Above the East China Sea: A Novel (7 page)

“Forget that HUT! Two, three, four, shit,” my mom advised. “It’s HUT! Twop! Threep! Fourp! Put that ‘puh’ in and you’ll get the cadence right.” Talking to Codie, my mom was happy and animated in a way I could barely remember her ever being with us. A strange mix of jealousy, sadness, and revulsion forced me to leave.

After Basic, Codie went into Security Forces training, where, besides learning to direct traffic and what to do about barking dogs in base neighborhoods, she studied capture and recovery of nuclear weapons, IEDs, and military operations in urban terrain. Codie was good at everything, but utterly excelled at BEAST, Basic Expeditionary Airmen Skills Training, the week when they all went
Lord of the Flies,
lived wild in the field, and made war on one another. Codie was elected leader of Reaper Zone, and, in spite of being half the size of most of the guys on her team and still wearing full body armor and humping a pack containing three MREs, all her MOPP gear—chemical warfare suit, gloves, boots, and gas mask—and carrying two canteens and an M-16 rifle, she was officially credited with the most kills. Because she was not only an honor graduate but got a ribbon for highest small arms marksmanship,
and
made Warrior Flight, Codie was rewarded with the assignment that everyone dreams of, Hickam Air Force Base, right next to Honolulu and across the bay from its sister base, Pearl Harbor.

Meanwhile, I was surviving my junior year at Pueblo Heights as best I could. Which, without Codie, was not too sparkly good. Codie had always been the filter between me and the world. Doing school without her was a root canal minus the Novocain. I killed two birds—social group and numbing the pain—with one group of Quasis, the stoners, when I discovered how easy it was to hang with the slouchy kids who liked to get high. How open and welcoming they were. How essential and mood-elevating their drugs were. My favorite of this crew were the kids who were bused in from the rez. The sweet-faced Navajo girls
who carried their weight in their tummies and favored low-rise jeans on their skinny legs and baby-doll tops with ties in back over their barrel chests. I liked them because they had even less interest than I did in getting acquainted. As soon as a brief, initial giddiness was over, we’d all clump together, say nothing, and kill time in as painless a way as possible. None of us was under the delusion that these were the best years of our lives or pretended that we’d “stay in touch.”

When Mom got her orders for Kadena, “Keystone of the Pacific,” the largest U.S. air base in Asia, near the end of my junior year last April, my reaction to her was, “No! You can’t do this to me. There is no fucking way that I’m transferring my senior year. Period. End of discussion. I’ll live on the street before I move again.”

“Why? So you can stay here with a bunch of loser dopeheads? That is not going to happen. Besides, this is going to be different. We have family there.”

“What family?”

“Your grandma’s family. I have some names.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard about this family before?”

“You have. Your grandma used to talk about them a lot.”

“I was eight when she died.”

“I remember lots from when I was eight.”

“She barely spoke any English.”

“So? You should have learned Japanese.”

“So!
You
should have taught me.”

“Why is everything always my fault? When are you going to step up and take responsibility for your own life? Where would I be if I’d had your attitude? I’d be sitting around in Bumfuck, East Jesus, waiting for the world to hand me something. You can think whatever you want about the air force and your sister’s decision, but at least she’s doing something with her life.”

“What? She’s doing exactly what you raised her to do. She grew up on air force bases; she joins the air force. You grew up on air force bases;
you
joined the air force. Maybe if either one of you had been given some other options—”

Mom jumped in at that point and went off on how my attitude was what was wrong with this country and how, at my age, she was working two jobs, and America was for winners, not whiners. When I tuned
back in, she’d returned to promoting Okinawa. “The point is, I have names. Aunts, uncles, cousins. You said you were always jealous of people with big extended families. Now you’ll have one. Okinawans are good about family. Tight. Your grandma always told me that. You’ll probably have a huge gang of cousins waiting to party with you.”

Someone to party with was sort of the goal of my mom’s life. Eventually I agreed to go. Cousins and a big extended family sounded good, but that wasn’t what changed my mind. What changed my mind was that, after almost a year at Hickam, after almost half of her hitch was over, Codie got deployed. I don’t know whether Mom’s strings didn’t reach to Hawaii or she just stopped pulling them, but Codie’s orders came in a month after ours, and they were for Afcrapistan.

The only string Mom actually was able to pull was to get a buddy of hers to work some magic with our orders, so that we had a five-day layover in Hawaii right before Codie was scheduled to leave. So going to Okinawa was the price I had to pay to see my sister before she deployed.

When Codie picked us up at the airport, I almost didn’t recognize her. She was taut and tan. Every soft place on her had been hardened into muscle. She had her hair skinned back in the same French braid Mom was wearing. When I hugged her it was like my sister had been compressed into a dense antimatter version of herself. I felt shy around her and hung back while she and Mom went into their pod-person Gung Ho routine.

“What’s your tempo band?” Mom asked.

“A,” Codie answered.

“Suh-
weet
!” They high-fived. “And what’s your max deployment time?”

“Hundred and twenty days.”

“Piece of cake. You can do that standing on your head. Just don’t leave base. For anything. Never go outside the wire.”

“No worries, I’ll be the best little fobbit ever.”

They laughed while I figured out that a fobbit had something to do with being stationed on a forward operating base away from the action.

Listening to them bond over “ABUs” and “CST reporting instructions” made me want to stow away in the luggage compartment on the next flight straight back to Albuquerque. Then suddenly, miraculously,
the Gung Ho talk was over. Ever the party girl, Mom had us drop her off at the NCO club, where she knew half the noncoms and planned on speed-dating the rest. Once I had her alone, Codie turned back into my sister. As we walked across the NCO club lawn, I took the first full breath I’d inhaled since she left. After New Mexico, the moist air was a plumeria-scented miracle.

“What did I tell you?” Codie asked, twirling around beneath a tree that showered us with brilliant red flowers when a breeze rippled through the high branches far over our heads.

“You were right,” I admitted, grinning up into the rain of crimson petals. I wanted to remember everything about the moment when I got my sister back, so I pressed one of the blossoms into the copy of
The Hunger Games
I had bought to read on the plane. Later I looked up the name of the tree that had rained red happiness on us and found out that it was called a coral tree. And
Erythrina variegata
became my favorite botanical specimen.

That’s when Codie unhooked the opal pendant necklace she was wearing, fastened it around my neck, and we fell back into sync so completely, it was as if the past year had never happened. As if she’d never told me she’d enlisted and we’d gone straight from counting lightning strikes to dancing beneath a shower of petals. We were so mind-melded that neither one of us had to say out loud that we weren’t going to even mention her deployment. With the full force of our combined sister power, we would keep it outside of our charmed circle forever and it would never be able to touch us.

Codie drove us to a secret cove she’d found. Unlike the cove where my fellow waste cases and I gather every night now, which is mostly pebbles and crushed coral, this one had soft powder-white sand. The water was the aqua of a movie star’s swimming pool, and it was encircled not by jagged black cliffs, but by royal palms with straight, ringed trunks and a starburst of fresh green foliage geysering from the top.

Codie stuck swim fins on my feet, a circle of glass in front of my face, a tube in my mouth, and told me to follow her. I put my head in the water and was stupefied by beauty. A stained-glass window came to life beneath my mask that fractured into clouds of fish like wriggling jewels and petrified forests of coral in Disney colors. She’d undone her hair, and bubbles glistened in a row along one strand as
it swayed around her head like a Samoan warrior princess’s. She took my hand and we flippered through a forest of translucent streamers of shamrock-green kelp while a mosaic of wobbling parallelograms undulated across the white sand bottom.

Codie tugged at my hand and I looked her way. She was so excited that the mask smushing the flesh down around her eyes made her look like an ecstatic Pomeranian as she pointed in underwater slow motion. I followed her finger and found a huge armored hulk, like something out of the Jurassic period, hovering in the water below. With one lazy stroke of its flipper, the green sea turtle rose and headed straight for us.

It stopped right in front of me, calm and still as a boulder, and I stared right into the turtle’s mysterious face, into those heavy-lidded eyes. Above her permanent frown, tiny bubbles of air escaped from the two dots of nostril at the top of her hooked beak. As the turtle oared a flipper and surged past, a current of water brushed against my cheek. Codie and I held hands and shrieked high-pitched, closemouthed insect shrieks of joy deep in our throats.

Fortunately, right on schedule, Mom had fallen in love with a staff sergeant in an operations support squadron at Hickam who looked like Kanye West but with even less charm than that arrogant a-hole. With Mom occupied, Codie and I got to spend every day of her leave at the cove. And every day the turtle came back. We decided that she was a mother turtle who would lay eggs on a secret beach at the next full moon. On our last night, Codie swore to me that I had nothing to worry about; all her unit was going to be doing was helping the transition to let the Afghans take over.

“I promise, Cabooskie: I won’t be anywhere near a hot zone. So stop worrying, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed, and something that had clenched tight within me finally relaxed.

The next day, my mom and I left at dawn on a space-available military flight to Okinawa, where we checked into the Shogun Inn to wait for base housing to open up. Two days later, Codie deployed to Afghanistan. One week after that I scratched through seven days on the calendar and calculated that my sister only had 113 days to go.

Codie had done twelve days in Afghanistan and we were finishing
our second week on Okinawa when two chaplains knocked on the door of our room at the Shogun Inn. After that the words scrambled and all I can remember are “Afghan insurgents,” “transitioning to joint control,” “details uncertain at this time,” and “the ultimate sacrifice for a grateful nation.” No matter how many times I arrange and rearrange the words, they always end up saying the worst thing I could ever hear.

EIGHT

The living one is coming,
Anmā.
I can feel the one the
kami
are sending approaching.

I feel it too. An urgency beats through me that reminds me of how women had described childbirth, when the wisdom of the body seizes control and what must be done is done whether they are prepared or not.

Who will it be?

I don’t know.

Your sister, Hatsuko!

No, it won’t be anyone from our clan.

A stranger.

Of course, it will have to be a stranger.

Do you know what to do?

We don’t need to understand the plans of the
kami.
Only to be ready to act as the instruments of their will.

But the stranger is coming, right? The one we will use to free ourselves?

No more questions. All that remains is for us to be ready.