Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  The morning after the tidal wave warning, I awoke to Arnie dragging the covers off me in a panic. He yanked the blanket off Kei’s bed next, and then the sheets. I felt a chill through my pajamas as he grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me standing, as if I might be lying on whatever he was looking for.

  Then he was gone, checking the bathroom, the kitchen. Mama stood in the doorway, struggling to get her arms into her robe. That was when I looked for the pile of clothes I’d laid out for the morning, only to see Kei’s pile alone on our single chest of drawers.

  Kei was gone.

  “Where is she? Where’s your sister?”

  This wasn’t my fault. That was my first reaction. The siren never sounded again; I didn’t hear Kei leave. Yesterday, wasn’t it all just silliness? Sandy, Donna, Marilyn. Kei’s dreams of return.

  I wanted to ask what happened, but I was too afraid of the answer. Or rather, Arnie was the answer, one I didn’t want: He was here when he was supposed to be gone for three days. He said he knew we were in trouble when he heard it on the radio. He felt it in his bones.

  Mama was already getting into the truck in her bathrobe. I grabbed Kei’s clothes and put them on. She’d be wearing my dark blue skirt and my lavender blouse. The thought came to me: That’s how we’ll recognize her body. I pushed it out of my mind. Was I more scared of finding her or of not finding her? I imagined her facedown and broken, lying on the shore.

  Days later, Arnie would tell us what it looked like when he returned over the saddle road that sits between the two volcanoes high above our town. Like a giant hand had dragged itself through town, sticking its dirty fingers first down one road then the other, then swinging south and raking everything up with a flat palm. But that ride down the hill was not a time for stories. None of us could think of anything but Kei.

  I could see the wave’s contour as we drove. We were still far away, and the road wound behind stands of trees, so it was hard to get much more than glimpses of the swathes of brown mud. The bandstand Kei and I sat in just yesterday afternoon was still standing, but it seemed as if the wave had rushed through its open sides and then turned and surged inland through the lowest lying areas. It wasn’t until we got closer that I began to understand what I was seeing. Buildings had been picked up and wrapped around trees. Cars lay smashed and twisted like a child balled them up, then threw them.

  I pictured Kei right in front of me, just as she looked at the beach the previous afternoon, staring thoughtfully at the horizon, mulling the details of her death. It never occurred to me that my sister would actually try to kill herself. Had she gone down for a lark, expecting to outrun it? I tried to imagine what she had done, what she was feeling. If something had happened to her, wouldn’t I know it? I was her twin.

  I warned her, I told myself, but being right didn’t change anything. The idea of it smashed me: what she might have done to herself; what she had nearly done to us both.

  Mama, too, was beyond speech. As we got to the barricades on Front Street, Arnie pulled over and Mama opened her door before the truck stopped rolling. I jumped out to catch her. She was so frail I could feel her ribs beneath her skin. Arnie passed us, practically bounding toward the sawhorses blocking the road. Maybe we had the same impulse: to protect Mama by knowing what happened first.

  The guardsmen and police were torn between keeping the area from being overrun with spectators and potential looters, and fielding the calls on their walkie-talkies for help with discoveries in the wreckage. That was Arnie’s opening: He could help. Of course Mama kept right on walking. Arnie whispered that her daughter was missing, but no one would have stopped the local madwoman in her bathrobe, even if she had been alone. It was the way she moved—I will never forget it—both unseeing and purposeful; she walked as you might imagine a sleepwalker would while being drawn through a landscape that isn’t there. But that was how I felt, too: As much as we might have squabbled sometimes, I couldn’t navigate without my sister. It never occurred to me until that moment what it might truly feel like to be just one.

  There were already tractors and bulldozers on the other side of the sawhorses; the farmers had started bringing them in from the plantations as soon as the water receded. This part of town was spared compared to what we’d see later, but it was still a mess. The wave had taken apart the seawall and dropped the boulders into the road. It smashed windows and pulled all the stuff out of the stores. Dresses, skeins of fabric, food, shoes, books, paper, dolls, and furniture—they’d all been tossed out to sea and tossed back, and now they lay tumbled, half buried, in a thick blanket of mud. The shop owners who’d returned were already dragging their ruined merchandise into piles beneath their hanging signs and broken windows, while families were salvaging in the opposite direction: bringing their belongings out. Through the open doorways, I could see the wreckage of all the possessions that had been volleyed into pieces between the walls. There was money on the ground—tens and twenties—but no one was picking it up.

  There was a muted quality to the salvage in those first few blocks where the rescue was limited to possessions. Further down—where the bandstand still stood muddy and bowed in its stand of trees—it was hard to believe what we were seeing, or rather what was no longer there. The buildings were flattened, or listing, or had been spun around and smashed into other buildings. Sheets of tin were scattered, along with lumber, like pick-up sticks, and the pavement had peeled off the ground.

  But the smell was the worst. The mud was slick and silky and it smelled like the sea. It smelled of dead fish, and also dead cows and chickens, dogs and cats, whole and in pieces. It smelled of broken sewage lines and gas pipes. It crawled up our calves as our feet slipped and sank into it. In my sandals, my ankles scraped on the glinting shards of glass and broken coral and tramp iron, as someone called it—nails and metal shards from the broken buildings—all of it embedded in the iridescent muck. I aimed for the sheets of tin and other pieces of debris that lay suspended in the mud to keep myself from being sucked under.

  As the day progressed, I realized the smell was also of dead people. Sixty of them, when the tally was finally done. It took so long to find some of them that they were eventually located by their smell.

  But perhaps all that came later. It’s hard to remember just the first moments of that first day.

  Arnie darted around, listening to the stories and asking about Kei. No one had seen her, but the only people in this area were the searching residents, the relief workers, and the dead. The refugees had gathered at the churches and the schools. The icehouse and the theater were being used as morgues.

  It would make sense to split up, to start checking the churches. But there was the question of the morgue, the way the word echoed and the fact that there was a demand for it, such a demand they needed more than one. Morgues. We wouldn’t begin there, but starting anywhere was still to begin the slow process of elimination. And once we had exhausted all our possibilities, what then?

  Instead, we looked for Kei where we were. It was the same impossible impulse that led Arnie to lift Kei’s flat sheets off the bed. She wasn’t here, she couldn’t be, and yet here was where we wanted her, where we demanded that she appear. Here, where we were, not just among the living, but among the saviors.

  While Arnie inquired, he lifted things, grabbed what had to be grabbed. Someone threw him some work gloves for the splintered beams. As for me and Mama, we kept moving, bent over, looking for clues in the mud. Kei could not have been buried there, so what were we looking for? I remember picking up an unbroken cola bottle full of mud and sand with its cap still tightly fastened. I remember headless dolls, lonely shoes, open purses. I studied these as if they meant something, as if, if I looked hard enough, I might see back through time, to the arrival of the wave, and know where Kei had gone. Mama kept glancing around, expecting to catch her daughter strolling down what used to be the road. In my mind, I was trying to take back all the words, said and unsaid, that hung between me and Kei,
though I knew that would not save either one of us. I was listening for her, and hearing nothing. I was in shock, but also hollow. I let my eyes glaze over the pyramid of three cars tossed on top of each other in the open field as the possibility that I might live even one breath without my sister entered me. Had she really chosen to leave us? Leave me?

  Arnie and the emergency crews were clearing a doorway—more like an open wall into the kitchen of a crushed building—when a shout went up. Mama had drifted slightly in the direction of the ocean and I followed, so by the time we figured out they found a body, there was a crowd of people around the building.

  It was strange, what we did then. Neither Mama nor I moved. I kept telling myself: It was not my sister, could not be Kei. I wasn’t keen to see my first dead body, but it was more than that. For the first time, I understood something about my mother, how she could watch and wait for tragedy because there was no reason to hurry it along. How much better to observe the rescue workers weave in and out from a distance. The crowd parted first for the medics; then, when it was clear the person was dead, the salvage team moved in again, but more gingerly, lifting the wreckage off the body so as not to bruise it further, then laying the debris carefully to the side. All that was left then was for the brave ones to volunteer to take the remains to the icehouse so the salvagers could get back to work.

  Mama and I waited out of the way, barely breathing until we heard that the body was a man’s. I don’t know how long we had searched for Kei amid the tractors and cane grabs and push rakes from the sugar plantations, but we stayed on our feet until the body passed. I looked at it, because my mother seemed incapable of telling me not to. Exposed, it was soft and purple. It was naked and bruised all over; the wave must have tossed it like a ball. I could see the legs and arms under the cover they threw over it. That was oddly shocking: damp black curls springing off bloated skin.

  Mama dropped to her knees. She stayed in that pose, like she could no longer stand but she couldn’t sit, either.

  It’s been a hard morning, I told myself. She’s fine. She just needs rest. It was up to me now. I cleared a space for me and Mama, picking splinters of glass, wood, and metal out of the crusting mud, tugging at the broken edge of a deep blue bowl. It was a curved crescent of indigo, nothing special, but Mama took it from me. She placed it carefully in her lap and was scrubbing the glaze clean with the edge of her shirt, when she looked up and gave me a grateful smile.

  It was only after she’d finished cleaning the shard of the bowl and had slipped it in a pocket that she picked up her foot and cradled it in her lap. I was beside her, too exhausted to pay attention, so at first I didn’t notice the blood running from her ankle to her instep.

  Her foot was bare; her sandal strap broken. Although her legs were brown with mud, the blood was turning black and beginning to color the ground beneath it.

  It was my worst nightmare. Mama was bleeding, badly, and I knew how hard it was to stop. But she didn’t act as if she was injured. She watched the wound as if it was out of her hands.

  “Arnie!” I screamed, and when he didn’t answer, either, I ran for him. I could feel my body scrambling. My legs were weak so I cycled them fast, knowing beyond thought and logic that each would only hold me so long; in fact each was failing at that moment. I could see the purple hand on the dead man’s body again, swollen like a balloon. The hair on it. The crusted fingernails.

  I could see my mother, dying in a river of her too-thin blood.

  “Arnie,” I whispered, feeling my whole body tremble as I reached him. I knew if I opened my mouth any further I might start screaming and never stop.

  This is what it looked like: Arnie bending over Mama, his face so close to hers; he was sitting on the ground, pulling her against him, their heads touching as they both studied her foot. The medics ran over with him. They were cupping her foot gently, friendly, consulting each other as if this injury might have some small chance of ranking as important on a day when their other patients had been dead for hours. All they could do was tell Arnie to take her to the hospital to get it looked at.

  A tetanus shot. Antibiotics. Because the blood was flowing fast and freely, the cut might be deeper than it looked.

  Arnie tried to help Mama stand. She fought him, trying to sink so he would let her fall, and when he lifted her entirely off the ground with one strong arm, she squirmed, kicking her feet so he couldn’t force her to leave. She refused to go without Kei, refused to be the one being cared for. She was instinct. No hesitation. She was back: my former mother who loved us to the point of fainting before Arnie arrived in our lives. Blood flew off her foot and splattered Arnie’s leg. His face was still close to hers as he whispered fiercely against her cheek.

  “Kei!” she called, twisting her head away from his. “Kei! Kei!” She kept calling my sister’s name. Everyone else knew that if Kei had been in this spot when the wave hit she would not be alive, and she certainly wouldn’t be lurking in the rubble waiting to be called out. But the hush around Mama was oddly respectful. Arnie put both arms around her and pressed her whole body to him, his mouth in her ear, and then suddenly, even though she continued calling, he stopped shushing her and let her go. She stood unsteadily; then, as we watched, she started hobbling toward the ocean. If we let her continue, she would walk right into the bay, which was dark with sludge but otherwise calm. She was looking for Kei, or maybe making an offering to the God who took her daughter: to take her instead and return her child. She didn’t say it out loud; she voiced nothing more than Kei’s name, but I could tell from the way she spread her arms and appealed to the sky, the way she kept stumbling, stumbling toward the water.

  My mother could not swim. What made her stop then and drop her arms before she reached the now-gentled lapping, and then let Arnie guide her into a waiting pickup? Perhaps it was me, hanging on her, anchoring her with my arms cinched around her legs so she couldn’t move, refusing to let go, to let her go on without me. Begging her through my sobs to come to the hospital. I was the one now. The only. And I would let her pull me into the sea if that was what she wanted, but I would not let her leave me.

  Please.

  Kei

  Sound comes before sight. A roar from the darkness. People will say it sounds like a train. It’s a rumbling, from a distance and from beneath your feet, too. The ground itself is beginning to shake. There is no wall of water visible. No proud prow of a wave cresting in the belly of the bay. There’s nothing to see, yet you are running toward the tidal wave. It’s coming, getting louder, but the sound is being overtaken by other sounds.

  Cars are racing past you, careening, as they flee from the waterfront, no proper lanes of traffic. One of them veers onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing a post that holds up the second-story awning of a building. And people, too. Where did they come from? You look for Eddie, for his friends, for anyone you recognize from the bridge. But these are not the spectators who have been waiting for the wave. There are children here, and old ladies.

  The police were working so hard to empty the streets and the bridges, but the buildings are full of people.

  Why are you running toward the bandstand? Before you can get close enough to the bay to see more than a pale shape forming in the darkness, something explodes, like a bomb, somewhere to your right. It lights up the sky, sets off a series of bursts as the buildings spark, greenish and crackling, before going totally black. It runs like a fuse through the town, darkness chasing light, pouncing on it. To your right, in the sudden glare, you see figures crowding in the windows. Then the streetlights are out. Your eyes are full of the shadows of the explosion. It takes a minute to adjust to the moonlight, a minute full of screaming. The people are running past you now, and in the commotion, you hear advice—“Run, run for your life! Big wave!”—as a base note to another kind of calling. Names.

  “Roy! Uncle Roy!”

  “Elvin, where are you? Elvin!”

  “Etsuko? Etsuko! Call back! We’ll come get you.”


  “Elvin! Elvin!”

  “Daddy, help!”

  All of them pleas, and no answers.

  Can you really hear this, clearly? Or is it only a story you tell? It’s a clamor of screams, and sobbing, of the rushing of water and the crack of windows shattering. Water is surging up the road toward you, people on the edge of it. The wave is coming, only marginally slowing as it spreads out into doorways. It twirls like a curious puppy before the doors fall open with the weight of the water.

  You expected a wall of water, like a gigantic surfing wave. This is more like the boiling pots of white water in the river, except they’re getting bigger.

  The water is rising. It has reached through the front row of buildings, threading through them, pulling furniture out the broken windows. Clothes. The buildings are groaning. You can hear snapping, splintering, big things crashing into bigger things, but all you can see are stores’ signs rafting along the water’s surface, and doors. Stores and houses are spilling into the streets, but the water isn’t as much of a hammer as you expected. The walls themselves are standing. The edge of the wave has found itself, hesitating. You are standing on a small rise on the shoulder between the road and the river. The water is approaching your feet.

  “Don’t let go! No, Georgie-boy, hold her hand. Hold on!”

  In front of you, a mother and her three children, all in their pajamas. She is standing on a stepped-up porch, trying to see out to the bay. Her youngest child clings to her hip with his legs. His head is buried in the black hair whipping around her face, his arms tight around her neck, pulling her down on one side. The railing is broken and the water is swirling up her calves but she doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening. She’s urging her other two children out of the building.