Above the East China Sea: A Novel (56 page)

“What a man-whore,” Jacey hisses into my ear.

“Naw, it’s not like that,” I tell her.

“Like what?” Kirby, his arm draped over Jacey’s shoulder, asks.

“Nothing.”

“Spit it out, Cabooskie. You want me to put the hurt on Furusato for you? Because I will. Someone disrespects my girls, I’ma cut a bitch. You know I will.”

“Thanks, Kirbs.” Even though he’s kidding, Kirby does actually have a nice protective streak that Jacey brings out. I can even see the possibility that he’ll grow up into a decent man.

An honor guard of Rotzees in khaki uniforms with white webbed belts crossing their chests marches out. The instant the first notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” play over the school’s loudspeaker system, we all shut up, freeze, slap our right hands over our hearts, and watch our country’s flag being raised. Right beside it, on a flagpole precisely the same height, the crimson bull’s-eye of Japan’s rising sun ascends. DaQuane and Wynn, red eyed and reeking of pot, slip in next to us and sing out, loud and proud.

Instead of singing, I look away from both flags, stare at the clouds, white and high as Marie Antoinette’s wig, and think about my mom. It’s been different since she came back. Actually, things were exactly the same as before when I met her at the flight line. She was surprised to see me for about two seconds, then asked if I was in trouble with SF, needed to go into rehab, or was pregnant. No, nothing really changed until the funeral. Until I caught the last glimpse I would ever have of those cut-up squares of baby blanket that had stroked Codie’s skin going into the tomb forever. That’s when I lost it. When I surrendered. When, amazingly, my mom stepped up to catch me as I fell and whispered the most astonishing thing to me: “Your sister did not die outside the perimeter. She was inside the wire. She died instantly. Being a good soldier. Your sister was a good soldier, Luz.”

Because I understood then that the same question that had haunted me had also tortured her, and that she’d volunteered to go to the Sandbox so she could get answers for both of us, I said, “So are you, Mom. You’re a good soldier.” That’s when I laid my grudge against her down.

So now we’re careful around each other. And when she’s not, when she’s a jerk, which she and I will both always be entirely capable of being, I think about my mom as a baby, a newborn whose skin color
made her father feel like the butt of a false friend’s joke. Baby Gena must have been just one color betrayal too many for Eugene Overholt, since she came along about the time that he was figuring out that his beloved air force had also done him wrong. That the supposedly harmless rainbow herbicides—agents Purple, Pink, and Orange—were killing him deader than any Charlie in the Mekong Delta could have.

And my sweet little grandmother?
Anmā
? I think a lot about her too. An ex–Koza bar girl, steeped in the belief that her entire purpose in life was to bear away a family’s shame in silence, what chance did she ever have to be the mother her daughter needed? I remember
Anmā
doing the best she could, dancing in secret with me and Codie, finding rare solace in the feel, the smell of her granddaughters’ dark curls, the ones that reminded her of being crazy in love with another man who wasn’t worthy of her, and my heart aches thinking of the damaged daughter these two damaged humans raised. A daughter who only found her true home in the military. Who was so genuinely devoted to the U.S. Air Force that she passed it on to her own daughter, believing, truly believing, that it was the most treasured legacy she had.

Once I accept that all of them, even my screwed-up mom, were just trying to do the best they knew how, I have no choice but to do the same. I even use military time now, just because it makes my mom happy. Makes her feel like the world is under control and has its shit wrapped up tight, the way it’s supposed to be. Which, I guess, is what we all want.

Kirby, DaQuane, and Wynn yell out their version of the last line of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The instant the anthem ends, the “on” switch is flipped, and all us military kids are reanimated again. At precisely 0815 hours, the bell rings and the doors open. Another first day at a new school starts, and Jacey and I surge up the steps together. We consulted on our first-day outfits. Even went to the BX together to see whether there was anything not terminally lame. There wasn’t. So she’s wearing the pink top I loaned her that looks amazing with her coloring, and I’ve got on a great pair of skinny jeans that shrank and
she can’t wear anymore. Codie and I used to do the same thing, trade back and forth. I thought it was only a sister thing. Turns out it’s not.

Our fellow brats eddy around us, the boisterous ones, the shy ones. The ones who’ve been on the Rock for a while and know the lay of the land, the ones who just PCS’d in. The Post Princesses. The Gung Hos. The strangers who’ll sit beside us in class and play with us on teams. The kids who’ll become our best friends or our archnemeses. The ones with whom we’ll keep in touch for a few years, then not recall who stopped writing. The ones who won’t remember sitting next to us in geometry. The ones who’ll tell us at the reunion in twenty years that they had the biggest crush on us. The ones who will look us up after their children are grown and they’ve retired and have time to wonder what it would have been like to have grown up with the same friends. The ones who will want to connect with their childhoods, who they once were, and will settle for sharing the name of a base, the name of a teacher we both had, the name of a maid who might have worked for both our families. It won’t even matter all that much that we were on that base, had that teacher, that maid, at different times and never really knew each other. It’s a connection. It’s a true thing from our childhoods, and we shared it.

I’ll meet new people this year, my last at a dependent school, and the first thing we’ll ask one another is, “Where have you been stationed?” If our bases overlap we’ll talk about how great the French fries were at that one snack bar by the pool or how there was that bakery right next to the base and the smell of baking bread would drive us crazy. I’ll send them all Christmas cards. I’ll keep in touch. I won’t be the one who stops answering, because it turns out that friends are like the Velveteen Rabbit: They’re all Quasis if you don’t believe in them enough to make them real.

At the top of the stairs, me and my brat brothers and sisters funnel into the crowded hall and start looking for our first classes. I have calculus on the second floor. As I head for the stairs, I catch Jake scanning the crowd. When his gaze falls on me, the one he was searching for, he stops looking around, and tugs down the collar of his shirt enough to show me that he’s wearing Codie’s opal necklace. It makes me happy that he recovered it from the shrine. He touches the opal, but doesn’t give me a sexy smile or mouth the word “pretty” or do any of those
flirty, playa things. He just closes his shirt and hides the gem’s pale radiance next to his heart.

I don’t know exactly what will happen with Jake and me. Maybe nothing will. Whatever does or doesn’t happen, though, I’m certain that the most important thing already has. I’m certain that Jake Furusato will never forget me.

SIXTY-SIX

My mother,
Anmā,
Kokuba Tamiko, Little Guppy, killed herself so that I could exist. Now that we have been released, I understand why. In the forty-nine days after we are delivered to our family’s tomb, yet before we complete our journey to the next world, the entire story is made known to me. Even the saddest parts, which Mother had never allowed me to share. Even the parts that took place after Aunt Hatsuko left our family’s tomb and, carrying my grandmother’s crock of pork miso, went in search of the unworthy Nakamura.

I see everything that happened after the sisters were parted. I see how, in the days after Hatsuko’s departure, my mother was tortured by visions of what would befall her feckless sister without her, the one with her broad Okinawan feet firmly planted on the earth. And so
Anmā
left our family’s tomb, where ten generations of ancestors guarded her, where she would have been safe and grown fat eating my grandmother’s dried sweet potatoes and bonito, and went into a world that was now ruled by demons. She left to save a life that she thought was her sister’s but was not. The life she saved was mine.

I see the colors she saw in the weeks before I came to be. The sea was still the blue of jewels. The sky was still the blue of softness. But there were no greens. There was only endless brown and black. The bleak colors swirled and formed into charred stumps, mud, potholes, and rotting corpses. My mother knew then that her sister, so much more refined and delicate than she, could not possibly have survived, and
she gave up her search. She no longer wanted to live in a world without green, without her sister. The
mabui
left her body and, bereft of her spirit, Mother could no longer go on. Little Guppy lay down beside the bombed-out remnants of a stone wall built to protect a family from typhoons. But the family and their house were gone; nothing but ash and the stink of decay remained. That is where my mother prepared to die.

Nearly starved, dehydrated, weak as a kitten, she was close to death when my father found her. He was a Japanese private who covered her mouth and called out the emperor’s name as he finished. When he was through using her, the soldier, instead of taking his hand away and letting
Anmā
go, pressed it down harder, as though she were the cause of his and Japan’s disgrace. He pressed with both hands until her nose and mouth were covered. At the realization that he was killing her, my mother’s spirit returned with a raging fury determined that no mainland bully was going to take another thing from her. Certainly not her life. Little Guppy bit down on the lump of flesh at the base of the private’s thumb so hard that she severed the tendon, causing the finger to droop from his hand, forever unusable. She escaped while he howled in pain.

Anmā
met the second of my fathers as she squatted beside a stream and washed away the soldier’s blood from her face and her own from the inside of her thighs. This father was an Okinawan boy barely older than she. He spoke to her in their language and begged for forgiveness and wept as he did what he did.
Anmā,
squashed against the earth, reached out a hand, found a rock, and left that father unconscious.

Anmā
met the last of my fathers when a typhoon descended on the island. When the howling winds hurled uprooted trees, sections of chain-link fence, and rusted truck doors sideways through the air,
Anmā
sought protection in an abandoned tomb. In the dark, she didn’t realize that the tomb already had an occupant. He was an American giant with a long nose and goat eyes. She could no more have resisted a monster nearly three times her size than she could have battled the typhoon raging outside. When it was over, he scurried away when a fraught calm descended as the eye of the storm passed over.

Though there was no one else in the tomb, as the ferocity of the typhoon’s second act howled outside,
Anmā
realized that she was no
longer alone. She knew I was with her. The giant had forgotten his pack of food. Inside the box, she found caramels, thick crackers, a package with four cigarettes, a tin with a key that peeled back the skin like an apple to reveal a rectangle of pink meat, and powders, one a bitter dark brown that dissolved on the tongue, the other yellow and salty with a vague taste of chicken fat. More than food, though,
Anmā
needed water, and, with many prayers of apologies, she emptied one of the oldest burial urns of its contents and placed it outside to collect rain. She quickly gathered enough to quench her thirst, then made herself eat and drink as much as her shrunken stomach could hold, while she whispered to me,
“Nuchi du takara. Nuchi du takara.”

Anmā
remained alive for me. Later, when she felt me flip and frolic within her, she rejoiced. Hundreds, thousands of other girls chose differently. Especially the ones raped by the invaders. Those girls drank tea brewed from camphor wood leaves, had cones of mugwort burned on their bellies, or ate the fruit of the sago palm to kill the unwanted child they carried. Or themselves. Many no longer cared which. Others took their newborns to the sea and let the waves carry their shame away.
Anmā,
though, she loved me from the first second that I existed within her. She ceased mourning for all who had been lost. I was her consolation, her companion and hope on a hard road. I was her family.