You do not offer your hand, but you don’t resist him, either. He is the one who will lift you out of the glass and call a doctor. Who will let you dig your fingers into his thigh while a long sleeping snake is sewn over the red tongue of flesh in your palm.
Arnie picks you up because you are barefoot, then notices that he’s the only one who’s wearing shoes. “Stay where you are,” he warns Hana and Mama as he turns his back on them. “You two are okay. I’ll come back for you.”
Over Arnie’s shoulder, your sister stays. How long will she wait there—a ruined dress, a frozen statue—as she’s told to? Just moments ago, the two of you were made in each other’s image, but she is Hana now, forever. She has let you take the blame, and more than that, she named you.
This is how Kei is born. This is how Arnie marries Mama, how he takes your place at her bedside because of you. From this moment on, two girls are two separate people who might do anything. All that remains is to collect the severed pieces and throw them away.
Hana
The light switch inside my apartment door had been dusted with a fine black powder. It stuck to my finger, clinging to the whorls of my skin when I rubbed it with my thumb. I stepped through the door and into the living room, the yellow tape that had sealed it looped in my left hand. I snapped the deadbolt into place behind me.
I was home. But with the bald bulb on the ceiling lit, the room rose into focus, and what I saw made me want to turn and run.
Every one of my walls was covered in the same black powder. Long strokes of it on the barely taupe paint; cross hatches, circles, overeager in some places, just misted in others. Each window and sill, each door up to the height of a man’s head had been systematically defaced. The police had even lifted the orange juice bottle out of the refrigerator, smeared it with powder, and left it on the table. I could smell the sour mass inside it from where I stood. Someone had dusted the cover of my unused turntable. And the two ceramic bowls on my shelf. My few pieces of leftover college furniture had been dragged around and left in the wrong position. The blue beanbag was in the center of the floor.
Hana’s home. Hana’s home. Hana’s home. I heard it in my head but I couldn’t tell whether it was a greeting or a taunt.
“I am home,” I said out loud. There wasn’t even a place to sit. And then, “I am Hana.”
Silence was the only response.
I stepped farther into the living room, turning on every floor lamp and even the undercounter kitchen lights. I flipped the switches in the hall, lighting my path. The police had been just as thorough with their powder in my bedroom. Walls again; closet doors; the items on my bedside table. The handle of the latch on my window safety gate—this time, securely closed.
When I gathered the nerve to peek into my tiny bathroom, I saw that every inch was gray, even the edges of the toilet seat. My eyes went to the floor, to the octagonal coin tiles, and I was suddenly terrified that I might find the tracing of his shoes.
He must have been wearing tennis shoes. That’s what came to me. I hadn’t heard his step in the lobby that night. I could see them—white, old, with a slight tear in one where the canvas pulled away from the rubber toe like Arnie’s used to. Shoes he had been meaning to throw away. I imagined I could tell where his feet had stopped. Was it here where he had been standing when he strangled Kei?
It was shock, these slippery imaginings. Easy to recognize. I had lived in shock for six years. How else would my poor brain deal with the fact that I was standing inches from the bathtub where I found her? A veil of black dust had fallen into it from the drawn plastic shower curtain, but I could clearly see the outline of my sister lying there. The dust was darkest where Kei’s shoulders had rested, tapering off vaguely as it neared the drain like the magnet shavings in a child’s science project. I ran my finger over the edge of the tub to wipe away the bit of the powder that had been left there.
But instead of the clear, satisfying arc I expected, I managed only to smudge a black, dragging trail on the porcelain.
I was suddenly too aware of my heart. I tried again, this time wadding up some toilet paper. I turned the water on, more of the blackness from the handles coming off onto my hands; I instinctively rubbed them on my pants before realizing my mistake. Everything I touched was turning black.
It was only fingerprint dust. Something the police used every day. There had to be a way to clean it. I would blast it off, dissolve it. As the bottom of the tub filled, the powder rose, filming on the surface for one hopeful moment until, when the water drained, it coalesced into black rivulets and settled down again.
The dust was defying me.
I turned to the sink, breathing, washing the bar of soap first, and then wiping down the medicine cabinet, which I had long ago covered over with strips of black duct tape so I would never surprise myself in the mirror. I used my bare hands. I tackled the porcelain basin and the knobs and faucets, before turning to my fingers. When I finished, my skin was still vaguely gray, but it didn’t mark my clothes.
I tried to remember my mother’s simplest recipe for cleaning. Baking soda in warm water. I pushed my long sleeves up my forearms, then put on the rubber gloves I always wore to protect my fragile skin. In the bathroom, I’d been fiddling, really, only testing the powder, but now I was determined to wipe it from my life. I took my pile of washed and folded rags and went to my front door.
The rag turned black instantly. I rinsed it in the cloudy water, and that, too, went dark. I emptied the bucket and began again; I wouldn’t rinse the rags, then, I would start fresh with each one. Each stroke only dragged the dust into the scrapes and dings on my walls, the spider web cracks in the paint I’d never noticed. The paint itself looked haggard, and as I tried to move on, to declare one section pau, the rags lost their power to erase even some of the obvious smudges. It was me against them—me against him, whoever he was—thinking, Are these his fingers here?
I leaned my weight into the wall for more power. Dirty water ran down the glove and off my elbow as I clenched the rag in my hand. I was scrubbing as hard as I could, but still, I was losing.
Out the window, I could see the downtown passengers gathering on the platform. I swung the curtains shut—with more force than I should have—but I couldn’t bear the thought of one of them peering in, of him peering in. The thousands of eyes I had immersed myself in at the precinct returned to me. My would-be attacker was everywhere and nowhere.
What about you? Detective Lynch had asked me.
I tried to picture it: Kei standing in the shower, washing the shampoo out of her hair. She would not have heard an intruder if her head was under the water.
Stay there, Kei.
The man was not coming back, I told myself again and again. If he was the one I had passed in the doorway, he would know I was onto him. If. The police were skeptical, but I couldn’t afford to be. I had to be right, because if I was wrong, then I had no protection. Kei’s true attacker would recognize me; he could be the man standing next to me in the elevator anywhere I was. Thinking of what he had done to her. And I would not know.
With all their dust, the police hadn’t found a single unspoiled fingerprint. All they had needed was one perfect whorl of black. Instead, my apartment was teeming with fingerprints: thousands, millions, fragments layered so thickly that there was no way to separate them.
I had let them stay too long.
Then he slid into me, like a shadow. Time slipped, and there he was. I dropped my rag and stepped back to the spot where I had first seen Kei’s slippers. Had he been the one who kicked them into the center of the room?
Double take, double take, double take.
Oh God, I thought. I was surely mad as a hatter. How else could I see Kei through his eyes? We used to play at being each other when we were little, but this was different. I’d barely slept now in more than two days. I was all of us and none of us, in the same way that our mother had sometimes seemed between two worlds: here and gone. I was watching Ke
i step out of the shower to greet me. Or, maybe that was her, caught between the tub and the sink, looking confused. She would have helped someone who claimed to be my neighbor; she might even have amused herself by pretending she was me. But not someone who looked so shocked to see her, and not naked. She didn’t know what to do.
She must have struggled. Her ankle was twisted. Somehow, he had bruised her rib. But how had she gotten back into the shower? Was he trying to drown her or revive her? Why couldn’t I see it? Too much had come between us—I could no longer see into her world.
A temporary lack of oxygen to the brain would not ordinarily cause this kind of unconsciousness, the doctors had assured me. So it wasn’t his fingers around her neck that almost killed her. There are no genital abrasions or evidence of, ah, a sexual assault.
I picked up the bucket and hurled the water; it splashed against the wall with a white froth and ran off, weak and gray, toward the floor. I could still feel his presence, just out of reach. I threw the empty bucket hard into the space where I imagined him. It bounced and came to rest at my feet.
I grabbed a can of Ajax, a cloud of it spraying from the can as it flew. The powder bloomed into tiny blue bursts when it hit the wet wall.
I threw the can.
Then I went to the kitchen sink and swept everything out from under it. Glass cleaner. Dish soap. Drano. I let them fly. I threw them closed; sometimes hurling them straight from my shoulder, sometimes scooping them in two hands off the floor and flinging them upward.
I opened the refrigerator. My meager food glowed.
I reached in and grabbed the milk. I launched the sour liquid, then the waxed cardboard carton—my arm aiming for Kei and the man. If only I could hit the right pocket of air, I could remake the past. I flung the fermented orange juice out of the bottle, hitting him full in the face as Kei surprised him in the bathroom. Spaghetti, fettuccini, knocking his hand away as he reached for her neck. A hunk of lasagna as I wished if only he’d made a move at me in the lobby so I might have jammed my key into his eyes. I delighted in his head splitting open as the tomatoes ruptured against the wall—flecks of meat embedding themselves, noodles wiggling down—but then it was Kei’s skull that was open, and my own, and I could see my sister in the tub, tucked into herself and cold. She loomed there, impossible and growing larger. I unsealed a gallon of shoyu, and swung it. The liquid arched, splashing again and again.
I swung it with everything I had, long after it was empty.
When it was over, I sat on the floor in the midst of it. My clothes were wet. My skin, clammy. And I was cold to the bone, as my mother used to claim to be. I could hear her, muffled, lying beside me on our linoleum floor muttering cold to the bone even as her body gave off a ferocious heat.
The room was in worse shape than I was, at least on the surface: the kind of mess that you would crawl away from because no one could ever get it clean again. The kind of mess you would move away from. Pack your bags. Leave behind.
Maybe I would, I thought. Just leave. It wouldn’t be the first time. I shook off the food, left the containers and the puddle on the floor, and went to the bedroom. I was shivering like my mother used to; even with the light on, I couldn’t stop. The ends of my hair smelled of shoyu and oregano. My blouse looked like it had been tie-dyed, so many distinct flavors, dark as blood, burrowing themselves into the weave of the cloth.
Take it off, and I would see my scars. Leave it on, and the craziness would crust itself around me. What could I do now that Kei was here and I could no longer turn off a light? I was too close to the edge of everything to make a decision. I was trembling; my stomach was turning over; I was not even strong enough to cry.
Mama, I thought. Help me. I waited, but there was no answer.
I collapsed onto the bed.
1943
Every morning at sunrise, they congregated on the deck to do calisthenics. It was a ritual for the men, but Donald insisted Lillie join them.
—The air is good for you, he would tell her as he hurried her up the narrow stairs to the deck.
The repatriates sang military marching songs as they exercised, punctuated by lusty shouts and grunts. Donald always staked out a spot near the front. Lillie knew he was eager to impress the others with his health and strength, preparing to die for the Empire or bring it glory.
The wind broke itself against the ship, hurling stinging salt spray—sometimes strong enough to rock the horizon—to greet each day. Rather than argue uselessly with her husband, Lillie stood shivering in the long shadows the new sun was not yet strong enough to erase, sheltering the sleeping, bundled Toshi with her body. What a strange pair she and Tateishi-sama were, she thought, standing here on the sidelines. She with a one-year-old strapped to her chest and her crippled, still-imperious father-in-law with the tin of his wife’s ashes strapped to his chest, in yards of creased, yellowing muslin. All of them headed for Japan.
Lillie spent her days floating in languages she couldn’t understand. Japanese mostly, along with Spanish and Portuguese once they picked up additional repatriates in Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo. Some of the foreign Japanese had been held with Tateishi-sama in the military detention camp in Utah. They were a motley group, regardless of language. There were more than thirteen hundred passengers now, including a handful of dignitaries. But Tateishi-sama was just one of so very many thin and sickly single men.
—They look so much like us, she had whispered to Donald when she first saw the foreigners.
He smiled at her, but without warmth, and cocked his head as if wondering at her ignorance. “Who did you think they would look like?” At least he didn’t add, Stupid girl.
Still, conditions were good on the boat, crowded as it became. Women, children, and the old people had the upper, larger quarters, and the food was plentiful, though Donald pronounced it bland. White decks gleamed in a flood of never-ending light, ensuring that the word DIPLOMAT painted on the side and stern of the ship could be clearly read even at night. Lillie kept herself apart from the other women, knowing that she was the only one who didn’t want to be there. Much as she had in the camps, she spent her days with Toshi, but now that he was older, and could chatter back to her and laugh, she tried to show him how to find wonder in the world. They would stand on the deck, counting the white crests of the waves, or finding patterns in the clouds. Occasionally, they saw another ship in the distance, and she wondered what country it served, enemy or friend—and how one might know the difference. At night, she held him up to the bottle-glass of the porthole in their compartment and pointed out the stars.
Otherwise it was a vast, thin horizon that surrounded them. She could not guess what future lay beyond it for her and her son.
Weeks passed this way. After running down the coast of South America, they crossed the vast expanse of the Atlantic and finally rounded the tip of Africa, heading for India. She had no chores to do here, no lines to stand in, no dust storms to duck as they swept over the empty plains. Her health was returning.
This was what she’d tried to escape, Donald could not resist reminding her. This, a luxury motorship with deck after deck of polished wood and bottomless supplies—look at the piles of boxes on the prom deck, so many parcels of food and medicine that they couldn’t even stow them all. Their luck was changing, now that they had escaped from her two-faced land of opportunity. Life in Japan would be as plentiful as he’d promised.
Lillie hoped he was right but knew better than to voice her doubts. She looked longingly at the shores of the countries where they stopped, imagining them as places where she and Toshi could get lost, begin again, meld anonymously into the local towns; where the shapes of their faces and color of their skin might not define them. Donald might have sensed this longing of hers, or perhaps he was just wary from her attempt to escape back at the camp, because he would keep a hand on Toshi—gentle, but its meaning unmistakable—every time they docked.
Eventually they arrived in Goa, where they would be disembar
king and transferring to a Japanese ship, the Teia Maru, to travel the final leg of their journey. Triumphant singing erupted on the Gripsholm when the two boats were finally docked beside each other, and the promise of Japan surged and strained on its mooring lines beside them. But Lillie wasn’t the only one keeping a nervous eye on the Teia Maru. The Gripsholm remained docked for two days as the diplomats counted up the passengers to be exchanged on each ship, doing and redoing the math as if they would be able to magically balance the numbers to account for the one man who went overboard shortly after they left South Africa. The interminable heat didn’t help.
When the exchange finally started and she stepped off the ship for the first time in a month, Lillie stumbled, her feet failing to adjust to the solid ground. As her body tumbled away from Donald’s, she felt again the pull to disappear into the crowd. For just a moment, she savored an image of herself pantomiming her needs among a strange but free people. But she couldn’t leave; Donald was holding Toshi. Even if it were possible to switch directions, or fade out of the stream of passengers and run over the packed earth and the railroad tracks and disappear into India, she wasn’t willing to go without her son. Still, the yearning sharpened once they got a close look at their new home: The Teia Maru was even worse than the internment camps. It was filthy. Food was limited. Even drinking water was rationed and given out only twice a day.
She had had her chances, and she had left them strewn on the shores of other countries.
By the time they arrived in Yokohama, two months after they’d left New York, Lillie could feel nothing at all. The repatriates were separated, men and women, and held for processing. They took her boy—he belonged to Donald—and she clung to his absence like she would her last breath. Days went by in which she could understand nothing that anyone said to her. The language sounded different here, and ran together like an unfamiliar line of exclamations. Ah. Oh. Eh. She didn’t bother to try to understand; she no longer cared about fitting in. She just wanted Toshi back—he was the only place she belonged. She knew the questioners would want to know where she was going—who would sponsor her and would she be a burden to their country? These questions floated up from the past, from the tight, pressed mouth of the internment camp director. Once she had known the answers. She had different answers then.
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