The Wind Phone

The Wind Phone

The flight from DFW airport to Northeast Japan took thirty hours. My head felt fuzzy and my legs cramped from the prolonged activity. Climbing into the taxi, I gave instructions to the driver and leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes. I rested my hand on the tiny clay jar tucked in my carry-on bag. The tears came often, sometimes uncontrollably. I stared out the window at the local geography to distract myself from the onslaught.

Pedestrians drifted by on sidewalks and pedaled bikes throughout the lanes of traffic. Signs with foreign symbols decorated tall buildings and small shops alike. The streets were teeming with people like New York or Los Angeles. I willed myself to enjoy it, but my heart felt like a stone in my chest.

           The drive to Otsuchi took another hour and a half, and the driver called back something in Japanese and put the taxi in park. He nodded his head toward the hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a steady stream of words coming from his lips. I thanked him in my best attempt at the language and paid him with the currency I’d exchanged at the airport. Never had I traveled so far from home, but what was home anymore? If home is where the heart is, then my home fit perfectly in the little jar in my bag.

           The walk to the booth was not a long one. The booth itself was vacant, nestled atop a small hill overlooking a carefully tended garden near the coast. I’d read about the Wind Phone in a travel magazine once two years earlier in the waiting room at the children’s hospital. Daniel had undergone eight surgeries in his six years of life, and many treatments to follow. In the end the leukemia had taken him in his sleep on a chilly night in October three months ago.

           I’d done all the things for grieving. I’d attended therapy sessions and returned to work. I’d made brunch plans with friends and called relatives. I’d taken up running, which I hated, but I could never outrun the pain. I’d kept Daniel’s ashes in the jar on the mantel, where I could see him every day. Having his ashes nearby was like having him, though I knew his spirit had long gone. I’d begun carrying it around with me in my purse, much to the concern of my mother and therapist. They thought it was unhealthy, but it was the only thing that kept me going.

           I stared at the booth while I stood only twenty feet away. The crisp wind blew, whipping my hair around me and stinging my skin. The waves drifted up the coastline in a lazy dance, and the garden below lay spread in its serenity; a garden for the ghosts.

           I opened the booth door with a shaking hand and stepped in, closing the door behind me. A black rotary phone sat atop a wooden platform beside a notebook with Japanese symbols penned inside of it. I withdrew the jar from my bag and set it beside the phone. Daniel and I had never discussed where or if I would scatter his ashes. I found the conversation too macabre for a six-year-old boy. He’d known that he was dying, but the two of us had, by silent agreement, continued pretending that his diagnosis was nothing more than a shadow in the sunlight.

           My fingertips drifted along the exterior of the vase, and my body was racked with sobs, one after another, until my body shook with them. My face was wet with tears, a familiar feeling, and my skin had grown cold. I wasn’t sure if this was hello or goodbye, but I’d known it was a trip I would have to make. There is no remedy for death and losing a loved one, only pain and acceptance and the will to move forward.

           Humans have created means of speaking to the dead for centuries through prayer or incantations or scrawling in stone and on notebooks. As far as I knew, the dead never spoke back.

           I picked up the phone receiver and typed in the number taped to the wooden platform below it. My hands shook as my heart beat rapidly. What was I so anxious about? Suddenly I felt foolish flying to another country simply to pick up a phone to nowhere. I’d encountered much difficulty getting my son’s ashes through customs and security. I was in a foreign land, unfamiliar and unprepared. But while I listened to the silence on the phone, something inside of me broke a second time, dismantling the false façade I’d erected.

           “Danny…”

I cried and sobbed alone in the booth, searching the horizon for any sign of life. Could it be that the dead congregated here, waiting for their relatives to speak? Or was the booth nothing more than another façade, another desperate attempt at healing? Grief was a singular language and the same in every part of the world, apart from its customs. Grief stemmed from love, and love stemmed from something none of us truly understood.

           “Danny? I- I miss you, baby. Mama misses you,” I sniffed.

The wind blew again, and a small pair of wind chimes placed in a nearby tree played a lovely tune. Would Danny’s soul know where to find me? Was he somehow connected to the remaining pieces of himself, which I kept safely secreted in the jar?

           “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I admitted. “I can’t let you go,” I sobbed.

           The wind blew harder, shaking the booth and making my heart leap in hope. The shaking of the glass resembled a knocking sound, like that of a hand rapping on a door.

           “Danny?” I whispered. “Are you here, sweetheart?”

I scanned the surrounding gardens and beyond, searching for some sign that my boy had returned, that the wind phone worked. Nothing about the landscape had changed, but I felt different; warmer. The wind blew again, whistling through the tree branches and cracks in the booth, and I cried out as the sound emulated the sound Danny used to make when he whistled.

           “I love you, Danny!” I cried desperately. I crumbled to the floor of the booth, phone in hand, trying to catch my breath. I’d tucked him in that night. I’d kissed his cheek and read him a bed-time story. He’d told me he didn’t feel well, but the treatments made him feel sick. The autopsy report had said he’d died two hours later, alone in his bed.

           “I’m so sorry,” I breathed. My tears pooled on the ground beneath me as I fought for air and words. I clung to this feeling like an animal, refusing to let it go. I knew I would have to leave this place and return to life, but I couldn’t face another day of it without him. Without Danny.

           “Mom?”

I gasped and clutched the phone to my ear. It was Danny. It was my boy!

           “Danny!? Danny, you’re there! My boy!” I yelped and laughed like a lunatic. If I’d lost my mind, I didn’t care. This was what I’d come for, what I needed.

           “Mom, I love you. I always will.”

           “Baby, I want you to come back to me. I want you to stay,” I begged.

           “I can’t, mama. I’m done here. It’s time for me to go. You’ve got to let me go, okay?”

I cried into the phone, shaking my head. He’d come back only to say his goodbyes. I knew goodbye was all I’d asked for, but now it wasn’t enough.

           “I can’t, sweetie. I can’t let you go. You’re my heart. You’re everything.”

           “You’re mine too, mama. But I’m not hurting anymore. And you shouldn’t either.”

His voice was fading as the wind blew more frantically, sending the wind chimes into a musical frenzy on the trees. I eyed the jar and sobbed into the phone, listening to the absence of breath. Had he gone? Was I alone again?

           “Danny?”

           “Yes mama?”

           “I can’t wait to see you again.”

           “Me too, mama. I’ll see you soon, okay? Smile for me.”

The line remained silent, but the wind died down and the cold returned. Danny had departed, leaving me with the same words I’d always given him when he’d been in the throes of his pain.

Smile for me, Danny.

           “Okay baby. I’ll smile.”

I arranged quivering lips in a sad smile and hovered over the disconnect button on the phone. Danny was gone, I knew that, but hanging up the phone felt like walking away from him, somehow. In truth he was already gone, his spirit transcending the pain and suffering of his human body. I sighed and hung up the phone with trembling hands. My chest felt heavy and light at the same time. Picking up the jar, I drew it close to my chest and cried a little more. Stepping out of the booth, I walked another few feet toward the sea, drawing the salty air into my lungs. I heard his giggle on the wind, that same muffled sound heard in games of hide and seek. I knew what I had to do, now.

           “Smile, baby,” I whispered, as I opened the lid and tossed its contents out into the wind and sea, releasing Danny just like he’d asked me to. And I smiled.