This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

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.