Radiance (36 page)

Save yourself,
Daisy said—a final time—in a voice deeper than her own. And Keiko did in the end, Daisy will always believe that she did, though it was possible to read Keiko’s disappearance as something different and far bleaker, a continuation of a pattern of terrified flight. Her story was always able to break into opposites. You could look at it one way, then surprise it, turning swiftly, to see a new visage on its changeable face.

In the years to come, Daisy would write about Keiko, pages and pages, in her journals. She wrote about Keiko’s amber eyes, her interest in fashion, her feet, her delicate finger joints, her tiny knuckles, her soft hair. This was late at night, unable to sleep, after a day working at the high school cafeteria, the voices of the teenagers still in her ears, cacophonous and full of eager swear words. She had gotten the hang of who hated whom, and who was dating whom—it was amazing how much you could pick up across a counter. The kids all thought of her as the woman with the open, friendly smile who doled out the stew and meatballs. Mrs. Lawrence, they called her, though some liked to call her
Daisy—an aging woman with a warm, slightly stupefied look on her face. Though some of them knew about Walter, his imprisonment. One of them once said to her,
Mrs. L, you are cool, man.
Which pleased Daisy more than she felt inclined to admit.

Coming home from these long days she would get out her journal and write, amazed that out of these ordinary days there was so much to record, and so much to get down, too, of the old days. She was amazed at how, slowly and quietly at first, and then with increasing vigour and certainty, she could flip back over the pages, read what she had written and discover that she liked it.

She wrote everything she could remember.

And when she had written everything she knew, she wrote about what she didn’t know. She wrote about Keiko’s disappearance, the week after Daisy met her at the café. She imagined the pounding on the door, waking Daisy and Walter from their profound sleep. (Now that Walter was dead, in her imagination they always sleep folded together, legs entwined.)

Walter turns on the bedside lamp, surprised, then gropes his way to the front door, belting his old tartan robe. There Keiko stands, gleeful, draped in Irene’s mink coat—because yes, wherever she disappeared to, she took that mink with her, that much has been established.

“Tom and I got married at seven,” Keiko whispers, her eyes lit up like mirrors. “Nobody knows—it’s a secret.” Oh, the fox is in her for sure, the very devil of the bakemono. She asks Daisy for a cigarette, and lights it and blows out smoke—like one of the femme fatales from
The Whistler.

Behind her, Tom’s car is parked on the road, expelling plumes of exhaust into the freezing air.

“I just stopped by,” she says. “Stopped by to say goodbye.” She uses her new, Eastern Seaboard voice. But now Tom leans over, undoes the passenger window and calls out that they have to get
moving. He has been keeping the engine revved, but now he gets out, stamping his feet on the packed snow, and grins up at them. “Can’t come up, the car may stall out in this cold.”

Daisy and Walter put on gumboots and sweaters, then walk down the frozen brick drive to wave the two of them goodbye. They stand in the middle of Linden Street as the car performs a three-point turn and drives away, past the snowbanks, leaving puffs of exhaust like a jet trail behind it.

And then?

And then?

Keiko would sleep and wake, warm in her purloined mink, and eventually, in the cold dawn—there it would be—plain and terrifying and utterly new: the blank Midwestern prairie, spread out on all sides, turning red in the morning sun.

And what do Keiko and Tom think, seeing each other plainly in that dawn? This is hard to imagine.

Still it might be true. They could have children by now. They could live in a house with a red door. When Daisy tries to picture this part, the images slow and become cloudy—Keiko in a station wagon, applying her makeup in the side-view mirror, wearing a scarf and dangling white earrings, Tom swatting his big hand into the back, telling the brood to be quiet. And if she tries to imagine further, the story slows to a creeping pace—becoming still, becoming frozen—until Daisy stands at the door, hand raised to knock, but never able to bring it down on the shining wood.

There are other possibilities: Keiko returning to Hiroshima to work in the back of Yoshiko’s hair salon. On Sundays taking the bus to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission Office, grimly spouting medical facts: facts about her skin, her hair, the strange bruises behind the knees. Keiko in a high school auditorium, spotlit behind a podium, describing, once more, the details of that one morning, August
6
.

But as Daisy grows older, she trusts her own version. It helps to remember what Keiko once told her about Hiroshima: how people believed nothing could grow again, yet how quickly the burnt areas burst forth with grass and weeds. And how terrible that was—to see the cherries bloom too, then the plums, the azaleas, peonies, lilies—the abandonment of it all, the wild and profligate blossoming, as though nature had no stake in human suffering.

But still at night sometimes—after a busy day at the cafeteria—Daisy wakes from dreams of children crying, trains swiftly passing through fields of long white grass. Sometimes the city in the distance was New York; sometimes Hiroshima, or sometimes a mixture of both: each laid out like a holy grid of roads and streetlamps.

And every August
6
since Walter has died, Daisy puts on her husband’s old gumboots and takes up two tin cans, into which she has punched holes with a screwdriver. She picks up her matches and candles and she walks out the back door, the screen door hissing closed behind her. She crosses the backyard, the smell of cut grass in her nostrils, and slips through the end of the fence into the Warburghs’ yard. The greenhouse is gone, and so is the fallout shelter—it’s been replaced by a bed of orange daylilies and purple windflowers. Down the street, the Palmers are gone, and so are the Lithgows—they left after Evelyn killed herself. The Palmers’ house was bought by a South African couple whose child is so blond that he burns in the morning sun. But Ed and Fran Warburgh still live next door.

Junie Warburgh waits on the back steps. When she sees Daisy, she stands up. She is rather burly, like her father, with stringy red hair held back by a red paisley bandana, low-slung corduroys, a jacket with the Union Jack sewn on the back. She is in her last
year at Hofstra University, though it seems to Daisy that she spends far more time picketing the draft board and organizing alternative classes than attending college. Her brother, Jimmy Jr., is in Viet Nam. Ed and Fran have recieved letters from him. So far, he’s doing fine. It makes Junie crazy that he enlisted, and she worries, Daisy can tell, though mostly she talks about “the fucking government,” and “shutting down the system.” Apparently that is what is needed: shutting down the system once and for all. Daisy listens as she describes the injustices—the body bags, the insanity of Kent State. In six months Junie’s boyfriend will have to appear in front of the draft board and they are both thinking of heading to Canada.

They walk down the back alley, then turn onto the crescent. The trees, which were once stick figures, are huge now, a canopy of red-cabbage coloured leaves above their heads. The school has changed too: in the playground there are now a series of turquoise tunnels for kids to crawl through and a concrete bridge over a sandpit. The path is solid, covered in mulched bark; it leads past the school and down to the golf course. Riverside Meadows at last has a meadow at its centre, a nine-hole course that has doubled housing values. Almost every house backing onto the course has a swimming pool. Daisy opens the gate and the two of them go through onto the green. Junie talks non-stop as they walk, furious about the pictures of My Lai that have appeared that week in the news. As they walk closer to the old bridge that spans the verdant edges of the creek, they begin to hear the frogs. Only at the creek, when Daisy gets out her matches, does Junie stop talking, and this is because Daisy tells her to.

Daisy lights her candle.

Junie asks in a low voice when Keiko died, what year.

At first Daisy doesn’t answer, she leaves everything to silence. But Junie Warburgh is a nice girl, despite what they all
thought of her at the time, and so Daisy explains that she doesn’t know what happened to Keiko and that the candles are not only for her but for other souls as well, other children.

“Yeah,” Junie says. “There’s so fucking many.”

Junie takes the matches and lights a candle for herself, and they hold their candles tightly. They sputter, a faint breeze buckling the flames. Daisy lowers hers into the tin can, and Junie does the same, and they clamber down to the pristine verge and set the cans on the still water.

They watch the tin cans burn and bob in the golf-course creek, not speaking a word, which is hard for Junie.

S
HE WAS SITTING AT A BOOTH
by the window, plucking her calfskin gloves from her fingers, looking poised. She wore a jacket with a Persian wool collar, and a hat with a bit of fishnet veiling, which obscured her face, while at the same time revealing it. The scar was gone—Daisy, sitting across from her, could see that much. She peered hard, but Keiko’s skin looked perfect. Her beautiful strange eyes shone out from under the net, and Daisy felt her stomach tighten.

“I can’t stay for long,” Daisy said. “And I’m sure you must need to rush off to wherever you’re going. Have you ordered?”

“Not yet.”

Daisy could smell Keiko’s perfume: Eau de Joy. Irene’s scent. She imagined Keiko dabbing it on when Irene’s back was turned, behind her ears, at the temple, and this made Daisy feel brighter. Around them she heard the sound of laughter. Someone at the
next table pointed out the window at the snow—huge flakes, the size of ping-pong balls, landing on the sidewalk, the hoods of cars, the roofs of the carriages parked along Central Park South. A horse shook its feathered headdress. When the door jingled open, people came in rosy-cheeked, wiping snow from their shoulders.

Keiko ordered hot chocolate.

“So appropriate,” Daisy said. “I’ll have the same.”

While they waited for their drinks to arrive, Daisy could have made ostentatious, bright—frighteningly bright—small talk
: I hope you’re enjoying the winter pleasures of the city. Skating at the Rockefeller Center, or in the park. You must see all the sights, before you head away.
Words slipped into her mind, then slipped away. Why bother? She didn’t have to speak, and neither it seemed did Keiko, who sat looking at the water glasses on the table, every now and then glancing up, trying to gauge, so Daisy suspected, the depth of the wound she had inflicted.

“So off you go, on your international tour.”

“Yes.”

“Everything arranged?”

“Everybody has been most kind.”

“Yes, well that’s everybody’s specialty, isn’t it? Ah, here are our drinks.” The hot chocolate arrived with great sculptures of whipped cream on top, sprinkled with chocolate.

Daisy took a sip, delicately wiping her lips. Keiko watched her.

“So, my dear,” Daisy said. “I suppose you have things to say.”

“Can you tell me how things are in Riverside Meadows? How is Mr. Lawrence?”

Daisy pursed her lips. What could she say:
There were rats in prison, you know. And worse. A lot worse. And he coughs up blood.
She looked into Keiko’s face. The girl was braced to hear the worst,
wanted
to hear it. Her chin was up, her eyes met Daisy’s. Here I sit, that posture said. The unforgivable enemy. Unforgivable survivor.

Daisy turned away, took a sip of her hot chocolate. Finally, she spoke. “He’s fine, Keiko,” she said, which was also true. When Daisy looked up, Keiko’s eyes were still on her.

“And Tom?” Keiko said.

“Have you not seen him?”

“He came at first—to Irene’s apartment. He stood beneath the window, and I saw him at Carnegie Hall, where I spoke. But the Project—Miss Day and Dr. Carney, they thought it best if I didn’t speak to him. He gave me his telephone number once. But that was many weeks ago now. I haven’t seen him since.”

She looked at Daisy. “And you—” she said. “How are you, Mrs. Lawrence?”

Daisy looked at the folds of whipped cream on her drink. “I’m sure you didn’t arrange this meeting to find out how I was. It’s a bit late for that, even you have to admit.”

“I wanted to say goodbye,” Keiko said simply.

“Ah.”

Daisy waited, but nothing more came. Daisy would not volunteer to cover the empty waste with words; she took another sip of her hot chocolate.

Keiko said, “Goodbye, Mrs. Lawrence.”

Daisy put her cup down in its saucer. “You never could get the hang of calling me Daisy.”

“Goodbye, Daisy.”

The word sounded unnatural from her mouth.

“So that’s it, then. Goodbye, Keiko. Good luck.”

Keiko had begun to put on her gloves, leaving her hot chocolate untouched. She looked down, and saw that she had not even taken a sip. But in order to drink, she had to lift her veil. She set aside her gloves and pushed back the netting—a casual yet perfectly contrived gesture. It was like watching a stripper drop a bit of clothing.

For a moment, Daisy thought, they did it: she’s really fixed.

The bubbled scar was gone. Across the room it would have been perfect, or in front of a podium, or on black-and-white television. But sitting intimately at a table beside a window increasingly thick with snow, Daisy could see that every inch of her skin was covered in foundation. The scarred area itself was smooth, but along its edges, following the old outline of South America, a lip of new scar tissue protruded, requiring a deeper coating of foundation.

Keiko looked at her—as she had so often in the past—as though to say, There. Now you know.

“Keiko,” Daisy whispered.

“It’s better than before,” Keiko said.

“Yes—yes, it is.”

The skin graft was not quite the same colour as the surrounding skin. The affect in total was of a different, subtler kind of deformation.