The Pearl Diver by Jeff Talarigo

Author:Jeff Talarigo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429148
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

She walks across the damp brown blossoms. The cherry blossoms were cheated of their week of beauty, as the heavy rains beat them to the ground only two days after blooming. This is her first time back to the western shore of the island since the uprising.

Many times she has thought of the boy and girl. That is what got her through those days in the isolation room. It was the children whom she thought of throughout the winter, and she thinks of them now.

Cherry blossoms are matted to the driftwood, to the bottom of her sandals. She sees nothing across the way, allowing the maybes to gather. Maybe they have started school, maybe it is too cold for them to play, maybe they have lost interest in playing on the shore, or, after receiving the last set of soap figures and not seeing her return, maybe they gave up on her.

She waits, staying back from the cold water. The tide is up, but it doesn’t matter; there is nothing across the way that she wants to get closer to. As she is about to go back, she hears a voice, then a couple of them. She hesitates, thinking it is her imagination or that maybe someone on Nagashima is talking. For a moment, she can’t make herself turn back toward the channel. First, a glance over her shoulder, and this leads the rest of her body to follow when she sees them. She is nervous; shards of shyness overcome her. It is only when they wave that she returns theirs. She stands on a piece of driftwood, but this isn’t high enough, so she climbs onto a rock. This is better, but not much; the children can be lost, if only for a second, on the choppy channel.

She waves and they wave. It is she who stops first and she who turns her back on them. A strange emptiness settles inside and stalks her all the way to the room, sits in her all evening, gets under the blanket of the futon with her. And she knows that she shouldn’t have made and taken those soap carvings over to the children, not the first time or the second. She berates herself for not being satisfied with only waving to them, for having to go and make the figures, her desperation for the boy and girl to take something of her back home with them.

A few days later, she is back and it isn’t long before the boy and girl show up. Although the tide is out, she doesn’t go to meet it, even up to her ankles. They wave, but for her, the game has lost some of its verve, the jolt of energy it once gave her.

They have waved only a couple of times, back and forth, when she sees someone running toward the children. An adult. A woman. The boy is the first to turn back to the woman, who is now shouting something. When she reaches the children, she grabs them both by the arms.

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