Luna

Luna hadn’t slept all night. She hadn’t slept because she couldn’t get the feeling of water out of her ear. The left one, which felt numb, simply there against her pillow, organic and rubbery when she touched it. As if it no longer belonged to her.

All night Luna tried to ignore it. She conjured up birds and fields, transformed the water-sound into wind. She busied herself with roads to bisect the fields, then cars to put on the roads, cars with rolled-down windows, and suddenly it was their car she was in. She knew this because there were pigtails in this window, pigtails belonging to her sister Katy; just the way they bounced obstructed not only the trees but the cows and barns as well. And in the trunk, jostling, was their wicker picnic basket. Then the rustling shade, the fluttering picnic blanket, the cracking Ziploc—chicken, gravy, mashed potato—all her favorite things, she snuck her hand, low, under the adult radar—SMACK —struck in midair, her sister covered her mouth, the chicken dropped back to the plate, and Luna heard it again, that sound. Plugged like water underwater. It made her aware of herself, of that part of her, dense and echoey like the dark of a wooded lake. It stretched her eyes open, chasing away her sleep.

Then the room was white. Light was pouring in through the open window, and there was her father’s face disappearing into the seam where the door was cracked open. 7:43. She registered her clock, then she was in the dining room, staring at a plate of scrambled eggs, two sausages curled like fat lips. Her mother said, “Luna, your shirt’s backwards.”

Katy snickered. But when Luna turned to protest, she noticed that her sister’s laugh was muted on one side, as if that side of her head was heavy with water. That’s when she remembered her ear, the sting at the side of her head, and the protest wouldn’t come at all.

It happened at the beach, earlier that week. Shonan-kaigan. She remembered the name because her father had pointed it out on the map. See, here? A nick on the belly of the seahorse: the eastern shore of Japan. Although Katy scoffed at their father, Luna liked that about him, the way he used serious words to speak to her. Luna, there are consequences to actions, he’d say. Or: Luna, it’s important to respect cultural differences. That morning, when he looked up from the map, he said, Luna, it’s important to remember where you’ve been.

Of course Luna never remembered anything—you’re six, her father said kindly—but she’d apparently visited this beach before, four years ago, the first time they’d flown here to visit Ojiisan, her grandfather, who was sick and who didn’t speak English. It was also the first time the family had visited this town a few minutes drive from Yokohama, where, on a clear day, you could see the white peaks of Mount Fuji jagged like a giant tooth above the trees lined with telephone wires.

The mountain was Ojiisan’s pride. Once, on a good day at the hospital, he pressed his fingertips together, peaking it like a tent. Fu-ji-san. Three even syllables, he made Luna repeat it. She was barely three then and didn’t retain the memory. But her father mentioned it often, how after she’d said it she clapped her hands three times, pressed her palms together, eyes closed in reverence, a prayer for Fuji-san, his mountain god. Keeper of health.

Ojiisan recovered that time, but ever since, Luna and her family spent two weeks each summer in Japan. This year they stayed two months in a rented apartment, midpoint between the hospital and their grandparents’ house.

That day, the beach was packed, the gray strip of sand dotted with colors: blue tubes, green boogie boards, towels like puddles of paint, the occasional parasol a dome of rainbow spinning the smoke from the beachside cuttlefish stands.

All summer Luna...