Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  Codie stuck swim fins on my feet, a circle of glass in front of my face, a tube in my mouth, and told me to follow her. I put my head in the water and was stupefied by beauty. A stained-glass window came to life beneath my mask that fractured into clouds of fish like wriggling jewels and petrified forests of coral in Disney colors. She’d undone her hair, and bubbles glistened in a row along one strand as it swayed around her head like a Samoan warrior princess’s. She took my hand and we flippered through a forest of translucent streamers of shamrock-green kelp while a mosaic of wobbling parallelograms undulated across the white sand bottom.

  Codie tugged at my hand and I looked her way. She was so excited that the mask smushing the flesh down around her eyes made her look like an ecstatic Pomeranian as she pointed in underwater slow motion. I followed her finger and found a huge armored hulk, like something out of the Jurassic period, hovering in the water below. With one lazy stroke of its flipper, the green sea turtle rose and headed straight for us.

  It stopped right in front of me, calm and still as a boulder, and I stared right into the turtle’s mysterious face, into those heavy-lidded eyes. Above her permanent frown, tiny bubbles of air escaped from the two dots of nostril at the top of her hooked beak. As the turtle oared a flipper and surged past, a current of water brushed against my cheek. Codie and I held hands and shrieked high-pitched, closemouthed insect shrieks of joy deep in our throats.

  Fortunately, right on schedule, Mom had fallen in love with a staff sergeant in an operations support squadron at Hickam who looked like Kanye West but with even less charm than that arrogant a-hole. With Mom occupied, Codie and I got to spend every day of her leave at the cove. And every day the turtle came back. We decided that she was a mother turtle who would lay eggs on a secret beach at the next full moon. On our last night, Codie swore to me that I had nothing to worry about; all her unit was going to be doing was helping the transition to let the Afghans take over.

  “I promise, Cabooskie: I won’t be anywhere near a hot zone. So stop worrying, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed, and something that had clenched tight within me finally relaxed.

  The next day, my mom and I left at dawn on a space-available military flight to Okinawa, where we checked into the Shogun Inn to wait for base housing to open up. Two days later, Codie deployed to Afghanistan. One week after that I scratched through seven days on the calendar and calculated that my sister only had 113 days to go.

  Codie had done twelve days in Afghanistan and we were finishing our second week on Okinawa when two chaplains knocked on the door of our room at the Shogun Inn. After that the words scrambled and all I can remember are “Afghan insurgents,” “transitioning to joint control,” “details uncertain at this time,” and “the ultimate sacrifice for a grateful nation.” No matter how many times I arrange and rearrange the words, they always end up saying the worst thing I could ever hear.

  EIGHT

  The living one is coming, Anmā. I can feel the one the kami are sending approaching.

  I feel it too. An urgency beats through me that reminds me of how women had described childbirth, when the wisdom of the body seizes control and what must be done is done whether they are prepared or not.

  Who will it be?

  I don’t know.

  Your sister, Hatsuko!

  No, it won’t be anyone from our clan.

  A stranger.

  Of course, it will have to be a stranger.

  Do you know what to do?

  We don’t need to understand the plans of the kami. Only to be ready to act as the instruments of their will.

  But the stranger is coming, right? The one we will use to free ourselves?

  No more questions. All that remains is for us to be ready.

  Ready for what? To kill the one they send?

  Ready to do whatever the kami set before us.

  Anmā, do you feel that?! The water is lifting us up! I’m frightened! Help me!

  There is nothing to fear. Let it move you; it is what the kami want.

  We are being swept away! Anmā, save me!

  I am with you! I am with you! Be happy! The kami are delivering us!

  NINE

  Puh-WHOOSH! Puh-WHOOSH! Puh-WHOOSH!

  The distant sound of a round of syncopated pops follows me down the beach as Kirby cracks into his magic treasure chest of malted delights. The offshore breeze grows stronger as I walk closer to the water’s edge. Fuzzed-out moonlight shines along the trail of foam left by retreating waves, outlining a gentle curve where the shoreline bends toward the far end of the series of cliffs.

  Behind me my people, the other military kids cast by our government onto this microdot of an island, are silhouettes outlined by flame. The shimmying blaze makes them jerk around like the puppets we are, which causes the question that military kids hate the most to pop into my head: Where are you from? What’s your hometown? The way all my thoughts—without ever asking my permission—always loop back to Codie, this one causes me to recall those girls in Wichita Falls when they asked my sister that exact question.

  It was halfway through my seventh-grade year. I remember because I’d just gotten my braces off right before we were transferred from Mountain Home to Sheppard Air Force Base outside Wichita Falls, Texas. Since base housing was full, Mom used our BAH, basic allowance for housing, and rented a dinky two-bedroom apartment off base in a complex where all the neighborhood cats used the empty pool for a litter box.

  I don’t know why, but having a new, braces-free smile without the big funky gap in the middle that my old one had made me believe that this assignment would be different. At the bus stop on our first day of school, I found out big gap, no gap, braces, no braces, none of it mattered to civilians. We were outsiders. We were different.

  It was January, and Codie and I walked through a freezing wind thick with dust and gravel to the bus stop half a mile away. As we got to the stop, the three girls already waiting there watched us with sour expressions, like we were Christmas presents no one wanted. Socks or cotton underwear. Finally, a skinny girl with mean hillbilly eyes and thin lips asked Codie where we were from. We never knew how to answer that question. Whether to say the base we just left. Or the one we were born on. Or the town where our father’s parents lived, even though we hadn’t seen them since I was a baby. Or Missouri, since our mom’s parents lived there. So Codie just pressed “play” on our standard answer and started counting off the assignments. “Okay, we just moved from Idaho. Our mom was born on Clark Air Base in the Philippines. But that base is closed now. I was born in Germany, but then we moved to California, where Luz was born, then San Antonio. After that was Nevada, then back to Germany, then …”

  I watched the girls’ eyes narrow as the litany of countries and states went on. The bright light of the group, a girl with the congested voice and under-eye shadows of someone with chronic sinus problems, stared hard at Codie’s antique gold skin and her cloud of espresso-brown hair, then observed with canny, shitkicking arrogance, “You don’t look German.”

  Her friend, wearing a “Support Our Troops” T-shirt, said, “They’re base kids,” in a way that meant, They’ll be gone soon, too soon to be friends with. But not too soon to bully.

  While they studied us, I saw my future in Wichita Falls like it was showing on a crystal ball: me getting picked on for the next two years by these inbreeds, and I mentally started erasing them. Codie saw the same vision, and, never one to erase or ignore, dropped her weight back and sank down into The Stance. My sister would have been a killer jock if we’d ever stayed anywhere long enough for her to get on a team. Instead, she channeled all her natural athletic gifts into martial arts. It was her major bond with our mom. Some mothers and daughters scrapbook or read Little House on the Prairie together. Codie and my mom sparred. In her prime, my mom was a female Bruce Lee, and she taught Codie her own mix of karate, kung fu, street brawling, and some system from Israel called krav maga. So, essentially, my sister could kick
your ass in half a dozen languages. She could knock your hat off your head with the back of her foot, then crush your windpipe with her elbow when you reached for it. The girls circling us at the bus stop had enough animal cunning to be able to read serious danger coming off of Codie like stars and squiggles from a KO’d cartoon character.

  They backed off and even let Codie and me get on the bus first. Those girls never spoke to us again the entire time we went to that crappy school. Hardly anyone else did either. But I didn’t care. I had Codie. Codie was my hometown.

  I follow the curve in the shoreline until the fire disappears from view and there’s no sign at all of the kids on the beach. The shoreline straightens out. I stop and let the tide wash in over my ankles. Ahead of me moonlight paints an avenue of silver across the waves so broad that it seems I could simply stroll across it.

  Where do you want to be buried?

  That question is the mind-fuck version of the hometown/where-are-you-from one. Brats hate it even more, since it highlights the fact that not only are we not from anywhere, but some of us have nowhere to go back to.

  We had Codie’s funeral in Hawaii. The air force took care of most of it. An honor guard of soldiers wearing white gloves marched in formation, then handed Mom an American flag folded into a tight triangle with the white stars on the blue background facing up. Seven people from Codie’s unit came, including her sergeant. They were all nice. They all said nice things about Codie. But they didn’t know her. The chaplain who conducted the generic, interdenominational service didn’t know her, so all he could talk about was how our nation owed a debt to Codie and she’d given her life defending what she believed in.

  That was wrong. Codie wasn’t defending what she believed in. She was just a girl who didn’t have the grades to prove how smart she was, and not much else going on at the moment she enlisted. It was also wrong that there were no cousins or friends from grade school. No aunts or uncles just because our grandmother was from Okinawa and our father checked out early and my mom hates his family. Or they hate her. The story keeps changing. But it was still wrong. There should have been people there who remembered Codie from before her permanent teeth came in. Who knew that she loved the Black Keys and Flamin’ Hot Fritos. That if the skin of a mango so much as touched her lips they would swell up like a starlet’s after too many collagen shots. That her handwriting was comically unreadable. That she could run the four-forty in under a minute. That her favorite movie was Princess Mononoke. That when our mother was too busy to go to the commissary or her car needed a new transmission more than we needed groceries and the money ran out before the month did, Codie would make us mustard-and-sugar sandwiches and ketchup soup. But no one said any of these things at her ceremony.

  All any of them wanted to talk to me and Mom about after the service was what a one-in-a-million fluke Codie’s death was. How weird it was for not just a female, but a female air force, to get killed by mortar fire. How it had something to do with her just getting there and not being fully briefed on SOP. How someone must have really screwed up if they hadn’t told her never to go outside the wire.

  That was the first I’d heard about Codie dying outside of the base. When I asked what had happened, why no one had told us about this before, their gazes ping-ponged around from Mom then back to me, and they all went mute until someone asked Patterson, the guy who’d made the comment, whether he was so stupid because his mother is his sister or if it was from being dropped on his head. Then they started in on how no one really knew how Codie had died. How details were sketchy. How the jerkwad fobbits were too fucking illiterate to even write a decent report.

  “So why did you say that?” I asked Patterson. “About Codie being outside the wire?”

  He didn’t answer, but a staff sergeant with a head too small for his beefed-up shoulders whispered to me, “Don’t worry. We’ll get them for you. We’ll get the sons of bitches who did this to your sister.”

  I wasn’t trying to get in the sergeant’s face when I asked, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “We understand,” he said. “We’ve all been where you are now, and it sucks, and sometimes it just helps to stay angry.”

  “I’m not angry, I really want to know if you’re planning to get the person who was actually responsible.”

  “Just give us a name.”

  “Her.” I pointed at my mother. “The person who signed her enlistment papers.”

  Before my mother could say anything, I walked away from all of them and went back to the cemetery. I half liked and half hated that an enormous coral tree shaded it. I liked that a fluffy quilt of crimson blossoms had already settled over Codie’s grave. I hated that I’d never be happy again when I thought of twirling with her in a shower of coral tree petals in Hawaii. My mother and I didn’t exchange one word on the long flight back to Okinawa. That was her version of being understanding and forgiving me. It was my version of being true to Codie.

  I trudge through the sloppy waves and the ocean is cool against my overheated calves, thighs, belly. I slide forward and the water gently lofts me up. It looks like molten metal around me, a silver syrup streaming ripples in a wide V from where it parts at the tips of my outstretched fingers as I breaststroke toward the moon.

  I swim until I can’t take another stroke, flop over onto my back, and let the sea rock me to a lullaby rhythm. During the day, looking down from high atop the black cliffs, this shallow part I’m bobbing above now is a collar of pastel blues and greens ringing the island. At the point where the coral reef wrapping around the island drops down as steeply as the cliffs at my back, the color abruptly changes from soft tropical shades to a midnight blue that’s black at the deepest spots. That’s my destination.

  I flip back over and continue on. I know I’ve reached the outer reef of dark blue when the water grows chilly. Beneath me now are hundreds of feet of sea snakes, moray eels, sharks, and grouper big as bears. Ahead is the East China Sea, then China, South and North Korea. Behind me, out beyond Okinawa, is the Pacific Ocean all the way to Codie’s cove where the mama green sea turtle swims.

  I glance back. In the misty fog the island looks like a place out of a fairy tale. An imaginary land that would vanish entirely if I asked why I, why any of us Americans, were there. A fairy tale that my mother and grandmother invented so we’d all have the comforting illusion that we belonged someplace.

  That lie was pretty much blasted to smithereens by three phone calls not too long after we arrived on the island but before the chaplains came. When the first call came and I heard my mom resurrect her halting Japanese, which she’d barely spoken since my grandma died, I knew she was talking to the Okinawan relatives I’d heard so much about. I was excited and asked her when we were going to meet them. But, even though Mom and I were still talking then, she wouldn’t give me any details. She said her Japanese was rusty and she couldn’t understand what they were saying, and obviously they didn’t understand what she was telling them, but that she’d try again.

  The second call was short and tense. It left my mom bristling worse than a rottweiler about to attack, and I knew better than to ask her about it. The third call was loud. Apparently her Japanese had come unrusted, because she was screaming like a Green Bay Packers fan in the language I hadn’t heard her use since my grandma died. I never even had a chance not to ask about that conversation, because she left right after it, went to the NCO club, and must have made a new friend, since she didn’t drag herself back to the Shogun Inn until dawn. Later that morning, a Saturday, a letter arrived.

  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 ho
ld 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.