FORTY-ONE

“What is that?”

“The cake? Beni imo,” Jake answers. “It’s made out of purple sweet potatoes. Very Uchinānchu.”

“No, the flower on the package.”

“Oh, the famous Princess Lily.”

“Famous? Why famous?”

“Because of the Princess Lily girls.”

“Who were they?”

“High school girls who were forced to be nurses in the Japanese cave hospitals. Why? Luz? Why are you so intense about this?”

It’s time. Time to stop just passing through. This assignment, this base, this life. It’s time to tell Jake everything. I reach into my pocket and show him the pin.

His eyes narrow as he touches it. “Where did you get this?”

“I saw a girl in the cave. She gave it to me. She was dead.” For a moment, he says nothing, and I’m certain I’ve made a terrible mistake. I brace for him to recoil, to turn back into one of the endless Quasis who’ve drifted through my life.

Instead he asks an amazing question: “This girl, was she wearing a school uniform? Sailor collar? Tie? The whole nine?”

“How did you know that?”

He takes the brooch, holds it up to catch more of the light. “Back before the war, the few girls who made it into the handful of high schools on the island wore school pins. It was such a huge deal to be picked that they were always buried wearing their pins. Why didn’t you show me this before?”

“Because I thought you’d think I was crazy.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“So? Do you?”

“Think you’re crazy? No. Hell, no.”

“Why?”

“Why?” He inhales a long breath, looks at me out of the corner of his eye. I recognize the push-pull of trying to decide whether or not to say something as weird as it is true. His verdict goes in my favor, and words he’s obviously thought about for a long time tumble out.

“Because this is Okinawa. Because you have to grow up here to truly understand it. Because the rules are different here. Because Americans believe that they can choose their family and relatives and leave them behind whenever they want and that they don’t owe anything to the ones who went before. And they’re the loneliest, most unhealthy rich people on the planet. And Okinawans believe that once you are part of a family, you are part of it forever, and they are part of you forever, and you owe everything to the ones who went before. And we’re the least lonely, longest-lived, not-rich people on the planet. And because, I guess, we all believe what we’re taught before we’re old enough to ask questions, since it makes us part of the ones we love most. So I may be as deluded as anyone else, but it’s what I believe.”

“But, Jake? A ghost? I didn’t grow up believing in that.”

“Listen, on Okinawa, ghosts run our lives. You want a whole list? We honor and placate the dead every day with offerings at the family butsudan. Families go bankrupt building and maintaining enormous tombs. Twice a year at Shiimii and Obon, the clans gather to weed and sweep the courtyards of their family tombs. Then feast and celebrate there and in their homes with the ancestors. Then there’s the Royal Hotel.”

“What’s that?”

“Giant multimillion-dollar hotel near the ruins of Nakagusuku Castle. When it was started in the seventies, right after the island reverted to Japan, when Okinawa was supposed to turn into Hawaii after a tourism boom hit like a tsunami and vast fortunes were made, the developer was warned that he was building on a sacred site where the medieval castle’s tomb had once been. But he scoffed at the warnings and went all in. He put in a swimming pool, a multistory water-slide, even cages for a zoo. He outfitted the rooms with fine furniture, hardwood flooring, and the most expensive tatami mats. But, one after another, his workers got sick with all these mysterious ailments. After two men died, none of the other workers would return to the haunted site, and construction halted. The owner, determined to prove that the stories were superstitious nonsense, spent three nights in this cavernous, empty hotel. After the third night, he was never seen again. Some say he went mad and was institutionalized. Others maintain that he killed himself. Whichever it was, the hotel was abandoned. No Okinawan would go near the place for any amount of money after that. Not even to steal any of the expensive furnishings that have sat there rotting now for forty years. So, yeah, we Okinawans believe. And, apparently, even the U.S. Air Force can’t argue with us.”

“You mean Murder House?”

“You ever heard of them leaving another base house unoccupied like that? Ever?”

“Have you seen one? A ghost?”

“No, negative spirits, what you call ghosts, only make themselves visible if they die violently or aren’t buried right.”

“Jake, she held out her hand to me. She gave me the pin. She wanted something.”

“Probably to be buried with her munchū, her kin group.”

“So I’m not on drugs or crazy?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

A bubble of something odd rises in me. It’s so unusual that it takes me a second to identify it as hope. Once I do, though, I rush after it, burbling over. “We have to tell someone. Tell the authorities, so they can find out where she belongs.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Jake? We have to tell someone. You’ll back me up, right? The bones in the cave are human. We have to report them.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

I don’t want complicated. I want easy. I want this to be over. I want to make peace with the girl in the cave. With Codie. With myself. With Delmar Vaughn’s revelations. This might not be the entire answer, but it’s a first step, and it’s been such a long time since I’ve even known what direction to go in that when I ask, “What’s the problem?” there’s a snap in my tone that comes straight from my mom.

“The problem is that you’ve wandered into the odd historical Bermuda Triangle that Okinawa occupies.”

“Jake, it seems kind of obvious: You find human remains, you report them to the police. Done and done.”

“Wow. Spoken like a true American. You know what will happen if we report this? I’ll tell you. Nothing. That girl’s bones will get tossed into a warehouse crammed floor-to-ceiling with the tens of thousands that have already been turned in.”

Jake sounds as annoyed as if all those bones were my fault. I blink. Is this the boy who just kissed me with such tenderness only a few moments ago?

Jake shakes his head. “Sorry. Sore spot. It’s just that here we are, what? Nearly seventy years after the war, and there’s still not an official channel for returning the remains of Okinawans who died in the war to their families. Volunteers have tried to fill the gap. Tried to match DNA samples from families with remains. But DNA testing is expensive, and there really are giant warehouses stuffed with bones. With more still being found every week. This is a tiny island, and more people were killed here than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

“What? That can’t be right. All through school, every time we studied the Second World War, we would always do a whole unit on the atomic bomb. Everyone knows all about the moment that changed history. Mushroom cloud. Instant vaporization. Why would no one have ever even mentioned Okinawa?”

“Good question. We Okinawans have wondered that. A lot. Not to make Hiroshima and Nagasaki any less tragic, but counting all those who died here after the surrender from starvation, disease, and injuries, as much as one-third of the population was killed. All totaled, a quarter of a million people died.”

I think of my grandmother. Of orphans being handed out like puppies at a pound.

“For what?” Jake asks. “A war we never wanted? Had no part in starting? A battle Japan knew from the beginning they’d lose? They used us like a human shield, throwing as many bodies as necessary at the invaders to protect their precious homeland. Then, when the war was over, Japan totally shafted us yet again in the so-called peace treaty. Not only did we get twenty-seven years of U.S. military occupation, but they handed over one-fifth of the island to the Pentagon. Most of it prime farmland. Then, after we reverted to Japan in 1971, which was supposed to make us a full Japanese prefecture, which we all dreamed of and protested for, you know what happened?”

I shake my head.

“Jack and shit. With Tokyo’s full cooperation, the Pentagon is still essentially running our country.” Jake stops. “Sorry, I promised myself that I wouldn’t go off on rants like that anymore, but you need to understand some of this backstory so you can see how Okinawa has been trapped in a limbo just like that girl in the cave. Tokyo allocated funds for DNA testing, but all they’ve actually done so far is ‘facilitate information sharing.’ Even the Japanese don’t understand what a huge psychic wound being separated from our ancestors is for Okinawans.”

“So if I report this, the girl will be even more lost than she is now in a cave at the edge of the sea.”

“Pretty much.”

I hop off the seawall. “I guess then that it’s up to us to find out who the girl in the cave is and where she belongs.”