Starlight & Dark Nights (Stardust Beach #4)

Prologue

DECEMBER 1941

“You aren’t safe here. This is no place for an American girl. Not right now.”

Judith Nagasaki looked up at her mother as she stood in the doorway to the bedroom that they shared. Judith, seven years old and unaware of anything other than a lot of hushed talk amongst the adults, was playing with a tiny doll she’d gotten as a birthday gift from her grandmother that year.

“Why, Mama?” Judith asked, wide-eyed and afraid. “Why is this not a place for me?”

Keiko Nagasaki walked over to the bed with her hands clasped together; she was small, delicate, and her dark hair was combed smoothly against her perfectly round head. She sat on the edge of the low bed that she shared with her only child, looking at Judith with so much love and wonder that it seemed she might cry.

“Mama?” Judith tried again. “I’m not an American girl. I’m Japanese,” she said in English.

This made Keiko smile wanly. “Oh, my baby,” she said, sliding from the bed to the floor so that she was sitting knees-to-knees with her daughter. She reached out and took the doll from Judith gently. “It’s not safe here because Japan did something to America two days ago, and now America has declared war on Japan.”

Judith’s eyes darkened. “What did Japan do to America?”

Keiko demurred, looking down at her hands, which were holding Judith’s small, dark-haired, dark-eyed doll in its tiny red kimono. “They did something very cruel when America wasn’t expecting it, and now America is very angry.”

“And they’ll come here and hurt us?”

Keiko looked right into Judith’s face. “They might.” She bit her lip, considering the possibilities. “I think you should go and stay with your father.”

Judith’s face crumpled the moment the words were out of her mother’s mouth.

Her father? She barely remembered him! He was a stranger to her!

Judith’s mother had met him in Hawaii as a young, beautiful Japanese girl with waist-length hair and a soft demeanor. Michael Harper, Judith’s father, was there with the Navy, relaxing and enjoying the tropical lifestyle. He’d seen Keiko across a restaurant and been drawn to her like a moth to a flame—or so the story went. But Judith did not remember him, and the photographs of her father that she had made her shy away in fear. He was big-boned, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, and Judith took after her mother, coloring-wise. She was pale and tiny, and Michael Harper seemed to seven-year-old Judith like a giant from a children’s story.

“No,” Judith said softly, shaking her head. “No. I don’t want to. I want to be with you. I can protect you in case the Americans come.”

Keiko’s smile came then—thin, watery, sad—and her eyes softened. “My darling,” she whispered in Japanese, reaching over to touch her little girl’s forehead, brushing her black hair away gently. “I’ve already spoken to him. You have to go. He’ll protect you there.”

And because Judith always did what her mother said, she nodded and stared at the doll that sat on the floor now. She willed herself to be tough and unafraid, but deep down, she was scared.

“Okay?” Keiko asked her daughter, taking her hands in her own. “Okay?” she asked again.

Judith nodded, but she could not look at her mother. She could not say okay. She could not be unafraid.

* * *

The boat left Japan after midnight, and Judith was on it. Keiko was not. She had explained to her daughter that a Japanese face arriving on the shores of the United States shortly after the bad thing that Japan had done was a one-way ticket to danger and disaster. Though she pretended to understand, this made Judith more, and not less, fearful.

As the boat pulled away from its port, the dark sky blanketed the ship and a million twinkling stars watched it slip away into the ocean like a thief in the night. On shore, several small fires burned hotly, flames licking the sky. Judith overheard two American men talking about the hellfire that was about to rain down on Japan, and she wondered whether the fires she could see had something to do with hellfire.

Her chaperone on the boat was the wife of a member of the Navy and was known to Michael Harper, which had assuaged Keiko’s concerns a little bit. Not a lot, but enough for her to decide that this passage was the best and safest option for her young daughter. The woman was named Esther, and her blonde hair was curled into sausage rolls and pinned to the sides of her face. She wore painted-on red lipstick and she held herself upright, shoulders back. Judith was sure she’d never seen anyone so glamorous.

“Your father will be waiting in Los Angeles,” Esther promised, sweeping Judith’s dark hair away from her cheek and tucking it behind her ear. It was comforting, the way that Esther mothered her, but it also made Judith sad; she wanted her own mother, not someone else’s. And Esther was already someone else’s mother: a twelve-year-old boy called Chester, who Judith hated on sight. The feeling seemed to be mutual, as Chester ignored her as much as possible, and whenever his mother left them alone in their stateroom, he called Judith words she didn’t understand, like “half-breed” and “slant eyes.”

After he’d said those things the first time, Judith had locked herself into the tiny bathroom and stared at her face for nearly an hour, inspecting her eyes to see if they really did slant, and wondering whether being a half-breed was something that she could see on her skin or in her own smile. She’d decided that she had no idea what she was looking for, and she finally let herself out of the bathroom.

Esther had gone to play cards with some of the other Navy wives on the ship, leaving Chester in charge. Judith said their names over and over in her mind: Esther and Chester. Chester and Esther. The words made her think of chestnuts and chests of drawers and undergarments and small, furry brown animals—though she didn’t know why. None of it made perfect sense to her, but she let her mind wander as she stared out at the vast expanse of ocean beyond the porthole windows of the ship.

“Esther and Chester,” she whispered to herself, picking at a loose thread on her dress. “Esther and ? —“

“What?” Chester slammed the door of their room, startling her. “Are you saying my mother’s name?”

Judith turned to him and stared. She clamped her lips together, as she’d grown accustomed to doing in Chester’s presence.

“Where is my mother?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at her as if she might be hiding Esther somewhere in the room. “Did she leave?”

Judith was afraid to answer and afraid not to. She toyed with the idea of getting up and running past Chester, opening the door, and fleeing into the long hallway of the ship. She also toyed with the idea of telling him she hated him and hoped he fell over the side of the ship and drowned. But she did neither. Instead, she sighed.

“She went to play cards,” Judith said, unable to meet Chester’s gaze. “With the women.”

“The women,” he parroted, using an annoying voice. He stood there, blocking the doorway as a look came over his face. “How old are you again?”

“Seven,” Judith whispered. “I turned seven in October.”

Chester eyed her appraisingly. “You know, for a half-breed, you’re not completely ugly. I bet you could even be pretty when you grow up. As long as you take after your dad and not your mom.”

Judith could feel an insult in there somewhere—what she did not yet know was the abrasive grind of a racist remark—and her heart seized up in her chest. She wanted to defend her mother to this boy, but she wasn’t sure how. Or why she needed to.

“Stand up,” he said, glaring at Judith. She stood. A strange look came over Chester’s face and his neck flushed bright pink. The color crept up to his cheeks and he turned to lock the stateroom door. “You want to see something?” he asked her.

Judith did not really want to see something, but for some reason this felt like an olive branch; perhaps an offer of friendship. She nodded.

“Go into the bathroom,” Chester said, checking the lock on the door again. “Hurry. I have something you’ll really want to see.”

Judith felt a prickle of fear as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and she understood later in life that this is the warning sign an alert animal gets when they are in some sort of danger. But at the tender age of seven, she did not yet know this, and she walked into the bathroom with an innocent heart.

Chester came in behind her, locking the door and changing her life forever.

* * *

By the time the boat docked in Los Angeles, they’d missed Christmas, and Judith had learned far more about the anatomy of young males than she had ever wanted to know. In fact, she’d never wondered about them at all, and was therefore entirely shocked to find that beneath his clothing, Chester had an entirely different piece of equipment than what she had.

Michael Harper was there at the port, waiting for Judith under a bright, cloudless blue sky. He squinted as Esther escorted his young daughter off the boat. Esther delivered Judith to him with a fair amount of excited chatter about her husband, who had served in the Navy with Michael in San Diego and also in Hawaii.

Judith was hungry and needed to use the restroom, but instead of saying so, she hopped from foot to foot as her father talked to Esther, keeping one watchful eye on Chester as he spit over the side of the dock into the water. She would not miss him, nor would she miss Esther’s ignorance of her own son’s behavior. Overall, Esther had been kind to Judith, but Judith did not particularly like her; any woman who could have raised a son like Chester was someone she did not trust.

In the car, Michael looked at his daughter in the rearview mirror. Judith sat in the back of his station wagon, eyes trained out the window in wonder as she watched the palm trees and the Christmas decorations that were still hanging on houses and businesses.

“How was the trip?” he asked her, hoping that she might say something.

Judith shrugged. “Fine,” she said so quietly that it was almost inaudible. “It was fine.”

Michael cleared his throat and tried again. “Did you do anything for Christmas on the boat?”

Judith exhaled loudly through her nostrils. “We ate turkey on Christmas Day.”

“Anything special for the children?”

Judith was bored of this conversation already. She was tired, homesick, lonely, fearful, and she still needed to use the restroom.

“Did Santa make an appearance?” Michael Harper swung his car onto the freeway and pushed down on the gas pedal, propelling them towards some unknown place that he’d referred to as “home,” as in “let’s get you home, shall we?”

Judith finally turned her head from the window and looked at her father. “Santa?” she asked. “Yes.” There had been a Santa, just not the real one. Judith instantly recognized the man in the red suit as one of the Navy men whose family was bunking in the same hallway as her and Esther and Chester.

“And did you get any gifts?”

Judith shook her head. There had been candy, but no gifts.

“Well, lucky for you, he knew you’d be coming to my house, and he dropped off a few packages.” Michael pulled the car off at an exit and slowed to a stop, waiting for a light to change. “He left some very nice looking gifts there, and we thought we’d save Christmas dinner for when you could join us. How does that sound? Doing Christmas with us tonight?”

Judith could sense a hopefulness that bordered on desperation in her father’s voice, so she pasted a smile on her face and gave him a single nod. “Okay,” she said.

His house was completely unlike the one that Judith lived in with her mother. Instead of a minka-style house with its sliding doors and tatami floors, her father’s home was a 1920s Spanish influenced dwelling with arched doorways and windows. Inside, there were black iron railings, red-tiled floors, and stucco walls. Judith’s bedroom looked out on a sprawling green lawn that sloped down to a wide street. Los Angeles was nothing like Japan.

“You’ll sit here,” Bea, Judith’s stepmother, said, pointing at a chair near the end of the table where her father sat. “Our children sit here and here,” she added, touching two of the other chairs that surrounded the table.

Bea had immediately informed Judith that she could call her Beatrice or Bea, but never Mom or Mother. Bea’s disdain for her husband’s first child was palpable, though Judith was young enough that she did not understand the dynamics of the situation, nor did she know enough to formulate thoughts like: “My stepmother hates me”—she just knew in her bones that she did.

Their Christmas dinner was a ham with potatoes and green beans, and after Judith and her younger siblings—a startling revelation: siblings!—had finished, they were allowed to sit beneath the Christmas tree with its dried-out needles and wait patiently for the gifts that they’d been promised.

These children, three-year-old Mary and five-year-old Oliver, were well-behaved—Judith could give them that. As she sat with her knees folded beneath her, Mary and Oliver did the same, staring wide-eyed at the lights and ornaments and not talking to Judith.

Finally, her father emerged from the kitchen, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows.

“Present time!” he said in a friendly, booming voice. He clapped his hands together and crouched down near the children, taking the wrapped packages from beneath the tree and handing them out to his kids as they sat there in a row.

“Mary,” he said, handing his youngest child a wrapped box and then another. “And Oliver,” he said, pushing something bigger towards his only son. “And finally, Judith.” He offered her something small with an almost apologetic look in his eyes. After he’d given them all boxes to open, he stood and unhooked three stockings from the mantel, handing one to each child. Judith noticed that hers looked the least full, but she pasted a smile on her tired face, trying not to look or feel slighted.

The journey had been long, and until just that morning, she’d spent all her waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours trying to dodge Chester and his strangely roaming hands. She’d tried her hardest to be good and to act like a happy, normal girl for Esther as they ate their meals together aboard the ship, and now here she was, sitting in a house with a father she barely remembered and a new family she wasn’t sure if she even liked, and all she wanted was her mother. Her mother, her house, her own bed, her familiar surroundings. She wanted to hear people speaking Japanese, to sip miso soup from a ceramic bowl in the mornings, and to play with the doll she’d been allowed to pack in her tiny suitcase to take with her on the journey.

Suddenly, tears felt imminent, and Judith did not want to cry. Not in front of these strangers. Instead, she bit her tongue as hard as she could, holding it between her teeth as Mary and Oliver ripped into their packages and emptied their stockings.

Just as she’d suspected, her younger half-siblings were the recipients of toys and games and candy in their stockings, while she had received a small pink hairbrush, a handful of shelled walnuts, and an orange in her stocking. For good measure, someone had dropped in a piece of caramel, which she held in the palm of her hand now, hoping that the warmth of her skin would melt it and render it inedible.

It wasn’t that Judith expected the world, nor had she ever experienced a Christmas that was full of gifts and magic and Santa Claus, but it would have been nice on this, her first day in California, to feel as if she wasn’t just some appendage to this already-formed family. She looked around at her father, who was making eye contact with his wife, and then at Mary and Oliver, who were happily playing with their new toys.

Over the coming weeks and months, Judith had plenty of opportunities to feel that sense of “otherness” that she’d felt when Chester had called her a half-breed; on more than one occasion, kids at her new school looked at her curiously, as if they wanted to ask her what rock she’d climbed out from under. And that’s how she felt, too: like she’d turned over a stone and slithered out from beneath it.

Her English was good: her mother had raised her to speak both English and Japanese fluently, but her father and Bea has instructed her fiercely to never slip into Japanese. No matter what happened, she was to stay quiet unless she could speak a sentence comfortably in English. She was never to mention Japan, and rather than calling herself Judith Nagasaki, she was now Judith Harper, for better or for worse.

Judith drifted off to sleep each night in the darkness of this strange California home, pretending that she was stretched out in her bed in Japan next to her mother. She breathed loudly, imagining that the sound of her own breath was really the sound of her mother’s breath—in, out, in, out—rhythmically falling asleep. It soothed her.

During the days, she counted the hours of difference in the time between herself and her mother (seventeen hours) so that she could always know where her mother was and what she was doing: when it was morning for Judith, her mother would be fast asleep in her bed. As Judith went to sleep each night, her mother would be eating her lunch of rice and fish in Japan, and perhaps thinking ahead to the chores she needed to do around the house that evening. It calmed her, thinking of her mother. It also stirred up emotions in her that she preferred to keep hidden from everyone else, so she took to hiding herself away in bathrooms and closets so that she could cry alone.

It was during one such secretive session in a coat closet that Judith overheard Bea talking on the telephone in the hallway.

“She’s only seven,” Bea said in this conversation that was, to Judith, one-sided. “I know. But Michael is a man of his word, and he insists that we take care of her. She’s his daughter. But will I have to raise her alongside my own children until she’s eighteen? Is it my responsibility to take care of his…well, his mistake?”

Mistake . The word sat heavily in Judith’s heart as she listened to Bea shuffle her feet on the wooden floor of the hallway. The rest of the conversation meant nothing to Judith, because all she could hear in her brain, in her heart, rushing in her ears, was the word “mistake.”

For the rest of her life, she would know that she was someone’s mistake.