This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

“Go now!” Mother chides. “The bus will be here in a minute.”

The boys hurry out, Frank grabbing Alex’s uneaten boiled egg. “Remember I’ll be home late tonight, Mother,” he says, pushing through the screen door. “It’s Dan’s birthday so a bunch of us are grabbing floats after practice.”

Frank’s cheerful mood continues as they wait for the bus at the end of the long driveway. He makes Alex run routes on the dirt road, throwing the football to him.

“You keep dropping them, kid!” he shouts, grinning good-naturedly at Alex.

“Then stop whipping them so hard!” Alex jogs back, tosses the football back to Frank.

“I’m baby-throwing them. Soft as marshmallows.” He spins the football, puts seams to fingertips. “Okay, let’s do a slant route at fifteen.”

“Frank, I’m pooped.”

“You only ran three, four times!”

“Frank!”

“Never mind,” he says, picking up his bag. “Bus is here.”

They get on. Alex takes his usual seat near the front, and Frank moves past to the very back row, greeting his friends boisterously. Morning sunlight pours into the interior, flaring through the windows into a soft, rainbow-hued haze. The banter about him is light and cheerful. Alex brings out his comics and for the next twenty minutes gets lost in them. It feels like the best morning he’s had in months.

He’s so focused on the latest issue of Captain America that he doesn’t notice the posters in town until the bus stops at a traffic light.

Someone two rows ahead says, “Look at that.”

And before Alex can look up and see for himself, he hears words he will never forget. “They’re kicking out the Japs!”

Alex’s head snaps up. Looks out the window. Sees the poster nailed to a telephone pole right outside:

INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL JAPANESE LIVING ON BAINBRIDGE ISLAND

All Japanese persons, both alien and nonalien, will be evacuated from this area by twelve noon, Monday, March 30, 1942.

From where he sits, Alex can’t read the smaller print that follows. But he doesn’t need to. He shifts his eyes away, stung, his breath snatched away. The comic book is somehow on the floor now. He does not remember dropping it.

He fights the urge to turn around and look at Frank. Instead he closes his eyes, presses his forehead against the cold sting of the window.

It’s happening. After holding out hope, yet fearing the worst, after all the weeks and months of anxiety and uncertainty, it’s finally happening. They’re being kicked out. In only six days. Evacuated from this area. Like a pest. A nonalien.

The traffic light turns green. The bus pushes forward with a loud groan. In the row behind him, Sarah Dunston wonders aloud if Doug Chesterfield will ask her out to the game on Friday night. The idle chatter in the bus resumes.

Alex finally turns around to look at Frank. He’s sitting in the middle of the back row, the empty center aisle directly in front of him. He’s stunned, his face pale, oblivious to the banter and laughter around him. He has the look of someone who’s been set up, then horribly betrayed. Slapped in the face, then kicked in the gut for good measure. For one awful raw moment their eyes meet. Then Frank flicks his eyes away, stares out the window.

Alex turns back around, looks down the street. The poster is everywhere. Dozens, stapled onto every telephone pole, in storefront windows of obliging owners, barbershops, pharmacies. Along the pillars of the town hall, the sides of mailboxes. Like skin lesions suddenly, inevitably breaking out, the cancer that never did go away. He sees two men next to the library in military garb wearing MP armbands and green berets, hammering more notices into a billboard.

The bus gusts past. The posters come suddenly to life, like the wings of pinned moths and butterflies resurrecting, flapping and fluttering, maniacally, as if desperate to take flight.

* * *

When Alex returns home after school, he finds Mother packing boxes in the kitchen. She stands up when he comes in, her hands on her waist. She looks like she’s been crying.

“You heard, then,” he says.

“Mrs. Tanazawa dropped by and told me.” She puts a hand to her cheek. “Six days. Six.”

Alex hangs his head. The thought alone of what they need to do exhausts him. Put their farm in order, hand it over to someone responsible and honest. Store their things away. Find a place for Hero. Buy suitcases because they’ve never been on a trip before. All in only six days—

“Do you know where they’re taking us?” Mother asks.

“No idea.”

“Or for how long?”

“I haven’t heard a thing. No one knows anything.”

She moves over to the glass-door cabinet, touches lightly the glass that she cleans every day. “What about Father? He’s getting released soon. What if we’re not here when he returns?”

A long pause. Then, reluctantly, he whispers, “I don’t think he’s coming back, Mother.”

In the cabinet glass he sees her reflection. Her face falling, her body concaving onto itself. She can withstand whatever lies ahead. Just not without Father.

“What are we going to do?” she asks.

“We should wait for Frank. He’ll know what to do.”

“But he won’t be back until late. He’s out with friends tonight, remember?”

But as it turns out, he returns home hours early. He stomps in, his face dark and tense.

“I thought you were going to be late—”

“They’ve imposed curfew,” he says.

“What?”

“Curfew. Just for the Japanese community on Bainbridge.”

“How do you know this?”

Frank smirks caustically. “Only because everyone’s talking about it in town. Public Proclamation Number Three, or something. No Jap”—he spits this word out loathsomely—“may be out after eight P.M.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah? Well because of that ridiculous law, the soda fountain wouldn’t serve me. The law was just announced, but they still booted me out. Like they couldn’t wait to get started.”

Mother goes to the stove. “I can heat up the leftovers.”

“Don’t bother,” he says, heading for the bedroom. “I’m not hungry.”

Alex sits down at the table. The whole room is tilting and swaying, everything is spinning out of control.

* * *

The next morning, another poster is put up. This one, with its bright colors and cheerful design, seems even crueler.

Alex sees it as soon as he steps into the school foyer. A crowd of students have gathered before it, huddling and squealing with excitement. It’s an announcement for the tenth-grade dance.

Lindy Hop through the Night! the poster declares. The date: Sunday, March 29th, 1942. The hours: 7:30 P.M.–10:00 P.M.

The news is not unexpected. Everyone has known for months there’ll be a dance this Sunday. But the exact time of the dance has taken weeks to finalize, on account of the war and last-minute security protocols. Alex just assumed the dance would be in the afternoon, especially since the new curfew law would prevent the Nisei students from attendi

ng.

But there it is in black-and-white (actually pink and lavender): The hours: 7:30 P.M.–10:00 P.M.

Alex peels away from the crowd. At his homeroom desk, he slumps down, all energy vaporized from his legs. He can barely keep from sliding off his chair.

They could have moved the dance to the afternoon. It’d have been so easy to do that on a Sunday. But they didn’t.

He knows why. Because he doesn’t matter. Not anymore. None of the Nisei students matter. It’s as if they’re already gone. Already discarded, flushed out, purged. All these nonaliens, as the poster had put it, evacuated from this area.

Students enter the classroom, talking excitedly. Already, everyone is chatting about what they’ll wear, who they might ask to dance. No one looks at him. Jessica Tanner is speaking breathlessly to Shirley Deckham. The two girls are whispering intently, excitement sparking off their shoulders like static electricity, their giggles bubbly. When the class rises for the Pledge of Allegiance, he finds, for the first time in his life, he can barely utter the words. The phrase liberty and justice for all caught in his throat.

The whole day he sits in classrooms and walks the hallways with eyes averted to the floor. He is afraid of meeting the inadvertent gaze of another Nisei, and finding in their eyes the same burning shame. He finds himself licking his lips a lot. Cutting short the swings of his arms as he walks off to the side of the hallway, his sleeve catching on the metal grill of lockers. When he almost bumps into someone rushing out of a classroom, the apology leaps out like a reflex. Sorry, sorry. The apology of an intruder. Of a coward. Of a nonalien. Alex bites down on his lip. He had no idea how much he loathed himself.

12

MARCH 27, 1942

Every day that passes is another day closer to evacuation.