Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  But the art show is old news by now. So why is Missy still after Hana?

  Then it hits you. You are the one who keeps pointing her in your sister’s direction. Missy must think Hana told Arnie about the cliff-diving accident. Why else include her in the note? Though it is also possible that Missy is so angry about the breakup that she has to punish someone, and she’s decided to use Hana to strike back at you.

  You got away from Eddie. But in return, you gave them your sister. You can’t leave Hana alone with them, even if it means you have to see him again. It doesn’t matter anymore whether he likes you, or whether Missy does. Of all the things you need to tell yourself, this is the most important one. You put Hana in danger then, and she is still in danger now.

  Only you can help her. That’s what Harada-san told you at the airport when you were leaving for New York, and you know what he meant. You saw her at Mama’s funeral. Some part of her is still lost in that cave. You came here to tell her the truth, but instead you have been hiding. But you are long past the safety of childhood, and far beyond the luxury of blame. Stop talking to yourself, Kei. You remember everything you need to know now. The time for guilt and punishment is over; you have Hana’s inheritance to give her.

  Wake up and talk to your sister instead.

  Hana

  The sky is like shave ice—crisp and sweet and tingling on the tongue—it’s a candy blue not found in nature, except there it is above me. Not a cloud in sight. I am laughing. Am I laughing? I feel it in my face, still lifting the corners of my eyes.

  I am walking with Russell along the side of the road.

  His arms bump mine from time to time. Our shoulders too broad, fanning out from our necks: They need space. Our forearms, the backs of our hands, held out even wider than our shoulders. His skin is warmer than mine, and smells like soap.

  It’s Saturday morning and the air is just losing the last of its cool edges. It swirls around my ankles and the hem of my skirt. Small puffs of dirt pillow my feet as we walk. Russell is saying something about some prank after basketball, but I would rather watch how the tip of his nose bobs just slightly when he talks. Some days we’re just silly, like today. Some days we talk about the draft for Vietnam and whether they’ll call the boys from our island. This is how I imagine it: that it starts in the East, in the big cities like New York and Boston, and then spreads slowly westward. I think of the draft as a storm, a patch of rain and lightning moving slowly across the continent, hovering over one place and not leaving it until only the women and children are left. The world will be depleted of young men before it gets to us. It seems impossible it will come so far.

  There is nothing for me in the world these days but these Saturday mornings, when I just happen to run into Russell outside Kress, when we both just happen to have nothing else to do, so we walk along Front Street, along a waterfront that still feels new. Spending time together even as we pretend not to notice it’s become a habit. Sometimes we go all the way to Coconut Island to watch the kids jumping in the water. Sometimes we follow the sounds of balls and bats. It’s part of what we count on—that each of us will be there, with a little time and nothing else to do and we will do that nothing together. Nothing but walk, sometimes so close I can feel the hair on his arm rise up to touch me. Bumping each other:

  Oops, sorry.

  Oops, no, I’m sorry.

  No, me.

  Then we laugh, exaggerate our stumbles so that when we right ourselves the momentum will take us into each other again. Arm against arm. Hip against hip. Arm against hip.

  “Hey, Russell!”

  Russell has just grabbed my hand to keep me from falling when we hear his name. A sampan has pulled over across the street and some of his friends are calling.

  “Hey, Russell! Kei! Hurry up!”

  Kei, they called me. I don’t know if Russell heard. I start to pull away but he squeezes my hand and twines his fingers in mine. In public.

  “Hold up, hold up!” one of the boys is yelling as the sampan driver starts to move. “They’re coming. C’mon. Hurry up!”

  Russell looks at me, like Shall we? and seeing no real resistance, starts to move.

  I am running across the road with Russell, with Russell’s hand beating against my palm.

  “Hey, howzit!”

  “Howzit.”

  “So—”

  “Hey, we waited for you…”

  We climb past the driver and into the back. The horseshoe of benches are full of Kei’s friends. There is Missy; there’s Charlene. Everyone squishes together to make room, but Russell and I get stuck on opposite sides. Russell is shrugging, like, Things happen, but I can’t tell if it’s aimed at me and he’s reacting to how we got separated, or if it is in response to the cryptic comment about waiting. The sampan is heading out of town toward beach run. That’s where we’re going. They had been expecting Russell to meet them, I realize. He must have stood them up for me.

  I am sandwiched between Charlene and a big girl with dark, glowing skin who I don’t really know. Of course she’s the one who turns to me.

  “So, what ’choo bin up to? I nevah wen see you round no moa’.”

  Kei, they called to me from the inside of the sampan. I’m wearing a flowered blouse my sister and I sometimes swap and a cotton skirt, but these are Kei’s friends; they would certainly know the difference. Did they not know Kei has been grounded for weeks? And why would they expect to see my sister and Russell holding hands on the street?

  “Oh my God, did you see Miss R at the basketball game?” Charlene asks, and my fumbling silence goes unnoticed.

  “Some fancy, yeah, da dress?”

  They don’t require me anymore. I can smile and nod and be quiet, even when the conversation turns to Russell and the layup he made to end the first quarter at the last game. The girl I don’t know asks if I saw it.

  I am thinking of the way he snuck into the key, how his arm hooked the ball into the basket in a singular swoop. “Some fancy,” I say. It just comes out that way, in the lightest pidgin, exactly mirroring the big girl’s speech.

  Russell does a quick double take when he hears me, but he’s smiling. No one takes it as an insult that I’m mimicking her; no one seems to notice at all. Maybe no one here has ever heard me speak, outside of class where we’re all expected to speak standard English anyway. Or maybe they actually do think I’m Kei—but how could they?

  What I know, though, inside, is that it’s Kei’s voice I am using. I’m dipping my toe in, seeing what it’s like to live inside Kei’s life. The only thing more absurd than trying to pretend you’re someone else in the midst of that person’s inner circle is to try to balance being two people at the same time. To answer to two names and hope no one notices. But still I wonder: Can it hurt to let this play out?

  It’s a small tremor, a shifting ground, as I decide it can’t hurt. Even as I wish Russell would say my name and rescue me from this limbo, I am also basking in the possibility of being new.

  When we get to the beach, some of the guys call for a stop. Most have towels under their legs, but neither Russell nor I had dressed to go swimming. We are quickly left on our own as the others take off, pushing through the bushes, looking for a good spot. We walk more slowly, Russell holding some of the branches so I can pass.

  Most of the places around the tide pools have families around them, so the group has gone over to a point, where the open ocean is broken up by rocky croppings, and a little island with a clump of ironwoods and a couple of palm trees sits just off the shore. The winter swells are over and the ocean is getting calmer, but there’s still some surge around the rocks and along the outside of the island on the ocean side, and the bottom is rocky and not easy on the feet.

  I’m still admiring the gorgeous day: Every color is saturated, and glazed by the sun: the black of the lava, the spectrum of blues in the sea and sky. The guys are in the water already. The first ones in stop and turn around to send big rooster tails of water into the
faces of the others when they come up for air.

  Russell and I are sitting and talking, waving off Missy, who keeps coming over like a stray dog. Although she’s Kei’s best friend, she’s never said much to me, but today she’s all about throwing her arm around my neck as she tries to coax us into the water. I wish she would say my name so I could be sure all this attention is really for me. She wants to pull us over to say hi to Eddie, her older brother and Kei’s boyfriend, who was set up like a little king under one of the ironwood trees when we arrived. Eddie’s a bit of a playboy, and he clearly hasn’t wasted any time while Kei’s been unavailable. The girl from the sampan is under his arm, leaning into him. Russell is not inclined to move.

  “C’mon in. It’s hot. Russell, Sammy has some swimming trunks for you.”

  It is getting hot, as Missy points out, and, besides Eddie and the girl, we’re the only ones who have not been in the water. If I noticed a hint of whitecaps when we got here, there is now a small break developing on the other side of the island. The stretch between me and it seems an easy swim away, if I could swim.

  “You love to swim!” Missy is looking at me.

  “Yeah…I do.” I can feel the lie twist. But Missy looks so delighted.

  “You want to?” Russell asks.

  Can I? I wonder. I would almost like to. Kids are in the water, though they’re over where the stairs are. Even kids can do it.

  I gesture to my clothes. “I can’t.”

  He nods. Then: “Boy, it’s hot, though.”

  He could take the offer of the trunks or we could join Eddie in the shade, but neither one of us makes a move. Missy flits down to the surf, then back, then down again, ankle deep in the water, calling us to join her. Much as I’d thought I would love a group of friends, I would much rather be left alone with Russell, just us two, to feel that personal gravitational force we both must lean away from lest we fall into each other. But my sister’s friends are watching, as if we are the stars of a play staged in the round. I can’t figure out why, unless they really do think I am Kei, and maybe they’re wondering when I became so close with my sister’s boyfriend. None of it makes sense, but for whatever reason, I can feel their active interest, even though each time I look up, they look away.

  “I can teach you to swim,” he says. “Or…we don’t have to go out far. We can just get our feet wet.”

  “I meant…” How does he know I can’t swim? I don’t want him to think that, even if it’s true. I’ve never lied to him, and I overdo it. “Of course I can swim. Who do you think I am? It’s just…my clothes.”

  “Oh, that. They’ll dry.”

  “I’ll race you!” Missy is back, dripping wet. She challenges Russell.

  “Nah.”

  “Oh, Russell, you’re so boring. Both of you, all snuggled together. So boring.” Her charm is powerful; I’ve never wanted to be in her orbit before, but suddenly I understand the force of her personality, why Kei has been drawn to her.

  Missy pushes Russell away, playfully, and plops herself down behind me, curving her legs around me on either side. Before I can react, she starts combing her fingers through my hair. I can feel the difference in our body temperatures, and how the water from her suit pools in the tiny pukas in the lava we are sitting on and cools the rock down. I don’t quite know what to do. She’s so close, surrounding me, her breath on my shoulders. She’s already separating out hefts of hair and braiding it into a crown. It’s been so long since my mother sat me in front of a mirror, combing my hair from the tips to the roots and then roping it into pigtails to keep it from becoming a hopeless knot when Kei and I played outside. I forgot how good it felt.

  “There,” Missy says. “Now it’ll stay out of the water and your mother will never know.”

  It is, at best, a curious statement. Is this what Kei does? How she gets away with things? Does she even worry about what Mama thinks anymore? I feel exposed, vulnerable. I can’t shake the feeling that this sudden intimacy is all for Kei. I am cheating, letting it happen, pretending to be my sister. But in that masquerade, the vertigo of saying and not saying, I feel alive. I feel seen and loved for the first time in years.

  “C’mon. I dare you. Let’s go.”

  I’m surprised at how much her friendliness means, how I fall into it and accept that it belongs to me, when I suddenly see Kei. I freeze. She’s there on the beach, walking up to Eddie in shorts and a red blouse, looking just like me. Two months ago, Kei would have been here and I would have been in the house with Mama, but now, isn’t Kei supposed to be grounded? It’s been a month, and I can’t remember the last time I ran into her outside of school. It seems impossible that on the one day in my life I find myself at the beach with her friends, she is here. But here we are: two girls, both girls, at the same time.

  I confess that I wish her gone in that moment. Whatever it would take to make her disappear, just for one more day. I want to stay with the warmth of the sun on my shoulders, Missy’s fingers in my hair and Russell smiling at me. Kei is walking toward Eddie and the girl from the sampan whose name, I have learned, is Lorna. It is a matter of seconds until everybody sees her.

  This is not my place. It’s time to leave. I try to rise, but Missy’s hands are on my shoulders, pushing me back down, then snaking around so her upper arms are resting on my collarbones. At the same time, she glances over in the direction of her brother and Kei. Missy doesn’t seem to react, doesn’t pause or do a double take. Instead, she looks at me and smiles.

  “Kei!” she calls. “Over here, Kei!”

  Had she known all along, then? Had all this intimacy really been aimed at me? My sister turns toward her name, and doesn’t look happy to see her best friend embracing me. I am caught—in Kei’s narrowed eyes and pointed glower, and Missy’s tightening hold on me. Will Kei run me off? Will she humiliate me for pretending I belong here? But then she turns back to Eddie, ignoring me.

  Missy stands up and takes both my hands, then pulls me to her. “Race you,” she says, as if I have already agreed to go into the water. I don’t know what to do.

  Russell gets up with us. “Are you really going in?” He’s seen Kei, too, but of course he’s always known who I am. None of the others have reacted with any surprise, either. I had given myself over to a silly fantasy, but with my sister standing there, I realize I am the only one who’s confused and Kei is the only one who is angry.

  Seeing me hesitate, Missy takes off, splashing into the water and then doing a smooth flat dive.

  I take a step toward Kei, then stop. Something new has occurred to me. What if I don’t give all this back to her, this gift of her friends’ friendship? What if I stay?

  Everything I am in this moment. Everything I am feeling. This can be me.

  I smile at Russell and gesture down at my clothes. “Well, to the ankles at least. Or maybe to the knees.”

  He takes my hand—it’s becoming a habit—and we walk into the surf together. The water’s always colder than it looks, and it tingles against my calves. Missy is about five lengths away, bouncing and hollering and drawing attention to us. Russell and I are in almost to our knees, and I am holding my skirt with both hands. I’m in deeper than I should be—I can’t raise my skirt much more without being indecent. We must look ridiculous, I think. Shipwrecked.

  I wonder if Kei thinks so. The hems of Russell’s madras shorts are swimming in the water, banding him in a wet ring up to his mid thighs, but he’s teasing me for acting like a movie star who sees a cockroach. He isn’t thinking about Kei, or the two of us here together. I am the only person he sees.

  Back on the shore, I can see that Kei is still not happy. She’s asking Eddie something and he’s ignoring her. I assume it has to do with Lorna, but the girl seems bored by the exchange, not threatened. It isn’t until Eddie turns away and Kei grabs his bicep that he gets into her face with his own and she drops her hand.

  “C’mon, Kei! Eddie! Come join us!”

  It’s Missy again, her voice s
ounding like she can’t see that things are tense on shore. But when I turn back to her she is treading water, waving to Kei. Eddie turns and walks away. Kei shrugs but doesn’t acknowledge Missy’s offer, signaling clearly that she wants nothing to do with me.

  She looks so much like me then, so much like I must have the many times I was pretending nothing was wrong, I was fine, just lost in thought and weighing my options. Like it was my choice to eat alone, to study alone, to be the only one in class without a science partner. Kei is the one on the outside now. For just a little longer, I want her to stay there. Is that so terrible? I want, just for a minute, to savor being the one who is “in.”

  I feel a rush of adrenaline. “Last one in is a rotten egg,” I call to Russell. I have been dared enough. I dive into the water, headfirst, fully clothed, before he realizes I’m serious. Hold your breath. It is only one breath, I think, calling back the few words of advice I allowed Mr. Torres to give me. Don’t suck in with your nose until you are all the way up. My feet cycle for the sand almost as soon as I raise them, and then I’m up in a panic, gasping for air in waist-high water.

  “You!” he says. Russell has followed me in and now he is laughing and swinging the water from his hair off to one side as boys do. I realize that I pulled the back of my head out of the water first like a drowning cat—it would be a mess except for Missy’s braid. The bottom goes up and down but where I am it’s shallow, and he creeps closer, keeping the lower edge of his face submerged with his body, as if he’s a sea monster or a shark. When he bursts out of the water next to me, he is so close I can feel it pouring off him.