Shadow Child
Page 28
You can’t tell her about the dive, how you changed your mind in midair and hit the water full force, still trying to flip your body 180 degrees from head down to feetfirst. You made it only partway, knocking your head back and the air out of you when you hit the water. You blacked out, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. You were close to the surface, but you couldn’t get your bearings. Which way was up?
Your body lifted you. Your body brought you to the light. The gang was yelling from the cliff, but they couldn’t jump without jumping on you, and you were still in the middle of the pool. You were floating in the icy water, your face barely above the surface. The rest of you was submerged, hanging like moss, and the cold helped. It kept you awake. It kept you from feeling your neck ache, and your skin, and how your stomach had exploded. You heard a splash, and it was then you started puking. Puking in the water, choking, almost drowning.
Clyde had jumped down to save you, pulling you to the edge like a lifeguard, swimming through your vomit. At the top, Eddie: “Ew. Gross.”
You don’t know how to tell Mama all of this. You want to tell her you’re alive, that you’re lucky to be alive, but you can’t think.
Your head is pounding. You are lucky to keep your head on.
Mama continues to flutter around you. Thank the Lord. Where have you been? You missed the relay tryouts and Arnie was so worried. I was so worried. Thank the Lord…
You didn’t expect this. This suffering. You didn’t think it through. You’ve always glided by, with bad grades, with ducking your chores; even your tidal wave escapades were never punished. Mama hasn’t fainted once since the tidal wave. Had you forgotten? You didn’t think—
That’s your problem, Kei. You don’t think.
That’s what Arnie would say if he were here now, and it robs you of words.
You can see Arnie, driving the roads. Going slower than the usual island crawl, stopping any kids who look to be your age. Though maybe not. It’s getting dark. It was a while before you were able to sit up, let alone hike back to the car. When the sun set, though, they half-carried you.
When no one’s on the street anymore, Arnie stops by the police station. Then he goes to his friends’ houses. Together, they get into their trucks and drive through town or search along the riverbanks while their wives poke their heads into the darkened bedrooms of your classmates to see if anyone knows where you are. Is it that late? Reports trickle in, kids extrapolating from other nights when you weren’t where you were supposed to be—at the movies, in a car with Eddie and his gang heading toward beach run—reports that make it clear to all his friends that Arnie doesn’t know what his daughter is doing. And yet he keeps searching, so they search, too.
* * *
You are dizzy the next morning and your head is pounding. Even when the pain has gone, it’s hard to get out of bed. You find yourself weepy for no reason. Mama sighs a lot. She must think you’re trying to play hooky, and, yes, you are the rebel, but surely she can tell when you are truly ill? This is your mother, who used to monitor your health for any flush or sniffle. Your mama, who was afraid of strangers and the bloody, walking dead. People will disappear, she used to say, which could have meant anything from contracting a sudden illness to exploding into flame. But she is only normally worried when the doctor tells her you have whiplash and you’ll have to rest in the dark to keep your brain from swelling. When you won’t tell Arnie how it happened, he promptly grounds you.
The first weekend after you’ve been released from your bedrest, you find Arnie under the house, running new pipe to replace the sink drain. You watch him without speaking and he doesn’t acknowledge you. He’s said maybe ten words to you since you got home that night, so his silence isn’t a surprise. You’re here to say you’re sorry for missing the relay tryouts, and you know it’s your turn to speak and you should just say it. But the back of his head is making you nervous. You’re having a hard time finding the words.
You watch him wrap the thin, clinging tape around the threaded end of the pipe, bandaging it as if with a skin to fill the gaps. “Remember when I used to help you?”
He looks at you now, as if you’ve suddenly gone insane.
“I did. We…remember?” You are trying to think of the last time you helped Arnie with one of his projects. “We put the porch light in together?” When you see yourself stripping the ends of the wire for him, though, you look much younger than you are now.
“What do you want, Kei?”
“I thought, maybe we could go to the pool on Saturday. I could float and maybe just do some kicking. You could help me…”
“What do you want?”
Arnie has finished tightening the pipe and he’s sitting now, slouched a little on a large rock, his legs spread and his elbows on his knees leaning forward. He’s looking at you as if this question is terribly important, but you have no idea what he’s asking, except that it makes you want to cry.
“I don’t know—”
“What do you know, Kei? Do you know why you treat yourself like crap? Christ, how much damage can a person do to herself? If it was someone else treating you this way I swear I would knock his head off. But it’s you.”
You don’t know why he’s attacking you, or what he’s saying, exactly. You were supposed to be at tryouts and you went cliff jumping instead. Is it just that you missed swimming, or does he know how you almost killed yourself? Maybe he’s heard something. Surely Hana knows. The story of Clyde swimming through your vomit must be very popular in the school halls.
Arnie might understand, if you could find a way to tell him. But you can’t, and anyway, this isn’t what he’s talking about.
Why do you treat yourself like crap?
Even then, you feel like you’ve been caught red-handed, but not in the way you could have expected: the way you could deny, explain, blame on someone else. And not for anything you even knew you were doing. Your mind is spinning and Eddie’s voice comes back to you: “Ew. Gross.” Eddie, who calls you a little girl and never asks what you want.
What you want. This is what Arnie is asking.
“I forgot.”
“You forgot three times in a row. Three Saturdays. You don’t even know that, do you?”
Three times. How long have you been lost? Why didn’t anyone tell you?
The look on Arnie’s face tells you he’s through. He’s disgusted, and for the first time, you feel disgusting.
“You aren’t stupid, Kei. I don’t know why you try to blow every chance you have. Forget the swimming. I know what kind of mind you have. Always pulling things apart to see how they work. How can you hang out with those friends of yours? You must be so bored.”
It’s like he’s speaking a language you don’t understand, except you hear his words clearly. It’s your response you can’t manage. You came here to apologize. And you expected that he would try to make you feel better. But this is something else. A truth he’s offering. You have to stand in it and let it wash over you as he says, “When are you going to love yourself as much as your mother and I do? Christ, Kei, I give up.”
You can’t breathe. And right then, you are suddenly so tired. How can he know you better than you know yourself? How can he say he loves you, that Mama does, and then withdraw that love before you can take it? You start to say it again, I don’t know…, this thing you keep saying, which is the only thing that comes to you, but it is also a deflection.
A plea for him to stop saying what he’s saying. To give you something easy to hold on to, or at least a chance to breathe and understand.
Though it has been a long time since you were home alone with Mama, your body remembers those steamy afternoons when you and Koko took care of your mother. What you want is to be grounded, you realize, following Mama from room to room. Let me carry that, you say when she’s on her way outside to do the laundry. And, Don’t bother with the stool. I’m taller than you are. I can reach. You smile at her. You have things to make up for. How would she have endured
it, if you had dived headfirst and died? But mostly you do it because it feels right, because when you are with her, really with her, you feel layers peel off you. Masks and skins you never knew you wore. You are moving backward in time, and you can feel the contours of the real you, where they have waited. You are remembering who you really are.
What you don’t notice is that Hana should be here, too. You should be tripping over each other in the afternoons to get to the ironing, but instead, you have slipped neatly into your sister’s chores and she slipped out at the same time. The truth is, it’s been a long time since you paid enough attention to Hana. You didn’t notice her leave, since you never had the experience of being two high school girls in the house together. But that means it’s simple enough to slip Hana’s sketchbook back under her bed when you find it shoved into the side of your gym bag. And it’s telling when, just as she never mentioned its disappearance, Hana never acknowledges the sketchbook’s return.
You remember how worried Missy was when you could barely stay conscious on the bank of the pond. She gave you back Hana’s diary in the car that night, didn’t she? You can’t picture it; you were too out of it in the dark, but it must be true. But Eddie is another story. You have no interest in being his “gutsy little Keiko” anymore. Your eighteenth birthday is coming up, and you won’t be grounded forever. Eddie has been waiting for that birthday. Wen you one adult, girl, he often says, they no can tell you what to do.
You want what you want. To learn how to love yourself. You break up with him in a letter, letting your imagination go a little wild.
We can never see each other again, you write, heart-dotting your i’s. You tell him that Arnie knows about your diving accident and wants to knock Eddie’s head off for pushing you. After all, he’s an adult and you’re still a minor, if barely. You nearly died, and Arnie says Eddie better stay very far away from you and Hana, or Arnie will have him arrested for endangering a child.
Never mind that there are cops in Eddie’s extended family. Never mind that almost no one in town ever got arrested. If there could be any world, any slip in time, that would let you write that letter over, you would get on your knees in gratitude. But instead, you were still congratulating yourself on including Hana under Arnie’s protection when you gave Missy the sealed envelope to deliver on your first day back at school.
When you dream, your voice is different. Not the pidgin lilt, the words in Japanese, Hawaiian, the slang you learned to pepper in and always sounds right to your friends. But this dream you’re having now—it’s a different kind of dreaming. It’s you, your own voice in your head, slipping into here and out of now to remind you of why you came. You have been gathering, gaining strength, but are you ready yet to wake up and face your sister? To tell her what you know, and apologize for what you did?
* * *
Do you remember the quilt Mama made for Hana?
At first, she worked on it in her own room when Hana was out. You came in one afternoon, poking your head in the doorway, and there she was. You thought maybe it was a birthday present, so you started to leave, but she called you back.
It was Hana’s going-away quilt. Mama put her favorite flowers on it. Plumeria. Pikake. Hana always picked the fragile ones. Hana was going farther than any of us had ever been, and the quilt was to help her remember, and to find her way home. You didn’t understand it then, though surely you would have noticed how strange that sounded? You were looking at the blossoms, cut out and stacked in order. Mama had just begun, and she thought she had the summer to finish. She couldn’t know what was about to happen. Neither could you.
For a long time after Hana left, Mama didn’t have the strength to sit up, let alone do quilting. You were surprised when she picked it up again. She spent years going over and over the stitches, trying to root her perfect daughter in hardier plants. During your college years, Mama’s spiritual invocation of invisible stitching seemed to work: Arnie got regular reports from Hana’s psychiatrist that suggested she was healing. That she had even started to paint again.
Much later, after Arnie received a letter from Hana’s college about her missing final credits, Mama put the quilt away. She was dying by then. She never said so, but you could tell.
Toward the end, Hana was beginning to flower, at least according to Arnie. She had a painting in a group art show. Then her own exhibition in her new gallery, which was why she could never come home. You wanted to go get her, drag her back to say her final good-byes to your mother, but Mama wouldn’t let you. Children are supposed to leave, she told you. Hana’s choices had to be her own.
There was one quilt. For the valedictorian—the one who could make her parents proud. Not for the twin left on a dead-end island, still looking for a way to love herself, relying on her parents to help her find a way to live. You would never leave. You would never even get on an airplane until Mrs. Harada died and left her pendant to Hana in her will.
After Mama and Arnie had committed suicide, the Haradas were all the family you had left, though you’d never thought of them that way. You sat together in the wake of Hana’s breakdown, trying to forget how she had walked into the funeral already broken, then proceeded to explode. To distract you, Mrs. Harada told you what she could remember of your mother’s stories. You recognized Lillie slowly: her voice in the children’s choir; her iconic quilt. But then Mrs. Harada told you about the internment, and Lillie’s trip to Hiroshima, and you realized that the old woman was not mixing fairy tales with reality. That was when you finally understood.
All your lives, Mama had been a mystery. First you thought she was sick, those fevers that would come over her. Later you began to understand that her heart and mind were damaged, that something beyond horrifying had happened to her. But no matter what terrible truths Mrs. Harada had to tell you, she was also Lillie. She changed her name, but she never changed who she was.
Mama is Lillie. The little girl who lived on a farm, scattered flowers with her mother, and sang the songs that brought the congregation. Lillie was Mama’s gift to you: the good-luck charm who was loved and who loved her parents. You inherited your gift for storytelling from your mother. And also, her stories of her own childhood. This is why you came to New York. One of the reasons. Hana needs these stories. There is so much she doesn’t know.
Once you are back at school, Missy sweeps you back into her circle like the dive never happened. And you go along because, what else are you going to do? You eat with the same girls, complain about the boiled vegetables, and covet each other’s musubi. But Missy also keeps passing you notes, insisting that Eddie still loves you. You shake your head and shove the notes in the garbage, as if even reading them might severely compromise you. You can’t tell her that her brother is a loser and you are happier without him. All your conversations—what Eddie is doing, who’s holding him back, what you’re all going to do together that weekend—have disappeared overnight, and there’s nothing to replace them. Missy’s dreams are still about getting a house together where you can string up side-by-side hammocks, with Eddie. About driving to the other side of the island to the blowhole where there is a secret underwater cave that has air in it to breathe. Yours involve going much further, and you keep them secret. You snap at each other, even as you try to hold on.
You never see Eddie himself, not even from a distance, which surprises you even with Arnie escorting you back and forth to school each day. The truth is, both of you are done with each other. When Missy can’t make you jealous about Lorna, Eddie’s new girlfriend who is as old as he is, she changes her story to warn you that Lorna’s trying to get pregnant with Eddie, like that’s something that should matter to you. Now you understand all the drama was coming from Missy. She is the one, of the three of you, who would not let go.
You’ve been back at school only a couple of days, when Missy goes up to Russell in the school yard. You see it happen but are slow to recognize the problem, so it takes you a few minutes to go running over to join them.
Russell looks as surprised as you are. “Who?”
“You know. Hana. I’ve seen you two together.”
Missy hates Hana, now more than ever. Why would she want her anywhere near them?
Russell flushes at the thought that the most beautiful girl in school has noticed anything about him, but he’s pleased to be included. “Sure. We can…I can…” He stops and looks at you in panic in case you know something he doesn’t, then takes a chance. “For sure.”
What is Missy hatching? You know it can’t be good.
You look around then, and you see Hana watching. Maybe she was heading over to meet Russell, but she stopped when she saw you. You have to squelch this idea before your sister hears about it, so you thread your hand in Russell’s, and steer him away from her.
“Nah,” you say, as if you are tossing the idea around, as if it’s still in play and you’re being consulted. “Hana’s…you know. She can’t even swim.”
Missy snorts and smiles at you from Russell’s other side. She waves away your objections like the breeze. “Who swims?”
“Well, you know.” You hear yourself pushing. Russell is beginning to look confused. He can’t figure out why you’ve come over to debate this—why bring him in before it’s planned? “We don’t want to be dragged down.”
“Hana? A drag?” Missy asks, and all the mocking Russell doesn’t notice is clear in her voice. She pats his arm. “We’ll make her feel right at home. Won’t we, Russell? And Eddie will come. He can teach her to swim. It’ll be a great day.”
When she says Eddie, you finally understand. You can see that poor girl, Emily, again. They invited her to the beach, too, then pantsed her in the water and left her stranded in her underwear. That was Eddie’s idea. You saw him take her out there. You saw him getting closer, smiling and slipping his arms around her waist. But you didn’t know what had happened until you saw her head drop beneath the surface as her feet were swept out from under her and Eddie came leaping out of the water swinging her shorts around his head. You had wanted nothing to do with their pranks, or with this girl who’d thought she could steal your boyfriend in front of you, but you had stayed to make sure they returned her clothing. When one of his friends finally flung the shorts back into the whitewash, you caught a flash of her underwear when she crawled in to snatch them. Then you could go.