Chapter Twenty-Two

We sat around an old picnic table and ate our barbequed hot dogs as we listened to the younger kids in the camp splash in the pool. The boys had changed out of their wet clothes and Dr. Crimm had told us she had some work to do in the motor home, so it was just the six of us again. I hadn't been disconnected from my phone for this long since I was five years old. My hand felt bare, but my soul felt light. No social media, no texts, no expectations that I should be calling someone or texting, no need to tell the world what I was eating or who I was spending time with. I could just eat my dinner and talk without reporting it to a single person. It felt private and intimate.

"So spill, Shima," Marco insisted from across the table. "Where did you learn to skip rocks like that?"

"And where did you learn to hustle like that?" Damien added.

Aideen laughed and nearly snorted her soda out of her nose.

Shima smiled around a big mouthful of her macaroni salad. Camp food was so much better than hospital food. The people who worked in the gift shop were a bit out of touch with city people, but they made a mean mac salad. "My dad is a geologist. When we lived in Japan he studied Mt. Fuji and he used to take me there sometimes to gather rocks and minerals. When I was bored, he would show me how to find good rocks and I'd try to skip them while he did his work. As I got older, I got better. There's an art to it. You want to pick rocks that are smooth and round at the edges, not too light, but not too heavy. You want them to have a flat surface but sometimes it's easier if they have a ridge on one side so your finger can grip it when you throw it."

"Wow. That sounds really cool. What does your dad study here in the US?" Marco asked.

"He doesn't study anymore. He took a job at the University of Washington teaching Geology to get my mom better doctors. He thought maybe she'd be happier in the US." Shima reached for her soda, her fingers tearing at the label absently.

"Was she?" Aideen asked.

"She was." Shima nodded and smiled. "He was right. It's crazy and unfair."

"What do you mean?" Aideen asked, resting her elbow on the table.

"My mom's family has a long, dark history with one of the forests in Japan. I think that's why it came up when I took the pill Dr. Crimm gave us." As Shima spoke, I remembered the bright green leaves and thick mossy trunks that had grown at the edges of the screen and then quickly fallen as her world formed in front of us. "But that forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji, my father's favorite place in the whole world. To study it properly, he had to walk through Aokigahara many times. He grew to love it."

"He must have loved your mom more than he loved that forest if he was willing to give it up for her happiness." Marco pushed his empty plate away and folded his hands so he could rest his chin on them as he perched his elbows on the table and listened.

"Without question. But now she's gone and he doesn't have either of them. I've tried to get him to go back to Japan, but he won't go." Shima sighed as she slid her finger along the edge of her soda bottle. A few kids ran past our table, squealing and wet from the pool.

"Why won't he go back?" I asked.

"He's worried about me. He thinks I'll fall victim to the same fate as all the women in my mother's family. He helped her to get away and he doesn't want to risk taking me back over there." Shima lifted the bottle to her lips and took a sip.

"What does that mean?" Damien asked the same question I'd been thinking.

"Aokigahara is known as the Suicide Forest. It's second only to the Golden Gate Bridge in the number of suicides every year. The Japanese government stopped reporting the number of suicides there because they believed it was attracting people and increasing the deaths. Some Japanese believe that yurei are in Aokigahara and those who wander in there will be lured deeper inside and convinced to kill themselves.

"It's a forest that is growing on a volcano, so cell phones and compasses don't work. Many people get lost once they veer off the path. People who haven't made up their minds about whether or not they want to kill themselves bring ribbon or plastic tape and tie it to the trees so they can find their way back out. It makes it look very eerie. Old ribbon and discarded personal belongings like tents and shoes are left behind when people wander deeper into the trees and hang themselves or take pills and die.

"It's been happening for a very long time. The townspeople have to comb the forest once a year to clear out the bodies. They take them to a building where they store them. Someone has to stay each night because they believe that yureiwill make the bodies rise and move. My father used to have to sit watch."

We all sat for a moment in stunned silence.

"What's yurei?" Aideen asked.

"Yurei are spirits whose deaths were traumatic or terrible in some way. The local people believe during times of famine, some families had no choice but to leave the elderly women in the forest to starve to death because they could not feed them. When they died, they became yurei, and now live in the forest, tormenting the people who wander in there. Also, some yurei could be the souls of people who have committed suicide there." Shima looked guarded, but she didn't need to protect herself around me; I'd never tell anyone they were crazy for what they believed in.

"What kind of history do the women in your family have with the forest?" I asked.

Shima set down her soda and let her gaze fall to the old wooden table beneath her fingertips. "My great-grandmother disappeared in Aokigahara. My dad tells me she was suffering an illness they didn't know how to treat at the time, but my mom said it was the yurei. She had two children, first a girl and then a baby boy. Four months after giving birth to her second child, she drowned the baby and probably would have done the same to her daughter, my grandmother, if she hadn't run away. By the time my grandmother was able to get help, my great-grandmother was gone. She went into the forest and never came back out."

"Wow, that's intense." Ken leaned forward and gave Shima's hand a quick squeeze. "Sorry. That's a heavy story to have hanging in your family tree."

"You said women," Aideen mentioned. "Like there were more?"

All eyes were once again on Shima. Could there be more? Was it possible for one family to live with another story like that one?

"My grandmother had a rough life after that. Her father was devastated at the loss of his wife and son. He feared the yurei would take them, too, so he took her and moved farther away." Shima shook her head slightly. "This is where science and spirituality collide and create the questions that keep me up at night." Her hands waved around her head, drawing a wild hurricane to show us the turmoil that must be roaring beneath her skull.

"My father tells me 'mental illness runs in families.'" Shima dropped her voice to mimic that of a cold male authoritative tone. "What caused my great-grandmother to wander into the forest was already inside her brain and that's why it was inside my grandmother's, too. He doesn't disagree the forest called to them, pulling them inside like a mother pulls her child into her arms, but he says the voices were passed down in the blood from my great-grandmother to my grandmother."

"Your grandma?" Ken asked the question on a soft whisper as if he couldn't quite wrap his mind or his tongue around the possibility that she'd lost them both to the same fate.

"Yes, but to tell you her story I have to tell my aunt's."

"Jesus," Damien said.

"She was seventeen when her boyfriend broke up with her. They had dated for two years and she didn't think she'd ever love anyone like she loved him." Shima picked at the dried wood beneath her fingers. "What's crazy is that no one talked about Aokigahara and my great-grandmother. My aunt didn't know the history. She was just a lovesick teen who was looking for a way to make the pain stop."

"Why there then? Why that forest?" Marco asked.

Shima's eyes lifted for a second to meet his. "There was a Japanese book written in the 1990s called The Complete Manual of Suicide. It described various methods of suicide and rated them according to the pain you'd feel, the effort it would take, the likeliness that it would work, and the appearance of your body. The author recommended Aokigahara and death by hanging in the manual and it was often found with the bodies inside the forest. My aunt's copy wasn't found with her—my grandmother found it beneath her mattress a year after her death."

"What did your grandma do with it?" Marco asked.

"I don't think we'll ever know for sure, but my mother believes she took it into Aokigahara with her on the last day of her life. When they found her body, there was nothing near her, but my grandmother didn't wander too far off the trail so my mother believes hikers might have taken her belongings and the book."

Ken ran a hand through his hair as if the motion would somehow pull his thoughts together. "I can see why your father was so afraid to stay there with your mother."

"A lot of good it did in the end." Shima's voice was laced with sadness and an anger I knew wasn't intended for Ken. "He lost her anyway. Some destinies you can't outrun. He thought taking her away from the forest would be enough to avoid the calls of the yurei. Maybe my father is right about the illness being in our blood, but I don't believe our yurei stay in the forest."

"He must be terrified." Ken reached out and slowly ran his finger along the wound at Shima's wrist. "If he believes something that powerful is running through your blood, he must feel so helpless to keep you from joining them."

Shima used her shoulder to wipe a tear from her cheek. Time was our enemy. Time gave us perspective—a moment to think about the people who would be affected if we ended our lives. For Shima, that was her father. He had fled the home he loved to try and save his wife from a fate that seemed tangled up in a forest too dark to overcome. Now thousands of miles from his beloved Mt. Fuji and grieving for the wife he'd lost, he had to wrestle with the demons he had hoped to outrun as they raged inside his daughter.

Aideen reached out, setting her hand gently on Shima's back. I couldn't help but think about what it might be like for her father to lose her, too. It was dangerous territory. Thinking of him quickly drifted to thoughts of my own father, no matter how hard I tried to push them from my mind. I remembered the way he'd tried to help me the weeks before my attempt, the countless times he'd knocked on my locked bedroom door to offer to talk or do something I'd like. I'd refused to let him in—not just into my room, but also into my head and the dark place it had become.

"Sometimes I think I can stay for him," Shima said softly, her voice hiccupping from the tears, "but other times I feel like I'm drowning in water no one else can see. Everyone moves on around me and I'm in slow motion beneath the sea, struggling just to move an inch. My body is tired from being dragged against the rocks and my head hurts from the way the memories of her and the indescribable grief come crashing over me from every direction."

Aideen slipped her unused napkin from beneath her plate and handed it to Shima. Tears fell along the freckles of Aideen's pale cheeks. I tasted the salt of my own sadness as it flowed over my lips and into my mouth and realized I was crying, too. There was so much pain at that table it was amazing the wild grass beneath our feet didn't wilt from the toxicity of it.

"And sometimes," Shima continued after taking a deep, calming breath, "I know that he's only staying for me. If I go, I set us both free." She folded the napkin and used it to dry the tears that had gathered in her lower lashes. "When I hear him crying at night before he can drown his memories of her with his saki, I know that the yurei call to him, too." Her body shook as she confessed her fears. "Sometimes I think we are both racing to be first into that forest so we won't have to be the one to find the other's ribbon. He told me that no father should have to find his daughter's dead body and I didn't have the courage to tell him that I'm afraid one day I'll be the one to find his."

I could picture them as clear as anything I'd ever seen with my own eyes, the twisted trees from her vision and the colorful ribbons that wrapped around them. I closed my eyes and wondered if I'd have the courage it would take to wake up every morning surrounded by them the way Shima must. Each bottle of alcohol her father finished—another foot of it; each night she heard him crying, like a long stretch of knotted material marking his descent into a place she herself longed to get lost in. How easy it must be for her to believe the least pain would be felt by the person unraveling the ribbon for the other to find. I'd never set foot in Aokigahara and yet I felt like I was standing among the trees with a helplessly spinning compass and no ribbon trail to guide me back home.

Dr. Crimm's feet crunched the tiny rocks as she approached and set a lantern at the edge of the table. She pulled a box of tissues from a bag she had slung over her shoulder and set it between us.

"It's going to be dark soon," Dr. Crimm warned. She set her bag down on the table and gave Shima's shoulder a squeeze. "You chose a great place to unload some of your feelings. It's safe and private out here."

Her words made me wonder just how much of our conversation she'd heard. Shima nodded and looked out between the tall trees. "Do you know about Aokigahara, Dr. Crimm?" she asked.

Dr. Crimm glanced at Shima before returning her gaze to the branches stretching between each trunk. Her head nodded once. "The Sea of Trees," she answered with a smile. "It's beautiful."

"You've seen it?" Shima asked, her back straightening.

Damien held up a finger. "The Sea of Trees?" he repeated in the form of a question. "I thought it was the Suicide Forest."

"It's both," Shima answered quickly.

"That's right." Dr. Crimm unfolded her arms and stepped closer to the table. Aideen moved over, inviting her to sit. "It's called the Suicide Forest because some people choose to end their lives there. It's called the Sea of Trees because of how beautiful it looks from above—like the sea." Her smile returned. "I spent a year in Japan while I was in high school."

"It used to be my dad's favorite place. He never talks about it anymore," Shima said as she reached for a tissue from the box and wiped at her wet cheek.

"If I could have asked your dad to tell me about Aokigahara while you were still a little girl, back before he moved you to America, what do you think he would have said? What did he used to tell you?" Dr. Crimm waited patiently while Shima considered her answer.

"He would have told you it was amazing." Shima smiled through her tears. "He used to tell me to listen," she said, cupping her hand around her ear. "He told me the wind could not get through the trees because they are so close, so there is a forest of peace at the base of that volcano. He used to tell me we were not standing on usual soil. Beneath our feet was lava that had flowed long before our people had inhabited the island."

Shima continued to cry, her tears racing down her cheeks and falling into her smile. Sometimes our memories are soft and warm centers with sharp, jagged edges. It was as if she was trying to hang on to them as someone pulled them free from her grasp, and it was only when they'd slipped from her hand that she'd realized they'd sliced her open.

"My dad told me there wasn't another place like it anywhere else. He loved the small caves and the green, mossy tree trunks. He had been there so many times and every day he saw something new." Shima sniffed and tucked her tissue into the pocket of her sweater.

Dr. Crimm nodded and smiled again. "It was beautiful. And now if I asked him, what would he tell me?"

Shima didn't even hesitate. "He would tell you it's evil. He told me never to go there again. He warned me that nothing can survive there—that no wildlife chooses to live there in that place where the sun can't shine through the trees. I asked him after my mother died if we could take her ashes back to Japan and scatter them in the forest to be with her family, and he told me I wasn't to speak of it, ever again."

"Sounds very familiar," Dr. Crimm stated. She looked around to each of us, her young face, messy hairstyle, and the casual surroundings making her feel more like a peer than a professional. "Aokigahara is the perfect metaphor for depression. For people without depression, life feels beautiful, precious, and exactly how nature intended it to be. It's enough. These are the people who would call Aokigahara the Sea of Trees.

"Maybe they know others see it differently, but they choose to ignore that or to stay focused on the beauty instead of the darkness within. And then there are others who once could see the beauty, but find themselves inside the forest as the sun is setting. Darkness falls around them like the sun fleeing behind the dense tree line. The peace of being alone becomes the loneliness of never having companionship. These are the people who would call it the Suicide Forest.

"Depression rewrites our maps and renames our landmarks. It takes what we know about our destinations and skews them so we are uncertain and insecure at every turn." Dr. Crimm looked to Shima once again. "Your father once saw the beauty of Aokigahara, but now he's allowed depression to convince him it's not the place he remembers it to be. That's a wicked untruth. The forest hasn't changed in hundreds of years, but his perspective has. Maybe if he could find a way back he could stand at its center and look for the things he used to love about it. It wouldn't be easy, because he's been practicing focusing on everything he hates about it for a long time."

"My dad will never again see it as anything other than the Suicide Forest. All the plastic ribbon in the world won't help him find his way out of it." Shima's bottom lip quivered as she discussed her father.

"You will never be able to control how your father sees the forest." Dr. Crimm's voice was sure. "I can't control how any of you see your lives. All I can do is try to look for the light in mine. I can walk my path and when I'm feeling strong and sure enough of my own way, I can walk beside you in moments when you don't feel like you should be walking alone. That's all you can do for your dad."

Shima closed her eyes as she took in Dr. Crimm's words. She took in a big breath and held it for a second before letting it go slowly.

Dr. Crimm reached out and patted Shima on the hand. "I can only imagine what it might be like for you to come home to your dad after he's been drinking all day. It must be so painful to watch him getting closer and closer to leaving your life after you've just lost your mom."

"I'm afraid," Shima confessed.

"I understand," Dr. Crimm validated. "One day you might decide you can't follow his ribbon into the forest. I want you to know that's okay. It won't make you a terrible daughter and it won't make you responsible for what happens at the end of that ribbon trail."

Shima covered her face with her hands, crying into her palms as if she were finally free to let out the pain she'd kept inside. No one at the table was safe from feeling the grief and fears Shima had shared. Our world was not a place that gave us much space to be vulnerable with any sort of privacy. But out there, secluded from the city, all we had was each other.

I wrapped my arm around Shima and felt Aideen give my shoulder a squeeze as she also wrapped her arm around our crying friend, and I realized just how right Dr. Crimm was. Focusing on the good things in life felt right. It didn't make the bad go away, but it left less space in my thoughts for them. I felt my heart squeeze inside my chest and I tried to hide the tear I had to wipe away quickly from my cheek. For the first time in a long time I wasn't crying because I was sad, I was crying because I could finally see the possibility of healing my own wound one day.