There Was No Answer by Rebekah Phillips

When they asked Cassie to write a story about the tsunami, she politely refused and went to her cubicle to finish the Last Article. The Last Article was the story one they had been working on before the gray waters had reached out and taken him away. The office was strangely quiet, filled with the awkwardness of sorrow and the accompanying loss of words. There would be no more of the familiar jokes, no calls of, “Tojiro, have you asked her yet?” The absence of these jokes, though she had expected it, broke her heart all over again. The heart’s ability to crumble over and over mystified her. I have cried my tears, her blue eyes seemed to say, and I did not know I had any left. She had probably expected more out of her heart. After all, hadn’t that heart carried Cassie unflinchingly through Indian brothels, Ugandan jungles and the Haitian earthquake, only to break now?

“Welcome back,” Leslie, the ad writer, said softly, falling in line with Cassie.

“Thanks.” Cassie smiled tiredly. There were purple bags under her eyes, and new wrinkles Leslie had never seen around her lips.

“I’m sorry,” Leslie said lamely. “You look tired.”

Both knew why Cassie looked tired, knew she was so very tired. But Leslie wanted to hear Cassie explain, see the story through the eyes of someone who had been there.

“Yes,” Cassie said.

“You shouldn’t have come to work today. Donald would have understood.”

Donald was their boss, the bull-like man who had sent Cassie and Tojiro to Japan. “No. I can’t. I have to finish this last project…” She turned the corner of her cubicle and stood there, quivering. Leslie watched her rigidly, forgetting to breathe.

The little cubicle might as well have become a shrine to Tojiro in Cassie’s absence. Flower bouquets of lilies and red roses and tulips littered every available spot on Cassie’s desk, with accompanying condolences from people she had never met. There were laminated copies of the news articles that had run en memorandum, the words TOJIRO HONDA REMEMBERED written in fat block letters, dropped off with chocolates from fans of the paper. As if Cassie had not known Tojiro had been born in Japan, what photographs he was famous for, the manner in which he had died. Photographs, of Tojiro and Cassie on location, as well as shots Tojiro had taken of their friends, were tacked to the walls, each laminated grin a memory. Cassie had put those photographs up herself, never dreaming they would one day hurt to look at. Tojiro’s wasabi beans were still on top of her desk, the lid slightly ajar from the last time he had snaked his slim hand inside. He had been the only one who ever ate them, Leslie remembered suddenly. Cassie had bought them just for Tojiro.

“No black roses?” Cassie said lightly, and Leslie breathed again. “Or, better yet, white. White means ‘death’ in Japan, you know.”

This was a Cassie-ism, filled with the light-hearted, happy sarcasm that filtered Cassie’s real meaning: She was touched, and not angry.

“Does it?” Leslie said, although she had heard this fact a thousand times before.

“What am I going to do with all of these?” Cassie asked, burying her nose in orange tiger lilies.

“It’s a wonder the smell hasn’t suffocated you yet.” She picked up the card that came with it, but did not read it out loud. Her chin twitched. Cassie’s veneer was starting to crack.

“You can distribute them to the populace. Eke some sort of meaning out of it. I can see the headlines now: ‘New York Journalist Gives Roses to Random People to Encourage…’ Come on, Cass, what are we encouraging?”

Cassie closed her eyes. “I don’t know. Tojiro always came up with the titles.”

Leslie took the other seat and reached out for Cassie’s hand. “Cass? Are you sure you’re up to this?”

“I feel so lost,” Cassie whispered. Then she shook her head, a tired doggedness in her blue eyes. “Don’t listen to me. I just need some coffee, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to be strong all of the time.”

She laughed. “Old habit.” Leslie remembered how awed she was by Cassie, even then, when Cassie had to struggle to prove herself to everyone at the paper. Cassie had spent 21 years of her life in a small Pennsylvania town, one whose name she did not care to remember, with an abusive father. Her mother had packed up and left when she was six. Cassie’s first chance of escape came with a boy by the name of Scott McDougal—but he had turned out to be a mistake, and all Cassie ever got from him were purple bruises shaped like teddy bears and the taste of blood and dirt in her mouth. None of this had broken her. She packed her bags and left for the city the day she turned twenty-one, and she never looked back.

“Cassie,” Leslie begged.

Cassie looked toward her Mac but made no move to turn it on. Both of their eyes slid, inexplicably, toward one of Cassie’s favorite pictures. Tojiro had always hated it, ducking his head in embarrassment whenever he saw it. It had been taken several years ago, just before Cassie had become the foreign correspondent for the paper. They had gone to the beach for a festival—Cassie to write, Tojiro to take photos—and had run into a local geologist who was explaining how quicksand worked. “If I can have a volunteer,” he had called, “we can see how it’s done.”

“I want to try,” Cassie had cried. She dragged an unwilling Tojiro out of the crowd and stood with him at the spot where the tide licked the sand, holding him in a death grip lest he escape.

“All you have to do,” the geologist said, “is run in place.” He demonstrated, and Cassie mimicked. The sand beneath her feet had loosened, becoming the texture of a milkshake, and she had sunk to her ankles.

 Cassie squealed, “Tojiro! You have to try this!” Tentatively, he followed her lead, and they peddled until they were up to their bellies in quicksand. Someone had snapped a picture, and then they had tried to crawl out.

“It’s trickier than it looks,” the geologist said, coming to their rescue. Cassie got out easily, but Tojiro had gotten suck and, by the time the geologist and Cassie had managed to pull him out, he had left his pants behind.

In the picture, Cassie’s smile was radiant and lit up her tanned face, while Tojiro was half-smiling, half-crying in embarrassment, his glasses slipping down his nose. Despite the terror on his face, he was clutching Cassie’s hand fiercely, and he must have been comforted, for Cassie was holding on as if she had no intention of ever letting go.

“He just stepped out,” Cassie whispered, still staring at the photograph. “For a surprise, he said. He was grinning. Ear to ear. He was so happy to be back in Japan. He was born there, you know.”

Leslie knew.

“I was in the hotel room, reading, when he left. He had been gone ten minutes when these sirens started going off, and I didn’t recognize them. I went onto the balcony, and I saw what looked like a wall of gray horses galloping down the street. At first I thought it was a flood, but it was moving so quickly for a flood, so fiercely. Cars were being carried off with the current, and so were these huge ships. There was this sailboat, with two men in it, and the boat crashed into a building and turned on its side, and they fell into the water and didn’t surface…that’s when I realized what it was. So I called his cell. I called him again and again…There was no answer. I could hear the other guests, Americans like me, panicking. The people staying on the lower levels were running up the stairs with the few belongings they could get... He never answered. Then you called.”

Leslie knew this part in the story. She had heard of the tsunami, mired as she was in the newspaper circle, and she had called Cassie immediately, only to hear her screaming shrilly: “He won’t answer his phone! Leslie, he won’t answer! Goddammit, Tojiro! My god, Tojiro!” That had been a hysterical Cassie, a Cassie Leslie had never seen before.

“When the water went down,” Cassie said, “there was rubble everywhere. Wood. Chairs. Bricks. Clothes. They wouldn’t let me out of the hotel for a long tim—I don’t know how long. I was in shock. But as soon as I could, I went looking for him. The phone lines had gone down by then, so I couldn’t call him anymore. The police told me I wasn’t cooperating, that I couldn’t go looking for him by myself. They said I would never find him. The water takes bodies with it, you see, back to the ocean. But I found him. It took three days, but I found him.”

Donald had told Leslie this part. He had summoned the entire staff to tell them the news, his iron shoulders sagging. Cassie had found Tojiro sandwiched between two cars, bloated and purple, his waterlogged phone blinking with twelve new messages that he had never been able to answer. In a sick and twisted way, Cassie had been a lucky one. There were so many Japanese whose bodies would never be found.

“There was no answer,” Cassie said again, slowly, and she bowed her head in defeat, her blond hair falling around her face.

“Oh, Cass…”

“Tojiro watched yakuza men slit his father’s throat when he was seven,” Cassie said listlessly. “I can handle this, Leslie. He would want me to be strong.”

Leslie watched her without saying anything. She was there when Cassie’s lower lip began to tremble violently, and she was there to catch her when she slid neatly onto the floor, warm tears falling onto Leslie’s neck as she cradled her.

“There was no answer,” Cassie murmured brokenly, allowing Leslie to rock her back and forth, whispering, shh, shh, there now. Shh, in her ear. There was no answer.