Radiance (26 page)

She paused, took a breath, and then continued.

“It was Dr. Carney. And sometimes he brought two other men. They started with questions about me,” she said. “About how I felt. I said I felt fine. I was in my bed, and they sat in chairs, facing me. They wanted me to talk about how it was—on the day. They asked me, Do I think about it all the time or just sometimes?”

In fits and starts she told Daisy what had happened.

There were three of them: Carney and two men connected with the Atomic Energy Commission. They told her that if she co-operated it would be easy, the session didn’t need to take long, it depended on her. When she was silent, Dr. Carney reminded her that recounting her experiences was part of her signed contract with the Project. Didn’t she remember?

And she did. She did remember.

At first she was reluctant. She closed her eyes. It seemed impossible, but for a long period of time she fell asleep. This had to do with the painkillers, she thought, but she wasn’t sure. Then
her mother whispered that she must save herself—as she had several times, pinching her lips, counselling her, when Keiko couldn’t go on. Without even willing it, she began to talk about her grandfather, about standing on the bridge, about the shrine, the words coming easily, flowing and roaming and sliding from their hidden thickets.

After a while they asked how she felt.

“I feel bad,” she said.

“Why bad?”

She told them about the many bad things she had done and they wrote them down. They seemed to like it when she said that—that was the kind of thing they were looking for. So she told them about the seeds.

“What kind of seeds?” they asked.

“Black seeds.”

“What are they like?”

“Bad.”

“Describe.”

“Shi no hai.
”

And when they asked what that meant, she said,
Ashes of death.

All three of them wrote that down.

They questioned her for a long time. Keiko was not sure how long. They asked what she felt about herself. She said she felt as though she was not there any more.

“Invisible?”

This she could not answer.

“Tell us about the seeds again,” they said.

“I have bad seeds in me.”

Someone noted that the play
The Bad Seed
was playing on Broadway. Dr. Carney frowned.

Describe the seeds, he said.

“They’re dark, “she said. “All inside my skin. They make me a
hibakusha.
”

“Atom-bomb victim,” Dr. Carney explained to the others.

“Why do you call them the bad seeds?”

“Because I didn’t take Ojii-chan his lunch box. Because I lived when they died. Because of the fox woman on the bridge.”

“What woman?”

“The woman who sat at the end of the bridge.”

Dr. Carney wrote this down.

“Was it your mother?” he asked softly. “Did you find your mother at the end of the bridge?”

Keiko shook her head. Not answering.

When she had spoken for a long time, the men left. She woke to a nurse yanking open the blinds. She took Keiko’s pulse, then told her it was time for her medication. “You’re a lucky girl,” she said, “coming here for surgery.”

When Keiko was done telling Daisy this, Daisy sat up and looked down at the girl’s face lit by the porch light, the ribs of the coverlet palely glowing.

Daisy caught hold of Keiko’s hands. She told her that Walter and she would stop anyone from asking her another question. And Joan and Fran and the others—they would stop Dr. Carney and the men from the Atomic Energy Commission. In fact, Daisy
said, all she had to do was talk to Dean Atchity. “He can’t possibly know what Dr. Carney is doing.”

The back porch light was on, and it poured through the bedroom window, so that she could see Keiko’s eyes, quite clearly, turned towards her. Her irises looked empty, like mirrors.

“As long as you’re here with us,” Daisy whispered, “you’ll be safe.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lawrence.”

T
OM WALKED
K
EIKO
down Linden Street. It was still light out, the end of a long summer afternoon, five days until the bandages would be removed. Jimmy Jr. ran by. “Hey, Tom!” he called out.

“Where you off to?”

“Joey’s place. Look it.” The boy took a red baseball card from his pocket. It showed Mickey Mantle holding his bat. Over his shoulder was the broad blue sky. Tom whistled.

“I traded three Mayses for it.”

“You reckon Mantle is three times as good?”

“Naw, I just didn’t have his card yet. Now I’ve got everyone but Campanella, Mathews and Jackie Robinson.”

Tom could have stayed and talked about baseball, but he saw that Keiko wasn’t interested, and so he said goodbye and they walked on. People called to them from their houses. An old couple who lived halfway down the block waved to them. A dog barked. The three-legged cat crossed a lawn. No longer lit directly by the sun, the grass had taken on a rich, cold colour.
At the corner where Linden Street met the crescent, Evelyn Lithgow was out front potting a geranium.

“Evening, ma’am,” Tom said.

She came towards them, wiping dirt on her black-and-green tartan apron.

“Where you off to?”

“Creek.”

“Not much good walking around here. It’s more fun in the city, I guess.”

They walked on. Tom thought of it as a ceremony: tipping his hat every third house or so, saluting the neighbours, whose names he was beginning to know; the sound of the sprinklers optimistically ticking; the ringing of the Good Humor bell several streets away. At the school some teenagers were smoking in the basketball court. The girls wore dungarees rolled up at the cuff, tight blouses accentuating their pointy breasts, high ponytails. One of the boys took out his comb and pulled it through his hair, before slipping it into the front pocket of his jeans, a provocative gesture. He said something mocking, and the girls laughed. Yes, that was there too: laughter ringing off the bricks, and the sound of Keiko’s feet as they stayed their course, stepping across the gravel, veering away from these children. He took her arm and felt her wince.

“Does it hurt today?”

“Only a little.”

It wasn’t because her face hurt that she had flinched. She saw herself in her skirt and cashmere sweater, clothing donated by the Atchitys, and she saw them in their rolled jeans and sleeveless blouses and sneakers, teenager clothes, and she thought about how she must look, face outlandishly wrapped, walking with her arm in the arm of her suitor.

American kids. She had seen them from the train, and in the
lineup for Frank Sinatra, and pushing each other in the shadow of the El, the boys with cigarette packages rolled in their T-shirt sleeves. It was hard to look at them; if they noticed her she averted her gaze or they would laugh, or stare, or—worst of all—look alarmed, as though she were a monster, wrapped in her bandages.

She was a teenager too. As she grew stronger, this fact seemed to have grown in importance. She read the copies of
Seventeen Magazine
Mrs. Lawrence had left in her bedroom. In one of them there was a picture of a girl sitting on a bed, wearing rolled jeans, a striped shirt, painting her toenails red while laughing into the telephone. Her lips formed an ooh of surprise, as though somebody had said something shocking and funny. Kissable lips, that was what they called lips like that. The girl had taken long-playing records out of their slipcovers and strewn them all around her bed.

Keiko stepped along the path that led to the creek, through the yellow grass, towards the old bridge so like the bridge from home. She was imagining the duck-tailed boy holding her face, kissing her the way they did in the movies, thoroughly, taking his time.

At the creek Tom told her about the barn silvered with age, the chickens, Emmy’s effort, for a full summer, to train Clover to roll over. As he spoke she glanced back, past the marsh, towards the embankment. Twilight had opened the fields and grasses, and she wondered if the duck-tailed boy had come to the edge of the playing field, if he was looking down at her, even now.

D
AISY STOOD AT THE WINDOW,
staring out on the street even after Tom and Keiko had rounded the crescent. Tom wasn’t so bad
to have around. In fact, Daisy liked him. He was kind and easy, and he accepted, in a way Fran and Joan didn’t, that she was the one who knew Keiko best. He would sidle up to her quietly while Keiko was in the bathroom and ask if she supposed Keiko might like to go to the movies, or if she might prefer just to go for a walk. As though Daisy had the puzzle pieces in her hand. It was too bad that Keiko seemed, at least on the surface, interested only in the novelty of him. There was no drawing together—not that Daisy had seen.

“You talk too much about your sister,” Daisy had said once. Jabbing at him a bit, to see what would happen.

“Oh, I know. I can see it ain’t a good topic. Nor the farm either. I’m still trying to figure out what interests her.”

“Why don’t you talk about hair?” she had said. “It seems to work for Fran.”

Each morning the girl was again dryly talkative and friendly and aloof—the shell of what she was at night. And so Daisy could not imagine grasping her hand, as she ate her eggs in the kitchen, bending down, swearing to keep her safe. She was afraid Keiko might look up at her, every part of her bandaged except her bright, incurious eyes, and say, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lawrence. I don’t know what you mean.”

Or perhaps a frisson of alarm would pass over her—what had her Aunt Nancy called it?—as though a goose had walked over your grave: that might be how Keiko would look if Daisy were to bring up what transpired in that closed room, at night.

Tell me,
she had said. She meant August
6
, tell me about August
6
. They went so far each night, not to the actual day itself, but around the dappled edges of it. Frogs call. Dripping stone. Then Keiko might turn her face to the wall, severely upset, and mention the seeds that, at least in this small bed,
represented the very texture of her suffering. She told Daisy of her mother’s name for her: Kitsune-chan, little fox child. She spoke of being bad for having stolen the lipstick. Daisy tried to soothe her. It was nothing, she would say. Something anyone would do. She told Keiko about finding the Goldenloaf Cheese box, just to show how these small thieveries, which seemed so wicked from the inside, meant nothing to Daisy. Keiko held her breath. Then her voice, just that once, came out coldly.

“You
looked
in my drawer?”

“I had to—but, you see, nobody blames you.”

A pause. During which Keiko let this disturbance, this small revelation, sink back, disappear.

“Tell me again about your baby,” Keiko had said then.

Daisy—moved—had told her story again: the dead child taken from her; the small handkerchief that she might have laid over its mottled face.

But in the morning Keiko came into the kitchen with her head down, avoiding Daisy’s eyes, then made her way to the bathroom, where she washed for a long time, using all the hot water. It wasn’t as though she didn’t remember—no, no. She remembered. But it seemed to Daisy there were two sides to Keiko now: the side wandering down the street with Tom—the bright, shyly talkative, hair-curling girl; and the nighttime side. Both were using all their subtle strength to discover what to do next.

That night Daisy woke to voices, though at first she was sure she had been woken by the brightness of the moon. It had travelled around the house and now it poured through the window and onto the bed, a blind spray of light.

Then she heard it again: Keiko’s voice flat, a counterpoint to his. His was a surprise: it went on and on; it rose and fell;
Daisy kept expecting the words to end, but they kept going. She listened—listened so acutely that her ear might have been a knot in the wall. The hum of their voices reminded her of her parents, many years before, their voices rising and falling in their bedroom.

She got up, her body hot, sweat between her breasts. She knew with the instinct of a survivor that Walter had always been kindest with the most broken, and that Keiko would use that knowledge, as skilfully as every night she drew Daisy in. Oh, she felt sick waves of knowing: they coursed through her body, black splotches of knowledge. What kind of a woman invited another woman into her house, a beautiful, vulnerable victim of the war, and left her alone with her husband for days? What had Daisy been doing? What had she been trying to prove? It was as though she had asked for this to happen.

They were not in the kitchen, though his many cigarette butts were in the Bakelite ashtray. Their voices came from out back. When Daisy thrust open the screen door, they were sitting a good two feet apart from one another. He was reading from a book on his lap, and she was listening. Daisy had seen that look on Walter’s face before: a sheepish smile, a mouth not straight, an expression sliding towards innocence, but not there, not yet.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m reading Keiko something.”

He was reading a passage from Arthur Koestler’s book
The God that Failed.
But now that Daisy was standing in the doorway in her nightgown, there seemed to be no point in continuing.

“It’s all right,” Daisy said. “I’m not staying.”

She got a glass of water at the sink and went back to the bedroom. But once there she crept back along the hallway, kneeling, listening. She caught the smell of Walter’s cigarette. He took a long drag, then butted it out on the stair and threw it into the
backyard. The moon broke into pieces on the greenhouse roof; the dog in Stoney Creek howled; then the girl spoke, yes, that was the voice of Keiko, such a strange chill voice, so like the voice the moon might have had if it could speak: blue and white, liquid, without variation. “Yes,” she said. “I understand what you are saying.”