The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea(69)

A portly man with round eyes and a mustache hurries to greet Shin. “Oh great and powerful lord of Lotus House—”

Kirin interrupts. “We need to arrange an ancestral meeting.”

The man blinks rapidly. “Yes, of course!” He snaps his fingers, and a small, hunched grandmother hobbles over. She wears a mask depicting a youthful girl. Slowly, she hands the man a rolled-up scroll.

The man clears his throat. “Family name?”

“Song,” I say.

“Village of origin.”

“Beside-the-Sea.”

“Are you the Songs of the Lower Mountains, the Farmlands, or the Riverside?”

“Lower Mountains.” I grimace. We don’t speak to the Songs of the Farmlands after their grandfather had a falling-out with my grandfather over a game of Go.

“Ah, here we are.” The man’s finger lands on the paper. “It looks like … both your great-great-grandmother and your grandfather are registered as Song ancestors in the city.”

I can’t breathe. Tears rush to my eyes. Grandfather. My great-great-grandmother.

“They are?” I whisper, overwhelmed. I turn to Shin. “They’re here. I’m going to see them.” I didn’t know how much I needed to see them until this very moment.

“I’m glad for you, Mina,” Shin says softly.

The grandmother coughs behind her mask. I turn from Shin and the others to follow her. We travel up five flights of stairs and down a hall with closed doors. She stops at the third door on the left and slides open the panel.

“Wait in here,” she says.

I walk into the room, and she closes the door behind me. The room is small with low shelves filled with items, some of which I recognize from the ancestral rites my grandmother and I would conduct every year. There’s the food we left out for my grandfather on his birthday the month before last. It hasn’t spoiled. The bean rice and dried-pollock soup—his favorites—still steam from their bowls. Although I notice the amount in the bowls is less. There are the bright fruits my grandmother left for my grandfather, his favorites, and for her grandmother, the bouquet of fresh flowers picked from the garden—golden flowers and deep red hibiscus, as bright as the day we picked them.

My gaze falls on a cradle tucked in the corner of the room.

I suck in a harsh breath. It’s the boat Joon carved, the one he labored over for weeks.

We were so excited when Sung, five years Joon’s elder, told us he and Soojin were going to have a baby. Joon and I went out into the mountains so that I could make a prayer to the guardian of the forest while he cut down his favorite tree, the one he’d planted when he was only a boy himself. Out of the heart of the tree, he fashioned a cradle for the baby. He carved beautiful images into the wood of the bed—a crane in flight to guide the baby through her dreams, a rising tiger at the head to protect her from nightmares—and every night I stood over the unfinished bed and said a prayer to the Goddess of Women and Children, giving a kiss to the wood where the baby would one day rest her head.

When she was born, she took one breath and no more. We burned the bed outside in the garden, so that it might cradle her in another world.

I trace my fingers across the stripes of the tiger and the scratched feathers of the crane’s wings.

Behind me, the door slides open, and my ancestors enter the room.





32


First, Mask steps through, then Dai with Miki, and even though I’m a little surprised, I’m not at all, because of course they’re my family—they’ve been helping me this whole time.

Dai grins. “You cry too much, Mina.”

Mask walks over, her elegant hands moving behind her head to untie the strings holding her mask in place. It falls to the floor. I look into Mask’s face, and it’s my own face looking back at me, except my face on her is far more beautiful. Or maybe that’s just the love I feel for her reflecting back at me. She takes me into her arms.

I choke back a sob. “You’re my great-great-grandmother, aren’t you?” I can feel her nod against my shoulder. “When I was dying, you sang to me. I thought it was my voice, but it was yours.”

“I sang to you, but it was your will to live that brought you back.”

I turn to Dai. “And you … you’re my grandfather.”

Dai smiles.

“And Miki…” And now I’m sobbing. I can hardly get the words out. “Miki is my eldest brother’s daughter.” The little girl who never smiled that beautiful smile in my world but was given a second chance at life in another. Miki giggles from behind Dai’s shoulder.

“Joon made a cradle for her,” I say weakly.

“Yes,” Dai says. “It was the boat that carried her. She would have fallen into the River of Souls if it weren’t for that cradle. Something crafted with so much love could never sink.”

Mask takes my hand. “Ask us what you need to know, Mina. We couldn’t tell you before—spirits are forbidden to directly affect the actions of their descendants—but we can tell you now, in this most sacred of places.”

I nod, brushing back tears. “I need to know how to return Shim Cheong to the world above.”

Mask and Dai exchange a glance. “It’s never been done,” Mask says slowly. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”