Chapter 22 The Temple
THE TEMPLE
Thirty-three years ago …
The house is cold as ice as you set foot across the threshold. It is almost a relief from the boiling heat outside except that the unnaturalness of it makes you feel uneasy. Maybe you should be moving out? It’s not the first time the thought has occurred to you lately.
Mami is standing in the kitchen, smiling vacantly. To your shock, she is wearing her one fancy dress that somehow made it to the island: a blue and pink qipao, beautifully embroidered and brought with her all the way from Shanghai. In all the years of your childhood, she has only ever worn it once.
She wears it now, singing a modern Chinese jazz song you’ve never heard before. The ghosts gather around her to listen and are bolder, less concerned with what you think. Her voice trails away as you come in, though.
“Why are you here?” Mami says, distractedly. “What are you doing?”
“I need a bottle to store water, while I am out.” The lie springs to your lips with ease. “It is so hot these days.” The sight of her makes you uncomfortable, so you busy yourself digging through the cupboards, because it’s an excuse to keep your back turned.
“That’s fine.” Her finger is tapping the wooden table.
Keeping time for the music. Several of the ghosts start playing on bamboo flutes, filling the silence her singing left.
“Try not to get sunstroke out there,” she adds, kind of randomly.
Like she’s grasping quickly for something motherly sounding to say.
“Try not to freeze in here,” you shoot back, unable to resist a barb.
“It is my turn to sing again, soon,” she says, and it’s unclear whether she is talking to you or to them. Either way, you get the sense she’s just waiting for you to leave.
You manage to find one old beer bottle, long empty and dry, and put it into a canvas bag.
There will definitely be others around, but this will do for now.
Some stacks of old newspaper go in next, along with a fishing knife for cutting, some oilcloth rags, twine, one of Baba’s old notebooks, a few other things.
As you head for the door, Mami says suddenly, “Wait.”
You pause in annoyance, fingers on the handle. “Yes?”
“You will stay out of the water.” She isn’t phrasing it as a question. There’s a curious flatness creeping into her voice. “Please, daughter.”
“Isn’t it your turn to sing?” you retort.
A few months ago, she’d have berated you for such a rude reply, and yelled till your ears glowed red. Strange to think how you used to cringe from someone whom you can just ignore these days.
No scolding this time. She just blinks, very slowly. “Yes, I should … get singing.” And she wanders back into the living room, attention focused on the deathly music.
You can’t get out of the house fast enough.
Back at the beach, out again in the hot, soothing sunshine, you put your worries into a mental box. One thing at a time: the mission for Sea Sister is occupying the moment. Worrying about Mami’s madness can come later, when you have to deal with her in the evening.
Squatting on the sand, open the bag and set to work. The knife is used to shred the old newspapers, clipping out pictures of Hong Kong with its boats and ferries and trading houses, all bustling around a choppy harbor.
Next comes the bottle. Pick up a photograph, partly roll it, and drop it in.
The picture curves convex against the bottle’s interior.
Next, though it feels almost disrespectful to do so, you rip out a sheet of the paper from one of Baba’s old notebooks, scribble a quick message, and slot it lengthwise into the last glass bottle.
You don’t know if Sea Sister can read, but it doesn’t matter. You can read it to her, if she needs.
And because there is extra space (the paper is only narrow) you also slip in a single photograph of you and Mami on the other side: taken two years ago, at great expense.
In it, you and she stand side by side, stiff and pale in the black-and-white grain, hands clasped at the front.
Mami wears a severe frown to match her dark clothes; you have a slight smile, undermined by an ill-fitting cheongsam.
Not much of a photo, but all you have to give.
When all of that is done, the bottles get returned to the carry bag and you stand, striding toward the beach. Splash back to the ocean with these newly made prizes.
This is the sort of kindness you are capable of, and as a goddess of mercy, I have always loved that trait in you.
Sea Sister appreciates it, certainly. She trembles like a reed when you hand her the bottle with its preserved pictures inside. A picture frame for ocean dwellers.
“Yours forever,” you say. “Bottles will last a long time.”
She turns it over and over in disbelief, handling it with amazed reverence. Finally, she traces a finger over the scrap of paper, with its small message.
“A message from me, in case you forget,” you say, and can’t quite meet her gaze.
Sea Sister whispers the words you have written:
From Shore Sister to Sea Sister: may we always be friends forever.
Sea Sister looks at you for a long moment from beneath the water. Then something extraordinary happens: she lurches out of the ocean, crouching on the rocks under the sun’s bright gleam.
You yelp and fall backward, more startled than afraid. The entire time you’ve known her, she hasn’t surfaced, and the natural assumption has been that she can’t.
Quickly, you realize why she doesn’t. That beautiful, pale-green skin begins to dry out, tiny cracks forming at the creases of her joints.
Just like a stranded jellyfish. Her pearly eyes turn red and veiny, as if exposed to a hot oven.
This creature belongs in the ocean, and being out of it surely causes her pain.
She presses a clammy palm to your sunburned cheek. Thank you, Shore Sister. Her touch drops away, but the coolness of it lingers.
“Do you like it? Is that okay?”
I love it, she says, in a voice like foam on rocks. No one else gives me gifts. No one else remembers me. Everyone left me.
“Who left you, Sea Sister?” Strange chills are going through you, despite the warmth of the day, despite the soupy water. There is something here, a moment happening and you do not want to miss it. “Who forgot you?”
A question for a question. There’s a challenge to her voice. Who do you think I am? When you know that, you will know who left me and forgot me.
“I think,” you say, carefully, “that you are the reason my mother warned me against swimming. I think when she speaks of sharks in the water, she is thinking of you.”
Sea Sister makes a strange noise, low in her throat; after a moment, you realize she is laughing. What do you think, Shore Sister?
“I think you are like nothing else on this island. Everything here is so dead, but you are so alive, so fierce.” You pause, searching for the words. “I wish I was like you. I wish I could be free and strong, swimming the waves as a jiaoren.”
Is that … what you want? Sea Sister peers from beneath the sweep of her kelp-tangled hair. I can make that happen, Shore Sister. I can make you like me.
“Really?” Astonishment blooms in your heart. “Do you have that power?”
I do. If you trust me, if you want it, then come with me. And she extends sleek green fingers, skin frazzling in the sun.
You don’t even hesitate. Her hand fits neatly against yours, and you squeeze it tight.
Sea Sister smiles and murmurs, Hold your breath! as she tucks the gifted glass bottle under her other skeletal arm, and pulls you into the water.
Sea Sister swims a long way.
Amidst the whirl of water and fish and sunlight and coral, you become disoriented, losing all sense of direction. The shore is visible to one side but she’s swimming so fast there’s no time to gauge how far it is, or which bit of the island.
One last surface breach for a gulp of air, and then she dives a second time.
This is deeper than you’ve ever gone, ears popping. Fifty feet? More? Hard to say. Strangely, it’s easy to hold your breath, easier to see than it was before you met her. You’re getting used to doing that, after all these months. Still, the suddenness of the descent is a little unpleasant.
Your lungs are beginning to ache again by the time she starts angling up and it is hard, hard, hard not to panic because she’s drawn you somewhere with a strong current and no light. Rock walls scrape your arms, and the space is extraordinarily narrow.
She has pulled you into some kind of undersea tunnel. The realization is alarming. Press tight against her, not wanting to be smashed against the sides, trying not to flail in that deep-set darkness, the cold salt, the long slow crawl. As if you are passing through death itself.
Up she rises, much too fast. But the pressure on your body eases as you ascend to shallower depths, and it gets a little easier to keep that breath in, air expanding in your lungs. That much is a relief.
Light grows around you, softening the dark. The tunnel widens rapidly. Deep ink giving way to paler and paler shades of verdant water until, finally, whole body hurting, you break the surface.
Ten extended seconds while you pant and gasp.
Chill air floods your throat and chest. A pulse hammers in your head; it’s too much, too soon.
You have the vague idea that diving and surfacing the way you have been is not really a good idea, though you don’t have the technical expertise to be more specific.
All you know for the moment is that a headache is festering in your skull, and your joints feel a little odd.
Sea Sister is beside and beneath you, keeping your fatigued, dizzy head above water. You turn on your back and float, inhaling until the starbursts disappear from your vision and the rush of adrenaline dies down. Only then do you look around.
The underwater passage has brought you to a cave.