Chapter 1
MY NAME IS LUCY JARRETT, AND BEFORE I KNEW ABOUT
THE girl in the window, before I went home and stumbled on the
fragments and began to piece the story back together, I found
myself living in a village near the sea in Japan. It had been a
spring of little earthquakes, and that night I woke abruptly,
jarred from a dream. Footsteps faded in the cobblestone lane and
distant trains rumbled; I listened harder until I could make out
the surge of the sea. But that was all. Yoshi’s hand rested on my
hip lightly, as if we were still dancing, which we’d been doing
earlier in the evening, music from the radio soft in the dark
kitchen, our steps slowing until we stopped altogether and stood
kissing in the jasmine air.
I lay back down, curving toward his warmth. In the
dream I’d gone back to the lake where I’d grown up. I didn’t want
to go, but I did. The sky was overcast, the faded green cabin—which
I’d seen before, but only in dreams—musty and overhung with trees.
Its windows were cracked, opaque with dust and snow. I walked past
it to the shore, walked out onto the thick, translucent ice. I
walked until I came to them. So many people, living their lives
just beneath the surface. I caught them in glimpses, fell to my
knees, pressed my palms against the glassy surface—so thick, so
clear, so cold. I’d put them here, somehow, I knew that. I’d left
them for so long. Their hair stirred in underwater currents, and
their eyes, when they met mine, were full of a longing that matched
my own.
The window shades were trembling. I tensed, caught
between the earthquakes and the dream, but it was just a distant
train, fading into the mountains. Every night for a week I’d had
this same dream, stirred up by the shifting earth, stirring up the
past. It took me back to a night when I was seventeen, wild and
restless, sliding off the back of Keegan Fall’s motorcycle, apple
blossoms as pale as stars above us. I fanned my fingers against his
chest before he left, the engine ripping through the night. My
father was in the garden when I turned toward the house. Moonlight
caught the gray in his short hair; the tip of his cigarette burned,
rising, falling. Lilacs and early roses floated in the darkness.
Nice of you to show up, my father said. I’m sorry you
worried, I told him. A silence, the scents of lake water and
compost and green shoots splitting open the dark earth, and then he
said, Want to go fishing with me, Lucy? How about it? It’s been
a long time. His words were wistful, and I remembered getting
up before dawn to meet him, struggling to carry the tackle box as
we crossed the lawn to the boat. I wanted to go fishing, to accept
my father’s invitation, but I wanted more to go upstairs to think
about Keegan Fall. So I turned away, and in a tone as sharp as
broken shells I said, Dad. Really. I’m hardly little
anymore.
Those were the last words I ever spoke to him.
Hours later, waking to sunlight and urgent voices, I ran downstairs
and across the dew-struck lawn to the shore, where they had pulled
my father from the lake. My mother was kneeling in the shallow
water, touching his cheek with her fingertips. His lips and skin
were bluish. There were traces of foam in the corner of his mouth,
and his eyelids were oddly iridescent. Like a fish,I
thought, a crazy thought, but at least it silenced the other
thoughts, which were worse, and which have never left me: If I’d
gone. If I’d been there. If only I’d said yes.
Beside me on the tatami Yoshi sighed and stirred,
his hand slipping from my hip. Moonlight fell in a rectangle across
the floor, and the shades rustled faintly with the distant pounding
surf, the breeze. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the shaking grew
stronger. It was subtle at first, as soft as the rumble from the
train a moment before. Then my Tibetan singing bowls, arranged on
the floor, began to hum all by themselves. My collection of small
stones began to fall from the bookshelf, hitting the mats with a
sound like rain. Downstairs, something crashed, shattered. I held
my breath, as if by being still I could still the world, but the
trembling grew stronger, and stronger still. The shelves lurched
sharply, heaving several books to the floor. Then, in one fluid
convulsion, the walls swayed and the floor seemed to roll, as if
some great animal had roused and turned, as if the earth itself
were alive, the ground mere skin, and volatile.
Abruptly, it stopped. Everything was strangely
quiet. Distantly, water dripped into a pool. Yoshi’s breathing was
calm and even.
I turned and shook his shoulder. He opened his eyes
slowly. These little earthquakes left him unfazed, though that
season there had been hundreds of tremors, sometimes several dozen
in a day, many so tiny they were noted only by seismic machines;
others, like this one, strong enough to wake us.
“Earthquake?” he murmured.
“Yes, a big one. Something broke downstairs.”
“Really? Well, it is over now. It’s quiet, no?
Let’s go back to sleep.”
He closed his eyes and pulled me close. His
breathing quickly grew deep and regular again. Through the
half-open window, beyond the roof of the house across the street, I
glimpsed the scattered stars. “Yoshi?” I said. When he didn’t
answer, I slid out of bed and went downstairs.
The aloe plant had fallen from the kitchen
windowsill, and its pot had shattered. I put water on to boil and
swept up the scattered dirt and glass and broken stems. Probably
Japanese housewives were doing the same thing all up and down the
street, which made me feel uncomfortable and faintly
bitter—clearly, I’d been without a job for far too long. I didn’t
like being dependent on Yoshi, having no income or meaningful work
outside the house. I’m a hydrologist, which is to say that I study
the movement of water in the world, on the surface and beneath the
earth, and I’d been doing research for multinational companies for
nearly half a decade by the time I met Yoshi in Jakarta. We’d
fallen in love the way it is possible to fall in love overseas, cut
off from everything we’d known, so the country we inhabited was of
our own making, really, and subject to our own desires. This is
the only continent that matters, Yoshi used to say, running his
hands along my body. This is the only world that exists. For
a year, then two years, we were very happy. Then our contracts
ended. Before I found work, Yoshi was offered what seemed at first
like the engineering job of his dreams. That’s when we moved to
Japan, which had turned out to be another country altogether.
I poured myself a cup of tea and took it to the
front room, sliding open the shutters and the windows. Night air
flooded in, fresh and cool. It was still dark, but the neighborhood
was already stirring; water splashed and plates clattered, near and
far. Across the narrow lane the neighbors spoke softly, back and
forth.
The house shook lightly with the surf, then
settled. I sat at the low table and sipped my tea, letting my
thoughts wander to the coming day and our long-planned trip into
the mountains. In Indonesia, that other country, Yoshi and I had
talked of marriage and even of children, but in those vague
fantasies I’d always had satisfying work, or I’d been content to
study Japanese and flower arranging and to take long solitary
hikes. I hadn’t understood how isolating unemployment would be, or
how much time Yoshi would end up devoting to his own work. Lately
we’d been out of sorts with each other, arguments flaring up over
nothing. I hadn’t realized how persistent the past would be,
either, catching me in its old gravity the minute I slowed down.
After three idle months in Japan I started teaching English just to
fill my days with voices other than my own. I took my young charges
on walks, pausing by the sea to teach concrete nouns: stone,
water, wave, yearning for the days when I’d used those same
words with ease and fluidity in my routine work. Sometimes I found
myself saying wilder things, things I was sure they could not
understand. Dinosaurs drank this water, did you know that? Water
moves forever in a circle; someday, little ones, your grandchildren
may even drink your tears.
Now, weeks later, I was beginning to wonder if this
would be my life, after all, and not simply a brief interlude in
the life I had imagined.
Across the room, tiny lights flickered on my
laptop. I got up to check e-mail, the glow from the screen casting
my hands and arms in pale blue. Sixteen messages, most of them
spam, two from friends in Sri Lanka, three others from former
colleagues in Jakarta who’d sent photos from their hike in the
jungle. I skimmed these messages quickly, remembering a river trip
we’d taken with these friends, the lush foliage along the banks and
the hats we’d fashioned from water lilies to block the fierce sun,
filled with longing for the life Yoshi and I had left.
Three sequential messages were from home. The
first, from my mother, surprised me. We were in touch quite often
and I tried to visit once a year, even if briefly, but my mother
used the Internet like an earlier generation had used the
long-distance telephone: seldom, succinctly, and only for matters
of certain importance. Mostly, we talked on the phone or sent slim
blue air letters, hers posted to wherever my nomadic life had taken
me, mine landing in the mailbox outside the rambling house where
I’d grown up, in a village called The Lake of Dreams.
Lucy, I was in an accident, but it was minor and
you are absolutely not to worry. Take any news from Blake with a
grain of salt, please. He means well, of course, but he is being
overprotective and kind of driving me crazy. I’m nearly sure my
wrist is sprained, not broken. The doctor said the x-rays will
confirm one way or the other. There’s no need at all for you to
come home.
I read this message twice, imagining my mother at
her solitary kitchen table, somehow injured. Though it wasn’t
fair—nearly ten years had passed and we had all moved on, at least
on the surface—I felt myself drawn back to the summer after my
father’s death. We’d gone through our days doing the usual things,
trying to create a fragile order. We made meals we hardly touched,
and passed in the halls without speaking; my mother started
sleeping in the spare room downstairs, and began to close the
second floor down, room by room. Her grief was at the center of the
stillness in the house, and we all moved carefully, so quietly,
around it; if I allowed myself to weep or rage, everything might
shatter, so I held still. Even now, when I went back to visit I
always felt myself falling into those old patterns, the world
circumscribed by loss.
The next e-mail was indeed from Blake, which
alarmed me. Blake spent his summers living on his sailboat and
working as a pilot for the cruises that left from The Lake of
Dreams pier every two hours; he spent his winters in St. Croix
doing much the same. He liked Skype, and twice he’d flown across
the world to visit me, but he didn’t like e-mail and almost never
wrote. He gave more details about the accident—someone had run a
stop sign, and he described my mother’s car as totaled—but he
didn’t sound overprotective to me, just concerned. It was my cousin
Zoe who sounded a little out of control, but then she always did.
She had been born when I was nearly fourteen, and she was so much
younger than the rest of us that it sometimes seemed she’d grown up
in a completely different family. Her older brother, Joey, was
about my age, heir to the family name and the family fortunes, and
we’d never gotten along. But Zoe, who was fifteen now and adored
the Internet, found my life amazing and exotic, and she wrote
frequently to relay dramatic events from high school, even though I
seldom wrote back.
It was nearly dawn. I got up and went to the
window. Outside, the cobblestones were brightening to gray, wooden
houses emerging from the night. Across the street, a subdued
rattling of pots jarred me from my thoughts, followed by the sound
of water running. Mrs. Fujimoro came out to sweep her walk. I
stepped out onto the patio, nodding good morning. Her broom made
such firm strokes—swish, swish, swish—that until she paused I
didn’t realize the earth had begun to rumble again. It was ordinary
at first, a large wave hitting the shore, a truck passing down the
street—but no. I met Mrs. Fujimoro’s gaze. She caught my hand as
the shaking extended, began to swell.
Leaves quivered and water trembled in a puddle. A
tiny crack appeared below the Fujimoros’ kitchen window, zigzagging
to the foundation. I held her hand, staying very still, thinking of
my mother’s accident, of the moment she realized she could no more
stop the car from smashing into her than she could alter the
progress of the moon.
The tremor stopped. A child’s questioning voice
floated from the house. Mrs. Fujimoro took a deep breath, stepped
away from me, and bowed. She picked up her broom. Her expression,
so recently unmasked, was already distant again. I stood alone on
the worn cobblestones.
“You turned off your gas?” she asked.
“Oh, yes!” I assured her. “Yes, I turned off the
gas!” We had this exchange often; it was one of my few phrases of
perfect Japanese.
Yoshi was in the doorway by the time I turned, his
hair tousled and an old T-shirt pulled on over his running shorts.
He had a kind face, and he gave a slight bow to Mrs. Fujimoro, who
bowed in turn and spoke to him in rapid Japanese. Her husband had
been a schoolmate of Yoshi’s father, and we rented the house from
them. On the rare occasions when Yoshi’s parents visited from
London—his mother is British—they stayed in another flat the
Fujimoros owned around the corner.
“What were you talking about?” I asked when Yoshi
finally bowed again to Mrs. Fujimoro and stepped back inside. He’d
grown up bilingual and moved with fluid ease between languages,
something I both admired and envied.
“Oh, she was telling me about the Great Kanto
Earthquake in the twenties. Some of her family died in it, and she
thinks that’s why she gets so afraid, even in the little tremors.
She’s terrified of fires. And she’s sorry if she startled you by
taking your hand.”
“It’s all right,” I said, following Yoshi to the
kitchen, picking up my empty cup on the way. “The earthquakes scare
me, too. I don’t know how you can be so calm.”
“Well, they either stop or they don’t. There’s not
much you can do, is there? Besides, look,” he added, gesturing to
the paper, which of course I couldn’t read. “Front page. It says an
island is forming underwater, and then everything will improve.
This is just a release of pressure.”
“Great. Very reassuring.” I watched him add water
to the tea, his movements easy, practiced. “Yoshi, my mother was in
an accident,” I said.
He looked up.
“What happened? Is she okay?”
“A car accident. Not serious, I don’t think. Or
serious, but she’s fine anyway. It depends on whose story you
read.”
“Ah. That’s really too bad. You’ll go see
her?”
I didn’t answer immediately. Did he want me to go?
Would that be a relief? “I don’t think so,” I said, finally. “She
says she’s okay. Besides, I need to find a job.”
Yoshi fixed me with the kind expression that had
once drawn me to him and now often made me feel so claustrophobic:
as if he understood me, inside out.
“Next week, next month, you can still look for
jobs.”
I glanced out the kitchen window at the wall of the
house next door.
“No, Yoshi. I really don’t want to put it off. All
this free time is making me a little crazy, I think.”
“Well,” Yoshi said cheerfully, sitting at the
table. “I can’t argue with that.”
“I’ve looked hard,” I told him tersely. “You have
no idea.”
Yoshi was peeling a mandarin orange in a skillful
way that left the skin almost intact, like an empty lantern, and he
didn’t look up.
“Well, what about that consultancy—the one on the
Chinese dam project on the Mekong? Did you follow through on
that?”
“Not yet. It’s on my list.”
“Your list—Lucy, how long can it be?”
Now I took a deep breath before I answered. We’d
been looking forward to this hike in the mountains for weeks, and I
didn’t want to argue. “I’ve been researching that firm,” I said,
finally, trying to remember that just hours ago we’d been dancing
in this same room, the air around us dark and fragrant.
Yoshi offered me a segment of his orange. These
little oranges, mikans, grew on the trees in the nearby
hills and looked like bright ornaments when they ripened. We’d seen
them when we visited last fall, back when Yoshi had just been
offered this job and everything still seemed full of
possibilities.
“Lucy, why not take a break and go see your mother?
I could meet you there, too, after this business trip to Jakarta.
I’d like to do that. I’d like to meet her.”
“But it’s such a long way.”
“Not unless you’re planning to walk.”
I laughed, but Yoshi was serious. His eyes, the
color of onyx, as dark as the bottom of a lake, were fixed on me. I
caught my breath, remembering the night before, how he’d held my
gaze without blinking while his fingers moved so lightly across my
skin. Yoshi traveled often for his job—an engineer, he designed
bridges for a company that had branches in several countries—and
this trip had seemed like just one more absence to add to all the
others. How ironic if now his job became a way for us to
reconnect.
“Don’t you ever want me to meet her?” he
pressed.
“It’s not that,” I said, and it really wasn’t. I
picked up the empty orange skin, light in my palm. “It’s just the
timing. Besides, my mother’s condition isn’t serious. It’s not
exactly an emergency situation.”
Yoshi shrugged, taking another orange from the
cobalt bowl. “Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation,
Lucy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that lately you seem like a very sad and
lonely person, that’s all.”
I looked away, blinking in surprise as my eyes,
inexplicably, filled with tears.
“Hey.” He touched my hand; his fingertips were
sticky. “Look, Lucy, I’m sorry, okay? Let’s not worry about this.
Let’s just go up to the mountains, like we planned.”
So we did. It was muggy near the sea but grew into
a high, bright, sunny day as the train switchbacked up the
mountain. In early spring, plum trees and cherry trees had
blossomed against this landscape, blanketing the ground with white
petals, and my vocabulary lessons then had been like poems:
tree, flowers, falling, petals, snow. Now it was late enough
in the season that rice had risen from the watery land near the
sea, but in the mountains, spring lingered. The hydrangeas were
just beginning to bloom, their clusters of petals faintly green,
bleeding into lavender and blue, pressing densely against the
windows of the train.
We hiked to an open-air museum beneath a canopy of
cedar trees and ate in a mountain village built on the rim of a
dormant volcano, and our talk was easy, relaxed, and happy, like
our best times together. It was nearly dusk by the time we reached
the rotemboro, an outdoor hot springs, and parted at the
door. The changing room was all clear pine and running water,
tranquil, soothing, and almost empty. I scrubbed carefully from
head to toe, sluicing warm water to rinse, walking naked to the
rock-lined pool. The air was cool, and the moon was rising in the
indigo sky. Two other women were lounging against the smooth
stones, chatting, their skin white against the wet gray rocks,
their pale bodies disappearing into the water at the waist. Their
voices were one soft sound; the trickle of water from the spring,
another. Farther away, from beyond the wall, came the splashing and
the voices of the men.
I slipped into the steaming water, imagining the
patterns of underground rivers that fed these springs, thinking how
everything was connected, and how our lives here had grown from
such a casual decision made during my first weeks in Jakarta well
over two years ago. I’d come back tired from a week in the field
inspecting a canal system, and I dropped my suitcase on the cool
marble floor, imagining nothing beyond a shower, a plate of nasi
goreng, and a drink. My housemate, who worked at the Irish
embassy, was leaving for a party and invited me to go, promising
good food and better music. I said no at first, but at the last
minute I changed my mind. If I hadn’t gone, Yoshi and I would never
have met.
The party was in a large house that buzzed with
music and laughter. I wore a dark blue silk sheath I’d had made, a
perfect fit and a good color for my eyes, and for a while I moved
through the rooms, laughing, talking. Then I passed a quiet balcony
and, on an impulse, slipped out for some air. Yoshi was leaning
against the railing, gazing at the river below. I hesitated,
because there was something about his stance that made me wish not
to disturb him. But he turned, smiling in that way he has where his
whole face is illuminated, warm and welcoming. He asked if I wanted
to come and watch the water.
I did. I crossed the tiled floor and stood beside
him at the railing. We didn’t speak much at first, mesmerized by
the swift, muddy currents. When we did start talking, we found we
had a lot in common. In addition to our work and love of travel, we
were the same age, and we were both allergic to beer. Our
conversation flowed so swiftly that we didn’t notice the people who
came and went, or our empty glasses, or the changing sky, not until
the monsoon rain began to pour down with tropical suddenness and
intensity. We looked at each other then and started laughing, and
Yoshi lifted his hands to the outpouring of the skies. Since we
were already drenched, there seemed no point in going inside. We
talked on the balcony until the rain ceased as suddenly as it had
begun. Yoshi walked me home through the dark and steamy streets.
When we reached my house he ran the palms of his hands across my
cheeks to smooth away the water, and kissed me.
At first it was easy enough to keep the
relationship from gaining traction. I’d had enough of the
transitory, long-distance love affairs that happen inevitably for
people who travel so much. Then the rains began again. They came
early that year, and with an unusual ferocity, overwhelming the
city’s open canal systems and flooding the streets. Much of Jakarta
was low-lying and susceptible to water, and the sprawling
development around the city—a loss of trees and green spaces—had
left few places to absorb the rain. The water rose, and rose. One
morning fish were swimming in the flooded lawn, and by noon water
was five inches deep in the living room. My roommate and I watched
on the news as the flood washed away cars, the fronts of buildings,
and an entire village of 143 people.
As the water began to recede, Yoshi and two
coworkers organized a cleanup at an orphanage. He picked me up in
an old Nissan truck he’d borrowed and we drove through the drenched
and devastated city. The orphanage grounds were awash in mud and
filled with debris. It stank. We worked all that day and all the
next, and Yoshi was everywhere, shoveling mud and orchestrating
volunteers. Once, he paused beside a boy in a worn red shirt who
stood crying in the mud, then picked him up and carried him
inside.
When he brought me home at the end of that second
day, the skies opened again. Running from the car, reaching for my
house keys, I slipped and grabbed a mango tree to keep from
falling. A cascade of leaves and twigs showered down, scattering
seeds and pollen, desiccated stems. I was already a mess from
cleaning. Yoshi took my arm and we fumbled our way inside.
You’re shivering, he said, come here. We let our wet
clothes fall by the steaming shower. Close your eyes, he
said, stepping behind me, the warm water pouring over us, and then
his hands were moving in my hair, working the shampoo through every
strand, caressing my scalp, massaging my shoulders, the cold and
grime draining away, my tension and uncertainties draining away. My
arms eased under his touch, he held my breasts like flowers, and I
turned.
And now we were here, all these days and miles
away, Yoshi’s voice, his laughter, drifting over the wall that
divided the hot springs pool. I slid deeper into the water, resting
my head on the damp rocks. My limbs floated, faintly luminous, and
steam rose; the women across from me chatted softly. They were
mother and daughter, I thought, or sisters born years apart, for
their bodies were similar in shape, and their gestures mirrored
each other’s. I thought again of my own mother, sitting alone in
her house.
Lately you seem like a very sad and lonely
person. The comment still smarted, but I had to wonder if it
was true. I’d left for college just weeks after my father died,
numb but determined to escape the silence that had descended on the
house like a dark enchantment. Keegan Fall had tried again and
again to break it, but I’d sent him away harshly, two times, three
times, until he stopped calling. In the years since, I’d moved—from
college to grad school, from good jobs to better ones and through a
whole series of romances, leaving all that grief behind, never
letting myself slow down. Until now, unemployed in Japan, I had
paused.
One by one, the women stepped out of the pool,
water dripping onto the stones, causing little waves. I remembered
my dream, the faces just beneath the surface of the ice. My father
used to tell me stories where I was always the heroine and the
ending was always happy. Nothing had prepared me for the shock of
his death. He had fallen, it was determined in the autopsy, and hit
his head on the boat and slipped beneath the water, a freak
accident that could not fully be explained, or ever undone. His
fishing pole had been recovered days later, tangled in the reeds at
the edge of the marsh.
I left the pool and dressed, but Yoshi wasn’t
outside yet, so I started walking idly down a path of stones alone.
It followed a narrow stream and opened into a pond, as round as a
bowl and silvery with moonlight. I paused at the edge. In the
darkness on the other side, something stirred.
Not for the first time that quake-riddled day, I
held my breath. A great blue heron stood in the shadows, its long
legs disappearing into the dark water, its wings folded closely
against its body. Then the pond was still, gleaming like mica.
Another, smaller heron stirred beside the first. I thought of the
two women in the spring, as if they had stepped outside to the pond
and been transformed into these silent, beautiful birds. Then Yoshi
called my name, and both herons unfolded their wide wings and
lifted off, slowly, gracefully, casting shadows on the water before
they disappeared into the trees.
“Lucy,” Yoshi called again. “If we hurry, we can
catch the next train.”
The heat closed in as we lost altitude, and the
hydrangea blossoms against the windows grew older and more ragged,
as if the slow, incremental season had been compressed into a
single hour. By the time we reached our stop by the sea, the
blossoms had disappeared completely, leaving only glossy foliage.
We walked home along the narrow cobblestone lanes. Crickets hummed
and the ground shook slightly with the surf. Twice, I paused.
“Is that the sea?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“Not an earthquake?”
Yoshi sighed, a little wearily, I thought. “I don’t
know. Maybe a very little one.”
A vase of flowers had tipped over on the table.
Several books were scattered on the floor. I wiped up the water and
gathered the petals. As I stood, there was a single quick, sharp
jolt, so strong that even Yoshi reacted, pulling me into the
doorway, where we stood for several minutes, alert again to the
earth, its shifting, trembling life. I was so tired; I dreaded the
night ahead, with its earthquakes and its dreams. I dreaded the
next day, too, all the little disagreements flaring out of nothing,
and the silence that would press around me once Yoshi left for
work. I thought of the herons at the edge of the pond, spreading
their dark wings.
“Yoshi,” I said. “I think I will go see my family,
after all.”