Above the East China Sea: A Novel (18 page)

At Kadena’s front gate, the guard, a young Okinawan woman in the short-sleeved khaki uniform of a host nation civilian employee, asks for our IDs. From my shoulder bag, I dig out the card that all dependents are issued at the age of ten. Codie and I used to talk about how we dreaded the day when we turned twenty-one and would have to surrender them.

By the time Codie was twelve, she hated the goofy photo on her card so much that she “lost” it so she could get a new one. Always Luz the Caboose, following my sister and copying everything she did, I “lost” the brand-new card I’d gotten when I turned ten. Before we went in for new ones, Codie spent a lot of time making us up. Eyeliner, mascara, blush, lip gloss. Her breath on my face as she told me to look up so she could put mascara on my bottom lashes smelled like Sucrets from the lozenges she was sucking that day for a sore throat. We thought we looked stupendous. The photos, however, taken by a bored GI under flickering fluorescent lights, were worse than the first ones.

“Oh. My. God,” Codie said when we got our cards, still warm from the laminator. “We look like Jodie Foster in that old movie where she’s a ho. We’re baby hos.”

The IDs became another secret in-joke between us. Mom, however, was not amused. She ordered us to redo them. Codie promised we would. ASAP. But we never did. We loved being baby hos together. Plus, we both considered our mother a giant hypocrite, because she was such a ho herself, and only transformed herself into the perfect, by-the-book soldier girl for work.

Eventually Mom confiscated the baby-ho IDs, torched them into a dripping mass of molten plastic with her lighter, and took us herself to get replacements. This time the only makeup we were allowed was ChapStick, and the photos were taken by an airman terrified of screwing up in front of a superior. I’m actuallly rolling my eyes in my ID photo.

At the gate, the Okinawan guard studies Jake’s ID, then mine, shines
a flashlight in our faces to make sure they match, hands our cards back, and waves us on. Going through the gate into the base is like watching one of those tiny sponges packed tight into a capsule miraculously expand into a dinosaur when you put it in a glass of water. In the instant that it takes to drive through the opening in the miles of chain-link fence encircling Kadena Air Base, the world opens up. The claustrophobia of Okinawa, with its narrow, twisting roads, and buildings crammed together right up to the street, expands into a sprawling world of wide, tree-lined avenues and rolling green lawns, endless acres of parade grounds and runways, a commissary and BX lavished with jumbo parking lots.

“Hey, there’s my house,” Jake says, slowing down to point out a big one-family unit at the edge of the most extravagant spread of open land of all, a golf course. The just-watered fairway perfumes the air with the scent of newly mowed grass. The house he points out, secluded from the rest of the neighborhood, is so large, I ask, “How many are in your family?”

“My parents, two brothers, two sisters. My aunt and her family were living with us, but they moved back to Naha. Two cousins are semipermanent. They’re all gone now, though, back at the ancestral home.”

“Oh, yeah, right, Obon.”

“Couple of uncles even flew in from Hawaii. This guy I surf with, his grandparents came in from Peru. Lots of relatives from the mainland.”

“So why did you stay behind?”

“It’s a long story. Is that Kirby?”

We easily catch up to Kirby, who’s creeping along way under the forty-kilometer-an-hour speed limit. He has trouble with converting kilometers to miles, so he just cuts the KPH figure in half and never drives over twenty miles an hour on base. His stepdad has promised that he’ll ship Kirby off to military school in Arkansas if he screws up one more time. And Sergeant Kernshaw, a Desert Storm vet with arms like tree trunks, does not play around. Kirby’s brake lights flash.

“Why is he pulling over?”

Kirby slides to a stop beside the parade ground, where, on review days, row after row of airmen in their freshly pressed service blues, their shoes like black mirrors, march in perfect unison. He jumps out of the car, grinning, the cut on his lip forgotten, holding up his
phone like he’s caught the game-winning ball. One thing you have to say about Kirby: He doesn’t hold a grudge. Codie was the same way. Always said her ADHD made it impossible for her to concentrate on one person long enough to get a good hate on.

Kirby pops his head in Jake’s open window. “Hey, I just got a text from Jacey. She’s dumping the Italian Shetland at the barracks before curfew—”

“Curfew?” Jake interrupts. “Curfew’s not for another hour.”

“They changed it to ten because of those navy guys.”

“Oh, right.” Curfew had been pushed back all across the island because some sailors had raped an Okinawan woman.

“Anyway, Jacey’s up for hanging out some more. You guys in?”

“Luz?” Jake asks.

“No, I’d better …” I point off in the general direction of our housing area. “Curfew.” None of us are supposed to be out after curfew, not that we care that much. I only observe the rule when it’s convenient. And it’s convenient now. My nerves are fried; I have to get something to take the edge off.

“What about you, jackwad?” Kirby asks Jake.

“Hang out? With you?”

“Yeah, me, rim job. What’s your problem. Not like I busted
your
mouth open or anything. I’m the aggrieved party here. Come on, we’ll—”

“Yeah, okay. Cool. Text me.”

Kirby leans in, gives us his blue-gummed smile, “You two. You’re good together. I can see it.”

Count on Kirby to zero in on and say the most awkward thing imaginable.

“Good to know you approve,” Jake says dryly. “Means the world to us.”

“Dude, you’re the one always talking about how you want to break up with Christy, but you’re afraid the whole Smokinawan world’ll turn against you if you do.”

“Thanks for sharing, Kirbs.” Without another word, Jake starts to roll up the window.

“Gahhh!” Kirby, his head still in the window, sticks his tongue out, pretends he’s being decapitated.

“Pull your head out of the window, Kernshaw, and put it where it usually is. Up your ass.”

Kirby backs away. “See you later, masturbator!”

“After a while, pedophile.”

I direct Jake through a series of crisp right-angle turns. We pass a neighborhood of midgrade officers’ housing with neat yards trimmed to the specified three-inch-height maximum. Farther on is enlisted housing, where I live. As the rank goes down, the number of cars and trucks clustered around the multifamily units increases.

“That’s us.” I point to the one empty carport on the block.

“You don’t have a car?”

“Yeah, but my mom parked it at the flight line.”

I don’t add that Mom not letting me use her car while she was gone was why we had a shrieking fight right before she left that had ended with her telling me, “You have an anger issue that you need to see someone about. Did you get in touch with the TAPS program like I told you to?”

I tried and failed not to wince at the acronym. Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. Motto: “Caring for the families of our fallen heroes.” It physically hurt me that our mother didn’t understand how much Codie would have hated that. The “fallen heroes” part. All of it. What made me sick, literally, physically sick, was how she acted like Codie’s death was a problem, a problem that was impeding the efficient accomplishment of The Mission. And, like every other facet of life that related to accomplishing The Mission, the air force had a solution, and setting up the TAPS program and Web site was it.

“Oh, yeah,” I told her. “I have an online mentor and everything. We’re always texting and Facebooking and tweeting and twatting and everything.”

Mom gave me her badass law-enforcement face, the one that told all the airmen stealing paper clips, and skeevy noncom window peepers, and brat taggers defacing government property that she knew who they really were. That they could lie to her all they wanted, but she knew. Just like she doubted that I had an online mentor walking me through the stages of grief. So she took the car. Her last words to me were, “You need to get your shit wrapped up a whole hell of a lot tighter than it is now or there is going to be trouble. Serious trouble.”

“ ‘Going to be’?” I’d asked her, flabbergasted. “There is
going to be
trouble? As if there hasn’t been trouble already? As if we’re walking
through a fairy-tale dreamland of happiness and cotton-candy clouds and have no idea what ‘trouble’ is?”

The words I hadn’t spoken when the chaplains came vibrated then between us like a hologram of Codie. Like my fury had summoned her to bear witness to the truth I was not allowed to speak, the truth I was being punished for even thinking:
Your daughter, my sister, the one person on earth who loved me and whom I loved, is dead. And it’s your fault.

My mom twitched with the effort of not slugging me. At that moment, I wanted her to crack out a little krav maga. I didn’t care if she beat me to a pulp, as long as I could get a few serious shots in on her. But she didn’t go martial arts; instead, she muttered, “Consequences, Luz, consequences,” and left before I could scream at her about what bullshit
that
was.

Jake pulls into our carless carport, leaves the engine running. “You want me to walk you to the door or something?”

“No, no. That’s cool. Daughter of the head base cop, who’d mess with me?” I pivot toward the door handle. I really don’t want to go into the empty apartment; there’s too much night left. But I’ve used up all the fake extroversion I can muster.

“You want me to come in with you?” he asks, quickly adding, “You were saying some pretty extreme things tonight.”

“Ex-STREAM THINGS!” I sing in a fake heavy-metal way. Literally and figuratively, I hit exactly the wrong note.

“Whatever. I just thought, after what happened, you might not want to be alone.”

“Are you suggesting yourself to solve the alone problem?”

“Fuck you. Jesus, Luz, get over yourself.”

“Sorry. I’m an asshole.”

“You don’t exactly make it easy to be your friend.”

“ ‘Friend’?”

He squeezes his eyes shut and scratches the back of his neck where irritation is making it prickle.

“You’re sweet, Jake.” Though I don’t intend to, I sound like a condescending bitch. I jump out before I can embarrass myself any worse than I already have.

Outside, the still air smells like Okinawa when it exhales its night breath, a sick fragrance of too much green. The base is sleeping. I watch
the station wagon’s red taillights crest the rise at the end of the block, then disappear on the other side. I stay out on the porch until the mosquitoes drive me inside.

The edifice we currently inhabit is a nice enough two-bedroom unit, assigned on the basis of Mom’s pay grade and number of dependents. The white paint and tan carpets are new. To stay under our weight allowance, we didn’t move any of our furniture from Albuquerque. Everything in the apartment is borrowed from the base, and it’s fine in an anonymous Motel 6 way. All the upholstery has been drenched in Febreze to kill the smell of past owners. Which just creates its own new superodor of Febreze plus sweat and cigarette smoke overlaid with the corn and cumin smell of Doritos.

Mom hasn’t hung up any of our usual stuff on the walls. Not the giant wooden fork and spoon from the Philippines, or the cuckoo clock like a little brown chalet from Germany, or the red-and-gray Navajo rug we got in Albuquerque, or the blue eye pendant from Turkey for warding off evil that she brought home from her last TDY. Mom had to hit the ground running when we arrived. Command was losing their shit because of a dependent crime wave. Brats staying out past curfew, stealing traffic signs, scrawling “gang signs” on the side of the commissary, getting GIs to buy alcohol for them at the Class Six, doing drugs. Pretty much all the activities that I enjoy with Kirby and his crew.

Plus, since the walls are made of typhoon-proof concrete, you need a drill to put anything up. So the fork and spoon, the clock and the pendants are leaning against the wall in the spot where, eventually, they’ll be hung. Everything else except our clothes and cooking things is still in boxes. Which is different. Before, no matter how short the assignment was going to be, Mom always made a big effort to make a new place homey. But home is just the people who live there, and we both know that we’ll always be one person short of ever having a real home again.

The only thing that looks normal is the battered old box with “
Anmā’s
Stuff” written on the outside in my mom’s handwriting. Of course, that box has never been opened again after the day we got it eight years ago. We were in the middle of PCSing to Germany when we found out that our grandmother had died. Since Mom had no one to leave us with, she
couldn’t even go to the funeral.
Anmā
’s box had bounced around the APO system for weeks before it caught up to us at the Ramstein Prime Knight Inn, where the billeting office had us staying until base housing opened up.

Inside the box were all the things
Anmā
had left my mom. A broken string of pearls, a cloisonné bracelet missing two panels, some dangly rhinestone earrings, a wedding ring, stock certificates for a company that had been out of business for twenty years, and the Smith & Wesson .38 service pistol that my grandfather Eugene Overholt had carried in Vietnam. On the bottom were a dozen albums from the sixties. Mostly Motown, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, all the music that Codie and me and Grandma Setsuko used to dance to when we visited her in Missouri. But only when Grandpa Gene wasn’t around. It would crack Codie and me up to watch our grandmother do her little dances: an old-timey twist and some all-purpose swaying and bouncing that she called “Fuggoo.” Grandma Setsuko, for never really learning English, had still managed to pick up a lot of classic moves. Even though my stolid grandfather Eugene was stationed at Kadena sometime in the late sixties, early seventies, I couldn’t see him teaching her those dances. Especially since, whenever he did catch us dancing, he’d yell at
Anmā
to stop “jumping around like a jungle bunny.”