Page 39 of Prima
“Sure.”
Then she remembers that someday they could lose all meaning to him, those buttons.
Bewilderment slams into her. What is she to do?
He seeks her buttons with the assiduousness of a pauper panning for gold. She gets up, goes back to her raft to brush her teeth. When she returns to the beach, clad in his spare uniform, he’s still there, at the same pointless task. On the folded blankets, next to her neatly gathered dress, lies a small pile of mother-of-pearl plumerias.
He fishes one more button out of the sand. “That’s all of them.”
She glances at her dress. “You counted?”
He nods. “Five are still on the dress, nine are here. Since I wanted those nine buttons, I’ve sewn their buttonholes together with fishing line—I hope that’s all right with you.”
She half laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. Then her eyes prickle. “What are you going to do with those buttons once you forget me?”
“I’ll put them in an envelope and mark that they once belonged to someone I loved,” says the boy who has yet to tell her he loves her.
Or maybe he just did. It feels as if he has knifed her in the heart.
“When you send your mother and your sister to freedom, why can’t you escape too?”
Carefully he drops all the loose buttons into an inside pocket of his uniform. “They can’t sail. I’ve been building a midget sub prototype for my father. In it they might be able to run the gauntlet into New Ryukyu. But it has only enough power to take two people that far—add a third person and somebody will die of oxygen deprivation.
“If I start after them immediately, then, yes, we can all run away together. But chances are I’ll be incapacitated for days. And once the palace realizes they’re gone, I’ll be watched carefully. At least for a while.
“And when I regain freedom of movement again…”
He might no longer recall that he was instrumental in their escape. Might, in fact, come to believe that they have abandoned him.
And as he already told her, without his mother there, serving as the guardian of his memories, he won’t even know what he has lost.
He hands her the dress and picks up the blankets. “I made some porridge from rice rations—I’ve heard that’s what people have for breakfast in New Ryukyu. If that’s not enough, we can also heat up the leftover scallion flatbread.”
And after that comes goodbye?
Her fingers close over one of the five plumeria buttons that remain on the dress. “Rice porridge is what my grandparents have for breakfast.”
In her part of New Ryukyu, young people are much more likely to eat steamed bao and marbled eggs before they rush to school or work.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.
She shrugs. “You can’t know what I eat for breakfast when I myself haven’t had a proper breakfast in ages.”
“No, I mean”—he takes a deep breath—"I’m sorry for trying to hold onto you when I shouldn’t. For wanting too much. For...”
He falls silent. In the watery light, he looks directly at her for the first time this morning, his eyes despondent and ruinously beautiful. The enormity of their upcoming farewell pummels her like a rogue wave.
She glances away and shoves her hands into the pockets of the uniform. “You could have made this a romantic goodbye, you know.”
He dusts off sand from the already folded blankets. “Please, I’mthisclose to abandoning my family to run away with you.”
Her eyes sting again. “So we shake hands and go our separate ways?”
He does not look at her. The next second the blankets are back on the sand, he has his arms around her and kisses her like a typhoon coming ashore.
Her hands are in his hair; his come up to hold her face.Remember this, she makes a desperate attempt at telepathy.Whatever happens, you will remember this.
They pull away from each other at nearly the same moment and pivot toward the southeast. An aeroplane—anaeroplane—is bearing down toward them, its flight silent as a whisper.
