Nami was gone again. I didn't know when she would return; perhaps in a few years, perhaps in ten. The village held nothing for her now that Arlong was gone and our safety was assured. She was off to make a map of the world and fulfill a long ago promise to Bellemere.
I, on the other hand, had the orchard to tend. That is the difference between Nami and I. She is happiest sailing on the waves she was named after and I am as rooted on this island as firmly as the trees I care for.
At that time, the trees needed quite a bit of caring, especially after their harsh treatment at the hands of the Marines. Nami had taken a few of the uprooted ones with her; I had replanted the rest.
So when, on one tree, the new leaves failed to appear and the old ones started to go brown, when mikans refused to grow on its branches, I tended it. I worked every day on that tree; trimming it, watering it, putting mulch around its base, and picking off bugs by hand. It was silly to put so much effort into one tree and by the end of the fall, it was obvious that there would be no saving this one. Yet it took me a week to find the axe. It took me another week to go into the village and get it sharpened. And then I waited a few more days, just on principle.
In the end, I couldn't do it. Bellemere had tended these trees and her mother before her as well. Cutting through the trunk would have been like cutting through my family.
So I found a shovel and began to dig. I hadn't gotten very far when the spade scraped metal.
At first I thought it might have been some leftover bauble from the treasure store, but Nami had hoarded her thievings more ferociously than any dragon. And while it was round and metal, it was no coin. It was a medallion.
The ribbon at the top was tattered and dirty. It might have been a brilliant crimson at one point, but now it was the shade of crusted blood. I was reminded of a song that had been popular a few years earlier.
The Marine colors – the colors are red – to show the world – the blood we shed.
The dirt fell away with a bit of rubbing and I could read the embossed letters on the front – Order of the Grandline.
Bellemere had never told Nami and I about her time as a Marine; had never told us that we had found each other in the ruins of a battle-torn port town. Gen told Nami the truth on the afternoon of that horrible day and Nami had told me – later, when it was much too late to care.
The medal was another lost conversation with my mother; an opportunity taken away from me by violence and greed and ego.
By Arlong.
I stared at the dying tree and my fingers tightened around the circle in my palm.
If Nami hadn't come, bringing trouble like always, the tree would never have been toppled over. It may have lived for years and years with this secret buried between its roots.
If Nami hadn't come, bringing those pirates in her wake like flotsam and jetsam trailing after a ship, the tree would still be living, but its fruits would have forever been used to pay for my life.
If Nami hadn't come, my hopes would have remained in the same dark, dirty place the medal had lain for all those years.
Years ago, I thought my hope had been killed, like a butterfly caught in the web of a spider. All those years of being paralyzed to do anything – the ocean that cocooned us from any assistance – the daily poison of seeing my mother's murderer walking freely; I was a husk of myself, empty inside.
Then, when I saw those walls come tumbling down, I realized that hope wasn't such a fragile thing as I had thought. It was like the medallion in my hand. Hope can be buried, hidden, or dirtied, but it will not allow itself to decay underground or rot in the dark. Hope doesn't die, no matter how far you bury it.
I put the medal in my pocket and picked the shovel back up. I carefully returned the earth to its proper place at the base of the tree. I don't know what maudlin emotion made me do it; a sense of fairness perhaps. The tree had kept the medal safe and returned it to me. Letting the tree die in peace, in the original ground that my mother's mother had planted it was not too much to ask for.
Now I keep the medallion on the mantle next to the picture of the three of us. Bellemere's grave may be up on the cliff over looking the ocean, but I know she makes it down to the house sometimes. Why else would I have found what should have been dug up years ago?
And the tree? It died, like I thought it would, but not before it produced one more crop. In fact, the season after Nami left, the orchard produced more mikans than it had ever done before.
Serendipity, I guess. Or maybe it was a harvest of hope.