“You are really something, Hana.”
In fact, I am. I am the only one in the water in a skirt. I am the only girl who has dared to walk into the ocean in street clothes. That Russell has done it with me, that it will be simple to dry and we will be respectful, if slightly salty, in an hour, is not the point. I am the one who did it.
Missy gives me a thumbs-up. Russell is circling around me, splashing me gently to get me to sink down to my neck, or maybe that’s just his way to bump against me with the water. I settle in, as the water warms around me, matching my skin so exactly I can barely feel where I end and it begins. When I lift my feet, even in my tucked position, I can float a little.
My sister is sitting on the beach, legs splayed out in front of her. She’s watching me intently, raking her fingers in the sand. I know the conversation with Eddie didn’t go well, but there are more important things than boys, I want to tell her.
I don’t know yet what Kei is doing here, but I want to put my smile on my sister’s face. I want to tell her that there is room for both of us. There has to be. I want to slip inside her, just as our mother used to slip in and out of the spirit veil, so she can see herself through my eyes: beautiful. I want to show her that it’s a perfect day, a day of utter belonging, when all futures are still possible and there’s no separation between you and the world. Even though I know now what they are planning—even though this day is the end, the last day I remember before the cave—still it is the best, most beautiful day, and I refuse to believe it has to end here. I am me, and I am really something. Can’t there be a world in which that is allowed?
We were Koko once. Before there was a Kei or a Hana, we were two girls, never apart. In all the lives I never lived, here is the one I long for the most: I am the girl who waves to my sister from the water; who saves her from Eddie; who is unafraid to be seen. I am the one who calls out, with the lightest lilt of pidgin entering my voice, my new voice, that is my own.
“Come on in, Kei!” I am calling to my sister. “Come in with us. The water is fine.”
Hana
I pass through the vestibule of the police station without a tremor, this time with my sketch in my purse. It’s a bright afternoon, but still, my lack of fear is a good sign. Maybe the high school Hana is resurfacing, after all. Her flash of confidence is more than welcome now.
The officer at the desk, Sergeant Cole, is a younger, pleasant-looking man with round glasses. “I’d like to speak with Detective Lynch, please? Or Detective Tapper?” I tell him. “It’s about the Keiko Swanson…Hanako Swanson…case? On Claremont Avenue? A week ago?”
He picks up a phone, not quibbling about the double name, and listens to it ring. Then he asks me to wait for a minute while he locates the detectives. I sit in one of two wooden chairs along the wall. It’s quite a bit more than a minute, enough that I wonder if I should have made an appointment. When he returns, he says Detective Lynch will be back in twenty minutes but that in the meantime, she asked him to show me a lineup.
I imagine myself standing behind one of those special viewing windows I’ve only seen in the movies, picking out the man in the lobby and then pulling my sketch out to show Sergeant Cole precisely how well I have captured his essence. But that vision is short-lived. He takes me back to a desk and hands me six plain file folders, each containing the photograph of a different man.
“I thought you said this was a lineup?”
“This is how we do it.” His voice matches his mild face as he explains that I should look at them one at a time, and let him know if I recognize anyone.
There I am again, with mug shots, only these are bigger. And again, none of the men are white. Why do the police keep ignoring my description?
“No.” I flip through them too quickly. “This can’t be right.”
Sergeant Cole has stepped away, out of my sight line. He tries to look encouraging. “I know it’s hard. But if you put him back into the room where it happened, you might recognize him.”
I have never seen any of these men before. Even allowing for the most liberal use of the word swarthy, each also has some defining feature: a strange, twisted nose, a scar, a stoop, a potbelly. My sketch loosened something inside me, and I thought it was almost over. But now, I could not feel more suffocated than if I was swimming in a pool of tar.
Do the police know something I don’t? Could it be that the man I saw in the lobby was a random stranger, maybe readying himself, as I searched for my keys, to ask if I needed help?
Showing them my sketch now would just make me seem even more crazy. And what do I know? Maybe Kei’s attacker really did go in and out the window. After all the effort I went through to draw him, maybe there was no double take at all?
I feel the possibility as if it’s creeping up behind me. Why does it feel so dangerous?
I look back at the mug shots. If the cops are right, if Kei’s attacker is there, would I feel him? At least Sergeant Cole is beside me to keep me safe. “It’s okay,” he says, after I ask twice for more time. He takes pity on me then and says something he probably shouldn’t. “We have him.”
At first, I assume he means that the man is in custody, and therefore can no longer hurt me. Then I realize he means evidence.
“Was any of it from my apartment?”
“There you are!” Detective Lynch interrupts us. She is weaving through desks on her way toward us, traveling in a waft of stale frying oil and Chinese food. When she reaches us, she spins a chair from a nearby desk around and pulls it over. “I didn’t know that we’d finally gotten ahold of you. By the way, I heard you were having a hard time last time you left here. Broken shoes or something?”
Is she being snippy, or is she testing me? “I’m fine. Thanks. I heard you caught the guy?”
Detective Lynch gives Sergeant Cole a flat look. “We’ve made an arrest in another case. That might be what you heard. We have eyewitnesses from some of the other buildings.”
“Some of the buildings?”
“Another girl saw him when he attacked her,” Detective Lynch continues, appraising me. “He’s a thief, making that little enclave around your sister’s place his own. The attacks were accidents—he picked an apartment that wasn’t empty and got surprised.” She shrugs. “Shit happens. It’s just bad luck.”
Shit happens. How to wrap my mind around this? Shit happened to the poor burglar who picked the wrong apartment? Or to my sister?
“And this other woman?”
“He knocked her over, but she faked blacking out and called 911 before he was even down the stairs.”
If only Kei had been smart enough to fake it. This thought replaces If only she had screamed for help, which goes along with If only she had thought to lock the door. These are all that stand between me and the accusation: If only I had gone out to the airport to meet her, or had been home to greet her when she arrived.
But now, there’s another possibility. Shit happens. It is Kei’s worldview, and my worst nightmare. How could we live in a world where people get hurt, killed, even, for no reason? How can a person protect herself if she can simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
And yet…if he was there to steal, why leave behind a hefty chunk of jade? Why not at least open Mama’s leather case? “He didn’t strangle this other woman?”
“Each break-in is not identical, Miss Swanson. It only happens that way in the movies.”
I can’t mention the necklace or the case, since I left them out of my original statement. But why would a thief leave them?
This magical thinking has to stop, I tell myself. They have him. Whoever he is. I have to stop believing that my intuition has anything to offer Kei and let it go. We are safe now, Kei and I. That’s something to celebrate. I can stand in my living room and look out at the night without the fear that I, as a witness, have to be silenced. There was no half-glimpsed truth in my hallucinations; no perfectly intuited double take. No role for me.
Shit happened, and now it is o
ver.
I have almost convinced myself of that when she continues. “We did find your sister’s driver’s license in the alley under the fire escape window. You should fill out a claims form to get it back.”
“Really? No one told me.”
“You haven’t been answering your telephone.”
Now I am sure I don’t like her expression. “You found her wallet in the alley? So your suspect didn’t have it on him?”
“No wallet. Just the license. Sometimes they dump them.”
It’s all coming at me so jumbled. The fact that I can have her ID back, that the window was the key. Detective Lynch doesn’t trust me, and why should she? I told her I worked late at the restaurant, and then told her I didn’t work. But she checked my alibi, and I can still help.
“I drew this. It’s what I remember.” It’s my last chance to right any wrongs I made in cleaning up the apartment in my shock. I pull out the picture and hand it to her.
She looks at me with a mixture of exasperation and annoyance, but also something more. In her expression, I can see a flash of Arnie: the way his brow furrowed when the faucet was still leaking after he had replaced the washers and the tape and tightened all the joints, after he had searched his toolbox for inspiration and even switched out parts that were perfectly good. It was the expression that said he had arrived at that point when he was torn between continuing to fiddle until the fix was found and smashing the pipes with a hammer. But still, she looks at the sketch.
I look at it, too. Only this time I can see it upside down, and I recognize him.
I have drawn Eddie.
With that, the vertigo slides in. I am fragile, exhausted. The police flooded my brain with predators, and I was so determined to prove them wrong. But the monster I drew this time was my own.
I was only trying to help. I was trying to be a good witness, a good sister. Being good, I thought, would protect me. They would like me, whoever they were. They wouldn’t hurt me.
Being good would keep me safe.
But the joke—on me—is that I have lived my whole life that way and it never worked. I am still afraid. I’m afraid of men, afraid of being robbed, afraid of being strangled and left to die in my own bathtub. I’m afraid of being misunderstood, and of being the victim. I am afraid of losing my sister, and losing my mother. I am afraid of drowning, and so very afraid of the dark. My fear hasn’t protected me. It has eaten me alive, literally poisoning me, and the question is: How long did I refuse to notice?
Time flows in all directions. Our past has almost filled itself in. And the truth I must face is this: I am not good.
We are not your friends, Eddie said to me. And he was right. Not your friends, not your friends. The words play in my mind—I can’t stop them—in the singsong voice that has been with me ever since I came out of the cave.
That’s when the final blow hits me. I realize what I am listening to.
Kei’s voice.
The voice in my head is Kei’s. The singsong I thought I created to help keep me sane is now an endless, taunting loop winding tight inside my brain. How is it possible that I never understood that before now? I thought all along that I was healing, when in truth, I was invaded. By a voice I thought was my own.
Suddenly, I am running. Out of the police station, four blocks to home, with no concern for what strangers might think of the only white girl on the street racing like the devil himself is behind her. I run through my lobby and up three flights of stairs, unable to wait for the elevator. But my apartment isn’t the sanctuary I am looking for. I can hear Kei’s voice in my head, whispering to me. Jus’ one joke. Jus’ one joke. Jus’ one joke.
How could it have been her all along? The singsong proves that I am crazy, that Kei has driven me crazy by luring me into a cave the same way she tried to lead me into the ocean on the day of the tidal wave. For the last six years, she’s been hounding me, haunting me, directing me like a paper doll.
She made me. And now, I have something for her to see.
I walk into the bathroom where I found my sister and strip off my clothes, baring myself in a blast of cold daylight. I yank the duct tape off my mirror, strip by strip. Through the ghosting of old adhesive, I can see myself, fully naked for the first time since I left home. There they are: my scars, each one just as I mapped it. The long pink keloids that hug my calves. The buckling, misshapen little brains that used to be my knees. Even the crosshatched skin on my upper back, like a rusty plaid blanket, which I can’t see.
Or, rather, where my scars are supposed to be.
The bathroom mirror gives me my body in pieces. There’s a bump on my shoulder, but more of a slight asymmetry, unnoticeable unless you look. On my triceps, where the angry red snakes of scar tissue should be, raised lines of pearly white trail like icing, thick enough that I can’t feel my fingers running lightly over my skin. It isn’t the old tape residue on the mirror, or the distance. My forearms and hands look more textured than angry. My knees are knobby, blunted, but not so noticeably. And on my legs, patches of skin are slick and off color, but the effect is delicately marbled and not entirely unpleasant. Nothing that a pair of sheer hose won’t conceal.
I look nothing like myself. The drawn, suffering version of my mother that I imagined doesn’t look back at me in the mirror, nor does the soft, startled seventeen-year-old version that I last saw. My face is flushed, and sloppy from crying, but that isn’t what’s so shocking.
Where is the person I knew myself to be?
I grab my purse and pull Kei’s pumice stone out of it. I have to see myself. I have to be myself. I am crying, stuttering sobs, but I won’t let time and healing take away who I am. I grasp the stone in my hand and scrape the scar on my left tricep. The thickened skin pushes back against the pumice, so I dig in harder. I am digging for the pain. Looking for myself, and also looking to escape myself. It doesn’t work; the stone’s too round and smooth. I palm it in my hand and smash it on the corner of the sink, shattering it. I know the monster I became, and I need to recognize her. I pick up a jagged shard and place it against my forearm. And push.
Red dots spring up as my skin bursts. Blood. I can see it in the mirror. Suddenly I can feel, in a rush of heat, how the lava kissed that same line once, how the glassy, spun shards of rock shredded my innocent skin. I close my eyes and rake the rock from the inside of my elbow to my wrist.
A hot shot of life lights the inside of my arm.
See me, Kei.
I am here, at last, in the place where you abandoned me.
Time slips, and I slip with it. The shower recedes behind me and the endless darkness of the cave moves in. It’s on the edges of my sight, suffocating: the memory I’ve been avoiding. This is it: the moment Dr. Shawe always warned me about. I expected to be a mess—straitjacketed, hallucinating—but my mind has never felt more clear.
I am back in the cave.
1947
That many days into the Pacific, the stars were as bright and close as tiny searchlights in a blackout. The constellations looked different here. Every night, unless the wind was slapping spray from the black sea onto the pitching deck, Miya slipped past the riggings and cranes and turrets toward the stern of the transport ship. There, in the shelter she’d found between the bench where the life jackets were kept and the stacks of cargo lashed down with oilskin, she looked up and tried to recall the stars. She could always find the warrior, Orion; the two Dippers; and Pleiades; but the names of the others escaped her. Was it her memory that was unfamiliar and shifting, or this sky itself, as she sailed into a new world?
She liked the night, with its varying shades of disappearing. And the lights off the ship that dappled the ocean with silver, tipping the little waves in long lines before fading back to black. And the wake, too, the water instantly cleft by the prow of the boat, each half carried helplessly apart from the other—good-bye, good-bye—before being consumed by the enormity of the sea. Above her, the Milky Way was a band of bright clouds tha
t seemed to catch the full moon, though of course it was too far for that. Too deeply past. That was what she liked the most about the stars: that when you saw their light you were looking back, past the beginning, to where time began.
Time before she was the mother of a beautiful boy she would never see again, except in a photograph. Before she was remarried and pregnant for the second time.
During the day, Miya stayed in her quarters, with its soft scent of old vomit. She shared a compartment with five strangers. There were three bunks on each wall with a passage between them that was barely wide enough to stand in, and one small porthole that didn’t open. From here, through the hazy crust of salt on the glass, she could watch the ocean in the sunlight, almost as black as it looked under the moon. On the decks, the day was harsh and loud. The heat magnified the smell of the fuel, and the close press of the baking sun made her more nauseated than usual.
She took most of her food in her bunk.
The transport ship was a large village, or a small city. The troops, coming home. Of the thousands on board, only a handful were Japanese American, and not too many more than that were women. The women banded around her whenever she appeared. Calling her dear, clucking at her. Poor thing, barely more than a girl. What were the generals thinking, sending her home without her husband in her state? They counseled her about what to eat, and what not to eat; they debated whether she should worry about the deep circles beneath her eyes and her sallow skin, or the fact that she was always sleeping. They didn’t know what the doctor had warned her in private: that her body was weak and there might be complications, even hemorrhaging, due to—he put it delicately—her time in Hiroshima, which meant the poison from the bomb. When they thought she couldn’t hear, the women murmured about how she was all wrists and collarbones, like one of those skeletons. Except for her pregnant belly, which rose like a hot air balloon pushing even her small breasts up toward her chin.
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