Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  People will disappear, girls. That was another way it could happen. Not hunted down by the strangers she was always on the lookout for, but by choice, too. All she had to do was tip, so slightly, and in a moment she could be gone.

  Those were the days when Mama would lie down. She never collapsed abruptly; she never dropped anything or pricked her finger on an enchanted needle. She would set aside whatever she was doing, her movements dragging slower until they stopped. We kept a blanket on the pune’e to put on the floor beneath her, but she didn’t always have time to get it before she went down.

  There were whole days when she didn’t get up.

  And if I try now, what can I remember? It’s an image so familiar I could draw it from memory. Three prone figures in white on the floor: the middle one tall, refusing to bend in either direction, the small ones curled. Three dark heads of hair, dark eyelash fringes—similar faces, though Kei’s and mine were fatter with life. Mama’s breath was shallow and slow, her skin moist and flushed red with a rash of pinpricks. Her most regular movement was her swallow—more insistent than her heartbeat—and I could almost feel the fluid in her body run past her eardrums and collect in tart pockets at the back of her tongue. She was always thirsty, so we brought her water in a large mayonnaise jar filled in the bathtub, which she drank from a length of flexible tubing. We brought her ice cubes, which she sucked on, and when her fever spiked too high, we skated them over her skin.

  “Don’t open your mouth,” our mother often warned us. Her eyes were closed, and we had no idea who she was speaking to. “Don’t swallow. They’re dead, all of them in the river. They are still drinking, but they’re dead.”

  She would be silent awhile, and then add, “Ah, you can’t protect, ne? Not against the past. Not from the leaving.”

  Her words echoed behind the hum of her blood in my ear.

  The “dead ones” in my mother’s river were probably the damned. At least, that’s how I used to picture it. The sinners who’d already sealed their fates but didn’t know it. Sins in Mama’s world were often slippery and difficult to identify. Good deeds did not return, nor could they shield you. The world was big, and uncaring, and even the most careful, most thought-out decision could send you down the wrong path. Now, I wonder if my mother’s life was like that. Two bastard children; a family who must have thrown her out when she disgraced them. What else had she endured? She never volunteered any information about her life before us. I knew she grew up in California, but I had never dared ask how she’d gotten to Hawaii. Had she come with our father, or was he long gone? Now I can see that, with that sixth sense that children have, I must have been afraid we were responsible for whatever shame had separated her from her family. If I had questions that I dared to ask, it was only later that they occurred to me. Once it was too late.

  But in those days, we were too young to be worried. We knew there was one thing that could bring our mother back from her ghosts and the sleeping. Stories.

  “Mama?” It was usually Kei who asked for them, lifting her head so she could look at Mama with upturned eyes. “Kudasai Lillie please, deska?”

  Sometimes just the name “Lillie” was enough to get Mama to move.

  “Mama? Lillie and the mirror? Moon-Lillie deska?”

  Mama’s eyes were still closed. There was nothing in her face to indicate that she heard us.

  Kei kept begging. “Onegai?”

  And that plea, soaring in Kei’s long, singing syllables, was the key.

  “Once upon a time,” our mother began, “there was a preacher and his wife who could not have any children. They were very lonely, just the two of them. Their church was empty, and they were also very poor.” Her eyes remained closed. The words, dredged up from far away, rolled from her as slow as they pleased.

  Kei smiled. She liked to be obeyed. This was the first in the series of stories, the one where Lillie was found. “Good girl,” she said, reaching out a small, soft hand to pat Mama’s chest in approval. “Nice, nice Mama.”

  Did Mama notice Kei’s compliments? She might have, as she continued: “Then one day, the preacher’s wife opened her front door and what did she find but—”

  “A giant peach, with a girl inside,” Kei said as if Mama was really asking a question. “And she has black long hair and night eyes—”

  “A beautiful girl,” Mama agreed. The peach was from another story.

  We were drifting in our mother’s voice, for we knew this story well. Lillie was a gift, a magic child—from the moment she appeared, other blessings arrived. Food came to the door in the same way Lillie did, families began to travel to the church from neighboring farms. Lillie was never allowed outside the house or the church, for her own protection, but it didn’t matter because she had a family. When the preacher’s wife made her beautiful dresses and taught her to sing in the evenings for her new parents, the thin line of music Mama hummed wrapped tightly around the three of us. By the time Lillie began to sing in church, attracting so many new members to the congregation that the preacher’s wife decided to open a school, my mother’s voice was just a murmur. But it didn’t matter. We knew Lillie would reappear.

  There was something reassuring in this story for all of us. Kei liked the power the girl had—that she was strong and gifted, and that she’d come to save the preacher and his wife; I was moved by the plight of the orphan and relieved that she’d found a home. My mother, though she never said so, always seemed taken with the idea of the church as a refuge.

  Whenever her story was over, my mother would always lapse into sleep. Her breathing was still shallow—still sick—but we did not run to get help. We didn’t even bother to stay quiet, since she would remain unconscious until she came back on her own.

  Instead, we squabbled on top of her body.

  “Ah,” Kei said, “Momo-boy, ne?” She was choosing the next story for our mother when she woke. It was the tale of the peach, and the boy who was so strong it didn’t matter that he was lazy. “Ah,” she offered, lowering her voice to cajole me, “belly button yum, ne?” It was a different version of the same tale—a little girl without a belly button who saved the town from the ogres.

  I shook my head.

  Kei turned her charm on me then, for it was my turn to choose the next story. “Mighty Mountain,” she whispered, holding my eyes with hers. This one was a fairy tale about three strong women. As Mama had always told it, about twins.

  I thought about the twins and their mother, living high in the mountains where no one ever went. About the web of strength between them—their inheritance—which they could choose to share or not. It was not as good as a Lillie story, but Mama gave those out so sparingly. In the end, it was easier to give in.

  “Koko, perfect,” I said, and then I snuggled into my mother’s sweat.

  Looking back, I can’t help but wonder at those two girls. At the single name we tossed back and forth between us, and our twin language, with its lack of verbs and made-up endings, that rises even now like an old song. In this still shimmering memory, the evening is what was “perfect”—having my mother under my hands, my sister’s face breathing into mine.

  Could I have meant that? Was “perfect” a limitation of my clearly inadequate language, or was it really my experience? Why weren’t we terrified that our mother was too weak even to stay conscious? Why didn’t we go next door to ask Old Harada-san and his wife for help? Even if we didn’t know exactly what was wrong with our mother then, I can still see her curdled pink-and-white skin and feel the mist of sweat collecting in her hair. But in those days, all we knew was that the three of us were together. Mama always got up eventually, and when she did, we had her heartbeat and a story.

  Could perfect, in fact, have been the right word?

  I must have dozed, because the ice cubes that I’d gathered had melted when I was jolted awake. Kei suddenly went stiff, making herself as large as she could, as immovable.

  Her eyelids sprang open.

  I rememb
er jumping up from my chair in confusion. She was in a different position, surely, but how could she have moved? She clearly didn’t see me, and yet she moved again as I watched. This time her legs bent and straightened, grimly, like a marionette’s.

  She was wrestling with him, I thought. Her attacker.

  I called out for help, running to her, and then to the curtain, and then back to the bed. The alarm sounded, summoning a staff of doctors I’d never met. There were words, suddenly, where there had been none, and voices. There were bodies between us: poking, pulling, applying resistance, calling.

  “Hanako? Can you hear me?”

  Blink your eyes, they said. Bend your fingers.

  I stepped back. As the doctors fussed around her, trying to get her limbs to release, trying to cause a reaction, I realized that, until that moment, I hadn’t accepted that Kei could be seriously injured. I had expected that she was going to open her eyes any minute and smile at me, say jus’ one joke. She had gotten away with so much in her life that it didn’t seem possible her luck could run out. Six years ago, Kei had broken me into pieces, erased me from my own life. It never occurred to me that she might, now, be as frightened as I was.

  And then their voices registered. Hanako, they had called her.

  I stepped back further, outside the curtain, no longer trying to see. As the volume of voices lowered, it became clear that she wasn’t responding the way they wanted. There were fewer people around the bed. But still, when the last nurse turned to leave, I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “She’s coming out of it?”

  She shook her head and that was when I learned two more terms: spastic, and reflexive without reactivity or perceptivity. “You should go home. Get some rest.”

  “I need to be here.”

  She caught my eyes. “Maybe a shower? You have time.”

  “Maybe.” I let it sink in—both the shower and the time. But I would say whatever I needed to get her to leave me, because there was something that I understood now that I needed to see.

  She placed a silent hand on my shoulder as if I were a crutch she needed to get by, and then I was alone. I stepped toward Kei’s bed. They’d put soft pads over her spastic eyes to keep them shut. Now, there was even less of her to recognize, except her wristband, which I had never thought to look at.

  There it was: SWANSON, HANAKO.

  Somehow, in all the paperwork and repeated questions, Kei had lost her name and taken mine. Only then did I remember that I had given the triage nurses my own insurance card. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, the voice in my head assured me, even before my guilt kicked in. What else was I supposed to do with the naked, half-dead body of my twin sister? Especially since she had no purse, no insurance of her own? Still, the fact of it sent chills through the center of my being: It had never been me they were addressing when they picked up the clipboard and read off the name “Hanako Swanson.”

  It is Kei, it is Kei, it is Kei, I could hear the singsong whisper.

  And it was.

  Koko

  There is a breeze. Can you feel it?

  It’s a light breeze, only a little cooler than the day. It’s the kind that eddies on your shoulder.

  Mama has risen. Opened the front door.

  Arnie is here.

  We are five. Wearing white dresses to reflect the sun.

  White is the only safe color, according to our mother.

  “Koko, deska?” one of us asks, checking in with the other. We have never seen a haole up close before. Not one so tall.

  We link hands, look at Mama.

  She isn’t expecting him, either.

  These are the days when both of us are still Koko. There is no one or the other. No Hana, no Kei. Nothing is set. We can go back there, to the time when we could still be whoever we wanted. It’s a time of intuition, of knowing what the other is thinking so well that it doesn’t occur to us that anything needs to be spoken. It is not the same with Mama, of course. She is weak and needs words, but still we love her. We love to be three with her. To take care of her when she falls.

  When Arnie drives up, we are still three, sitting at the kitchen table, shredding stacks of newspaper into long, thin slivers. Harada-san needs them for his flowers. He is the old man who owns our house. His wife smiles at us more than other ladies, and brings us sweets that we never know if it’s okay to eat. But the newspapers are okay. It’s a job we love: the way the paper rips in straight, sure tears if we pull it in the right direction, from the tops of the pictured people down to their feet. Remember how our fingers blacken quickly? How we try to hold them away from our white clothes? When we are pau, we will all three jump into the large burlap bags we recycle, packing down the shreds with our feet and the weight of our bodies. We all three will crowd into the tiny bathtub. Two girls and Mama, we will lather the soap against our gray skin, scrubbing stubby hands and thin ones. Remember how we watch the proof of our labor run down the drain?

  We are halfway through the stack when we hear the car engine. Old Harada-san broke his shoulder falling off his roof, so we know it isn’t him. Harada-san hasn’t come for six weeks, and in that time, we have seen no one. Mama leaves instead. Six times to town. She wraps our green avocados in newspaper then places them carefully in sacks, one for each hand and one for her back. Before she goes, she spins a magic circle around the house that keeps us safe inside and silent as secrets. She says it will keep the dead away. When she returns, there is rice for us and, on special days, tofu. Sometimes she gets a ride, she told us once. But only from our kind. We hear the warning. We know there are bad people out there that Mama needs to hide us from. But we don’t know what our kind is.

  On this day, though, there is something about this car engine. Mama continues ripping, but her motions are smaller with the sound. She is tense, even her eyes holding steady. We have always admired this about her, how she can disappear while she’s still there.

  It could be someone lost, turning around, going back to where the people live. Mama’s hands don’t stop until a car door slams and a man’s shoes step up the stairs.

  Mama stands before this strange man, blackened hands hanging from her wrists like fruit. Look at her light green blouse and loose, clumsy pants. Her gentle braid sways down her spine. It is midafternoon and she looks soft, weathered.

  We like her best on these days, don’t we? The days when she doesn’t leave the house.

  Mama’s eyes move around the room and ours go with her. Now we can see the mound of shredded newspaper spilling off the kitchen table. We can see how close things are, how they’ve suddenly shrunk in size. The pune’e nudges the man’s calves. He is three steps from everything else. Including Mama.

  She is so small, he could tuck her beneath his shoulder.

  “Girls, this is Mr. Swanson.”

  We dip our heads as we do to the Haradas, watching him in case he moves. Trying to guess which direction he will go in and what he will knock over.

  “Mr. Swanson has come to…”

  We are all three waiting to hear how he will finish Mama’s sentence. He barks, cheerfully, and then says, “Just passing by. I missed you in town this week, so…I thought I’d say hello.”

  “Oh. Well. Sit down. Sit down, then.” Mama doesn’t explain his words: I missed you in town this week. “Can I get you something? If you can stay.”

  “You have RC?” he asks, and then misinterprets our surprise. “It’s a soda pop. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you got will do.”

  No one stayed. That you must remember. Only Harada-san and his wife ever came by. Can’t you see them, sneaking up the front steps, tontoko, tontoko, and Mama always rushing to greet them? You must be so tired. Please come in. The newspapers are so heavy. You are so good to come.

  And Old Harada-san always shakes his head, puts his hand up. No trouble, he is saying. He has only come to leave the newspapers, or to retrieve the shreds for packing and shipping his anthuriums. We are earning the house with those shreds. Each sack i
s a plank, a nail, a hinge that will make it ours.

  Harada-san’s wife never speaks or smiles at Mama, but she, too, is part of the dance. The escape: They must refuse each offer of food or drink until they are safely out the door. Mrs. Harada steps back when Mama steps forward. She keeps her eyes on the floor, as if the planks are terribly important, except when Mama calls for us and we two are brought into the room. Then, her eyes suck us in, her hands rising to cover her mouth or to finger the jade pendant that hangs from her neck. She loves us like she is starving. Look at her and remember. What does she want us to call her? Aunt Suzy? But we never do. We bow, we bow. Then they go.

  Arnie is standing too close to Mama. In light green, her hands and hair hanging, she doesn’t move as we three wait for him to withdraw his request for an “RC” and back out of the house. When he doesn’t, Mama retreats toward the kitchen. Sidestepping, bouncing on her toes like she might change her mind. But instead, she leaves us with him. Just us, two girls, without her.

  We back away as she did and tuck ourselves into the cane chair. We do this flat-footed: toe then heel, right foot then left. And there we wait for her return.

  Arnie sits on the pune’e, near the front edge. He sinks until his knees nearly reach his shoulders. He scoots back toward the wall and sinks again, though not as deeply. His arms snake down to the cushions, where the long length of them lies.

  “Koko, silk-silk, ne?”

  He has not removed his work boots, which even the Haradas do when they step into the house on their short errands. His shoes are crooked. One is normal, but the other heel is much heavier and taller and it sits on the floor like a rock. These shoes are deeply creased and lined with sawdust. But as unexpected as they are, we are not staring at his shoes.