Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  I found an aged elevator to take me down to the receiving area. I descended in a fugue state, to find a new and smaller night crew. Detective Lynch wasn’t there, and no one seemed to care who I was or where I was going. I made it all the way through the first set of glass doors and down the steps to the outer door.

  Then it happened.

  Night had fallen and the world beyond the glass was black, the street erased by the reflected light of the precinct behind me. Standing at the door, I realized it could open onto anything. I froze. Dry leaves of fear blew through me: pricking my inner ears, the backs of my knees, my instep; scraping all the soft, shielded places where I thought I couldn’t be touched.

  My fear of the dark had returned. I had arrived in New York with a terror of living in anything but a continuous blaze of electricity, and a timidity—okay, really a freezing—in precarious situations: stepping into elevators, walking at night, and most especially when I found myself alone with a man. I called it vertigo: an otherworldly slipping that kept me caught in one place while time and space seemed to move. Panic disorder, Dr. Shawe had called it, one of the rare times she resorted to medical terminology. Tonic immobility, a normal part of the defense cascade. But her reassurance that it was a common response to trauma didn’t make it any less psychotic or unfair.

  But that was then, and over time, I had stopped freezing at every corner until finally I couldn’t precisely remember the last time I’d found myself unable to move. Until now. Standing in yet another vestibule, I could no longer raise a foot to slide it forward. I couldn’t lean ahead to force myself to leave. My mind and my body were two distinct creatures, and one couldn’t understand why the other would not respond. Although I could no longer step out onto the street as I had done just hours before, the truth was it was that earlier freedom that now seemed so inconceivable.

  Take a step. Take a step. Take a step. I tried to coax myself into moving.

  It wasn’t working. Neither was the obvious fact that I was standing in the door of a police station; one of the safest places I could possibly be. There was no way I was going to be able to step into that dark night.

  I heard a new voice in my head. “Don’t let go.” It was hauntingly familiar; in fact it was my own: six years earlier, giddy and young. Something twitched in my brain—loosened—and Russell, my first and only boyfriend, was pinning a flower to my dress. His fingers entwined with mine. His hands soft and slightly damp. We were all going to the dance; at least that was what they told me. My first dance, even though I was a senior, almost finished with high school. It was everything I ever wanted. Everything, but this also: “Promise me you won’t let go of my hand.”

  We were such children.

  Just like that, my mind had tricked me: turned me around, then delivered me back to the night of the cave. There I was, about to get into the car. I closed my eyes, refusing to remember. Blocking out my dress, yellow, a Simplicity pattern, which Mama and I had finished sewing only that afternoon. Blocking out the touch of the soft cotton on my shoulders. I blocked out Eddie, Missy, and the rest of Kei’s gang, too. And Russell. My heart was pounding so loudly that it seemed a real possibility that it could explode.

  No.

  I gasped for breath, realizing only then that I had been holding it, and opened my eyes to bring myself home.

  I was shaking. Afraid of the dark, more afraid of the monster I would see if I ever took a good look at myself. That was what happened in the cave, the night that my sanity skipped over.

  I became monstrous.

  I stepped backward up the stairs of the police station, as if slinking away from a predator, then when my back hit the set of inner doors, I turned, almost throwing myself against them. The officer at the main desk looked up, wary, as I burst back into the receiving area. He didn’t recognize that I had just passed him on my way out.

  “Can I help you—”

  Several other policemen started toward me from different places in the room.

  “If you could just…I was just here. Looking at the mug shots. I need…” I paused, trying to make some kind of sense. “I’m a witness. I need a ride home.”

  It took a while for him to sort out what I was saying. The officer’s expression said he had seen people like me before. People with impossible demands. “Detective Lynch brought me,” I explained to him. “She said she would be here…”

  “Claremont Avenue? That’s just a few blocks away. We aren’t a cab service.”

  Could I say my ankles were weak? My shoes broken? I was weak all over, so only one was a lie. “I’m going back to the hospital. It’s farther.”

  “The hospital?” I watched him try to decide whether I was the patient.

  This was Kei’s fault, I thought. She had ruined me, abandoned me, forced me to learn new ways to survive. And I had done it. Since I left home, I had relied on meticulous planning—every decision weighed exactly to ensure that it contained not a single ounce of danger. For years, I lived in the light, stayed away from strangers, skirted anything stressful or scary, and, most important, kept my past behind its obliging veil. I had begun to heal, and then Kei came back and ripped all my wounds open. And now, I was surrounded by policemen looking at me as if I was oozing, as if my damage might be dangerous, or contagious.

  “Never mind. I’ll just…if you could call a taxi for me, I’ll just go home.”

  The officer looked as if he’d like to tell me he wasn’t a secretary, either, but then he relented. Perhaps he could see the stinging in my eyes as I tried to hold on. There was a squad car that had to go in that direction anyway, he told me. If I could wait a few minutes, they would take me home.

  Home, I thought. If only I had one. I had been run out of my home in Hawaii, my safe haven destroyed long before. There was no place for me there. I was trapped, and as the police delivered me to my apartment not too many minutes later, I could feel the danger that Kei brought with her pressing me deep into the cushions of the car.

  Home. It was unbearable. But the apartment waiting four stories above me was the only place I had left in the world.

  1942–1943

  Manzanar. That was where they had been sent. It meant “apple orchard.” It was an empty plain. A desert, really, once the city of Los Angeles had diverted all its water. Now it was a city of tarpaper barracks, lined up in a hurry and standing at attention. The first Japanese Americans who were sent there would build it for the ten thousand others who came after. All of them crammed into skeletal buildings without partitions, three or four families together. They were people Lillie could get lost among, but who were not, she was to find out, remotely like her.

  They were given bags of straw to sleep on. They had to stand in line to use the open latrines. They stood in line, too, to eat their meals in the mess hall in their allotted thirty-minute slots of time. Dust storms blasted through the planks in the floors and the cracks under the doors and the walls and left, within minutes, a blanket of fine dirt almost as deep as Lillie’s fingernail. People took to carrying goggles, when they could get them, for when they got caught outside in the sudden gray storms.

  Lillie was two months pregnant when they arrived at Manzanar, throwing up on the train, but her mother-in-law was even worse off. The old woman had started coughing blood almost immediately. It was more than the dust—none of them had ever experienced such brutal extremes in temperature: blazing hot by noon and freezing shortly after the sun set. At night, they pushed their beds together to keep from shivering, but it didn’t help much. Lillie had to keep opening the seal of warmth in the blankets so she could vomit in the bucket they kept outside the door.

  Lillie spent most of her time going back and forth to the hospital in the compound. It had no walls. For a while it had no roof, either. The staff was mostly volunteer, and the doctors had to supply even basic medical instruments on their own. They tested Donald’s mother for tuberculosis, the only diagnosis that would have qualified her for a transfer to a real hospital, but the
results were negative. It was probably the dust, they said. It was probably the weather. It was seven long months of being examined and then turned away. Donald’s mother kept saying she was ready to die, leaning heavily against Lillie on the long walk back to their little room in the barracks. She was only holding on to see her grandson. Donald’s mother knew he was a boy, because when she whispered to Lillie’s belly, brushing her hands on Lillie’s tight skin in endless circles so he would know her, she could hear him answer. “Teaching him Japanese,” she teased. But it was a kind joke.

  The baby was a bridge between the two women, a new start for the family. In the camp, they had each other. Meanwhile, the men kept themselves busy.

  There were jobs running the camp and even building it. Though they were paid almost nothing, at least the internees had something to do. There were factions forming between those who had actually lived in Japan, as Donald and his parents had, and those who had never even seen it. In the evenings, the men began to gather, and fights broke out between the Kibei—the American-born children who had gone to school in Japan like Donald had, though he had only been there for a year or two and his memories were hazy—and the “loyal” Americans who had formed some kind of league. Lillie knew little about the fights, just that the conversations got heated. Donald protected her from it, and Lillie didn’t gossip, not that she had friends who would have whispered the rumors to her. What Donald did tell her was that someone was stealing the food the government was sending, and no one knew where to point fingers. Where had the meat gone? The sugar?

  Donald was ever more indignant, but Lillie was just numb.

  It was December when the riots began. Lillie tried to ignore them at first. It was better to keep your head down in the camps, she thought, though it was true that this was not a new impulse for her; her parents had brought her up to be humble and respectful, as befit a daughter of the church. Then one night, Lillie was in their barracks with Donald’s parents when the shouting grew right outside their windows. Most of the shouting was undoubtedly in English, since speaking Japanese in the camps was prohibited, but Lillie couldn’t make out what the problem was. From the tone of the yelling—something about inu, which meant “dog”—Lillie understood there was no fire, no emergency that they would have to contend with, and that the three of them were safer in the room. The sound eased as the crowd moved past their block toward the mess hall.

  Then they heard the shots.

  Lillie ducked, though she was not in front of the window. Donald, she thought, panicking. Where was he? On the weekends, he usually played cards with his Kibei friends. Donald’s mother clutched anxiously at her blanket, but his father insisted there was no reason to worry. The riot must have trapped him in the hall where their game was; he would not want to cross a crowd like that to get home.

  When Donald slipped through the door many hours later, disheveled and alarmed, he confirmed that his father had been right. Lillie didn’t ask him what he’d seen. She would wait until morning to find out what happened—now he should rest. Though as the night stretched on, she could tell that no one was really sleeping. Donald’s body was like ice, too stiff beside her, and the whole camp was frozen as a held breath. Only Lillie shifted, restless, as her baby kicked, regular as a metronome, against the tightening band around her womb.

  She must have slept, since just before dawn, Lillie woke to a fierce contraction. She moaned, still half awake, and reached out for Donald, but he returned her hand to her and slipped out of the covers, throwing on his heavy peacoat to go to the latrine. Her mother-in-law must have been in pain, too. She was sobbing softly beside her husband, and for once, the old man didn’t seem annoyed at her weakness, but propped himself up on the bed beside hers and let her cry. Lillie was too shocked by the pounding in her lower back to wonder why everyone was awake. She pulled her knit hat over her ears and curled on her side, letting the cramps rush through her. It was still dark, and the night was still below freezing, clearly not the right time to draw attention to herself. With her arms slung around her belly, she breathed, wondering how long it would be before she would be ready to go to the hospital. She longed for her own mother’s arms around her, her warm hand against her skin, but she had thrown her lot in with Donald’s family, and there was no one else who could help her. She was going to have to do this alone.

  She waited all that morning, slow to come to the understanding that Donald was not coming back. It could have been Tateishi-sama’s unusual patience with his wife, or the fact that they had no interest in doing anything, even getting food at the canteen. Neither of them looked over at Lillie, even as she stayed in bed and the fierce tightening continued, as constant as her breath, though not as quick. The neighbors next to them had been gone all day, leaving a blanket of quiet that Lillie had to work hard not to puncture, and it was in that noiselessness between her caught breaths that Lillie could almost remember Donald’s dead-of-the-night whispers to his father, and the old man’s measured response.

  When the military police arrived, it was all Lillie could do to scramble into a sitting position. What had been a band around her belly spread through her entire torso; the pain was everywhere, pounding on the floor of her pelvis and deep inside her bones. The police informed them that a snitch had reported seeing one of the instigators of the riots sneaking into their room after dark, and it was only then that she finally understood. Tateishi-sama stood, and in a moment of quiet, reserved dignity, put his wrists out for handcuffs.

  Donald didn’t return.

  The barracks door closed behind Donald’s father, and Lillie was ashamed to feel something like relief. It was nothing to be proud of, but there it was, just an instant, when his criticism lifted, before the weight of her labor bore down again. She heard noises outside and looked up, expecting Donald, but it was only the neighbor couple, returning—of course—within minutes of the visit from the MPs.

  Where was her husband? Why would he let them take his father in his place? Lillie had no time to linger on these questions—her labor was filling her body, running through the tops of her femurs and into her thighs, and now, just as she was left alone with her mother-in-law, the old woman started to convulse with coughing. It was only the tears that brought it on, her mother-in-law said, but Lillie understood she was also giving up. As Lillie tried to stand so she could comfort Donald’s mother, she felt a pop deep inside her and a warm rush of fluid between her legs. She cried out for the neighbors, who gathered the two sobbing women in their arms and somehow hurried them to the hospital.

  Donald never returned that night, the night his mother died, choking in her own blood on one side of the makeshift hospital room, crying out for her only son. He was not there a few hours later when, on the other side, Lillie gave birth. No one could have stayed in the latrine all day, she knew; not sitting on the holes cut into the splintered wooden benches that the internees were forced to use, side by unbearable side. Not even for an hour. But she never asked her husband where he’d hidden while his mother died and his father was taken, and his wife brought their son into the world all alone.

  She didn’t ask, because there couldn’t be an answer.

  After the riots, the camp was quiet. Whether the arrests were right or wrong—depending on whom you talked to—the atmosphere seemed to lighten somewhat, since the agitators from both sides were arrested or removed. For a few weeks, martial law kept everyone in their barracks as much as possible, whispering among themselves as if the influx of patrolling soldiers might hear them through the holes in their walls and send them off to jail, too. Which meant, as soon as Lillie left the hospital and found Donald waiting for her in their newly empty partition in the barracks, the two of them were left alone with their son.

  Lillie could lose a whole day lying next to Toshi. Her son was a miracle. Lillie brushed his skin with her cheeks. She nursed him and burped him and sang to him. She whisked him away from Donald the instant he started to cry. She had no idea what to say to her husband, and
she had less and less interest in hearing his excuses as time passed without even a word of regret. Donald was preoccupied—rough, and also angry—but on top of that, he didn’t seem to know what to do with an infant. His son was bald, and lumpy, and easily squashed. Lillie was different, too, he complained, uninterested in getting out of bed or putting clothes on. He humored her by bringing her food from the canteen for the first week, and in return she said nothing when he snuck out of the barracks—it was becoming a habit—to “get some air.”

  Lillie mourned her mother-in-law, and felt her absence as a companion, but now she had Toshi. The tiny shells of his ears could easily hold all her secrets, so she confided to him the many joys and worries that she would have shared with her parents, if she could get the courage to write to them. She missed her own mother more than ever, wondering what advice she might have passed on if Toshi had been born back home. Lillie spent whole days composing a birth announcement in her head, a happy letter that could lift them out of this world of dust and sharp weather that Toshi had been born into, an announcement that would proclaim her first achievement: She was a mother, too, a successful wife with a child of her own.

  She never wrote it.

  As the months went by, the wall of everything left unsaid still separated her from Donald, while she was learning that it also insulated her. It was not that they did not speak; for example, Donald had traced his father to a jail being run by the Justice Department, and he made sure to tell her whenever Tateishi-sama sent a letter, though they were almost completely black with redactions when they came.