Page 90 of The Gods Will Sing Our Song

I was raised and taught by the ocean. I know its ways. How the tide hurries up to submerge your feet before tumbling away, how your heels sink into wet sand, making you feel as though you’re moving backward. The world is huge there, as huge as the unbroken horizon. It is also small, as tiny as specks of sand in your eyelashes. I always put my white shells down in a circle. A line. A heart. When the waves would recede and leave my offering, I’d think something ancient in the ocean’s depths didn’t want it.

But then Otōsan would come next to me.

He’d notice I was worried and would help me pick up the shells. He’d swing me onto his shoulders and wade far into the water so I could release them to the depths. We’d linger, the waves lapping at his chin and my knees. There, the world was neither big nor small but just right for a girl who is safe with her father.

And he’d carry me back.

Ren comes, but Mr. Kimura turns him away. I know Mama can’t handle him being here. I want to see him. I need to see him. But I must take care of Mama.

Tonight, on the other side of the wood partitions, everyone in our barrack is silent. The couple doesn’t fight or talk. Mr. Kimura doesn’t snore. The restless sleeper doesn’t toss and turn or make their bed creak.

Only we can be heard.

I lie in my bed. I’ve cried for hours. But for now, I listen to Mama. She’s weeping and praying. As I let her words blanket me, I understand part of the Job story from the Bible. After losing everything, Job’s friends want him to curse God. I want Mama to curse God, too. God has taken Otōsan from her, from us. Anger cuts against the endless painful gulf inside me, if only for a few moments. I embrace it. But like the tide, it pulls away. I think I might follow it. I might walk into the waves until they are over my head. Maybe I already have. Everything is far away, and Mama’s voice is muted, refracted, and my ears are full of water.

But then I leave my bed.

I go to Mama.

I hold her, and she holds me back. Somehow, eventually, my head is in her lap, and she strokes my hair. My tears run crossways over the bridge of my nose and down the side of my face. Mama keeps praying. She begs for peace that surpasses understanding. She isn’t asking it for herself. She’s asking it for me. I listen, and as the sun finally rises, I start to pray for her, silently, in my head. Eventually, fitfully, she falls asleep.

I pull on my coat. I need to see Ren. I open the door, close it quietly behind me, and prepare to hurry through the camp.

“Hey, slugger.” Ren’s voice is soft. I turn. He’s leaning against my barrack, shoulders hunched against the cold, arms tightly crossed. Everything in me dissolves at the sight of him. I fall into his arms, and he holds me tight. His skin is icy against my feverish warmth. He must’ve been standing out here all night, keeping watch. I start to weep again. My legs turn to jelly and my heart gushes pain.

I can’t stand, but it doesn’t matter.

Ren holds me up.

Word spreads about our loss. Mama doesn’t leave our apartment, and I stay with her. We grieve together. Our pastor, Pastor Phillip, visits often. Women from church, Mama’s job, the newspaper, and my classmates’ mothers bring cakes of tofu, canteens of hot miso, soft-boiled eggs and tamagoyaki, and fish caught outside the camp and blackened over open fires. The Kimuras greet them and take everything inside for us. We make them keep most of it. Neither of us can eat.

Rage strikes me all the time. Otōsan loved America. He never did anything wrong but the government locked him up. Why? What threat was a man who loved his family? Whenever I say anything like this, Mama tells me I need to forgive them. I nod because I won’t worry her but inside I vow I never will.

Every morning, there’s a new piece of origami on my windowsill from Ren. Swans. Flowers. Trees. Even a little bench. He leaves them on his way to work without fail. It reminds me of kissing him in the truck, where the furniture formed a house for us. If the truck was our house, the origami is our garden, and I always find solace in the thought, even just for a bit.

Plans are made. Mama arranges for Otōsan to be cremated in accordance with his Buddhist beliefs and for his remains and personal effects to be sent to us. We can have a funeral for him, but Mama refuses, saying, “He will be a stranger in a strange land.” We will keep his ashes in our barrack, and when we go home, we will have a funeral for him there.

His ashes arrive in a cardboard box, and it’s brought to us by Pastor Phillip. Mama is shaking too hard to take the box, so I do, and then I think I might faint or vomit. Because how can Otōsan be inside this cardboard box? I have the surreal urge to splash water on my face so I can wake up. Everything is surreal—it’s like I’m living in one of my drawings, only it’s been drained of meaning. Just strange, disturbing shapes and ghastly images void of hope, a netherworld from which I’ll never wake.

Eventually, we return.

Or, at the very least, we physically go to the places we’re supposed to be. Mama goes to work. I go to school and the library. Ren continues to leave origami on my windowsill every morning and stops by the library on his way home from work. Today, we sit on the floor of the library, leaning against the wall. The light cuts through the windows at an angle, and the bookshelves form long shadows on the floor. They fall across us. My head is nestled on his chest, and my legs are intertwined with his. One of his hands rests on the arch of my hip and the other gently strokes my hair.

“I’ve been thinking about Akira, and I don’t understand,” I murmur.

“Yeah?” Ren asks. He waits for me to keep talking. One thing Otōsan’s death has shown me is how patient Ren is. He waits for me in every regard. To tell him what I need. To share. To let an unexpected bout of tears or rage pass. It’s like he knows that grief is slow and fast all at once. That he will wait for me forever to find my way and, when I can’t, help me look for it.

“When we learned Akira was here, I thought he was the key to making things right again. After all, what were the odds that he was trapped here, and we were the ones to find him?” I ask haltingly. “It felt like a miracle, something divine sent to help us when nothing else could. Only, it’s cruel. It’s—mystifying. It saved Cosette and it saved you during the rebellion, but it didn’t save Emi, and it didn’t save Otōsan. Why give us glimpses of magic and miracles when their shadows are as dark as they are bright? Why take some loved ones from us but leave others and…” The surreal sense falls on me again. I don’t know what I’m asking. Or perhaps I know exactly what I’m asking and can’t face the answer.

“Maybe it all works out in the end,” Ren says softly, his breath fluttering above my head.

“What do you mean?” I whisper. His hand tightens on my hip, and his fingers are still, my hair interlaced between them. Those points of contact become my equilibrium, as though the force of my grief is stabilized by the opposing strength of his touch.

“Maybe we don’t know everything, and those glimpses of goodness are real. Maybe later, when we’re on the other side, it makes sense.”

“I hope so,” I say, and my voice breaks. “I miss Otōsan so much. I think he must miss me, too.”

“Yeah.” Ren speaks heavily. “I feel the same about Emi. But for all we know, time is different…where they are. Maybe by the time they realize we aren’t there, we’re already arriving ourselves. Or maybe distance is different. Maybe it’s far for us, but for them it’s only up the hall or down the street.”