This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

It’s at that moment … he feels an odd sensation. A tingle at the base of his spine.

Onscreen a man is laying almost atop Maureen O’Hara, their lips scandalously close, an inch from touching. She whispers, Say again you love me.

“Don’t do it,” someone shouts to laughter.

I love you.

More than anything in the world?

I can’t do anything more than just love you.

“Oh please,” the same person says aloud before being shushed.

The tingle grows more insistent. Spreading up his spine, warming his cartilage. But there’s a prodding sensation to it. Like a beckoning. He stands, blocking the projector’s beams, the image of the beast rippling on his clothes.

“Are you okay, Alex?” asks Sandy, peering at him quizzically.

He barely hears her, stumbles past her and through the exit.

Outside, an orange tinge lines the horizon. The Sierra Mountains loom in the distance, their snowcapped peaks topped with dusk light, their lower halves already darkened in the shadows of night.

The odd sensation has only grown stronger. It’s now a heat coursing through him, radiating along his rib cage, directing him.

He lets it. He finds himself walking past the church in Block 15, past the elementary school in Block 16. He keeps walking, and now he is past the Guayule Lath House, where rubber is extracted to aid the war effort. He hears the faint trickle of Bairs Creek, which cuts, briefly and teasingly, across the southwest corner of the camp. In the winter it is as deserted and still as the loneliest crater on the moon.

He stops. Something is about to happen. Slowly, he turns around.

Someone is standing there. Blurred, a smear of light, right up against the fence. In a light blue dress, a large jacket thrown over it. The image quivers like the reflection on a rippling pond. It’s a woman; no, younger, a teenage girl.

“Hello?” he says.

She turns. Her face is blurry, as if underwater. A white girl, that much he can see. The daughter of a camp staffer? Probably. Perhaps going out for a walk at sunset.

The wind blows and her hair dances wildly in the wind.

She begins to fade. The edges to her form blurring first, becoming translucent. Her eyes rising up to meet his, and in that short moment they hold each other’s gaze. There is an intensity in her brown eyes, steely and lit up even in her wavering, vanishing form.

And suddenly his heart is breaking to pieces.

He steps toward her, a name caught in his throat.

Dust blows into his eyes. He blinks. Opens his eyes.

She is gone. If she was ever there in the first place. Nothing but the vast empty landscape, dusk’s light spilling gauzily across it.

It was merely an optical illusion, he thinks. A dusk-lit reverie of dancing dust playing tricks in the windswept plains. Nothing more than a figment of his overripe, yearning, lonely mind.

He stares at that empty space where she was and then was not. And whispers:

“Charlie.”

* * *

He runs home. Pulls out the suitcase from under his cot. Riffles through her letters, his fingers fluttering with excitement. He finds the envelope, pulls out the letter. Eyes swing to the sentence he’d glossed over.

… they are magic pieces of paper: if I write a person’s name on the slip, I will appear to that person. Like a ghost …

At the crack of dawn the next day, he goes back to that spot by the fence. He gets as close to the fence as he dares without drawing attention from the guard tower.

Nothing. No footprints in the dust, no sign that any had ever been there.

By evening, filled with doubt and feeling foolish, he’s already discounted it ever happened.

But the next morning, just before dawn, he steals out. Heads past the Guayule Lath House. Past Bairs Creek. He waits. An hour passes. The dawn sun rises into the sky, spilling its ochre light.

No one appears.

Still he waits. Casting his eyes left, right, near, far.

Charlie.

Charlie.

Charlie.

* * *

In the barrack, everyone is still sleeping. He stomps over to his cot, takes out his sketchbook, an expensive leather one Charlie sent him for his thirteenth birthday. Every page has since been filled with sketches of her, what he has imagined her to be, anyway. Except the very last page. That, he’s kept empty, saving it for when she’s finally sent over a photograph.

He’s still waiting for it.

He turns to that page now. Takes a deep breath, puts pencil to the cream wove paper. He draws from memory: her slight form by the fence, her chin tilted defiantly upward, her hair tossed in the wind, anger and despair in her eyes.

But he’s not even halfway done when he slams the pencil down. This is all wrong. It is accurate but it is clinical. There is nothing of her spirit. Her essence. He grabs his eraser, starts over.

But again it is not right. And it is never right, no matter how many times he erases and starts over. He stares down at the page covered in tiny eraser shavings. He’ll give it one more go, he decides, blowing the shavings away.

Twenty minutes later, hand aching, he holds the page up. This sketch, almost. But not quite. He reaches for the eraser. Pauses. This will be the closest he’ll ever get. He gazes critically at the sketch:

Then closes the sketchbook.

36

LATE JANUARY 1943

Every day he looks at the drawing. Every day he visits the same spot by the fence. Every day he stops by the post office, and every day he is waved off. Sometimes with a sympathetic shake of the head, more often with an irritated sigh.

“Nothing, Alex. Nothing but your returned letters.”

Everywhere he walks, he walks with searching eyes. Sometimes he catches in his periphery a blur of swirling color, and his heart leaps. But it’s only a colorful shirt or blanket on a clothesline blown by the wind, or the dulled reflection of the setting sun caught in a swinging window.

She is nowhere. She is everywhere.

There are moments of lucidity. When the absurdity of all this slams home. When he accepts that her appearance was merely a trick of light. A stupid, juvenile flight of fancy, a deceit of a lonesome mind. In those moments, he laughs at his own idiocy, turtle boy with his head in the clouds.

And yet. She is on his mind all the time. He rereads her old letters over and over. He finds himself wondering what she is doing at that very moment: Is she sleeping? Eating? Reading?

Is she even alive?

This last thought surfaces only in his nightmares, where every night he roams the empty Parisian streets, searching for her in café after café filled only with Nazis who bark out in haughty German demands for more beer, more Camembert, and he walks past them with head tucked down, walking all over Paris until his feet blister and the cobblestones rub his tender soles raw.

Sometimes he startles awake. He lies in the darkness, his only company the snores and strangled sounds of others. He wonders what is happening in Paris. In France. In Europe. He wishes there were some way to find out. Even a drop of information would connect him, however tenuously, to Charlie. But out here in the desert, cut off from the world at large, there is nowhere to get such news.

One morning, walking empty-handed out of the post office, he suddenly stops. He is realizing: that is not entirely true. He is suddenly thinking of the man he met here months ago. The editor of the Manzanar Free Press. Ray Tanaka. No, Takeda. Ray Takeda. The man who knew about the Vichy occupation. About the stoppage of international mail. Who had access to international news.

Fifteen minutes later, Alex is standing outside a barrack in Block 15. An awning hangs over the door:

OFFICE OF REPORTS, MANZANAR FREE PRESS

He knocks. No one answers.

He pounds again, harder, more insistent.

The door opens. A man stands silhouetted by light, a cigarette dangling out of one hand. Handsomely dressed with careful

ly coiffed hair and clothes that seem tailor-made.

“There’s no need to pound the door,” Ray Takeda says, clearly annoyed. He pauses, his intelligent, curious eyes studying Alex. “I remember you.”

“Tell me,” Alex says, panting hard, “what’s happening in Europe. In France.”

Takeda regards Alex with a hard stare. For a second it looks as if he’s about to shut the door on him. Then he swings the door wider. “Come in.”