Shadow Child Read online

  She could see the blocky city skyline growing bigger through the window when she craned her neck and clenched her jaw against her gurgling stomach.

  Los Angeles. January 1942. They had arrived.

  Donald’s parents lived in a two-room apartment over a small store in the south corner of the city. The stairs in the hallway smelled of garlic, and some spices she would come to recognize later as shoyu and ginger. Not unpleasant, exactly, but cloying and sharp. The hall itself was so narrow that she had to scale the stairs sideways to get her bag up, trying not to bang her shins, which had become black and blue on the long walk from the station despite Donald’s help, carrying both bags for long stretches. Here at last at their destination, he’d found a burst of energy and took the stairs quickly. He was excited to surprise his parents, she knew, and he wanted them to welcome her. By the time Lillie arrived at the top of the stairs, Donald was half inside the door, propping it open for her with one trailing foot as his body leaned forward, dragged down and into the embrace of his frail, sobbing mother. Lillie assumed the man in the chair in the living room, waiting for Donald to disengage himself, was Donald’s father. Tateishi-sama. The man seemed to grimace, but nodded when Donald came over to bow in front of him.

  Lillie’s own entrance was less joyful. When his parents greeted her in Japanese, the sounds were rushed and slurred. Lillie froze, fumbling, unable to remember the formal Japanese phrase Donald had taught her, though she wasn’t sure if it would be the right response anyway, since she didn’t recognize the noises they had made. She also forgot to bow.

  His parents, she was shocked to discover, didn’t speak any English. Belly so nice to greet you, his mother said to her, as Lillie fought the urge to smile at the double entendre. The rest of the initial welcome fluttered over her head, punctuated by tears and coughing on the part of Donald’s mother. His mother was, indeed, quite sick.

  Unsure how to proceed from the doorway where she remained, hovering, Lillie felt the urge to run. When she finally moved into the room, she perched on the arm of the couch where Donald and his mother sat, barely floating her bottom in case this was not allowed, though there was nowhere else to sit. No one acknowledged her.

  She couldn’t tell how long they talked: Donald’s mother gesturing and tearful, his father seemingly angry, and all of it in a language that dipped and dove like birds around her. She noticed that they were not offered food; she wondered, for the first time, if Donald’s parents could afford to host them. When Donald’s mother finally laid some bedding on the floor for them to sleep on, since they wouldn’t both fit on the narrow cot that had been Donald’s bed in a room barely bigger than Lillie’s own closet, Lillie didn’t ask him to fill her in on the conversation.

  She was not ready to know.

  * * *

  The ticket taker had been right. The patriotic fervor of the country had trained itself on the people who looked like the enemy, and it seemed that the government released new restrictions every few days. Lillie and Donald had barely arrived when it was announced that Japanese Americans could no longer travel more than five miles without a permit. Also, they were not allowed on the streets after dark. Donald fumed—he was a citizen and this was clearly unconstitutional, but if that was true, no one in the government seemed to care. It was more than a touchy subject for Lillie. Not just because they were trapped here and a burden on his parents instead of being the support they had intended to be, nor because—even though each new rule was a surprise—it was also clear in retrospect that they’d been warned. When Lillie met Donald, he’d been on his way to New York for a scholarship to law school. After lingering for a week with her and her family, he called to let the registrar know he was delayed and learned his funding had been revoked because of the war. Donald blamed the broken axle, and a racial prejudice he’d thought he was leaving behind in California, but Lillie blamed herself. Donald could have taken another bus if he hadn’t met her. Every time the word unconstitutional crossed his lips, which was often, Lillie only heard again that it was she who had destroyed his dreams.

  Donald’s father seemed to think so, too. Whether he appreciated his son’s return or thought him stupid, Lillie couldn’t tell, but it was clear Tateishi-sama didn’t like his son’s choice of bride. Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t speak Japanese, which he often pointed out by cursing her, rather than isolating the words like Donald’s mother did so Lillie could understand. Maybe he knew that she had distracted Donald. Maybe he had been counting on his son to find a lawyer in New York to rescue them. In the whirlwind that was their romance, it had never occurred to Lillie to ask if there was someone else his parents had picked out for him, and now that she was slowly learning about “her people,” she wondered about that, too.

  On the bright side, Donald’s parents never ventured out of Little Tokyo anyway, so the travel restrictions didn’t affect her daily life. Lillie spent her days trailing behind her mother-in-law, carrying whatever food they purchased, and letting the old woman lean on her when she grew tired. If she’d understood Japanese, Lillie could have taken over the shopping and let Donald’s mother rest, but unlike Donald’s father, her new mother-in-law seemed to enjoy pantomiming the proper way to do things and teaching Lillie simple words in her new language. Please. Thank you. Excuse me. Don’t go to any trouble. I’m sorry. Lillie tried her best, but there was always another word to learn to get across the specific nuance of Excuse me, I’m sorry in whatever she was trying to say. She gave herself to the role: proud of the few words she learned and grateful that her mother-in-law enjoyed her company. “Living in a bubble,” Donald called it, but not unkindly since he could see that her cheer made his mother feel better, especially on the days when the older woman’s lungs were so weak that she couldn’t get out of bed.

  Weeks went by. Then months. Lillie never wrote to her parents. There wasn’t time at first. Then there wasn’t money for frivolities like stationery and postage stamps. Donald’s parents were poor, but it was more than that: She was out of place in what felt like a foreign country, so far away that a letter would never bridge the gap between here and her former life. After a while, it had been so long since Lillie had had a conversation of more than a few sentences in English that she was at a loss for what to write. It might have been, too, that she simply couldn’t bring herself to admit what she was bursting to say.

  She had made a mistake.

  She was tired of the strangeness, of being an outsider. She wanted to roll back time: travel away from the city, erase her marriage, unmeet Donald, be under her mother’s protection once more. But it was done. Her luck had run out, if she ever had any. Could she bear to disappoint her foster parents by showing up on their doorstep once again, feeling ill and tarnished, and vaguely unworthy? Children leave, she reminded herself. When she returned next, she wanted to make them proud, to show them she was a woman in her own right. And yet for every day that passed here, she grew more childlike, less able to fend for herself, more dependent on Donald and his parents.

  And she knew, too, that now that she was here in LA, there was no way for her to get back to the farm—with or without a sense of defeat. She was trapped: by her marriage, by her duty to her mother-in-law, by the government itself with its no-travel zones.

  Then, once again, Donald and Lillie were leaving.

  The posters went up in April on the telephone poles all over Little Tokyo. “Aliens and non-aliens” were being evacuated in six days’ time. As their family head, Donald had to report to the Civil Control Station for instructions, where he started to point out that non-alien was another word for citizen of the United States, but then kept his mouth shut when it became clear that comments like that would get him arrested, leaving Lillie and his parents to be evacuated alone. No one was told where they were going or why, or how long they’d be gone; they knew only where to meet and what to bring, which was almost nothing. Bedding, clothes, plates, and utensils for each of them, but only as much as each person could carry
themselves. Lillie had brought only what she could carry with her in the first place, but even she had not expected that that would be all she ever owned.

  The much larger problem was what to do with the things they were leaving behind. Six days was not much time to sell everything the family owned. In fact, it was an impossible time frame. Everyone was having the same fire sales. Signs that read, EVERYTHING MUST GO! competed with signs that assured curious gawkers, I AM AN AMERICAN. All the homes and stores in Little Tokyo had been thrown open to loud, pink men who left perspiration all over their furniture and refused to drink the tea Lillie offered. Carpetbaggers, Donald called them. No one bought anything the first day, or the second. Panic mounted, and as the week went by, it was clear from the haggling that Donald and his family were going to get little if any money for their hard-earned possessions. The bids were getting lower. Some people offered, with their gloating and their false pity, to take things off their hands for free.

  That was when Lillie learned how truly unconcerned her husband was with possessions. The day before they were leaving, Lillie and her mother-in-law were sorting through items in the front room. The older woman kept trying to rescue her most precious objects, replacing bedsheets with a picture album and a cup with a candlestick. Her one bag was hopelessly overflowing, and Lillie was trying to slip the candlestick back out without her mother-in-law seeing when a man arrived. He offered Donald a nickel for whatever he could stack into one box. When Donald refused, the man changed his offer.

  —A tenner for everything.

  —For what? What do you want?

  —Everything. The whole house.

  He was sneering at Lillie when he said it, as if she might be part of the sale. Lillie looked away from his greedy blue eyes and wanted to vomit. What was wrong with these people? These were their neighbors they were preying on. Poor old people, who had done nothing wrong. She wanted to scream at him, but Donald was shoving her out of the way hard as he moved to shield her, and she and her mother-in-law scrambled to the bedroom as Donald shoved the man next. Lillie and the old woman remained there through the raised voices, the threats to call the police and the crash that followed, and even through the held breath of silence that stretched painfully in Lillie’s chest. From behind the bedroom door, they listened to Donald stacking dishes, and gathering all the breakable items in the house. These, she knew, they could never carry. Was he taking them somewhere else to sell them? Was he filling up a nickel box?

  She knew she should go out to help her husband, but the fury in his face as he pushed her lingered, adding to the queasy feeling she’d had in her stomach all day. Her mother-in-law clung to her arm, so Lillie gave in to her weakness and stayed in the bedroom with her, letting Donald take care of the house for a change. There were no sounds of carpetbaggers. She imagined the huge stacks of things they would have to carry, twisting and swaying against the sky.

  Lillie and her mother-in-law were still in the bedroom when the glass-blown lamp shattered: first through the windowpane, then again from a distance below them, in the street. Lillie leapt to her feet, startled, until she heard Donald swearing at the living room window, breaking the shards of glass out of the wooden frame. She could tell from the high, shattering pops that he was lobbing drinking glasses next, and found herself trying to guess which glass was which by the pitch of the sound. She knew she was numb, that there was something wrong with her reaction, even as she heard Donald’s voice float out of the past: Your world, Lillie. The time has come to see your world. Donald’s mother moaned, and Lillie held her tightly while she sorted through the sounds of her husband picking up each piece of china and tossing it, one by one, into the street two stories down.

  She needn’t have worried; there would be no wavering tower of valuables. Donald took care of everything, just as he had promised. Once the sound stopped below the window, he started flinging what was left around the apartment. Lillie heard liquid splash against the door. Her heart broke to hear him stumble into the furniture. To be filled with his braying, keening despair. Yet she stayed still, holding his mother in her arms. When the two women finally opened the bedroom door into silence, long after Donald departed, they found that carrying what was left would be simple enough. The more difficult task would be to gather it, when they couldn’t even take a step through the glass and the splattered food without shoes.

  Hana

  It was a quiet ride to the hospital, and a too-short one. I imagined sirens for Kei, and fishtailing in the back of an ambulance as the EMTs rushed to save her, but she was gone, ahead of me, and I was bundled into the back seat of Detective Lynch’s squad car with my options dwindling to none. My breath kept catching; it might have been the heater, or the protective guard between the front and back seats that shut me off from the detective and her partner, but I couldn’t seem to fill my lungs.

  When the squad car pulled up to the neon-lit emergency room entrance, I didn’t move. Detective Lynch asked me again if there wasn’t someone I could stay with, then she told me she’d check for me here tomorrow if she didn’t hear from me. It sounded like a threat. Huddled families smoked in the sallow spotlights in front of the sliding doors to the ER, arms wrapped against the spring cold. I looked from her to them and then back, letting my eyes rest on the gray roots peeking out from beneath the detective’s bristled perm. The light caught the sheen of a long day splashed across her nose and accentuated the soft puffs under her eyes. And still…I wanted her to hold me. I had barely touched another human being in years, and suddenly I had the urge to fling myself at her, through the barrier of the squad car, and be borne back to a safety that I couldn’t even locate in my mind.

  My desperation shocked me.

  The air outside was sharp and cold when the car door opened. Inside the waiting area, I was accosted by that too-familiar smell of hospitals: shrill on top, sour underneath, and in the middle, empty. I even recognized the sound of the vending machines clicking on and off, and the soap opera stars in their endless loop murmuring from television screens set so close to the ceiling that none of the grief-stricken people in the waiting room could shut them up.

  Kei was somewhere behind the locked doors that read, DO NOT ENTER. The triage nurse gave me my sister’s intake forms, but I could barely hold a pen. Surrounded by coughing, bleeding patients playing musical chairs as they waited for their injuries to become more urgent than anyone else’s, I waited—forms in my lap, half-filled insurance papers on the chair, and a jangling in my legs that kept taking me back to the triage window.

  Was Kei awake? Had she been asking for me? Did someone tell her that her sister was here?

  The nurses would tell me nothing about my sister’s condition. We don’t know yet. They’re doing tests. They’re doing everything they can. They had questions for me, plenty of questions I couldn’t answer, but they would only say in return, Let the doctors do their job.

  “Is she dead, then?” I asked the poor nurse behind the thick, scratched glass of the triage window; she’d seen far too much of me by then and had probably been awake just as long as I had. The sharp warble of my worry unnerved me. I raised my voice. “Is she dead?” I wanted to shock her. I could feel a riot growing inside me and I wanted it to spread. We were all gathered here in the early-morning hours reserved for the furtive and the sleeping, and wasn’t that what we were all thinking? Why couldn’t we see the people we had come for?

  I caused a ripple in the room, but barely. They probably chalked me up as someone off her meds, a patient myself, and right then I wished I still was. I was the quiet twin. The caretaker. Normally, I would never have made a scene. It was Kei who, for so much of our childhood, had been the rule breaker: the one who could slip in and out of trouble like it was the sea. We had worried for my reckless sister, even lost her, but she had always been stronger than any trouble she called to her. Now, her sudden vulnerability unnerved me. It reminded me too much of my own.

  * * *

  I lost some time. That nigh
t, even the hour leading up to the cave, is spotty, but I remember Kei, and her boyfriend, Eddie, and I remember standing at the dark, yawning mouth. I held Russell’s hand. I can hear one voice, Eddie’s, hissing, Kei was right, we aren’t your friends, and then he switches off the flashlight and the dark rushes up to meet me. The next thing I remember, I woke up in the emergency room. I couldn’t even tell Dr. Shawe how I got there.

  Did I wander out on my own? Did I make it to the road to flag a passing car? That I have no idea how I was rescued, or if I was, is a blank that Kei could have filled in for me.

  I still don’t know how many days I lost afterward, either. All I have are mental snapshots of Arnie on a folding chair by my bed in the hospital. His head was in his hands. His back hunched, as if braced for a beating. As I waited for my blood to refill my body and fought off a massive infection, it was Arnie and only Arnie.

  My mother never came to the hospital. The only visit I got was from two awkward policemen, standing a safe distance from my hospital bed, asking me questions I didn’t have answers to. What exactly did I claim Eddie had done to me? Was I sure I wasn’t mistaken? Couldn’t I just have gotten turned around and wandered off into the cave?

  It was my word against his, against my sister’s, against my “friends’.” The policemen didn’t want to hear me. There was no one to take my side. One cop kept reminding me that Eddie and Ray were good boys. My friends. Why else would I have gone with them? Didn’t I want to think better of it and drop the case?

  Arnie said nothing, watching me.