Above the East China Sea: A Novel (16 page)

Jake looks back at me. “Where’s your car?”

“I walked.”

“You walked? From the base?”

“Just from the bus stop.”

He glances at the narrow, twisting road. “That’s not safe.”

“I can’t argue.”

“Come on, Surfmobile’s right up ahead.”

I get into his ancient station wagon. I’ve never seen it without a couple of boards sticking out the back. Jake pulls off the shoulder and a breeze blows in through the open windows. The night air is all soft and heavy with smells that remind you you’re eleven time zones away from the States. As we lurch down the hill trying to keep up with Kirby, who is pinballing around turns like the lunatic he is, I stare out into the dark, unable to stop the image of the girl in the cave, which I apparently hallucinated, from strobing through my mind.

“Hey, come here.” Jake reaches across the bench seat, puts his arm over my shoulders, and pulls me to his side.

I lean against him, and the instant I make contact with his body, the visions disappear. His warmth makes me realize that I’m sodden. “I reek.”

He leans over, puts his nose against the top of my head. “No, you smell like my favorite thing, the ocean.”

He starts rubbing my arm, and I know I have the choice of a quick
hookup or something else. Because I don’t want some random sleazy encounter to be his last memory of Luz James, I pick “something else” and kill the moment by asking, “Where’s Christy?”

The rubbing stops dead. “She’s off somewhere.”

“Where?”

“You really care?”

“Should I?”

He withdraws his arm, puts it on the steering wheel. “She’s up in the
yambaru.
Up north in the backcountry. Doing Obon stuff with her family like a good
Uchinānchu.
”

Uchinānchu.
The funny, singsongy word rings like a nursery rhyme in my memory and causes smell tags to pop up in my brain: Pond’s cold cream, cigarettes, a vinegary body odor mixed with the wet-hay fragrance of green tea. They’re all the smells I associate with my grandma Overholt, who’d been born Setsuko Uehara, but whom Codie and I called
Anmā,
the Okinawan word for “mother,” since that’s what we grew up hearing our mom call her. I see
Anmā
in my mind pointing at me and saying that word,
Uchinānchu,
then pointing at me and saying, “You, you
Uchinānchu.
” Then she’d point at Codie and say the same thing. She always made us repeat the funny word, then, when we said it correctly, she’d smile and kiss our cheeks and give us pieces of hard candy that smelled like violets. Gradually, we figured out that the word
Uchinānchu
meant Okinawan.

I do the translation and ask, “What Obon stuff are the other Okinawans doing?” Codie always said that being a brat is good training for being a spy. Since you’re always coming in cold and having to pick up cues fast, so that you can fake knowing more than you do, you learn to make a little information go a long way.

“Just the usual three-day blowout when the whole extended clan, the
munchū,
gathers.”

I can feel Jake trying to decide what slot to put me in: crazy druggie girl, quick hookup, or, maybe, someone who’s a little bit like him. I go for door number three and say, “Yeah, Obon, I remember my grandmother talking about that.”

“Your grandmother is …?”

“Pure
Uchinānchu.
”

“So your mom is
hāfu?
”

Half-oo,
the word that explains itself. “Yeah, Oki and Cawk.”

Stripes of light from the oncoming cars flash across Jake’s face as he studies me, sees something that doesn’t add up, and I explain, “My father was pretty dark.”

“You never know. Genetics is such a crapshoot. I have this one
hāfu
friend, his dad was long gone before he arrived. His mom. Bar girl. Too poor to raise him. Farmed him out to her family up north, so he was brought up very old school, right? Pure
Uchi.
Barely speaks a word of English. And this guy, he looks exactly like Will Smith. I mean big grin, jug ears, completely round eyes.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, plays the
sanshin
and everything. Very traditional. Was your grandmother?”

“Was she what?”

“Traditional?”

“Definitely.” Codie used to call us chameleons. Said blending in was the best protective mechanism until you figured out what was going on. “Obon was always a really big deal in my family.”

Jake laughs in a way that’s not either flirty-sexy or worried I’m going to have a mental meltdown. He laughs like we’re friends. “God, my mom and all my aunts go into total overdrive. They even left a day early to consult with their favorite Utah back in Henza.”

“Yeah, Utah,” I repeat, having no idea on earth why he’s talking about consulting with a Mormon state, but not wanting to show him what an outsider I really am by asking.

“They’ve all been cooking like maniacs. Huge batches of
sātā andāgii,
since all the grands and the great-greats back for forever loved their Oki doughnuts. Spam for some long-gone uncle who developed a taste for that in the camps after the war.
Gōyā chanpuru,
because it was my great-aunt Hide’s favorite. But really? What
Uchinānchu
doesn’t love their
chanpuru?
”

“Really,” I agree, having no idea what
“chanpuru”
is, but liking how amazingly normal I feel when I talk to him. Like I actually do belong here and I just imagined everything: the girl in the cave, the rogue wave that saved me, a sea turtle sent by my dead sister. I start to believe that it was all drug-induced and has nothing to do with me. As if to literally prick this new bubble of coziness, whatever it was that I swiped from
the cave and stuck in my pocket pokes me. Tilting away from Jake so he can’t see my stolen goods, I unzip the pocket and dig the item out. When I uncurl my fingers, a brooch rests on my palm. It is in the shape of a flower and is made of iridescent mother-of-pearl. The trumpet-shaped flower hangs from a long stem that is bent over in a humble way. I think it’s a lily.

I’m still surreptitiously staring at it when Jake asks, “You plan on doing anything for Unkeh later today?”

I stuff the pin back in my pocket. “Yeah, Unkeh, I remember my grandmother talking about that,” I lie, “but I can’t exactly recall what it is.”

“Unkeh? First day of Obon. Welcoming day.”

“Welcoming who?”

Jake looks over to see if I’m joking. “The dead. Today is the day the dead return.”

SEVENTEEN

Anmā,
she knows that today is Unkeh. How do I know what the demon is thinking?

Because we’re with her now.

Oh. Because you made her take your pin?

Of course.

Are we
kami-sama
now?

No, far from it.

But you are happy.

Yes.

Because the
kami
are helping us?

Yes.

Will there be time for you to finish telling the story?

There has to be. Where did I stop?

Your father had just told you that you were going to Shuri to give your chickens and pork miso to the emperor.

Just so.

So your name
was
on the list.

Oh, you’re a greedy one. Listen, the story must be told as it happened. Now, I will begin again.

I was going to Shuri! I would join Hatsuko and our cousin Mitsue.

The words sang in my mind, accompanied by the creaks of the cart’s wheels and groans of the leather strapping as Papaya strained against the great wooden yoke. Blue shadows cast by the full moon slid over her broad back as we swayed along. The long branches of the sea hibiscus hedge lining the path scraped the sides of the cart and rat-a-tat-tatted against the bars of the chicken coops piled in the back.

What a day! Just when I thought that my dream of going to Shuri as a student had died, it was brought back to life in an even more magnificent form: I would arrive at the headquarters of the Japanese army as a hero, with wonderful gifts of food and livestock. I imagined the handsome face of Hatsuko’s Lieutenant Nakamura bright with gratitude at our family’s largesse. Perhaps this display of devotion to the emperor would prove how Japanese my sister truly was and inspire him to propose marriage to her. I knew that Hatsuko had always dreamed of marrying a pure Japanese and fleeing our backward island.

While I imagined my sister’s joy and gratitude, Papaya snorted, yanked the reins from my hands, and came to a dead halt. At first I thought that she must have spotted a
habu
viper, and I grabbed the machete from where it swung by a hook on the side of the wagon to chop off its poisonous head. Instead, six ghosts blocked the path.

I screamed and the machete clattered to the bed of the cart.

“Stop screaming,” Aunt Junko ordered. “It’s only us.” My mother and her sisters, all of them, oldest to youngest—Junko, my mother, Yasu, Toyo, Sueko, Yoshi—stepped out of the shadows.

In front of them all stood my impetuous cousin, Junko’s daughter, Chiiko, who told her aunts, “Yes, be quiet. We certainly wouldn’t want to wake up
your brother.
”

All the women laughed at Chiiko’s sarcastic comment. The women had long ago agreed that the decision to adopt my father into their family had been a terrible mistake that only laughter could allow them to bear.

“Wake our brother?” Aunt Junko asked. “After all the millet brandy he drank? Nothing will wake him.”

When my mother joined in the laughter, the deep cut from my father’s lash that sliced beneath her high cheek like a dark shadow seemed to lighten a bit. Even Little Mouse, tied to her mother’s back, peeked over Chiiko’s shoulder and grinned. Little Mouse’s baby teeth had come in, and, just like her mother and grandmother, Chiiko and Junko, she had a gap between the front two. Our father always said that it was that space that allowed all the foolish words in the women’s foolish heads to tumble out. Father warned Hatsuko and me that blurting out whatever thought crossed your mind was a very Okinawan trait and we must strive to keep our thoughts and especially our feelings to ourselves in the refined Japanese manner.

“Let’s get this cart unloaded,” Aunt Yoshi ordered. Though she was the youngest of the sisters, she was the tallest and the strongest, since she’d been the baby adored by her siblings, who regularly went hungry so that she would have extra treats to help her grow strong and healthy. They also never allowed her to carry heavy loads on her head, as they did, which caused her to grow taller than the others. Aunt Yoshi was the mother of my twin cousins, Shinsei and Uei. Since everyone knows that multiple births are a sure sign of a shamefully animal nature, it was generally agreed that all the spoiling was the reason.

“What are you doing?” I asked, as my aunts and cousin carried off the chicken coops and crocks of pork miso.

“We are undoing what should never have been done in the first place,” Mother answered firmly, untying the goats and leading them away from the cart.

“Those are for the emperor,” I protested. My mother caught Aunt Junko’s eye and all the sisters laughed, their merriment an enchanted piping in the still night.

My
anmā
and her sisters carried the cart’s contents to the narrow footpath that led into the dense growth of the jungle.

“Where are you taking the emperor’s gifts?” I called after them, but they’d already been swallowed up by the night. I jumped down off the cart. Papaya was slewing her head to the side as she yanked off a wad of weeds, then calmly chewed. Confident that she wouldn’t wander away until every blade had been consumed, I left the empty cart and ran down the footpath.

The narrow, twisting path cut through the sacred grove thick with tall red pines that smelled of resin. The path led to the tomb of my mother’s clan, where we gathered several times a year. Especially at Shiimii and Obon, my mother and her sisters would spend days weeding the family plot and cleaning the tomb. Then they would produce a multitude of square lacquered boxes filled with rice cakes, wafers, seaweed rolls, boiled octopus, and potato pudding for us to share with our ancestors. There were no lacquered boxes that night.