by Kyoko Mori
I scoop up a handful of sand and let it slide slowly through my fingers. When all the sand is gone and he has not spoken, I say, “I am so sorry. I shouldn’t complain to you about my mother.”
He takes his eyes off the water and turns back to me. “Why not?” he asks, looking into my eyes, his lips drawn tight.
I don’t know what to say. I must have offended him by sounding stupid and patronizing. Bracing myself for his anger, I stay quiet.
After a few moments, Toru shrugs his shoulders. “Look,” he says, his face relaxing a little. “I wasn’t saying you had no right to complain about your mother—like you should be thankful to have a mother when mine is dead. I would never say a stupid thing like that to you.”
“No, of course not.” I shake my head, hard. I imagine Mrs. Uchida smiling at us, glad that we didn’t get into a fight. I remember her strong potter’s hands, her long, thin fingers like Toru’s.
Until the last year of her life, when she became too weak from cancer, Mrs. Uchida worked at the potter’s wheel set up in her basement. I loved watching the clay rise between her fingers, turning into bowls, vases, teacups. It reminded me of a photograph I saw in a science magazine, of a drop of milk hitting a plate and shattering into a perfect white crown. I liked to think about that photograph when I was drinking milk out of the cups that Mrs. Uchida had made—I could feel all the perfect white drops going down my throat. The thought amazed me and made me happy. Sometimes at the beach Mrs. Uchida dug a handful of sand and brought it back in a plastic bag to mix into her clay. If it was a hot day, a mist of moisture would cloud up the inside of the bag, almost as though the sand were breathing. Mrs. Uchida would hold out the bag, and we would all touch it in awe. When I was with her, I knew that every grain of sand was a miracle waiting to happen, to be turned into something beautiful.
Toru and I lie back down and watch the sky. “I miss your mother, too,” I say, sending my words up toward the dark sky.
He reaches out and puts his hand over mine. I continue to stare at the sky in silence, my fingers curled between the dry sand and Toru’s warm palm.
* * *
A few minutes past one, Toru steers his car around the corner onto my street.
“You should stop here,” I say, a block away. “I don’t want my grandmother to hear me.”
Stopping the car, he tilts his head sideways.
“She’s hard of hearing. My father’s gone to Hiroshima. My usual curfew is nine o’clock.”
He shakes his head and smiles. “Did you tell them you might stop going to church on Sunday nights?” he asks.
“No.”
“That could be our usual meeting time—unless you are going to church after all.”
“I’m not going.”
“Want to meet me in the parking lot at seven then?”
“Sure,” I say, without thinking.
“Seven o’clock, then,” he repeats.
“Wait.” I hesitate. “I can’t meet you unless I lie to Grandmother—an indirect lie, that is. She’ll think I am going to church.”
“Of course. That’s the whole point.”
“It doesn’t bother you? You’ll be part of my lie.”
“Come on.” He laughs. “Nobody is completely honest with their parents or grandparents. Lying to them is a little different, don’t you think, from lying to other people?”
He is right. I would never lie to my friends or teachers. If my grandmother and father didn’t make up so many stupid rules about what I couldn’t do, I wouldn’t have to lie to them, either.
“Okay,” I say. “It doesn’t bother me. Not a lot.”
“Good. Of course, you can always come and find me at the club or at my house, if you need someone to talk to. You don’t have to wait in my car. My boss won’t mind if you come in for a second to let me know you’re there.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m going to wait here and make sure you get into the house.” He leans forward and gives my shoulder a light squeeze. “Good night.”
I get out of the car and walk up to my house. Turning the key quietly in the lock, I open the front door and wave toward Toru’s car. As I step into the house, I hear him driving away, backward for a block so he won’t have to drive in front of our house.
I close the door carefully, take off my shoes, and step up to the hallway. Any second, I expect my grandmother’s door to fly open, but nothing happens. Suddenly, I have a great idea. I go on into the kitchen, open the fridge, and pour myself a glass of juice, still being quiet, but not as much as before. After drinking the juice, I leave the glass on the counter where my grandmother will see it in the morning. If she hears me going up the stairway now, she will assume that I have come down in the middle of the night for juice and left the dirty glass on the counter in my usual inconsiderate way. She will mumble, irritated, but she won’t know the truth. I leave the kitchen and go up the stairs, which creak a little no matter how careful I am.
* * *
Back in my room, the blank stationery is still on the desk. I sit down, careful not to scrape the chair legs against the floor, and turn on the desk lamp. “Mother,” I write with my fountain pen. “I am lonely and miserable. I miss you. I’m mad at you. Please let me come to see you.”
As soon as I write the last sentence, I begin to cross out the whole thing, surrounding each word with a black box and filling it in until nothing is visible except a row of black boxes; it looks like a train I would have drawn as a child. The tip of the pen has jabbed some small holes in the paper. I hold the paper in front of the lamp and look at the pinpricks of white light, the way we used to observe an eclipse of the sun. Then I crumple the paper and toss it into the wastebasket across the room. It falls on the floor a few inches away.
Walking across the room to the wastebasket, I see a light flash across the Yamasakis’ yard. Repeatedly, a cone of orange light wavers across the dark cluster of bushes. I walk up to the window. When my eyes get used to the dark, I can make out Mrs. Yamasaki, Keiko’s mother, standing by the row of hydrangea bushes with a flashlight in one hand. Leaning over the bushes, she picks out something and drops it into a pail at her feet. After a while, she goes to the next bush and starts the same thing over again. I know what she is doing; I have seen her do it many times, though usually earlier in the evening. She is picking the snails and slugs that infest the hydrangea plants, drowning them in salt water. She must have waited till now—one-thirty in the morning—because she had been too busy.
My mother often told me that she felt sorry for Mrs. Yamasaki. Her husband, the doctor, was a rich man, and yet he refused to hire a cleaning lady, a cook, or a receptionist for his clinic because he considered all these things to be part of his wife’s job. “I can’t believe he expects her to slave away like that,” Mother said. “Every day she cleans their house and then his clinic next door. Then she works at the clinic, comes home, and cooks for everyone.” Because Mrs. Yamasaki came from a poor farming family in northern Japan, she never complained about the hard work. Not only her husband but even Keiko and her two older sisters treated her like a maid—they were always busy with their piano, flower arrangement, and ballet lessons; I never saw them help clear the dishes, set the table, dust the furniture, or anything. Thin and wrinkled, her shoulders stooped, Mrs. Yamasaki looks at least ten years older than her husband, a plump man with a ruddy face. Tonight she will stay up another half-hour picking off the slugs, and then she will get up at five or six to start her endless job all over, cooking, cleaning, bookkeeping. I shudder. Being cooped up in my little room and feeling like my grandmother’s prisoner is nothing. I would rather die than to live like Mrs. Yamasaki, doing the same chores day in and day out, a slave in my own house.
It dawns on me then that my mother must have thought her life was even worse than Mrs. Yamasaki’s. She had to leave our house because life with Father was making her too unhappy to stay alive. She is gone, while Mrs. Yamasaki is still here, slaving away: My mother considered
her life to be worse than picking slugs off hydrangea bushes at one-thirty in the morning. I imagine the soft, pink snail bodies squished between my fingers—how horrible it must be to stand in the dark yard, watching them writhe in the salt water. To be worse than that, my mother’s life must have been completely unbearable.
Flicking off the light, I lie down on the bed, not even bothering to change my clothes. Small jagged shapes float in the dark before my closed eyes, afterimages of the light. When I was young, I used to think they were like islands floating in the sea, islands full of secret treasures and beautiful birds. Now they remind me of something broken—colored shards of glass or porcelain.
Trying to fall asleep, I think about the girl in my mother’s fairy tale, the girl who had to carry the upside-down bowl on her head for years till she met a kind prince. How relieved she must have been to hear the bowl crack and fall away from her face. She must have laughed to see the pieces scatter on the street along with the coins and gems her mother had so carefully stacked on her head. Surely she must have been happy to be rid of the foolish spell after all those years, no matter what else did or didn’t happen. Maybe it would have been all right even if the prince had not fallen in love and married her, or if thieves had come and stolen her treasure. She would have been happy just to lose the weight that she had been forced to carry, to feel the wind ruffling her hair and the warm sunlight touching her face.
Chapter 7
EASTER SUNRISE
Halfway up the hill to Dr. Mizutani’s, I stop and turn around to look at the sea. The water foams dark blue, the color of the indigo vats at the dye shops in Grandfather Kurihara’s village. Only in the far east, on the edge of my vision, the small waves glitter under the sun. I wonder if Kiyoshi got up to watch the sunrise alone. Pastor Kato decided not to hold the Easter sunrise service this year because so few of us had attended last year. “I’m going to get up early, watch the sun, and pray,” Kiyoshi told me last week. He didn’t ask me to come along.
It’s a few minutes before ten. At church, Mrs. Kubota must be playing a prelude on the organ, a series of Easter hymns with hallelujahs climbing the scale. People are sitting with their eyes closed, heads bowed, reviewing the past week and talking to God in silence about the things that worry them, the things they regret. I can almost see the three or four rows of thin hands clasped tight in prayer. In the front row, Kiyoshi is wondering where I am, but he won’t turn his head to check the door even if he hears footsteps. He is too serious and grown-up to fidget in church. Maybe this once, he and Mrs. Kato will assume that I had overslept or been ill. But before the week is out, I will have to tell them so they won’t keep looking for me. I have to write to Mother and ask her not to send her letters to their house. That means telling her that I stopped going to church, that I don’t believe in God. The thought makes me queasy. The white buildings along the coast remind me of teeth. The blue sea looks cold and rough. I picture my mother sitting up in bed, her back stooped, her hands clasped so tight in prayer that the veins stand out. She will ask God to forgive me for my faithlessness and protect me all the same; she will panic, thinking that I am completely alone now without the Katos, without God.
Last year on Easter, the sun came up while Pastor Kato was reading the passage in the Bible about the two disciples meeting Jesus on the way to Emmaus. Though the disciples walked with him, they had no idea who he was, till a few hours later when Jesus blessed the bread before dinner. Seeing him in this familiar gesture, the disciples suddenly recognized the way he held the bread, the tone of his voice, the expression on his face. At that moment, Jesus vanished; overcome with joy, the disciples rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the others. Standing between my mother and Mrs. Kato in the early morning light, all of us hearing the familiar story one more time, I wanted to believe again. Jesus seemed like an old friend, someone whose gestures and words I, too, would recognize. But as soon as we got home, I changed my mind. When Jesus caught up with them outside Emmaus, the two disciples were very sad about his death. They told him about the crucifixion, believing he was a newcomer who did not know about the tragic event. It seemed unkind of Jesus not to reveal himself right away, to reassure his two friends. Instead, he tested them, waiting to see what they would say, trying to judge the strength of their faith. That was unfair and cruel. The Son of God shouldn’t have to spy on his own friends. Thinking back on it now, a year later, I am still angry at the story. I am not sorry that it is Easter again and I am skipping out of church, once and for all. Turning back up the hill, I hurry to Dr. Mizutani’s clinic.
* * *
Dr. Mizutani has left the door open for me though I am two hours earlier than usual. She is already in the back room of the clinic. As soon as I walk in, I can hear the chirping and peeping noises from the countertop. The doctor puts down the syringe she was holding over a tiny box, the kind strawberries are sold in; the box is set on a heating pad. I get a glimpse of the little heads—smaller than my thumbnail. I can’t help recalling the crushed seedlings underneath the camellia tree in my yard, the broken planters beside them. Who am I to help the doctor take care of birds? I couldn’t even water my mother’s plants.
“You are just in time to feed the baby sparrows,” the doctor says, handing me the syringe and pushing a cup of thick brown food—like cold soup—toward me.
The three birds in the box look nothing like sparrows. Eyes bulging out of pink, naked heads, they could be sick frogs that have sprouted a few quills. Dry peeping noises come out of their open mouths as they reach up and flail their bony arms—their wings, I suppose, but right now they are just tiny bones covered with skin. Though these birds are among the ugliest things I have ever seen, something catches in my throat and in my chest. They remind me of very skinny swimmers treading water and crying out for help.
“Don’t be afraid to stick the syringe way down their throats,” Dr. Mizutani says, guiding my hand. “You need to get the tip past the trachea opening so they don’t inhale the food into their lungs.”
With the tip deep in the first sparrow’s mouth, I pump the syringe and pull it out. The bird clamps his mouth shut and swallows, his neck weaving from side to side with effort. A tiny bulge forms along his throat. Through the thin skin, I can see the brown color of the food. The bird opens his mouth again, peeping, while the other two cry out louder.
“Go ahead and feed the others. Then you can come back to that first one and give them another round.”
I fill the syringe and stick it into the gaping mouths. The birds keep swallowing the food and opening their mouths again, flailing around, making their hungry noises. Soon, food is bulging out along all their throats, and dark blue veins stand out. I’m afraid of their thin skin bursting open.
“When should I stop?” I ask the doctor, who is making more food in the blender—pellets of cat food and vitamins and water and things that might turn my stomach if I thought about them too much. She spoons the mixture into an ice-cube tray to freeze.
“They’ll stop gaping when they’re full,” she tells me.
“They won’t choke or explode?”
“No.” She laughs. “Trust me.”
I continue to feed the birds, my hands trembling because I can’t stop picturing them with their thin necks splitting open like flimsy balloons. After the third round, all three birds close their mouths and slump down. Dr. Mizutani gives me a cotton ball and some warm water to clean their mouths and feathers so the spilled food won’t dry on them. In my hand, each bird is warm and bottom-heavy. Their stomachs are completely naked and distended; the thin legs are pink and smaller than flower stems. I change the tissue-paper lining of the strawberry box, put the birds back in, and place the box on the heating pad. In a few minutes, the birds are sleeping, piled up on top of one another.
“Someone brought them yesterday. She found the whole nest fallen from a tree—one dead bird in it and these three. There’s something else, too.”
Dr. Mizutani leads me to the other corner of th
e room, where another berry box has been placed on a heating pad. The bird inside this box is larger than the sparrows, though he looks just as naked except for the white down on his back. Eyes closed, the bird continues to sleep, his body heaving up and down with each breath.
“What kind of bird is it?” I ask.
“A Japanese grosbeak, I think. They are much rarer than the tree sparrows. An old woman found this one in the woods, fallen from a nest she couldn’t find. She brought him in this morning. He’s about the same age as the sparrows but bigger because he’s going to grow up to be a bigger bird—if he grows up at all.”
The doctor picks up a book from the counter and opens it to a picture of a grayish bird with a black head, a bright yellow beak, and small patches of white and blue on his black wings. It doesn’t look anything like the skinny thing in the berry box. When the doctor taps the side of the box with her index finger, the bird wakes up but does not stretch his neck to beg for food. The doctor sighs.
“We need to make a decision. This bird may have a better chance if we put him in with the sparrows for the first week. They’re about the same age. Being with them will keep him warm, and it might make him want to open his mouth and eat. But he might grow up thinking he is a sparrow. He could spend the rest of his life wanting to live in a flock of sparrows.”
“Will they chase him away?”
“I don’t know. He’s going to be bigger than they will. The sparrows might feel threatened and chase him away or even try to kill him. It’s also possible that they will accept him—sometimes birds feed or move around in mixed flocks. But I have never seen just one bird in a big flock of another kind. In a way, it isn’t right to raise this bird unless we can raise him to live with other grosbeaks. But then again, maybe we should give him the best chance to survive. I want to know what you think about it. I want you to make the decision.”
