Above the East China Sea: A Novel (9 page)

It wasn’t the normal kind of letter that came through the air force’s APO system that you had to pick up at the base post office. It was local, and a messenger—an Okinawan girl who rode up on a moped and had some sort of special badge clipped to the pocket of her blue blouse that allowed her to get on base—delivered it. She wouldn’t give it to me and I had the extremely unpleasant duty of waking my mother so that the delivery girl could bow and hold the letter out to her on the palms of both upturned hands as if it were a sacred offering.

Pausing only to grab her pocket Japanese dictionary, Mom took the letter into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and switched on the fan, which let me know that she was smoking the cigarettes she swore she was going to give up when we got here. An hour later, she came out smelling like a bar at two in the morning and refused to tell me what was in the letter. All I knew was that after it was delivered, the phone calls in Japanese and the talk about the Okinawan relatives who were going to open their hearts and homes to us stopped dead. A few days later, the chaplains knocked on our door, and I forgot all about the letter and most everything else.

I turn back around and keep swimming. The seawater is cool and leaches warmth from my body. My arms and legs feel noodly. I wear out easily these days, since I don’t—can’t—eat or sleep much. If I swim out any farther, I won’t have enough energy to go back. Should I turn around or keep swimming? I stop and dare the ocean to make the choice for me.

My back is turned on Okinawa, on Kadena, on my latest group of Quasis. The vast dark of sea and night sky swallows me up. I am alone. The only person on earth who really knew me, who would really, truly care if I vanished, is gone. That awareness starts to pull me down. I tread water for a few seconds and panic shivers through me.

This is a bad idea. I have to turn around.

The panic adrenaline gives me a jolt of energy and I think I can make it back to shore. Then, suddenly, in the black night two orbs of shimmering light appear. They’re the eerie bluish green of phosphorescent waves. They hover around me, one on each side, like guardian angels. They’re so oddly companionable that the panic vanishes. An unexpected peace fills me with a warmth like five tequila shots, and the words “Stop struggling” form in my mind, like a command spoken by my sister, who always took care of me. I let my body go still as glass and sink down under the waves. The orbs follow, dimly lighting the water around me. As the dark sea closes in above my head, I have one last thought:
Codie, if this isn’t what you want me to do, if this isn’t what you yourself did when you enlisted, send a sign.

But no sign comes. I go down so far that the moon shrinks away to a tiny pearl far overhead. My lungs scream for oxygen. The phosphorescent orbs wobbling beside me show me how easy it is to breathe water. All I have to do is exhale the dead air in my lungs and breathe in and it will all be over. In the same instant, a swoosh of water swirls up against me and the shadow of a large sea creature passes by. Drowning is one thing, but I do not want to be eaten by a shark. I flail at it, and my hand hits what feels like the rounded edge of a heavy table. It’s solid as furniture and not sandpapery the way sharkskin is supposed to be. Then the shadowed thing tips its head up toward the last glimmers of moonlight penetrating the dark water and I see the hooked profile of a sea turtle. She hovers directly in front of my face so that the beat of her flippers lofts my hair up and down.

Codie has sent a sign.

I struggle to rise to the air. But I’m too far down. I fight toward the surface, but a wave like a giant fist slams into me, holding me down, pushing me farther and farther back under. It bashes my head against the reef at my back, and, with a crack that shoots a bolt of pure white pain through me, the film in my brain stops.

TEN

Anmā,
where are we? The water is gone. The girl is gone. Why did the wave put us here?

Because the
kami
willed it.

Where is the girl?

The girl is where the
kami
will her to be.

But we need her.

The
kami
know that. They will bring her to us again.

ELEVEN

The next thing I am aware of is rolling over onto my side and vomiting up roughly ten gallons of seawater along with another couple salty gallons that pour out of my sinuses.

I sprawl on the gritty sand, too exhausted to even roll over, until a chill sinks into my bones. I hoist myself up on wobbly arms and see that I’ve been spit out on a steep patch of deserted beach. The sand is smooth except for the tracks left by a handful of busy crabs. I can’t see any marks from where I came ashore. It’s like a giant hand has dropped me here. Cliff walls jut up all around, caging me. The tide creeps closer, and I realize that very soon I’m going to be trapped. Codie didn’t save me just so that I would be battered to death against a cliff. I study the stone walls locking me in and search for a way out.

The moon is operating-room bright over my shoulder. It casts a pattern of pocked shadows across the sheer stone faces and reveals that rather than rising, the rock walls tilt outward. I don’t have the strength to climb a regular cliff; you’d have to be Spider-Man to scale a jagged cliff that leans out like that.

There seems no way out until I notice a crevice where the cliff walls join. With no other choice, I haul myself up, and, hoping the opening leads to an escape route, or at least to higher ground, I scramble into the slit. There’s just enough moonlight for me to make out that the opening leads back into a tunnel. I follow it. The instant the rock walls close in around me, I am overwhelmed by a monstrous stench. With the tide rising behind me, though, I have no choice but to forge ahead. As the last few flickers of moonlight fade, darkness worse than a nightmare of being buried alive closes in around me.

As I go farther back into the cave, the sand turns to hard rock ground beneath my feet. I am on an incline that rises slightly as I follow it even farther back, praying that it leads to an escape route or at least to ground high enough for me to wait out the incoming tide. I feel my way along with a hand on the clammy stone wall. The ocean roars at my back, echoing off the rock walls and filling the narrow tunnel with a salty mist denser than the densest fog. I glance back. The moonlit mouth of the cave is lost in a whiteout of surging surf as the tide roars in. Soon the opening will be completely blocked, and even if there were a way out on the beach, I won’t be able to get there. I briefly regret not taking the swan-dive option from the top of the cliff when I had the opportunity. Even worse for my mom than Codie’s closed-casket funeral would be if my body gets trapped in this stone labyrinth and she has nothing to bury.

A second later, the rock walls echo with a thin chirping cry. All I understand from it is that the crier is female, Asian, young, and scared.

The water rises up around my ankles and I pray that whoever’s back there calling for me knows how to get out. I run up the gentle slope toward the far end of the cave. The voice grows louder and a glow appears. At first I think the phosphorescent orbs have returned, but the closer I get, the brighter the glow grows. Its source is hidden behind a bend in the cave walls. I hurry toward the feeble glimmer. When I round the bend, I catch a whiff of kerosene.

The cries are so strong now that, even above the roar of the waves, they grow louder. I rush toward the voice and scraps of memories of my grandmother speaking to me come back.
“Konbanwa!”
I call out.

As I get closer, the light from the kerosene lamp quivers, reflecting wetly off the oozing cave walls. It draws me closer with its homey
incandescence. I turn the corner and there she is, an Okinawan teenager, collapsed beside a kerosene lantern that is sending up a black snowfall of soot. Her wavy black hair hugs her round face in a bowl cut. A few dingy scraps of what was once a school uniform cling to her skeletal limbs. She is so emaciated by hunger and disease that she lies sprawled on the damp rock floor of the cave, her torso barely propped up against the slick walls. A bandage black with dried blood hangs from one stick arm.

As ravaged as she is, however, the girl’s eyes light up when she sees me. She stretches hunger-hollowed cheeks in a grin and joins her hands in a prayer that seems to be thanking and begging me at the same time. I realize she thinks that
I
have come to rescue
her.

“Who are you? How long have you been trapped here?”

Of course, she doesn’t understand English. In fact, from her expression, it almost seems as if she’s never heard it before. As if the sound of my voice terrifies her. I grab the lantern resting beside her on a flat rock, hoist it up, and shine it around the cave. No crevice, no chink in the rock, no way out is revealed. Worse, I see now that the rising tide is pushing the line of foam deep into the cave. The drowning waves will follow.

The cold salt water flows in and she speaks, a pleading stream, her hands pressed together in front of her heart, begging me to help her. Her eyes are bright and so filled with intelligence that they shine in spite of the gloom of the cave and her dire condition. What is she asking? She’s beckoning me forward, begging me to come to her. Does she expect me to carry her out? Is that what she’s asking?

“I can’t.” I point to the dot of pearly foam blocking the exit. “The waves. The tide is coming in. We can’t go out that way. How did you get here? Show me the way out.”

Of course she doesn’t understand. I curse my mother for never teaching me Japanese. The roar of the advancing waves echoing off the rock walls rises to a deafening level. The girl locks my gaze with hers and, without the slightest gesture or word, compels me to come forward.

I lean in closer, feeling as I do as if the ground is tilting under me, tipping me toward her. The closer I come to the girl, the softer the sound of the waves behind me becomes. By the time our foreheads are nearly touching, the roar is a silence more total than any I’ve ever known. Into
that quiet comes a sound so soft that at first I can’t identify it. I listen hard and hear a sick mewling coming from somewhere beneath her blouse, as if she has the runt of a litter of kittens hidden there. It’s the whimpering of a newborn. An infant. A dying infant. That is who she is pleading for. That is who I was saved to save. The strange gravity pulls even more strongly at me, dragging me forward.