Above the East China Sea: A Novel (44 page)

The students close to me exchange looks and move away. I don’t care, because when I return my attention to the portraits, one of them jumps out at me. All the other photos depict individual girls, but this one has captured two in the same frame. One rests her hand on the other’s shoulder. The taller girl in back has an elegant, long neck, thick braids, and a serene smile. She’s the only one of the students not wearing a pin. The shorter girl in front wears her wavy hair in pigtails that flip up just beneath her ears. The beaming smile on her broad, open face mirrors the curve of her perky hairstyle. Though they don’t resemble each other, the possessive hand of the older on the shoulder of the younger combined with the younger one’s smile of contented security make me so certain that the two girls are sisters that I can feel Codie’s hand on my shoulder.

This knowledge, however, doesn’t help me in the least. I stare at the rows of white lilies pinned on the left side of all but one of the girls’ blouses, placed exactly above their hearts. All of the brooches are identical to the one in my pocket. The pale mother-of-pearl flower heads stand out in sharp contrast against the black of their blouses. And they’re all positioned with the blossom drooping inward to the right, toward their hearts. Every girl except the elegant older sister has one. Which means that she is the only student I know for sure is not the girl in the cave. Which leaves me with 219 other candidates. I can’t stand the feel of all those girls who’ve been waiting so long to be reunited with their families staring at me, knowing that the one I’ve failed so badly is among them.

I rush out of the room and make my way outside to a meditation garden at the back of the museum. An old woman in a kimono sits silently on a bench, staring at a hillside densely planted with flowers, while tears roll down her cheeks. The sun comes out and the orange of the museum’s tile roof and the yellows and bright magentas of the flowers beam with a disconcerting gaudiness.

What else can I do except make a report to the authorities? Authorities who will then put the sea-washed bones I tell them about in a warehouse, where the girl with the Princess Lily pin will stay until long after everyone who knew her and has been waiting seven decades to find out what happened to her is dead. I think of Codie sleeping beneath her blanket of red
deigo
tree petals and try to imagine how infinitely more awful it would be if we didn’t have even that. Though I ache to believe otherwise, I have to accept the truth: No matter how different the rules are on Okinawa, how much these
kami
of Jake’s may or may not be able to intervene in our lives, one rule remains the same: The dead are beyond our help. They are gone forever and ever and ever. We can do nothing for them.

Defeated, I drop onto a stone bench in the shade. The pin in my pocket jabs me. I take it out, study it, and I decide that I’ll donate it to the museum. Perhaps they’ll make it their mission to identify its owner. Deciding to give the pin away makes me as sad as I was when, without asking me, my mother threw away Codie’s old hairbrush that I had saved. The one that still carried her scent and held strands of her hair. I hold the brooch against my own heart, and touch the flower to feel it bending inward toward my sternum, just as the heads of the lilies in all the portraits drooped to the wearer’s right. Except that the lily on my chest doesn’t face to the right. Though I hold it on my left side, just where all the girls in their portraits had pinned their brooches so that they would curl inward, the one in my hand faces the other way. Outward, to the left. I look down to confirm what my fingers have told me: Yes, this pin is different from all the others.

I rush back into the museum and head straight for the portrait gallery. All the girls’ pins do face inward to their right except for the one belonging to the cute girl I took for a little sister. Her lily droops the opposite way, to her left. Pinned over her heart, just like all her classmates, it faces out. Exactly like the one I have in my hand. I find the girl’s name on the guide beneath the portraits: Tamiko Kokuba. And the name of her village: Madadayo.

FORTY-THREE

“Navigate to Madadayo,” I tell the map program on Jake’s phone.

I’m standing on the main road with the museum behind me. The sun is out, and steam rises off the drying road in wisps that smell of dust and asphalt. I’m trying to get an idea of which way to go, but the nice lady on the map program keeps telling me that there is no such place as Madadayo. I try a few more pronunciations with no more luck. My brain is starting to cook, so I give up and head to a shop across the highway that rents scuba gear.

Inside, a loud hissing comes from the area where tanks are being filled with compressed air. Racks of neoprene suits hang like the gaudy pelts of animals furred in black with neon-colored stripes. A couple of Japanese vacationers, probably newlyweds—the husband in golf clothes, his bride wearing a large, droopy hat—sit on a bench trying on swim fins.

At the counter, an Okinawan woman listens to me repeat the name of the village several times with a quizzical expression on her face that finally disappears when she bursts out with the name correctly pronounced, “Ah! Mah-dah-DAY-o!”

She points to a broad-shouldered man filling scuba tanks in the corner and tells me something that I take to mean he knows where Madadayo is. “Yeyo!” she yells at him. The hissing stops, and Yeyo walks over with a bowlegged gait, his broad, flip-flopped feet gripping the earth.

The woman explains, and he points to me and asks, “Madadayo?”

I dig through my feeble memories of my grandmother speaking Japanese and answer,
“Onegai shimasu.”

Yeyo nods and motions for me to follow him outside. A few minutes later, he flags down a bus, has a lengthy discussion with the driver, then gestures for me to get on board.

“Madadayo?” I ask.

“Madadayo!” the driver answers with a smile, nodding his head vigorously.

The bus is filled with housewives holding string bags of groceries
on their laps, students with their heads bent over phones and comic books, and old people staring out the windows with peaceful expressions on their faces, as if they are on a holiday that is going perfectly. I sit down next to an elderly man so slender that his belt is cinched up to the last hole and the extra wags down half a foot. He bows, smiles, and asks, “Madadayo?”

“
Hai,
Madadayo,” I answer, bobbing my head in a bow, and smiling back.

He grins like I’m his smartest grandchild and, pointing at me, repeats my destination, “Madadayo.”

“
Hai, hai!
Madadayo.”

He mutters, “Madadayo,” to the riders around us, and they all nod in a happy way that tells me not to worry. The route hugs the coastline, rising until we have a view of the ocean that seems to go all the way to China. I settle in, and the miles rock past.

I feel a light pat on my knee and find a serious-faced little girl in a yellow sundress with ties at the shoulder standing in the aisle next to me and holding a piece of paper with Japanese characters written on it in ballpoint pen. The man beside me taps the characters and explains, “Madadayo.”

I turn around to face the little girl’s mother, who is still holding a pen. I wave the paper in the air and thank her:
“Arigatō gozaimasu.”
She nods and the little girl runs away and buries her face in her mother’s lap.

A few miles later, Jake’s phone announces a message; he has texted me his friend’s phone number. I am on the verge of calling him to share the news of my giant discovery at the museum when the bus rocks and hisses to a stop. A cooing like doves in the evening sweeps through the passengers as they call out the stop: “Madadayo.” My seatmate taps me lightly on the shoulder and waves his hand, shooing me off. At the front of the bus, I feel how happy everyone is at the success of their group effort to get me to my destination, and I stop to bow and wave good-bye. They wave back and are still waving out the windows when the bus pulls away.

I look toward the ocean far below, which seems as flat and silver as a mirror in the sun. A breeze lifts my hair and cools me down. Next to the highway is a small wooden sign that points to a small road. I pull the paper from my bag and check to make sure that the characters the helpful mother wrote there match the ones on the sign. They do.

The landscape gets more jungly and overgrown the farther I walk down the narrow road. Soon the entire road is shaded by a thick canopy of trees that cools the air beneath. The noise from the highway grows more and more muffled until I can’t hear anything but birds and the breeze rustling leaves above my head. No cars pass. I notice horse turds along the road and wonder whether people in Madadayo still use carts.

It’s such a peaceful place that I am even able to think about Codie and how this seems exactly like the kind of fun adventure she would have taken me on, without wanting to run back to the ocean cliff and jump off. In fact, it seems like she’s with me, and it
is
a fun adventure that we’re sharing. I rub my hand against the lily pin and almost break into a run. Excited, I call the number Jake texted me. The owner of the phone answers in Japanese, then passes it to Jake as soon as I speak.

“Lusitania!” he answers. I can barely hear him above the pounding in the background, like thunder with a heavy-metal beat.

“God, Jake, it sounds like it’s going to be the Night of Ten Thousand Drummers. On steroids.”

“You got that right. Where are you?”

“On my way to Madadayo.”

“What’s that?”

I tell him about how I figured out the identity of the pin’s owner and Jake says, “Awesome, possum.”

“Did you really just say that?”

“Maybe I did and maybe I
did.
”

“Jake, have you been drinking?”

“Takes a hella
awamori
to chase the dead back to where they belong. Some of them don’t wanna go.”

He laughs and I wish I were there with him. Jake is very cute when he’s drunk. Hoping that he won’t remember the question, the proof that I care, I ask, “Is Christy there?”

“Am I having fun?”

“You seem to be.”

“Then that answers your question. She’s still up north with her people. Tell me about Madadayo.”

“Jake, I wish you could see this place. I’m walking down this narrow road and not another soul has passed me, and it’s all shaded and cool. It actually feels enchanted.”

“Lots of little hidden parts of Okinawa feel that way.”

“I can’t wait to find someone related to Tamiko and give them her pin. I hope someone in her family still lives here. They’ll know what to do about the bones.”

“Great. Good plan. Hey, Luz, seriously, five stars for you. Pretty rare for anyone from the base to care as much as you do.”

“I’m not ‘anyone from the base.’ ”

“You’re not, Luz. Believe me, you really are not.”

I listen to Jake breathe and imagine that he’s holding back from saying more because of still being with Christy. That maybe it’s possible there’s an honorable guy out there. I want to tell him that I appreciate him looking out for me, but someone who sounds half-mad, half-teasing yells at Jake in Japanese, and he says he has to go.

“Jake, I’m going to need you to translate when I get into the village.”

“Sure, I’ll hang on to Nobu’s phone. Call me when you get there, okay?”

“I will.”

I stay on the road and soon come to a house with a red-tiled roof. I rehearse saying the girl’s name the Japanese way, with the family name first, Kokuba Tamiko. I wish I’d copied the characters down at the museum, but I’m filled with confidence and a feeling that, no matter what, I will end up on the right path; the
kami
are guiding me.

The road widens and ends in a cul-de-sac. Circled around it are more houses with red tile roofs. In a large garden plot, a short woman is bent over, hacking at the roots of a plant until she unearths a large, bushy head of lettuce. It is only when she uses her hand hoe to stand up that she sees me. For a moment she freezes; then she heads my way. She is so short and bowlegged that she looks like Yosemite Sam.

“Hai-sai mensorei,”
she greets me.