Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  At the gate, the Okinawan guard studies Jake’s ID, then mine, shines a flashlight in our faces to make sure they match, hands our cards back, and waves us on. Going through the gate into the base is like watching one of those tiny sponges packed tight into a capsule miraculously expand into a dinosaur when you put it in a glass of water. In the instant that it takes to drive through the opening in the miles of chain-link fence encircling Kadena Air Base, the world opens up. The claustrophobia of Okinawa, with its narrow, twisting roads, and buildings crammed together right up to the street, expands into a sprawling world of wide, tree-lined avenues and rolling green lawns, endless acres of parade grounds and runways, a commissary and BX lavished with jumbo parking lots.

  “Hey, there’s my house,” Jake says, slowing down to point out a big one-family unit at the edge of the most extravagant spread of open land of all, a golf course. The just-watered fairway perfumes the air with the scent of newly mowed grass. The house he points out, secluded from the rest of the neighborhood, is so large, I ask, “How many are in your family?”

  “My parents, two brothers, two sisters. My aunt and her family were living with us, but they moved back to Naha. Two cousins are semipermanent. They’re all gone now, though, back at the ancestral home.”

  “Oh, yeah, right, Obon.”

  “Couple of uncles even flew in from Hawaii. This guy I surf with, his grandparents came in from Peru. Lots of relatives from the mainland.”

  “So why did you stay behind?”

  “It’s a long story. Is that Kirby?”

  We easily catch up to Kirby, who’s creeping along way under the forty-kilometer-an-hour speed limit. He has trouble with converting kilometers to miles, so he just cuts the KPH figure in half and never drives over twenty miles an hour on base. His stepdad has promised that he’ll ship Kirby off to military school in Arkansas if he screws up one more time. And Sergeant Kernshaw, a Desert Storm vet with arms like tree trunks, does not play around. Kirby’s brake lights flash.

  “Why is he pulling over?”

  Kirby slides to a stop beside the parade ground, where, on review days, row after row of airmen in their freshly pressed service blues, their shoes like black mirrors, march in perfect unison. He jumps out of the car, grinning, the cut on his lip forgotten, holding up his phone like he’s caught the game-winning ball. One thing you have to say about Kirby: He doesn’t hold a grudge. Codie was the same way. Always said her ADHD made it impossible for her to concentrate on one person long enough to get a good hate on.

  Kirby pops his head in Jake’s open window. “Hey, I just got a text from Jacey. She’s dumping the Italian Shetland at the barracks before curfew—”

  “Curfew?” Jake interrupts. “Curfew’s not for another hour.”

  “They changed it to ten because of those navy guys.”

  “Oh, right.” Curfew had been pushed back all across the island because some sailors had raped an Okinawan woman.

  “Anyway, Jacey’s up for hanging out some more. You guys in?”

  “Luz?” Jake asks.

  “No, I’d better …” I point off in the general direction of our housing area. “Curfew.” None of us are supposed to be out after curfew, not that we care that much. I only observe the rule when it’s convenient. And it’s convenient now. My nerves are fried; I have to get something to take the edge off.

  “What about you, jackwad?” Kirby asks Jake.

  “Hang out? With you?”

  “Yeah, me, rim job. What’s your problem. Not like I busted your mouth open or anything. I’m the aggrieved party here. Come on, we’ll—”

  “Yeah, okay. Cool. Text me.”

  Kirby leans in, gives us his blue-gummed smile, “You two. You’re good together. I can see it.”

  Count on Kirby to zero in on and say the most awkward thing imaginable.

  “Good to know you approve,” Jake says dryly. “Means the world to us.”

  “Dude, you’re the one always talking about how you want to break up with Christy, but you’re afraid the whole Smokinawan world’ll turn against you if you do.”

  “Thanks for sharing, Kirbs.” Without another word, Jake starts to roll up the window.

  “Gahhh!” Kirby, his head still in the window, sticks his tongue out, pretends he’s being decapitated.

  “Pull your head out of the window, Kernshaw, and put it where it usually is. Up your ass.”

  Kirby backs away. “See you later, masturbator!”

  “After a while, pedophile.”

  I direct Jake through a series of crisp right-angle turns. We pass a neighborhood of midgrade officers’ housing with neat yards trimmed to the specified three-inch-height maximum. Farther on is enlisted housing, where I live. As the rank goes down, the number of cars and trucks clustered around the multifamily units increases.

  “That’s us.” I point to the one empty carport on the block.

  “You don’t have a car?”

  “Yeah, but my mom parked it at the flight line.”

  I don’t add that Mom not letting me use her car while she was gone was why we had a shrieking fight right before she left that had ended with her telling me, “You have an anger issue that you need to see someone about. Did you get in touch with the TAPS program like I told you to?”

  I tried and failed not to wince at the acronym. Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. Motto: “Caring for the families of our fallen heroes.” It physically hurt me that our mother didn’t understand how much Codie would have hated that. The “fallen heroes” part. All of it. What made me sick, literally, physically sick, was how she acted like Codie’s death was a problem, a problem that was impeding the efficient accomplishment of The Mission. And, like every other facet of life that related to accomplishing The Mission, the air force had a solution, and setting up the TAPS program and Web site was it.

  “Oh, yeah,” I told her. “I have an online mentor and everything. We’re always texting and Facebooking and tweeting and twatting and everything.”

  Mom gave me her badass law-enforcement face, the one that told all the airmen stealing paper clips, and skeevy noncom window peepers, and brat taggers defacing government property that she knew who they really were. That they could lie to her all they wanted, but she knew. Just like she doubted that I had an online mentor walking me through the stages of grief. So she took the car. Her last words to me were, “You need to get your shit wrapped up a whole hell of a lot tighter than it is now or there is going to be trouble. Serious trouble.”

  “ ‘Going to be’?” I’d asked her, flabbergasted. “There is going to be trouble? As if there hasn’t been trouble already? As if we’re walking through a fairy-tale dreamland of happiness and cotton-candy clouds and have no idea what ‘trouble’ is?”

  The words I hadn’t spoken when the chaplains came vibrated then between us like a hologram of Codie. Like my fury had summoned her to bear witness to the truth I was not allowed to speak, the truth I was being punished for even thinking: Your daughter, my sister, the one person on earth who loved me and whom I loved, is dead. And it’s your fault.

  My mom twitched with the effort of not slugging me. At that moment, I wanted her to crack out a little krav maga. I didn’t care if she beat me to a pulp, as long as I could get a few serious shots in on her. But she didn’t go martial arts; instead, she muttered, “Consequences, Luz, consequences,” and left before I could scream at her about what bullshit that was.

  Jake pulls into our carless carport, leaves the engine running. “You want me to walk you to the door or something?”

  “No, no. That’s cool. Daughter of the head base cop, who’d mess with me?” I pivot toward the door handle. I really don’t want to go into the empty apartment; there’s too much night left. But I’ve used up all the fake extroversion I can muster.

  “You want me to come in with you?” he asks, quickly adding, “You were saying some pretty extreme things tonight.”

  “Ex-STREAM THINGS!” I sing in a fake heavy-
metal way. Literally and figuratively, I hit exactly the wrong note.

  “Whatever. I just thought, after what happened, you might not want to be alone.”

  “Are you suggesting yourself to solve the alone problem?”

  “Fuck you. Jesus, Luz, get over yourself.”

  “Sorry. I’m an asshole.”

  “You don’t exactly make it easy to be your friend.”

  “ ‘Friend’?”

  He squeezes his eyes shut and scratches the back of his neck where irritation is making it prickle.

  “You’re sweet, Jake.” Though I don’t intend to, I sound like a condescending bitch. I jump out before I can embarrass myself any worse than I already have.

  Outside, the still air smells like Okinawa when it exhales its night breath, a sick fragrance of too much green. The base is sleeping. I watch the station wagon’s red taillights crest the rise at the end of the block, then disappear on the other side. I stay out on the porch until the mosquitoes drive me inside.

  The edifice we currently inhabit is a nice enough two-bedroom unit, assigned on the basis of Mom’s pay grade and number of dependents. The white paint and tan carpets are new. To stay under our weight allowance, we didn’t move any of our furniture from Albuquerque. Everything in the apartment is borrowed from the base, and it’s fine in an anonymous Motel 6 way. All the upholstery has been drenched in Febreze to kill the smell of past owners. Which just creates its own new superodor of Febreze plus sweat and cigarette smoke overlaid with the corn and cumin smell of Doritos.

  Mom hasn’t hung up any of our usual stuff on the walls. Not the giant wooden fork and spoon from the Philippines, or the cuckoo clock like a little brown chalet from Germany, or the red-and-gray Navajo rug we got in Albuquerque, or the blue eye pendant from Turkey for warding off evil that she brought home from her last TDY. Mom had to hit the ground running when we arrived. Command was losing their shit because of a dependent crime wave. Brats staying out past curfew, stealing traffic signs, scrawling “gang signs” on the side of the commissary, getting GIs to buy alcohol for them at the Class Six, doing drugs. Pretty much all the activities that I enjoy with Kirby and his crew.

  Plus, since the walls are made of typhoon-proof concrete, you need a drill to put anything up. So the fork and spoon, the clock and the pendants are leaning against the wall in the spot where, eventually, they’ll be hung. Everything else except our clothes and cooking things is still in boxes. Which is different. Before, no matter how short the assignment was going to be, Mom always made a big effort to make a new place homey. But home is just the people who live there, and we both know that we’ll always be one person short of ever having a real home again.

  The only thing that looks normal is the battered old box with “Anmā’s Stuff” written on the outside in my mom’s handwriting. Of course, that box has never been opened again after the day we got it eight years ago. We were in the middle of PCSing to Germany when we found out that our grandmother had died. Since Mom had no one to leave us with, she couldn’t even go to the funeral. Anmā’s box had bounced around the APO system for weeks before it caught up to us at the Ramstein Prime Knight Inn, where the billeting office had us staying until base housing opened up.

  Inside the box were all the things Anmā had left my mom. A broken string of pearls, a cloisonné bracelet missing two panels, some dangly rhinestone earrings, a wedding ring, stock certificates for a company that had been out of business for twenty years, and the Smith & Wesson .38 service pistol that my grandfather Eugene Overholt had carried in Vietnam. On the bottom were a dozen albums from the sixties. Mostly Motown, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, all the music that Codie and me and Grandma Setsuko used to dance to when we visited her in Missouri. But only when Grandpa Gene wasn’t around. It would crack Codie and me up to watch our grandmother do her little dances: an old-timey twist and some all-purpose swaying and bouncing that she called “Fuggoo.” Grandma Setsuko, for never really learning English, had still managed to pick up a lot of classic moves. Even though my stolid grandfather Eugene was stationed at Kadena sometime in the late sixties, early seventies, I couldn’t see him teaching her those dances. Especially since, whenever he did catch us dancing, he’d yell at Anmā to stop “jumping around like a jungle bunny.”

  I search through Anmā’s box for her favorite album, the one she took out of its secret hiding spot and played only when Grandpa Gene was gone for an entire evening to one of his Agent Orange meetings. I find it at the very bottom of the box and pull out the album. It’s clear and red, as if it were made out of candy-apple coating. Like all the albums she had that were produced locally, this one’s cover is made of low-grade, speckledy cardboard. It has a photo of a soul group on the front. Only the hair suggests that everyone in the group is Okinawan except for the singer, an American guy, either black, Latino, or, maybe, Smurf. The picture has faded so much that he’s now a pale blue. He wears white pants and a white vest with nothing under it. A corona of curly hair puffs out around his head. Back when we first heard the album, Codie and I figured that the group must have been like the Beatles on Okinawa, because Grandma Setsuko would play it over and over again, dancing or just swaying to the Motownesque beat with a dreamy, faraway look on her gentle, round face.

  In the apartment above ours, the weight-lifting beef kebab starts grunting and clanging dumbbells down on the ceiling. I put the album back, flop down on the couch, listen to the barnyard noises, and am suffocated by the usual combo cloud of Febreze, loneliness, and the kind of sadness that’s beyond the reach of tears. All I feel is a jittery exhaustion, too wound up to sleep but with barely enough energy to get out of bed. I click the TV on, but after only a few seconds the firewall of snarky late-night talk-show hosts and psychic crime fighters is breached by the image of the girl in the cave lifting her wounded, maggot-ridden arm out to me. Drug-induced or not, the vision makes my heart pound so fiercely that I jump to my feet and pace until I can breathe again.

  In the kitchen, I use the broom to sweep out a bottle of Chivas from between the refrigerator and counter where Mom hid it. She’s selfish with the good stuff and doesn’t want me helping myself. Still in its velvet bag tied at the neck with a gold cord, the scotch was a present from Eli, some marine stationed at Futenma that Mom met in July at a joint training exercise on the north end of the island. My mom believes that everyone understands that deployments are like marriage recess. I doubt that Eli’s wife back in South Carolina with three kids understood any better than my dad understood when she cheated on him. Even if she did maintain that she was only doing it so he’d know what it felt like.

  “Some people just aren’t meant to be married.” That was her entire defense.

  Almost none of the soldiers who killed themselves had an “intact family.”

  I most definitely do not want to think about that evil factoid. Or the one about how most of the soldiers didn’t seem suicidal. Instead, I take the scotch to my bed and work on switching off my brain before it forces me to ask questions I don’t want to know the answers to. My phone is there where I left it on the night table. I make a point of not keeping it with me, since the only person who ever calls is my mom. Sure enough, as soon as I turn the thing on, it starts making the horrible Psycho shower-murder scene eek-eek tones that I put on to warn me I was getting a text. I have nine new messages. All from her. I delete them. That—just thinking about her—makes my heart jackhammer so bad I’m like a drop of water skittering around a hot grill. I take a slug of the Chivas just so I can get calm enough to sleep off whatever Kirby put in the Cuervo. The scotch has zero calming effect, so I kneel down beside my bed and stretch an arm under the mattress, feeling for the slick plastic of the Ziploc bag with its gravelly wad of pills inside. My chest relaxes just imagining the lovely, serene blue of the Ambien. The soothing lilac of the thirty-milligram Oxy. The very grounding sage green of the Percocet. When I can’t immediately find them, I sweep my arm from one end of the mattress to the other. Fighting a p
anicked, nauseated sensation, like being on an elevator that drops too fast, I do one more sweep before I tip the mattress up and shove it off the bed. The Ziploc is gone.

  “That bitch.”

  Consequences. I can hear my mother saying that as clearly as if she were in the room with me.

  Consequences? I want to ask her. What did Codie do that she had to suffer you and your fucking consequences? Trust you? Love you? Who would be that stupid?

  I was. I actually did believe my mom when she told me that everything would be better on Okinawa. That because of some half-understood words her mom had told her about us having family here, about how Okinawans are so warm and honor family above all else, that we’d be welcomed into a cozy island paradise.

  Fuck that. The only family I ever really had was Codie, and you took that away.

  I hate going in my mom’s bedroom, but I have to find that Ziploc. Her room smells like her: pressed ABUs, vanilla-musk body lotion, and gun oil. I understand an arsonist’s glee as I root through her drawers, leaving devastation in my wake. I rip apart the socks that she still rolls into tight balls and arranges in perfect rows like she learned in Basic. Like she taught Codie so that her daughter would have “an advantage.” I yank the camouflage uniforms off hangers spaced exactly three fingers apart. They momentarily stay upright, held there by starch and discipline, before melting onto the floor of the closet, where I stomp on them, wipe dirt from the cliff trail on them. I knock the head-shaped metal hat shaper she uses to keep her blue service cap rigidly upright off the lamp it sits atop.

  I flip her mattress over, delighting in violating her hospital corners. I tear her room apart and find nothing until I push the chest of drawers over and discover, not my baggie of delights, but something almost as interesting: the letter that was hand-delivered to her by the Okinawan messenger girl on a moped the day after my mom had her third and final phone call with what I assumed were our relatives. Though she never did tell me what was in the letter, it was obviously not good, since, after coming out of the bathroom smelling like a tobacco factory, she went directly to the NCO Rocker Club, came home very late and very drunk, wearing an XXL Lakers fan jersey with Kobe Bryant’s number on it, and refused to say another word about our alleged Oki relatives.