Page 3 of Starlight & Dark Nights

“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.

CHAPTER1

December 13, 1964

DEREK TRAGER

“Good morning,good morning, it’s time to reach for the moon,” Maxine Trager sings to her husband in her slightly off-key, warbling voice. “Good morning, good morning, my love will be home sooooooon.”

Derek laughs at this and reaches for her in their bed, pulling her warm body closer to his.

“Did you sleep at all?” Maxine asks, snuggling into the spoon of his body with the back of hers.

As Derek reaches around his wife’s body, he can feel the swell of her stomach and he lays a palm flat, waiting to see whether or not he’ll get the light quickening of tiny hands and feet from inside her belly. He hasn’t yet, but Maxine can feel the baby moving inside of her, and so he places his palms on her stomach each day, hoping for a greeting from the tiny astronaut who is currently floating around inside the universe of Maxine’s body.

“I slept a bit,” he lies, kissing the back of her neck. In truth, he did not sleep a wink. Being chosen to lead the Gemini orbital mission in Bill Booker’s place had been unexpected, and Derek feels as if he’s been given a gift that he isn’t sure he deserves.

“Let me make you a good breakfast,” Maxine whispers. She turns her body around in his arms until they’re nose-to-nose, and she kisses him gently. “Unless there’s something else you’d like to do first.”

A slow smile spreads across Derek’s tired face as he returns her kiss in a way that lets her know exactly what it is that he’d like to do.

When the Tragers finally emerge from their bedroom—Maxine wrapped in a satin robe, Derek wearing a thick cotton robe and leather slippers—they can hear small, happy noises coming from their daughter’s bedroom. Their son, Ryan, who is a seventh grader, is still asleep.

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