Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  No.

  In the doorway, a boy, who must be Georgie. He’s as tall as his mother’s rib cage, and it’s his job to hold on to the little girl who is sobbing beside him, her pajama pants wet and clinging to her legs, refusing to leave. She’s half his size, but stubborn. She’s holding onto the doorway first, and then the windowsill as Georgie tries to pry her off. Hand on, hand off. Hand on. They’re in front of you. The water still rising, the woman still looking toward the shore.

  You are far from alone. Around you, men who have come down to help—one with a rope ladder, could you use it?—others who have struggled out of the wave. Still, no one else sees Georgie succeed in getting his sister’s fingers loose. You watch her float up just a little before she tips and is carried off the porch.

  What of the innocents? you once wondered. What of the children stolen by the wave? But that was before. Now, you aren’t thinking anything at all.

  You are in the water, wading toward the girl. It’s cold and slimy with something you don’t even want to guess at. Your skirt lifts. The swirl around your legs pulls much more strongly than you expected. The little girl is a ball, tumbling. The water is carrying her toward you. You can intercept her if you don’t go too deep. But between the rush of the water in, and your haste to get to the girl, whose pajamas have ballooned on her back forcing her face into the water, that is not a clear calculation. Then something big pushes past and the girl’s direction shifts. She’s off to your left. You need to reach her. You jump.

  You’ve got her. Wet flannel in your hand, but your feet went out from under you and now you, too, are being carried by the wave. You have to fight to keep yourself on the surface, to get the girl turned over, get her face in the air. You are spinning like a top, but she’s okay. She is coughing. She is also trying to climb on top of you. Under you go.

  Your eyes sting, and the little girl’s foot clubs you in the ear. You can’t tell which direction is up, except maybe the girl is. Everything you can grab moves with you. You can’t hold on. Your lungs spasm and there is water in your mouth and it occurs to you that you may not get to the surface. The little girl needs you, and you don’t want to die.

  You don’t want to die.

  The water grabs you like a hand and spins you up again. You surface next to a floating piece of plywood. You’ve got a breath now. The little girl is screaming for her mother, which is a good sign, but you can no longer focus on any noise, not even one that’s shrieking directly into your ear. You are hanging off the wood, throwing up putrid water and trying to breathe. Is it your imagination, or does it seem like the pull of the wave is slowing?

  Then something happens, you don’t know what, and the wood is ripped away from you as you are swirled into a hedge. You still have the girl in one hand, and the hedge is in the other. The branches won’t hold you unless you can get your whole body pushed inside it. The girl’s little hands are wrapped in your hair. Her fists hold tight, yanking on you because there’s nothing else to do, as you shove yourself into the hedge.

  You will find your feet, as the water waits, then sucks back out. You will hear yourself praying, Oh Lord, hold on, though you have never prayed before. And when you finally stumble to safety, the solid earth beneath you, you will sit on the grass with Georgie’s little sister, and both of you will sob.

  Do you remember how Mama used to tell us about Lillie’s nightmares when she was a young girl? Lillie dreamed she was drifting alone on a wooden raft in the middle of the ocean, with no light in sight and very far from home. Every night she would wake up screaming for her mother. Finally, one night, Lillie’s mother gave her a song to protect her. With it, just when the night was the darkest and Lillie was sure she would never find her way home, an island rose on the horizon, and peeking around it was the sun. On the shore, Lillie could see two girls, hand in hand—the same girls who would someday be her daughters. Look at them. Surely you can see them, standing in a beautiful paradise, a place that could be Lillie’s home? All Lillie had to do was to find a way to get there, so she sang her song, and the two girls reached out their hands, and pulled Lillie all the way across from the other side of the ocean. And then Mama would sing that song, which sounded a lot like church music, just like she did every single night of our childhood before she turned off the light. Sing it, now. Let it pull you back out of the past. Remember why you had to come to get Hana. If you don’t wake up soon, you are not the only one who will be lost.

  There’ll be light, there’ll be light,

  There’ll be light on the other side.

  With two girls I love, there is no more night,

  There’ll be light on the other side.

  1945

  When the train stopped, they stayed in their seats, and when there was no announcement about the explosion, no movement, the few passengers in the compartment began to look at each other. Then look away. Out the window, Lillie noticed, people were beginning to leave the other cars. A man and his wife, arms around each other, walked directly under her window, heading along the tracks in the direction the train would have taken them. Then there were others, and she wanted to call out—what had they heard? What happened and could they see it? She’d thought it was a bomb first, maybe still burning in a nearby factory, but the others didn’t seem afraid. Lillie imagined an accident on the tracks, even a suicide, and wondered if she could wait it out, if she could stay safely in her seat and never have to see the wreckage, the life destroyed.

  As more people walked by, the passengers around her got up to leave, and Lillie found herself rising. Better to be with the group heading for the city than to end up alone. Outside, the stream of people was thin but steady. They walked for a long time beside the tracks, passing other train stations. They acknowledged each other only by moving to make room when the clearing narrowed, but no one, not even the children, whispered about what might have happened.

  By then, the glow over Hiroshima was unmistakable. August was a hot month, but this was different. The air was scorched, sizzling, rippling everything out of sight.

  The black rain had already fallen. The firestorms were sweeping through anything that could still be burned, including people alive and trapped in the rubble. Lillie didn’t know this yet. She wouldn’t hear these stories until later. Then, she was still walking through her final steps of innocence.

  They did not yet know, and they could never have imagined. Still couldn’t believe, even when the black ghosts began to approach them. From a distance, the ghosts looked like people, but as they got closer, it became apparent something was wrong. Their hair, for one, puffed and frizzy even in the distance. Their color. From her vantage point, with the sun in her eyes and a strange glow behind them, they seemed to be completely in shadow.

  As they got closer, Lillie could see it was their skin that was black. Some of it was burned, exposing white bone; some of it hung off their bodies. What had seemed to be a crowd when she first saw them had whittled, people falling off in the wake of the rest to sit or lie down on the ground. Those who continued walking held their arms floating in front of them like sleepwalkers, maybe to avoid the pain of rubbing raw nerve on raw nerve; maybe—with the instincts of a woman holding her hem off the ground—to keep their skin from dragging since most of them were too deeply in shock, too far beyond feeling.

  They didn’t even look at the passengers. No one asked a question. No one offered a warning.

  It would have been horrifying, if it wasn’t so clearly a nightmare.

  Sometime, in the future, she would remember screams. She would remember silence. The first sight of the bodies clogging the Yokogawa river, lying like a dam that should have raised the level of the water. You could walk over them, she thought. It was how she understood they were all dead. She would remember questions, whose answers, she already understood, had no power to help her.

  What had happened here?

  Lillie didn’t look for Hanako when she was able to get close enough to the city to skirt the edge
s. She couldn’t get near the castle. Instead, she searched everywhere for Tateishi-sama, even though she knew he could only have been in two places: the house they lived in, which had been engulfed in a huge lake of flames, or the hospital. He was the bedridden one. Her responsibility. Yet she was wandering through streets that she knew he never would have traveled.

  She couldn’t think.

  There was a woman with her head submerged in a drum, her long hair still swaying like seaweed in the murky water. A child huddled blind under his dead mother’s arm. Toshi, she thought. Thank God he was not in the city. But there were so many tiny bodies. So many people of all sizes. Up close, she could see that those who had worn white clothing with darker patterns had been seared, their skin oozing in wounds that matched the charred, once-dark designs. Their faces blurred, rubbed out. People without eyes. Without ears. Without a nose.

  There was no way to recognize anyone, but Lillie was afraid to stop moving—into the city, out of the city, direction didn’t matter. Others were doing what she was: searching automatically just to have someplace to go. She couldn’t help. She couldn’t stop, either. She had seen an older man stop; she had watched the horror hit him. He’d raised his hands high to the sky, calling out for the gods to take him and return his wife instead. She had watched him crumple to the ground and stay there.

  Lillie kept going.

  She walked the ruined city all day, burning her hands and the soles of her feet through her sandals, before she’d ended up in the hospital. There were bodies lying in the hallways, in the courtyard. And camped outside the front door, more injured, more dying, and others just in shock, with no food and nowhere to go. Nowhere was where they all were, she realized. There was no outrunning it. An entire city incinerated by a single bomb.

  Her son was a tiny light, in a sea of lights that she’d once believed would be protected. She had believed people had rights, that the good would be rewarded, that life was precious. And fair. But no one was safe. And in the caustic embers of the city, surrounded by the impossible, this truth that she had spent the day eluding finally caught up with her. Her hope guttered out. She sank down against the wall of the building and closed her eyes.

  Lillie didn’t move again until a young woman woke her. The stranger needed help carrying her father off a wooden cart and onto the ground. Lillie found she could stand. She was alive, and that was more than could be said for most of them. She could help. And so, for days, she did: dressing wounds as she could though it meant shoving her feet between the injured since there were so many of them that there was no room to walk. Her bare, slippered toes searching for the floor, sometimes forced to use their bodies as a wedge to keep her feet from skidding on the dark wet ooze. And each time she touched them, even so gently just to clean them, they screamed if they could, if it was still possible. She was awash in a new knowing, just another shard of what used to be unthinkable: Sometimes, it was better to die.

  She had been helping at the hospital two days when she found Hanako in the mass of victims lying on the ground. Lillie was turning an injured young boy, when she nudged the woman’s body next to him accidentally and saw the pendant on the ground behind her neck.

  Hanako’s face had been flattened into a white feathery ash. Her nose and one ear were burned away. Lillie wasn’t even sure if Hanako was alive—her eyes were blank sunken sockets and her lips were gone. It seemed cruel that she still had hair, that her blouse was white, though twisted around her and covered with brown stains. She wasn’t bandaged, which was a sign that no one had claimed her.

  —Hanako.

  Her best friend didn’t respond to her name, whispered or shouted. Lillie tried to get help, to get salve and bandages, but one of the nurses stopped her. Lillie understood. There were those who could be saved, and then there were the rest. Hanako was beyond help. Lillie only had to look at her to know.

  —Rest peacefully, the nurse said softly, before turning away to take some bandages to one of the doctors. It wasn’t clear which one of them she was speaking to.

  It should have been Lillie who had been there when the bomb dropped. That was why she’d never been able to bring herself to search for Hanako. Whatever injury Hanako suffered should have been hers.

  Hanako’s face was gone, burned away and then hardened into charcoal—that was how Lillie knew she must have been looking out the window and directly at the flash. But her body was still pulsing, red and raw, slippery where there was no skin to cover her bones and muscles, and everything slick with pus. Lillie knew better than to try to embrace her. All those nerve endings exposed, unbearable even to feel the floor that was holding them, the rush of air when someone else was moved. No one could imagine what it was like, the moaning and the screaming—people begged to be killed rather than to be turned over. Was Hanako at peace? Lillie chose to think of her that way, rather than trapped so deeply in a body that had lost all its markings.

  Peace. How much damage did people do, and how much was done to them, because of what they looked like on the outside? In this war, as Lillie had learned too well, one’s face was one’s destiny—looking like the enemy, looking like a friend—it made all the difference. How much better not to have one. To be no one. To slide away.

  If it wasn’t for the pendant, she never would have recognized Hanako. It was a testament to how little anyone could imagine a future that no one had stolen this one thing of value. The chain was fused shut; many of its links melted into each other and embedded in her best friend’s neck.

  It should have been her.

  Rest in peace, Lillie thought. She was crying. That was strange, in all this time, with everything that had happened, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. But there was no peace. She hadn’t had the chance to say good-bye.

  Hanako’s chest stopped rising almost immediately, as if she recognized Lillie’s cries.

  Hanako was gone. Could she still say thank you? Could she say she was sorry? If Hanako could have heard her, she had no idea what she would have said.

  —Rest in peace, Lillie whispered. That was as good a wish as anything. Then she grabbed the pendant and broke the chain, tearing her own hands to get it. Hanako’s body remained limp as the chain dug more deeply into her seared flesh. Her soul had been released before her pendant was. Lillie stared at the piece of jade in her palm, and then at the chain, still biting into the neck that was once her best friend’s, its loose ends brushing the floor.

  Hana

  If Kei had stayed in bed instead of sneaking out to see the wave, we would’ve been like so many other little girls whose greatest loss in the Big Wave of 1960 was that their fathers disappeared for a week, coming home only to sleep, smelling of the rotting sea. It was the grown men who were supposed to bear this burden, smoking cigars to blunt the smell when gas masks ran out, operating the cranes that sometimes dredged up a body instead of rubbish. We girls were supposed to be with our mothers, gathering in home-front spirit to make food for the refugees. If my mother was willing to throw herself into the sea in exchange for my sister’s life, it was because Kei had gotten it into her head that the tidal wave was some kind of fairy tale. She lived inside her wishful thinking and never once thought of how it might destroy the rest of us. She was too focused on creating her own world.

  Since we’d come so far from our own truck and there was no way Mama could walk back, Arnie put Mama and me in a pickup with a guy he knew. My bleeding mother insisted that Arnie stay behind to keep looking. Although the hospital was as good a place as any to search, she believed Arnie would find Kei in the wreckage. I was given my charge: Hana can do it. Just take her inside and tell them whatever they need to know. It was a simple order; for the first time since Arnie appeared, it fell to me to protect my mother. I was the one they trusted.

  It seemed like everyone in town was at the hospital. Everyone was either bruised or broken or had family members who were. Either that or they simply had no home to return to. So they stayed, on the floor, in
the halls, on the lawn around the building. And every one of them had a story. One man had tried to hang on to a tree trunk as the wave whipped cars and even a cow at him. The cars bounced off the trunk but the cow wrapped around, pulling him off the tree as the wave surged inland and deposited him on a roof. Compared to their injuries, Mama’s cut was minor to the triage nurses, who kept pushing her down on the list, and no one would listen to me when I tried to explain how serious this was for her. Everyone besides me knew someone in authority, and as I watched them try to negotiate themselves up the list, I realized Arnie wasn’t the odd one for having so many friends: Mama and I were, for being strangers in our own town. There were plenty of kids there whom I recognized from school, but the town’s shared tragedy didn’t bring us together. So I searched for Kei on my own.

  Mama was here, at least. The nurses didn’t seem worried. Maybe that was what put Kei uppermost in my mind. I asked if she had been admitted, of course, but got no useful answer. All I could do was loiter, periodically, near the hall that led to the examining rooms where someone looking for Kei’s family might recognize me. I couldn’t bear to think about the harsh things I had said. Now that she was gone, I would have done anything to save her. I assured myself that, as her twin, I would know if she was dead, and I couldn’t feel that. But I couldn’t feel that she was still alive, either.

  I had found a spot against the wall so Mama had something to lean on, but time dragged on and her foot kept bleeding, sometimes in a spurt of bright red, and other times in dark, thicker hiccups. I tried to keep up with the mess by mopping around the cut with paper towels, but she wouldn’t let me put any pressure on it, and whenever I got too close, it stimulated more bleeding. I was getting desperate for them to admit her—but in her muddy bathrobe, she looked just like all the others who fled on the lip of the wave when it came in, and there was no way for a thirteen-year-old to make the overworked nurses understand that hers was a special case. I sat beside her and felt her bones pushing into my body, like the spines and corners of books settling inside the soft purse of her skin. She was tired. Fading. I needed to do more than hold her hand.