Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Clear skies. Tendo away. The hunters all back from the hunt.

  Laqi restrained herself from asking: Is it my turn, Grandmother?

  She remembered a winter long past—so long ago there had been no school and no police substation—when the last girl had had her turn. Laqi had been too young to realize the village ceremony was illegal even then. She only knew it was special, and for some reason, secretive. They had gathered in the granary and watched from the shadows as one of the village’s oldest women, skilled in the ancient art, stirred the ink in the wooden bowl, her mutterings soft and musical. Laqi remembered the girl lying flat on a narrow bench, her thin legs pressed together, her ankles touching and toes pointing as she steeled herself against the pain. She remembered staring at the girl’s long thin feet, the bottom of the soles, the delicate soil-darkened heels with their high arches, avoiding the girl’s face, her cheeks and mouth and chin, where the tattoo artist was piercing the flesh, pushing the dye below the skin, scraping away the excess with the looped end of a small bamboo tool.

  Once, the girl let slip a single wincing cry. Laqi tried to rise up on her haunches, but Grandmother gave her a warning glance that made her sit back on folded legs, listening to the scrape against skin, the suppressed inhalations of the girl being marked, the pensive sighs and open-mouthed breathing of the old ink artist as she slowly, steadily transformed the girl into a woman. As long as there was no infection, as long as she healed well, the girl would be more beautiful than ever, her cheekbones defined, her mouth enlarged by the intricate black shadowing. She would marry. At the end of her life, she would be welcomed over the rainbow bridge into the afterlife. The rightness of all this was communicated in the rhythm of the tattooing itself, and as the ceremony wore on, in the warm relief of the soft chatter that finally started up between the women watching from the shadows.

  It would be a risk for the village to perform this ceremony again. There was no reason to believe their people would risk it unless they were planning to defy the authorities in a larger way.

  But Laqi’s awareness of the tension brewing was not as compelling as her romantic daydreams. Pausing in her weaving, she felt the smooth skin of her cheek, wondering how much the piercing and the scraping would hurt. She pushed the skin toward her ear, widening her smile, envisioning the area around her mouth painted dark. She would be a child no longer. Eyes closed, she moved one finger over her top lip again, trying to make the lightest possible contact, pretending that she was not the one doing it. The gentle fingertip and soft, testing caresses came from a stranger’s hand, and now she was leaning into the touch . . .

  “Girl,” her grandmother said abruptly. “What are you doing, with that idiot expression on your face?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Hunh. I’ve come to tell you something.”

  The moment was here. Against the rules of the authorities. Her turn!

  “The ceremony tonight,” Grandmother said. “We need you to do something for us.”

  Laqi nodded, so excited she could barely focus on the words that came next.

  “You are to take the visitor on a long walk. You are to keep him away from the village as long as possible, until it is nearly nightfall.”

  Laqi’s heart sank. She pressed her cheek toward her shoulder, pretending not to understand. “What, Grandmother?”

  “The Japanese. The ugly one. You know.”

  “You want me to walk with Daisuke Oshima?” Laqi was stalling, hoping Grandmother would change her mind.

  “Is something wrong with your ears today?”

  “But—how far?”

  “The men don’t want him carrying back news of what he might see here.”

  Laqi couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “Don’t look that way. This isn’t your time. Do yourself and the stranger a favor. Keep him away.”

  “Grandmother,” she hesitated. “Will it ever be my time?”

  In that moment Grandmother seemed to decide, finally, to stop pretending. “You’re different. Your mother should not have done what she did.”

  “She didn’t do anything.”

  Grandmother glared. “She did the worst possible thing. Never speak of it again.”

  “A grandfather tree,” Laqi promised Daisuke that afternoon in order to lure him away, using the best Japanese she could muster; still faulty, but adequate. “The oldest. Good for your duty?”

  “Not a duty,” he replied, smiling, and put a hand to his chest, as if to say, only a personal desire.

  And yet, after a half day of walking, his face became less serene. He did not want to get lost in this land of headhunters, with good reason. He had no way of knowing if he could trust her.

  He crouched down along the muddy river’s edge, scooped a handful of water and wiped his brow with it, then dipped a handkerchief and wet the back of his neck. His shirt stuck to his spine. She could see the individual knobs of his backbone when he bent over and the pinker patches of his skin showing through the damp fabric. She did not stop looking.

  He dipped the handkerchief again and held it out to her.

  “No,” Laqi said. “We keep walking.”

  He looked at his wristwatch—only the second wristwatch she’d ever seen in her life—then gestured all around, to the trees dripping with vines and the shady undergrowth.

  “We are not lost,” she said, pointing across the river.

  “Boat?”

  “No. Bridge.”

  “A big bridge?”

  “Small.”

  “Wakatta,” he said, resigned to uncertainty. “A small bridge.”

  They continued along the trail. As they climbed a small rise, the vegetation thickened, the forest darkened, the air grew even more humid and then suddenly came alive as they rounded a bend.

  “Ah,” Daisuke said.

  There were butterflies by the dozens: black spotted, white striped, jewel green. Daisuke stopped to study one, but then an even larger butterfly, metallic blue, caught his attention. He stepped off the trail to follow it, tripped over a root, caught himself from falling and swung around, laughing, amazed.

  She laughed, too. How easy this was, in comparison to talking! She loved seeing him so carefree, his face angled toward the sky, his collar loosened, his sleeves rolled up, standing relaxed with one foot planted upslope, legs and arms lean, the skin at his neck and wrists pale, smooth and defenseless.

  How easily the hunters could dispose of him.

  He was the enemy. And she was . . . not the enemy, but someone who did not belong and never had.

  As she watched Daisuke with the butterflies, the truth became clear. Her mother had said that her father was someone not of their people. She’d pictured an aboriginal man, perhaps from many days away. But that did not explain Grandmother’s attitude. It did not explain why she would never consider Laqi to be ready for the tattoo ceremony.

  Why had she not realized it? Her father might have been one of them: Japanese.

  It hit her with a sickening jolt, which confused her more than anything. If she liked Daisuke, why should she reject the idea that her own birth father was most likely Japanese? But she did. And yet, it made everything else more clear: why she was half-invisible in the village and always had been. Why her mother, before her death, had been half-invisible as well, for her transgression.

  Laqi remembered now the way her cholera-stricken mother had described Laqi’s conception. She remembered the loneliness in her mother’s voice, the desire to unburden herself to a child not yet mature enough to receive the news. Laqi had been planted inside her during a cold, bright winter day, Mother had said. She had grown in her belly during the plum rains, that long period of rainy, moldy misery that ends, finally, in something good: summer, when the skies briefly clear again, before the typhoons come.

  You were the good thing, small an
d sweet, that comes after a long period of difficulty.

  Laqi had listened to her words without understanding them and without understanding her mother’s need to tell. But now she knew. There are certain aches, love and loneliness both, that refuse to remain untended.

  Laqi needed to walk.

  “Beautiful,” Daisuke said, still watching the butterflies.

  Laqi gestured up the trail, impatient now.

  “I don’t see the river,” he said.

  He followed reluctantly, looking back down the trail frequently as if trying to memorize landmarks for the way back. He looked puzzled, no doubt in response to her sudden bad humor. But she could not overcome her sour mood. Finally, when the twinkle of the river came into view between the trees, he insisted they stop.

  Daisuke sat on a flat rock and opened his rucksack, taking out a bamboo tube of cooked rice. When he offered, she took some in her fingers, pushed the sticky rice—toasted, delicious—into her mouth. She hadn’t even realized she was hungry.

  When they were finished and he pushed the fire-cracked bamboo shell back into his pack, he said, “There,” and pointed at her face.

  She thought it was an insect. She brushed her hands across her face and neck.

  “No, there,” he said quietly, scooting closer, so that now he was crouched in front of her. “There.”

  He reached slowly and touched the spot just next to her mouth, gently removing a grain of sticky rice. He showed it to her, to prove he hadn’t been lying, and then he flicked it away, laughing again, but it was a hollow, embarrassed laugh. And yet he didn’t retreat.

  She clasped his wrist and started to pull his hand back toward her face, but just as quickly he flinched and pulled his hand away. Now she was left staring at him, looking disappointed and foolish.

  She had been too forward. Or she was simply unappealing. Unwanted in the village and equally unwanted here. An outcast.

  She jumped to her feet, thinking only: Go. Disappear.

  Confusion crossed his face. “Laqi?”

  She took off, running away from Daisuke and away from everything.

  “Laqi, wait!”

  She saw the big boulder and recognized the turn in the trail. Light streamed through the forest. Daisuke was catching up, reaching toward her as she slipped between trees.

  “Careful,” he called out.

  They both stopped just in time. The ground fell away. They were high up on the side of a bluff, high enough over the river now to see the varying striations of blue and green current and the muddier eddies near shore. A long-legged white bird took off from a rock just along the river’s edge, so far below them its thin neck was barely a thread.

  Ahead of them was the swinging footbridge, a tricky harness of ropes and frail planks over the yawning chasm of the river.

  Words failed again, but not actions. When Laqi turned and saw Daisuke’s fearful expression, she darted out of his reach and forged ahead.

  She had not been on this swing bridge since her brother had left home. Unlike the bridge far downriver, closer to the village, this one was no longer commonly used. The first ten planks were solid, but out further, over the river, the wood had splintered. She stepped over one gap, another, ran forward and jumped to clear two missing planks. From behind her, Daisuke shouted. Her landing had made the entire bridge shimmy. His lurching steps, out of sync with hers, turned it into a thrashing snake. She looked over her shoulder and saw he was clenching the horizontal rope on one side, a grimace on his face. His boot, landing on the next plank, made a cracking sound.

  But they were more than halfway across now. She called out his name, sorry for having run, and even sorrier for having tempted him to follow. He was bent over, half-paralyzed, both hands on the right-hand rope, one foot raised, the entire bridge trembling in sympathy.

  She turned away from him, determined to make it across, stepped and felt the splintering sinking motion of the next rotting plank as her foot went through. Her hands grabbed for air and caught the rope, slid, and despite the burn against her palm, held strong. Her leg had broken through wood to the knee and the splinters had cut her skin, but she was not falling.

  Behind her, Daisuke must have frozen in place, because the bridge jounced twice more and then stilled. She pulled her leg out, scraping red-streaked skin as she extracted it. Below them, broken wood tumbled. End over end over end. She held her breath waiting for the tiny wooden pieces to hit the blue river without a sound. A ripple formed and flowed and the skin-like surface of the river resettled into oily smoothness. She willed herself to be lighter, to be the white bird they’d seen soaring beneath the bridge, to be the river moving without sound, to be across.

  Then she was. On solid ground she fell to her knees, clasping her throbbing shin, hands covering the bloody gash.

  He was next to her, muttering with relief. “Aa, yokatta.”

  He wrapped his arms around her. They shook together, and it felt good, it felt right, it felt like something she had been missing at least since her mother had died, without realizing it: a full and decisive embrace, even when it came with frustration.

  “Aa, yokatta.” Finally, she was not translating him, she instantly knew what he was thinking. She felt the pressure of his arms, the pounding in his chest. She understood the danger they both confronted, at this time when things were suddenly changing, but she also felt more safety than she’d ever felt. A paradox. But love is always a paradox.

  And yet, their trip had only begun. Because now, across the river, they were facing nightfall near enemy territory, surrounded by strangers and by ghosts.

  When Sayoko paused in her telling, Hiro asked, “And what happened that night?”

  Gina had appeared in the doorway, requiring further instruction.

  “No,” Sayoko said. “I will finish another time. Angelica will be back soon. We can’t spend all our time telling stories.”

  And yet this story had delivered her own braver self back to her.

  She had been fearless, once. She had also been less selfish. Despite isolation and despair, she had still managed to respond to the touch and loving look of another. Needing protection had not stopped her from wanting to protect another. There was no excuse for the way she had lived the last part of her life, and no reason to keep following the wrong turn she had made, so many miles and years back.

  “Anji-chan gets upset every time you try to help,” Sayoko said to Hiro. “She hasn’t wanted you here since the beginning. I think she may try to influence my son to send you back where you came from.”

  Hiro insisted on his own logic. “If we win her over, if I make myself useful, she won’t want to get rid of me.”

  Sayoko sighed. “I disagree. But we can do our best to change her mind.”

  Hiro called Gina to come closer and listen carefully. They had another, more important job for her.

  10 Angelica

  Angelica was on the subway when her phone started vibrating as new messages flooded in and old ones, formerly truncated, repopulated the small screen. The most recent was from Uncle Bagasao or, more likely, some flunky handling his “customer service.” The outfit was certainly responsive, even if they seemed to be following the script of some dated mafia movie. Now you understand. Don’t miss another payment. We’ll be in contact with more information. Followed by the total of what she still owed, including an overdue charge.

  But the amount was way too much. She had just sent half of her total due. Even considering extra interest and penalties, this new balance was wrong by a factor of ten. If it had been a little off, she would’ve been upset, but this was clearly an error. Maybe she misunderstood the currency used for the calculation.

  The worry and the frustration lasted only moments, eclipsed by the utter relief of being able to read her messages, to be back in the world. She retreated into a far corner of the last subway car and re
ad as quickly as she could, oblivious to everything around her.

  At the next stop, more passengers piled in. Another commuter leaned hard against her, the back of his long raincoat in full contact with the back of her cheap synthetic nurse’s tunic—more than just a brush, a full and sustained pressure of one body against another, not pushy, not malicious, just an accident of overcrowding—and she was overwhelmed by her unexpected reaction, a grateful counter-pressure and a sudden upwelling of emotion that she barely managed to contain. He smelled good: soap and musk. How embarrassing to know that the innocent pressure of a man’s coat against her was enough to make her go teary. Touch was what she needed. Not even sex. Just touch plain and simple.

  When the stranger turned and opened a small space between them, apologizing with a downward glance for having leaned into her, she had to look away, pretending she hadn’t noticed the contact in the first place. In the dark reflection of the subway window she couldn’t quite see her own face but she knew how she looked: eyes and nose red, emotion barely suppressed.

  She struggled to put the incident out of her mind. The nearly endless messages to read made that possible. She had never gone this long without connection.

  On the ride home, she didn’t think to check the feed from Gina’s cam. There had been nothing new to see the last five or six times. The rush hour traffic had picked up and she was still crammed in a corner, but she blocked open a space with her elbows and remained facing the back window, phone cradled next to her chest, screen tilted up, devouring her messages, newest first in case there was urgent news, then oldest, then messages in the middle. Datu was all right. He was acting strange, but he was all right. Thank God.

  It’s not so bad here, he had written late one night, which she usually took to mean: leave Japan. Come here instead. There was always a demand for nurses and doctors in a place where most workers would eventually fall ill.