Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  “Ow, ow! It’s worse!”

  Kei’s urgency was contagious. Mama rubbed her hands on her pants in hard sharp strokes. They were far from clean, but the spigot was near the house, on the other side of the yard. She scrubbed them once more, this time on her blouse, then reached again for Kei.

  “Ow. Mama.” Kei was crying, shaking her head. She was shaking her hands, bouncing, anything to keep from leaping to her feet.

  “Shush, shush. Hana.” Mama raised her voice over Kei’s. “Shush, Hanako, it’s all right.”

  Just like that, Mama gave Kei my name. Until that moment, I was with them—in Kei’s jangling movements, lending my own quiet panic to save my sister. Now, as Mama brushed Kei’s eye with her cheek, trying to clear the dirt off her lids and lashes, I found I was not willing to share it. Kei was still twisting, working herself up—she appeared not to have heard Mama, but the name entered me, running from my ears into my toes, and I could only assume it was in Kei’s tears, too, and in the smirk I would see at any moment that would prove this was a ruse—this dirt she put into her own eye—it was a plot to take the name Mama had given me and the love that came with it.

  “Shush, shush,” Mama said, and when Kei still did not quiet, she placed one hand on the back of Kei’s head and the other on her shoulder.

  Then, holding Kei in a vise so she couldn’t move, Mama parted her lips and dropped them open over Kei’s eye to lick the dirt out with her tongue.

  Kei jerked, surprised; her other eye opened into Mama’s hair. Mama’s hands were holding Kei tight and Kei suddenly relaxed—closing her eye, closing me out. Mama’s eyes were shut, too, in concentration. Her lips skimmed Kei’s nose, flowed around her cheekbone, like wax, creating a seal that didn’t break even as her tongue chased the timid eyeball. I could see it moving through her cheek. She was feeding on Kei the way the bees and butterflies feed on the long tongues and open throats of the honeysuckles.

  And I remembered a kiss then, late at night, at our front door. Arnie was leaving. Kei was asleep, but I had gotten out of bed so I was there to watch them, Arnie and my mother, both tucked close but not touching in the doorway.

  Arnie stooped and his head lunged at Mama’s. I expected her to duck, but she rose up, onto her toes—she tilted her face to catch his. She held the kiss there. It went on much longer than when she kissed us good night, and was curiously singular; the rest of her body was still—no stroking hair, no whispered wishes—as if the kiss itself was enough. Their lips clung to each other’s so utterly I imagined for a second their bodies had been left behind—that my mother and Arnie had disappeared, leaving their skin and bones hanging together like coats waiting for the rain on the hook by the door. I felt myself longing for her, missing her even though she was still there. And then, they pulled apart. Mama dropped back onto her feet slowly, inch by inch, exposing more of Arnie’s face as she did—his blurred expression, his hopeful smile.

  The next morning, no matter how carefully I studied her, I could see no difference in my mother.

  But now, my mother’s mouth was on Kei, and the confluence of their faces was like cool air around me, like the chill that rushes in when two people, tucked together, suddenly separate. Kei had my name; Mama gave it to her, gave her the exact space that was mine—the precise width of my wrists, the curve and pose of my slippered feet. Mama’s lips were meant for me. I could smell her breath skimming my own forehead, and my blood rushed to meet it. Her tongue was rough, insistent, and it stirred up my already swirling thoughts as it probed the uncharted crevices of my eye.

  Then she pulled away from Kei, and I could see the clean circle where my mother’s mouth was, the lashes moist with saliva. Kei fell against her chest and Mama wrapped her in her arms. The circle hovered, pure in Kei’s otherwise dirt-streaked face, and then began to dry, shrinking back into the world that, until that moment, I’d never questioned.

  I was crying. I wanted my mother to take me into her mouth and heal me, too, but when she turned, astonished, I couldn’t find the words.

  “I have dirt in my eye,” I said.

  Mama considered me. The mouth I craved opened. Her teeth danced, and for a moment, I believed she’d do it.

  Then Kei wailed again and Mama turned her back on me, holding my freshly sobbing sister. She whispered into Kei’s hair. “Hanako,” I heard. And also, “Peace.”

  I had disappeared.

  How long did it take Kei’s tears to subside? Long enough that I didn’t even remember what Mama was referring to when she turned back to me. “Copycat,” she called me, but kindly. “Come on girls, let’s finish up here.”

  The bucket had been righted. My mother scooped the spilled manure and began sprinkling again. We were still coming out of her spell. I was clinging to the hope that she’d change her mind, that she would reach out and take me, too, into her arms. It’s my name, I wanted to remind her, you said I was Hanako, but her attention was on the peas. We finished the patch in no order. Mama and Kei were in sync, fertilizing by feel, and I was the misfiring piston.

  I, who tried so hard.

  I remember now that, every year, Mama gave me and Kei two handfuls of flower seeds to plant wherever we wanted in the garden. I used mine to create a color-coded collar around the house. Kei scattered hers just the way Lillie did in our mother’s stories, in the spontaneous, spinning romp the preacher’s wife allowed her, an annual release of a child’s high spirits to help her act with virtue for the rest of the year. Kei had been known to drop her entire handful of seeds in a single footstep, once flinging a drift of nasturtiums into the tomatoes. She trusted the seeds would take root, and often, to my amazement, they did.

  Now, I realize that Kei was not the only one who created a garden landscape with her eyes closed. Mama, too, believed eyes could deceive: She let her feet map paths for cinder-lined drainage ditches that would never overrun even in the rainiest weather; she let her skin find the holes in the breeze for her orchids. Where did this trust come from, that they didn’t need to test, or to practice, or even to imagine the final product?

  How was it that they were so much the same, and when did I become so different?

  And they were the same, I could see even then. There I was, reaching in from the right. Kei and Mama together on the left. The connection between them remained in the blotch of clean skin around Kei’s eye and the fine lines of dirt smudged into Mama’s lips. This was what they gave each other: soft, swollen skin and crushed lips; dazed eyes, bleary mouths; slight, immodest smiles and peace. So much peace I could not bear to be their witness.

  It was the last peace we would have as a trio, though we didn’t know it yet. But in the final hours of Before, the peas were staked and almost fertilized, and I was staring at the black dirt on my hands wishing I had the courage to smear it into my eye. Instead, I sat back and watched my mama and my sister finish the pea patch.

  Neither one of them turned to look at me.

  Koko

  And here is where we split. Do you remember? You don’t want to—why would you?—but you need to, all the same.

  Look at us. It is after dinner, after the mishap in the garden, and Mama has let us finish our dolls in her bedroom. There we are: two girls, the snowflakes, and two dolls. The dolls are creamy white, outlines cut from heavy paper. Arnie gave them to us, and Mama gave us her shoebox full of sewing scraps. We have ribbons and buttons, fabric and paste, and a single pair of scissors. One girl has been trying to cut snowflakes from the fabric, but it keeps slipping. The other girl shifts through the buttons and ribbons and the paste, and waits.

  “Scissors, ne?”

  Fold, slip, snip. The scissors snap shut. Another snowflake ruined. The fragile points Arnie showed us: One of them is sliced off.

  Spindles, he called them. Cloud seeds. Every point a mirror of every other. We select another scrap of fabric and start over. We have to make one right.

  We are two: both and neither. Is it hard to remember what it felt like to be “we
”? Just like Mama always told us: four hands, four eyes, two hearts. But one of those eyes was too loved by Mama in the garden, and that is where the trouble starts.

  We are the girl with the scissors. And we are the girl who waits. But the girl who waits, the one who Mama did not hold in the garden—let’s call her Koko, even though we both are—she’s annoyed. Her doll is lying naked beneath a blanket of uncut ribbons, a chain of unpasted buttons around her waist. Koko’s hand rattles in the box, telling you to hurry. Trying to find something to trade for the precious scissors that she knows you will want.

  Look at us there, lost without Mama. She should be here to help us. To smile away Koko’s anger, to hold the scissors in our hands and snip the points. Instead, she is laughing with Arnie in the living room where we should have been. Balancing each other on the edges of the pune’e in their new, after-dinner positions. Creeping closer to the middle every night. Are we just now realizing that he’s taken over, or were we aware of it as he slipped in? Did we notice, for example, when Arnie began to bring meat for dinner? Tonight, it was a small gray snapper. Mama’s favorite. That’s what she said.

  “George da Silva wen catch ’um,” he said when he gave it to her, forgetting Mama doesn’t like pidgin. “De’ah stove wen make on dem.”

  Ma-ke: one of those crude Hawaiian words. Arnie was telling her he was paid in fish for fixing the da Silvas’s stove.

  Now, it is after, and the door is almost closed against us, but Arnie’s voice is loud. His stories are long and high and hanging, and Mama is the only one who can catch them. We can hear her, leaping for his words, cradling them in the deep pocket of her laughter.

  Every time we hear it, the scissors slip and we have to start again.

  “Scissors!” Koko demands over Mama’s floating laughter. Koko wants her turn.

  Watch now as Koko snatches a scrap from the stack of cloth we have carefully layered. See her find the pins and scatter them across the floor. The almost-snowflake twists between the blades of our scissors. Only one cut more.

  But Koko has lost her patience. She yanks her doll out from under its buttons and ribbons and tears the head from its body, then flings the head at you. She flings the arms from the body. One, then two. The paper legs fall on our scissors, and another snowflake is ruined. This one is her fault.

  The head of Koko’s doll is lying in your lap. Why would she destroy her own doll? Arnie starts another story in the living room and Koko grabs for your doll now. You cover it with your knee so she can’t destroy it, too.

  Koko’s hand dips into the shoebox again. Her face is wild. Her fingers open like a flower, and there it is. A pale, pearl button in her palm.

  We look at it together.

  “Fish eye,” she hisses.

  Is it only then that you understand what is wrong?

  We have seen Mama pick up the snapper’s head at dinner. Seen her dig out the soft meat of the cheek and then raise it to her mouth. Her cheeks draw in. Her lips, greedy. The opaque marble fish eye disappears.

  “Fish eye. Fish eye. Fish eye. Fish—” Koko’s singsong now is the only sound.

  Koko is the watcher, the one who can describe what happened, and she has just done so. We are back in the garden, Mama’s hands clenched around your head. You are joined with her. You flow into each other. But Koko is watching, and her eyes are greedy like you’ve never seen.

  “Not,” you protest, but Koko is smirking. In her eyes, you are being stripped and sucked on. You are cast aside and left bone clean. But you are still two together, aren’t you? Why then is she so mean?

  “Fish eye.” It’s so dirty when Koko says it.

  “Not!” You have to change her face.

  That’s when the scissors fly out of your hand. They miss Koko and hit the table next to Mama’s bed.

  Koko turns to grab the scissors, and then pauses. Her eyes fall on the picture frame Mama keeps there. It’s a black-and-white photograph of a child standing, though she seems barely strong enough to stay upright on the skinny legs sticking out of her shorts. Her arms are raised up toward someone who is not in the picture, as if she is asking to be lifted. Her face is sharp, but shining, and her short hair whirls like a helicopter on her head.

  Koko looks at the picture. Neither one of you has ever given much thought to it. You are rarely in Mama’s room. But now both of you can feel the child’s laughter bubbling up with so much force that it might lift her. She is tilting, as if she can’t find the space between movement and stillness. But you feel sure that in the next, uncaptured instant, she will be safe and happy in her mother’s arms.

  You watch Koko understand that she is not this child. Then she looks at you and remembers how Mama hugged you in the garden and fixed your eye.

  She throws the frame at your head.

  It lifts, arcs through the air. Then it cracks against your collarbone and the glass shatters on the floor. The sound is high and compound. Mama’s voice cuts off in the living room. We have her attention. She is coming. There are only seconds. And you realize: It’s Koko’s turn to take the blame.

  You look at Koko. So jealous she is pinking from the inside.

  It’s Koko’s turn to be Kei.

  Your hand picks up a shard of glass and strikes at the photograph. The glass severs the child’s head from its body—Where is Mama? Why isn’t she here to stop us?—the glass slashes the child’s body into rags. The battered head from the photograph floats, but not far, and settles near the body of Koko’s paper doll. Your flesh is ripped, too. This is all Koko’s fault. This is how deeply she has hurt us. Fish eye, she called you, and now she will pay for it. Your fist closes to hide the blood.

  The door swings open.

  Mama is finally here.

  Mama is broken, barely standing. Looking at the empty frame and the ruined photograph. Arnie is with her, asking who did this.

  Neither one of us comes forward.

  We have seen our mother faint. We’ve seen her falter. But she always smiled for us when she fell, as if to promise her return. She always went down whole, not bone by bone like she is falling now, as if her insides are untied. Arnie is holding Mama around the waist, but she is hanging oddly. Her head at the wrong angle.

  Move, Koko, you urge her without speaking. Koko knows it’s her turn, so why isn’t she moving? Move forward. Arnie and Mama are looking at us.

  She’ll step forward any second now.

  As you wait for her to take the blame, a red stain creeps around your fingers, growing darker in the folds of your skin. You watch it gather in the spiral of your clenched pinkie until it falls—a large dark tear.

  Then, everything changes.

  Mama sees the blood in your hand and makes a choice. “Kei—” she begins, and then, it happens. In one sure, strong movement, she slaps you so hard she is standing.

  Do you remember? Mama doesn’t even look at Koko. She slaps you.

  Look at yourself as Mama hits you. See the spring of her legs and the length of her twisting back that knocks you down. You are too stunned to cry. How is this possible?

  You cannot see the bloody smear your own hand leaves when you touch your stinging cheek. You only have eyes for Mama. She has dropped straight down in the scattered glass. She is kneeling in the shards, crying, scrambling for the shreds of her cherished picture. Although she has always been so careful not to cut herself, her knees are bleeding, and Arnie is trying to tell her not to bother with the scraps, that we can clean up later. But she doesn’t hear.

  “Mama?” It’s your voice. She is broken. Everything is very wrong. And still Koko is sitting. Like she did nothing. Like she is not here.

  “Kei.” You hear the name. It’s Arnie speaking, looking at you. “Are you okay?”

  Kei is not supposed to be a someone. She’s a passing storm, a fire in the woodstove. She’s a cry in the night even as the nightmare has begun to ebb. Kei is rage, and fizz. She is the pressure that spits from the bottle. But she is not the soda. Not the bottle
.

  She is not supposed to be you.

  Koko threw the frame at you. She is the one who started it, and cutting at the picture should only have made her punishment worse. Mama is kneeling in the glass, scraps of her picture in her lap. The familiar curdles rise in her newly sunken cheeks. Her eyes are like whirlpools pulling her face into them until all that’s left are dark, black sockets. She is already gone: to the land of the ghosts.

  The blood from your hand is running off your wrist. “You!” You launch yourself at Koko. “It’s you!” Your hands reach her face, her shoulders. You scramble at her, wanting to hit her the same way Mama hit you so you can be together again, but she pushes back. There is blood on her now, too. It’s on her face, droplets spraying an arc across the front of her dress. You wipe your blood down her arm so Arnie will see that there is no difference between you, and so it can also be her fault. Koko ripped the doll. Koko threw the picture. And then, as you turn to try to explain it to Arnie, you hear Koko’s voice on top of yours.

  “Stop it, Kei,” she says, even though you are no longer touching her. “You’re hurting me.”

  Two girls are no longer. Koko is gone. Even Arnie notices.

  “Oh, Christ, Miya,” Arnie says, but he isn’t looking at Mama. She’s so still, he doesn’t see how fast the pool of red is forming beneath her, or realize that she’s fainting. He doesn’t know there will be days—many of them—when he wonders if she’ll ever wake up. She’ll spend weeks in bed, unmoving, her face gray and rough with sweat. He will be told it’s in her blood, but will he learn that Mama’s haunted? That she sees things that no one else can, goes to places no one else can follow?

  But Arnie doesn’t understand that yet. Right now, you are the focus of his attention. You and the blood you have splattered all over you and your sister; the blood still pooling in your palm. “Let me see your hand, Princess,” he says, creeping toward you with his arms extended, like you are a wild animal. “Keiko. Keiko? Look at me.”