Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  She was lying in bed, alone, no visible restraints, no eye tape, nothing except a catheter and a feeding tube in her nose. The guardrails on both sides of Kei’s mattress were raised. Kei’s room was small—almost filled by the bed and the single reclining chair—but like the rest of the center, it was light and calm. A large three-panel window dominated one wall.

  A small hand crank lay on the sill. I’d give her some air, I thought, fitting it over one of the starburst knobs on the window casing. The pane swung easily and wide; a cool burst of spring ducked around it and into the room. In the cloister behind the Center’s main building, the first signs of spring were beginning to show in the tufted grass.

  Grass in New York—it has always reminded me of my home. I chose this city because it was a place to get lost in. I didn’t expect the buildings to actually scrape the sky, to magnify the heat of the rotting summer, or to whip the inevitable February wind through their ruthless canyons. The town I still longed for was a place of banyans and palms, of lazy rivers; it was the trembling lip on the wide smile of the bay. While Manhattan was arrogant, claiming every inch of land in concrete and even spilling into the surrounding waters, my childhood home depended on the island’s indulgence. When the tidal wave came and licked out the heart of downtown, we rebuilt further up the mountain, leaving a long green tongue along the ocean—a park for baseball and soccer and the bandstand, and for memories no one wanted anymore.

  The grass below Kei’s window had been wrenched out in disks around the few still-skeletal trees, and disconnected by the wide, wandering asphalt paths for wheelchairs. But it was there. And it was all I might ever have to remind me of home.

  I pulled the fledgling smell of it into my lungs.

  Dr. Bree Sheridan was a short, slim bit of a woman—clean faced, with blunt, fine hair and eyes that matched her beige outfit. When she first passed Kei’s door, she was on her way somewhere else. I saw her profile rushing by—actually, I tried to duck it from where I stood at the window—but her face popped back a moment later.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said, acknowledging my resemblance to Kei, perhaps. She walked to the bed.

  “Hello, Hanako, it’s Bree again. I see your sister’s here.” Her vowels were lazy, muffled by misplaced ews and ahs, but I couldn’t place her accent. She reached out a gentle hand and put it on Kei’s shoulder.

  “Call me Bree,” she said, sticking her other hand out to shake mine. The patch on her jacket read, NEUROREHABILITATION. “I’m from Sydney. I’ve been here ten years but people still ask about the accent.”

  “Call me…Miss Swanson.” It wasn’t until her face shut down that I understood how offensive I sounded, but I was floundering. “It’s a joke. That’s all I’ve been called in the hospital. You can call me…Koko.”

  “Koko, then.” Bree gave me a brief smile, then indicated that I should stand beside her at Kei’s hip before she settled her right hand on my sister’s rib cage. “We’re going to roll her away from us and hold her on her side.” I’d seen the ICU staff reposition Kei to avoid bedsores but I’d never been asked to help. Not that Bree had asked.

  “Upsy-daisy,” Bree said. “Here we go.”

  We got her positioned, awkwardly, and Bree did something I had never yet seen in Kei’s treatment: She guided her body in movement. As Bree talked, Kei’s arm rose, stretched, and pivoted like the swimmer she had always been. How could Bree tell?

  I’d been pressing Kei securely into the bed until that point to counterbalance Bree’s therapy. Then, suddenly, I felt a fraction of new heat rise in Kei’s body, more unnerving than any reflexive spasm I’d witnessed so far. She lit up, and for a moment, I felt her presence there. Then, she stiffened at my touch; she bucked, arching herself even further backward. The shock of her flexed muscles fired up my own.

  Had I hurt her? Could she tell from my touch it was me?

  I was shaking.

  Bree began easing the slight twists out of Kei’s limbs. “Easy, Hanako, there’s no need to be frightened,” she said. Did Kei quiet at her voice? Her eyes were so blank, so much darker and more similar with the pupils shuttered open. My heightened heartbeat seemed to fill the room.

  Hanako. She kept saying it. My mother didn’t even like the name, she had used it so rarely. “It’s Hana,” I said, trying to keep the tremors out of my voice. “She likes that better.”

  Bree picked up Kei’s hand again and began bending her wrist as if nothing had happened.

  I thought of Kei twisting away from me. What if she doesn’t want me here?

  I remembered the phantom pain I felt in her body. What if she does?

  There was so much in our past neither one of us could bear to face. If Kei did wake up, what could forgiveness look like?

  At last, there were tears coming. True tears this time, the kind I had no idea how to stop. I never cry. I hadn’t even cried when my mother and Arnie died.

  Bree wavered, her hair dripping into her shoulders, face rippling from the tip of her nose. Her body stretched, then thickened, radiating from its own dark shadow. I felt my heart clench. I forced my eyes closed, knowing that if I let my tears continue not even Bree could put me back together.

  “It might have been a reflex, or momentum,” Bree said quietly. “But she might have been trying to keep her balance, too. We’ll know soon enough. Right, Hana? You’ll show us soon enough.”

  All that afternoon, Bree Sheridan taught me about my sister’s body. We began with the softest parts. The bottoms of her feet, inner thighs, and armpits. Her hands. Her mouth.

  “Think of it this way,” she said. “You’re standing next to Hana, but the only way she can tell you are here is through one of her five senses. So, one of two things could be happening: Either she’s in there but somehow her senses aren’t getting her the information, or she’s getting it but she isn’t answering back. You’ll need to bring in things that she’ll recognize: smells from your childhood, maybe a food she likes or a favorite perfume. Anything to give her a direction, show her the way out. If there is a consciousness of any kind, we don’t want to leave it trapped alone in the dark.”

  Alone in the dark. I didn’t have to close my eyes to imagine that. “And if there isn’t?”

  “With your sister, as you know, it’s a curious case. We know there was probably oxygen loss, though not for long, but her symptoms are more consistent with stupor, or catatonia. The cause could be anything, even psychogenic.”

  Bree’s explanation sounded marginally more like English than the ICU doctors’. It also sounded more like Kei. “Psychogenic? As in, she’s faking it?”

  “Well.” Bree paused. “The brain protects itself, especially in the case of trauma. More likely there is more than one factor: underlying imbalances, even old injuries, can exacerbate an acute event. How was she feeling, the last time you spoke to her? Was she upset? Any complaints about her health? How did she look?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t even begin to explain why I couldn’t. “So she’ll come out of it?”

  Bree looked tired, though it was midafternoon. “We don’t know. Let’s hope she’s in there, healing. We can give her a week of intensive therapy and reevaluate, depending on how much time you can devote. But people do come back to consciousness, and some swear they knew their family members were there.”

  I stayed with Kei all day, learning Bree’s routines for pinpricks, bells, lights. Between the therapies, as I watched my sister, I began sketching her image on an invisible page in my mind. I took inventory. We had both cut a few wisps of hair to frame our faces, but Kei’s were highlighted red by the sun. Her fingers were rougher than mine, and the bottoms of her feet were callused from going barefoot. But it was her face I focused on. Did the tip of my upper lip quiver like hers when I slept? I realized that I had no idea what I looked like any longer, and even less idea what everyone else saw.

  Bree told me to talk to Kei. I didn’t know how to explain that I no longer knew what to say. It wasn’t me w
ho could bring her back. Our bond had broken, and broken again, so many times there were only pieces of us left. But then I remembered—Mama’s case. Kei had brought it with her. I wasn’t convinced that I had the courage to face the memories that would come surging back out of it, but I knew that if there was help to be had, answers, that was where I would find them.

  When I returned home that night, my apartment still smelled faintly of shoyu and Ajax. I’d spent the day of Kei’s transfer cleaning it. My sparse furnishings and bare walls made the job easier, but the paint was still a little dingy. I’d hung a clothesline over the windows for my rags, my clothes, and my bedspread, and though they were dry, I left them there to do the double duty of weighing down my curtains so that not even my moving shadow could be seen from the subway station.

  During the day, at the Eckert Center, I’d felt like cracked glass waiting to shatter, but at least there I had something to distract me. Now, my evening stretched out before me, every minute of it bending toward the case. What did I usually do with my time? Most nights, I brought my staff meal home and lost myself in the different world of a library book as I crocheted intricate patterns into handkerchiefs, and then unraveled them and began again. Crochet was as close as I could allow myself get to artistic expression. My first and only painting in high school had attracted the wrong kind of attention, and in six years since, despite what I had told my shrink, I had not so much as doodled with a pen.

  The case had been a familiar sight during our childhood. It was a beaten thing—a strapped leather box with two loose buckles filled with all Mama’s secrets and treasures. She kept it on one of the makeshift pine shelves that served as her closet, out of reach but jutting far enough off the edge that we could always see it. But now it was here, in its new place on my bedside table, waiting for me.

  My mother had secrets, and I was afraid of them. I wasn’t scared that they would explain things—her illness, her abandonment, maybe even her death—but that they would not. Why had Mama made me, her discarded daughter, the executor of her will? And what could be so important for Kei to tell me, or give me, that she would travel halfway across the world with a case she knew I cared so little about that I had left it behind? And yet, perhaps Kei was right. I could feel the sudden urge to know who I was to my mother. What had she kept of me? What parts of Hana had she cherished?

  I unfastened the buckles and readied myself to receive my mother.

  There were fewer items than I expected. No ribbon-tied packet of letters, no outpouring of her last words. There was an old, stained crochet handkerchief I didn’t recognize. A small notebook, which I flipped through and then set down for later when I saw Arnie’s lanky handwriting. Tucked inside the notebook were a few pictures. Two—empty and seemingly old shots of a concrete bridge and a water tower—I’d never seen before. On the back of one, someone had penciled the word “Hiroshima,” but with no date, no explanation for why my American-as-apple-pie mother might have wanted it. Also stuck between the pages was a folded clipping from the Herald during the aftermath of the tidal wave. I remember the morning it came out—and the way Arnie tucked it away, tenderly and quietly, when he saw me.

  Most of the rest of the contents struck me as items Arnie had believed were important, rather than talismans our mother would have cherished. The quarter Kei had dipped into a lava flow when he had taken her to see the eruption after she’d gotten into trouble at school. A wooden, hand-carved yo-yo that I didn’t remember, wrapped in a curving piece of calligraphy on parchment paper. One of Kei’s swimming medals. It was all old stuff, too—as if time had stopped when we were in high school. I couldn’t tell if the contents were prepared deliberately or had simply accrued over the years.

  There was nothing about my mother in it. No birth certificate. No marriage license. No family papers. No deed. Mama could have been dropped from the moon or washed up on shore in a woven reed basket for as much as she’d told us, and there were plenty of times when that kind of explanation would have made perfect sense. As for our biological father, there were no clues there, either, but that at least was a blessing. Whoever he had been, we didn’t miss him when we were young, and once Arnie showed up there was almost too much man in the house.

  There were no pictures of Mama, even as a child, and none of her family or my father. Just one of Kei and me.

  The twins.

  Two small girls, dressed alike, reflecting identically back at each other, even the cowlicks in our hair swirling in opposite directions. Our blue bridesmaid dresses jumped off the gray sky behind us; blue half-veils hung off our hats. It was the day of Mama’s wedding to Arnie, a rainy day, so we’d gathered under the house for the vows. The ceremony was short, originally planned for the garden, and on a day that was more somber than it should have been, I remember Mama leaning on a cane and watching the clouds approaching, draped in the simple, cream wedding dress Mrs. Harada had made for her. She was thin but radiant. She had only just gotten well enough to get out of bed for the first time in weeks.

  Rain, Mama said, is lucky.

  She seemed perplexed at the possibility of good fortune.

  I had never seen this photo. Kei and I, side by uncomfortable side. We hung like lost puppets, our limp fingers extending toward each other as if we were being shown how to pose—Hold hands darlings, no, the other hand Kei, switch sides girls so you can put that bandage behind your back, that’s it. Something Arnie would say, most likely. He was always so determined that everyone in his new family should get along.

  In those days, of course, we barely knew him. Mama had collapsed when Kei destroyed her picture, and later she rose out of bed a bride. In between, Arnie and Mrs. Harada kept us from her. No place for little girls. Don’t worry your heads about it, he always told us, never wondering who had taken care of her before he arrived. Through the doorway, we could only see her sleeping, the blankets tight over her pale birds of paradise hands.

  If I was going to subject myself to these traumas of my childhood, the least I could have hoped for was that the objects that Mama believed were so precious would also surround me with home. But when I saw what little there was in it, I felt more alone than ever. Of everything, it was only the final item in the case that could prove that my mother had ever really loved me. I had left it for last because I knew what it was.

  She had slipped it into a plain envelope. It was her most cherished possession: the photo of me as a toddler that Kei had destroyed in her jealous rage. Though it was slashed into pieces, still Mama had kept it. Proof that she loved me once. I slipped it out of the envelope, flipping and turning the pieces to puzzle the image back together so that I could look at it for the first time since it was whole. But it was different than I remembered. Even with the shredded white lines, I didn’t recognize my face. I fit the pieces together on a book cover and held it directly under the light, but the disconnect only got worse. The child’s eyes were both black. And the white outfit was not a dress.

  Something was wrong.

  I looked for the love, the joy that had imprinted on me in the instant I saw the picture. Tried to identify the fingers the child was stretching toward, but nothing could transform that face back into my own as I had remembered it. My picture, the one Kei and I were both convinced was of our mother and Hana, wasn’t.

  It was a photograph of a little boy.

  1944–1945

  The night was cooler when she woke. Lillie reached out, panicked, but Toshi was still there, asleep beside her, his arms flung in both directions to claim as much of the futon as he could. Sometimes, he ended up sideways, his head against her body, his two-year-old feet kicking Donald in the ribs. On those nights, which came more and more frequently, she wondered if this restlessness was a sign of the wide chasm between her and her husband, or if it was her son’s slumbering desire to keep his mother to himself.

  Was he old enough to sense that his parents were separating? Would he understand and would it matter that he was the one who was going to le
ave her?

  The plan was for Donald to slip away into the night with Toshi. The draft had finally caught up with her husband, and if he didn’t report for duty in the morning, the military police who would come for him were not the kind from whom his father could save him. If Donald wanted to survive, this was his last chance to run.

  She pulled her son close. Just under a year old when they arrived in Japan, he was still barely bigger than he had been when they landed in Yokohama. The war had not been good to any of them, but especially to a growing boy. Lillie had breast-fed Toshi as long as she could, but he was old enough now to leave her. All the schoolchildren up to twelve were being evacuated to the countryside, where it might be safe. Entire schools were relocating with their teachers. Toshi was too young to go with them, of course, but also, with the dwindling food and Lillie’s own conscription, too young to stay.

  She could see a small candle dancing in the dark of the main room; that was why the bed felt cooler. Donald was awake. Her heart fell. She could hear him sifting through their few possessions for whatever small things of value he could tuck into his clothes. She knew she should get up and help him, but instead, she pressed her lips to Toshi’s ear and sang him the song he liked about the red birds. Did she see him smile, even in his sleep? Thin as he was, her son was a happy, obliging child who had an uncanny link to his mother’s voice. What was he going to do without her? It was a question within a bigger question: How were any of them going to survive to the next day?

  Japan was not the refuge her husband expected. The trip west from Yokohama gave Lillie her first taste of it: barren fields and long stretches of nothing. Of course, it was winter. When they got to the family house in a village in the Hiroshima prefecture, an hour north of the city, they were a sad group: a crippled old man and a baby, and a woman who couldn’t speak her “own” language and had to ask her husband what everything meant. Lillie found herself living with a bunch of strangers under a thatched roof, in a building with sliding walls. It was bitterly cold, heated only by a central sunken hearth that the extended family gathered around to eat, and then pulled their sleeping mats up to in the night to stay warm. It differed from the barracks in the camps only in the constant smell of smoke in everything and the lack of electricity. And the lack of food.