Above the East China Sea: A Novel (4 page)

Though the waves that day were gentle enough to rock a baby’s cradle, we all went wide-eyed with fear. Everyone knew that on the third and last day of Obon, the spirits of the drowned whose remains were lost at sea tried everything within their power to lure one of the living to his death so that the displaced souls might find a home in the corpse.

At the beach that evening we all saw what we feared most.
Fiidama,
the hazy phosphorescent fireballs that are a sure sign of the presence of an uneasy spirit, danced in terrible clusters above the waves. As tears streamed down her face, Mother tried to hold Ichirō back. She pleaded with her son, telling him what she would tell me years later:
Nuchi du takara.
Life is the treasure. But he forced her to let him go. His spirit
had already left his body, and his life had stopped being a treasure. Mother wept as her brave, handsome child swam out so far that we could barely see his dark head bobbing up and down among the waves.

We watched in horror from the shore as the eerie glow of a
fiidama
shining with a particularly bright and steady green luminescence targeted Ichirō. It followed him as he swam away from us, wobbling over the black dot of his head like a jellyfish swaying in an ocean current. Our mother wailed out her grief, for she knew that some lost spirit who’d never had a proper burial—some fisherman who’d drowned in a storm, or merchant who’d fallen overboard off a trading vessel, or even one of the brave warriors who’d defended the island against the Japanese invaders—waited to claim her son’s body. In the twilight, the
fiidama
pulsed with a deep, murderous glow that reflected red on the waves. And then it vanished and our brother was gone.

When his corpse washed ashore, we placed it in our family tomb and observed all the proper funeral rituals, but we knew we were honoring a stranger who did not belong with us. Mother grieved terribly that her son’s body, his chance to spend eternity with his clan, had been stolen. Over the years, though she never specifically wished for Ichirō’s displaced spirit to claim a stranger’s body, as his had been claimed, she did go frequently to the place where he had disappeared to pray that, if such a thing were to happen, her son would find his way to our family’s
munchū.
More than anything, she wanted her oldest son to be waiting for her with our clan’s departed in the next world.

Had our mother been more specific in her prayers, I might now know how to become a
fiidama
myself and how to lure a stranger our way. But since she gave no instructions on this score, I am powerless, and I ache with a ferocity unknown to the living for what was promised in my mother’s stories. For sweet potatoes in green-tea sauce, the scent of lilies and pineapples, but most of all, I yearn for Hatsuko. Near the end, when thirst and hunger were knives twisting ceaselessly within us, I believed that my ruined body was the cause of all my suffering. Here I have learned that pain is not sharpened by flesh; it is blunted. With no body there is no way to partition off suffering. It is a curse, yet it gives me an advantage over any of the living, who never see clearly until their eyes are closed forever. They are blind to the injustice of love withheld from the unlovely and lavished on the lovely, who, with their consolations of lovely, long necks and shiny, straight hair, need it so
much less. They don’t see how their foolish desires drive them to crawl over one another like crabs in a bucket fighting for a small circle of blue when the whole sky waits above.

And now, though I don’t yet know why the
kami
have awakened us, I must make myself ready to use my advantage. I concentrate. I put doubt and despair aside and hone my desire. I fletch it like a samurai’s arrowhead. I pull it back taut in the bow until it quivers, and I wait. The rules of destiny are harsh, but to save my child’s soul, I have accepted them. The
kami-sama
will send to us someone who hovers between the living and the dead, as Ichirō once did, as my child and I do now. And when that person arrives, I shall be ready and will release the arrow of my yearning straight into his heart.

FOUR

On the beach a driftwood bonfire shimmies in the offshore breeze. When I get close enough that the cave-drawing figures clustered around the fire turn into actual humans, I slap something resembling a smile on my face.

“Luz! Luz! Luz and brews!” A baboon-troop hoot of greeting goes up when they spot us. Well, not us so much as Kirby’s sloshing Igloo.

DaQuane Green lopes our way, and asks Kirby, “What the hell took you so long, son?” Tonight DQ’s sporting a fade with a topknot of glossy curls. In a burst of speed, a figure breaks away from the others, darts ahead of DaQuane, and reaches the cooler first. It’s Jake Furusato. Jake is the reigning prince of Smokinawa, leader of the kids who are either full or part Oki and part American and attached in some permanent way to the base. The Smokinawans are perfectly fluent in both languages and cultures. I wait for Jake to take my end of the cooler, but he messes with me, pretending to take the handle, then pulling his hand away.

“Jake, quit being a douche.”

He grins, grabs the handle, brushes up against me, doesn’t move.
It’s been this way since the first second we set eyes on each other, Jake always finding excuses to touch me in semijokey ways. I guess that if there’s one thing that would keep me interested in Okinawa, it would be Jake Furusato. But he’s not a possibility, since he has an attached-at-the-hip-girlfriend, Christy Medoruma. I check the group gathered around the fire to see whether Christy is over there shooting daggers my way. She’s not; Jake only gets playa with me when she’s not around. In fact, none of Jake’s crew of Smokinawans is in attendance tonight. An empty Orion can flashes in the firelight as it arcs into the flames, sending sparks flying into the dark night.

“Dude!” Jake protests, as he leans away from the burning shower. In the light from the fire, his skin is the color of apple jelly and his eyes are two slashes of calligraphy angling into his high cheeks. He reminds me so much of Ashkii Begay, this really good-looking Navajo guy I was crushed out on at my last school, that it’s eerie.

As I head toward the fire, my flip-flops pelt gritty sand against my calves with each step. I met most of the beach crew three months ago, right after my mom and I arrived at the beginning of summer. Summer is high season for PCSing—permanent change of station—when the air force shuffles the deck and, for its own random reasons, moves about a third of its personnel to yet another random spot on the globe. Which is why Kadena was having an event to welcome incoming “military teens.” It was held at the Kadena Teen Center Millennium: “Where Being a Teen Has Never Been So Much Fun!” Representatives from the crafts shop, gamers’ club, archery range, and bowling league spoke about their groups and services. Then the director of the center, a staff sergeant with an Adam’s apple like a hatchet blade sliding up and down in his throat, told us “military teens” that joining one of the groups he ran was the best way to integrate ourselves “into the community of your choice and to find others with shared interests.”

Turned out that even better than throwing pots or playing “World of Warcraft” for getting integrated into the community of
my
choice was the interest me and Kirby’s crew shared in getting high. Which, thanks to my mom’s endless supply of benzodiazepines, I was when I went to the meeting. It was no big trick for us—the glassy and red of eye, the inappropriate of mirth, the flattened of affect, the bad of attitude—to recognize one another at that first meeting. It was even
easier to sneak out of said meeting when the director told us to “break out”—an unfortunate choice of words for a guy whose cheeks were spangled with lavender acne—into our “interest groups.”

My interest group broke out into the area behind the Teen Center. That’s when Kirby said, “Welcome to Smokinawa,” passed around a handful of one-hitters that looked like cigarettes from a distance, and we all smoked up. Then DaQuane volunteered that he knew a GI who’d buy liquor for us at the Class Six. Someone else, maybe me, had a sampler platter of pharmaceuticals. And boom. It was party time there, “Where Being a
High
Teen Has Never Been So Much Fun!”

The next night, we adjourned to Kirby’s cove, and that’s when I met Jake. He’d been surfing with his boys, and his black hair was wild and bushy and all spiked out from the salt water and humidity. A sleeveless T showed off his excellent surfer’s tan and shoulders. From the second Jake noticed me, he kept looking my way. When Christy and her friends left to pee, he came over.

“Hai-sai, mensorei,”
he said.

“Hi sie to you too,” I answered.

“Sorry, I thought you were part Oki.”

“I am. My grandmother was born here.”

“Cool.”

There was a silence and, out of nervousness, I threw in that, on my dad’s side, I was also part German, African American, Irish, and Filipina. I didn’t mention that my mom’s father was a Missouri redneck.

“So, your name, Luz, it comes from the Philippines?”

I smiled, impressed that he could pronounce my name. Looz. Not Luss. “Yeah, it was my dad’s mother’s name.” I didn’t add that my name was pretty much the last thing my parents collaborated on, since my dad was gone before my first birthday. What did my mother expect, marrying her Kali martial arts teacher? A long
harmonious
relationship?

“Means ‘light,’ right?”

“Indeed it does. You get the bonus points.”

He tipped his head to the side, either to study me or because he knew that his eyes and lips looked amazing from that angle. “There’s something different about you, Light.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. You’re not like most base kids.”

“I guess that’s a compliment.”

“It is. I like your necklace.” Jake slid his fingers against my collarbone as he lifted up the opal pendant I always wear. “Your boyfriend back in the States give you this?” He was playing playa with me and we both knew it wasn’t for real. Or was only as real as I wanted to make it.

“No. No boyfriend back in the States.”

Rubbing the opal gently between his fingers, he asked, “Is it true what they say about you?”

“I don’t know. What do they say?” His eyes—larger, rounder than Japanese eyes—tilted up into perfect paisleys.

“That your mom is head of base police.”

“It’s true.”

“So should I try to get on your good side, so she won’t bust me?”

“That’s funny.”

“Why?”

“Because being on my good side would actually increase your chances of her busting you.”

“Jake, I’m back!” Christy, standing off with her friends, called out. She looked pure Okinawan, but, eyes popping and head bobbing with ghetto exasperation, she sounded and acted pure American high school girl. Pure
jealous
American high school girl.

Jake continued cradling the opal, until Christy called again. Then, very slowly, he glided the backs of his fingernails against my skin as he slid the pendant back into place. “Pretty,” he said, walking away.

For the next three months, although Kirby and the rest of us were at the cove almost every night, Jake and his crew of surfing Smokinawans only showed up sporadically, and when he did Christy never left his side. But whether he talked to me or not, there would always be a moment when he’d catch my eye, tap the spot below his throat where my opal necklace would have hung on him, then point to me and mouth the word “pretty.” The necklace was the last thing Codie gave me. If she was here, we’d have spent hours dissecting the meaning of Jake’s touches and smiles. But she’s not, and without her, it’s obvious that there is nothing between Jake Furusato and me to dissect. And nothing to hold me on Okinawa.

FIVE