Death by Water Read online

  My fellow initiates hugged their chill arms even as the leader’s wife was warming, steam rising from her skin.

  We shall begin. One rule; do not open your eyes in our water.

  The leader worked his way through all the others. He dunked, they gasped and choked and took great gulps of the lake that then became a vital piece of them; the core that spread its roots within as they bobbed back up soaked and shaking with the cold, water running down their exquisite forms as if they were [still human] fountains, now accepted by our hosts.

  My time came, still no Miss Palmer, so he went ahead and plunged me under. His [webbed] fingers outstretched, cupped over the top of my head, he thrust me into the water. I held my mouth clamped against the lake.

  Weeds became conversant with my thighs, wrapped around my ankles, and yanked me urgently away.

  The leader’s hand squeezed my head one last time as if to say, No choices, no choices.

  I chose to open my eyes and I knew what I saw.

  I drowned in the visions and that was my choice, too. You won’t find scrapes on my palms and fingertips. I don’t have torn or broken nails. I didn’t change my mind and go back to be revived.

  This carpet of bones is awkward for escaping; they make tiny tick tick sounds I can hear even in the bottom of the lake as I flee through the dark water, no time to kick them from beneath my feet.

  I avoid the roller coaster paths created by both man and nature. Here dangerous chunks of cement jut from the slimy bed into the water. Roots of fallen trees thrust up a hazardous impediment just over there. Weeds thrive in the rich soil, fed as it is by the graveyard, ropey weeds that encircle and explore a car, a tricycle, an empty wheelchair.

  I hear someone calling my name, as if there were anyone left who knew of me, who cared.

  I lie down on the familiar bones; press my cheek against a smooth ivory bowl.

  The water turned colder as it leached my heat. The surface beneath me grew harder as inertia drew the softness from the planes where my body and the bones made contact.

  As time passed, moss covered my face and the roots made of me a home. Police cars cruised by periodically, searchlights illuminated the water and scanned the old farm and the graveyard. In the echoes above the lake, I no longer hear my name. I am an orphan, broken and abandoned. I chose that.

  A JOURNEY OF GREAT WAVES

  by Eric J. Guignard

  The amaranthine pull of the ocean is a marvelously ominous sensation, thinks Kei, the tugging from the surf like little tendrils dragging back what it can from piebald sand into the maw of the briny void. The pulling, too, gives her thought of some urgent love a mother must have for its newborn; the instinct is deep-set as any lightless fathom below, of a maker reaching desperately to its lost child. Such is the ocean as our own progenitor that we are drawn to her from birth, screaming and obtuse at the sea’s allure until it snatches us back finally into the same great womb from which we were born.

  So here the tide creeps forth, surge by surge, reaching for Kei with those very same tendrils. She lets them caress her feet, her bare calves, tasting, tempting, and a shiver comes with it. She moves through spume, searching the wreckage, but with no great interest.

  It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us mothers and daughters. This proverb comes to her suddenly, and Kei remembers her grandmother, Sobo Youko, repeating it often. Last week in English class, Kei’s teacher, Ms. Onuma, claimed the quote to have derived from an old German poet.

  Baka bah oom, Ms. Onuma, those will always be Grandmother’s words, not some rich lord’s from two centuries ago. Of course, if she answers that on next Monday’s exam, she’ll fail…such is American high school.

  A seagull squawks. A dolphin leaps. The air is warm and drowsy. Kei feels old and young at the same time, already grown weary in the yearning body of a teen. She does not understand how her classmates can be so kuso happy all the time; there is only one thing left that brings her joy, one person, and that person languishes in illness…

  Today, more wreckage than ever clogs the shore, leavings of the ruinous tsunami from far away, and questions fill her mind: Is it due to the maternal bond that she searches these castaway things, the sea offering gifts and baubles as to a child…or is it all but taunts? Kei escaped the ocean once before and now, perhaps, the ocean sends her reminders of whence she came, where she’ll return, for what else has an islander to expect?

  The beach is filled by flattened soccer balls and scuffed plastic bowls and gasoline cans riddled with rust. Unmated sneakers weep strands of seaweed. There are shattered planks, blobs of hemp and sodden foam, a clammy metal drum, waterlogged books, fishing buoys, a dog’s carrier filled with muck, tires encrusted with mussels and barnacles and sea stars; the enormous steel hull of some lost vessel stabs up from the tide, broken at mid-ship, though even halved it seems to tower upward a hundred feet, while millions of empty water bottles with the Japanese writing of her homeland clutter the sand like worshippers at the great altar of ruin. A couch cushion that is cross-hatched black and delicate gold molders—the pattern reminds her of home, of her “old” home, her “real” home. There is much more, and part of her aches to discover anything in the brine of that life she lost.

  But the sun is waning, and she has a new home, on a new island, and knows she’ll be missed, will be worried over if she does not soon return, though before she puts her back to mother ocean to retrace steps over the pigweed-lined banks, up three carved stone steps, and through a screen of satin leaf trees, she spots one more sea-swept gift languishing on the beach: a small porcelain doll with black cloth hair and the bright kimono dress of an imperial ojou or a haughty no kimi.

  Kei pauses, bends to look closer at the doll. Its face has a slight knowing smile, one corner of tight red lips pulled higher than the other corner. Its eyes are…red, painted red as its lips, red as bright pooling drops of blood. The doll is beautiful and strange at the same time, cast off, as she herself feels, and she touches it. The doll feels somehow warm, fleshy. But isn’t that so of any waterlogged thing, beach-landed and cooking days under a long sun? There’s a familiarity to the doll also, although it’s any toy that could have been replicated a thousand times over.

  Without warning a voice cries in her head, and it sounds as she imagines her own mother’s voice once to have sounded: Throw it back! Throw it as far as you can, Kei-Kei, and run away, run, run!

  But that’s silly, and Kei has long grown weary of others telling her what to do, even if such a demand were coming from an instinct within herself, some ghost of a memory, as irrational and hysterical as that instinct or memory may be. Another voice—this one emotionless and sensible—argues immediately that such a throw would be pointless. She’d have to hurl the doll a hundred yards beyond the pull of the tide, otherwise the surf would just return it back to shore, and then what would be the point?

  Kei brushes sand off it, the doll’s silver and scarlet kimono still damp on one side, but islanders are used to dampness; the ocean has a way of pervading the broadest of walls, the thickest of blankets. Damp is in the air, it is all around, it is life. Otherwise, the doll is unmarred from its oceanic voyage.

  She brings it home.

  “Thank you,” Leolani says as she takes the porcelain doll. Her smile seems too big to fit any child’s face, less so one waning under the illness she suffers.

  “A gift from the sea,” Kei replies. “My grandmother used to collect these. She was your great-aunt.”

  “Of course I know that! Because we’re second cousins.”

  “How’d you get so smart? I did not understand great-aunts and distant cousins when I was your age.”

  Although that is not true; heritage has always been important in her family, and Sobo Youko drilled her frequently with relationships and ancestral names. But Kei will say anything to see the smile return to Lani’s face.

  “I was born in the year of the rat, so Mom says that makes me extra clever.”

 
“It must be true.” Kei nods to the doll. “What will you name her?”

  “Hmm…I think she wants to be called Obaasan.”

  “Old grandmother?”

  “Yes, like the oldest of all the other dolls.”

  “That’s funny. Have you been learning Japanese?”

  Lani shrugs. “I just thought it, like somebody said the name in my mind.”

  Kei furrows her brow, and that haunting voice of her mother comes again: Throw it back into the sea! You were wrong to take it…

  “I guess she doesn’t look very old, but you don’t look old either, and you’re almost an adult.” Lani giggles. “You are Obaasan Kei!”

  Kei can’t help it, she giggles too. Lani’s joy is infectious.

  Oba Hana’s call for dinner sounds from the dining room.

  “Walk or be carried?” Kei asks.

  “It’s only the house. I can walk.”

  “And you’ll be running again in no time. Should Obaasan stay with the others?”

  “Of course, it’s where she belongs if she’s their old grandmother.”

  “Of course.”

  Kei sets the new doll above Lani’s bamboo-and-velvet bed, into an alcove made from the shelves of rich koa slabs, between a pink panda, long-stained from spit and apple juice, and a baby-blue child in pajamas, praying with a Zen expression on its face. There are others. Lani is old enough to no longer play with the dolls, but not so old as to forget the comfort they provide late at night.

  The girls make their way across the small house to a dining nook, where Kei’s aunt and uncle await. Oba Hana is really her mother’s cousin, which makes her “once removed,” but Kei thinks of her as an aunt, feels closer as an aunt is a maternal figure, not a cousin. Oji Tommy’s a California poster boy who served in the Navy and now charters diving excursions around Honolulu.

  “Who’s ready for boiled asparagus and steamed peas?” Oba Hana asks.

  “Yuck, no,” Lani cries.

  “Okay, double servings then for Leolani?”

  “Are we really having that?”

  “Just kidding, Dad grilled burgers.”

  “Yay!” The relief on Lani’s face is palpable.

  They eat in a room that is snug and warm, adorned with Oba Hana’s watercolor art and the surfboard of Oji Tommy’s youth, facing a picture window that is aptly named, as what Kei sees through it is no less fantastic than any picture ever made.

  Oranges and browns and mauves tangle in leaves, and the sky is a jungle of overgrown clouds as much as the island is overgrown by shifting bracken. The sun sets low behind a purple ocean, the waters seeming to devour it like a piece of great red fruit, its own weight the very thing that pulls it farther and farther down into the maw of the waves. Tall palm trees silhouette the glass like fingers of an extraordinary animal trying to reach inside, dreaming, perhaps, of life as their own. Hoary bats dart by, chittering love songs, and lazy drops of rain begin to fall.

  And if Kei squints very hard, she can still see the beach, filling by each crashing wave with more of the tsunami’s debris: soggy wicker baskets and sun-stripped rowboats; crushed sandals and tires marred by shark bites; dolls and bloated bodies, sometimes difficult to tell apart. It’s overwhelming at times.

  What will be done with all that rubbish, that wreckage, those memories? Eventually it must be taken away, disposed of, abandoned.

  They feel sorry for her, everyone does. It is something that cannot be helped. It is nature that she was cast adrift…It is Obaasan come to claim her family…

  Kei winces at the strange thought.

  “How was the beach?” Oba Hana sounds slightly hesitant to ask, but it’s a thing that cannot be unsaid. “Anything interesting, or just rubbish?”

  “Mostly scraps and trash, the hull of a freighter. I’ll never use a plastic water bottle again. The beach is drowning in them.”

  Oba Hana’s eyes soften. The laugh lines at her mouth pull taut. “Does seeing the wreckage hurt?”

  Kei bites her lip. “Yeah…I keep expecting to find a photograph or one of Sobo Youko’s oil-paper umbrellas.”

  “But you’re drawn to it anyway, you have to sort through it all?”

  The word barely comes out. “Yeah…”

  “It’s so hard, dear. No one wants their grief to return years later, and yours has come to literally surround you. But still, I worry when you’re down there— ”

  “Kei found me a doll!” Lani interrupts.

  “I did,” Kei grabs on to Lani’s excitement, happy to change the subject. She hates when Oba Hana talks about her being a worry, like a guilt she’s responsible for. “It reminded me of Sobo Youko’s dolls.”

  Oba Hana snorts. “What doll would not remind you of her collection? She had near ten thousand.”

  “This one wore a kimono.”

  “Ah, her favorite.”

  Kei loses herself in recollection for a moment, the rows upon rows of her grandmother’s dolls: porcelain, cloth, china, corn husk, leather, bone. Sobo Youko kept so many, and each with its own story, like their ancestors. Already her memory grows hazy as to keeping them separate. But Obaasan, Obaasan, why did it seem familiar?

  Oji Tommy breaks the silence. “I sailed off the coast of Haleiwa today, and there was a house floating in the distant waves. No kidding, an entire house, its windows and tile roof perfectly intact.”

  “Some homes float because they have walls made of foam instead of wood,” Lani says importantly, “to save money.”

  “I never heard that before.”

  “I saw it on Discovery channel.”

  “Wow, you teach us new things every day, baby.”

  Lani smiles, and so Kei smiles. It fills her with joy.

  She thinks again of Sobo Youko’s words: It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us mothers and daughters.

  If that is true, Leolani is truly Kei’s heart, for it is not relations that define us, but the love we bear those relations. How often had Sobo Youko drilled such words into her, rapping her knuckles to pay attention? How often does she see herself in Lani? How long can she bear the pain?

  “How long?”

  The question startles her, as if Oji Tommy has read her mind, parroting her thought. But when she looks up, he’s speaking to her aunt.

  Oba Hana replies, “Four years since March…I still can’t believe it.”

  “There are websites tracking the disaster, the Tōhoku Tsunami’s debris,” Oji Tommy adds. “It took that long to reach us, four years, after running the coast of Alaska and Oregon. All that wreckage is swirling in a big pool; what doesn’t wash up on Hawaii’s coast will head back home to Japan and then circle around the Pacific again. The currents, you know, it’ll spin around us forever.”

  Her clothes, her memories, floating in the ocean until the end of days…

  Oba Hana had proved Sobo Youko’s words true about the heart which makes us mothers and daughters; she’d taken in Kei four years ago, when no one else was left. And before that, it’d been Sobo Youko who’d fostered infant Kei, when Kei’s parents drowned in a sinking ferry.

  Sobo Youko had been full of love and the most regal of poise, but so too had she been filled with bitterness and small-minded judgment.

  It is because Hana married a gaijin—a foreigner—that their daughter fell frail. So once said Sobo Youko in her crisp, emotionless voice.

  Sour old bitch. So once replied Oba Hana in her fury.

  Cruel words on both sides, though the dispute was long ago. There is no grudge any longer; the tsunami took care of that. The tsunami took care of everything Kei knew, everything she’d worried about, everything she’d disliked, everything that had not fit into her life then of twelve years; as it was useless, so was it taken, but at the cost, too, of all she loved, all she desired, all she cherished, all of it crushed by the sea, sent to swirl forever in that great sink.

  Yet she wonders: Would Sobo Youko have ever recanted, given time changed her ways? Found the joy that L
ani gives? Would her heart have ever swelled to know that family goes on, regardless of circumstance? Or would she have ticked off her fingers the number dead, the number remaining, until all her brood joined each other under the waves?

  “Want to play a board game?” Oji Tommy asks Lani as they finish eating.

  “Yay, which one?”

  “Whatever you want, baby.”

  “How about Clue, but only if Kei can play.”

  “Set it up,” Kei replies. “While I help your mom clean up.”

  They leave, and Oba Hana clears dishes to the sink, where Kei wipes away crumbs and mustard blobs.

  The rain begins to hasten, rattling upon the roof like tapping at a door to come inside. A moan of thunder sounds from faraway.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Oba Hana asks Kei. “You seem so— ”

  “I’m happy, of course,” Kei lies. It’s not bad on Honolulu, but neither is it where she belongs.

  “You say ‘of course’ like Lani says it, not dismissively, but like it’s something that should be assumed and not discussed further.”

  Though she bristles, Kei forces a smile. “I am happy, it’s just different than before. You and Oji Tommy have done so much.”

  “Lani loves you being with us, she’s always wanted a sister.”

  “And a pony, and a unicorn.”

  “Don’t make fun, every girl wants one of each, not to mention a prince to whisk us away.”

  And all I wanted was a mother…

  “You know my childhood was also in Japan, in the Setagaya Ward,” Oba Hana says. “Before I came here with my parents, uprooted from all I loved so my father could earn an extra nickel in the seafood markets.”

  “Sobo Youko complained often about your dad. Said he splintered our family by leaving the homeland.”

  “Yes, she’d say such things. I remember your grandmother too well—she was Oba Youko to me, spoiled and stuck in her ways. I remember her doll collections, filling up shelves on walls and old display cabinets that were inlaid with ivory slabs and memories, as old as Grandmother’s Grandmother’s Grandmother, she said.”