Above the East China Sea: A Novel (31 page)

“Tell me.”

“Jeez, this is embarrassing.”

“Isn’t embarrassing your specialty?”

“Okay, remember the Sheppard NCO pool?”

“Yeah, but I was like nine or ten when we lived on Sheppard. Oh, no. Now I remember. That was you? You were such a shrimp. How did you get so tall?” And then all the details of the incident he doesn’t want me to recall come back and I explode. “Yes! That was you! That was totally you!”

“God, Luz, I was a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“What didn’t you know you were doing?” Jake asks as he slides into the booth next to me.

“He showed my sister his wiener at the pool on Sheppard.”

“Get. Out.”

“I didn’t make her touch it or anything.”

“Yeah,” Jake says. “Probably because she couldn’t find it. Thought you dropped a Hot Tamale in your swimsuit.”

Maybe it’s because Kirby is such a complete goober that talking to
him is like talking to a big, slobbering, but ultimately lovable dog. Or maybe it’s just such a thrill to meet someone who knew Codie that, like with Jacey, talking about her, thinking about her doesn’t hurt. “Codie sort of actually liked you.”

“She did?
Now
you tell me.” Kirby shakes his head. “Codie James. Jesus, she was like my sexual awakening. She was like this perfect anime warrior princess. Badass but so cute.”

I grin; it’s the perfect description.

“I used to come out of the pool all pruned up and shivering, and I’d lie on my stomach on the hot cement and put a towel over my head and watch her just being so cute that I kind of wanted to squeeze her to death. Just
aaarrrr.
She kicked my ass after I … You know.”

“Say it, perv,” Jake interjects. “Exposed yourself to her.”

Kirby slugs Jake on the biceps. Hard.

“Yeah, she told me.” I smile at the memory of Codie going krav maga on the skinny white boy. “Also told me that the carpet matched the drapes.”

“There wasn’t any carpet! I was a kid.”

“I was messing with you. She never said that.”

“She scared the shit out of me. Said what I did was a federal offense, since it happened on federal property, and I’d go to Leavenworth if she told your mom.”

“No! She never told me that. That’s good.”

“She was such a badass. She was killer with all those Oriental martial arts. I could totally see her enlisting.”

The happy-memory vibe screeches to a halt. He hadn’t known Codie at all. “Really? Because I couldn’t. I never could.” My tone is so weird and intense that no one says anything after that. We pull menus out of the holder and study them until a waitress approaches and asks, “You look
yuta
?”

“
Yuta,
yes.
Hai!
” I answer eagerly.

She holds a tray with a mug of root beer and burger off-greasing onto wrapping printed in Japanese with the words “Melty,” “Chubby,” and “Lite” sprinkled around, points me to the private meeting room down a short hall, and says something in Japanese to Jake.

“She’s waiting for you back there,” Jake translates, giving the girl some bills and taking the tray. “We’re supposed to bring this to her.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry,” Jake says as we leave Kirby at the booth ordering half the menu. “It’s good karma.”

“Okinawans have karma, too?”

“Everyone has karma.”

The back room is deserted except for a grandmotherly lady, sitting with her hands folded in front of her, at a booth covered in orange Formica. The
yuta
has short, frizzy hair and is wearing glasses so enormous they cover half her face and magnify her round cheeks and the pouches beneath her hooded eyes. When she spots us, she waves for us to come over, then turns her entire attention to the order that Jake slides in front of her, peeling the top bun aside to check the toppings on her burger. The pineapple, onions, cheese, and bacon meet with her approval. She takes a bite as she motions for us to sit. As we do, she leans forward, grabs the straw poking from her root beer, presses her lips together in a prim seam, and pipelines half the mug down while staring intently at me. Not that I necessarily would have liked a séance atmosphere with incense burning, but the overhead fluorescent lights, poppy music, and the
yuta
’s obvious fondness for all-you-can-drink root beer in a frosted mug don’t build my confidence that she will be any help at all.

I expect her to pull out a deck of tarot cards or take my hand and read my palm. Maybe a crystal ball, something with tea leaves. Instead, she unlooses a clattering barrage of Japanese.

“She needs your list,” Jake translates.

“List of what?”

“Ancestors,” Jake says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “All
yuta
s start with the list. Sorry, I should have told you that.”

Jake tells her that I don’t have a list. The
yuta
looks perplexed but reaches into a shiny vinyl tote bag printed with the face of a smiling Corgi dog and extracts a notepad and ballpoint pen that she shoves toward me.

“She wants you to write down as many of your family members that you are related to by blood as you can remember. She can’t help you without the list. Just write all the names you can think of.”

“Does she read English?”

“She doesn’t need to. She senses from the list who is unhappy.”

The
yuta
adds a few other specifications.

Jake nods and tells me, “She needs you to go as far back as you can. Preferably at least six generations. Married and maiden names of blood relatives.”

“You’re kidding.”

I make the list starting with Codie and go back through my mother and father, and the few other relatives whose names I’ve even ever heard. As I write, the
yuta
listens to the music and studies the ceiling tiles while she chews her pineapple burger, as serene as a cow in a pasture working her cud. The list is pathetically short; I think of Jake’s house, of the constellations of ancestors dancing around his family altar and feel like an orphan compared to him. When I finish, I twirl the sheet around and slide it back across the table.

As she studies the first few names, her cud-chewing expression tightens dramatically. She pushes the burger aside, carefully wipes her hands, screwing each finger into a napkin to clean all the grease away. When she’s finished, she squares her shoulders, closes her eyes, chants softly to herself under her breath, and lets her hands hover above the list like someone waiting for the spirits to make the planche of a Ouija board move.

Her eyes still closed, her finger comes to rest, time and again, on Codie’s name. Each time her fingers contact the letters, her eyes screw shut even tighter and her entire face contracts in an expression of pain. She opens her eyes and strokes Codie’s name, her fingers resting on the letters and smoothing them as gently as a mother soothing a fretful child.

I clutch Jake’s arm. “What? Ask her what she sees.”

Jake starts to speak, but she holds up a silencing finger, bends forward, clamps her lips around the straw, sucks down the rest of her root beer, shoves the empty mug toward Jake, and dispatches him for a refill. Waiting until the door closes behind him, she pushes her trash to the side, and holds her hands out until I place my palms atop hers. She cradles my hands and studies the ceiling tiles some more, her eyes occasionally flickering. She nods as if the transmission had ended, lets go of my hand, taps Codie’s name, and says, “Cry. Make sick. Sad.”

“My sister? Codie? Codie is crying? Why? Why is she sad? ‘Make sick’? What does that mean? Is she making me sick?” The old lady has no idea what I’m asking. “My mother? My
anmā.
” I throw out one of the
few Okinawan words I know. “Did my
anmā
tell you to say that? Did you speak to my mother?” I pull out the crumpled envelope and point to what I hope is my mother’s name written in characters on the first line of the address. “You know? Did she call you?” I pantomime making a phone call as I point emphatically toward the
yuta.

She studies the characters and shakes her head no.

In all my pantomiming, the surveillance photo falls out of the bag. The
yuta
notices and reaches across the table for it. As she studies the photo the furrows deepen on her forehead.

I tap the street corner dude. “Do you know this man?”

Instead of dismissing him, she tilts her head back in order to study the photo through the bottom part of her glasses. When she gets the image in focus, her expression curdles even more. Her lip curling up, she looks from me back down to the photo; there’s something about the photo that has upset, disgusted her.

“What? Did my mother show you this photo? Do you know this man?” Even as I ask the question, an answer begins forming in my mind. I shove it away as less than a distant possibility, the far-off sound of thunder in the summer that does not signal rain.

When Jake returns, the
yuta
hurriedly shoves the photo back and, with rapid, emphatic waving gestures, orders me to hide it away. Without knowing why, I feel ashamed as I stuff the photo back into my bag. Jake slides the refill in front of the
yuta,
who reattaches to the straw and suckles like a baby pig with a bottle. She finishes with a gasp then proceeds to unleash a nonstop stream of Japanese on Jake.

Jake listens, interjecting crisp head nods and several explosive
Hai!
s to indicate that he’s following her. When she’s done, Jake turns to me. “She can’t help you because your list is incomplete. You have to get more names of ancestors, blood relatives, otherwise she can’t give you a full reading.”

The
yuta
nods vigorously as Jake translates, pausing only to reach over, grab a stack of sugar packets and a handful of creamers from a box on the table, stuff them into her tote, and extract a tissue-thin envelope that she pushes across the table to me.

I open it and a bill for sixteen thousand yen flutters out. I have all the commissary money my mother gave me in my bag, and I hand her nearly two hundred dollars. Jake sees the money, explodes in annoyed
Japanese, takes most of the bills back, and hands them to me. “That’s an insane amount. She didn’t even give you a decent reading.”

The
yuta
gathers up the remaining bills, scoots to the end of the bench, and stands. She is even shorter than she appeared while sitting, barely reaching my shoulder. She pushes past me and rushes out. Leaving Jake to collect Kirby, I intercept the
yuta
outside in the parking lot, next to the mechanical bear. “Wait, you can’t leave.” She hurries away from me, tacking toward a bus stop with a red clay-tile roof next to the highway. I run after her and block her escape. “You have to help me.”

She looks up, goggling, the big lenses an aquarium in front of her eyes, and says, “Need list. List too short. Find all ancestor.”

“I don’t know any more ancestors. Did you talk to Codie? My sister. Did my sister have a message for me? I can get more money.
Takusan yen.
You picked my sister’s name out, and then you got an expression on your face like you saw something horrible. What does my sister want me to do? Why did I see that dead girl in the cave?” I scrape my brain for phrases my grandmother used to say, press my hands together, and plead, “
Onegai,
please, tell me what I need to do?”

She scribbles something on a scrap of paper, thrusts it at me, and rushes away to catch the bus hissing to a stop on the edge of the highway.

Jake appears at my elbow, takes the slip of paper from my hand, and studies it. “It’s the name and address of her teacher in Naha who’s a master
yuta.
I’ve actually heard my aunts talking about her.”

“But won’t she need the same list of ancestors?”

“Maybe not. She’s much more on the spiritual side. Supposedly just being in her presence, it, you know”—he pauses, his voice becoming gentle—“helps.”

“Even if you’re a total psycho—” I’m surprised and embarrassed when a sob almost hijacks my attempt at humor. I choke it back as fast as I can.

Jake puts his hand on my back in a comforting way and whispers,
“Shi, shi, shi.”
The hushing syllable—
she,
not
shhh
—strikes a chord of deeply buried memory, and I recall another voice whispering it into my ear long ago, when I was very young and had hurt myself. I struggle to remember who it was who had once dried my tears.

Just as it almost comes back to me, Kirby struts across the lot
holding his phone above his head like a trophy. Jake pulls his hand away as Kirby announces, “
Gomen nasai,
young lovers, but this is where I’m going to have to leave you. Shortie’s on her way right now to pick me up.”

When neither Jake nor I take the bait and ask who the “shortie” is, Kirby whines, “Don’t you want to know who she is?”

“Just the luckiest girl in the world, right?” Jake answers.

“You got that right,” Kirby agrees gleefully. His thumbs popping across his phone’s keyboard, he mutters, “Yeah, baby, daddy’s gonna beat them cakes like Betty Crocker.”

“Ew,” I say. “Just ew.”

Jake puts his hand out, I give him the keys, and we walk back to the car. “Kirbs, you coming?” Jake yells.

“Seriously, I got a hot date coming to pick me up.”

“Don’t talk about your mother like that,” Jake riffs.

“Watch and learn, son,” Kirby yells back. “Watch and learn.”

Before he starts the engine, Jake advises me, “Keep your phone handy. Kirby will be calling any minute for us to come back and get him ’cause his ‘shortie’s’ car broke down or got hit by an asteroid or something.”

As we pull out of the A&W, I glance back just in time to see Jacey turn into the parking lot.

Jake checks the rearview mirror. “I did not see that coming.”

“No kidding,” I agree, stunned.

“What do you think? Is Kirby her act of charity for the month?”

“Or her total psychotic break with reality.”

“More like.”

As we head south to Naha, I zone out for a moment, stare at the clouds stacking up in an indigo sky, and let myself sink into the luxurious feeling of someone being on my side, someone looking out for me. As soon as I identify the source of my contentment, I realize how undeserved and inexplicable it is. “Jake, seriously, you can just tell me how to get to that address and put me on a bus to Naha.”