A few more words and then she pulled away and I returned to the shadowed interior of the office, mopping my sweating face before settling into my chair once more. Through the window I watched the Pontiac cross over the freeway, turning north before that big ­Victorian that marked the edge of town. The bumper of the car flashed once just as it disappeared into the high shadow of the fruit sheds, a bright blooming of sunlight reflecting across the open space under which the freeway sped unceasingly. Then she was gone, that apparition of my own lost childhood, and I was once again alone with Nat Turner and the growing rage of his troubled mind.

I HAVE SINCE PONDERED that moment in great detail, for had I said nothing to her, had I simply filled the tank of the Pontiac and let her drive away, I would never have stumbled into the story of Ray Takahashi and his ghost would never have come to ride upon my heart the way it has. In 1969 I only managed to write that single chapter, but my failure to continue his story was not because it had lost its hold on my imagination but instead because I could not see my way around writing about Evelyn Wilson and Kimiko Takahashi and the rest of them, not while they were still alive and their stories still belonged to them, although it is easy enough to see the opposite of that point of view, that they deserved—especially my Aunt Evelyn, or rather the woman I am calling Evelyn Wilson in this book—to see the bare, bold truth printed in black permanent ink.

And yet I have also come to understand that this story is not only a tragedy but a love story, not only Ray Takahashi’s but Evelyn Wilson’s too, who looked upon a child and felt within her some upwelling of emotion so surprising that she could hardly bear to breathe and yet still turned away, leaving that child in Seattle as if to leave him were to eradicate a whole swath of her history, not only from her own memory but from the memory of her family and perhaps even the town. No one yet knew the full story of what had happened—not even Evelyn Wilson herself and certainly not any of the Takahashi family—but she ensured that its pale phantom would never rise to haunt whatever sunlit days remained. And for two and a half decades it had worked, not only for my aunt but for the whole town, a place that believed in its own noble sacrifice with such fervor that its very history was made to serve that definition, certain facts remembered and others conveniently forgotten. Of the buses and the camps which are a fair part of the story to come: I do not recall ever hearing about them when I was growing up, not in school and not at home. We did not talk of what happened, of what we did, nor did we talk of the families who were taken away and who, with rare exception, chose not to return to Placer County. We banished them so completely that after a time they did not even come to our thoughts, not to the thoughts of the generations who had witnessed and experienced that removal and so not to their children’s. So it had been as easy for this place to forget Ray ­Takahashi as it had been to forget his family, his return only a lapse of a few weeks, his absence a kind of relief for our collective conscience. They were gone. That was all. They were gone by way of Executive Order 9066 and yet that order was only the most recent manifestation of a general feeling of difference and separateness held within.