The Red Shark - Chapter 0006

Chapter 6 — Deep Roots

Sometime during the year I was three, I stopped thinking of myself as Erick living in someone else’s house.

I couldn’t tell you the day. I still remembered everything, California, the desert, the lab, and when I was tired I still thought in English. But those memories had started to feel like a life I’d read about in a book. What felt real was the stone floor under my feet, the smell of fish and rice from the kitchen, and the twenty-odd people who knew my name and yelled it across the courtyard.

Part of it was that the compound got busier that year, and I got pulled in.

About halfway through the year, three of the wives announced they were pregnant: Miyu, the second wife, the calm one; Akemi, the seventh, who never sat still; and Nagi, the ninth, who came from the sea. For a while nothing looked different. None of them were showing yet. But the compound rearranged itself around them. There was more ginger in the kitchen and more herbs drying by the stove, and the mothers kept trading looks over their teacups.

“Careful, Miyu,” Hanae would say, putting a cup in her hands. “No heavy work. I mean it.”

I’d never seen how this family treated a pregnant woman. They closed in around the three of them like a wall. Hanae took charge, naturally. In the evenings she warmed oil and rubbed Akemi’s swollen feet. “Lie down. Your feet look like dumplings.” Akemi laughed so hard she had to hold her belly, and then she let Hanae do it. Nagi brewed a seaweed tea for the nausea that smelled like low tide. I stole a sip once and regretted it. “Small sips,” she told Miyu, who drank it with a grateful smile and one hand on her still-flat stomach.

They traded remedies and old stories. “When I was carrying Daigo,” Hanae told the others one night, “Isamu brought me fresh fish every week. Every single week. And he’d stand there with that face, like he was handing in a mission report.” The whole table cracked up, and then everyone had a story about him, and it went on until the lanterns burned low.

Ten women from ten different places: the slums, the pleasure houses, little villages up and down the coast. Most of them would never have met if not for him. Back when I could only lie in a crib and listen, I’d assumed a household like this would be full of jealousy. If there was any, I never saw it. Once, while helping Nagi to her feet, Rina said quietly, “If one of us falls, we all fall.” The others just nodded.

I made myself useful. At three I could talk in short sentences without anyone finding it strange, so I fetched things. Damp cloths, cups of tea held very carefully in both hands. “Here, auntie. It’s hot.” Miyu smiled and pulled me into her lap, and I could hear her heartbeat through her clothes, slow and steady. She smelled like the herbs she’d been drinking. I stayed there longer than I needed to.

In my old life, nobody held me like that once I was old enough to walk. Here it happened every day, from one person or another, and at some point that year I stopped going stiff when it did.

My brothers had a lot to do with it too.

Daigo was eleven and a genin now, going out on real missions with his team. He came home with mud on his sandals and stories that made the younger kids’ eyes go huge. One evening at dinner he stood up and put a small handful of coins on the table in front of the mothers.

“My first real pay,” he said. “For the family. It’s not much, but it helps.”

For a second nobody spoke. Then Hanae’s eyes filled up, and the whole table started talking at once. Until then, every coin in the house had come from my father. Now someone else was bringing money home, and he was eleven.

Afterward he swung me up onto his shoulders. He smelled of sweat, and there was a fresh scrape on his neck with a little dried blood on it. “Little shark,” he said, “one day you’ll bring home more than I do.” I held onto his hair and didn’t answer, because toddlers don’t make promises. I made one anyway, in my head.

Some nights after a mission he’d sit with me in the corridor and talk. About patrols along the coast in fog so thick you couldn’t see your own teammates. About a chūnin on his squad who snored. He talked to me as if I understood, which I did. “One day you’ll be out there with me, little brother.” I wanted that, and it scared me.

Rokuta, at nine, was the brother I fought with. Every day in the courtyard he’d crouch down, growl and come at me. “Come on, Arashi! Show me those teeth!” I’d throw myself at him with my soft fists, and we’d roll around in the wet grass until we were both filthy. He always let me win in the end, falling over with a big theatrical groan. Then he’d pull me up with a hand already rough from training. “You’re tough, huh?” I’d laugh, and the laugh was real. That was what surprised me.

Nao was seven and quieter. He’d sit next to me at the writing table and show me how he made a curve, without making a big deal of it. “Like this. See?” He had a patience the rest of the family didn’t.

The writing table got crowded that year. My mother started teaching some of the younger kids along with me: Haruto and Toma, and Kenta and Hajime when they had a free afternoon. The common room filled with the scratch of brushes and someone always complaining that their ink had run. My mother walked between us like a sensei. “Control the flow.” I had a year’s head start, so the others watched my hand and copied it. “Arashi makes it pretty!” Kenta said, with ink all over his cheek and a character that looked like a dying spider. We all ended up with black fingers, and Haruto left a handprint on the back of Toma’s shirt that Sae spent an hour washing out.

By late in the year Miyu was showing. I’d find her resting on a bench in the courtyard while Hanae worked oil into her feet and Akemi told jokes to keep her mind off her back. Nagi always turned up with more tea. The other mothers took turns watching their children without being asked.

I still trained every night, and most days there was still a pebble under my shirt. But I’d stopped thinking of the family as cover, a crowd a strange kid could hide in. Without quite deciding to, I’d started wanting them safe for their own sake.

On my fourth birthday, the hall smelled of grilled fish and the mothers wouldn’t stop fussing over me. Someone had pinned one of my practice sheets to the wall, and they kept going over to look at it. “Look at these strokes, and he’s only four!” “Such steady hands.” “He talks in full sentences now, did you hear him? And he reads.” I let them hug me and pass me from lap to lap. Under my shirt a stone sat against my ribs, held there by something none of them could see.

I didn’t know yet what the world outside the compound would ask of me. I knew what I would do if it ever came for them.