Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  At first, you don’t want to see her brother, but you don’t want to admit that. She might think you have a crush on him, but what you’re really afraid of is that he’ll put you down and make you look like a too-little kid. Somehow, you manage to avoid him until the town no longer smells—or perhaps you’ve all grown used to it. Until the empty spaces along the waterfront are no longer shocking when you walk by. Then one Saturday, he’s there in the carport of his uncle’s house playing pool with his friends when you come to see Missy.

  You pad along the edge of grass that ruts the driveway, approaching sideways. When you get close enough, you can hear him bragging about how he was called on to patrol the waterfront that night.

  “First, you know, da police wen deputize me to get everyone evacuated. Den, da fire department wen arrive and I was in charge of going into da buildings to get out da people who was trapped. Oh, an’ I was helping da volcano guys get all de’ah gear out, too. When da wave wen come, we went running up da hill so fas’…”

  His pidgin is much thicker than you remember. He is hamming it up for his friends. Eddie shoots while he talks, dominating the cue. You have forgotten the lengths you have gone to, to be unnoticed. He is lying. Grandly and cheerfully. Now, you want him to see you there, listening to his lies.

  But of course, he has already seen you. And, far from being embarrassed, he has slipped you into his story.

  “De’ah was a bunch of us deputized, not jus’ me. It was some night. You might’a heard’a one little girl, well, not so little, but…” That’s when he glances over at you. “We was out da bridge together, and when da scientists wen say da wave was coming, we wen start yelling out de alarm and pounding on da buildings. Get up! Get up! Li’dat.”

  Two of the boys around the table were in the truck that night, but neither one contradicts him. Missy is rapt, too. You realize she’s heard these stories before. You have no idea if she believes them, or if their truth matters to her at all.

  Missy is different in the presence of her brother: breakable, and full of longing. You feel that way also. So aware of your skin and edges and flushed blood when he is there. Why don’t you see this, about her, about you? Why don’t you understand what this means? She is smiling. You are smiling, too. You have been joined with her brother in the biggest thing that’s happened in your lives, and what occurs to you is…it would be rude to correct him. Or maybe the truer thing is this: He is a junior in high school. He’s on the basketball team that the whole school parades down to the Armory to watch. He’s got soft hairs over his lips in his still-baby face, and he’s looking at you. Including you.

  If you could see into the future, would you save yourself? Would you turn around and walk away? But you have already lingered too long and the chance to step out of the world of Eddie’s stories is gone.

  At first, Eddie is mostly away, hanging with the latest of his high school girlfriends, all of whom treat you and Missy like little girls even though you’re only three years younger. When they’re in the house, Missy can’t stay away. She is drawn into any room Eddie is in like a magnet. The girlfriends tell her to get lost and Missy tells them to suck eggs. Then whichever girl is today’s favorite raises a knowing eyebrow at Eddie and he swats at Missy from his still-reclined position—You like lickins, eh, sistah? In many ways, it’s a relief when Eddie gets into a fight with his uncle and moves out. It is peaceful at Missy’s house for the next several years.

  In the beginning, you and Missy lie around on her bed together and make up stories about her missing mother. You pretend her mother was sent away to a sanitarium, then you kill off her father with a broken heart. Missy is a magical storyteller, and she tells you all about Eddie, too. How kind he was when they were younger. How every night before bed, he’d bring her a treat and sit with her while she ate it. The treat was usually a candy from his pocket that never got paid for, but the point was, he took care of her. That is the Eddie of her dreams—the Eddie of your dreams, too, since you can almost feel him bending toward her, smoothing her hair as he whispers good night. You never tell her any stories about you and Hana, though, about your years as two girls with Mama. Even in those first few months, Missy bristles at the thought of your “other” sister if you even mention Hana. Besides, that world seems so long lost now.

  You will teach Missy to cook. In return, she will try to teach you to dance the hula. First, you will watch her. Here she is, bending her knees so deeply her bottom sticks out and sways with a grace that steals your breath. You are hopeless. Missy tries. She arranges your body like a doll’s: pushing your shoulders down, floating your fingers, and finally even standing in front of you with her hands on your hips shoving them from side to side. You are growing, already too slippery and tall, your shoulders too broad from swimming. She will have more success teaching you how to smoke. Those days will feel so dangerous: your throats seizing on the years-old tobacco she steals from Eddie; you holding Missy’s hair back as she vomits into the toilet bowl. You are finding your edges. Testing your effect on the world. Testing your image inside that world also, since now you are like Arnie: Everyone in town accepts you.

  You are two. Instantly. Although you often hang around with Charlene, you and Missy complete each other. You have found the new family you were looking for when you decided to throw yourself into the wave.

  The year you and Missy and Hana are seniors yourselves, Eddie comes back into your life.

  You have been doing cannonballs with the kids off the rope swing at the Ice Pond, where the freshwater comes in and you can shock yourself in the summer when it gets really hot. You don’t remember where Missy was that day. Hula maybe, or just smoking with Charlene at the beach. After three years of being everything to each other, you and Missy have hit a bump. You are the captain of the varsity swim team and Missy is jealous. She didn’t mind last year, when you were the star and kept winning everything. But being captain takes too much time, calls for too much responsibility and perfection. Just like Hana, she says when she really wants to insult you. As if swimming in a pool and being the valedictorian were in any way the same.

  You are on your own, then, and you haven’t seen Eddie for so long it takes you a minute to recognize him in his sunglasses, with the thin goatee on his chin. Once you do, you add a little somersault to your cannonball.

  He claps.

  You pretend to notice him for the first time. “You try.”

  “Nah.”

  “Scared?”

  You are taunting him from the water, shielding your eyes from the sun. He’s staring at you like you’re someone new. That’s the only way you can explain it—suddenly, you feel new. It’s the same feeling you had when you first met him, first met Missy: that they could see inside you, and were delighted with whatever it was they saw. But in Eddie’s eyes, you can sense the outline of your bra under your T-shirt, the lace on the swell of your breasts under the clinging cotton. You can feel your heart beating against the fabric, blood flooding to the surface of your skin to meet his gaze as you search for words to deflect him. “Missy said you’re a jumper.”

  Eddie raises an eyebrow at the challenge. He unwinds himself and stands up, taking off his hat and sunglasses. That movement dances all the way to his smile. He walks over to the rope and begins his swing. At the top of the arc, his body throws itself forward but too casually to get the height he needs, or too lazy to tuck: He lands flat on his belly in the water. As you laugh, he shoots up sputtering, slinging the water off his hair like a dog, and in two splashing lopes, he grabs you by both shoulders.

  “Too low,” he gasps, laughing himself.

  He isn’t embarrassed that you bested him. His hands hold you firm, the heat of his body melting over the ice of your skin. What does he see in you that is so amusing, as if he has just opened a birthday present? And why does it make your face burn to match his heat?

  All the Eddies you thought you knew get mixed up in that burning. All the futures you might have had disappear.


  “You like jumping, Gutsy Little Keiko? Come with me.”

  Hana

  The next morning, I am sitting at home inside an angle of early sun through my front windows, an unused sketchbook in my lap. Arnie sent a set of five with me when I left for college, and I kept them in the back of my closet behind my winter coat. The sketchbook is oversized, overly optimistic. I have my colored pencils, pastels and crayons and charcoals, too.

  Images have power. A power, I am realizing too late, that I have denied myself. Once I stopped drawing my mother’s ghosts and started trying to fulfill my school assignments, I lost my creative spark. As a child, I knew the thrill and terror of seeing my emotions spilling onto the page, but in primary school, my teachers were much more concerned about realism and perspective. Technique was the focus of intermediate school art classes, but the assignments kept changing, each one just a hint of where we could take our ideas, delivered so quickly that there was no chance to perfect anything we began. By the time I got to high school, I understood that absent a personal urgency, there was no way for my art to match my own expectations, let alone whatever unfathomable rubric my teachers brought to their grades. I was only adequate. And I was not interested in being adequate, so I stopped.

  But to catch the perpetrator, I need to find that spark again. I am no Nancy Drew: I don’t have the courage to sneak through back alleys searching for bad guys, nor the strength to fight them off. But if stories of our childhood are not enticing to Kei, surely safety must be? If I can tell her that we caught the guy…I can feel the pit in my own belly aching to deliver that news.

  Justice and safety. Maybe it’s me who needs it. I am afflicted by voices, tormented by a lack of sleep. Will Kei’s attacker come back for me, and can I find him before he does? There is something in that bellyache that reminds me: I am the only one who can see his face.

  I can draw him myself. I never needed a sketch artist to create a wanted poster; I guess I’ve known that all along. I am the only witness, and I am an artist: that much my memories assure me of. But my art is risky and unreliable. If I do this, I have to be accurate so the wrong man is not arrested. And accuracy is the obstacle that has always shut me down.

  I begin with a pencil. First, I try to capture the shape of his face. Then his nose. I can feel my throat seize every time my pencil falters. I experiment, skipping around and taking shortcuts, imagining what I want to see instead of reproducing what’s no longer there. It’s more of an exercise for the lead and my eraser, both of which seem to be working equally. The eraser is a nice touch; it blurs the lines, opens new possibilities. But still, he’s slipping away. With every mistake, he moves further out of my control. Eight days feels like so long ago, I might never reach him.

  No, Hana. You can do this. In high school, I found a way to reach much further back than eight days for the painting I did for the senior art show. Not just to images that I barely remembered, but also to faces I had never seen.

  It was shortly after our Home Ec teacher had gotten bored with meat loaf recipes; she had given us some watercolors and declared that the best pictures would go in the year-end show the art department was organizing. Usually that was a showcase for the Honors Art class, but this year, they opened it as a competition, with a first, second, and third prize for seniors. The winners would be exhibited in the public library next door.

  I wasn’t interested, but I did the assignment. I roughed out a quick impression of the town. Over a black silhouette of buildings along the waterfront, I introduced a heavy yellow fog shadowing the bay. It was a fluid, impromptu image, and it was fun to hang a specter of loneliness over a home where I had never fit in. But it wasn’t a great painting. Certainly nothing that would have moved the art teacher, Mr. Kealoha, to grab me one day and ask that I come to the studio to talk to him. And I was right. When he sat me down to suggest that I enter something into the show, the picture he had in front of him was not the watercolor. It was a page out of one of my old monster diaries.

  Kei had submitted it, and not as her own work but as mine. I was shocked first, then confused. What was she thinking? Mr. Kealoha said that the energy and naïveté were excellent, but that they would need something bigger, something not rendered in crayon. Oil, he suggested. Or encaustic. How familiar was I with the different media? If I didn’t have my own materials, I was welcome to work in the studio with the school’s supplies. And, if he could make a suggestion, perhaps an image with more of a narrative would be more compelling. A connection between the figures. A story.

  Naïve? At first, I was angry, then embarrassed. I hadn’t thought about the diaries in years. Of course, it was naïve; I had drawn it when I was five, six, no more than eight years old. Had Kei been trying to humiliate me? How could she think it was okay to rip a page out of my old sketchbook and flash it all around the school? Or was she trying to help me? What help she’d thought I needed, though, I couldn’t conceive of.

  Those days, it seemed that I barely knew my sister. It was as if the tidal wave had picked up my family, swung us around, and left us marooned on different shores. We still resembled a family, but Mama was better after her stay in the hospital. Healthier, more vibrant. I stuck around her, still the “good, smart girl,” but she didn’t need me. Instead, she leaned on Arnie; they entered into some strange, unspoken devotion, and I was cut loose.

  As for Kei, she had been reborn in the tidal wave. At first, she was famous, but after that, she had friends. She had a community. She was accepted. Even by Missy, the stuck-up queen of our class. Kei was free, no longer the daughter of crazy Miya Swanson. She still didn’t finish half of what she started, and she was just as happy to be known for what she did wrong as what she did right. Her talent for getting boys to like her for her mediocre grades helped me understand that the ones who didn’t like smart girls were no loss. But for all of her continuing embrace of her identity as the shadow child, it was me who was living in the shadow of my sister. I longed to be seen, to make something of myself. I had a plan to go to college, to get as far away from a town that looked right through me, and the people who seemed to no longer care that I was there.

  But suddenly, whatever her reasons, Kei had singled me out.

  I had to admit that she hadn’t chosen badly. The picture that she had ripped out was, ironically, of three figures: two smaller on each side flanking one in the center almost double the size. They were standing, each in the same posture: legs apart slightly as if taking a step but with no feet; backs hunched identically; both arms slightly raised in front of them and held out, feeling their way without sight. Each figure’s head was also bent forward, all at the same angle: their round heads sitting on their necks like marbles and just a topknot of hair falling forward directly off their scalps. They should have been looking ahead, zombie-like, but instead, their faces were swiveled, confronting the viewer directly out of the plane of the paper, their simple features twisted into black-eyed screams. I had drawn the figures in red and yellow crayon, along with some lines of black ink pen, slashing in a suggestion of blood, skin, and shredded clothing.

  It wasn’t the fact of the trio that caught my eye, because these were Mama’s monsters, not us. It was how I had rendered a clear image without an outline of a body to follow. I remembered what Mama used to say about this particular kind of skin-walker when she was hallucinating: that their skin hung in rags off their arms. From the crayon slashes, I couldn’t tell if I’d drawn them naked; if the red was raw meat and muscle everywhere, or just blood running from a discrete set of wounds. Though they were almost replicas of each other in posture and color, the figures were not a family. I could see, even now, the complete isolation of each one.

  I heard my yes before I understood that I would do it. The page had squeezed my heart, and even the ease of the watercolor of the waterfront urged me to find my creative voice again. I was thinking as an artist, not a daughter, when I accepted Mr. Kealoha’s offer to do it in the department’s studio. But I didn’t want
anyone to know I was painting, in case I changed my mind or failed. Thankfully, I already had class scheduled during Honors Art, so he agreed to let me come by after school, when no one else wanted to be there. As for Kei, I didn’t know what to say to her, so I settled on saying nothing at all.

  I set up a canvas and an easel, but I didn’t know where to start. What did he mean, a narrative? Despite the echoes between the three figures from my diary, Mama’s ghosts never inhabited a scene. I tried sketching lightly in pencil to locate different elements and decide how they would interact with each other, but I ran into the same problem of control that I’d been having since middle school. I decided to work small at first, to try out some ideas in a sketchbook before I committed to the paint, but I spent most of my time tearing up the paper I had barely started on. I spent more than a week with nothing to show for my efforts except some pointed questions from Arnie about where I was spending my afternoons. I didn’t think of what I was doing as dangerous then. Time was surging by me, running out, and I was struggling to find my voice. I had no choice but to return to the source: If I was going to draw anything halfway important, I needed to pull one of the monster diaries out from the carton under my bed and study it. A narrative. How had I ever put Mama’s monsters together on a page?

  I could see Mama again, in her night garden. She was lying in the dirt, as if dead, beneath drowsy but plentiful stars. How old was I? Maybe three or four. I could hear myself yelling, my screams billowing into the night air. Within moments, Kei was in sight, dodging green onions, tomatoes, and nasturtiums, jumping off the terrace walls toward Mama, who had scrambled to her feet in surprise and then was strangely frozen at the sight of her desperate daughter.

  When I reached them, Kei was sobbing, still caught in the thrall of an unknown fear. Mama’s face held no questions as she looked toward the house for whichever of her monsters might emerge. Maybe it was the violence of her dreams in those days, or the fear in her eyes when a car pulled up to the house, but I understood that my mother was a fugitive. From what, we never knew.