Above the East China Sea: A Novel (19 page)

I search through
Anmā’s
box for her favorite album, the one she took out of its secret hiding spot and played only when Grandpa Gene was gone for an entire evening to one of his Agent Orange meetings. I find it at the very bottom of the box and pull out the album. It’s clear and red, as if it were made out of candy-apple coating. Like all the albums she had that were produced locally, this one’s cover is made of low-grade, speckledy cardboard. It has a photo of a soul group on the front. Only the hair suggests that everyone in the group is Okinawan except for the singer, an American guy, either black, Latino, or, maybe, Smurf. The picture has faded so much that he’s now a pale blue. He wears white pants and a white vest with nothing under it. A corona of curly hair puffs out around his head. Back when we first heard the album, Codie and I figured that the group must have been like the Beatles on Okinawa, because Grandma Setsuko would play it over and over again, dancing or just swaying to the Motownesque beat with a dreamy, faraway look on her gentle, round face.

In the apartment above ours, the weight-lifting beef kebab starts grunting and clanging dumbbells down on the ceiling. I put the album back, flop down on the couch, listen to the barnyard noises, and am suffocated by the usual combo cloud of Febreze, loneliness, and the kind of sadness that’s beyond the reach of tears. All I feel is a jittery exhaustion, too wound up to sleep but with barely enough energy to get out of bed. I click the TV on, but after only a few seconds the firewall of snarky late-night talk-show hosts and psychic crime fighters is breached by the image of the girl in the cave lifting her wounded, maggot-ridden arm out to me. Drug-induced or not, the vision makes my heart pound so fiercely that I jump to my feet and pace until I can breathe again.

In the kitchen, I use the broom to sweep out a bottle of Chivas from between the refrigerator and counter where Mom hid it. She’s selfish with the good stuff and doesn’t want me helping myself. Still in its velvet bag tied at the neck with a gold cord, the scotch was a present from Eli, some marine stationed at Futenma that Mom met in July at a joint training exercise on the north end of the island. My mom believes that everyone understands that deployments are like marriage recess. I doubt that Eli’s wife back in South Carolina with three kids understood any better than my dad understood when she cheated on him. Even if she did maintain that she was only doing it so he’d know what it felt like.

“Some people just aren’t meant to be married.” That was her entire defense.

Almost none of the soldiers who killed themselves had an “intact family.”

I most definitely do not want to think about that evil factoid. Or the one about how most of the soldiers didn’t seem suicidal. Instead, I take the scotch to my bed and work on switching off my brain before it forces me to ask questions I don’t want to know the answers to. My phone is there where I left it on the night table. I make a point of not keeping it with me, since the only person who ever calls is my mom. Sure enough, as soon as I turn the thing on, it starts making the horrible
Psycho
shower-murder scene
eek-eek
tones that I put on to warn me I was getting a text. I have nine new messages. All from her. I delete them. That—just thinking about her—makes my heart jackhammer so bad I’m like a drop of water skittering around a hot grill. I take a slug
of the Chivas just so I can get calm enough to sleep off whatever Kirby put in the Cuervo. The scotch has zero calming effect, so I kneel down beside my bed and stretch an arm under the mattress, feeling for the slick plastic of the Ziploc bag with its gravelly wad of pills inside. My chest relaxes just imagining the lovely, serene blue of the Ambien. The soothing lilac of the thirty-milligram Oxy. The very grounding sage green of the Percocet. When I can’t immediately find them, I sweep my arm from one end of the mattress to the other. Fighting a panicked, nauseated sensation, like being on an elevator that drops too fast, I do one more sweep before I tip the mattress up and shove it off the bed. The Ziploc is gone.

“That bitch.”

Consequences.
I can hear my mother saying that as clearly as if she were in the room with me.

Consequences?
I want to ask her.
What did Codie do that she had to suffer you and your fucking consequences? Trust you? Love you? Who would be that stupid?

I was. I actually did believe my mom when she told me that everything would be better on Okinawa. That because of some half-understood words her mom had told her about us having family here, about how Okinawans are so warm and honor family above all else, that we’d be welcomed into a cozy island paradise.

Fuck that. The only family I ever really had was Codie, and you took that away.

I hate going in my mom’s bedroom, but I have to find that Ziploc. Her room smells like her: pressed ABUs, vanilla-musk body lotion, and gun oil. I understand an arsonist’s glee as I root through her drawers, leaving devastation in my wake. I rip apart the socks that she still rolls into tight balls and arranges in perfect rows like she learned in Basic. Like she taught Codie so that her daughter would have “an advantage.” I yank the camouflage uniforms off hangers spaced exactly three fingers apart. They momentarily stay upright, held there by starch and discipline, before melting onto the floor of the closet, where I stomp on them, wipe dirt from the cliff trail on them. I knock the head-shaped metal hat shaper she uses to keep her blue service cap rigidly upright off the lamp it sits atop.

I flip
her
mattress over, delighting in violating her hospital corners. I tear
her
room apart and find nothing until I push the chest of drawers
over and discover, not my baggie of delights, but something almost as interesting: the letter that was hand-delivered to her by the Okinawan messenger girl on a moped the day after my mom had her third and final phone call with what I assumed were our relatives. Though she never did tell me what was in the letter, it was obviously not good, since, after coming out of the bathroom smelling like a tobacco factory, she went directly to the NCO Rocker Club, came home very late and very drunk, wearing an XXL Lakers fan jersey with Kobe Bryant’s number on it, and refused to say another word about our alleged Oki relatives.

I’m disappointed that the letter is all in Japanese characters—until a photo falls out. The date stamped in red across the bottom shows that it was taken at the beginning of the summer, the day before the letter was delivered. The color photo appears to have been shot with a very long telephoto lens on a gray and cloudy day somewhere in a dingy urban landscape. Possibly Chicago, I’m guessing from the small segment of an elevated rail line visible between the two buildings that dominate the image. The subject of the photo obviously didn’t know he was being surveilled. He looks like he’s in his sixties, Latino, or maybe a really light-skinned black.

For a second, I think I recognize the guy. Then I realize that I don’t know him at all. He’s just some anonymous, old street-corner guy, slouching against the side of a building, looking warily off to the side, studying the street with a tense, alert expression on his face. Above his head is part of a sign that reads, “apLand.” The one thing that’s not dreary and monotone in the photo is a patch of sidewalk at the guy’s feet, which is covered by some sort of red fluff, as if a parade had just passed by and one of the floats had exploded.

Though he’s only a guy standing on some random, big-city street corner, and there’s no way I could possibly know him, I still can’t entirely shake the feeling that there’s something familiar about him. My mom trailed a lot of men through our lives, mine and Codie’s, but this one is too old to be one of her hookups. She doesn’t demand much, but she does require buff. And nearly always young.

I try but can’t see any connection between the letter written in Japanese from what were supposed to be my Okinawan relatives and an old street-corner dude in Chicago. I finally have to conclude that the
photo must be from an investigation my mom was involved in and she just randomly stuffed it in the envelope the letter came in. Who knows how many stakeouts she’s been on? She certainly never would have told me about them. Probably she’s secretly in OSI and has trunks full of surveillance shots, including ones of me stealing prescription meds.

I’m about to wad up the tissuey letter when I notice one word written in English on the envelope in my mom’s handwriting:
“yuta.”
I say it out loud and realize that that is what Jake was talking about, not the Mormon state. A phone number is carefully written next to
“yuta,”
and underlined several times. A time, 1500, and a date the day after she received the letter follow. Why would my mother make an appointment with this
“yuta”
? Is there a connection between that and the photo? A strange sense of urgency overcomes me, as if I were intended to find the photo and the envelope. As if, like the sea turtle, they might be signs from Codie. Signs that I have no idea how to interpret. I’m so clueless that I feel like I’m trapped in a video game called “Okinawa,” where I don’t know the rules, but the person I love most will be hurt if I can’t figure them out and act according to their logic.

Or I’m buzzed on bath salts.

Or I’m deranged.

The possibilities are limited.

The wreckage of the sergeant’s room, all the tidy sock balls lying unspooled, the starched uniforms crumpled in a heap, the decapitated hat-shaper, rocking on the floor, certainly votes for deranged. Suicidally, death-wish deranged. My heart thumps and my guts twist from needing the confiscated baggie of calming pharmaceuticals. The psycho-killer
eek
s ring out, startling me so bad that I let out a little shriek. I shove the photo and envelope with the number written on it into my pocket, and the stolen pin jabs me. I grab the phone, ready to hit “decline.” I cannot hang up on my mom fast enough. But it’s not her. I answer.

“LOOZER! Get your ass over here, Lulu. ASAP. We’re going in.”

“Kirby, what—”

“Quit being a little bitch and come out and party with us.” He lowers his voice. “Luz, seriously, come; Jacey won’t go with us if you don’t come.”

“Go where?” I ask.

“Murder House.”

“That place you keep talking about? And every time you bring it up, Jake freaks out and won’t let you take us?”

“ ‘Let’ me? Luz, that guy is not my CO. And he’s straight-up cray about all this Oki stuff. Besides, he left. Not that it was ever his call anyway.”

“He left?”

He raises his voice to its typical bray. “Yeah, got his kimono all up in a bunch when I told him where we were going and that it wasn’t up for debate. You coming?”

“I don’t know.”

Kirby whispers again, “Luz, please come, okay? For me? If you don’t come, Jacey won’t go.”

In the background, Jacey asks, “Kirbs, is she coming? ’Cuz I’m not gonna go without my best friend.”

Best friend? Jacey Bosfeld just called me her best friend?
This throws me for a loop, since she’s never even been to my house and I’ve never been to hers.
Best friend.
I can’t think of what to say. Codie was always the only best friend I ever had. The only one I needed.

“You talk to her,” Kirby says, his voice fading out as he hands the phone off.

“Are you in?” Jacey asks. Her voice sounds different—louder, clearer—like she’d been talking to me through a window before and has stepped inside to where I am. Before I can answer, she whispers, “You should have seen it, Luz. Jake totally went off on Kirby. For once, though, Kirby didn’t back off.” She lowers her voice even more. “Wanna know why?”

“Why?”

“Me. Because I said I wanted to go. I think he’s into me.”

“ ‘Think’? Jace, he’s been crushed out on you all summer.” Having a normal girl conversation feels like speaking in a language that I haven’t used in a long time, but one that comes back with no effort.

“Really?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Hey, what’s the deal with you and Jake?”

“No deal. Flirting while his girlfriend is away, I guess. Why, did he say something?”

“Like he needs to? With the way he looks at you?”

“What ‘way’? There’s no ‘way.’ So he’s not there now?”

“God, no. He was really pissed about Kirby taking us to Murder House.”

“Why?”

“You know. His usual Oki stuff. He says it’s this big desecration to go in there.”

“The house?”

“Yeah. It was supposedly built on some ancient Oki family’s tomb.”

“And that’s why it’s haunted?”

“I guess. I tune him out when he goes off like that.”

“So you don’t remember any of what he said?”

“I don’t know. Something about Murder House being all sacred and everything.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Oh, wait. Now I remember. It’s where the dead wait to make contact with the living and steal their souls.”

Grabbing my shoulder bag, I stand, and as I walk to the door, say, “I’ll be right there.”

NINETEEN