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April 1993 - Escape
One day, when I was about 9 years old, my Mother collected me from school, just after second bell, and had taken me away from my father, and from the only life I had known, and into a new life in Kyoto. At the time, I had expected that this new life wouldn't last. I thought that it was likely a temporary arrangement that would come to an end as soon as my Mother had arranged a way to put more distance between my father and myself. For pretty much all of that first year in the compound, I braced myself for the news that we would be moving on. Every time that my Mother seemed hesitant or when her behavior became a little bit more secretive or erratic than usual, I expected the news to come that we would be packing up and leaving. However, the news didn't come. That first year went by and we were still in the same place. The a second year came and went, and we were still living in Kyoto. By which time I was settled in school, and and my life. By the third year I felt like I'd always lived in Kyoto. I'd completely forgotten about my fear of being uprooted again, and I stopped automatically tensing up at the slightest thing. By the fourth year, the idea of my Mother moving us again seemed like a distant nightmare. Unfortunately, it didn't stay distant for all that long. Portent Late in March, just after I had turned fourteen-years-old, something happened, and I knew that things were about to change. One day, late in the evening, a man arrived at the compound gate and headed straight for the door to our apartment. He knocked heavily, and with urgency, and when my Mother answered it she gasped, and hurried off to the kitchen with the man, with such haste that she didn't even bother to shut the front door properly. I don’t know what exactly what he said to her, or what she said to him, but I heard one word amongst the muffled jumble of words that I had not heard my mother say in four years. It was my father’s name. After that late conversation with the a stranger everything began to turn on its head. My mother’s demeanor became more suspicious and far more secretive. More so even than it had been during those first few months in the compound. My unsupervised travel outside the compound ended abruptly, as did the visits for many of the other children, and for the first time that I can remember since the first war in Iraqi, back in 1991, the men of the compound started a guard roster for the compound's gate. She became tenser and tenser, and so did everybody else in the compound. As if they were waiting for something to happen. Which it did, about a week later. My Mother received a telephone call one evening. She picked up the handset and, almost instantly, she went white and stood there, transfixed for a few seconds, before slamming the handset down on the receiver so hard that the vase next to the telephone jumped up into the air and crashed to the floor. Seconds later, she made me swear that I not answer the phone should it ring again. The next day, when I came home from school, there wasn't a telephone to answer. She'd removed it. She'd also removed our name from the compound mailbox, and even from the tambour hole for our internal mail. Not long after that, two or three days before the end of the school year (Japanese schools start and finish in the spring, rather than finishing in the summer and starting in fall, as in the US), the men came to move us. The sorted what was ours out from what belonged to the apartment, and packed most of the former up in big wooden crates. Leaving us with only a few essentials in three suitcases. The next day, we said our goodbyes and headed out. After a short journey and night in a hotel, we boarded a plane, and that was it. We left Japan and headed for Hawaii. My Mother never looked back, except maybe over her shoulder to see something was following her, and I never stopped looking back. Although it seemed to be rushed, and more of a rout than a strategic withdrawal, my Mother must have known what was coming for a while, even before the man arrived that evening. As I would later find out, we weren't running blind. She had a bolt hole arranged in advance. A very nice one indeed, located in a small Midwestern town, somewhere just past the boondocks, where we would be hard to find. This bolt hole was about to become my new home. Epilogue At the of our move, things were very confusing. I barely knew what was going on, and I jumped to a lot of conclusions and had a lot of questions without answers. However, I later found that some of those conclusions were wrong, and that some of those questions did, indeed, have answers. Some time after that fact, I learned that the man at the door had been an officer from the base where we had lived, who came to warn my Mother that her husband, my father, had found out something that might lead him to us, and that he was planning to leave the base in order to search for his missing son. I also learned that that phone call in the night was not, as I had once believed, from my father, but rather was from a friend of our family, a forces wife whom my parents had known for many years, who had given my Mother an ultimatum. She would contact my father and arrange for my return to him, or she would tell him all that she knew about where we were. |
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