Above the East China Sea

by Sarah Bird

  I expect her to pull out a deck of tarot cards or take my hand and read my palm. Maybe a crystal ball, something with tea leaves. Instead, she unlooses a clattering barrage of Japanese.

  “She needs your list,” Jake translates.

  “List of what?”

  “Ancestors,” Jake says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “All yutas start with the list. Sorry, I should have told you that.”

  Jake tells her that I don’t have a list. The yuta looks perplexed but reaches into a shiny vinyl tote bag printed with the face of a smiling Corgi dog and extracts a notepad and ballpoint pen that she shoves toward me.

  “She wants you to write down as many of your family members that you are related to by blood as you can remember. She can’t help you without the list. Just write all the names you can think of.”

  “Does she read English?”

  “She doesn’t need to. She senses from the list who is unhappy.”

  The yuta adds a few other specifications.

  Jake nods and tells me, “She needs you to go as far back as you can. Preferably at least six generations. Married and maiden names of blood relatives.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  I make the list starting with Codie and go back through my mother and father, and the few other relatives whose names I’ve even ever heard. As I write, the yuta listens to the music and studies the ceiling tiles while she chews her pineapple burger, as serene as a cow in a pasture working her cud. The list is pathetically short; I think of Jake’s house, of the constellations of ancestors dancing around his family altar and feel like an orphan compared to him. When I finish, I twirl the sheet around and slide it back across the table.

  As she studies the first few names, her cud-chewing expression tightens dramatically. She pushes the burger aside, carefully wipes her hands, screwing each finger into a napkin to clean all the grease away. When she’s finished, she squares her shoulders, closes her eyes, chants softly to herself under her breath, and lets her hands hover above the list like someone waiting for the spirits to make the planche of a Ouija board move.

  Her eyes still closed, her finger comes to rest, time and again, on Codie’s name. Each time her fingers contact the letters, her eyes screw shut even tighter and her entire face contracts in an expression of pain. She opens her eyes and strokes Codie’s name, her fingers resting on the letters and smoothing them as gently as a mother soothing a fretful child.

  I clutch Jake’s arm. “What? Ask her what she sees.”

  Jake starts to speak, but she holds up a silencing finger, bends forward, clamps her lips around the straw, sucks down the rest of her root beer, shoves the empty mug toward Jake, and dispatches him for a refill. Waiting until the door closes behind him, she pushes her trash to the side, and holds her hands out until I place my palms atop hers. She cradles my hands and studies the ceiling tiles some more, her eyes occasionally flickering. She nods as if the transmission had ended, lets go of my hand, taps Codie’s name, and says, “Cry. Make sick. Sad.”

  “My sister? Codie? Codie is crying? Why? Why is she sad? ‘Make sick’? What does that mean? Is she making me sick?” The old lady has no idea what I’m asking. “My mother? My anmā.” I throw out one of the few Okinawan words I know. “Did my anmā tell you to say that? Did you speak to my mother?” I pull out the crumpled envelope and point to what I hope is my mother’s name written in characters on the first line of the address. “You know? Did she call you?” I pantomime making a phone call as I point emphatically toward the yuta.

  She studies the characters and shakes her head no.

  In all my pantomiming, the surveillance photo falls out of the bag. The yuta notices and reaches across the table for it. As she studies the photo the furrows deepen on her forehead.

  I tap the street corner dude. “Do you know this man?”

  Instead of dismissing him, she tilts her head back in order to study the photo through the bottom part of her glasses. When she gets the image in focus, her expression curdles even more. Her lip curling up, she looks from me back down to the photo; there’s something about the photo that has upset, disgusted her.

  “What? Did my mother show you this photo? Do you know this man?” Even as I ask the question, an answer begins forming in my mind. I shove it away as less than a distant possibility, the far-off sound of thunder in the summer that does not signal rain.

  When Jake returns, the yuta hurriedly shoves the photo back and, with rapid, emphatic waving gestures, orders me to hide it away. Without knowing why, I feel ashamed as I stuff the photo back into my bag. Jake slides the refill in front of the yuta, who reattaches to the straw and suckles like a baby pig with a bottle. She finishes with a gasp then proceeds to unleash a nonstop stream of Japanese on Jake.

  Jake listens, interjecting crisp head nods and several explosive Hai!s to indicate that he’s following her. When she’s done, Jake turns to me. “She can’t help you because your list is incomplete. You have to get more names of ancestors, blood relatives, otherwise she can’t give you a full reading.”

  The yuta nods vigorously as Jake translates, pausing only to reach over, grab a stack of sugar packets and a handful of creamers from a box on the table, stuff them into her tote, and extract a tissue-thin envelope that she pushes across the table to me.

  I open it and a bill for sixteen thousand yen flutters out. I have all the commissary money my mother gave me in my bag, and I hand her nearly two hundred dollars. Jake sees the money, explodes in annoyed Japanese, takes most of the bills back, and hands them to me. “That’s an insane amount. She didn’t even give you a decent reading.”

  The yuta gathers up the remaining bills, scoots to the end of the bench, and stands. She is even shorter than she appeared while sitting, barely reaching my shoulder. She pushes past me and rushes out. Leaving Jake to collect Kirby, I intercept the yuta outside in the parking lot, next to the mechanical bear. “Wait, you can’t leave.” She hurries away from me, tacking toward a bus stop with a red clay-tile roof next to the highway. I run after her and block her escape. “You have to help me.”

  She looks up, goggling, the big lenses an aquarium in front of her eyes, and says, “Need list. List too short. Find all ancestor.”

  “I don’t know any more ancestors. Did you talk to Codie? My sister. Did my sister have a message for me? I can get more money. Takusan yen. You picked my sister’s name out, and then you got an expression on your face like you saw something horrible. What does my sister want me to do? Why did I see that dead girl in the cave?” I scrape my brain for phrases my grandmother used to say, press my hands together, and plead, “Onegai, please, tell me what I need to do?”

  She scribbles something on a scrap of paper, thrusts it at me, and rushes away to catch the bus hissing to a stop on the edge of the highway.

  Jake appears at my elbow, takes the slip of paper from my hand, and studies it. “It’s the name and address of her teacher in Naha who’s a master yuta. I’ve actually heard my aunts talking about her.”

  “But won’t she need the same list of ancestors?”

  “Maybe not. She’s much more on the spiritual side. Supposedly just being in her presence, it, you know”—he pauses, his voice becoming gentle—“helps.”

  “Even if you’re a total psycho—” I’m surprised and embarrassed when a sob almost hijacks my attempt at humor. I choke it back as fast as I can.

  Jake puts his hand on my back in a comforting way and whispers, “Shi, shi, shi.” The hushing syllable—she, not shhh—strikes a chord of deeply buried memory, and I recall another voice whispering it into my ear long ago, when I was very young and had hurt myself. I struggle to remember who it was who had once dried my tears.

  Just as it almost comes back to me, Kirby struts across the lot holding his phone above his head like a trophy. Jake pulls his hand away as Kirby announces, “Gomen nasai, young lovers, but this is where I’m going to have to leave you. Shortie’s on her way right now to pick me
up.”

  When neither Jake nor I take the bait and ask who the “shortie” is, Kirby whines, “Don’t you want to know who she is?”

  “Just the luckiest girl in the world, right?” Jake answers.

  “You got that right,” Kirby agrees gleefully. His thumbs popping across his phone’s keyboard, he mutters, “Yeah, baby, daddy’s gonna beat them cakes like Betty Crocker.”

  “Ew,” I say. “Just ew.”

  Jake puts his hand out, I give him the keys, and we walk back to the car. “Kirbs, you coming?” Jake yells.

  “Seriously, I got a hot date coming to pick me up.”

  “Don’t talk about your mother like that,” Jake riffs.

  “Watch and learn, son,” Kirby yells back. “Watch and learn.”

  Before he starts the engine, Jake advises me, “Keep your phone handy. Kirby will be calling any minute for us to come back and get him ’cause his ‘shortie’s’ car broke down or got hit by an asteroid or something.”

  As we pull out of the A&W, I glance back just in time to see Jacey turn into the parking lot.

  Jake checks the rearview mirror. “I did not see that coming.”

  “No kidding,” I agree, stunned.

  “What do you think? Is Kirby her act of charity for the month?”

  “Or her total psychotic break with reality.”

  “More like.”

  As we head south to Naha, I zone out for a moment, stare at the clouds stacking up in an indigo sky, and let myself sink into the luxurious feeling of someone being on my side, someone looking out for me. As soon as I identify the source of my contentment, I realize how undeserved and inexplicable it is. “Jake, seriously, you can just tell me how to get to that address and put me on a bus to Naha.”

  He looks over, gives me a slow smile, and asks, “Now, why would I want to do that?”

  I don’t know whether Jake truly believes that his ancestors have ordered him to help me, or if he does want to sleep with me. The only thing that comes across for certain is that he actually wants to be with me. The instant I accept that, a remembered scent of Pond’s cold cream, green tea, and a not unpleasant, vinegary body odor overwhelms me, and I recall that, of course, the person who used to comfort me as I sat in her lap and she whispered, “Shi, shi, shi. No cry,” was Grandma Setsuko.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Most of the month of May blurred into a never-ending round of too much work and too little sleep and food. And far, far too little water. An instant after the rain stopped, the moisture all disappeared, sucked away by the coral and limestone of our rocky island. And although every surface in the cave was damp, all the moisture, contaminated by salt or human waste, was undrinkable. Though it seemed futile in the face of the round-the-clock bombing, we continued to set out whatever container we could lay our hands on to collect rainwater. Invariably, we found them either filled with dirt or completely overturned by the constant explosions. Or, worst of all, smashed to bits. So we lived with constant thirst and hunger.

  One thing did happen near the end of the month, however, to brighten the drudgery: Hatsuko and I received a letter. All mail from overseas had ceased long ago, when the enemy cut off our shipping lanes. Even within the island, it was impossible to communicate with our families left behind. This letter, however, was delivered directly to us by Kenta Higa, our oldest living brother’s best friend. Kenta, a handsome boy with fine, long limbs and hair that shone as if it were lacquered, had been sent home from the Philippines when the leprosy he’d contracted there had worn his fingers and toes to nubs. After he delivered the letter to our cave, he left us and continued on, making his way to the Airakuen leper colony where he would live out what remained of his days. We waved good-bye from the safety of the cave opening as Kenta walked away in broad daylight, his stride still strong and straight, with no apparent concern for the planes buzzing through the sky above his head.

  Her hands trembling, Hatsuko carefully unfolded the tissue-thin paper that doubled as an envelope. “It’s from Takashi.” We both had always idolized our second brother. Where Ichirō had been the most handsome of the boys, Takashi was always the smartest. I pressed my fingers against my lips to silence the little yips of joy breaking forth, and Hatsuko read.

  “ ‘Dear Sisters, Since I am certain that nothing could have stopped my hardheaded little Tamiko from joining First Sister, I know that wherever this letter finds you that you will be together. So I send you both greetings from a spot on the Pacific Ocean that I am not allowed to divulge. I am in the top level of the “silkworm shelves,” what we call our bunks because we are stacked in here so tightly. We are suffocating with the heat and sick as dogs from the waves batting us about. Yet I couldn’t be happier, for guess who occupies the two shelves beneath mine? Your brothers Mori and Hiroyuki.’ ”

  We gasped with delight. Not only were our brothers alive, they were together. We both covered our mouths then, and tears spilled down over our fingers.

  “Go on! Go on!” I finally urged Hatsuko.

  “ ‘Mori has stopped vomiting long enough to send his greetings.’ ”

  Hatsuko and I laughed. Mori was even more squeamish than Hatsuko. As a boy he threw up at the smell of a rotten papaya.

  “ ‘Hiroyuki has stopped singing now long enough to do the same.’ ”

  We shook our heads. That was our Hiroyuki, always ready with a song or a joke. He had the carefree temperament of our mother’s family. Hatsuko’s and Mori’s nervous stomachs came from our father’s.

  “ ‘Our Okinawan good luck has continued to hold, and all three of us have been transferred back to the headquarters of the 2nd Army at a city on the mainland, the name of which I am not permitted to divulge. There we will be part of the defense of all of southern Japan.’ ”

  Hatsuko gently pressed the letter to her chest. “They’ve done it, Tami-chan,” she exulted. “They’ve been accepted as real Japanese, sent to defend the mainland. Father must be so proud. It is all he’s ever wanted.”

  “And Mother must be happy, because they are together and will be safe on the mainland.”

  “Yes, no enemy has ever invaded the homeland.”

  “Read the rest! Read the rest!”

  “There isn’t much more. He asks, ‘How are Mother and Father? We have sent several letters but have received no reply. I know that conditions don’t allow you and Tamiko to write, but we three brothers are so hungry for news from home.’ ” Hatsuko looked up at me, stricken. “But we have written. All those letters before the mail stopped. Did they not receive any of them?”

  I shook my head and she continued. “ ‘In closing I will leave you both with a selection from the Imperial Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors that always heartens me: “Obligation is heavier than the mountains but death is lighter than a feather. Do not disgrace yourself by being captured alive, but kill yourself first.” Mori, Horuyuki, and I send you our best wishes and ask for a letter in return as soon as your duties allow. From Second Brother, Takashi.’ ”

  “They’re safe,” Hatsuko exulted.

  “They’re safe and Mother and Father are safe,” I added. “I just know it.”

  Hatsuko didn’t break her vow never to speak of our parents, but she did blink away tears and nod her head.

  We read and reread Takashi’s letter so many times that the thin paper became limp from the dampness of the cave and spotted with black where flakes of soot landed on it.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The next morning when I reported for duty, Head Nurse Tanaka informed me that the surgery ward was swamped and she had assigned me to assist with operations.

  “But I’ve had no surgical training,” I objected. “Really, I’ve had no training of any kind.”

  “Do your best. Show true Japanese spirit, and don’t disappoint the emperor.” With those words, she retreated to join the other nurses in the supply cave.

  I had avoided the surgery ward because it frightened me with its glaring horror-movie lighting. Weeks had passe
d since the hospital had had any supplies of aspirin, much less morphine or ether. As I made my way through the maze of tunnels that led to the surgery ward, shrieks of agony echoed out. They grew even more piercing when I entered and saw that where there had been just three operating tables before, now six were crammed into the same space. All of them were being used. The shadows of the doctors and nurses bent over patients danced across the cave walls as if they were demons capering before a fire.

  “You!” A nurse with a face like a dried gourd and a smock splattered with blood yelled at me. “Come help us here! Hold his leg down!”

  A soldier, naked except for his loincloth, thrashed on the table. It had grown unusual to see a patient move. Their rations had been reduced to two servings a day of gruel so thin it was little more than cloudy water, and most of them had only enough energy to lie on their bunks, hollow-eyed and filled with despair. The patient thrashing on the table was as handsome as Ichirō, my first brother, who had been drowned by a vengeful spirit on the third day of Obon. A strap around the patient’s waist held the young man’s torso in place, but he still flailed his limbs. Feeling as if my hands belonged to someone else, I clutched the soldier’s ankle. He screamed as the doctor poked his gloved fingers into a gaping wound so deep that the femur showed through the blood.

  “We can’t save it,” the doctor barked. “Prepare to amputate.”

  “No! No! No!” the young soldier screamed. “No. Please let me die! Let me die!”

  “Stop disgracing yourself, your family, and our emperor,” the doctor ordered.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” the soldier muttered, weeping uncontrollably.

  For a moment, as the doctor began, I could hear the bone being cut into; then that sound was drowned out as the soldier’s whimpers rose to the howling shrieks of a beast that faded away until a sharp pain in my upper arm brought them back. I returned to my senses to find the nurse with the gourd face pinching me as hard as she could.