Radiance (28 page)

She stopped to listen.

Voices came from the back porch, steady and cool. Daisy went through to the kitchen. Ed was standing beside a deck chair, looking down at Keiko. Two glasses of ice water sat beside the chairs, at their feet. Ed’s face, that big pumpkin head of his, was pink, and his neck was pink, and his throat was red, wattled and textured from the sun. Daisy could smell his sweat: like old potatoes and something crisp, oniony. The scent of his adrenalin.

When he saw Daisy he muttered, “I’m going to go now,” then he walked down the porch steps two at a time and crossed the lawn. He closed the back gate with a yank that made it spring back open.

Keiko sat looking at her hands, bandages shining in the morning sunlight.

“I couldn’t find anything to offer but water.”

“What did he say to you?” Daisy knelt and took her hands. She called her my dear, and my darling, and other things, which later she would not remember having said—only the string of words, coming from deep within her. “He doesn’t know you,” Daisy whispered. “Ignore him.”

“No,” Keiko said in a clear, low voice. “I didn’t mind what he said.”

This was what had happened:

Ed had flung himself across the front lawn, leaving Fran terrified, with no recourse but to run and get Daisy. He knocked at the door, ready to see for himself this girl whose presence caused him such grief. He would tell her she was a source of disease in his community, although he knew full well that his kids had the chicken pox. Still, there she was, trailing her mortality like a curse through Riverside Meadows, and he planned to tell her what was on his mind. Or perhaps that was all just bluster and show; perhaps he only thought he would say such things, and underneath another tide was taking him towards a different place.

Keiko was still in her bedroom. When she heard the knock, she got up and pulled on her robe, thinking, perhaps, that it was Tom. She fiddled at the latch, then opened the door.

Ed looked at her bandaged face, her frightened eyes, the pretty hand that held the door. He hesitated, the bluster
receding from him like a dank tide. She let him in, telling him that Mrs. Lawrence had gone to the store, but that she’d be back soon if he cared to wait. She knew that he wanted something from her, she could see it in his eyes, but she pretended he had simply come to call. He followed her down the hallway to the kitchen, his big hands dangling at his sides, while she opened the fridge and, finding nothing to give him, poured water into two tumblers, then cracked open the ice tray, placing two cubes in each glass, as she had seen Daisy do. She opened the door to the back porch, praying that Daisy would come home soon, and she and Ed Warburgh went out to sit on the chairs.

After a while Ed mentioned the fine weather.

She said yes, it was fine.

“You’re lucky to see the place when it’s so fine. It rained all last summer. Rained terrible.”

“I have been lucky in the weather.”

He had only a brief amount of time to say what he had to say. He looked away from her to the fence, his greenhouse roof, the hidden fallout shelter, deep now, with a floor of hard dirt, a few nasty roots poking from the sides, which he would have to cut out with a saw.

“You’ve been doing pretty good here, haven’t you?” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve had it pretty good.”

She didn’t know what he meant so she said nothing, sitting still, mostly invisible—she knew that—because of the bandages. He didn’t say much after that, just a few words to paint the picture. The sandy compound. A girl interpreter, real pretty, who watched a man die at roll call. Quite a thing. Quite a thing. His voice was low and confiding as he warmed to his point. Yes, quite a thing it was. Shocked a few of the men, to have such a pretty young thing around, watching men shot or
kicked to death, or what have you. Kind of thing gets stuck in your brain afterwards.

“But do you know what I think?” He turned to her now, his face amiable. “I think you could have done that. Yep—” He nodded sagely. “If you had to. What do you think? I bet you could have.”

She could not answer, and in the stillness that followed there was birdsong, a child screaming in a nearby house.

“All summer,” Ed said, “I’ve been seeing you come and go. And I’ve thought that every single time—bet she could have. Bet she could have. And now I’m here, telling you all this—and you know what I’m thinking? This’ll interest you, miss.” He scratched his head, as though perplexed but pleased. “I probably could have done it too. I mean, if I had to. So there you are, miss. We ain’t unalike at all. Probably the whole lot of us could have done it.”

Keiko still said nothing, and Ed stood up in a leisurely sort of way, stretched his big arms over his head, then turned to face her, his body blocking the sun. He stood a while looking down at her, but she would not raise her eyes, nor show a touch of that humanity—or inhumanity for that matter—which he so craved. How long they were like that, she couldn’t say. Then, strangely lithe for a stocky man, Ed bent, quick as quick, to take a sip from his water glass. His face came close to the girl’s, his eyes met hers—and there it was, before she could stop herself. A flinch.

“Don’t be startled,” he whispered, unable to conceal a note of triumph in his voice. “Don’t be startled, miss, I’m just like you.”

And that was how Daisy found them—Ed standing over Keiko, who sat very still, and who said, when he was gone, quite gone:
I could only find water to serve him.

Later that afternoon, while Keiko was resting, Fran came to the back door.

“She’s not like he thought. He says she’s just like everyone else. ‘Well, if she’s just like everyone else, why have you been giving us grief all summer?’ I didn’t say that, but I might have. I swear he makes me mad sometimes. Him and that place.”

“Shamshuipo.”

“Now he’s gone to town. But tell me what happened—he won’t say anything, except that they talked.”

“I don’t know.”

“He must have scared her. I tell you, I’ve really had it. You want to know where he is now? He’s watching girlie shows. And I bet he’ll come home drunk. I think this may be the last straw, Daisy. I said to him, ‘Why do you have to go running at people like that?’ He just told me to shut up. Said he and the girl understood each other—which I doubt severely, he hardly knows a thing about her. He’s telling me to shut up, but I’m not going to—not any more. If Keiko weren’t here, I’d go to Tulsa, where my sister lives. I would.”

“We should be quiet. She’s resting.”

It was just like Ed, she said, to panic on account of the chicken pox. “A-bomb disease! I don’t know where he got a notion like that.”

“But, Fran,” Daisy felt moved to say. “You panicked too, you told me so. You thought it was something—just for a second.” And so had Daisy, at least for a second, hearing about that spire of vomit shooting from Junie’s lips.

“You’re right,” Fran said, and she began to blame herself, apologizing for having let herself think such a thing about Keiko, even for a moment. Not wanting to seem like Ed, who was, even that moment, drowning his memories at a strip show, in a bar with sawdust on the floor. “He thought Keiko was contagious,” she snorted, shaking her head, reverting to ridicule.

Daisy shook her head too. Still, she thought, Ed may have been right about one thing, even as he was mostly wrong: there
was something contagious about Keiko’s presence. And for an instant she let herself imagine those tiny motes of radioactive dust—breathed in by Ed, by Fran, by Walter—mixing with each cargo of human frailties.

M
IREN-WO NOKORAZU
. M
IREN- WO NOKORAZU
.

She had lit the wick of rush pith floating in the rapeseed oil. She had prayed to the
ihai
of Ojii-chan and Mama, at the ancestor shrine in Yoshiko’s ugly hallway, covered in grey wallpaper. Suffer no regret for this world to linger with you. Do not go astray.

But the spirits had followed her here. They arrived in full force the night after the neighbour man bent so suddenly to look into her eyes, trying to see what was inside her:
Shi no hai,
ashes of death—what she carried inside her despite the surgery cutting away the scar, despite every attempt to leave the past behind.

How had he known?

Keiko imagined the ghosts floating across the icy Siberian Sea, following the misty clouds above lakes, making their way up tiny shrunken waterways, ditches, creeks, going through cisterns to get past the highway, until at last they rubbed their invisible fingers against the window.

First there was Mama and Ojii-chan, pressing their palms against the pane, finding their way inside, trying out the metal pedal of the garbage can, wafting from room to room alarmed by the unfamiliar odours. But then there were the others, too
many to count, clustered at the window or pushing under the door. There was the faceless woman on the bridge, whose skin hung from her wrists like empty gloves. She wanted water, but Keiko would have had to climb down under the bridge, near the grotto and the shrine. The faceless woman had clutched a dead child.

Mizu,
she had said. Water.

Mizu
is the cry on everyone’s lips. But there is no water.

And then there were the new ones, who came because she dared to believe she could cross the world, escape: there was Emmy-Mae with her wheezing breath, and Joan’s twin brother, whirling in the water like a black top, and now there was the interpreter, watching men die.
Bet you could do that,
he had said to her. The smell of the neighbour man, dank and bathroomy. The ghost of that woman was in the room now. And the babies were there too. They were the worst. Keiko could feel their fingers on the bedcovers.

She had said to Mrs. Lawrence that she would pray for the soul of her babies.
Suffer not the soul of the dead to linger near us.
When she said that, Mrs. Lawrence had started to cry. Not as film stars do in the movies, dignified tears falling down polished cheeks, but in gasps, like a fish coming out of the water. She had knelt by the bed and hugged Keiko so hard it had hurt.

“Nobody but you has offered to pray for them.”

Suffer not thy souls to linger near me.
She had said it to make them go away, but the ghosts, sitting at the end of the bed, had only gathered closer.

That evening Daisy came to Keiko’s room. “Nothing Ed Warburgh said can mean anything,” Daisy said. “He doesn’t know you.” Keiko leaned her head briefly against the older woman’s collarbone. She asked Daisy to stay with her, and so Daisy sat on the floor beside
the bed and rubbed the girl’s calves, which had cramps in them. Then Keiko turned her face to the wall and began to speak. If Daisy had chosen to write it all down, there would have been much to record. Daisy asked her not to—she was sure, later, that she had done this. Please, she had murmured. Don’t. But Keiko shook her head. And so Daisy rubbed her legs and listened.

Hiroshima is a city of many stories
—that was how her grandfather always started.

Keiko could have told Daisy a story about the shadowy world before the bombing. She could have told about her mother and grandfather; the garden full of frogs, or the green snakes along the riverbank that ate the frogs at night. She could have told about the path of uneven pebbles that ran past three large, crooked stones, two of them moss-covered. She had heard Mama teasing Grandfather one morning:

Now tell me, Ojii-san, how is it you have this gift to encourage moss to grow? What do you do?

My dear Sumiko, you ask a question to which I’m sure you know the answer.

Indeed, I do not.

Ah well. I speak to the moss gently, and I rake leaves from its hair, and I occasionally admonish it, much as you encourage your Kitsune-chan. And after all that, it grows in spite of me.

Yes, she laughed. That is like Keiko. She grows in spite of me too.

She could have told Daisy stories from that world. Hiroshima was a city of many stories, that was what her grandfather had believed, seeking in his quiet way to preserve the places that existed below and beyond the Imperial dictates of official Shintoism, with its massive new shrines.

But there is only one story left.

In the dark, with Daisy beside her, Keiko begins to rehearse it.

    BAKEMONO

K
EIKO SITS ON THE LOW STEP
in the foyer. She can hear their neighbour, Takahura-san, in his front garden, trimming his azalea bushes. She licks the palm of her hand, sticky from the rice ball, and then steps out the door through which Mama disappeared only moments before. She climbs a rock she knows well, fat and moss-covered at the base, thinning to a ridge of granite at the top. Balancing on the ridge, she can lean against the wall, peer over the tiles and spy on Takahura-san. His back is to her, and he is trimming green sprigs from the limbs of an azalea. When he turns, he spots the top of her head outlined in shadow on the gravel. He bows elaborately.

“You are late, Keiko-san. School must have started by now.”