This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
Reading group guide copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Cover design art direction by Anne Twomey
Cover illustration by Olaf Hajek
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rizzuto, Rahna R. author.
Title: Shadow child / Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.
Description: New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053601| ISBN 9781538711453 (hardback) | ISBN
9781549168673 (audio download) | ISBN 9781538711446 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Family life—Fiction. | Twin sisters—Fiction. | Japanese
Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942–1945—Fiction. | World War,
1939–1945—Concentration camps—West (U.S.)—Fiction. | World War,
1939–1945—Japan—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION /
Family Life. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary. |
GSAFD: Suspense fiction | Historical fiction
Classification: LCC PS3568.I87 S53 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053601
E3-2017031417-DANF
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Double Take Hana
1942
Hana
1942
Hana
Koko
Hana
Koko
Hana
1942–1943
Hana
Koko
Hana
1943
The Wave Hana
Kei
Hana
1944–1945
Hana
Kei
Hana
1945
Kei
Hana
Kei
1945
Hana
Shadow Child Kei
Hana
1945
Kei
Hana
Kei
1946
Kei
Hana
Hana
1947
Hana
Rising Kei
Hana
Kei
Acknowledgments
A Note on Place and History
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Newsletters
What if you slept, and what if, in your sleep you dreamed? And what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand?
—Attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Double Take
Hana
He was a ripple through the stained glass. A dark and shifting shape in an only slightly brighter lobby. It wasn’t far from midnight, on the edge of Harlem, and I had already opened the outer door to my apartment building and was standing in the vestibule when he appeared. Behind me, the street was empty of everything but the occasional used coffee cup and some lazy leaves of newspaper skimming the sidewalk. There was no voice in my head whispering at me to run—not yet—though the flush creeping beneath my collar was familiar.
I was a woman alone, clenching my key between my knuckles. But when the flicker of him reached the heavy iron door handle, I looked away.
If I had chosen to stare him down, I would have had some answers for the cops when they asked me: How tall was he? How heavy? What was he wearing? I pulled back against the tiled walls instead. It was my silent deal: I won’t see you and you don’t see me. That was when he looked at me.
Twice.
The double take was for Kei. I knew it, even if I could never prove it. Even if I barely noticed it at the time. In my defense, it had been so long since I had seen my sister that I had forgotten the effect we had on others.
Kei was upstairs, waiting. Come for me, six years too late.
I slipped by the man as he hesitated, rushing through the second door and into the lobby, inflating the air and life between us with each step. I can still feel him watching me, though his footsteps didn’t turn to follow mine across the marble floor. Thinking back, I can’t hear any sound at all—not even the front door clicking behind him as it closed. He was a memory already, fleeing. When I finally remembered the double take, he was long gone.
Where does this story begin? My mind returns to the lobby for the safety of “before,” but the truth is, there was no safety then, nor was that the beginning. If someone had told me, before Kei arrived, that I would let her drag me back through our past, I would have said that person was crazier than I am. But there are answers I need, and the strength to face them. Our stepfather Arnie used to tell us to trace each step back to the beginning if we wanted to know the truth.
Here’s what I know: When Kei called and asked to visit, I said I didn’t want to see her. When she booked a flight anyway, I knew I had to hold my ground. I had to show her that she didn’t control me any longer, that my life here was my own. She had laid claim to our mother, our town, our home in Hawaii. The least she could do was leave me my tiny, gray New York life.
But Kei never listened to anyone, so the only protest I had was not meeting her at the airport. In a city bigger than she could have dreamed of, I let her find her own cab. I left an extra set of keys for her with Hal, my super, and stayed late at Luciano’s, the Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side where I work in the back as a bookkeeper. Nick, the owner, had taken me in like a misplaced kitten a couple of years ago, when I started lingering there every afternoon instead of going to the art studio. I still couldn’t bear to create when all I wanted was to disappear. I was grateful for the job, for the bustle of the restaurant. It was a perfect way to get lost in plain sight—and wasn’t that what New York was supposed to be good for?
That night, once I had lingered so long that I had organized the invoices for the whole month and finished the payroll, I came out from my one-desk office and tucked myself behind a table near the kitchen for my staff meal. Usually, I take it home at six p.m., like clockwork. But that night, after I finished eating, I decided to help bus tables. At first, it was just water refills, but when the calls for “Check, please
!” began playing around me like background music, I started running those, too. Some of the waitresses eyed me, though no one asked me what I was still doing there. I hadn’t told them about Kei, and could not even begin to imagine how to do so. Instead, I smiled to deflect the occasional spark of concern.
Nine o’clock passed, and so did ten. I can’t say now if I was hanging on to the last, untainted minutes of my life without Kei, or if I was simply preparing myself to face her.
I had worked hard to leave my sister behind. I traveled five thousand miles to find a place where no one would stare at my scars. People in New York saw so little of me that they didn’t even notice my eyes—that the right one is dark brown and the left tawny, almost hazel. It gave me an ersatz David Bowie look in this big city but had just screamed hapa haole in our little Hawaiian town. Kei and I were two of the few privileged and damned creatures of mixed race in that watery backwater place. Not the cosmopolitan girls with the pale skin, rounded eyes, the dark chocolate hair; they were more beautiful than any one race alone. No, we were clearly a mistake: Japanese on one side, Caucasian on the other. We were the daughters of Miya Swanson, the town’s crazy lady who had breakdowns in public and talked to ghosts. Hana the good girl; Kei the rebel. We were opposites but equally haunted, though by what we didn’t know.
But there are only so many hours in a day that can be wasted, and it was close to midnight when I finally left the restaurant. I often liked to walk home in the early evening, especially as the days got longer, but I’ve always been afraid of the dark—more so now than ever—so I took the bus that night, my brain so stuck on Kei that I barely noticed the time. Was she here to beg forgiveness all these years later? What could she possibly have to tell me, now that everyone we had loved was dead? And if I couldn’t bear her voice on the phone, how would I stand having her invade my apartment? We had once been inseparable, and now—part of me still hoped that I might not find her when I arrived.
Oh, Kei. If only she had decided not to come.
* * *
It wasn’t until I stuck my key into the door of my apartment and heard the top deadbolt snap closed instead of open that I had to admit to myself for certain that Kei was really here. I could picture her then, fumbling with the many keys Hal had handed her and then letting the door slam behind her once she was inside. She wouldn’t bother to relock it; the house we grew up in didn’t even have a key. Doors were like coats; we needed them some nights and on a couple of chilly days, but most of the time we left them hanging out of sight. In Hawaii, screen doors—those banging, bouncing, fraying things—were all that we needed to keep the flies out and let the breeze in. But we weren’t children anymore.
“Kei?” I called, bolting the door behind me. “You left the door open!”
I winced even before the words left my mouth. I should have started with something nicer. I’m home, I should have said, though I could already feel what my place must look like to my sister. Maybe, I’m here?
My apartment could only kindly be called a hole in the wall. It’s a railroad with low ceilings and narrow doorways, opening into an eat-in living room and galley kitchen, then running down a shoulder-width hall past a bathroom to a single bedroom beyond. The kitchen has a matched set of three-quarter-sized appliances lined up side by side against the wall with gaps just big enough for cockroaches between them. After a miserable freshmen year with a revolving arsenal of roommates, my college eventually gave me special permission to move off campus, and I had picked this particular apartment for the same reasons I would later take my job. Transience. Anonymity. Mediocrity. Solitude.
Kei was the first person to step inside it in five years, except for my super. I hadn’t expected her to think much of it, and clearly she didn’t. She had kicked her rubber slippers, kapakahi, into the middle of the living room floor, nowhere near the neat line of my own shoes beside the door. My blue leather beanbag chair, which I had bought after I left college, had been shoved across the floor. She must have been hungry, because she’d also raided my refrigerator, leaving an open bottle of orange juice balanced on the tines of my gas range and some cartons with my leftovers half eaten on the edge of the sink. Kei had even claimed my spare keys as her own. I recognized them on Arnie’s old key ring, the one with his rusty, hand-forged can opener, which she had tossed onto my secondhand modular couch.
I hadn’t even laid eyes on Kei yet and she was already displacing me. She had always assumed the world was hers for the taking, and I guess in some ways she’d been right.
“Kei!”
Did I expect an answer? I heard the clock radio playing John Denver in my bedroom, but it couldn’t have been loud enough to block my voice. Was there a chance that Kei was simply asleep on my bed? I wasn’t ready to walk in on her, trespassing in my most private space. The truth is, I couldn’t bear to see her face. I wanted to freeze time. To roll it back.
But Kei was here, no longer looming and potential. I nudged her slippers into line with my now bare feet and then took the six steps to my stovetop. I shook the orange juice bottle, still partially full, and smelled it reflexively before putting it back into the refrigerator.
When I moved to the sink to throw out the food Kei left and wash the fork, I felt the faucet vibrating. I listened more carefully, over the light whine of the radiator that could not decide, in the wee hours of this late March morning, whether to blast me with heat or to knock, impotently, on and off.
The shower. Of course. That was why she hadn’t answered.
The bathroom door was closed, but the bedroom was open. She’d left signs of herself all over my room. My bedspread was rumpled, tugged off toward one corner. Her flowered blouse and a pair of blue bell-bottoms already threaded by a thin gold elastic belt had been flung onto my bed. Kei’s duffel bag was open and spilling out more clothes, as if she was looking for something.
I folded Kei’s clothes as the disc jockey took over the radio, then placed them back inside her bag. As I picked up one of her blouses, a necklace fell onto the bed. It was a piece of jade half the length of my finger on a green, knotted cord. I was surprised to see it. Arnie hadn’t failed to tell me that Kei made a very good living making and selling jewelry, but I’d assumed she was hawking tin plumeria earrings to tourists. This piece, plain as it was and strangely familiar, had character. Where had I seen it?
I don’t know how long I stood there, contemplating the pendant. And also my mother’s leather case, of course, where she kept her small collection of mementos. That was lying on my bed, half tumbled on its side. Kei had brought it, just as I had known she would. I sank down beside Kei’s things, sitting hard on the edge of my mattress. I was as careful as I could be not to disturb Mama’s case. I wasn’t ready to touch it again.
“I have your inheritance,” Kei had told me. Was it several weeks ago when she called? “I need to talk to you.”
I hadn’t wanted to hear her voice because it was my voice. I couldn’t bear to argue with her. Kei could make up a story for anything; she fabricated a world with her fantasies, retold the truth. That was, in fact, the thing about my sister that I feared the most. But need? Kei had passed the cutoff for that long ago. It was my turn to get what I needed. And more than anything, what I needed was a reality I could cling to when things began to slip away.
As for my inheritance, Kei knew better. Although I could think of a long list of things our mother had left us—secrets, ghosts, and insanity, among them—our actual inheritance had been settled when Mama and Arnie died six months ago. It was, in its entirety, barely enough money to “plant them” as Arnie used to say, plus the house. And the one thing I wanted nothing to do with: Mama’s leather case.
Mama had named me her executor. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. From the moment we were given names, I was always Hana, the good daughter—the perfect daughter, really. It was my definition. Kei was the black sheep, given to impulse and destruction. My sister was charismatic but dangerously jealous, and three times in our li
ves together, she’d left me painted in blood. And yet no matter what Kei did, Mama kept choosing my sister, protecting her, supporting her, while I was left to find my own way. I’d come to understand too late: The bad girl is the one who sucks up all the air in the room.
By the time Kei called to say she was coming to New York, I already knew that she had gone to the bank and managed to withdraw the leather case from the safe deposit box where I had left it. I had received a confirmation copy of the withdrawal slip. She had signed it with my name. My precise slashes, which she had perfected when we were in our teens, and then mimicked so that whenever I tried to change it, her signature was always almost my own. It was easy to see her bent over the lamp on her bedside table, her fingers shimmying across the page. It shook me, that sudden vision of her, practicing. Blackening both sides of each sheet with my name.
As hard as I had fought to protect myself against her, that forged autograph had scribbled over my new life. My nightmares were the first thing to return. In them, I am lost in utter darkness. A dark so deep I cannot find myself; I cannot even see my hand when I touch my face. These were the nightmares that drove away my college roommates, the dreams I’d fled across the country to escape. They came with middle-of-the-night screams and sleeping with the light on. In the mornings, I used to stumble to a mirror, both longing for and terrified of the face I’d see. Until the mirrors started getting broken, then going missing. Until I started having blackouts, spells disturbingly like Mama’s. Sometimes, I would come back to myself to find I’d been sketching eerie portraits in a kind of sleepwalking state.
I couldn’t help what I didn’t see in those mirrors, any more than I could stop the nightmares. Any more than I could reclaim my memories, which are as utterly empty as most of my dreams. The moment my life hinged on was the same one my sanity had blocked for me. I could see myself standing, happy, at the mouth of the cave, surrounded by people I’d thought were my friends. And then nothing. Nothing, except Kei vanishing, and her boyfriend Eddie’s whispers, and me waking up in the hospital, crusted in dried blood.
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