Shadow Child

by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

  Kei, it’s okay. I’m here. It’s Hana.

  Stop mumbling. Everyone is talking at the same time. How can I understand anything you say?

  She’s moving. Look! She’s moving.

  Are you moving? There’s so much light in my eyes. Move the light.

  The moonlight is so bright when we get to the entrance. No, it’s not the moon. It’s the third searchlight, Charlene’s father, who has come out ahead of us to warn Mama that her daughter has been found.

  Mama doesn’t move as we approach her. She waits for us to emerge fully from the dark. Her face is grave; it holds no questions. It’s as if she knows the worst has happened and there’s nothing to be done but to deliver the news.

  The tight knot we wove around you has loosened in the final chamber of the cave, and the tension goes out of your body. Your head falls backward, and Arnie’s afraid to shift his arms.

  “Hold her head,” he says to no one in particular.

  I am holding you, Hana. But now our mother is here.

  Russell has been waiting to be useful. He cups your head as I break around him and run.

  I fling my arms around Mama, sobbing. She feels so small in them—smaller even than Charlene and so light. How can her shoulders tuck into my armpits? Where is the safety her body once offered?

  Mama’s body yields when mine hits, absorbing the shock of my weight. Her arms come up reflexively to keep her from falling backward, but I count it as an embrace. I want her to cry with me. I want her to move, to scream, to try to make things better. Anything but to accept the limp form of my sister coming toward her as something that cannot be changed.

  Mama, are you here, too? Go to her. Call her. Hanako.

  Kei!

  Your rescuers are approaching, fanned out and silent. At last Mama leans against me, but still she doesn’t move. You could be an armful of red laundry in Arnie’s arms, except for Russell bobbing sideways beside you still trying to cradle your head. Go away, I will him, this boy who has ruined everything. Go away. How can Arnie turn and head up to the road without saying a word? How can Mama fall in, trotting behind you as if to pick up any scattered pieces, without trying to touch you?

  When Arnie gets to the top of the pit, you suddenly see the moon. You begin screaming again, a much thinner sound amid the dripping, bending trees, and here, the scene changes: jangled and pitching as we run, yell; we reach the cars; we try to plan. Arnie says, “Get the door open, Miya, get into the cab. I’m going to put her over you so you can hold her.

  “Hana, don’t move. If you can. We are trying as best as we can not to touch you. Stop. Please.”

  Mama gets into the truck and Arnie tries to drape you over her. Each time you move, each time your wounds scrape something new, you scream. Mama’s arms hold you tight. Her arms are sliding in blood but she won’t let go. You settle into her embrace. Maybe you are numb now, but you have stopped trying to fight it.

  I can see Mama holding your head, pressing her face to yours, forehead to forehead. She is trying to pull you into stillness. Your blood is on her face. She is kissing your forehead, saying your full name over and over again, and I’m right there beside you standing in the open door.

  “I’m so sorry I left you,” I hear Mama say to you. “Rest in peace, Hanako. Rest in peace.”

  Arnie meets my eyes, helpless. Both he and I are covered in your blood. There is no room for me in the truck. When I close the door gently, Mama is still pressed to your forehead, whispering, fretting—Peace. Rest in peace—as Arnie inches the truck away from me. Then all of you are gone.

  Russell is standing beside me. His lips are moving. He needs to say something, but I will not hear him. He sits down and holds his head between his hands, and I wonder what it’s like to hold his own head, to feel his own fingers, after holding Hana’s.

  You warned me to protect her, he’d said when he returned with Arnie. And he was right. I knew something was going to happen. This is all my fault.

  There’s nothing to do now but go home, me and my few scrapes and bruises. There are still two cars here, and Charlene’s father putting away the searchlights. I wonder where Charlene is, and what her father has been told. Is he here in penance or in solidarity with Arnie? Will he go to the police station next and have Eddie and the others arrested for what they have done? Penance and punishment: They are both pounding in my brain. Mr. Chow will deliver me safely to the Haradas’ house, but he can’t look at me.

  At the hospital, after they’ve stabilized you and given you so much morphine you are quiet at last, Mama will climb onto your bed and try to keep her balance on the edge of it. There’s not much room, but her body is tiny, and she can almost fit beside you without touching any of the bandaged parts. She can nestle her face near your neck, even if you won’t respond, and whisper to you. She can tell you secrets. She can be there even if they say you are unconscious. She knows you’re still there. She has seen this before—minds and bodies separated, one freed from the other—and she has to believe her daughter will experience this moment, even if you don’t remember.

  I don’t know how I know this. Perhaps Mrs. Harada told me later. But this is what it feels like now to me.

  They might have let Mama stay if she’d gotten up when they asked her to. Or if she’d allowed herself to be changed into clean clothes. She refused to acknowledge the nurses when they told her she couldn’t be on the bed. Every second she could still touch you would be imprinted on you, Hana. She was there. You would know.

  They probably whispered about her. Wasn’t she the one people used to say was crazy? The Cowgirl? The Calrose Rice Queen?

  Arnie let Mama do what she wanted, held the nurses at bay, until the doctors all came into the room at the same time, saying she would have to go. Mama would be better off at home—it was a stressful time, but more so for you, Hana, and it would only hurt you to have her there, acting so deranged. They let her stay for a full day, but she kept crawling back into the bed, incoherent, stroking your hair. They couldn’t know that you were the only thing keeping Mama from fainting, that once she got home she would sink into her own bed and not get out. By the time Arnie gave in and brought Mama home, I had more than a day of being left behind with the Haradas, desperate about where everyone was and what was happening. It was fitting that I was the one waiting. The one pressed against the window yearning for someone to approach; listening for the footsteps on the porch to tell me that, at last, there was someone on the other side of the door.

  I want my sister, but no one can see you. Arnie tells me this, his eyes averted. Not me, not Mama, who doesn’t get out of bed until after my graduation, weeks away still. Not even Russell, who has been coming to the hospital every day. Not even, Arnie says. Of all the words out of his mouth, this priority for a boy over me is the strangest. I’m your sister, your other half. I can reach those wounds in your mind that Arnie says are too deep—we can’t risk making them worse. I can heal you, tell your story, Koko. That’s what I do.

  I can explain.

  Except, I couldn’t then. No one could. Arnie started by trying to get everyone arrested, but the police only held Eddie and Ray, and then only for one night. There was no proof, and barely any blood on either one of them. All of us had banged up something that night, however accidentally. Eddie denied hurting you, and their stories were consistent, though as Arnie pointed out, he and Ray had had all night together in a cell to rehearse them. You could have just gotten lost or wandered off. That’s what the police said. You could have fallen. They hadn’t seen you when we found you in the cave, so they couldn’t know. If you had just told the police what happened they could have helped us…But you didn’t.

  No one had the guts to tell me the day you left.

  Arnie never stopped trying to bring those two boys to justice. Even when some of his friends grew cooler to him, tired of picking sides. As for me, I crossed the street rather than talk to any of my former friends, even Charlene. But I couldn’t forgive myself, even
if Mama did. I told her how I had put you in the center of the gang’s attention, but she just waved my words away. I couldn’t have known, she told me. I couldn’t freeze time and judge it from the worst moment. You never knew what terrible things would bring something good in the future.

  People make their own choices: That was always Mama’s mantra. And Hana…Mama paused then, as if she knew something, but whatever it was, she didn’t say. Her final words on the subject were the ones she often said to us: Each one of us has to make our own way in a big, big world.

  Kei?

  I remember lights. New York City, flashing through the windows of my cab on the way from the airport. It wasn’t until I walked into your apartment that I realized Arnie had lied. All his talk about your friends at the galleries had been made up to protect Mama, just as he used to pick me up when I was in middle school so Mama wouldn’t know about the fights. There was no sign of the “big city success.” No sign of any painting at all. You had one plate, one cup, one set of utensils. You had three library books, but no books on a shelf, no possessions. No wonder you hadn’t wanted me to come.

  The walls were bare. That’s when I knew my trip was for nothing. All those lost years, and it was my fault. You were hiding; you had stopped living after the cave incident, and no necklace, not even Mama’s history, would make you better. I could still hear you screaming at Mama’s funeral, the same scream you had been screaming since I left you. I couldn’t save you. You would never come home.

  I needed a cigarette.

  I carried my bag into your bedroom and turned on the radio. Then I rummaged in my duffel for the small folding case where I kept my emergency Kools. You have always abhorred the smell of cigarette smoke, so I tugged the window open and unlatched the safety gate so I could stick my head all the way out into the fresh air before I lit up.

  I was leaning on the windowsill, trying to blow the smoke downwind. I was trying to figure out what to do. I had been counting on your success, on your curiosity about Mama’s secrets. On a promise that we could start over, and the assumption that you felt as I did: that you missed me every single day. I had come to give you your inheritance.

  Your name.

  Hanako sent your mama to Hawaii, Mrs. Harada told me, in one of the very last stories she told. She was dying—her voice was full of pauses, barely more than a whisper. Her shaking, fragile fingers tucked the pendant into my palm, and she held it there with what little strength she had left as she told me about her niece. Maybe I had heard her talk about Hanako when we were little, but I never understood. But after a lifetime of assuming that it was my name that held the secrets, I realized that the world was not so big that I couldn’t fly to New York for my sister. You couldn’t make your own choices without knowing what I knew. Once upon a time, you gave me my own name, and it was time to return the favor.

  You were never a Flower Child. You were named for the best friend who saved our mother’s life. But now that I was here in New York, with the truth of what your own life had become, I was no longer sure whether that name would be enough to save you, too.

  The night air was cool. When I was finished with my cigarette, I grabbed Mama’s quilt off your bed and was pulling it around my shoulders when I heard a door slam across the hall. It wasn’t you, but as I whirled around, the stiff edge of the quilt swept my cigarette case off the sill and down into the narrow alley between the buildings, four stories below. I could feel it falling. I never thought about my cash and my driver’s license tucked in with my cigarettes, perhaps because I was falling, too. My ankle gave out beneath me as I turned, off balance after a long plane ride, a head rush from the tobacco, and no food. I slammed my ribs hard on your bed frame and lay there, groaning.

  What did I do then? I hobbled into the main room and drank some juice to get the sugar back into my system, had a few bites of your leftovers. I was exhausted, and still waiting, so I decided to take a shower to clear my head. I hadn’t brought a robe, and couldn’t find one in your bedroom, so I wrapped the quilt around myself after I undressed, then left it on the lid of the toilet when I got into the tub.

  When I turned off the shower and went to dry myself, there was no towel. You clearly had no interest in making yourself comfortable or at home. Still dripping in the tub, I glanced at the mirror above the sink as I squeezed my hair out, and it was only then that my brain finally registered the tape.

  When you die, will you be all alone? That was Missy’s first question to me, all those years ago. Being alone was Missy’s greatest fear. She had reminded me of it at Mama and Arnie’s funeral, when her first words, her only words to me since the cave incident, were the greatest comfort she could muster: At least they weren’t alone. It had bothered me then, but it wasn’t until I got here and saw how lonely your New York life was that I understood why.

  I could see you again, sitting by yourself in the back of the chapel at the funeral in your fancy New York suit. You had reappeared just as suddenly as you’d disappeared, and no one in town knew how you wanted us to approach you. There was a buffer of breathless space around you; even those of us who would never stop reliving that night weren’t sure what to do. Your story had become gossip, then rumor, and then forgotten. And then, there you were, resurrected in the form of a black-clothed specter perched on a wooden pew: so forlorn, in the flesh. Silent. So…alone.

  Growing up, as we did, as Koko, I knew the one thing that neither one of us could ever bear was the feeling of being just one girl. That was what the tape on the mirror told me: the piece of the puzzle I had been missing all along. There was one thing even more terrible than being attacked by one of my former friends in the cave that night.

  And that was being left in the dark all alone.

  In that blacked-out mirror, I understood you were still there, Hana. That you were still haunted by monsters you could not face. I could see them: your loneliness as the perfect daughter, and your terror in the dark. But I could also see something else: you on the beach with Missy having your hair braided. You were shining, in love with your life and your possibilities. I wanted you to remember yourself that way.

  I stepped out of the tub and wrapped the quilt around my shoulders, the rest of me still naked and wet, putting myself directly in front of the mirror. I didn’t touch the careful strips of tape covering it; instead, I chose what I would see. I was crying as I parted my own sopping hair with my fingers and began to twist sections of it into a French braid. This was your beauty, Hana. Your reckless joy at conquering your fears. I was lost in that day—the candy-colored sky, the laughter of the children in the tide pools, and you standing in the water, the ocean streaming from your dress—when the door to the bathroom opened. The sound of the radio came rushing in. I spun around. There you were, my actual sister, standing there.

  You looked worn. Defeated. Still white and drawn, as I had seen you at the funeral, and still dressed in black. You must have heard the water, heard me turn the shower off, and yet you looked at me, surprised. As if you had both expected and not expected to see me.

  You had taken a step into your tiny bathroom with the swing of the door. You were only an arm’s length away. I could feel the connection between us, all our history sizzling back into being as our postures adjusted to mirror each other without any thought. Your eyes were so close, looking directly into mine, but also far away. My own must have been equally startled, and surely puffy, running with my tears. I was caught in time, wet and hopeful, hair half braided, in the escaping steam of the shower. I was waiting to hear you speak, to see if, despite everything, you would welcome me.

  It happened so fast. You reached toward me, and I was so happy to be with you, to be so close to you, at last. It wasn’t until I felt my throat closing that I recognized the clouds that had come over your expression. Mama’s world used to slip the same way. Mama lived with us, but also in the world of Lillie. And also in a world of ghosts she never wanted us to see. And there were times when she couldn’t tell the difference.
Just like, at that moment, you couldn’t.

  Your fingers dug into my neck. And then I heard a whimper. Don’t.

  That raw. That aching. You were pleading. Were you pleading?

  With all our history between us, known and unknown, there is one thing I know to be true. My sister would never hurt me.

  But before I could say your name, the force of your lunge carried us both over. I hit my head on the corner of the shower enclosure as we went down. I didn’t fight, because I knew it wasn’t me you were seeing.

  The twin you were trying to punish was yourself.

  What was the bedtime song Mama always sang to us? I keep hearing it in my head. Two girls. Lillie’s light is on the other side with the girls.

  But now I’m here, in your cave, Hana. I’m the one trapped without you. But I am also the one who became the storyteller, and now it’s my turn. I can change the story if I want to: It’s me and you, here together in the cave. You’ve been waiting for me. My sister.

  The story begins here: in the dark.

  Arnie, give me your flashlight.

  It’s a dim beam in the darkness. Not really even a beam. It’s a yellowish splotch, brown around the edges, that lights the bits of dust in the air and the bugs when you point it too far forward. “Good enough for government work,” Arnie says. He likes to say the same thing over and over. Good enough to see your feet if you point it down.