Kei swam. I got a book and read in the shade.
If we’d had a radio, maybe Mama and Arnie would have heard talk of the tidal wave, but it wasn’t until after Arnie dropped us off at the beach with a toot, on his way to help a friend put a new roof on his house on the other side of the island, that Kei and I first heard the whispers. Someone’s uncle had heard something, so it was declared to be fact. But we knew that if there was a real threat, we’d hear three sirens, as we learned in school. The first was an alert, the second meant get ready to evacuate along the routes we were all supposed to have memorized, and the third, that the tidal wave was about to strike land. Our house was so far above the water that we didn’t need a route ourselves; perhaps that was why the whispers—tidal wave, tidal wave—were so strangely exciting. Even I couldn’t resist watching the horizon, imagining what a hero I would be if I was the first to see the huge wall of water.
Usually, Kei practiced her strokes for an hour, after which she sat in the sun until the pruned pads of her fingers smoothed out and her hair regained flight, and Arnie came to pick us up. That day, since Arnie was away, we were supposed to catch the sampan. I expected we’d take the usual drying-off interlude, so I kept reading when Kei came out. She strolled over to me, the water dripping down her newly rounding curves—a hint of hip and breast—making them shine. She stopped just beyond the reach of the darting shadow tips of the palm trees to indicate with her head that I should join her.
“Hey. You should come in sometime. The water is fine.”
On any other Sunday, she might have called out, “Hey, Rags!” or “Hey, Haole!” loud enough to get a smile from others on the beach. She would have kept her distance, too—for some reason, twelve feet seemed most comfortable to her. When we were at intermediate school, this distance wasn’t really noticeable, but when we went anywhere with Arnie and Mama, she was like a stray dog, unwilling to get too far from a source of food but otherwise uncommitted. It bothered Mama; she was always sweeping her fingers at Kei to get her to come closer, but Arnie just laughed, and it was that laughter that made Kei inch over when she realized how ridiculous she looked.
I didn’t respond. Kei lay down a towel and stretched her legs out, then patted the ground beside her.
I felt it, too: This day was different. I shook off my own towel and sat where she indicated, lengthening my legs beside hers, feeling the sun lift the soft hairs off my skin. We were closer to the same color than you would have expected. The splitting image of the other, as Arnie used to tease us. If you squinted, you probably couldn’t tell who was who.
“We can’t miss this.”
She was referring to the wave. “Maybe Mama will let us go to the Chows,” I said, thinking of the clear view of the shoreline from our neighbors’ porch. Mrs. Chow was one of the few women in the neighborhood Mama visited, exchanging avocados and guava cake.
Kei’s sigh was propelled by the great extravagance that came so naturally to her. “I need to be here, where it’s happening. It’s coming for me.”
“Coming? What do you mean, coming?”
There was a pause then, for Kei to figure out how to make sense of what she was about to say, or maybe to think better of saying anything at all. “Don’t you ever wonder why we look like this? Like two people?”
“We are two people.”
“No, I mean each one of us looks like two people. Like half and half. There’s nobody else in the whole town with two different-colored eyes. It has to mean something.”
“What?”
Kei grabbed my arm, as if she could shake her ideas into me. “You’re the one who told me what my name means—you of all people should understand. I came back! Ghosts, you know they can come back every year on the day they died. Maybe there was only supposed to be one girl, but there were two souls battling for the same body, and the battle was so terrible we split apart. Or maybe…maybe we both came back. So, I—that’s who we are, two of those kids who died in the big wave, but we weren’t supposed to, see? It was an accident, we weren’t supposed to die, so when we got the chance, we came back to find our real families. I’ve thought this all out, you know, but the problem was always—how do we find them? How do we get back to our families? If there’s a tidal wave today, then that’s our answer.”
I studied her for wild eyes, uncontrollable twitches. The kids in school called Kei lolo, especially when she came in from recess with grass in her hair, and I wondered then if they were right. Though our mother acted quite normally since she married Arnie, it was still common knowledge she was crazy. And if madness wasn’t as easy to catch as cooties, despite what the other kids said in the school yard, I knew that it could crop up suddenly. Kei was looking off at the horizon, her eyes red from the saltwater but otherwise usual. There was no “gotcha” in her face, no appraising me to see if I took the bait. There was something else at work, too, a warmth that still surprises me: As ridiculous as her fantasy was, I was in it.
Even though Kei’s mind was on escape, mine was focused on something equally enticing: the word we. Of course I’d heard how she tossed it in at the last minute to win me over, but hope isn’t logical. I wanted to believe. Not in the ghosts from the tidal wave—that was preposterous—but in the fact that my sister was sitting beside me.
I missed her.
“Do you think we belonged to the same family?” I asked her.
“What?”
“Were we sisters? You know, in the other family?”
“Maybe. Or maybe we were sister and brother. Maybe I was a boy.”
“A boy?” How she could think that was appealing, I didn’t know.
I could feel the us slipping away. That must be why I asked, “So what are we supposed to do, then?”
Kei’s eyes shone. “We’re supposed to let the wave take us. And when it’s over, we’ll return again as April Fool’s babies and be who we’re supposed to be.”
* * *
No—it must be said—I didn’t believe her. Nor was I, who could barely dog-paddle for five minutes, interested in being sucked out to sea and drowned so that I could be reborn in a year’s time. But in my defense, I didn’t believe in the tidal wave, either. Sure, there had been a big one in 1946, but everyone knew there were also some pretty small ones and a lot of false alarms. We were safe. Though Mama was always worried about the end of the world, the truth was we lived in a town so slow you couldn’t get hit by a car if you tried, and the juxtaposition of Mama’s fear and our safety made it even harder to conceive of danger. There were none of the drugs or thieves or dark alleys I would come to dread in New York City. In our early-morning-rising town, almost all the houses were dark by ten p.m.
I could allow Kei her silly fantasy. We could spend an hour hanging around the soda fountain and maybe get some ice cream. And when no big waves came in, she would remember I stood by her. That we were together, I thought then, was the most important thing.
After a few hours on the beach, we stopped at Kress to call Mama so she wouldn’t worry. Kei told her Mr. Torres had brought some adobo to the beach and that he’d bring us home later in his car. Although I couldn’t hear Mama’s side of the conversation, I didn’t expect her to agree. She would know nothing about the tidal wave, but she’d never let us stay out unsupervised before, and with Arnie and his truck on the other side of the island, there was little chance of it that day.
Kei hung up, then dug around for some change. “We can get…some sour lemon,” she said, seeing how few coins she had. “Want some?”
“What did she say?”
Kei gave me a thumbs-up. “You like? Hah?”
I ignored the touch of pidgin in her voice, and we walked along Front Street until we reached the store where the big mayonnaise jars of sour and salted lemons stood on the stairs in the sun. Kei handed over a couple of pennies and we plucked the brown, crusted rinds of fruit from the liquid, licking our fingers as we headed back toward the bandstand on the edge of the bay. It was already late in the afte
rnoon. While I tore the skin off with my teeth—I could never eat the inside, where the seeds were, but the skin was soft and vaguely sweet—I wondered why Mama had let us stay out. It had to have been the telephone itself, I decided—Mama had just wanted to hang up as quickly as she could. Arnie had gotten it so we weren’t still living in the dark ages. I remembered the first time Mama picked up the receiver and heard talking—we had a party line at first, so nothing was private, really, and you had to ask the other people to get off if you needed to make a call. I could see the words she must have been hearing chase themselves across her face, making her cheeks flare and her eyes race to follow them: For a split second, the spirit world had finally found her. Even though we had gotten a private line soon enough, she hated to answer it, and she could never get off fast enough.
A steady stream of small boats began docking at the fish market to unload their catches. The ocean was a shivering sapphire, as placid as always.
“What about names?” I asked. “What should our new names be?”
I couldn’t decide whether to come back as Sandra or Donna, trying them both on with different poses and imagining the corresponding hairdos. Kei chose Marilyn. From there, we moved on to whether we should have any other sisters and brothers. Brothers were gross and sweaty, but oddly thrilling; sisters we weren’t much interested in. As we waited for the wave, the baseball game in the park came to its natural close: little boys wilting in the sun in the last inning. I tried to determine if there were actually more people than usual in the streets, their cars packed, escaping to higher ground, but Kei didn’t notice anything.
The lapping waves remained as safe and inviting as every other Sunday. Kei’s disappointment grew. I was bored with the game of turning regular people heading home into some whispered evacuation. Plus, I was hungry.
“How long did Mama say we could stay?” I knew Kei would insist on using every last possible second, so I would have to be persuasive to bring this adventure to an early close.
“I thought…” Kei sighed, looking out at the horizon, as if the wave might still appear. “I was just hoping.”
It took a minute to sink in. Then, of course, I understood. “What did Mama say, exactly?”
Kei wouldn’t look at me.
“You lied!”
“I didn’t—”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t answer. She must have been in the garden.”
I was beside myself. Our mother was alone, worried. Had she left the house to search for us? Would it be empty when we got home? What if she had wandered away, then fallen and lost consciousness? Mama hadn’t fainted for years, thanks to Arnie’s cure of less work, more sleep, and red meat, but I knew that her sickness had just gone into hiding, and that the next time she might never get up. That was Kei’s fault. Everything was Kei’s fault. She was jealous, and spiteful. How could I have thought for a moment that she wanted to be with me? “I knew she wouldn’t give us permission. I knew it! Why do you have to drag me into your idiotic stories?”
“I thought—”
“It’s bad enough you’re always in trouble. Someday Mama’s going to have a heart attack and it’ll be all your fault.”
Was I more angry or afraid? It had suddenly hit me: What if there really had been a tidal wave? Kei could have killed us. I imagined Mama getting that news. Your daughters are dead, Mrs. Swanson. Sucked out to sea, not even a body to bury. I wanted to shake Kei until her teeth rattled. With all her trouble at school, the almost suspensions, and the hushed conversations in the night, was it too much to ask Kei to consider anyone else for a single second? “Leave me out of your stupid stories. If you want to kill yourself, go ahead. But I’m going home.”
“Hana!”
But at that moment, Kei was not my concern. Mama hadn’t answered the phone. She didn’t know where we were. With Arnie gone, she could be in danger and it would be our fault, not Kei’s alone. “I don’t care,” I said, ignoring the tears that sprang up, so fast and so unfairly, in Kei’s eyes. We were missing, and I could see Mama falling. I could see her bleeding in a spray of broken glass. It was my mother I was frantic over as I lashed out. “Throw yourself in the ocean if you want to. Be a boy; leave us. It’s better for Mama anyway if she doesn’t have to deal with you.”
Mama was in the kitchen when we got back. I ran into the house, grumbling about how the sampans were so full we couldn’t get on one and had to walk, and there she was. Alive. Seemingly, she hadn’t even noticed the time. I surprised her with a hug, while Kei muttered something about Mr. Torres. Kei would surely have contradicted whatever I said, so I put my hand on Mama’s back and drew her over to the pune’e, offering to chop all the vegetables for dinner and clean up, too. She’d been doing laundry since early morning and she had burned her arms twice on the iron, so she was happy to let me pamper her. Kei could have helped, given that the whole senseless afternoon was her fault, but she just glared at me and claimed she had a history project to finish and there was no way for me to contradict her without getting us both in trouble.
After dinner, though, I was glad for Kei’s homework excuses. Mama had a stack of mending in the front room. Helping people get an extra year out of their clothing was good business—we got a dollar an hour for it—so I sat down to help her rip out waistbands, let seams, and even add gussets.
“Good girl,” she said, patting my hand after I held up my work for her inspection. I allowed myself a burst of pride. With Kei, Mama would often have to pull the stitches out. But Kei wasn’t joining us. Arnie wasn’t home. It was just Mama and me, alone together for the first time since I could remember.
The absence of sound closed in around us, as if silence was a vacuum that shrank the space and pulled everything closer: There were no ticking clocks, no radios playing, no kids shouting in the already darkened street, almost no cars. There must have been cicadas or birds competing with the soft rustling of fabric, but I couldn’t hear them. Without Arnie’s loud stories about the latest guy who let go of the hammer when he was swinging it and sent it sailing through the window behind him, the night was calm and the near tragedy of the afternoon felt erased as I mirrored Mama’s quiet presence. I knew if I spoke, her startled look would only remind me she had forgotten I was there. It was enough to help her, that was what I told myself; enough to leave her with my perfect stitches. That night, the sweet, clean smell of my mother’s skin assured me she was not at all afraid of anything to come.
The first siren, when it sounded, was a soft wind-up whine from far enough away we might not have heard it on a regular night. I must have been half-listening, because once it registered, it became a mosquito that wouldn’t leave me alone. My first reaction was to talk over it: If I could keep Mama from hearing it, then it wouldn’t exist.
“So,” I blurted, “how was your day?”
Before Mama could decide what to say to this casual and entirely misplaced small talk, Kei bounded out of our bedroom.
“Did you hear that? See, it’s true!”
Mama reassigned her confusion from me to Kei and then to the siren. I watched it enter her.
“Air raid.” Mama whispered the words, completely white.
“No, it’s not—it’s not an air raid, Mama.” We did have air raid tests in those days, and tsunami tests, though it was usually the curfew sirens we heard at night. But this one, of them all, hung in the air.
“It’s just a test,” Kei said hurriedly. “Don’t worry. I mean, it’s nothing to worry about.”
Kei’s assurances surprised me, but I was also hedging. I hadn’t forgotten how the two of us had made up stupid names for ourselves while we waited for death all afternoon. A look flashed between us—I told you so—but who initiated it? For all my anger at Kei, I was more concerned about the red blotches that were beginning to appear on Mama’s blanched face.
“It’s just a test,” I repeated. I wasn’t lying, exactly. Just trying to keep her from falling. If it was a tidal wave, there
would be more sirens, and we could decide what to tell her then.
“Pikadon,” she whispered.
“No it’s…” I didn’t know what she had said. “It’s not an air raid. Don’t worry.” I grabbed her hand.
Where was Arnie? It was a wish more than a question. We were too high above sea level and far from the waterfront for any need to evacuate, but that had never been the biggest danger we faced. And what if Kei and I did have to take Mama somewhere in the dark of the night during an emergency? Where would we go? Arnie would know, but he was on the other side of the island.
Kei would know.
I understood that suddenly as I looked at Mama, who needed to be rescued, and faced the truth that I needed the same thing. Kei would have to be the one to save us, and I realized, with a shock, that I trusted her to do it. I don’t know if I hated or was comforted by that thought.
The siren had stopped, and once again the night was so quiet it was hard for any of us to believe what we had actually heard.
“I’m going to bed,” Kei declared.
Maybe the siren was just a warning, I assured myself. Maybe it was a test for something that I had never bothered to notice. That far from shore, a tidal wave seemed like a fantasy. But whatever was true, there would be no more mending that night. With Arnie gone, and Mama agitated and asking for him, I took her into her bedroom like I used to do when we were younger and tucked her into bed. It was a game we used to play, pretending to switch places, I’ll be the mommy and you be the girl, and if it bothered me that it seemed much less like a game now, it still worked.
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