Within two months, Shisu became someone the whole bay lined up to see outside her hut.
It started with the wife of a boatman whose vessel had sunk the year before. She came to ask Shisu to stand on the rock where her husband had been washed ashore that morning. Shisu went and stood there, waiting until her legs went numb. When she returned, she said he had told her, “Under the third floorboard from the stove.”
Under the third floorboard from the stove, there was a cloth-wrapped bundle of coins buried there—enough for a mother and her three children to live through another season.
After that day, people came every day.
A mother whose child had drowned wanted to know if the child had been in pain. Shisu could only tell her that the boy had said, “The water was warmer than I thought.” That mother cried outside the hut all night, then went home and slept for the first time in three years.
A carpenter’s son wanted to know who his father had given the boat to.
An old woman only wanted to know whether her husband, who had died forty years earlier, had spoken of her as his last words. Shisu stood there for two hours, then returned and told her no. He had spoken about the boat.
The old woman laughed and said she knew that already. That was just how men were. Then she left two dried fish for Shisu and walked home.
The villagers called her the woman the sea never returned. No one knew who had coined it, but everyone used it.
They paid her in rice, fish, and firewood. Some paid with their time, helping repair her roof. Shisu never asked for anything. She simply accepted whatever people left outside her hut, and for the first time in her life, she had enough rice left for the next day without having to go into the water every day.
The old man who had pried Tsuru’s corpse’s fingers apart one by one came to see her one evening. He stood watching the line of people who had yet to leave, then spoke without looking at her.
“You’re becoming a staircase for the living to walk to the dead,” the old man said. “A staircase never gets anywhere. Its only purpose is to let other people step on it.”
“I’m helping them.”
“I can see whom you’re helping. I’m asking who’s helping you.”
Shisu didn’t answer, because in truth, she hadn’t heard the old man’s final sentence in full. She had heard only the words who and you. Everything else had vanished, as though the speaker had turned away and walked off in the middle of the sentence.
That was how the price came. Quietly. One word at a time.
In the first month, she couldn’t hear the children calling from across the dirt road. In the second month, she couldn’t hear the people standing behind her. In the third month, she stopped greeting people first because she no longer knew whether they had already greeted her.
Then one day, she couldn’t hear the isobue whistle.
That morning, she went into the water with nine other women, as usual. She pried up four shells, surfaced, and let out her own long whistling sound to release her breath. Then she waited to hear the others so she could count them.
Not one sound came back.
The sea around her was utterly silent in a way the sea had never been silent before. She saw six wooden buckets floating nearby. She saw two heads break the surface. She saw mouths moving, but not a single whistle reached her ears.
The person who couldn’t count her companions was someone no one was counting, either.
She dove again because she didn’t know what else to do. And in that depth, all the voices of everyone who had drowned in this bay rang out at once, clear as if ten people were standing around her.
“Cut the sail rope. Cold. Dad, don’t come down. The water was warmer than I thought.”
She surfaced twice as slowly as she ever had before, and for the first time, the other women had to swim out and drag her to shore.
That night, she sat outside the hut, touched the earrings hanging from both earlobes, and tried tugging them gently.
They came off very easily. Too easily. It was frightening.
She held them in her palm and stared out at the pitch-black sea. She thought of the coins beneath the third floorboard. She thought of the old woman who had laughed and said she knew that already. She thought of the mother who had slept for the first time in three years.
Then she put them back on.
The next morning, a stranger arrived in the village.
He was a man, neither young nor old, wearing old brown-dyed cotton clothes. He had rolled up his sleeves with perfect symmetry on both sides and carried a small wooden chest about the size of a palm. He spoke a language whose every word everyone could understand, but no one could say which town he had come from.
He didn’t ask about shells. He didn’t ask about seaweed. He didn’t ask for a place to stay.
“I’m here looking for something the sea refuses to take back,” he told the old man. “Usually, things like that first appear in the hands of the person who died, and someone always keeps them.”
The entire village turned toward Shisu’s hut at once, without anyone intending to.
The man walked over and stopped in front of the door where she stood. He bowed politely, like a well-mannered merchant, and looked at the two earrings for only a brief moment.
“I’m not here to take them back today,” he said. “Their owner is still using them. I’m just waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For the day you want to return them.” He smiled. “No one throws away something like this. Everyone returns it when it becomes most costly to them. Everything has a price, and your price has only just begun to be counted.”
He set the small wooden chest down on the stone outside the door and opened it for one second. The inside was lined with velvet. Two hollows, each the size of a pinky fingertip, had been pressed into the velvet side by side in the center.
Then he closed the lid, picked it up, and walked back the way he had come. No one in Toba Bay saw him again for the rest of that season.