LITMIR.BIZ

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in how it’s kept. That’s not true for everyone. Our neighbors across the street? You can barely see their front door for the weeds. But my closest neighbors? Well, they had a trellis of roses in the backyard that was a sight to behold when it was in bloom. You could smell ’em from a block away. Now, Mike Watanabe tended those roses himself. Wouldn’t let his wife—her name was Risa—anywhere near ’em. They were his pride and joy.”

      The policeman opened the door to let us into the station, then followed us inside. A Japanese woman, her half-Japanese children, and a cop as big as a truck? Every eye turned toward us. But Officer Mackley didn’t appear to notice. He continued on with his story.

      “Mike Watanabe owned a landscaping business he inherited from his father. Hardest-working man I ever met. Out by six o’clock every morning except Sunday. Didn’t come home before sunset. On Sunday he’d take the family to church, then work all day on his house. Mike could fix anything. Plumbing, wiring, roofing, painting—you name it. And he did it himself.”

      Officer Mackley stopped us on our way to the ticket counter. “They gave Mike three weeks to sell his house and his business. I know for a fact that his home sold for a quarter of its true value because I spoke to the man who bought it. And Mike never did sell his business. Just closed the door and walked away. Now, I’m only a dumb copper, so maybe I should keep my opinions to myself. I’ve been told that by Sergeant Carnahan on more than one occasion. But for the life of me, I can’t see the justice in takin’ away everything Mike Watanabe and his family worked so hard to get and then sending them to an internment camp. This is a man who in his entire life never did anything to harm his country.”

      Chapter 3

      It didn’t take more than two seconds for me to realize I’d been completely naïve. Somehow, probably because I was desperate at the time, I had imagined the train being a place of refuge, a sanctuary. But the long passenger car we entered was really a trap. Our original strategy—keep moving—wouldn’t work there because there was no place to go. Oh, sure, we could change cars, but the second-class cars were all the same: long and narrow, with a row of dome lights running along the center, and luggage racks on either side. The people were all the same too. They regarded us with suspicious eyes as we stood on the platform with Officer Mackley. As we boarded the train clutching our suitcases, we were again on our own.

      We made our way along the aisle to a pair of facing seats. Then Mom and I put the suitcases on the racks and we settled down, me and Charlie on one seat, facing backward, Mom on the other.

      I stared at her for a moment. She wore a yellow scarf on her head, the scarf wet enough to appear almost transparent. I knew I didn’t look any better. My hair was a shade lighter than Mom’s jet black, and I could feel it clinging to my neck. I kept my hair fairly short, and I didn’t curl it into flowing waves—the style in the early 1940s. Now it lay plastered against my scalp like paint on the head of a doll.

      I watched the Whizz look out through the window when the train began to move. Though he was as bedraggled as his mother and sister, he seemed unaware of his surroundings. Maybe he was still hoping our voyage would turn out to be an adventure.

      The Whizz, like Dad, had always been an optimist. He looked more like Dad too. His hair was lighter than mine, and he even had a few freckles on either side of his nose. In Hawaii our mixed heritage had earned the Whizz and I the label of hapa, the Hawaiian word for half, or hapa haole, the Hawaiian term for half white. But here we were all Japanese. Observation wasn’t the Whizz’s strong point. He didn’t notice, for example, that the seats in front and behind us were empty, as were the seats to either side, even though the car was fairly crowded.

      It felt to me at that moment like we’d been dropped into a pit. The glances we received—and everyone looked at us—were distinctly hostile. But nobody said anything, not just then.

      The conductor came down and took our tickets a few minutes after we departed. He’d greeted each of his passengers along the way, but not us. After he moved on, the Whizz and I shrugged out of our wet jackets and laid them across the seat next to Mom. Then I somehow found the courage to fetch one of the suitcases from the rack, the largest one. I dug out a sweater for myself and another for Charlie. Mom looked at me and gave a slight shake of her head. She would endure.

      I felt myself grow angry. At the end of the car, four soldiers lounged in seats across from each other. They were looking directly at us, their expressions a mix of hostility and contempt. I wanted to ask them why they were headed east, away from the fighting, while my dad’s ship roamed the Pacific in search of the enemy. The words were on the tip of my tongue, but my courage failed me at the last minute, and I sat.

      “Here,” I said to Charlie, “put this on.”

      A few minutes later, with the train entering the steep hills separating San Francisco from California’s central valley, a porter came down the aisle pushing a cart loaded with snacks. He wore a starched, snow-white jacket and a white cap with a stiff, black peak. He was short and thin, and the expression on his mahogany face was so unchanging it might have been set in stone.

      The Whizz’s eyes fastened on a row of candy bars and didn’t move. Oh Henry!, Zagnut, Almond Joy, and Chuckles, arranged in little boxes. To say my younger brother had a pronounced sweet tooth would be to understate the reality by a mile. He sighed when Mom bought three hard-boiled eggs, three oranges, and a bottle of milk, but he didn’t argue. For once.

      Mom bought a newspaper, too—the San Francisco Chronicle. Before Pearl Harbor, Charlie and I had paid no attention to the news. That was for grown-ups. I read the Sunday comic strips to my little brother and that was the end of it. Now, with Dad at sea, we followed the progress of the war as if knowing could somehow change the course of events—which needed changing because every day seemed to bring another Japanese victory. Hong Kong, Guam, Wake Island, Burma, the Dutch East Indies. We’d taken a stand in Singapore only to be brushed aside in a few days.

      The headline across the top of the Chronicle’s front page on that day read: JAPS ADVANCE ON CORREGIDOR. A smaller article on the left side of the paper carried a familiar headline: “Japanese Atrocities in Bataan Verified!”

      Mom glanced at the Chronicle and then turned it over to me. The Whizz, as usual, scooted across the seat to read over my shoulder. Only in second grade, he had to ask the meaning of every other word, and I sometimes became impatient. Not on that day, however. I wanted to keep my head down, to become so engrossed in the articles that I didn’t notice the four soldiers only a few rows away, or hear their comments about Japanese, or see them open a bottle that could only contain hard liquor and pass it around.

      I started with the main article, the one I knew would affect our lives in Connecticut. Corregidor is a small island at the entrance to Manila Bay, on the southern end of the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Manila, the Philippine capital, had already been captured, and the American forces were making a last stand on Corregidor. Talk about a hopeless situation. The American commander, General Douglas MacArthur, had already been evacuated to Australia. But hopeless or not, Corregidor would play a central part in our immediate future.

      Our final destination was the home of Ellen Hardy, Dad’s sister. Aunt Ellen didn’t have any children, but she did have a husband. Having graduated from West Point, Colonel Blake Hardy had been serving his country for twenty years. At the time he was in the Philippines, on the island of Luzon, fighting for his life.

      Except for official messages transmitted in code, all communication with the American soldiers stationed on Luzon had been terminated a month earlier. Six weeks had passed without Aunt Ellen receiving a letter from her husband.

      I knew all this because Mom had summoned me and the Whizz into our living room, which we rarely used, right before we had packed for the trip. She’d seated us on the couch, pulled a chair to within a few feet, sat, and folded her hands over her knees. We were accustomed to this ritual when Mom had something important to say. Our job was to listen attentively—even the Whizz, who couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds.

      “I want you to respect your aunt’s circumstances,” Mom had said after she’d

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