The Rope Bridge

The drizzle started when the bus dropped me off. Not real rain. Just grey mist that settled on my camera bag and made the whole village look like it was from another era.

I'm thirty-four. I'd been in Japan nine days on assignment and I still felt like a ghost with a camera. My husband died three years ago, and I'd stopped expecting to feel anything about anyone. I mostly noticed light. That's the job.

The pottery barn sat at the end of a lane, low wooden roof, open doors, warm light spilling out onto wet gravel. A hand-painted sign said SALE TODAY. Something for a shrine festival, probably. I went in.

Inside it smelled like wet clay and green tea. Rows of tables. Bowls, cups, plates, small glazed animals. Maybe thirty people wandering, mostly local, a few travelers.

And one man standing at a table holding a tea bowl like it was made of glass.

He was younger than me, early thirties maybe, tall, dark hair pushed back, a wool coat too nice for the drizzle. He turned the bowl over. Looked at the foot of it. Tilted it toward the light. Set it down. Picked up the one next to it and did the same thing again. Complete focus. The kind of attention you don't give to something you don't care about.

I caught myself watching him longer than I'd watched anything in months. Then I raised my camera, out of pure habit, and he looked up right at the shutter click.

Oh. Well. Awkward.

"Sorry," I said.

He smiled. "No, it's fine. Did I ruin your shot?"

"I don't know yet." I lowered the camera. "I wasn't shooting you. I was shooting the light on the glaze. You were just in the way of a good picture."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in two weeks," he said, and laughed, and I laughed too, surprising myself.

"You're English," I said.

"London. I buy tea. That's my whole personality, apparently." He held up the bowl. "This one's for whisking. See how wide the foot is? The potter thought about your wrist when she made this. Two hundred years of thinking about wrists."

"Sienna," I said.

"Nico."

An older woman came around the table then, silver hair, paint-spattered apron, the kind of energy that runs a whole village by herself.

"You found our sale," she said to me. "American?"

"Canadian, originally. I'm here photographing the kilns for a magazine."

"Then you must meet everything. I'm Eleanor. I've been here twenty years, which makes me the local expert on nothing and everything." She waved an arm at the tables. "All of this funds the shrine festival up the river. Every plate buys a lantern. That bowl Nico's holding, that's two lanterns and a drum."

"And I'm buying four," Nico said.

"Good boy." She turned back to me. "You should come tonight. We do a séance after the sale closes. It's nonsense, complete nonsense, but it's village nonsense and the foreigners always love it."

"A séance?" I said.

"For fun. Lanterns, candles, a local guide who translates my terrible attempts at ceremony. At the little shrine by the rope bridge. Dusk." She patted my arm. "You've got a widow's face, dear. Grief likes a ritual, even a silly one."

I didn't know what to say to that. She'd already moved on to yell at someone about price tags.

Nico and I stood there a second.

"Widow's face," I said finally. "That's a new one."

"Are you?" he asked. Gentle about it.

"Three years." I touched my camera. "I don't usually lead with it."

"You don't have to." He picked up four bowls. "Two weeks," he said. "That's how long I've been traveling alone. Buying tea up and down these mountains. Hotel rooms, trains, more tea. I started talking to the bowls."

"That's grim."

"That's the trade." He paid Eleanor and tucked the bowls into a padded box. "Are you going to the séance tonight?"

"Eleanor didn't really leave me room to say no."

"She doesn't, I've noticed." He smiled. "Then maybe I'll see you there. Under a lantern, holding a candle, pretending a spirit is talking to us."

"Maybe," I said. And I found I meant it, which was new.

The sale ran through the afternoon. I photographed the kilns out back, the long sloping brick chambers steaming in the drizzle, an old man feeding wood into the mouth of one. Eleanor's assistant stacked boxes for shipping. The crowd thinned as the light went grey-blue and then gone.

I bought two cups I didn't need. Small, rough-glazed, one slightly crooked. I told myself it was for the magazine's prop shelf. It wasn't. It was for me.

At dusk, maybe twenty of us walked the lane toward the river. The rope bridge showed up first as a shape against the last light, swaying planks, two thick cables, the kind of bridge you cross holding your breath. Past it, up a short path, the little shrine. A wooden structure the size of a shed, a stone fox statue, mossy steps.

And lanterns everywhere. Paper lanterns on poles along the path, candles in jars on the shrine steps, a ring of cushions laid out on the flat ground in front.

Eleanor arranged us like place settings. I ended up diagonal from Nico. Our eyes met once and he raised his eyebrows, and I had to look down at my candle so I wouldn't laugh.

The guide, a small quick man named Hiroshi, explained the rules in careful English. "We light. We hold hands with the person next to you. We close eyes if you want. Mrs. Eleanor will say things. I will translate. No spirit is obligated to attend. Please do not be disappointed by the ghosts."

That got a real laugh out of everyone.

We lit the candles. The circle went soft and orange. Somebody's baby slept in a sling against a grandmother's back, which seemed like a good omen for anything.

Eleanor began. She'd clearly rehearsed this. "Beloved tea maker of the kiln village, are you with us?"

Hiroshi translated. Pause. Silence. Wind in the cedars.

"He says the wind is the ghost's opinion," Hiroshi announced. "It is a rude opinion."

Everyone cracked up. Eleanor shushed them with zero authority.

Another prompt. Another dramatic silence. The candle flames leaned when people leaned. And in one of those leans, in the flicker, I felt Nico looking at me.

Not staring. Just looking. I felt it the way you feel sun through a window. I looked up. He didn't look away. He didn't smile either. He just held it, one full breath, and then went back to the ceremony like nothing happened.

My chest did something it hadn't done in three years. Not fireworks. More like a door I'd boarded up rattling once in its frame.

I held the baby's grandmother's hand on my left, a farmer's rough hand on my right, and stared at my candle and thought, carefully, like checking a wound: huh. Still in there, then.

The séance ended with no spirits and total success. Eleanor declared the ancestor "clearly busy but flattered." Hiroshi led applause. The grandmother woke the baby, who took it well. People collected lanterns and drifted back down the lane in twos and threes, voices going soft with the dark.

I stayed to shoot the shrine by candlelight. Long exposure, tripod, the works. When I turned around, most everyone was gone. Nico was standing at the head of the rope bridge, hands in his coat pockets.

"You too," I said, packing up.