Gaia Girls Way of Water

by Lee Welles

  A game that she and her mother often played while sitting dockside was to make “wave wishes.” The trick was to perfectly form your thought, your wish, at the very moment a wave winked at you. However, Miho didn’t believe in wave wishes anymore.

  If wave wishes were real, she wouldn’t be traveling all alone, at the age of ten, to a place she had never been and to live with an uncle she had never met. If wave wishes were real, she would’ve been on the dory, the small boat, with her mother and father. If wave wishes were real, there would not be two pieces of paper in a sealed folder that had the awful words, “Lost at sea; presumed dead” on them.

  Miho didn’t believe in wave wishes anymore.

  2

  In the Dream

  Miho fell asleep with her head against the cool, thick window, still holding her wave-imprinted right hand. Perhaps it was the reminder of wave wishes that sent her sleeping mind back to the otter.

  In her dream, the tide was rising and likely the whales would be returning. Her parents were loading their gear: hydrophone, recorder, cameras, notebooks and reference books full of pictures of whale fins and snouts and tails. Each picture showed the scrapes and bumps and shades of gray that patterned each whale with its own, individual marks.

  Miho knew these marks, these humpbacked whales, almost as well as her parents. Each winter they followed the whales to Hawaii to listen and record their song. Each summer the family went to Alaska to watch them feed and try to figure out why the whales only sang while in Hawaii. Miho often went out on the water with her parents while they worked and stood with her feet braced on the pitching deck, binoculars in hand, waiting to hear the distinctive sound of whales surfacing to breathe.

  In the dream, Miho stopped her play in the shaded stream, stopped looking for another one of the odd animal tracks in the mud. In the dream, Miho didn’t see the otter that stood tall on its back legs and waved its right front paw. She never begged to stay and follow the creature. In the dream, she climbed onboard with her parents and therefore, her mother never called back over the clattering outboard motor, “Miho, take one of the tape recorders; when you find your otter, ask her why she’s here!”

  In the dream, Miho went with her parents and motored out, as always, past the great rocks that marked the inlet of Kaumet Sound. In the dream, they were laughing about some silliness, probably another of her father’s poems, when a great wave rose up! The dream wave’s white fingers curled and raged and grasped the very air from the space around them before all ended in an enormous roar and crash.

  Miho sat up fast and hard. Sweat rolled down her temples and her heart thumped against her breastbone hard enough to make it ache. The only white she saw was the plastic of the plane’s overhead compartment.

  “Mizu?” a woman’s voice asked.

  Miho rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and shook her head. She clambered through her mind for the meaning of ‘mizu.’ She knew that she knew it, but the dream had made her mind all fuzzy. Miho gave up and said, “Watashi wa wakarimasen.” This meant, “I do not understand.” It was a phrase that she had decided she had better know well.

  The smiling flight attendant held up a bottle of water. “Mizu?”

  “Hai, domo.” Miho had often said this to her mother. In Japanese, it meant, “Yes, please.”

  The flight attendant’s eyes scanned the laminated card that hung around Miho’s neck. Miho couldn’t read much of it herself. It was written in hiragana. In Japan, they used three different kinds of writing. Miho knew some kanji. In kanji, a whole word, sometimes a whole idea, was represented by a single symbol. Kanji was fun to draw in the sand, like pictures. But she had only just started to learn hiragana and katakana. They were a sort of alphabet, not made of letters, but of shapes indicating the sounds that made up a Japanese word.

  Miho knew the flight attendant was learning her sad tale by reading the card around her neck. She knew the card said she was traveling alone, what flight she should be on and who was meeting her at the airport in Nagoya, Japan. She suspected it said the sea had taken her mother and father because she saw the flight attendant’s lips purse together and a sad cloud cross her eyes. But then she brightened, like all flight attendants are trained to do.

  “If you need anything…special, ask for me, Keiko.” She gave Miho a wink and moved on to the row behind her.

  I need to get off this plane! thought Miho. The problem with spending 20 hours in the air is it gives you much too much time to think. Miho thought about all the places she would rather be than on this plane.

  Miho had lived with her parents in many interesting places, always by the sea, always near the whales.

  Her mother, who was born and raised in Japan, recorded whales. When she worked, she often called Miho into her office, unplugged her headphones and whispered, “Listen!” The sounds that came from the speakers could sound like squealing, rattling, doors creaking, or low booms. Many sounds could not be heard at all unless her mother sped up or slowed down the tape.

  Her mother said whales sang, looked around, and said things as simple as, “Where are you?” She often told Miho that whales and dolphins were great minds in the water and she wanted to be able to talk to them. This was so important to her that she had left her family in Japan to study in America and follow the whales around the globe.

  Miho’s father, an American, helped her mother with this work and took amazing photographs of the whales and dolphins they saw. He took pictures of the oceans and seas that they traveled. His photos captured the many moods of waves and his pictures had been in magazines and books; some had been used in advertisements. Like her mother, he loved the humpback whale songs best. He would listen for hours and hum along. Her father said that humpback whale song was the first poetry of the world. And her father knew a lot of poems. He often quoted great poets and Miho dearly missed his habit of marking a moment with an appropriate verse.

  Sometimes he would say the whole poem, sometimes just a piece. He was funny with his poems. Practically every time their boat set out her father would call, “Once more upon the waters! Yet once more!” If Miho was nearby, he would turn to her and say, “Lord Byron.”

  Miho had not been born in America or Japan, but on a boat in the searing blue waters far off the coastline of Kauai, a Hawaiian island. Her father loved to tell the story of the great humpback whale songs that had been booming through the hull as her mother groaned and yelled with Miho’s coming.

  “Here she was, my darling Yoko, covered in sweat, obviously in pain, but yelling at me to ‘get the hydrophone in the water!’ I asked her why she had waited so long to tell me about her labor. She said that she was waiting for the song she was recording to end before she said anything. That’s why I love her; she appreciates fine poetry!”

  So Miho had come into the world on a wave of whale song. She had been listening to the whales ever since. Her family had lived in California, Hawaii, Mexico, British Columbia and Alaska. Alaska was where they were, working in the summer feeding-grounds of the humpback whales, when the ocean turned against them.

  Of all the places Miho had lived, she liked Mexico best. She understood why the gray whales came there to have their babies. In Baja, there were endless calm, sunny days. The whales rolled and sported and lounged and the people did too.

  Her family made friends with other people who studied whales and dolphins. Some evenings they grilled dinner over an open pit with Mr. Hernandez, a big man with a wide face and a booming laugh. Mr. Hernandez liked to tease Miho about her name.

  In Spanish, “Miho” was an affectionate thing to call a boy, like saying “buddy.” “Miha” was sort of like an American saying “sweetie” to a girl. Mr. Hernandez started calling her, “Miho-Miha.” He said it was her name in a crazy mix of Japanese and Mexican. He dubbed it “Japican.”

  There were a lot of kids in Mexico; they called her Miho-Miha too. She loved Baja and spent many afternoons exploring, fishing and body surfing waves. Each place they went,
Miho tried to make friends with other kids. But sometimes, she didn’t meet any until it was almost time to leave. When she did find some kids to play with, she asked to learn their songs, jokes and jump rope rhymes. She discovered that everyone liked to teach the songs they liked to sing.

  But Miho and her family moved with the whales. She sometimes wished they could just stay in Baja, where it was warm and fun and she knew people. After it was certain her parents wouldn’t be found, she had begged the lady at the Japanese Consulate to contact Mr. Hernandez. “I could live with him!” she had argued. Why did she have to go and live in a country she had never been to, with an uncle she had never met? The answer was, “Because Kazuki Kiromoto is your family.”

  Miho sat on the plane and thought of the shark. She knew that shark better than she knew Kazuki Kiromoto. The plane continued westward. When it crossed the International Dateline, somewhere over the vast blue Pacific, it would instantly be tomorrow. Miho leaned against the window, looked at the winking waves, and wished that the plane could go so far, so fast that she could go all the way back in time to the day the otter waved.

  3

  Stolen Property

  Miho was scared to get off the plane. Her fellow passengers were moving out slowly, chattering away in Japanese. She realized how little Japanese she really knew, because the sounds surrounding her were more like the twitter of birds than language she could understand. How would she recognize her uncle? How would she find him in the Nagoya Komaki International Airport? How would she ask for help?

  She clutched her backpack tighter to her chest. In it was everything most important to her: a Japanese phrasebook, a small stuffed dolphin her mother had named Shinju, which meant ‘pearl,’ a small photo book with pictures of her small family, and a larger photo book with pictures of the whales she had known. She also had her portable CD player, extra batteries, and stolen property.

  The stolen property was a small zippered case with ten CDs in it. The CDs had labels such as, “Beakman’s Point, Fins 6/24/05,” “Lat64 Long12 Sei 3/4/05,” and “Maui Humpback 1/11/06.” They were her mother’s recordings. Actually, they belonged to The Foundation that paid her mother to record and study whale sounds. When the man from The Foundation had come to their little house in Alaska and started packing up equipment, Miho had acted fast. She had called their house phone from her mother’s cell phone, which was still plugged into the kitchen outlet.

  She then answered the house phone and called out to the man, “It’s for you!” When he had found no one on the other end of the line, Miho told him that The Foundation had called right before he arrived, looking for him—perhaps they were calling again.

  While he dialed and talked to an understandably confused person on the other end, Miho raced around the office grabbing the CDs she knew and loved the most. Not only did she sweep up CDs of the grand, hours-long, humpback poetry, she had grabbed CDs of the other rorquals, the whales that had baleen instead of teeth and long grooves that allowed their throats to expand. While the humpbacks sang songs that took hours to complete, the other rorquals sent low, booming pulses that sounded like the very heart of the earth.

  Miho found the sounds settling and calming and she had listened to them every day since the sea had stolen her mother and father. She liked to close her eyes and imagine that the deep pulses were slicing through the dark waters of all the oceans of the world and seeking out the lost boat. She dreamed more than once that her parents returned, riding into the bay on the backs of two fin whales.

  Miho told herself the CDs really belonged to her family because they had spent all the long hours in the sun, on the waves, searching the depths for those lonely calls. She was sure The Foundation had already found some other scientists to take their money and go out on their boats.

  Miho hugged the backpack and waited to get off the plane. She squeezed the backpack tight to her chest and wished she wasn’t too old to pull out Shinju, the tatty little dolphin that she slept with and talked to, even though she knew that a stuffed dolphin couldn’t really hear her. She loved Shinju so much over the years that the poor thing now only had one eye. But it was okay if she didn’t see so well. She could listen. Shinju was the only one that really knew how Miho felt when her parents left and never came back.

  “Miho, you can come with me.” The flight attendant’s smiling face was looking down at Miho and her hand was extended. “Your uncle will be waiting for you after you go through Immigration and Customs. I will take you there.”

  At the front of the plane, the other three attendants stood saying goodbye to people. Miho remembered her manners and stopped, bowed slightly and said, “Domo arigato. Sayonara.” (Thank you. Goodbye.)

  The oldest of the attendants, a woman whose lipstick was creeping into the wrinkles around her mouth, turned just the corners of her mouth up in a put-on smile, patted Miho on top of the head and said, “Good luck, Gaijin-ko.” The other attendants smirked.

  Miho felt strange. She didn’t know what to say or do, so she bowed again and said, “Domo arigato,” which made the attendants smirk even more. Miho looked up at the nice flight attendant; she was shaking her head and rolling her eyes.

  “Come, Miho.” She took her hand and they left the plane.

  4

  Gaijin-ko

  Miho almost had to jog to keep up with the flight attendant’s long, purposeful stride. The pretty young woman kept glancing at her watch as they walked. Miho hardly had time to look around as she was pulled forward.

  The noise of the airport was terrific. Outside, jets pulled into and out of their gates, engines revving. Inside, it seemed like a thousand people were rushing to or from the gates. All around her, men in dark business suits, pulling small suitcases and carrying briefcases, were coming and going with looks of great concentration. Many were talking rapidly into cell phones. Overhead, a voice streamed from an intercom; it sent out a stream of directions, warnings, and flight information in Japanese, English and what might have been Chinese or Korean.

  They passed restaurants and bars and stores full of shiny new things. Miho had no idea that an airport could look so much like a shopping mall. Music poured out of each establishment and often a store clerk stood in the doorway and called to passers-by. Miho’s ears felt full.

  Finally the rush of people thinned out and the remainder formed into lines. The signs overhead were in many languages. Miho’s eyes went automatically to the English, “Immigration.” The flight attendant looked ahead at the long lines and sighed. She checked her watch. “Miho, do you have your passport?”

  Miho swung her red backpack around and unzipped a pocket. There it was—the little blue book that had followed her so many places. Miho loved to look through the pages at all the round and square stamps with their dates and place names. It was almost better than a photo album to remember the places she had been.

  She liked to show her passport to people. Not only was it proof of all the places she had been, it showed that she was a citizen of two countries. Miho knew that was special. Most people were only the citizen of one country at a time, but Miho got to be both Japanese and American.

  “Good. Keep your passport in the pocket until you get to the counter. After you are done, just keep walking and you will get to Customs.” The flight attendant straightened up and looked at her watch yet again.

  “Are you leaving?” Miho asked, happy she didn’t have to try to say it in Japanese.

  The flight attendant looked a little embarrassed. “I have to go. I am late to meet a friend.” She looked Miho square in the eye. “You will be fine. Just stay in the line.”

  “Can I ask you a question first?”

  “Only a question with a short answer.”

  “What is Gaijin-ko?”

  The flight attendant sighed again and rolled her eyes a little, as she had when they left the airplane.

  “Gaijin is…Gaijin is stranger, someone who is not Japanese. Ko means child. So…stranger child.” She smiled brightly,
as flight attendants are trained to do.

  “But, I am Japanese.” Miho pulled out the passport and opened it.

  The flight attendant leaned down and squinted a moment at the text. Then she stood and put her flight-attendant smile back on her face.

  “In that book, you are Japanese. But in Japan, you are Gaijin. You will always be Gaijin because you are half.” She waved her hand as if to send any other questions Miho might have sailing away. “Good luck, Miho.” She pivoted on her high heel and strode off before Miho’s next question could come out.

  Half? Miho looked at her passport. American and Japanese. That’s what she must’ve meant by half. But in America, Miho was American. Why couldn’t she be Japanese in Japan? She turned this question over and around in her mind as the line inched forward. She decided she would have to ask her uncle.

  Miho finally reached the counter. She slid her passport across it to a man with tiny eyes behind thick glasses. He picked it up and began to flip through it.

  “You came from Canada?”

  “Yes,” Miho said and then added, “Hai,” for good measure. She would do her best to be Japanese.

  “Hmmm.” He flipped through the passport again. He stopped to peer over his glasses at Miho.

  Finally, he began writing on a piece of paper. He pushed it across the counter and said, “Sign here.” Miho carefully used her best cursive to write out her full name, “Miho Mary Rivolo.” She pushed the paper back across the counter.

  BAM! BAM! The agent hit the passport twice with his stamps and then thrust it back across the counter. Miho waited to be told what to do next. The agent leaned around her and started speaking to the person behind her.