This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

He’s inserting the letter back into the envelope when his fingers brush against something in the envelope. He frowns. It’s something he never noticed the dozens of times he’s read the letter. A tiny slip of paper, perhaps the length of half a pinkie finger, not even. He turns it over. Hard to make out any details in the dim light.

He places it back into the envelope, then leans his head back into the pillow. In the darkness, someone groans. The air is fetid and hot, and Alex suddenly finds he needs light. He needs air. The deck. He slides out, causing the whole five-tier canvas bunk to sway. He throws on a shirt, placing the envelope into a pocket.

“Tell me it’s over,” Teddy groans from the top bunk, his face green. He’s suffered seasickness from the minute he first stepped on the Johns Hopkins. Now, three weeks later, the ship zigzagging to evade Nazi subs, there’s been no let up. “Tell me we’ve arrived.”

“Nah.”

“Throw me overboard. Please.”

“I think about doing that a dozen times a day.”

Teddy turns over on his side, groaning.

* * *

The deck is surprisingly empty. Even at night there are usually a dozen soldiers braving the cold, or bent over the rails, upchucking overboard the half-digested remnants of their last meal and sending nighttime fish into a feeding frenzy below.

But an earlier rainstorm has chased everyone below deck. Now only a drizzling mist sprinkles down, fine as pixie dust. Alex draws in a breath, fills his lungs with the cold air. A cleansing. Even the saltiness in the air feels medicinal, a scouring of infestations within. He exhales, pushing out the rank breath. Draws in another gulp of air. He can do this all night. He can do this all the way to Europe and still feel like he has not expelled whatever has festered within.

He stares out to sea. Large swells move like shifting plates of scuffed armor. The enormity of the vast waters—

In the distance, a strange light. A tiny glowing dot, ghostly and ephemeral. Alex is suddenly thinking the strangest thought. The floating lantern Charlie wrote about. One she had made and set afloat on the Seine. He watches this light now, his heart beating wilder. A light between their worlds of ash and dust. It draws closer, growing larger, stretching out into a glowing string.

It’s not a floating lantern, of course not. It’s a mass of some kind of fluorescent plant—or perhaps a colony of jellyfish—passing by. He stares, disappointed yet mesmerized by this sight. This radiant heart light. If he had not come to the deck, it would have passed unobserved. He wonders if the world is like this: so many miracles of beauty everywhere, if only you knew where to look, that go otherwise unobserved.

He imagines one day telling Charlie about this scene. He sees them sitting at an outdoor café in Paris, talking over coffee and éclairs or maybe even that pastry Charlie has raved about, the gâteau St. Honoré topped with a ring of pâte à choux. And he would describe to her this night. The passing storm, the dark, mysterious black waters. And this massive glowing pool.

She’s dead.

No. She’s alive.

He stares out to the black ocean as if the answer lies somewhere within its unfathomable depths. It roils before him, solemn and silent.

He remembers now why he came up to the deck. He reaches into his shirt pocket, withdraws the envelope. It’s one of Charlie’s last letters, he sees now. He takes out the tiny slip inside, and examines it under the moonlight. It’s blank on both sides. Probably just a whatever scrap of paper. He’s about to fling it into the sea when he freezes.

Could it be?

He’d always imagined the Sinti slips to be large and embroidered, made of cloth or some kind of parchment, and full of gypsy curlicues along the margins, a centering watermark encircled by a phrase in Sinti. Something mysterious, magical. Imbued with a mystical aura that would tingle your fingertips. Not this: a castaway fragment of paper.

In her letter, she’d written, Maybe you can try, too, no?

He stares down at the slip. Is this a Sinti slip? Did Charlie put one in the envelope for him?

A gentle ocean breeze blows, and the slip begins to flutter like a streamer on the handlebars of a child’s bike. No way, he thinks to himself. No way.

And yet his hand moves to his pants. To the pen in his pocket.

Charlie Lévy, he scribbles on it. And waits.

Nothing happens. A minute passes. He glances around, sees nothing out of the ordinary. Just the rain-splattered deck, the dark cartilage of metal rising over him. No sound but the blowing of the wind, whistling through the loading booms and mizzenmasts.

Another minute passes. Two. Three. He is feeling very foolish now—

It’s the smell he notices first. A sootiness mixed in with the saltiness of the sea.

He tilts his head this way and that. The smell is coming from the bow. He walks past the midship house, the flying bridge, the mainmast. The wind stronger, the smell fuller—

He sees it. Just beyond the foremast, floating above the hatch cover. A kind of hole blooming open, a mouth of frayed, indistinct edges. No, not a hole, more globular, like a sphere—

He hears a strange crackling sound, like radio static.

At the edge he pauses before stepping onto what should be a canvas stretched across the hatch cover. Initially he feels it, the soft give under his feet. Then it hardens, feels gritty. He looks down. Dirt, black snow. He glances up.

A row of barracks. Another on his left. As dark and cold and lifeless as tombstones. A guard tower in the distance, machine guns pointing inward. Everything hazy, just out of focus. Some shapes shuffle along, but they are distant and contorted, tiny wraiths floating just above the ground.

The smell. Black and sooty and acrid.

His nostrils twitch. He takes another few steps until he is swallowed whole, and now the smells are pungent and the blurred surroundings sharpen into focus.

These barracks. They are not the tar-papered ones in Manzanar. But larger, longer, made of brick. With steeped rooftops, a chimney jutting out of each. They reek of famine, of cold soot.

A sharp wind, colder than the Atlantic Ocean in May could ever be, slices into him. He shivers. Flakes of snow—somehow black—drift past his face.

He hears nothing. No door clacking shut, no truck roaring away, no human voice, no sounds of camp life. Just an eerie silence.

He waits. She will come. Previous times, he had come to her. This time, she w

ill come to him. He waits, his heart beating, curious yet fearful, the icy ground stinging the soles of his feet.

He waits only a short time.

She comes bounding around the nearest barrack. At a mad sprint, her legs and arms a blur. She is looking in the other direction. She swings her head toward him. Freezes. Stares at him. Big, blinking eyes. Her breath, frosting out in gigantic plumes of white.

In this vision, she is not awash in glowing light. She is gray like the barracks around them, like the abraded sky, the hard ground. But sharper and clearer for it, like a pencil sketch.

She takes a step toward him. Her eyes brimming with emotion. A flickering soft light falls on her, dim waves of purple and orange. The light is radiating from him. Because it is he who is the traveler this time, the visitor, he who is glowing with light.

The colors dance over her face, over the clothes that drape over her like an oversize coat on a skinny hanger. How dangerously thin she has become. Even thinner than the last time he saw her in Manzanar.

“Charlie,” he whispers. No sound. Charlie.

Her lips quiver—is she speaking?—he does not hear a thing.

Alex.

He motions to the ground. “Charlie. Write down in the dirt where you are. Write. It. Down.”

She shakes her head, not understanding.

He drops to his knees, and stabs at the hard ground. He wants to write Where are you? but his phantom fingers touch nothing. He shouts with frustration, jabbing harder. But nothing, his ghostly hand passing through the dirt and dust, touching the plastic canvas.

She kneels down before him. Her face so gaunt.

Snow drifts past their faces, black and soft. One catches on her eyelashes; he wishes he could gently blow it away.

“Where are you, Charlie?” he says.

But instead of answering, her eyes suddenly widen in panic.