The Pearl Diver by Jeff Talarigo Read Free Book Online

break.
    Then, the week before, she saw a man cross over to the island and knew that she, too, must cross.
    The sea recedes, leaving less than a yard from her to the rocks that have begun making the path to the island. Before going back to begin her day, a beautiful red rock at the bottom of the suicide cliff catches her eye. She picks it up. Almost like coral, she thinks, bits of white shells fossilized in it, a glossy black swath sweeping over the stone, as if someone has swooped, only once, a calligraphy brush along it. She carries the stone back up the slight grade leading away from the sea.
    While giving Miss Min a massage, she asks about the island. Miss Min arrived here in 1943, when she was brought over from her homeland as a war slave along with her brother to work in the Kyushu coal mines. At the port, she was discovered to have leprosy and wasn’t sent to the mines, but here. Although less than ten years separate the two of them, Miss Min’s disease is much further along. While giving massages, she tries not to get involved too emotionally with the patients, tries not to think too much, but with Miss Min, it is most difficult. Sitting before her is not a woman in her early thirties, but twenty years older than that. Hardly a shadow of what she must have been less than ten years ago remains.
    She likes Miss Min, who, almost always while she is giving her a massage, tells stories—real or not, she isn’t sure. Sometimes she listens intently to the stories; at others, she allows the words to meld into the rhythm of her kneading hands.
    “Have you ever crossed over to that small island?” she asks Miss Min.
    “Why would I want to?”
    “To see what’s over there.”
    “I’m sure somebody’s been there. There’s that giant
torii
gate.”
    “Let’s go sometime.”
    “Are we allowed?”
    “I don’t see why not. Not much of a place to escape, is it?”
    “Not much of a place.”
    Two days later, they wait together at the dock, watching the water peel itself from the stones.
    “We have only about an hour and a half before the sea comes back.”
    She takes Miss Min’s hand, the fingers having collapsed to half their size.
The hand is ice-cold, although the autumn air hasn’t yet shaken all of summer from its breath.
    “What are you afraid of?”
    “I told you I can’t swim.”
    “Who needs to swim. You can walk, can’t you?”
    “What if the tide comes in early?”
    “The tides have been following the same schedule for a lot longer than we’ve been around. Why would they change today?”
    She helps her onto the stones, some of them nearly knee-high, yet to be dried by the sun and wind. Miss Min’s feet are mangled; she wears flat plastic insoles in her boots to help her walk. Most of the rocks are sharp, almost crisp, volcaniclike rock. Like the rock she cut her arm on at the bottom of the sea. Each step sends flocks of water bugs scrambling, as if the rocks are moving.
    They stand under the
torii
gate; it must be three times higher than they. Miss Min is breathing heavily, the trip across much more of a strain on her. Atop the gate, there is a gathering of stones thrown by somebody. It brings good luck if one lands there. But when? Has their luck changed? Since there is a gate, there must also be a Shinto shrine of some sort.
    “I’m going to go over there. Do you want to come?”
    “No, I’ll stay here. Don’t go far. The tide is going to come back soon.”
    “There is no far to go here, Miss Min. And the tide won’t return for more than an hour. I won’t be long.”
    She goes around the shore of the island; it is not marble-shaped as she had thought. When she gets to the south side, there are some large rocks, much like those across the way at the suicide cliff. Light brown, the bottoms wearing slippery skirts of moss.
    “Miss Fuji!”
    The panicky voice of Miss Min. A few minutes away, she hurries as best she can, and Miss Min is sitting there hugging her knees to her