by Karin Tanabe
“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.
There was something about being an only child that Christian had always found civilized. His closest friend growing up in River Hills, Baxter Novak, had seven brothers and sisters, each louder and rowdier than the next. And though their house with six bedrooms should have been big enough to contain them all, it felt to Christian that there was always a child about to drown in a bathtub or break their leg bounding off the furniture. At night, the few times Christian had agreed to sleep over, it was never so silent you could hear your own heartbeat, like at his house. With ten Novaks in the house, plus him, someone was always awake. There was even a sibling who sleepwalked, plodding straight down the stairs every night.
“Her subconscious probably just wants out of that crowded house,” Christian had told his mother one night after he’d sworn to himself that he’d never sleep there again. He was helping Helene make dinner and was washing the salad until it squeaked. “She’s probably heading for the front door every time, but all their belongings get in her way.”
“Growing up in Germany, I always believed that the rich had few children and the poor had many,” Helene had replied. “Or at least that’s how it always seemed, and maybe part of the reason why they were richer.”
“The Novaks are Catholic,” Christian had reminded her, and they’d gone back to preparing dinner, the only noise in the house their knives on the cutting boards and at one point, the sound of his mother giving him a kiss on the cheek, as she was prone to do.
Suddenly, he ached for that peace and quiet and for the assurance of parental love. He let himself turn from his back to his right side so he could take in the room and groaned at the pressure on his already strained bladder. He was thinking desperately about relieving it when he felt a shoe hit his cheek.
“You awake, Adolf?” asked someone with a too-loud voice.
Christian weighed his response before answering: “I would be, wouldn’t I? I was just hit in the face by a shoe.” He sat up in bed, the mattress barely doing a thing to keep the coils of the bed from digging into his flesh, and felt sweat inside the waistband of his pants. The shoe had fallen next to him in bed and he picked it up and examined it—light brown leather, with the sole worn deeply on the inside.
“That’s my shoe. Bring it back here now, kraut. Right away,” said the boy, who Christian could tell was significantly smaller than he was, judging by the size of the worn-out Oxford shoe and the short, stocky frame just sticking out of the bedcover halfway across the room.
Because things were already dismal, Christian got out of bed and brought the boy his shoe. He should have thrown it back at him, but he was smart enough to know that he was currently in need of friends. He dropped the shoe on the white iron framed bed, but it bounced off when it hit the shoe thrower’s leg. Both of them watched it fall to the floor and neither moved to pick it up.
“And why have you joined us at such an advanced age?” asked the shoe thrower, looking up at his morning’s entertainment.
“Not exactly sure,” said Christian, shrugging. His bladder was starting to hurt terribly.
“I’m exactly sure,” said the shoe thrower, loudly. “You’re here because your pa
rents are Nazis. There’s one other kraut kid here. A lot younger than you. Sickly looking. Her parents are Nazis, too. Big-time Nazis. Sprinkle baby Jew parts in their cereal.”
“Sure they do,” said Christian.
“They do. Poor kid. But she’s just a pawn in all of this. Like you. ’Course you’re older, so who knows? You could be involved in the krauts’ plot to take over America. But not her. She cries constantly. Like a starving dog.”
The shoe thrower was making no move to get out of bed, even though the boys around them were all standing up and heading out of the bare white room, adorned with nothing but a cross, in the direction of what Christian assumed were the toilets and showers. He wanted badly to follow them, but the shoe thrower was still engaged.
“Want to know what brought me here?” he asked, putting his hands behind his head as if he were lying in a beach chair instead of in the boys’ cottage at a children’s home.
“Sure, why not?”
“My parents died. Both of them. I’ve been here for ten years.”
“Ten years? Jesus Christ. I’m sorry,” Christian said, his eyes still following the other boys.
“Don’t lament on my behalf, sauerkraut. I’m almost eighteen, so I’ll be getting out of here soon. My birthday is in ten months, five days and—” He turned his head and looked at the black plastic clock on his pine bedside table, identical to the others in the room. “And twenty-three minutes.” Behind him snow was falling in large flakes, too wet to turn the ground white, but pretty to watch. Christian could see the small bare trees of an apple orchard beyond their dorm and half-frozen horses with blankets on their backs in another field.
The shoe thrower tossed back his covers and stretched his muscular legs. “Bring any liquor in with you?” he asked with a grin.
“Me?” said Christian, looking at his brown leather bag across the room. The floors were tiled, big and rust colored, and freezing against his feet. “I barely brought a thing with me. Definitely not liquor.”
“Then you’re useless. Get lost.”
Christian felt a burning in his groin and backed away from the shoe thrower suddenly. “I have to . . .” he said.
“You got to use the can? Back there. Hurry up, don’t piss near my bed, kraut.” He motioned Christian away and watched as he struggled to make it to the restroom.
Two days later, Christian opened his eyes and saw a low, gray sky, the color of freshly poured concrete. He watched the clouds move across it as fast as airplanes. He couldn’t remember why he was on the ground, or where this ground was, but his mind felt pleasantly fuzzy. Then he saw Jack Walter’s face come into view, leaning down until his fat pink ear was almost on Christian’s nose. Suddenly he remembered exactly where he was. He was at the Milwaukee Children’s Home, and Jack Walter, the shoe thrower, had just knocked him out with one punch. But it was a sucker punch, so it didn’t count. Where he was from, people didn’t walk up to you with a smile and then deck you with all of their weight behind their right fist.
Christian held his breath, sure that Jack was checking whether he was dead or not, and then when he saw the look of panic spreading on Jack’s face, he lunged up and bit his ear.
“You feral son of a bitch!” Jack screamed, losing his balance and falling onto the frozen ground himself. “You bit off my ear!”
“Me?” said Christian, standing up and trying to ignore the cloudy pain in his skull. “You just punched me for no reason. Is that what you do around here? You just punch people in the face and then place bets to see if they have a concussion or not?”
“No, but that’s a good idea,” said Jack, holding his bloody ear. “You’ll be dead soon enough, kraut. Just like your parents. I’m just trying to speed things along.”
“This is Wisconsin. My parents aren’t getting beaten in some cell till they bleed out.”
“Think what you want. I think the feds would have shoved you on some relative if they thought your parents were coming back. But instead of cohabiting with a fat aunt, you’re here. I bet you hear the death knell soon, just like them.”
“For a boys’ home bruiser, you’ve got quite a vocabulary,” said Christian, brushing off his coat and battling a rush of nausea. Though he knew he should hate Jack Walter, there was something about him that he liked. Maybe it was that he offered distraction, or that although he liked to throw shoes and punches, he also liked to be around Christian, and he was the only one at the Home who did.
“You’re grim,” said Christian, his ears still ringing. They both let their ailments settle and turned their attention to some of the older girls sitting in the field just a few yards away, close enough to watch the boys fight, far enough away that they didn’t feel the need to stop them.
“I’ve slept with all of them,” said Jack, giving a wave in their direction.
“Sure you have,” said Christian smiling as they made retching sounds at Jack.
“I have,” said Jack. “Okay, most of them. The pretty ones definitely, which after a few drinks is all of them. Actually, I lost my virginity not far from where we’re sitting. I’m surprised there hasn’t been an earthquake since. All that . . . passion,” he said laughing.
“When was that?” asked Christian, who felt a slight surge of jealousy that someone in a children’s home had lost their virginity and he hadn’t. “Yesterday?”
“Years ago,” said Jack, his laugh stopping abruptly. He pointed to a field behind them and said, “The Home sits right on the Monarch Trail. As in butterflies. They fly through the tall grasses all around the Home and then stop, as much as a butterfly can stop. Thousands come, all right here, next to these buildings, covering acres and acres. But they’re smart enough not to stay in Wisconsin. They’re flying from Canada to Mexico. It’s really beautiful. Maybe you’ll be here long enough to see it,” he said, stretching his wide calloused hands up to the sky.
“Maybe,” said Christian.
“It’s during the summer,” said Jack. “It’s the best part of the summer.”
“So you made love to a butterfly,” said Christian, trying to keep his head still.
“No,” said Jack, still looking up and smiling at the memory. “I made love to a beautiful girl. Patricia Talbot. She looked like she was made of corn and rain, just a pretty Wisconsin girl. And we decided that the first time we should have sex was when the butterflies were migrating, flying all around our naked bodies. Because if we couldn’t leave, at least we could be surrounded by creatures who fly. Who are completely free.” He closed his eyes and said, “It was the best day of my life.”
“What happened to Patricia Talbot?” asked Christian. “Can I take her off your hands?”
“If you can find her,” said Jack. “She was adopted. Fourteen and adopted. Doesn’t happen often, but like I said, she was really pretty. Some woman adopted her whose daughter had been around the same age when she died. I never heard from her again. I’m not mad at her for it. She’d been here since she was six because her parents decided they had too many kids to feed. Just dropped her off like she hadn’t lived with them for six years. Washed their hands of her. I hope she never sees them again. Or this place. Or even me.”
“The butterflies sound nice,” said Christian. “Kind of stupid, but nice.”
“No, said Jack, grinning again. “It was amazing.”
“I could use some amazing,” said Christian.
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Jack. “Because if your parents are in prison,” he said sitting up next to him, “bad times are ahead for you, kraut. First, your house will be looted. They’ll take everything, down to your mother’s underwear.”
“My house in River Hills?” said Christian, hugging his knees into his chest, hoping it would ease his need to vomit, which had just hit him more sharply. “Everyone there is already rich.”
“So what? You think the River Hills rich are above greed?” said Jack. “The rich are the worst kind of criminals, because they don’t need anything but they take it anyw
ay. Trust me, you’re getting looted. Hope you’re not too attached to your stuff. Bet you had some nice things; you’ve got that rich boy smell.” He wrinkled his stubby nose. “I can smell River Hills on you. I should punch you again just for being from there.”
“You smell like a thief,” said Christian, grabbing Jack’s right hand and squeezing it until Jack couldn’t move his arm. “You want my address? You can go and loot it yourself. Bring your magical butterflies with you.”
He let go of Jack’s hand, the effort of twisting it only making him feel worse. This time he was sure he was going to be sick.
“No, thank you,” said Jack, flapping his bruised wrist. “I like my things brand-new. Even the things I steal.”
“How discerning of you,” said Christian before vomiting.
Though Christian suffered through his first week at the Children’s Home, getting sucker punched and going to the infirmary with a concussion (thanks to Jack Walter’s right cross), he did not break down to the extent he’d feared.
It was the staunch belief that his parents were innocent that kept him from folding into himself. They would be questioned and tried, but then they would be let go, with an apology. He was sure he’d be leaving the Home within a week.
Lying in bed, Christian imagined his parents thinking about him. It comforted him to envisage their worries and prayers meeting somewhere in the air in Milwaukee, knotting together, because they were suffering at the same time.
After dinner at their long dining table, which was sectioned off by age, Jack came up and stuck out his leg to trip him, but pulled it back when Christian went to pin it down with his foot. The boys around them pushed back their plastic chairs and stood to see if a fight would break out.
“Let me say it for you, so you don’t have to bother,” Christian said. “ ‘Get out of here, dirty kraut.’ ”
“That’s right!” said Jack, laughing and hurrying to catch up with him. “Listen, you dirty kraut, I’m sorry I gave you a concussion. I was just trying to present you with the gift of a little shiner to remember your time here by. I guess I don’t know my own strength. I have grand plans to become a boxer, or a philosopher, when I get out of here. What I won’t do is end up dead in the war. Not for me an early death. That’s just for you.”
