Chapter Thirty-Five Violet
Chapter Thirty-Five
Violet
I stay up late, drawing with the weak light from the bulb.
I listen to our barrack’s ballad, all of it accompanied by the wind.
It’s familiar to me, now. I hear Mr. Kimura’s great, thundering snores and Mrs. Kimura’s interjections.
She speaks in Japanese, but I’ve learned that she says, “Breathe!” “Wake up!” “Stop snoring, old bear!” Beyond them, the couple talks and the woman says, “If your mother gets transferred here from Poston, I’ll commit harakiri,” to which the man says, “Oh, come on, she’s not that bad.
She’ll help with the baby when it comes.
” The restless sleeper sighs and hums and counts to one hundred in English and then in Spanish.
Ren leaves in two days.
Mama sits up with me, reading her Bible. I tell her about seeing Otōsan, adding our own voices to the ballad. Mama says she’s not surprised.
“God let him come,” she says. “He knows you needed to say goodbye.”
“But what about you?” I ask.
“You needed it more,” she says, and I know her love is sacrifice. She would give me everything if she could and keep nothing for herself. Her love is made from the same thing as Otōsan’s light.
I set my pencil down. I think about Mama asking how my day was when we first arrived, trying to re-create my tradition with Otōsan.
It’s hard to change, but she loves me enough to try.
Maybe I need to try, too. I’m learning how to be my own woman, and part of it is being brave enough to decide how you want to live your life.
If the time comes, I will pursue art. I won’t ignore the call of my own heart.
Not in regard to this. And not in regard to Ren. I take a breath.
“Mama?”
“Hai?”
“We never talk about it, but we both know.” She lowers her Bible, waiting.
“I love Ren. I want to marry him someday. I don’t want to keep it hidden from you, and I want you to get to know him, once he comes back from the war.
I know you are worried that he won’t know how to love me well. But, Mama, he already does, every day.”
Mama closes her Bible. There’s no disapproval in her face, only a strange distance, as though she’s wrestling with something within herself.
“You never knew my parents,” she says. It’s true.
Her parents died when she was a teenager, and she never speaks about them.
“My father was a harsh man. Very harsh. I always feared love until I met your Otōsan. I thought that because I was hurt, I would hurt others. I would hurt him. And, sometimes, I did. I only want the very best for you, Violet.”
“But you were the very best for Otōsan,” I say quietly, and I know it’s true. He would have married her every day if he could, and she knows it, too. “You made your own choices to be different from your father, and so does Ren. Trust me, Mama, and trust Ren.”
Mama is quiet again. Then, slowly, she reaches out a hand and gently brushes my hair back from my face and says, “You are a gift, Violet. I don’t tell you often enough.”
The next day, as I walk across camp to meet Ren, there’s a commotion near the administration offices.
An ambulance has been called. The siren is off but its red light flashes and the rear doors are ajar.
Several men wheel someone out on a gurney.
The man is strapped down and shrieking. I freeze, clutching my deer to my chest.
It’s Mr. Boser.
His eyes are huge and unblinking. He jerks wildly against the straps buckling him to the gurney. Suddenly, his crazed gaze catches mine, boring a hole into my chest where I hold my relic, and his slurring screams become words.
“You’ve had one all along, Miss Aratani? You’ve had one and you never told me?”
He lets loose a cackle that makes my skin go cold. I quickly slip my deer into my pocket. A man in a white jacket sticks Mr. Boser with a syringe and he goes limp against the gurney.
I hurry on my way. I don’t think I’ll ever see Mr. Boser again.
“Hey, slugger,” Ren says when I greet him outside his barrack. “You okay?”
“Of course,” I say, shaking the thought of Mr. Boser from my mind. I don’t know what drove that man mad, but at the moment, I cannot bring myself to care. All I can think about is the fact that Ren will be leaving in six hours.
The truth is, I already miss him, even though he’s right next to me.
I’ve lived seventeen years without knowing him, yet I can’t imagine life without him.
It’s like my composition has changed since we met.
The tempo of my heartbeat, the rise and fall of my chest, the pulse in my neck—it’s all quicker, happier, attuned to life.
He makes me move to music only he and I hear.
He makes me dance steps only he and I know.
But the music is about to stop. I’ll be left standing there, stuck to the floor after flying across it.
“Here. Take this one.” He removes the sketch I did of him from his pocket and hands it to me. “We don’t have photos and all that, so I want you to have it.”
I carefully put the drawing in my pocket and take out my deer.
“And you take this.”
He pales. “Violet, no. What if something happens over there and I lose it? It’s from your father. You need to keep it.”
“I’ve already decided,” I say. “I’ve whispered in its ear every night that it must keep you safe.”
“Are you sure?”
“More than sure.” Slowly, carefully, he slides it into his pocket.
His reaches for me, holds me. “You better come back to me,” I say.
He’s been so strong, but suddenly I see the enormity of his future in his eyes.
He’s going to war. Who knows what he’ll see or what he’ll have to do.
“I swear, I’ll kill you if you die over there, Ren Hamada. ”
In one motion, Ren envelops me in his arms. I hear his heart hammering beneath his shirt, and I close my eyes.
“I will, Violet,” he says. “I promise I’ll come back. We’ll get married and we will never be apart, ever again.”
My heart is breaking again. When I learned Otōsan died, it shattered.
I wanted desperately, violently, to go home—while knowing I never would.
Now my heart breaks in a different way. It has the same desperation, but it feels like searching—like I’ll be looking for Ren everywhere and my eyes won’t find rest until he’s safe and back.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he says, clutching me.
“How can everything be okay when we’re apart?” Agony fills my voice.
“Because this—me going away—is how we’ll get there, Violet. It’s how we get to a world where no one can ever tear us apart. We’ll get there, and then we’ll leave them all behind. We’ll forget them and what we had to do because we’ll have each other, and damn it, it’s all we’ll ever need.”
War is a horrible thing. I know this. But I’ve learned something.
Some people go to war out of hate. But some people go to war out of love.
As I stand in his arms, I think that the government tried to take everything from us.
They took our homes and our shops. Our futures and hope.
They took Otōsan and Emi. They called us the enemy and put us behind barbed wire.
But there’s something they can’t take away: how I feel when Ren takes my hand in his and whispers “I love you.”
Shakily, I pull free and wipe my eyes.
“I—I need to go,” I say. “Mama has to register the answers to her questionnaire tomorrow at the mess hall. I told her I’d help her get ready.” I pause. Life and the rest of its worries scramble to claim my mind. “She signed yes to the allegiance question. She’ll be stateless.”
“But she’ll be with you, and that’s what she cares about most,” Ren says, and it’s true.
I think about Mr. Nomura fighting for our rights.
After the war, I’ll fight for Mama to get hers.
For her to have what she’s always been denied, even as she’s poured her blood, sweat, and tears into America. Citizenship.
Ren pauses and shifts.
“Violet, I don’t think you should come when we leave. It’ll be too hard. So hard that I might not get on the bus. Will you do that, for me? Let this be our goodbye?”
I think he’s doing it for me, really. I might not be able to let him go. I reach for him again, and when we kiss, it’s our goodbye.
And then it happens.
Time freezes.
Rationally, I know it doesn’t. But, in a way, it does.
It’s as though our kiss is one single, untouched moment.
It’s like my drawings, where every detail captures movement—dripping salt water, unfurling hair, splashing waves—but the image is frozen, just as it is. Just as it was. Just as it will be.
And that’s us. Here and now.
It makes it easier when we do pull away. I think the kiss is something I can return to, even when Ren is a continent away.
As I leave, I round the corner of Ren’s barrack and stumble by the fish pond. Ethan is there, floating a paper boat. He peers shyly up at me through his overgrown bangs.
“What will you fill the pond with?” he asks. “You didn’t say.”
I stare deep into the water, as though it’s a wishing well. And maybe it is. Maybe the pond cradles everything for us at the camp, letting us pour our hurts into it and keeping them for us so we can just be for a bit. I smile at Ethan.
“I’d fill it with hope.”