The Turn of the Tide Read online

  And now she hid behind the fridge door, just as uncertain about what to say to her mom, who looked like she might cry at any moment. She turned her thoughts to the contents of the fridge. The breakfast shakes were too healthy; the yogurt was too pink. Hot dogs sounded good, but Oliver had a habit of licking them and putting them back. She scooped up three muffins and a juice box and headed back to her room. She paused at the foot of the stairs. Her brother was still in the living room, waving an imaginary sword in one hand while he read his way through yet another of Horatio Hornblower’s famous sea battles. Typical! If she didn’t do something, he’d be there six hours later, no breakfast, still fighting Napoleon. She should get him out of the house for the day, so Mom could stop worrying about the news frightening him. She should take him sailing. That would be better than anything she could say.

  “Oliver,” Jet said. “Oliver!”

  He didn’t even hear her.

  “Dude!” She threw a muffin straight at his head, landing it solid just above his ear.

  “Hey,” Oliver said. He rubbed the cinnamon-sugar spot on his hair.

  “Eat something. We’re sailing in half an hour!”

  “But…I’m…” Oliver waved an arm at the page and searched his highly advanced third-grade vocabulary for a word to express how important this book was to him.

  “Bring it along! If we hit a calm, you can read in the boat.”

  Oliver looked wistfully around the living room. There was a shelf with ten more Horatio Hornblowers on it and another shelf with Master and Commander and Sherlock Holmes, plus all of Mom’s comic books. Sometimes even laser tag wasn’t a good enough bribe to get him out of there.

  “Look, it’s the first day of summer. Nobody ever died from fresh air, you know!”

  “Can’t you sail with Beck?” Oliver said. “You like Beck.”

  Jet sighed. How could she possibly explain? She wasn’t even sure herself what had gone wrong. Last summer Beck had been over almost every day for their epic construction project—a tree fort, rock wall, and zip line. Last summer their dads finally let them crew the Saga alone. Last summer Roland hadn’t moved to town yet.

  Jet reached over and brushed a clump of cinnamon sugar from Oliver’s buzz-cut red hair.

  “Well, I like you better,” she said. “So eat something!” Jet pointed to the muffin on the floor. “And milk!” she called over her shoulder as she took the stairs two at a time.

  Jet slid the window up and settled into her usual spot on the porch roof. A city crew was almost finished mending the section of the boardwalk that had broken away in the rising water. A tugboat pulled a tsunami-damaged fishing boat from its mooring and towed it away for repair. Jet nodded with satisfaction to see things set right on the waterfront. Shecouldn’t have done better if she’d been in charge herself.

  She opened her juice box. Her cousin Kai’s town had taken the worst of the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Just like last time, the power plant was in trouble. Not a meltdown. Not yet. But trouble. Jet had watched the news for an hour, and then she couldn’t take it anymore. The rising water was relentless, and nobody had time to prepare. In Astoria they’d had hours. People had time to move their stuff. A friend of Mom’s had packed up his entire waterfront studio and put all his paintings and art supplies in their garage just in case. And then the water only rose a dozen feet—enough to break a few boats and flood a few shops and make the riverfront roads muddy. It wasn’t fair that they got off so easy and Japan was suffering again.

  Jet tried to remember her cousin. He’d come to America with Uncle Lars and Aunt Hanako when she was too little to remember. She’d been to Japan for a visit once, when she was seven and Oliver was tiny. Jet remembered a house with a blue roof, but she couldn’t remember a thing about the boy with jet-black hair and freckles, whose school pictures showed up every year on the refrigerator.

  She took a few bites of muffin and then grabbed her binoculars. Feathery clouds in the west showed no trace of the storm predicted for later in the day, but the wind was already picking up. Jet tugged her hood up over her head. The pilots were still busy clearing backed-up traffic from the tsunami warning that closed the bar three days ago. People had been finding all kinds of crazy stuff along the shore, now that the high water had passed: boat fenders in the road, gill nets tangled in bushes, harbor seals taking shelter miles upriver. Jet was dying to get out and explore it all.

  She wasn’t the only one. Lots of kids had their eyes on the water. You had to be twelve to enter the Treasure Island Race, the highlight of the Astoria Regatta and the most hotly contested championship in town. She and Beck had started training for the race together last summer. Beck’s dad, Captain Chandler, was a bar pilot too. He and Jet’s dad took turns taking her and Beck out in the Saga, the same dinghy her dad used when he won the Treasure Island Race with Uncle Lars a zillion years ago. Captain Chandler grew up sailing the Chesapeake in a little boat just like it, and both captains were determined to see their kids be the youngest team ever to win the race. Jet could feel that championship cup in her hand. She could imagine her picture on the front page of the Daily Astorian.

  Jet polished off her muffins and licked the cinnamon sugar from her fingers. She picked up her phone and thought about texting Beck for a sail that morning. Beck loved days like this.

  Last summer it had been simple. But then came sixth grade, and for the first time since kindergarten Beck didn’t sit in Jet’s row. He picked a spot clear over on the other side of the room next to Roland, the new kid in town. At lunch there was a girl table and a boy table. Even worse, nobody played soccer or even basketball at recess anymore. The boys stood around and talked about hunting and played video games. Skye and Bridgie and the rest of the girls were all about clothes and music videos. Suddenly headphone sharing was a thing, and everyone was a foot taller than her.

  Then the worst thing of all: Captain Chandler missed his jump one stormy night in November. He survived, and that was lucky, but his legs were crushed between the pilot boat and the oil tanker he’d been boarding. He spent almost a month in the hospital in Portland and the rest of the winter learning to use a wheelchair. Beck stopped talking to Jet altogether that winter. Was he mad at her because her dad was fine and his wasn’t? Dad and Captain Chandler were still friends. It didn’t make sense. Maybe boys just stopped talking to girls in the sixth grade.

  Jet typed out Sail? and hit Send. She didn’t want a boyfriend. She and Beck didn’t even have to be best friends. But why couldn’t they be sailing partners?

  AT SUNRISE KAI set out for the emergency shelter at the shrine. He found a cell-phone tower in a clearing a short distance away. The fence around it looked completely untouched, but the cell-tower mast was tilted like a fishing rod. Kai took out his phone. It had half a battery left but no reception at all. He shut it down. There was no point in keeping it, but he pocketed the phone out of habit.

  Kai looked toward the ocean. The water had gone down, and a few of the buildings in town were still standing, but he couldn’t see the fish cannery from where he stood. The cannery had survived other earthquakes. His grandparents could be alive. They were far above sea level, on the fourth floor. They could have sheltered overnight and even now be finding a way to safety. Ojī-san had gathered coats and water and Obā-san’s medicine on the way out the door. He would find a way to save her.

  Kai trudged down the hill, working his way around fallen trees, alert for landslides. As the day grew warmer, hunger and thirst made his head swim, but nothing in the forest looked like food. Just by luck he happened across a nest late in the afternoon. Kai crouched beside it and considered the gray-speckled eggs. They were beautiful in their own plain way. The mama bird, some kind of lark, was scolding him from a tree branch above. Kai could not bring himself to touch those eggs. So much around him was in ruins. It felt wrong to break an egg now. Kai made do with stream water.

  It was dark by the time he reached the shrine. The emergency shelter was
set up in the open area in front of the offering hall. People packed every available spot. A few kerosene lanterns spread rings of light through the crowd. There would be a procedure, Kai was certain. He looked around for the leader.

  “Kai?” a voice called from the shadows. “Is it you?”

  “It’s him!”

  “He’s alive!”

  Kai turned and was surrounded by Tomo and Hiroshi and some of the other boys from school. They bombarded him with questions about where he’d been. They took him to Kōchō-sensei. The school principal sat at the table, ear pressed to a hand-cranked radio. There was a mud-spattered briefcase beside him, two first-aid kits, and a dozen road flares. A portable radiation detector beeped and displayed a number. Kōchō-sensei copied it in a column on his school ledger. There was a second clipboard with a long list of names.

  The boys fell quiet as they came closer, stopping just inside the ring of lamplight. When the principal looked up, they nudged Kai forward.

  “It’s Ellstrom-kun. We found him,” Hiroshi said.

  Kai’s mouth went dry. He fixed his eyes on a spot of dirt in front of his principal’s shoes. The boys shuffled their feet nervously, as if they were somehow to blame for forming a friendship with the kind of person who would be so thoughtless as to run off in a crisis. They searched for something correct to say.

  “Are we all accounted for now?” Tomo said.

  Kōchō-sensei ignored the boys and turned to Kai. He launched into a lengthy scolding. Kai stood with his head down. He put all his energy into letting the words roll away from him without sinking in, and they all did, all except one—hāfu. Who else would do something so completely disrespectful of the others in the group? When the scolding was done, Kai murmured “thank you” and looked up. Kōchō-sensei dismissed them all with a nod.

  Kai hesitated. “My grandparents. Are they…”

  Kōchō-sensei shook his head. “The tunnels are caved in, the lower parts of the road washed away. Go with your classmates. Rest. I’ll need workers in the morning.”

  Kai followed his classmates past families who had staked a space for themselves. They came to an open place and smoothed out sleeping spots on the ground. Tomo wordlessly invited Kai to scoot in closer and rest his head on the jacket he’d spread out. Gradually the lanterns were put out. The whimpering babies were quieted. The wind shifted, carrying the worst of the smells from the ruined town out to sea.

  Kai tried to let sleep come, but it didn’t. Eventually he gave up. He walked silently among the sleeping people, pausing whenever he saw gray hair. He pulled out his phone, lit up the screen, and shone it on the faces of the seniors from his town. Some he knew—friends and fishing companions of his grandparents—but none were the faces he was looking for. He searched silently until he’d used his last drop of battery life.

  The moon rose, the sky was clear, and there was enough light to see the road. Kai glanced around to be sure no one was watching. One man sat at Kōchō-sensei’s table beside the emergency radio, his eyes fixed on the radiation counter. Kai headed down the road, walking as quietly as he could, listening for movement. A cry for help. Anything.

  The air was still, and it was unearthly quiet, as if every mouse and bird had vanished. He came to a bend in the road, and in the moonlight he could see the ocean. Smoke drifted over the water, and there were a few scattered lights of deep yellow and orange.

  Obā-san had a favorite story about ghostly lights that hovered over the water where men had lost their lives at sea. But these were no ghost lights. These were real ships, and they were on fire.

  Kai shuddered and turned away from the water. He was so rattled that he almost didn’t see the washout in the road until it was too late. He gasped as the curve of wet pavement appeared in the moonlight only a few feet ahead. Beyond the high-water mark was the jagged ring of asphalt where the tsunami had taken a monster-size bite out of the road. Broken slabs of pavement, highway railing, and shattered trees littered the ground fifty feet below. The gap left behind was as large as a baseball diamond. There was no way across. Not for an old man leading a woman who could barely walk.

  But Ojī-san was the smartest, bravest man Kai knew. He’d never give up. Never.

  Kai swallowed back tears, crammed his hands into his pockets, and closed a fist around his phone. Without thinking, he took it out and hurled it as hard as he could at the ocean.

  KAI WOKE IN the morning, cold and damp. He shook the dew from his hair and brushed it off his uniform jacket. He braced himself against shivering and against thoughts about his grandparents. He joined his classmates in the line for food and water. Kōchō-sensei’s steady voice was calling out directions. There was only a mouthful of peanuts and a morsel of dried fish.

  Kai looked at the stack of emergency rations and the size of the crowd. The supplies wouldn’t last long, maybe not even past tomorrow. There were mikan farms in the hills, but the oranges wouldn’t be ripe for months. Kai licked the last of the salt from his fingers. With the roads washed out, they’d have to do something to find more food.

  After breakfast as they were breaking into work groups, a foghorn rang out in three short blasts and a long one. A fishing boat appeared on the horizon. It was the green-and-red trawler that belonged to the son of Ojī-san’s best friend. Kai let out a roar. He threw an arm around Tomo’s shoulder and pounded him on the back. The rest were jumping and shouting.

  “They made it!” Kai shouted. “They’re alive!”

  “They’ve got fish!” Hiroshi yelled.

  Kai could just make out the red flag a fishing boat flew when it was making its way toward the cannery.

  “We should help carry the catch up,” Kai said. There was wood in the forest for fires. Fish could be roasted on sticks. A full boat would feed them all. The boys gathered around him and worked out a plan.

  Kōchō-sensei beamed when they brought him the news of the fish and their plan to bring it to the shelter. He pulled a group together to meet the fishing boat. In a few minutes Kai was following a dozen men and older boys into town.

  As they came out of the hills, Kai heard the hum of small powerboats. When they stopped at an overlook to scout for a safe path into town, they could see a few small boats picking their way along the shore. One was pulling a family from the roof of a house. Another called out for survivors with a bullhorn.

  Hope sprang up in Kai like a struck match. His grandparents could be alive! The front half of the cannery building lay in ruins, but there was a section still standing. He looked for a route that would take them closer, but the whole waterfront was a jumble of mud and debris. Upended cars and boats lay side by side in the wreckage. When the team arrived at the harbor, Kai questioned the huddled group of survivors. No one had seen his grandparents.

  “Plenty yet to find,” one of the rescuers said.

  “We’ll do our best,” his partner added. “There’s a boat taking some to the hospital in Matsuyama. Ask them.”

  The men in the group were deep in conversation with another rescue team about how to safely bring the catch of fish ashore. Kai and the other boys stood together, waiting for their moment to be helpful. A larger boat landed.

  “Ellstrom!” a man’s voice trumpeted out.

  “Kai Ellstrom!” shouted another.

  Kai turned toward the voices, knowing them even before they came into sight. Miller and Valdez were navy veterans, friends of his dad’s, from the next island over. They’d been retired as long as Kai had known them, but they still did odd jobs for fishermen and a ton of local search and rescue. They’d both been corpsmen.

  “Hah! Found him!” Miller strode across the broken pavement and pounded Kai on the back. He turned to Valdez. “Ya owe me a beer!”

  “Hey, man.” Valdez held out a hand to shake but then thumped Kai on the back anyway. “Promised Ellstrom we’d find you.”

  “You talked to my dad?”

  “Oh-dark-early this morning,” Miller said. “We’re doing the hospital runs
.” He pointed to their boat. A hugely pregnant woman sat in the stern. She was holding an IV bag for a man who was lying down. “The power plant was on our way.”

  “Is everybody…” Kai suddenly ran out of breath. He’d been sure his mom and dad were safe. The power plant had more emergency supplies than anyone. But what if…

  “They’re fine,” Valdez said quickly. “Every single one.”

  “We need to talk to whoever’s in charge over here,” Miller said.

  Kai led his father’s friends to the group.

  “Konnichiwa,” Miller began with a bow. He explained that he was there to take the survivors most critically hurt to the nearest hospital. They had room for six more on this run. He said that the coast guard, with their water and food, were at least another day away, maybe two. And then he lowered his voice and started talking urgently about the power plant.

  “What’s going on?” Kai said. “Is something wrong at the plant?” Ever since the last earthquake, one safety measure after another had been put in place.

  Valdez shifted his stance a bit. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Yet?” Kai felt a chill run the length of his body. Hiroshima was only 150 kilometers away. Radiation poisoning and the atomic bomb were things he studied every year in school.

  “Many things are broken,” Valdez said quietly. “Every single one of them is fixable. But just in case, they sent along some extra radiation counters.”

  Kai and Valdez brought three boxes of them from the boat to where the men were discussing radiation and clean drinking water with Miller. Valdez moved on to the other survivors with a medical kit in hand.

  “One more thing,” Miller said. He drew a letter out of his shirt pocket. “We’re taking Lars and Hanako’s son with us.” He handed over the letter. “His folks are going to be working around the clock for weeks, and he’s got family to stay with in America.”