“It looks like chi chis,” the gingko girl muttered to her friend.
“What?”
She repeated herself in a clear voice. From the blushes and the laughter, even a mainlander should have known what the girl was talking about, but Miss Shima asked anyway.
“What’s a chi chi?”
Encouraged by the snickers around her, the gingko girl cupped a hand under each of her nonexistent breasts and pretended to lift them to cradle her chin. “You know, chi chis. Big ones. Moo moo!”
“Women are not cows, Katie,” Miss Shima scolded, but then I saw her make a different connection. Her eyes flicked to me, helpless.
Don’t run.
It was an old Lillie story, just a snippet that Kei and I had grabbed on to. Was it a coyote Lillie encountered in the prairie, or just a threatening dog? The story was Mama’s way of warning us to be obedient because there was a world out there waiting, literally, to eat us.
My face was burning, even as I pretended not to hear them. My arms inched up across my chest. I was almost thirteen then. It would have been a lot easier to perish on the spot.
Who knows what happened next? Time gets stuck there. At some point the other girls had gone home and I was left alone with Miss Shima waiting for Arnie to pick me up. Usually I enjoyed that time, with its chatter about sewing tips and tricks; I even encouraged it. But that day I could feel the bull’s-eye on my chest and I understood all the name-calling that was normally directed at Miss Shima was about to be aimed at me.
I was standing just inside the doorway, looking away from Miss Shima to indicate to the other girls, all long gone, that I didn’t want this woman’s sympathy nor did I want to be her friend.
“It must be hard,” Miss Shima said to my back. “Your mother, I mean. War is a hard thing to live through. Sometimes people…well, there are scars.”
I shrugged. I had no idea what she was talking about. And yet, I did understand that she was referring to the teasing. There was something in it, something more specific than Mama’s reputation as the Calrose lady, which she’d gotten for the inside-out logo stamped on the clothes she made from rice bags that she used to wear when she walked downtown. If I turned around, Miss Shima would tell me—what scars? which war? what did this have to do with the mooing?—so I held myself away stiffly, looking toward the world outside. I held even my breath until I was dizzy.
Still, she persisted.
“Your triptych is lovely, Hana. You have a gift. Not just for handwork, but an artistic eye. You said it represents you and your sister and your mother?” When I nodded, still facing away, she suggested I might want to add our names to the image, perhaps in kanji, so that the image was less confusing.
It didn’t matter that crests were not supposed to be labeled. Miss Shima didn’t even know kanji, but it gave her a reason to pick up the white paperback book of Japanese names and their meanings that she’d brought for this purpose, and once again to try to act like a “real Japanese.” With her flip and her black-cat glasses, I realize, she was younger than I am now. That makes it easier to forgive her. She sat down and patted a seat next to her, leaving me no choice but to obey, and opened the book.
Hana, she said quickly, meant “flower.”
And Kei—she had marked the page but she still looked at it as if trying to make up her mind before she pronounced it. Shadow. Keiko meant “shadow child.”
I have lived with this information so long that it is hard now to remember exactly how it felt. Recognition is the word that comes to me, and relief. If it had never occurred to me that a name would have a meaning, it was comforting that mine was simple; pretty. But it was Kei’s, after that tantalizing pause, that came like an answer.
Miss Shima explained that Kei was probably second born. She said she’d read of cases in which the doctors were quite surprised when a second child appeared after the first. She told me twins were often considered blessed or cursed in many cultures, and sometimes one was even killed. Twins were thought to control the rain and the weather. There was even a myth about how, if one twin died, the family would make a little statue for her spirit to dwell in, so she wouldn’t try to enter the living twin.
What stuck was that Kei was my shadow. Kei was the copy. I was the original.
When I told Kei what her name meant, everything changed. All the labels that we had used to distinguish us fell away. She could be bad. Was bad, by name and nature, so why not embrace it?
Miss Shima gave Kei her name, and I was a fool to deliver it. But the truth is, Kei was the one who chose it. No matter what else her name could have meant, she was the shadow. It was a curse on all of us, and the worst was yet to come.
Kei
Wake up, Kei. Must we relive all of this? Okay, then. There is light. Do you see it? So much light through your eyelids.
And heat.
It’s lunch recess. The sky is its usual soft white pillow, vaguely drizzling, and you’re in the hall. Hana is home with a nervous stomach. Playing hooky on your birthday, something Mama would never let you do. But Hana is fragile. She clings to rules, and she breaks with them when they are broken. She believes being good will protect her.
You are worried about her absence, but she hasn’t confided that something else is wrong. Not even late at night, in the dark, when either one of you can say anything. For as long as you can remember, Hana has been terrified of the dark, so once the two of you were too old to sleep in the same bed together, you created the ritual of your “night conversations” to keep her in the safe company of your voice until she fell asleep. Recently, you have been amusing her—counting by sevens, speaking in both pig latin and haiku. Last night, you gave her a gift: You recited all the vice presidents in reverse order. Hana’s gift to you was better. Your name.
You are the Shadow Child.
In the name, you can feel that presence lurking. The earth becoming, Arnie said. The shape-shifter in you. A shadow can be anything: long as a road or just an edge. It is always different. Full of possibility.
A shadow can’t be pinned down. It is never in one place, never stuck. It is never alone, either. Never without the thing that casts it—
It’s the copy, not the real thing, Hana points out. It only follows.
You can hear in her voice that she didn’t expect your excitement. But you know everything depends on where the light is. Sometimes the shadow leads.
You are still thinking about this in the school hallway when you realize you’ve been moving too slow. The pack of boys is outside the bathroom, between you and the yard.
The shadow is transformation, you remind yourself. And then they are on you.
This time, they will pull you into the bathroom and dunk your head in the toilet. When they leave, you will spend the rest of the recess blotting your hair dry. Then, you will clog every toilet in the boys’ bathrooms with wads and wads of paper towels, pull out the stoppers in the tanks, and listen to the water run. You can almost see the dances the outraged teachers will force the dog-boys to do that afternoon when they cannot pee because the toilets are overflowing out of the bathrooms and into the halls. You could not even have hoped for the scene tomorrow when the principal takes every eighth-grade boy out of shop class to plunge out the toilets, mop the floors, and scrub the walls. But you do know that from this day forward, the dog-boys will decide you are too much trouble to deal with. The shadow tells you they will not bother you or Hana again.
After school, on your way home, you pass Missy and her friends under the tree where they always sit, even in the misty rain. Missy is cross-legged at the head of their circle, chewing on a blade of grass. She is their queen. Her hair is caramel and so smooth it’s always slipping out from behind her ears. Her eyes are jet-black against her lighter features. Missy is soft. Ripening. She is a rose on the morning it begins to bloom. Even the dog-boy crew and some of the teachers fall silent when she walks by. She isn’t one of those girls with a wisecrack, or a “look at me” smile. When she’s in a
crowd, her mind is far away from what’s going on around her.
You know all this because you have watched her from a distance. But today, you can get a little closer because there is something going on. One of the girls in Missy’s group is upset, Charlene Chow, and Missy is leaning forward with her hand on Charlene’s shoulder. You slow down, and move close enough to hear Charlene talking about her grandmother who was swept away in the tidal wave. It was fourteen years ago today, before any of you were born.
You’ve seen tidal waves. One came in three years ago and it barely ran up three feet. The tidal wave, the one she is talking about, was a big deal—a bunch of kids and their teachers got swept out to sea and part of downtown was ruined—but that was a whole lifetime ago. You try to imagine it, how the water could be so strong. There are warnings now, but no one bothers to leave the buildings when they test the sirens.
Missy’s eyes flicker toward you as you sidestep in their direction, but Charlene continues with her story. Her grandmother’s car was lifted by the wave, she says, and she describes how it tumbled over and over, smashing into a building before it got sucked back out toward the sea. Her lao lao couldn’t get out to save herself, couldn’t open the door, so she was stuck in that car, tossed around like she was in a washing machine. When they found the car, it was wrapped around the trunk of a palm tree, empty. At least that was what they told her: Her grandmother had been sucked to the bottom of the sea.
It’s a lie. You of all people can tell. No one would know what happened to the grandmother inside the car if she also disappeared. But it’s a good one. You can see that from Missy’s tears.
You stand at the edge of their circle, lingering where you don’t belong. These are not your friends—you don’t have friends. “April Fool!” You wait for them to scream it and shoo you away.
Instead, they don’t even seem to see you. The story holds. The story is magic. As the other girls wait for her lead, Missy reaches out to embrace Charlene.
Let me tell you a story. This one is about five Chinese brothers. Surely you remember Mama’s version of the story? One brother could swallow an ocean and when he did, all the children were dazzled by the flopping fish and ran out onto the sea floor to collect them. The Chinese brother waved for them to come back but they ran farther and farther out. He kept waving, until he could hold the ocean no more. The 1946 April Fool’s tidal wave was like that: The first two waves pulled the water out so far that the beaches were drained, just like in the story. Twenty-three students ran out to collect the fish, and then the deadly third wave swept in and dragged them out to sea.
What did they do to deserve it? There are always tales of lucky people. The ones who are not in the bus when it crashes because they are sick that day, or they woke up late. But what of the people who are unlucky? Don’t they exist, too? The ones accidentally in the wrong place, whom fate is not supposed to take? And what if one of those unlucky children wants to come back? What if her spirit tries, but there is already a little girl in the mother she enters, so they have to split in two?
At that moment in the school yard, you understand what Pele has been trying to tell you: You are the daughter of the dead. A spirit from the big tidal wave. Why else were you born exactly one year after they all died: April Fool’s Day 1947? How else to explain your appearance? You and Hana. Half and half. Two people who wouldn’t mix. Two souls who fought even then because it was your turn to be reincarnated and Hana was already there.
You are exactly thirteen, don’t forget that. Doesn’t every girl that age fantasize that she’s adopted, that her true parents are kings and queens from another land? How much more far-fetched to imagine that you are one of the tidal wave children, so desperate to get your life back that your spirit entered the only mother to give birth on the first anniversary of your death? To imagine that you could find a way to stop being “bad-stupid-crooked-selfish-clumsy-trouble”? That there is another family out there for you, and you can try again?
You are Kei, after all. The teller of fantastical stories. In this new story, to find your real family, you will have to return to the depths of the ocean. And to do that, you will have to learn to swim.
* * *
Mama is getting better at cakes by your thirteenth birthday. This one is a three-layer devil’s food cake with a rough sea of deep chocolate icing. It is ablaze: fifteen candles flashing, one for each year and two to grow on. Hana’s so excited.
The singing is over. Arnie says, “Make a wish.”
Birthdays are the days when wishes are granted. It is the one day when you can have anything. The trick is to ask for something that can be given.
On the fourteenth anniversary of the tidal wave, the cake on fire in front of you, you have chosen carefully:
“Swimming lessons.”
There is, in Mama’s face, a flash of our old mother. The fearful Don’t wander off too far, girls! expression that always led to a story in the evenings in which everything turned out all right. You can almost feel her fingers stroking your hair the way they used to, smelling of soap after dinner has been put away. Time slips. If you could put your head in her lap like you did as a child, you would gladly give up your birthday wish.
“That’s a great idea. Miya? Isn’t it?”
Everyone looks at Arnie.
“It’s easy. Anyone can swim. I can teach her.”
You want to keep watching Mama’s face, get back to that old life you glimpsed in it. The life before Arnie and his inventions and his laugh. But then Mama sways slightly, and you think of how much she hates the water, of her old nightmares about rivers full of the dead. You are afraid that she will fall, that she will disappear into herself for days as she did when you were little. Will it be your fault again? And still, you are ready to catch her, to lie on the floor beside her, except that Arnie keeps on speaking.
“Babies swim,” he says. “It’s easy as pie and safer, too.”
His hand touches hers as it always does when he’s about to jump in between you. He will tell her not to fret, that things will be okay, and she will believe him. Really? She will ask, Do you think so? And then he will go on about how he does, and she will listen.
And you will lose her.
“Isn’t it good that she wants to get out and do something?”
“Not me,” Hana says. “No way I’m getting in the water.”
Mama is different, looking into you. On her face, a new expression: Who are you and why are you haunting me?
“It’s safer,” you echo. By now the flickering candles are leaving puddles in the frosting.
“Make a wish,” Mama says, her eyes on the cake.
Hana
Within three days, I’d become an intimate at the Eckert Trauma Center. The ward nurses knew what kind of bagels I liked, and that cream cheese made me gag, and I knew, but couldn’t quite get over the fact, that one of them ate plastic-wrapped black-and-white cookies for breakfast. My relationship with Bree Sheridan was verging on friendship—she now told me, freely and often, that I looked like hell. She had given me a nickname. From the very first day we met, “Get some sleep, Coco Chanel,” was her four o’clock farewell.
Koko. I was Koko. Kei was Hana, and so was I except when I was actually at Eckert visiting Kei. If it is curious to imagine being two people at once, especially when both of them are in the same place, it was more possible than it seemed. The hardest part was how oddly exhausting it was to have to remember who I was.
I responded by throwing myself into Kei’s stimulation therapy. I was giving it every minute of every day. Taking care of “Hana” allowed me to use a skill I knew I was good at, and in this case, the more I had to give the better: the more hours; the more things.
Kei’s clock had reset, but it was still ticking. Bree asked for more bedtime stories, Kei’s favorite songs, a different perfume. It wasn’t easy to find papayas, or ukulele music, not even in the city that never sleeps, but I took the challenge.
I combed through Arnie�
��s notebook looking for inspiration. The pages were mostly blank, and the ones that weren’t were filled with lists of things to do and buy, but what did Kei, or I, know of “motor start relays” and “water inlet valves”? More interesting were the entries I recognized. Call Torres re: swimming, for example. There were some notes about the volcanic eruption Arnie took Kei to when we were about twelve. That was what had given me the idea for yesterday’s “something familiar.” The smell of sulfur, of rotten eggs, would bring the volcano back. Kei had not responded, but she seemed to have stopped thrashing—sometimes I imagined I could feel her waiting for something—and I hoped that it was some response to the comforts of home. My next task was to find some pumice, scraping like the lava rocks at the beach we used to walk on barefoot.
If Kei woke—when—I needed it to be because of me. Because of a smell or sound or sensation that I had thought to bring in, not the standard stimulation therapy of flashing lights, ice, and pricking that we still alternated through the day.
Memories popped into my head whenever I looked at my sister, and more when I was touching her, as if they were stored deep within Kei and only she could help me relive them. Or maybe they were prompted by our favorite smells and sounds, because most of the moments I remembered were more benign than I would have expected. If we were a feral, gibberish-talking duo before Arnie appeared, there was no malice then. With the exception of the photograph episode, it wasn’t until intermediate school that we began to truly fall apart.
It was a Sunday afternoon in May, a day of baseball in the park and plate lunch at the beach for the rest of the town, but for us, it was another weekend afternoon of birthday swimming lessons for Kei. Most normal people would have taken their lessons in a pool, but Kei didn’t want any of the kids at school to see her floundering, so she convinced Mr. Torres to take us to the beach. I understood the shame of it, since pretty much every child in Hawaii who had not been raised by our mother had learned to swim as a toddler. Mama hated the water, and I did, too: too cold, too salty in my nose, and every time I came up to breathe, the waves slapped my face and in went a lungful of ocean. I sat out with the implied excuse of female discomfort, which older girls used during gym with surprising success, and no one bothered to let me know that it couldn’t be used every week. Mama did fret that I never wanted to do what Kei did, but Arnie, who was always butting in to be her mouthpiece, took my side. “They’re teenagers now, Miya, why not let them decide?”
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