He sits on the front stoop and smokes. After a minute, he hears the door creak open behind him. May is standing there.
“I can’t sleep,” she says. “I want to sit with you.”
“All right, just for a minute.” He opens one side of his coat and she curls against him.
“Daddy, why won’t Doreen play with me?” May asks.
Oh, dear. Doreen is Keo Sasaki’s niece. How can he explain this mess in terms a six-year-old can understand?
“Well,” he starts, “Do you think that you should do what is right even if other people don’t like it?”
“Yes,” May says.
“So I made a decision that some people don’t like.”
“I see,” May says. Her voice is sleepy. “I wish that Doreen would stop being mean to me.”
“She will,” he says, hoping he sounds like he is sure.
• • •
The next day, the last before the forms are due, everyone is subdued.
When Karl comes back to change his shirt before supper, he finds Leigh sitting on the front steps of Building No. 147 looking distraught.
“I can’t find May. She didn’t come back from school with the other kids.”
He can tell that she’s imagining the worst: an accident or some harm visited on May because of Karl. He goes to Leigh and takes her hand.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “She can’t be far. You stay in case she comes back here. I’ll go and find her.”
He searches among the cabins. He calls May’s name. He asks any children he meets if they’ve seen her. He knocks on the doors of the cabins where her playmates’ families sleep. No one has seen her.
It is already beginning to get darker and colder. What if she has fallen and hurt herself? What if she is hiding, scared because of something the other children said or did?
Some of the people he asks come out to help him search. Hana Sumiyoshi puts on her husband’s big overcoat since she does not have one of her own. Helen Nakamura, who works in the mess hall where they eat. The guys from his work detail, even the ex-plumber. Some of the children May plays with after school, some adults he doesn’t know. Soon there is a big group of them hunting through the cabins altogether.
• • •
It feels like some kind of parade, some kind of celebration, all of them out with flashlights and hurricane lamps that shine gold in the gathering blue-gray dark. Still there is no sign of May.
Finally, a little boy tells him that he saw a girl and a boy going toward the main gate of the camp a short while before. Karl sets off in that direction.
As he comes in sight of the gate, he notices that both the sentries have left their posts, which is strange. He keeps going toward the edge of the camp, looking for some sign of the children. Then he sees where the sentries have gone. They are over where the little stream runs along the boundary fence, standing among the gray skeletons of bushes on its banks. It is almost completely dark now, but they are illuminated by the arc lamps that shine along the boundary fence to prevent escapes: two white men in mud-colored uniforms, long wool coats, wool hats under their helmets.
They are looking down at something in the ditch.
Karl is behind them, so he cannot see their faces, and they have not heard him approach; he is perhaps twenty-five feet from them, but the wind blows away the sound of his footsteps. He hesitates. He does not want to seem to have been sneaking up on them. They are armed, after all.
Then, while he is deciding what to do, he sees one of the sentries nudge the other with his elbow: hey, watch this. From the holster on his belt, the man draws out his pistol. With a big exaggerated movement that uses his whole arm, he aims it at something in the stream bed in front of him, something Karl cannot see.
Karl stands rooted to the spot. His throat has gone dry. Is it an animal the man is aiming at? A tin can stuck in the ice? The man is still poised as if he’s going to shoot, as if he’s looking for just the right angle from which to fire.
After a little while, the other man seems to grow uncomfortable. He reaches over and pushes the barrel of the pistol down toward the ground. The first man laughs and holsters his gun. Then both men turn and walk back toward their posts at the main gate.
Karl, standing in the dark, watches them come toward him. He thinks that at any moment they might see him. But the darkness is full now and they pass by about fifteen feet from him without knowing it.
When they are gone, he approaches the place where they had stood. He looks down toward the stream. And he sees, as he expected, as he hoped he would not, the children.
In the spilled arc light, he can just make them out: May and a boy about her age. They are absorbed in looking at the great blue-white icicles that are hanging over the entrance to the culvert. They have noticed nothing.
May looks around when she hears his footsteps coming down the bank. Her eyes are wide in the dimming light. Karl grabs her by the hand, yanks her around to face him.
“Don’t you ever, ever run off like that again,” he says. He takes both children by the hand and marches them up the bank and back across the snowfield to where they sleep.
Leigh sends the boy, Ken Ozu, back to his family and puts May to bed early as punishment. She cries herself to sleep and they sit there listening to her cry, talking in whispers.
“Where did she go?” Leigh asks.
“She was looking at the icicles.” Karl sees again the children at the culvert mouth, the guards. He takes a breath and when he lets it out, it is a sob.
Leigh looks at him.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
For a moment he considers telling her. But what good would that do? Later, he thinks, later, when they are no longer in the camp, when they are somewhere far away.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Just tired. Just. ” He does not know what to say next.
She looks at him like she doesn’t quite believe him.
“Well, let’s go to bed,” she says. And so they do.
In the end, he does not tell her. In fact, he tells no one until many decades later when a PhD student from Berkeley called Julie Chen asks him for an interview. Leigh is four years dead by then, from cancer, and the young woman seems friendly, earnest. She reminds him of May when she was a student, before she moved to Michigan and started her own family. He is not sure why, finally, he decides to speak of what he saw, but once he starts it feels like he’s been waiting all this time to tell it.
• • •
When he’s finished, Julie Chen sits silent.
“You never told anyone this before?” she asks at last. Karl shakes his head.
“I never told.”
“Why not?”
“I was afraid. Until then I did not know that people could do that, make a joke of killing. I mean, I’d read about such things in the newspaper. But I must not have believed them. I think this is what I learned at that time. People are capable of any bad thing.”
“Yes,” Julie says. “I think I understand.”
Karl looks at her: her lineless face, her beautiful, well-made clothes. She has grown up in a time of nervous plenty. No, in spite of what she says, she doesn’t really know what he is saying. He could try to tell her this, but it wouldn’t do any good. Instead, he should just pray that she never learns to perceive her own unknowing.
“And what about the questionnaire?” Julie asks. “What did you decide to answer in the end?”
For a moment Karl, whose mind wanders off quite easily these days, hesitates.
“The. what?” he asks.
“The questionnaire. Did you answer yes or no to the last two questions?”