The Pearl Diver (34 page)

She looked up as we came through the door. “Well, hello again. How was lunch?”

“Excellent,” I said. “I had the lobster. It’s amazing that they swim this far south.”

“A lot swim in places you think they don’t belong.”

I exchanged glances with Andrea, but the next thing that she said put me at ease.

“It’s a good thing. Keeps us going, keeps us growing.”

“I hear there’s a chance of bringing in a new, nonnative oyster species so they could spread and repopulate,” I said.

“That’s right. The Asian oyster. A lot of people are afraid of it.
My husband’s cousin Bobby, who works over at the crab-packing plant, says it’s been bred over on the Virginia side of the bay for a while without causing problems. Too bad the brilliant minds running our state won’t let us do it. What’s the bay gotta turn into, a swamp or something, before they’re willing to act?” She raised her eyebrows, making the creases in her forehead deeper.

“We talked to Bobby, actually.” I was happy for the easy opening. “He mentioned a friend of yours, a Korean woman who used to dive around here. We’d like to meet her.”

“Why’s that?” She looked at us expectantly.

Andrea and I exchanged glances. She shook her head.

“I’d rather not say. I mean, I’ll tell her, of course, because I’m hoping that she will be able to lead us to the person we are actually hoping to talk with. It might not pan out, but we’ve come so far, I thought it was worth a try.”

“Well, it don’t matter. I can’t think of anyone who fits the description. Round these parts men do the diving, not women.”

“But your cousin said—” Andrea protested.

“Bobby’s never been able to remember anything right.”

“But she was the only woman diver. He said that you used to have a beer with her, now and then, and you saw her recently in Centerville.”

“He was confused.” She’d stopped paying much attention to the dog, and the shearing continued over one of its ears, catching an ear corner on the edge. The dog yelped. She dropped the power razor.

She knew something. There was a buzzing in my ears that had nothing to do with the tool that was lying on the floor.

“It’s my mother we’re trying to find,” Andrea said in a low voice. “This woman you know, we think, might have befriended my mom, back when she was here in the seventies, before she disappeared.”

“It’s so long ago. I’m sorry, I just don’t know how to help you. Off the table, Daisy!” She grabbed the pooch around its middle and set it on the floor.

“You’re still protecting her, aren’t you?” I said. It had to be.
Polly’s reaction to throw us off and protect her friend could only mean that the so-called Korean diver might not be the source we needed to lead us to Sadako. She might be Sadako herself.

“What do you mean? Daisy has her owner coming back in a half hour. The dog’ll be fine.” Polly sounded testy.

“No, I mean you’re trying to protect your friend by not telling outsiders about her,” I said. “You’ve been her ally all these years.”

“Girls, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but I’ve got to put this dog out in our short-term kennel. Good luck on the rest of your trip!”

“The men my mother was afraid of are finally in prison,” Andrea said. “She—Rei, I mean—she was almost killed by them a few weeks ago. But they can’t hurt anyone again.”

Polly looked unconvinced.

I watched Andrea shut her eyes for a moment, then open them. She seemed to be gathering her courage for something. At last her voice came out, a little shaky. “Please help me. My mother’s name was Sadako. She was married to a guy who’d been in Vietnam. I was born in Virginia in 1974. She liked to call me Akiko, but my American name is Andrea.”

Polly swayed slightly, and put her hands on the dog-grooming table to steady herself.

“You know what she’s talking about,” I said softly.

Polly looked at me with a fierce expression. “You swear they’re in prison?”

“My copy of the
Washington Post
containing the news story is back at my apartment,” I said. “If you like, I can drive back to D.C. and fax it to you.”

“No,” Andrea said sharply. “I’m not leaving the shore until I’ve seen my mother. She walked away from me, but I still—” Andrea stopped speaking and buried her face in her hands.

Polly looked at me. Her careworn face suddenly looked even older. “There’s not supposed to be a daughter anymore,” she said. “Not one alive.”

“Just as there’s not supposed to be a mother alive, either,” I said.

Polly sat down. “I—I better make a phone call.”

I sensed that Polly wasn’t going to send us unless it was clear that we were wanted. And there was a chance that this woman really was a stranger. All my instincts were screaming that Polly’s friend was Andrea’s mother, but it might not be the case. I’d been wrong about so much over the last few months.

Andrea was still weeping. I led her to a bench near the doorway and made her sit down. Daisy wandered over and nosed against her knees. This made Andrea cry even harder.

Polly disappeared with a cordless telephone into a back room. I wondered how she’d put the situation to her friend. Two strange city girls had wandered in, looking for her. They’d thrown around some Japanese names. Was that enough for her to agree to see us?

Polly came out again without the phone. Instead of saying anything, she went to Andrea and put her arms around her.

“She doesn’t want to see me, does she? I knew it was a bad idea,” Andrea said, her mouth wobbling.

“No, hon. She wants to see you right away. I’m going to give you directions to the marine center. She works in the lab on the first floor.”

“There are Marines here on the Eastern Shore?” I asked.

“It’s a marine biology research center,” Polly clarified. “Pearl is working in the lab on an oyster cultivation project that’s been going on for five years now. She got the job a while ago, when she stopped diving.”

“Pearl,” I said. “Her name is now Pearl?”

“Yes. It’s not her given name, she said, but the one she chose to use ever since she moved out here. And it suits her more each year. You’ll see.”

“I feel sick,” Andrea said as we started driving again, this time toward Centerville. “Sick as a dog. I wish—if I had known—I wouldn’t be dressed like this, I’d be in something more conservative. And look at my hair.” She touched her light gold curls. “She’ll never believe I’m her daughter. I should have brought my birth certificate, some kind of proof.”

I shook my head. “She’s your mother. She’ll recognize you.”

The marine center was a modest two-story cinder-block building that I guessed must once have been a grade school, because of all the windows and the playground equipment in back. In front, there was a neatly clipped lawn decorated with a sculpture made from oyster cans. A boat, I realized belatedly. An oyster boat, made of the cans used to catch oysters.

We pulled into a large parking lot that was underoccupied by only a dozen cars, all of which bore “Treasure the Chesapeake” Maryland license plates. I was beginning to feel that some Americans were a lot like the Japanese, understanding that the value of nature was greater than all of us put together.

“I’m perfectly willing to wait in the car,” I said to Andrea.

“No.” She shook her head. “I’ll lose my nerve if you aren’t with me. Besides, you might need to translate something. Remember how she said in the letters that she couldn’t speak English well?”

“She’s been here for twenty-eight years, though,” I said. “She’s made friends and gotten a job. So don’t worry about the English. I’ll come along though, if you want the moral support.”

The building had a wide central hallway with doors along both sides. I looked at the room directory, which was posted on a big
board. There were offices for the study of sea grass, others for crabs, others examining salinity. The oyster recovery group worked at the rear of the first floor. I practically had to pull Andrea along with me. She was scared. Well, I’d be, too, if I were to meet my mother after twenty-eight years.

“I wish I wasn’t meeting her in front of a crowd,” Andrea said in a low voice.

“She might be alone. There were only about twelve cars in the lot. Divide that by the number of offices.”

“You never know—” Andrea broke off. We were standing in front of the oyster-recovery-program door.

“Shall I knock?” I asked, because she hadn’t moved.

“Yeah. You go first, because if she’s there I—I don’t know what I’ll say.” Andrea’s face had tightened into the chilly expression I’d always seen on her in the old days, the days before I realized that was just the way she looked when she was nervous.

“Relax,” I told her as I knocked. “Ten deep breaths. And you might want to smile.”

“This is not a beauty pageant,” she muttered.

The door opened, suddenly, and I found myself facing a tall, American boy—a man, I revised, a young man with glasses and blue jeans and an intense air. “Come on in. Are you the ones here to see Pearl?” he said. The room behind him was filled with marine equipment, books, and banks of computers and telephones.

“Yes,” I said, squinting beyond him to see where she was.

“I work on the project with her. She wanted me to walk you out to where she’s tending the oyster beds.” He indicated the room’s windows, which had a thrilling view of the blue bay.

“You mean—out to sea?” Andrea asked.

“Naw.” He smiled. “We have the lab set up outdoors, along the pier. You’ll see.” We went back out in the hall, and then around to the back of the building. All along a wooden dock were round fiberglass containers that looked like small, aboveground swimming pools. A woman was standing with her back to us, leaning over one of the containers and examining something in a net. She
was tall, and wore blue jeans and a purple-striped jersey. I’d been expecting black hair like my aunt’s, but hers was silver.

“Is that Pearl?” Andrea asked him. I could hear the doubt in her voice.

“Yep,” he said. “I’ll leave you here, then. Take care.”

When he was gone, Andrea gripped my hand. “I don’t want to go up to her. I can’t stand the disappointment.”

“You mean, if it’s not her?” I said, just as the woman turned. She looked at us without smiling. Her face was not the classic middle-aged Japanese woman’s face at all. It was creased deeply with sun damage, and she wore a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. But the eyes behind the glasses—they were Asian eyes. And they were looking at Andrea with intensity. Clearly she’d guessed which young woman was her daughter.

I kept hold of Andrea’s hand and started walking forward. Now we were only three feet from the woman.

“Hello,” Andrea said.

“Are you my Akiko?” She spoke softly, with a strong Japanese accent. There was no mistaking it, nor was there in the strong way she held her shoulders. This was Sadako.

Andrea nodded. “Andrea is the name on my birth certificate, but—yes. I learned a little while ago that Akiko was my baby name.”

“How did you learn that?” Pearl asked. She was still on guard, it was clear.

“Letters. Your letters to Atsuko. Rei and her aunt translated them from Japanese for me.”

Sadako looked at me as if she was startled to see anyone else standing next to Andrea. I bent my head, and in Japanese, introduced myself and said that we’d gotten the letters, which had been returned from her sister’s home in Japan to Robert Norton.

“Yes, the early letters were returned. I learned that after some years,” she said.

“And you stopped writing to your sister, Atsuko,” I said. “My own aunt just met your sister a few weeks ago. Atsuko has thought, all these years, you were dead.”

“Yes, I imagine she did.” She let out her breath slowly. “Rei, I am very grateful for what you did. And yes, I am concerned about my sister. But how you found Akiko remains the most important thing.”

“We found each other,” I replied in English, smiling at Andrea.

“But I never found you. You were not there,” Sadako said, turning to address Andrea directly. “I went back to get you, two months after I’d found my new life here. I went back in the night, slipping in with my old key. Robert was sleeping in the apartment, but you were not there, nor were any of your things. Because you were missing, I was sure that something terrible had happened to you. I went into such a—depression—after that. I stopped writing to my sister. I separated completely from my old life in Japan.”

“I was in foster care,” Andrea said. “You could have found that out if you’d asked my father.”

“I should have.” She bowed her head. “But I was frightened. I thought you were dead, that it was my punishment for what I had done.”

“The river,” I said. “Someone put your clothes by the river.”

“I did that,” she said in a low voice. “When I ran away, I wanted to make it look as if I’d died.”

“But then, if you came back and got me, people would have thought I was kidnapped,” Andrea said.

“But not by me, since I was supposed to be dead.” Sadako sighed. “The plan sounds so crazy now. I was not the same person then. I thought I couldn’t trust Robert to keep secret where I’d gone.”

“What about Neblett and Garcia—the men who were in Vietnam?” I asked.

She nodded. “Those are the names of the Americans who had been with him there. And when he came back, they told him they’d reveal his secret about the killing, make it come out that he’d murdered the children. In exchange for their silence, he gave them so much! Money, weapons. He would even have given
me
to them, I think, if they hadn’t thought I was so ugly.”

“You’re not ugly, Sadako-san,” I said. “You are one of the loveliest, strongest women I’ve ever seen. In Japan or America.”

“I prefer Pearl now, if you don’t mind,” she said softly. “I changed my name when I came here. I wanted a place where I could work without showing an identity card, and at that time, you could do that here. And in those days, the 1970s, there were many oyster boats working the bay. I decided to try. At first they didn’t believe I could do it, because I was a woman—they use heavy machinery, not their hands. But after I showed a few of the boat owners what I could do with my hands, I had as much work as I wanted. The work, it was all I had. I never married again.” She paused. “What about you, Andrea? You say that you were cared for by another family all these years. Were they kind?”

“There were several families,” said Andrea carefully. “Some were kind, others—not. I survived, although I can’t say that I’ve accomplished much. Not like you, becoming a scientist.”

“Oh, I’m not a scientist. I never had the education for that. But because of what I’d done on the water, I was chosen for this laboratory-technician position. People call me the oyster mother, sometimes, because these are like my babies—” She broke off. “My words are stupid. I am no mother at all.”

“It’s okay,” Andrea said dully.

“No, it isn’t. I should have brought you here to the island with me on the day I ran away. I didn’t because I wanted to make things—secure—first. I didn’t want to be one of those women you see on the street, sitting with a child and begging for money.”

As she spoke, I shivered, remembering the woman and baby I’d seen on my way to Mandala on that rainy day so long ago. Pearl and Andrea had both gone through tough lives, without a protector, but they’d emerged strong. And though their conversation was halting, it was clear how much Andrea’s mother wanted to know her grown child. And I knew, from experience, that Andrea’s reserve would thaw.

“I’m just going around front for a while,” I said, knowing that I wasn’t needed anymore. I turned and walked past the tubs of oys
ters, big clean shells to which tiny oysters were clinging. Asian oysters by way of California, and now, the bay. Too risky, some environmentalists said. Ha. I loved old things, but now I understood that you had to change to survive. I hoped the bay wouldn’t turn into a lonely swamp before people realized that.

I passed the car and went straight across the street, where I’d noticed a small line of tourist shops when we’d driven in. There was a snack bar called Oyster Alley, and Body Art, a tattoo and piercing parlor. A neon sign in the window beckoned, saying that it was “Open 11–11.”

It was three o’clock now, firmly in the window of operation. I stood close to the window for a few minutes, studying the pictures of tattoo designs, and pierced tongues and ears. My old roommate Richard had pierced his tongue when piercings really were radical. To get a piercing now, in the twenty-first century, was passé. Especially for a woman my age who didn’t drink much, washed her darks and whites separately, and even gave money to a mainstream politician.

I pushed the door open and went in.

A woman in blue jeans and a tank top was moving through a yoga asana on a mat in the center of the room. She looked up at me from about knee level.

“I’m working. This is just what I do when it gets slow.”

“It’s better than watching TV,” I said.

“So what can I do you for?” Slowly, she came up to a standing position, her arms outstretched. I saw now that she was over forty, but had the kind of long, straightened hair that was popular with high school and college girls. She had multiple hoops in both ears, a nostril pierced with a glittering red stone, and a tiny gold ring through her navel. A leafy vine tattoo wound its way around one ankle. There was a big-eyed moon on the other.

“I was wondering how much it is for a piercing,” I said.

She cocked her head to the side. “Depends on where.”

“Navel.” It would serve as my mark, my memory of what had happened. My stomach pains had gone away, but I didn’t ever want to forget that there had been a connection there—a cord that had briefly run from me to a baby, nourishing it for a few months of life.

“Oh, that’s easy. Lots of gals your age are doing them, and the nice thing is, it can come out if you get pregnant. I charge forty bucks and that includes the ring itself.”

I glanced around the parlor. It looked clean. “What kind of, ah, health precautions do you take?”

“We use a piercing gun, just like they do at the shopping mall when you get earrings. Everything’s sterile. If you’re nervous, our health department certificate is right by the door.”

“I still don’t know.” I hesitated.

“You need your mom’s permission, if you’re younger than eighteen. In any event, I’ll need to see a driver’s license to verify your age.”

Then I had to laugh. “What can I do to make it, well, not exactly the same as every other woman’s belly piercing?”

“You could do gemstones. I’m wearing onyx.” She raised her tank top so I could have a better look at two small black gems glittering in the middle. She was no flat-bellied nymph like Andrea, but the body jewelry was attractive on her, somehow serving to make her curves look more luxurious.

“Could I have a jewel on mine?” I was getting excited. What would Hugh think? If it was a genuine stone and completely tasteful, of course.

“Sure, but I don’t have much of serious value. Right now, my stock is mostly onyx, amethyst, cubic zirconia, and freshwater pearl.”

“Would it be a real freshwater pearl?” I asked.

“You can check it out if you’re curious. Frankly, I don’t know. I just buy the stuff from my supplier, who’s always been reliable.” She handed me a tiny box filled with the odd-shaped, small pearls. I scratched lightly at the surface of the one I liked best. It gave way slightly, so I knew that the pearl was real.

A few minutes later I was lying on a table that she’d flung a clean sheet over. I closed my eyes, knowing this couldn’t be worse than a waxing. I didn’t even have to get undressed. A swab of alcohol, and then a stabbing pain—but it was over quickly. I didn’t look down until I sat up. Voilà, in my once plain belly button, a light smear of antibiotic ointment highlighted a curving wire of gold and two gleaming, Rice Krispy–shaped pearls. The body part that I’d hated so much a few months ago now looked almost magical. And like the woman said, when I had my next baby, it would come out.

There would be another baby, I said to myself as I walked out of the piercing parlor and back to the Marine center. And that child would learn about the one who hadn’t made it.

It was time to catch up with Andrea and Pearl. I sensed that Andrea probably wouldn’t need to ride back with me that evening. But I’d say good-bye, just to put a frame on her happily ever after, and my bittersweet one.

Relishing the secret under my shirt, I looked both ways before jogging across the street.