Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  My mother wasn’t there.

  How can a mother abandon her child like that? It’s a question that can barely find its shape in words. How can a sister disfigure her sister? Mama chose Kei over me. By then, Kei was popular, confident, whereas I was just beginning to realize how repulsive my ruined body would seem to her. I was my mother’s worst nightmare, and I couldn’t bear to see her recoil from me again.

  Every day, I still hoped for them—Kei and Mama—and when they didn’t come, I punished Arnie. I made sure he saw every detail of my shredded knees. They were raw knobs, swollen mounds of poké—sashimi flecked with bits of black cinder and served up just for him. I made sure he saw my legs: shins tattooed in brick red. My arms were impressive, too: my elbows swollen twice their normal size, my forearms scraped flat and oozing. Arnie’s questions went unanswered: What happened, Hana? What kind of monster could do such a thing? My anger was all I had; my silence the only edge I could push hard enough to force Kei to come to see me. It wasn’t enough, of course. Nothing I did was ever enough.

  And now, six years later, Kei and I were finally together in a hospital, and I was the one who would have given anything to escape. My mouth was thick with Cheetos dust, and my adrenaline had ebbed, leaving me nauseated, when the nurse finally called for me.

  “Miss Swanson?”

  The tests were over. Kei had been transferred to Intensive Care.

  The ICU was full to capacity, but there was no life in it. There were no doors, no televisions, and the bathrooms were through locked doors and down the hall. They were so unused to the living that they never even turned off the lights; day and night, all the patients floated in the glow of technology, curtains drawn open so that the nurses on duty would be able to see them if they started to die. Each of the eight beds arranged in the semicircle around the nurses’ station held a person so frail you might believe the machines were filtering the life out of them, not the other way around. I recognized Kei instantly by the thick, dark flag of her hair.

  At last, I had access to the doctors. Kei’s injuries were slight—a bump on her head and a severely twisted ankle; also a costochondral separation, which meant a separated rib—except that something was wrong with her brain. She had not regained consciousness, and I could measure their concern by the tangle of wires that mimicked Kei’s still-matted braid, and the litany of words the neurospecialists recited as they assured me of the very many tests they were running. Cerebellum, infarction, aneurysm. Edema, hemorrhage, increased intracranial pressure. All the causes and indicators of coma. Was it the beeping, so many lines of jumping light that came from so many monitors, that made it impossible for me to keep track of what they were saying? I noticed they’d put socks on her, and a tube in her nose, but I couldn’t see Kei’s neck between the brace and the blankets. Her face was chalky—what color she had now lay in the thin surface of her skin.

  Strangulation, they told me when I asked about the bruises on her neck, can cause anoxic brain injury, though in this case we don’t know if she was deprived of oxygen or for how long. There is a hematoma behind her right temple, but fortunately no lesions, no apparent areas of internal swelling in this patient. Your sister. There are no genital abrasions or evidence of, ah, a sexual assault. We have also ruled out a pharmacological cause—

  In other words, they had no idea why she hadn’t woken up.

  But in the list of all the things they didn’t find, there was hope. She had not been raped. She could wake up any moment; all there was to do was wait. Time heals all wounds. Did someone really say that? What I heard for sure is that the first twenty-four hours would be decisive.

  And after that, the first forty-eight.

  I stood inside the ICU curtain, processing my sister. Kei’s consciousness had sunken deep inside her, leaving all the angles in her face to break free and rise to the surface. I could see the architecture of her body. I knew, if I looked, that her ribs would stick out like stepping-stones to her heart. Kei had been divided, and the physical part of her that was also part of me had been assaulted and subdued, while her personality and essence were hiding somewhere out of reach.

  I must have been standing there for some time. Enough that someone brought me a chair from the cafeteria. I was perched on the edge of it, a safe distance from Kei’s bed, as the nurses came by every forty-five minutes to check the machines and pinch the tender skin on her belly. A pattern was quickly established: Whoever was on rounds would open the curtains and pick up Kei’s chart. “Hanako Swanson?” they would ask me, as if I could be anyone else, and then they would flash a light into her pupils and begin their work. I watched as they enacted their routine without comment, which was all I needed to understand that the first twenty-four hours were ticking by, more than half gone. And once they left us alone, the growing bruise on her forearm where the intravenous fluid was needled in was my timekeeper. There was nothing for me to do, no way to help.

  Perhaps I could relate. Perhaps Arnie’s question, What kind of monster would do this? was still haunting the recesses of my mind. But seeing Kei from this angle in profile—the gentle curve of her cheekbone, the tender snub of her nose—she didn’t look like a monster.

  I suddenly found that I could breathe.

  Kei was my sister. How quickly this feeling came swirling through me, after so many years of protecting myself against her. And when it did, I stood up and moved over to her bed. I brought my face close to hers. Nose to nose; brown eye—if hers had been open—to brown eye.

  “Kei?” I asked, my voice disappearing before it could be heard. And then, “Koko?”

  It was the nickname that we gave each other when we were children, made of the small, safe endings left over when our mother created Kei and Hana, the bad girl and the good. It came to me then like a call, a way to sound the depths of our past to find her.

  I hadn’t spoken it in years.

  “Hanako Swanson?” a voice asked from behind me. I jerked away from Kei as the nurse slipped the chart out of its slot. “Date of birth?”

  “April first, 1947,” I mumbled.

  She glanced at the chart and nodded. And then: “She can’t see you.”

  I know a reprimand when I hear one. I pulled back to give the nurse room to work. On the outside—the part of her the nurses were supposed to be tending—Kei’s hair had dried into a ratted halo, fraying and uncertain ropes of it falling to one side. It wasn’t her brain, or her rib, or even her ankle, but wasn’t this still their job?

  I watched the nurse check the monitors. “Do you have a comb?”

  “A comb?” she asked, recording her readings on the clip chart. “No, we don’t have those.”

  Maybe you should go home and get one. I waited for her to say it.

  “There’s a deli on Amsterdam.”

  I nodded, but didn’t move.

  Instead, once the nurse had left, I pulled my chair across the floor until it was beside Kei’s head. My fingers teased a small section of her hair loose and began pulling through the snarls, just as my mother used to do when we were girls. I started with the ends like Mama taught me, avoiding Kei’s scalp, feeling my mother’s ghostly hands tickle my own hair once again as I began to work on Kei’s. An inch at a time, she used to say; anything more would pull the twists and tangles into knots. Do it in order—ends to roots, or all the way around the bottom and then one inch up.

  Kei seemed to frown, if only for an instant. It brought out the tight edges of her skull.

  I’m sorry, I thought at her.

  As a girl, Kei never sat still for my mother’s fingers. She wriggled, and, like everything else in her life, she made things worse. But then Mama would start humming and Kei would immediately relax. Mama made up some lyrics to that tune, something about how “the light on the other side shines on two girls.” I hummed it now, even though I could barely remember how it went.

  “Two girls,” I told her. “Do you remember?”

  I imagined I could feel her listening. And my mot
her, too.

  Two girls.

  Koko

  Two girls. Two white cotton dresses: Simplicity, size 4T. You must remember how we looked then? A-line, eyelet lace on the hem. Long-sleeved shirts underneath, and white cotton momohiki to protect our legs. Tabis on four feet.

  White.

  Lauhala hats, broad with brims to shelter thin, white necks. Gloves, too. Our mama tucked each fragile finger into its cocoon, and still we lost them. Still we flung them. We needed to stroke everything or dismantle it, and the gloves got in our way.

  There is light on the other side.

  Do you remember?

  There’s breath in our ears from sneaking away from Mama. And light between the leaves. The leaves are called oleander, and they are long. Green as the ground. She tells us not to come here. Don’t touch the sap. It will kill you. But when we watch the neighbor children, the leaves must be stripped so we can see.

  The boy is there, on the other side of the oleander, in denim shorts that end in fringe above his knee. We can see his dark nipples and his filled-in skin. His legs are folded. His buttocks hang behind his ankles. He leans forward slightly on his flat, bare feet. Dirt dots his skin and sleeps in Us around his toenails.

  We don’t know where his twin is. We only ever see one boy.

  There is a girl, too. Also only one. She’s smaller than the boy. About our height but rounded like he is, with his same bare feet, his same ropy, red-tinted hair. They have the same skin, the color of wood.

  These children we spy on, toasted by the sun.

  The girl crouches beside the boy. They’re both intent on his kneecap. He scrapes at it with one finger, then lifts something small and dark and puts it in his mouth.

  “Eeeww, gross! You wen eat um! You wen pick your scab and eat um!”

  He looks at her.

  “You wen eat da scab!”

  “So? You eat hanabata. I seen you.”

  “Not.”

  “Do too. Do too. Cindy picks her nose and eats it,” he sings. “Hanabata eater.”

  “Still yet.” The girl stands, steps away from him undecided. She sees us.

  “Eeeww!” She points. “Spy girls! Spy girls!”

  We’ve been waiting for this. Waiting with our thighs pressed against each other’s, savoring the heat between. It is thrilling to be caught. As thrilling as it is to be spied upon.

  We look back at the children, then we all run.

  It is just us, now, with the children gone. Us two, trying out the new word. Hanabata. We prance together on the top of one of the low rock walls embedded in our hill. The hill is steep, so the wall holds it back so it won’t fall into the stream.

  The wall is very low. Maybe three stones high? Two wide? Lava rocks. Full of spindle-sided pukas that tear our clothes. And pale, dusty lichen.

  The air is still and hot. It clutches at us, collecting in our armpits.

  We crouch: feet flat, splayed in a V toward the drop; big toes gripping. White toes, in Mama’s tabis. Fingers free. Our leggings scratch as we tug them so our buttocks can drop like the boy’s, and we bounce, at first only testing. Opening and shutting four white knees.

  “Hanabata, ne?” That’s how it was then. All our questions end in ne.

  Do we dare?

  We look down the steep hill, measuring the jump. Then toward the house where Mama is sleeping. Hanabata, it is. We bounce, faster and higher until we’re standing, then crouching, then standing again. We check with each other—are we ready?—feeling the sweat tickle our necks and faces, and we laugh. We laugh, laugh until one long white scarf unknots and then flies. The hat it was meant to tie down follows. It tumbles away in the still air. One matted head, bouncing and dropping. One head released, to make its own breeze.

  It’s time to follow.

  “Koko!”

  Together we leap for the hat. Arms swimming, legs cycling to drive us through the air, to spin it into something new: a cool breath beneath our dresses. We fall. The scrubby kikuyu grass at the edge of the stream tickles as we tumble. And when we’ve had our fill of flying and rolling in the grass, we crawl, crushing rotted yellow flowers with our knees as we seek the shade of the nearby hau tree. We scratch at the drying sweat on our scalps quickly, replacing the hat, entwining fingers. A puff of stink air blows over from the pen behind the children’s house. Slop and manure in the heat. We breathe in, large and full. By now, our heartbeats are steady and the hot iron has worn out of our dresses, leaving the scent of Mama’s soap to rise.

  We lie with our hands laced on the grass, inside our mama’s safety, and relive our temporary flight.

  “Hanabata.”

  Hana

  I didn’t leave. Kei didn’t wake. The nurses gave me their barely perceptible frowns of acknowledgment when they found me still slumped in the molded plastic chair every time they came to check on Kei. I called the number Detective Lynch had given me and left her a message telling her where I was. No doubt she would judge me, but whether as someone friendless or as a devoted sister, I didn’t know. At least at the hospital, we were safe from Kei’s attacker.

  They added machines, more tubes, but Kei was unresponsive. I was so weary I could feel my heartbeat dragging. Though the room had no windows, the clock told me I had been there so long we had entered into another night. I could imagine the moon and the impossibly blood-orange clouds that would be floating through the dark sky in the city; I had nowhere to go, no one I could turn to, and no choice but to hope the staff would take pity on me and let me stay until morning. I could feel the pull of sleep, the toss of dreams, and the danger that was waiting there. My nightmares were still worse than my waking life, though not by much.

  To keep myself awake, I went down to the cafeteria on the second floor, which was less appetizing than a vending machine and possibly less nutritious. I was ravenous, and I thought, how bad could a bagel be? But everything was closed and dark. I grabbed a paper cup off a serving station; water was free and I was dehydrated. Then I filled it with ice and carried it back to Kei’s bedside.

  All our lives, Kei had been my unexpected mirror—the one in which your image appears before you can compose yourself, where you must confront yourself unassembled in those split seconds before you remember who you are. Standing over her, still trying to work out the cramps and cricks from my night in the chair, I fished a piece of ice out of my cup and placed it on Kei’s chest. I did it with the same stunned dissociation that I’d felt in my bathroom, which had led me to place my fingers into the bruises on her neck. I half-expected a jolt, to feel her feel me even through the ice cube that separated us, but there was no response. What was it like to be so free from fear and pain? I circled the ice inside the hollow between her collarbones until its edges rounded, losing hope that I could reach her. Then I lifted it off her perfect skin, and placed it on my own lips.

  The ice was soft and almost immediately painful. I closed my eyes and traced the cube across my mouth, then drew it down my chin and neck until it became a more familiar thing. We used to do this for our mother when we were very young, in her “lying down days” when she complained of the cold but burned between us until morning. And now I wondered: Did the ice also feel like a fever? I could feel myself slipping with the ice, just a little, into tenderness, and my heart closed like a fist against the dangers I would surely find there.

  I swirled the ice cube in the hollow of my own throat with caution, feeling for the ridges of my windpipe. Then I skated it down my arm, beneath my loose sleeves and in the gutters between my scars. My wounds had closed over time but long, pink keloids hugged my body like worms. My knees were buckling, misshapen little brains. I made it a careful practice not to look at them; I didn’t have to see them to know: I could feel each scar, along my arms, my back, as if it was placed there yesterday. They were numb to the cold. The pain picked up only in the bend of my elbow, before disappearing in a small splash in my hand.

  The ice was dripping, and half its original size, when I pl
aced it on Kei’s lips. I held it there, letting the cold water trickle into her mouth safely, until it was gone.

  * * *

  When Kei and I were very young, and it was still just the three of us, we lived in a small plantation house so far off the main street you couldn’t see it. The house was square, divided exactly in half—kitchen and living room on one side, adjoining bedrooms on the other with a bathroom so small that the door couldn’t open inward and swung out into the living room instead. Our lot was only twice as wide as the house itself; a skinny piece of land that fell down in two directions: gently toward the ocean and more steeply toward the stream that ran along its length. Because our house was on a hill, our front door was close to the ground, accessible by a short run of pavestones that led to a landing filled with shoes. The rest of it floated on stilts, cantilevered almost a full story above the sharp drop down to the stream.

  Our favorite place was the long, shadowed lanai that wrapped around our house. That porch was unusual for a house like ours—a simple workers’ home, identical in most other ways to the clusters of shacks that filled the nearby camps, with their raspy board and batten walls and their unlined, tin-hat roofs. We often crouched there, peering through the wide-spaced slats of the railing to survey the fruit trees and the three long, terraced plots of vegetables bound by the low lava rock walls that we used to jump off. And in the farthest corner of the property, beneath the huge, ancient hau tree: my mother’s garden.

  Even though most of my old memories have left me, I know there were nights when we woke up to find Mama planting in the moonlight. We still slept with her in those days, and Kei and I would wake up when the bed was cool and walk out onto our lanai where we could see her under the drowsy but plentiful stars. Perched on her knees at the edge of the narrow tears she had made in the dirt beside the broccoli, she looked so tiny. She seemed about to dive into the waiting earth, head first, then shoulders, slipping into the dark, wounded world beneath her. A world that would close around her, slick as water, and leave no clue she had ever existed.