust covers the desk, over the ridges and grooves of wood, over the worn-down smoothness in its center. This is the desk, then, where she had written all her letters to him. During the dusk hours, her favorite time to write. He can see her here, madly scribbling away, occasionally lifting her head to stare at the Eiffel Tower aglow in the sunset.
He thinks of all those hundreds of letters over the years, for almost a decade. Thousands upon thousands of words scratched into existence. Her stories, her jokes, her thoughts, her hopes and fears. Written for him. Just for him. No one else read them; they were meant just for him. For a lonesome skinny American boy halfway across the world on a place called Bainbridge Island. Lonely Turtle Boy.
His eyes fill with tears.
He places his hand on the desk. Feels the soft silt of dust. He stares down at the uneven wood, the knots and whorls like the scutes of a shell. Charlie will never sit here again. She will never write again. She will never have another thought again. He thinks of her lips, how they will never curl into a smile, or spread with laughter. Her eyes, how they will never sparkle with life. Her feet, how they will never walk the pathways of the Sorbonne campus. He thinks of that café in Paris where they will never drink coffee together, that empty table set for two, those two empty chairs, the conversations they will never share, the moments together they will never remember for the rest of their lives.
“Charlie,” he whispers, “God, Charlie,” and he bends over until his forehead touches the desk, and he feels the ridges press into his skin, and the tears, they flow out now, sinking past the dust and into wood.
69
OCTOBER 21, 1945
BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, WASHINGTON, AMERICA
Everything seems smaller than he remembers. The ferry, Puget Sound, even Bainbridge Island as it slowly appears on the horizon.
One thing that remains the same, though, thank God. Its beauty: the smell of salt in the air, the sun dancing off the million little platelets in the rippled waters, the sight of bald eagles in the sky, a sea otter basking in the sun as they approach the pier. He’s glad to have come out onto the deck even on this cold October morning, to take in the sights unimpeded by the ferry’s dirty glass windows. He stands alone at the bow, duffel bag at his feet, the wind loudly flapping the American flag, his army hat held in hand lest it blow away.
Charlie’s words come to him now: Maybe, Alex, maybe loving a city, a country, is like loving a person: you love her despite her faults, you forgive her constantly, you always believe in her, fight for her, you never give up on her.
As the ferry pulls into Eagledale Pier, he scans the dock. A group of commuters stands waiting, clustered together against the cold. A few glance curiously up at him, at this Japanese American man in military uniform. If anyone recognizes him, they don’t smile or wave. Alex stares past them, scans the pier. Frank is nowhere in sight.
Several weeks ago, Alex received a postcard from him. Frank had written but a brief message: they’d all recently been released from Manzanar, and were now back on Bainbridge Island. They were waiting for Alex to return.
He has that postcard in his pocket now, his ticket home. He’d put it in a small plastic bag to protect it from the elements. In that bag he also carries a photograph. Of the Lévy family, of Charlie, taken from the Paris apartment. L’amour d’une famille est quelque chose de merveilleux.
Alex walks down the gangplank, the last to disembark. The commuters heading into Seattle get on the ferry, none giving him a second look.
The ferry pulls away and now Alex is left standing alone on the pier. This quiet, empty pier. So different from that day when they all left, and the white community had come out to bid them farewell and good luck. He’s returned as something he never imagined he’d become: a bona fide war hero, a member of the 442nd. A unit, he has recently learned, that suffered staggering numbers of casualties, whose blood is spread all over Europe. A unit awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations, twenty-one Medals of Honor, and over nine thousand Purple Hearts. It has become the most decorated unit for its size in United States history. Only you wouldn’t know it from the empty pier welcoming him back now, or from the diner he was thrown out of two days ago in Orange County.
The sound of barking. From behind. Familiar—
It’s Hero. Older, thinner, but undoubtedly him.
“Hero! Come ’ere, boy!”
The dog, stiff with age, bounds even faster, his tail working furiously. Alex gets down on a knee, and Hero bulldozes into him, almost knocking him over.
“Good boy, Hero!” Alex laughs. “Good boy!”
The dog circles around, claws clattering against the dock, his tail whipping against Alex’s face, whining with joy, his dog breath sour and warm and wonderful.
Alex sees him then. A lonely figure standing by the lamppost, one hand holding a leash. Frank.
They walk up to each other. Frank, so much thinner than Alex remembers. But he seems well rested, the bags under his eyes gone. His skin a healthy bronze, the kneecaps of his pants browned with soil; he’s been working the fields.
Two yards from each other they stop.
Frank looks at Alex for a long time. “We weren’t sure exactly when you were returning.”
“But here you are. How’d you know I’d be on this ferry?”
“I didn’t.” Frank hesitates. “I’ve been coming down here every morning for two weeks.” He smiles shyly. The first smile Alex has seen in years, and it looks like a miracle, feels like magic. “What took you so long, kiddo?”
Alex grins back. The brothers step toward each other, arms extended to handshake. But in the last second Alex brushes aside Frank’s hand and they embrace. Tightly, with white knuckles and clenched, damp eyes. Frank’s sweater, recently pulled from boxes Mother had stored in the basement years ago, smells of mothballs. But also o
f open fields, of sunlight, of strawberries, of the raw musky earth.
And of America, always America.
EPILOGUE
YEARS LATER
COOPER’S BEACH, LONG ISLAND
The beach is calm tonight, the tide mere whispers. Overhead a few stars are beginning to peek out. Darkness presses in, making the world smaller, cozier. At the tide’s edge Alex kneels down on the soft sand. He opens the bag, removes the square planks of wood, the candle, the pages of his latest, wildly popular comic book. Slowly, carefully, he constructs the floating paper lantern. When he is finished, he removes his shoes and socks, hikes up his trousers as high as they’ll go, and heads down to the water. The cold sand turns wet and squelchy under his feet, makes sucking sounds.
Then he steps into the sea. It stings with cold. When the water reaches his kneecaps, he stops. He places the floating lantern onto the water. It bobs lightly but securely on the small waves. He pulls out his lighter, carefully lowers the flame to the centered candle until it catches. That moment always beautiful, when the four walls of the lantern are set aglow, softly and palely, the illumined cartoon characters brought to brief, flickering life.
For a moment—just a little longer—he holds onto the lantern. Then with a gentle push, he releases it into the wide open sea.
He stares after it. A gentle riptide carries it slowly out to sea, the glowing light bobbing but never sinking, never disappearing. He watches as it gets smaller and smaller against the infinite horizon. When the cold of the sea begins to numb his ankles and toes, he sets back for the beach. On the shore, his feet caked in the fine fuzz of sand, he turns to look.
There. That pulsing light between two worlds, still beating out to sea.
He imagines the lantern journeying across the ocean. Past cargo ships and cruise ships, past glowing colonies of jellyfish, past vast pockets of emptiness and darkness and desolation. He sees it entering the English Channel, then slipping into the small gateway of the Seine River. Floating down its length, under the Pont Neuf, past the Sainte-Chapelle, past the Notre Dame Cathedral.
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