The sun climbed high in the sky, and the wind slacked off as it usually did around noon. The Viking turned for the shore. In her head Jet could hear the boys congratulating themselves on a race already won. It galled her to pull in beside that bragger Roland. But they’d lose the wind if they stayed out, and her dad was watching from one of the picnic tables. He was taking notes on her nautical judgment, Jet was sure of it. She swallowed her pride and turned for shore.
When they tied up, Kai hopped out and congratulated Beck and Roland on a good sail. They slapped him on the back like boys do and asked him to hang out at the skate park later. Jet wondered for a moment if Kai was a spy for the enemy. She got wearily out of the Saga and checked the patches on her hull. They’d held up just fine. She went over every aging bit of her boat. The ropes were in good shape, but the pins that held the rudder in place were worn and should be replaced. She bailed out the water that had splashed into the boat. That was another thing a catamaran sailor didn’t have to worry about, taking on water. Jet sighed. Or a nervous crew.
She just didn’t understand him. On the first tack they’d taken, Kai had been everything she’d hoped he’d be: fast, strong, and willing to follow her command. But then Beck and Roland got out there, and he went all cautious. It was like he wanted to lag behind. No, that wasn’t fair. He was trying the best he could after all he’d been through.
The boys trailered their boat and went home with Captain Chandler. Dad and Oliver took off for the library, leaving Jet and Kai alone. Jet knew she should say something captain-like and reassuring.
“Next time,” she said, forcing cheer into her voice. “We’ll be a little faster next time.”
“Yes,” Kai said. He was grinning more broadly than he had any reason to. “And the time after that and the time after that.”
Well, at least he was willing to practice, Jet thought.
“Does the wind come up again in the evening?” Kai asked.
Jet nodded.
“When’s the next rising tide?”
“7:42 tonight.”
“So almost two hours before sundown,” Kai said. “We’ll start our real training then.”
“Real training?”
Kai looked over his shoulder to make sure Beck and Roland were really gone.
“Yes,” he said with determination. “Because now we know that even though their sail is taller, we have slightly more sail area with our two sails combined. We know two sails are going to be an advantage when the wind is light. And we know that Beck is not a great judge of the wind. And we know that Roland is a rank beginner—enthusiastic but reckless. And we know that they tend to turn early when there’s a dozen more feet of sailing room, which means you and I will gain time on every tack if we make longer tacks than they do.”
Jet’s mouth had fallen open five sentences ago.
“Are you following this?”
She nodded, rethinking her entire calculation of her sailing partner.
“And all they know,” Kai said with undisguised glee, “is that we are not very good at sailing a boat.” He folded his arms across his chest and grinned in satisfaction. “I bet they hardly practice at all after this.”
“You!” Jet sputtered. “You!” She grabbed a float cushion and whacked Kai over the head with it. “You did all that on purpose?” She swiped at him again. “Would it kill you to tell me about this ahead of time!”
“You played it perfectly!” Kai said, ducking the float cushion as it came in for a third blow. “Can’t you see it? The more you got mad about falling behind, the more smug Roland got.”
Jet paused mid-attack. It couldn’t be true. No way.
“You are like rocket fuel for his boys-are-better-than-girls engine,” Kai said.
“Am not!” Jet said automatically, but already she was thinking.
“It’s okay,” Kai said. “You played right into our strategy.”
“Our strategy?!” Jet said, voice rising. “You mean the strategy you didn’t tell me about?”
“Subtlety is not really your best thing, Jet.”
“I can be subtle!” Jet hollered.
Kai turned away. His shoulders were shaking with laughter. Jet whacked him over the head one more time with the boat cushion. But not very hard.
“Fine, Mr. Espionage, you can be subtle for both of us.” She dropped the cushion back in the boat. “Just so long as I get to be right!”
“You handle the navigation,” Kai said. “Just leave the strategy to me.”
“So we train twice a day,” Jet said. “But if Beck and Roland are on the water with us, we make them believe we’re not very good.”
“We have to convince them the Saga is nothing but a leaky bathtub.”
“And then?”
“Come race day—surprise attack!” Kai said.
“Oh yeah, I’m in.”
Jet gave her cousin a hard look. He had been afraid out there, especially right at the very start, when the mist was blowing off the water. But he stuck it out with her for three whole hours. For some reason that Jet was never going to understand, he found something to like about Roland and Beck. Okay, fine. It was probably lonely to not have guys his age to hang out with. But even so, he’d spent the last three hours plotting to beat his new friends in the race. Whatever his reasons, Kai wanted this win maybe even more than she did, and he was willing to work all summer to get there. Jet could not remember meeting a person who seemed more different from her. And now when she least expected it, he was just like her: pride and loyalty above all else.
“One more thing,” Jet said. “I want to memorize the river. A month from now I want to know every inch of the course by heart, every current, every ripple.”
Every way-finding marker, every depth and sounding, Jet said to herself. Everything she’d need on her pilot’s exam someday. Kai trusted her to captain the race, knowing she’d made a terrible mistake once. He knew the worst the ocean could do, and he got out on the water with her anyway. It was the best present she’d ever been given.
“The charts are in the barn. Will you help me study?”
“Yes.”
“Now about that bathtub!” Jet said with a laugh. “Are you calling my Saga names?”
“Kidding!” Kai said, throwing up his hands. “I was being subtle. Seriously—you should try it sometime.”
“Our Saga,” Jet charged on, “is the most worthy! The most winning! The best craft of her class! The strongest—”
“She’s our legacy,” Kai said quietly. “I won’t let you down.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, at sunrise, Kai noticed with satisfaction the rows of calluses on his hands, the blackened thumbnail he’d gotten while lowering the daggerboard at top speed, and the new crop of sun freckles. Out of habit he got out his phone and thumbed through the news. The earthquake was no longer a front-page story, even in Japan. He had to flick through a dozen other stories before he found it. But when he read the headline, his heart skipped a beat. It was the official register of those lost and declared dead.
Kai knew this day would come. His mother had said it would be soon, had sounded almost relieved that it was coming. And now here it was in black and white on the unblinking screen, his grandparents’ names, side by side, as they had been in life.
A flood of memories washed over him, a thousand details of sound and smell. He used to sleep on Ojī-san’s back porch in the summer. He’d lie very still, waiting for the first sliver of sun to rise above the water. On a calm morning the first rays of sunlight made a golden road across the ink blue of the Uwa Sea.
Kai took the compass out of his pocket. It fit perfectly in his palm. He loved the cool, smooth weight of it. His ojī-san had a box of tools for building wooden boats: planes, chisels, rasps, and saws in many shapes and sizes. The wooden handles of the tools had turned from nut brown to almost black over years of use. Ojī-san had said the tools would be Kai’s one day. They’d planned to make a wooden boat together, and Kai had loved the idea of spendin
g his whole life in that little house on the bay, making boats with his grandfather.
He flipped up the lid of the compass and waited for the golden arrow to settle on north. He’d already set the sliding marker at 260° west by south to mark the direction home. He wanted to go. It was a solid ache in him that never went away, but the town he knew was gone. He held on to the image of those summer sunrises and the sound of Obā-san lighting the stove and stirring miso paste into hot water for the morning soup.
Kai wandered into the garden and picked himself a handful of peas and a few leaves of something that smelled good. He couldn’t bring his grandparents back or fix Ojī-san’s house. He couldn’t find or mend the Ushio-maru. He couldn’t fix anything—except maybe a proper soup for breakfast.
Back in the kitchen, Aunt Karin was packing cookies in boxes. Kai asked if he could use the leftover noodles from the Thai restaurant Uncle Per had taken them to the night before. She showed him the broth in the cupboard that smelled and tasted nothing like broth. It wasn’t going to be his grandmother’s miso soup, not by a million miles, but with the herbs and peas from the garden, it wasn’t so bad. It was better than all that crunchy stuff in boxes that his cousins ate in the morning. He’d just slurped down the last savory noodle when Jet bounded down the stairs and barged into the kitchen.
She was wearing a dress, a blue dress that went down past her knees, with a yellow apron and a vest thing on top. There was a ring of daisies on her head. It was like she stepped out of a storybook from a hundred years ago.
“If you laugh I’m going to hit you with something large and heavy,” Jet said. She slid in next to him at the table and started wolfing down cereal.
“Did I laugh?” Kai said, edging away just in case. “I didn’t say anything.”
Aunt Karin pulled up a chair behind Jet and started working her tangled hair into braids. Jet went from pale to angry pink to volcano red by the time her mom was done.
Oliver arrived in the kitchen next, wearing dress pants, Sunday shoes, and a bright-red vest with silver buttons. Uncle Per emerged from the garage in full Viking attire.
“So!” Uncle Per said, turning slowly in the kitchen to model his costume for Kai. “There’s a spare cape out there. You want to dress up for the festival?”
Kai froze in his seat, horrified.
“No?” Uncle Per laughed. “Not even a helmet with horns?”
Kai shook his head, still speechless.
“Not surprised,” Uncle Per boomed out. “Your dad was never one for dressing up, either.” He gestured for Kai to get up and help him carry things out to the car. “Not that I ever gave Lars much of a choice in the matter.” He laughed again.
Kai trailed after Uncle Per with an armload of cookie boxes. Kai’s father hated bullies above everything, and Kai was beginning to understand how he came by that sentiment.
“Next summer,” Uncle Per said, sliding a folding table into the back of the van, “you can help me put together a display for the festival about the ancient navigators of the Pacific.”
He paused and gave Kai a meaningful look. Kai was still back on the breezy mention of his return next summer. As if his coming to America was going to be a regular thing.
“Because the Chinese invented the…” Uncle Per paused for Kai to fill in the blank.
Kai’s thoughts raced. There was a brief mention in the news that the power plant where his parents worked would close for good. They hadn’t said it was a done deal, but they wouldn’t. Not on the news. Not until long after all the workers knew.
“The compass,” Kai said absently. “The Chinese invented the compass.”
Were his parents thinking of leaving Japan? Would they move back here? They’d never have left Japan while his grandparents were alive. Never.
“But the Chinese used the compass mostly for fortune-telling,” Kai added. His father scorned fortune-tellers, and usually Kai did, too, but today he’d have given every penny in his pocket for some hint of what his future held.
“Bet the Japanese got a hold of the early compass and engineered the heck out of it,” Uncle Per said. “Do you think?”
Kai shrugged, bewildered by far more than the question. Oliver bounded out of the house, took a couple of skips around the driveway, and launched himself into his usual spot in the van. Jet and Aunt Karin followed. Jet had more boxes of cookies, and Aunt Karin had a bagful of paints and brushes and little pots of glitter.
“Schedule?” Aunt Karin said.
“First performance at ten, and then we have the Midsummer Pole dance at three, and then nothing until our last show at five o’clock,” Jet rattled off.
“Great, and do you have your—”
“Phone!” Jet said, pulling hers out of the apron pocket.
“Good. The fairgrounds aren’t all that big,” Aunt Karin went on, turning to Kai. “You won’t get lost. If you need me, I’ll be at the booth for the women’s shelter selling cookies in the morning, and then I’ll be painting faces in the little-kid area in the afternoon. Per will be with the Vikings all day long.” She laughed. “You won’t have any trouble finding him.”
Aunt Karin put some cash for lunch in Kai’s hand. “There’ll be plenty of kids your age to hang out with, or you can come paint faces with me if you like.”
“I’ll take pictures for my father,” Kai said.
“Oh, he’d love that. Did you know that vest on Oliver is the one your dad used to wear when he danced at the festival?”
“Really?”
Kai’s father hardly mentioned being Swedish-American. For sure he never talked about dancing.
“You should hear those boys talk about it. Made to dance with girls!” Aunt Karin said. “In public!”
“The horror!” Jet added.
“Does Oliver mind?” Kai asked.
“You’d think,” Aunt Karin said, “shy as he is. But he loves it. You’ll see.”
“He only started loving it after Dad showed him the part of the book where Captain Hornblower dances a quadrille,” Jet said. “Now he thinks it’s a form of combat.”
“Well, it’s no wonder the way you dance, honey.”
“Mom!” Jet glared at her mother. “I only knocked that boy down one time. One! And it was two years ago!” She turned and looked out the window. “He totally deserved it,” she mumbled.
—
THE FAIRGROUND WAS only a mile away. Kai made himself busy at the start by helping Aunt Karin set out the cookies at the booth for the women’s shelter. Then he helped Uncle Per set up a display about Viking navigation. Eventually it was time for his cousins to dance, and to Kai’s surprise Oliver really did look like he was having a good time.
Afterward Oliver went off to the Viking tent with Uncle Per. A couple of girls from Jet’s school joined the two of them. They wandered around the display tables together, buying snacks and chatting.
The booths had foods Kai had never seen before, smells he’d never smelled, mysteriously milky soups, and sausages shining with grease. Fortunately there were lots of spicy little fishes, so he had no trouble filling up a plate. There was a storyteller in the library corner wearing a dress like Jet’s, but she was his obā-san’s age. She had a group of kids under a spell with a story about a Viking ship. Kai’s grandmother loved to tell stories, and not just the ghost stories she favored while doing the dishes. She made sure Kai knew his history.
And yet here was a history he knew nothing about. There were booths with toy trolls and pots of lingonberry jam and wreaths woven from wheat and folded paper stars. He took pictures of it all. His father talked about his time in the navy, but he never told stories about his heritage. As Kai walked through the festival, he met dozens of people who remembered Lars and gave Kai messages of encouragement for him to pass along.
Kai wandered outside and sat on the grass alone. He had dozens of pictures ready, but he couldn’t quite make himself hit Send. Pictures of Ikata, even Ikata in ruins, made Kai’s throat ache. Even now, when he kn
ew for sure his grandparents were gone, he still wanted to go and put his feet on the ground where they’d stood. Maybe these pictures would make his father want to come back to the United States, even if the power plant didn’t close. Maybe he didn’t talk about his heritage because he got that awful feeling in his gut that Kai got whenever someone asked him about his hometown. Maybe he felt as rootless in Japan as Kai felt in America. Kai weighed his sense of duty about sending the pictures against how desperately he wanted to go home.
He scrolled through the photos again and deleted every single one.
ON THE MORNING of the race, Kai was up with the sun. A week and a half ago, he and Aunt Karin had found a Korean grocer who carried miso paste and the good kind of tofu. Kai gathered greens and carrots from the garden and set out to make the perfect miso soup for his captain. Something easy to eat on a nervous stomach but with plenty of energy for the long hours ahead on the water.
Kai and Jet had been out on the bay every single morning. They’d sailed in every version of wind from a light breeze to a near gale. They’d walked the shoreline of the race and taken kayaks around all the islands. Kai spent hours going over every inch of the Saga, replacing every worn cleat and shackle and stay. Jet pitched in on repairs where she could, but more often she pulled up an empty bucket in the boat shed and copied out the chart of the Columbia River, reciting the names of all twenty islands and every navigational marker. They’d sized up the other teams that practiced on Youngs Bay. They speculated wildly about the out-of-town teams. Beck and Roland practiced every few days, and Jet and Kai kept up their strategy of making them believe they’d have an easy victory. They were sloppy sailors whenever the Viking was nearby.
The Turn of the Tide Page 11