A Crack in the Sea

by H. M. Bouwman

  “He’ll be fine, I think. The doctor says it’s a clean cut and will fix him up. The other gentleman—”

  “Uncle Truc,” said the smaller boy. “The injured one is Uncle Hung. They’re brothers.”

  “Well, your uncle Truc will stay with his brother. We’ll eat and rest, and when we return, Hung will be all stitched up and ready for you to visit.” Jupiter squinted at the boys. “Let’s get you out of the sun for a bit. And sitting on some cushions. And make you some tea.”

  “Hold on a minute,” said the Raft King. “Hold on. I have a couple of questions before you go.”

  “Questions can maybe wait,” said Jupiter.

  “No,” said the Raft King. “Details can wait. These questions are quick, and they can’t wait. I mean to say: I can’t wait.” He turned to the uninjured man, the man called Uncle Truc, and bowed in greeting. “I need to know if you’re from Amelia’s world. Do you know Amelia?”

  The tall, lean man shook his head, holding out both hands, and the smaller of the two boys answered instead. “Uncle Truc doesn’t speak English. But I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know anyone named Amelia. I mean, our world is a big place. There are probably lots of Amelias. I’m not sure we’re from the world you’re looking for anyway. But we’re definitely not from here.”

  The bigger boy nodded, bristly hair standing straight up on his head. “Different water.” He mimed drinking and looked like he wanted to say more but wasn’t sure of the words.

  “This world I’m asking about,” said the Raft King, “is the first world. The one with Africa in it. The one with Amelia in it.”

  “We do have an Africa in our world,” said the smaller boy cautiously.

  The Raft King jolted, as if he’d hoped for this answer but not expected it.

  But Caesar clapped her hands to her face. “Then you are from the first world! That’s wonderful! Our king wants to go there.”

  The boy said, “We’re not from anywhere near Africa, though.” He paused. “You know it’s a whole continent, right?”

  “Do you know Amelia?” the Raft King asked again. He shifted his robe back on his shoulders to gesture at the sky. “She could fly. Here, she was carried by birds, but in your world she flew inside a big engine. She was paler than you, with red hair, and she flew a machine in the clouds. She was my adopted mother. From your world. She went back there when I was a boy, and we never saw her again. She was famous. She was the first woman to fly around your world. Or she would have been, if—”

  But the boy jerked to his feet, his face slack with surprise. “Amelia?” he said in a foggy voice. “Amelia Earhart?”

  4

  Thanh’s Story.

  THANH’S FATHER had told him about Amelia Earhart—and he’d later studied her story in one of his dad’s books. She was the famous red-headed woman pilot, an American, who’d tried to fly around the world. She and her copilot had disappeared over the Pacific Ocean—forty years ago—and had never been seen again. They were dead. They were dead.

  Before telling about Amelia, Thanh asked what the king’s story was. He listened to the old man, Jupiter, retell how Amelia had arrived by accident, in a storm, how she adopted the king when he was a baby and lived on Raftworld, and how she finally departed one day in a flurry of feathers. She must have come over to this world, he thought, when she disappeared from her own; and when she left Raftworld to return home . . . she didn’t make it. She must have died in crossing back—or just after crossing back.

  Carefully, with concern for this purple-caped man who had known and loved Amelia when he was a child, this man who’d been Amelia’s adopted son, and remembering his own parents’ deaths, Thanh told his story. He told the tale well—remembering and telling was his talent—and he felt his gift keenly here, as if what he was doing were actually important and worthwhile. He was giving an answer to someone who longed for one. It wasn’t the answer the man wanted—the Raft King’s adopted mother was dead, she’d never made it back to the first world—but it was an answer nonetheless and the knowledge would provide some small amount of comfort.

  When he finished talking he sat back on the floor and bowed his head at the broad-chested, purple-caped man. “I’m very sorry, mister,” he said.

  “Putnam,” said the man. He seemed lost in thought. “Call me Putnam.”

  Putnam? Thanh sat up straighter. He knew something. There was a little more to the story. “She named you,” he said, and the man, startled, nodded. “She named you after her husband in our world. Putnam. She named you after someone she loved and missed.”

  The man stepped back. “I did not know that.” He cleared his throat. “What—what was he like? This Putnam?”

  Thanh didn’t know, except that he was Amelia’s husband and very rich. And also: “He was a publisher.” The man looked confused, so he added, “He made books. Stories.”

  “She did love stories,” said Putnam.

  “And you,” said Thanh. “Definitely and you.”

  • • •

  AFTER PUTNAM bowed his thank-you to Thanh and walked unsteadily off alone, the old black man with the white hair made a second offer of tea and shade and cushions. Thanh felt his little pool of energy—the nugget that had kept him walking for hours with no land in sight—he felt it swoosh out of his body. He didn’t think he could walk as far as anyone’s cabin.

  But this old, old man held out his hand and smiled, and when Thanh grasped it, he felt he could travel a little farther. “This way,” said the man. “I’m glad to see you speak English.”

  “I studied it,” said Thanh. “So did the girls, but not as much as I did.”

  “The girls?” The old man’s eyebrows rose, and then his face cleared. “You must have different hair customs than we do. I thought that one was a boy.” He tipped his head back toward Mai.

  Just behind them, Mai drawled, in Vietnamese, “I’m a success!”

  “She was trying to disguise herself as a boy,” explained Thanh. “She’s happy to hear that she fooled you.” He paused as they negotiated some children’s toys spread over the path. “My older sister was disguised as a boy, too.”

  “That one?” asked the old man, glancing back to Sang, who was now carrying The Turtle. “That one was less successful.”

  Thanh looked back. Sang was wearing her own shirt again—the man’s shirt having been torn into ribbons to make bandages for Hung. Her hair, raggedly cut and longer than Mai’s, lay flattened against her head. But under the bandage and the dried blood and the grime, her face was delicate, and her long lashes drooped on her cheek as she whispered to the baby. Their mother’s necklace glittered around her throat. “We’re done pretending now, I think,” said Thanh.

  They entered the old man’s cabin, and he fed them some fresh strawberries and green-tinted bread—but don’t eat too much, he warned them, or you’ll be sick—and they drank tea and sat on cushions. The Turtle stood on her good leg, hitched herself onto the padded bench, and promptly fell asleep, sucking her thumb.

  Three kids about Thanh’s age had followed them into the house. They sat against the wall, watching. Two kids looked like siblings (one boy, one girl—the girl with a bright white stripe in her hair, the boy small with huge, unblinking eyes), and one girl was darker-skinned like Putnam and the old man—with dozens of long braids down her back. She seemed to be made of movement, twitching and tapping her leg. No one spoke for several moments as Thanh, Sang, and Mai ate.

  Then the old man asked their names and introduced himself as Jupiter—which Thanh had already heard. “That’s a name in our world, too,” said Thanh. “There’s a lot of stories about Jupiter.”

  The old man grinned. “I don’t doubt it. And I’d love to hear about them later. And to hear how you received your training.”

  “Training?”

  “As a storyteller,” Jupiter said. “It’s clear you’ve
studied under a master. Are you apprenticing to be a storyteller for your country?”

  Thanh shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean. We don’t have storytellers. I mean, stories aren’t important enough for someone to be an apprentice—to study them . . .” The girl with the long braids was violently shaking her head at him and drawing a line across her throat—the universal shut-up sign.

  Jupiter watched him closely, smiling a little. “We’ll talk more about it later. I may . . .” He trailed off, staring into space, his face suddenly lighting up as if an enormous idea had just occurred to him. “Huh. I may have some work for you here.” He grasped his cane, his hand shaking. “Meanwhile, I have work to do.” To the braided girl and her companions he said, “I’ll tell people about the arrival of these sea-walking folks. Why don’t you all rest here? I predict a feast tonight, and you’ll want some sleep before that.”

  After he left, Thanh and Sang and Mai looked at one another. Thanh could see that Sang was on the verge of tears. Everything was so new, and their old world was so far away. And they were all so tired.

  The braided girl scooted her cushion closer to them. She introduced herself and her companions: Caesar, Kinchen, Pip. “Caesar’s a boy’s name,” Thanh said—and then realized he’d been rude.

  But Caesar didn’t seem to mind. “Used to be, when a boy had it. But now I have it, it’s a girl name. Don’t you think?”

  Thanh nodded. And he introduced himself and his companions: Sang, Mai, and of course The Turtle, asleep. They ate and drank some more; then Mai folded herself into a mound on the floor and began snoring.

  “She’s been worried about Uncle Hung,” said Thanh. “And she’s done all kinds of work to save us. She’s the one who got us here.” He told them briefly what had happened, which meant talking about the war in Vietnam and about his mother’s and, later, his father’s deaths, and so many other things as well. (Trying to make himself sound good, he skipped over the parts where he messed up, got kicked out of school, and lost his temper on the boat.) Caesar and Kinchen asked questions. Pip mostly listened, watching with his big eyes as if trying to memorize Thanh’s face. When Thanh got to the part about Mai walking on the water—a gift she’d had only an echo of in their world, valuable as that echo was—Caesar nodded as if she understood.

  “That makes sense,” she said.

  Sang poked Thanh and motioned. Her English was poor, and she was embarrassed to ask the question herself. But he knew what she wanted to know.

  “The thing is,” Thanh said, “can we get back? To our world, I mean?”

  Caesar tilted her head to the side, her braids swinging. “You want to go back to that war place?”

  “It’s not just a war place. It’s our home. And Uncle Truc and Uncle Hung—they have wives and children back there.”

  Sang nodded. “Yes, home.”

  The three Raft children looked at one another for a long moment. Finally the one with the white hair stripe, Kinchen, said, “Normally the answer would be that you can’t go back. For a long time everyone thought there was no way back. But the fish just said today that the door is stuck open.” She shook her head. “I’m not telling this right.”

  “The fish?” said Thanh, feeling stupid.

  “Door?” said Sang.

  Mai snored and turned over on her cushion.

  Haltingly, Kinchen, Caesar, and Pip told Thanh and Sang about the doorway and about how they were trying to find it. “So that we can close it,” said Caesar firmly. “The Raft King—that’s Putnam to you—says he wants to go through to your world. And you all can go through, too. But after that, we’re going to get that monster to move and we’re going to shut the door.”

  “Somehow,” Kinchen added, as if admitting that making a sea monster move sounded like a crazy idea.

  “Jupiter says that leaving a door like that open is a bad idea,” said Kinchen. “And he’s right. I’ve been thinking about it. What if your pirates came through?”

  “And even though the second world is huge,” Caesar said, “it’s mostly water. There aren’t any islands big enough for a country—except theirs.” She jerked a thumb at Kinchen and Pip. “That’s why our country is a raft. And we’re overcrowded.”

  “We can handle a few people coming over once in a while,” Kinchen added, “but we can’t have all your people heading here every time you have a problem over there. There isn’t room for all of them.”

  “But mainly,” Pip said, “it’s a magic door. Magic doors shouldn’t be propped open.”

  Sang nodded, able to understand more than she could say. “Beautiful door.” She swooshed her hands up and down to show how it went from the ocean floor to the sky.

  Looking around the cozy cabin, Thanh thought how many people might come here if they could cross back and forth easily, whenever they wanted. This place seemed like a good world: a lot less packed than his (even Raftworld’s crowdedness didn’t seem bad to him compared to stories he’d heard about Saigon—or pictures he’d seen of New York or other busy cities in his world). And peaceful. And here there was sweet water. How long they could have lived in their little boat if it had floated on sweet water!

  Without an open doorway they would have died.

  As if she’d read his mind, Sang said in Vietnamese, “If the doorway stays open, how long until some rich, important country or company finds it—and goes through—and takes everything in sight? How long before they come here and try to conquer everyone? Start a war?” Her voice was reasonable, but her words had bite. “We got lucky.”

  Lucky because a doorway cracked open. A magic door that only unsealed in rare instances, with storms and desperation. “I see what you mean,” Thanh said.

  When Mai and the baby woke up—at almost the same time—they all scrounged up some more bread and ate again. Then they walked to the hospital building and found Uncle Hung reclining on a bed, propped with pillows, a clean white bandage around his side. Uncle Truc lay in the bed next to him, snoring almost as loud as Mai had been snoring earlier.

  “I’m getting better,” Uncle Hung said, smiling. And suddenly everyone felt just fine.

  Before the dinner that night the old man, Jupiter, asked Thanh, since his English was best of the group, to tell the story of how they arrived. Thanh thought for a moment about what to say. He could remake his whole history—be a hero, or at least be as brave and hardworking as Mai. Then he shook himself. What was he thinking? The story was the important thing; what he wanted was simply to tell it truthfully, to help everyone understand who he and his people were and where they were from.

  He stood at his table and faced the Raft King and all the people. And he told them—he told them the truth. He told about Vietnam—how beautiful the river was in the evening, how the rice smelled in the fields, how the buffalo shook their shoulders when the flies were thick, how the rain fell in monsoon season—he told it all. Then he told about leaving this wonderful home, starting with the war itself and moving to his mother’s death and then his father’s, and from there to his and Sang’s life afterward, with some focus on how he’d been kicked out of school and how bad he was at rice farming. He told of their escape and how he forgot the food and knife and clothing. He told of the trials at sea and how he lost his temper and how Uncle Truc forgave him. He told of how Mai was a natural sailor and he a poor one, and how they eventually became friends. And finally he told of their salvation through the open doorway. He told everything about their trip: how he failed, what he feared, what it all felt like. He told, in other words, the story you read earlier, even the parts that made him look bad.

  “This world,” he said to the people. “You call it the second world. But second isn’t less than first. This world isn’t an exile. Some of my people want to go back because they have wives and children waiting for them. If they didn’t, they might want to stay here, where they’ve drunk sweet water and escap
ed death and received the hospitality of others who arrived so long ago. This is a place for starting over. A good place.”

  After a moment of silence, Caesar whooped, and then everyone clapped and cheered. When Thanh sat down, Jupiter spoke to him in a quiet but firm voice. “Son. Our world needs a storyteller when I’m gone; and we don’t have anyone with that gift. I’m asking you to consider it. Be my apprentice. Then, someday, be our storyteller.”

  “But—I’m so scatterbrained,” Thanh said, surprised. “And I forgot all the supplies when we left our village. And I yelled at Uncle Truc. And I’m a terrible sailor. Did you not hear those parts of the story?”

  “None of that matters for this job,” said Jupiter. “You tell the truth. And on top of that, I like you. Think about”—he leaned forward—“becoming my adopted grandson and my apprentice. I’d adopt your sister, too. She’d like it here. We’d find a job for her—a place for her to fit in.” He paused. “I never really wanted to be a father—I was too busy all the time—but I have long wanted to be a grandfather.”

  Thanh was stunned. Someone wanted him? And had a job for him to do—something he’d be good at? He couldn’t think how to reply. “Sang—she wants to be an artist.”

  “She could certainly try that out. You think about what I said.” Jupiter squeezed Thanh’s shoulder, heaved himself to standing, and hobbled away.

  “Did he say what I think he said?” asked Sang in Vietnamese. “Did he just invite you to live here forever?”

  “You, too,” said Thanh.

  “What does apprentice mean?” She stumbled over the English word. When he explained, she studied his face. “Do you want to stay?”

  He shrugged. Several people came up to introduce themselves and compliment the storytelling, and the moment was lost. But he kept the question in his heart. What might it be like to stay here? And to be good—really good—at something useful? And would Sang want to stay?