Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  That was all I needed. Fear. With our childish terror racing through my veins, I picked up the largest brush I could find and loaded it with black. I started with a single stroke, then added the next one without thinking. I built it one stroke at a time, surprising myself, changing direction. The black paint slashed across the canvas in some places, but in others, I began to recognize what was emerging. Bodies, naked. I grayed them out with my elbows, smudging the paint so they looked like they’d been rolled in ashes. One figure was standing—a woman, a mother?—but most of the rest were lying in a jumble. Dead. After a while, there were a pile of bodies, then a river. My initial slashes became a bridge. I grabbed another canvas, put it next to the first, and continued. Then I added a third. Now there were people beneath the bridge and on top of it, reaching out for help, reaching out for water. They were thirsty. Crawling, falling into the river of the dead.

  It was horrifying, even just with the thrown-back heads I had roughed out and the impossibly twisted limbs. But still, it wasn’t enough. I took a much smaller brush, the equivalent of a writing pen, and began to fill in. The faces in the river were contorted, nightmarish, like the diary drawing of the skin-walkers, but I wanted them to have features, too. That was the terrible beauty of the skin-walkers: their faces. I needed to make these people real.

  When I was finished, the three panels created a bleak garden of bodies: some blossoming, some trailing, some withered. The juxtaposition of the thick brush and fine lines was arresting: Your eye didn’t know whether to be affronted or drawn in. But still there was something missing in the monotone. I looked at the panels for two more days until I knew what to do. Finally, on the afternoon before it was due, I squeezed tubes of red and yellow paint into the bottom of a shallow tray and used my fingers to swirl it loosely together. With every possible combination of the two colors on my fingertips, I picked up my hand and added fire. I raked the pads of my fingers and the scrape of my nails around and sometimes over the ghosts in my river until the entire canvas ran in blood and flame. When it was done, I stood back and started to cry.

  People said it was an antiwar protest. Others thought it was supposed to be the Big Wave. I called it Ghost River, and it won first prize. The art teacher declared I should give up the idea of college and enroll in a school for fine art. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone but my mother.

  I had wanted to surprise her. On the evening the show opened in the library, she still didn’t know that I had entered it, let alone that I had won. I took her arm and escorted her over to my painting, approaching it from the side so she could get the full effect at once. Now, I don’t know what I was thinking. Mama hadn’t fainted in so long. I had been carrying my mother’s demons around inside me forever, and they were so familiar that I didn’t think they would upset her. The more important thing was to let them out, let them be seen so they could be conquered. After all, that was what the monster diaries had always been for, how Kei and I had exorcised Mama’s ghosts together. It wasn’t the monsters, but me I wanted her to see: how carefully I had listened to her, how deeply I felt. My heart fluttered as I pointed to the little plaque with a description and my name as the artist. Then, as I looked at her expression, the flutter became bubbles, and the bubbles swallowed each other until there was a pressure in my chest that I could barely breathe around.

  Why are you haunting me? It was something she used to say to her ghosts when we were little, and at that moment I heard it clearly in my head. The clouds spread over her eyes and she stuttered—her body stuttered—swaying toward the painting and also away. She looked shocked. She looked at me but also through me, as if there was someone else she expected to see. Was I haunting her? What did she see in me?

  Neither one of us could get a breath. In her face, I could feel the gut punch of every gruesome detail I had rendered, but wasn’t that my point? I had felt all the things that she had, but I had also painted through them. Seeing gave me a control that Mama’s invisible ghosts couldn’t. It was a way to come out the other side. I never considered that the opposite would be true for her. I could feel the room around me begin to slide as I waited for the splash of pinpricks across her face. I waited to catch her as she started to fall. But instead of fainting, the haze over her expression cleared, and I watched her emotions move through disbelief to dread. My mother of old; there she was, and I was shredded with remorse. Then, I saw a new specter rise from my mother’s eyes, something I had never seen before.

  Revulsion.

  She spun away from me then, wrapped her arms around herself and turned, looking for the exit. I was trying to jump-start my heart when Arnie reacted, reaching her quickly with his long steps, gathering her into his arms. I watched him whisper into her hair. She clung to him like a buoy, but she didn’t faint. How long was it before she could turn to see me and my painting from where she stood? It might have been seconds, but it felt like my entire lifetime.

  She didn’t move, but that meant she didn’t leave, either. She stayed in Arnie’s shelter in the middle of the room, her face twisted, rubbing at her arms like there was something on them that she had to shed. Other guests moved between us, but Arnie didn’t let her go. She kept looking back and forth from me to the painting, as if I was someone, or something, she hoped never to see again.

  I got swept up by Mr. Kealoha then, and the ceremony started. When he announced my first prize, I didn’t look out into the audience to see if Mama was still there; I couldn’t bear to find her face, nor could I bear to find her gone. He talked for a long time, and I didn’t hear any of it, though once I got home, Arnie was full of compliments, mostly about the nice things the art teacher said about my style and my finger painting technique when they gave the award to me. Mama never said a word, and it was just as well.

  The painting was effective: That was what I had to hang on to. Art moved people; it disgusted people; it made them do terrible things and fall in love. Mr. Kealoha had said this, and it was true. Ghost River had nauseated my mother; her body wanted to expel everything inside her, and she had to keep her jaw locked so her bowels would not end up on the floor. In that horrible moment, I became a true artist. I had proof that I could render something from nothing, something from history and memory, that I could make it so real that someone seeing it might want to throw up.

  So real that I vowed never to draw or paint again.

  But now, with my sister in a coma, I have no choice. I put my pencil down and pick up a crayon. If no one in their right mind would create a wanted poster in finger paint, I still have my favorite tool. With single, sure strokes, one at a time, I begin to build a face. When I make a mistake, I rip out the page and start over. But with every almost success, I can feel a sense of self that I barely recognize flooding back—my surety and my creative energy.

  Kei’s attacker begins to take shape.

  1945

  The train thumped slowly through the patchwork landscape. Hiroshima had been untouched for so long—and then completely obliterated—but the rest of Japan had been burning in random smatterings of bombs for years. Lillie had heard about the fire bombings when she was working as a monitor. By virtue of her job she was better informed than most, but the news, delivered as it was by a staticky shortwave radio in the shrouded communications room, had lacked a visual component. She didn’t expect to see acres and acres of black on the way to Tokyo.

  She hadn’t planned to go to Tokyo, either. But August 6 had changed everything.

  Hanako was dead. She had watched them place her best friend’s body in the fire. They were trying to burn as many as they could, but still, only those who were lucky were cremated, and even luckier if the fires didn’t go out before they were completely burned. The smell of it—she couldn’t bear it—that was why she couldn’t go out to claim any of Hanako’s ashes. But it wasn’t better inside.

  Inside, people were rotting. Without their skin, there was only pus and maggots. With nowhere else to go, Lillie stayed at the hospital for those firs
t days, in shock: dabbing dying bodies with iodine until there wasn’t any left, then just water and some salt.

  She was so tired, and then she was ill, too. Throwing up; her bowels were gelatin. There wasn’t much food, so there wasn’t much to come out, and once she was empty, she couldn’t keep conscious. Lillie lay on the floor, unresponsive. On the outside she was burning, the same way all the victims had burned, but even as her fever broke through her skin in a rash that resembled a scouring of pinpricks, on the inside she felt cold to the bone. There was blood in her stool, and then her menses came, after a year of being so skinny she didn’t bleed at all, and there was so much blood, weeks of it, clotted and dark, that the nurses thought she might not survive.

  To have their mysterious sickness without being there when the bomb dropped: that was punishment. She was not the only one. No one knew what the bomb contained. At first, they thought it was a new kind of poison. Then a contagion: a mysterious plague that was felling not only those who had been in the city at the moment of the pikadon, but also, days and weeks later, those who came in after to help. Boatloads of people began escaping out to the islands of the Inland Sea in hopes that the freshest air might save them. But for most, it was already too late.

  They didn’t deserve this, Lillie knew, but she did. She knew every choice she had made to get here, and still, she thought: I want to go home. Lillie didn’t have a home. She hadn’t spoken with her mother in years, had been unable to find her own child. But there was no reasoning with despair. She wanted to be lifted out, to be somewhere safe, and maybe that was punishment, too, to want what she couldn’t have. To want to hold a little boy who was dead or may as well be. She was never going to find Toshi. To admit it felt like it might stop her heart from beating, but she had seen enough of this ruined world to know it was true.

  Lillie wavered in and out, of sickness and also time. She knew the days were passing only because there were fewer bodies on the floor. She was in the hospital, in the river, with Hanako; she was with Toshi again. When her fever broke and she could lift her throbbing head to see through the ruptured walls of the hospital, she understood that it was not just the rooms around her that were emptying. The city had cleared out as well. Once it had been looted of what the survivors most cherished—the dead, the dying, the possibility that someone they loved was still out there waiting to be found—it was left for what it was: a burial ground. Hibakusha who had anywhere to go, any family who wouldn’t turn them out, went.

  She had been too sick to hear the news of the second bomb, of the Emperor’s surrender on the radio. Later, she heard people’s unease: how tinny his voice had been. How small, and how human. Japan’s returning soldiers drifted back to the city, carrying their humiliation with them and perhaps also their relief. They must have expected that those feelings would be the worst and best parts of their reunions with their families. But by the time Lillie emerged from her illness, people were counting themselves lucky if half their family members were still alive, and the soldiers who came back to nothing had devolved into marauders, peddling stolen goods and dog meat in the black markets that sprung up around the train stations.

  She could have stayed in the city, at the hospital, helping the injured, but she didn’t. These people wanted to die; Lillie wanted them to die. What was the point of hanging on? She was living in a world where children kicked bones and even skulls out of their way as they crossed the sudden fields that stretched between the few, staggering buildings. Where the starving children who had been sent out of the city were the more fortunate of the orphans simply because their clothes were not yet in tatters. She felt as dead inside as the two bodies she passed on her way to Hiroshima Station, still seated at their breakfast table, charred hard and black in their ruined house in exactly the poses they must have been sitting in when the bomb fell. She envied them. It was harder to be a survivor than to be dead.

  She had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and nothing to eat. She only went to Hiroshima Station because it was one of the few places people gathered, and it wasn’t until she was there that she found out the trains were running again. There were rumors of jobs in Tokyo for people who could speak English; the Occupation Forces had arrived. She didn’t know if they would take her, but when she turned to leave, falling back into old patterns—as if she would go home, maybe gather her things, check the train schedule and pick the best time for her departure—she remembered that she had no home. She had no “things” besides her small handcase. She was wearing everything she owned.

  The world was just too big and too broken. Even if Toshi and Donald had survived, she would never be able to find them now. Nor would they come looking for her; not her husband, who had twice abandoned his father to save his own skin. That was what she had to do, too. Not to haunt the pile of sticks and rubble that used to be their apartment. She had to continue, to move forward somehow.

  She didn’t know how she forced herself onto the train, but she remembered the twenty hours that followed, standing in a compartment that was so crowded she could fall asleep and not fall down. When the train stopped in Osaka, she pushed her way out between cars for a breath of air and ended up trapped there, her fingers hooked onto the window ledge; her entire body, even her face, covered with soot. She was stranded for what seemed like hours until another woman pushed her way out between the cars. Then, Lillie tried to get back in, but even a small adjustment in each person’s posture had filled all the space that both women had taken up and no one seemed inclined to make room for her. She didn’t get back inside until the other woman shoved Lillie like a cork in a bottle so that she could close the door.

  Once they arrived in Tokyo, Lillie found that Shinjuku Station, too, was filled with beggars and the homeless, but the center of the city rose around her, tall and square, with working streetcars and arcades. The Allies had taken over, bustling in and out of the huge department stores like there was something to buy. Later, she would learn where the PX was, and which buildings had been commandeered for housing. She would know the map of the new city and which places were reserved for Americans, and which for Japanese. But that day, the atmosphere was like a carnival.

  Jeeps were swarmed by children chanting for chocolate. The soldiers cheerfully threw handfuls of it into the streets, calling out “Ohio!” as if it was a greeting, not even waiting to see if it was retrieved from the ground. There were lines everywhere, wrapping the sidewalks: lines for jobs, for papers, for rations. Anyone who could speak English, or who could cling to someone else who could, was chasing after one GI or another. Lillie was cautious. After years of being spit on in the streets because she was American, of having to excise every borrowed word, every mention of America—even pastimes, like baseball, that the Japanese used to love—this fawning was shocking.

  The Americans looked so big, so fat and shiny.

  It was clear, from the reports of the people standing in lines, that she wasn’t going to get very far with a job. To claim she was actually an American, she needed papers, and even so her skills were limited to changing bedpans and bandages. One of the GIs directed her south, to the Army hospital in Tsukiji, watching her curiously as she fumbled to orient herself in the unfamiliar city, trying to create a map of it in her mind.

  —Where are you from?

  Even then, before anyone had heard the phrase radiation poisoning, Lillie knew that “Hiroshima” was not a good answer. She couldn’t think of a better one, so she pointed vaguely in the opposite direction.

  —Oak-key, he drawled. Then he repeated his directions, using broad arm gestures and the loud, slow speech one reserved for the stupid. “Away from the palace, toward the water. You can’t miss it.”

  She was halfway there, moving out of the nest of skyscrapers toward a section of town that was more wooden and worn. The pace here was slower. There were fewer cars, fewer people in Western dress. But it was still a place for the living.

  In front of her, an old man in a rough, patched kimono, barely more t
han a robe, was shuffling his way across the street. She had almost overtaken him when a weapons carrier full of careless GIs came careening too fast around the corner. The truck fish-tailed in the intersection, the brakes screeching. On instinct, she leaped forward and shoved the old man out of the way, her own handcase skidding across the pavement and out of reach as they both went down. The truck stopped so close she could feel the heat of the engine waft over her, and more than a couple of uniformed men spilled out over each other like puppies.

  —Are you okay?

  Lillie nodded and tried to help the old man to his feet. But it was immediately clear that the old man was not okay. He was in a panic. Scramble as he tried, he was unable to put even the lightest weight on his leg—when she looked down, the bones jutted out. It was broken. The soldiers stood back as she tried to settle him down on the ground and keep him from moving, but he was wailing and clutching at his leg, casting around for help from anyone other than the girl who’d pushed him. A small crowd of pedestrians had gathered behind the soldiers, watching.

  Lillie felt a panic of her own coming on. The old man wouldn’t accept her help, and her handcase was beyond her reach, having skidded to a stop beside the curb. “That’s mine,” she warned sharply in Japanese as she pointed, hoping to preempt the street urchins and perhaps inspire someone to bring it to her. Her own leg hurt—she’d fallen awkwardly and pain was shooting up her side. She felt a rush of fury at the soldiers.

  —Why don’t you slow down? Why don’t you watch where you’re going?

  —Hey! one of them said, unfazed by her anger. “Where’d you learn that American?”