One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  I regretted that incident—and all my mean looks and words—when she died from a stroke the following spring. She had no time to see us, no time to hear how much I loved her in spite of my bad manners and moods. Now I will never be able to tell her about my love or regrets or anything.

  Staring at the ceiling above my head, I worry that someday, my mother or Grandfather Kurihara will be gone, too, before I have any time to spend with them. If one of us were to die now, my mother, especially, would not know how much I loved her in spite of my angry words and lukewarm letters. Instead, she would remember the last thing I said to her when we were alone: “You didn’t have to lie to me.” Unless I see her again face-to-face and tell her something else, those words will be the last words between us. At the time I thought I was telling the truth, but my words have become a terrible secret. I am too ashamed to tell anyone—even Toru, Mieko, or Noriko—that I said such a cruel thing to my mother on our last day together.

  I think sometimes that the truth isn’t just one thing. On the day my mother left, it was true that she was leaving never to come back and that she had been lying to me about her intentions. But it’s also true that I was angry at her and wanted to see her cry. I kept bullying her to be honest with me, not because I believed in honesty or truth as Kiyoshi believes in God, but because I wanted to see my mother lose her composure. I wished she would break down and tell me how sad she was to leave me. I wanted her to say how much she loved me, how hard it would be to live without me. I was trying to make sure that she felt as miserable as I did. That’s a truth I didn’t know then.

  Downstairs, Grandmother Shimizu is beating on her samisen, making angry music at the crack of dawn. If she or my father were to die suddenly, I would not worry about what they thought about me, whether they knew that I loved them. I am not sure myself whether I love them. Even though I behave no better to them than I did to my mother or Grandmother Kurihara, I don’t think I would regret anything if they were to die.

  * * *

  Arriving at Dr. Mizutani’s later that morning, I walk straight to the outdoor cage in the backyard. The sparrows fly down to a low branch and beg for food, flapping their wings. They have been outside for almost two weeks, eating seeds and fruits from the dishes; even so, they line up to be hand-fed as soon as I come in. Having had their fill, they swirl up to the highest point of the cage and land side by side on a branch. From another corner, the Japanese grosbeak watches me. I put a few dabs of liquid food on a branch not too far from him. Cautiously he hops over and pecks until all the food is gone, eyeing me the whole time. Once in a while he spreads out and closes his wings, balancing himself. The edges of his dark wings flash white.

  I refill my syringe while, on the ground, a brown-eared bulbul screeches and hisses. He is opening his mouth wide, as if to say, Hurry up. Feed me. As soon as I approach him and hold out my hand, he lunges, snapping his beak to bite me. I flinch and pull back—long enough for him to flop backward a few steps and then dash across to the other side of the cage, where he hides behind a log. I have no choice but to corner him and pick him up in my hand while he continues to screech and hiss. He must think I mean to kill him. All the same, he opens his beak at the sight of the syringe. Quickly stuffing the tip into his mouth, I pump in the food and gently drop him to the ground, where he looks dazed, almost satisfied for a moment, before he begins to back away from me, hopping backward and hissing. He is this way every time I feed him.

  Dr. Mizutani got him last week; he had been sitting in a fallen nest with another baby. Both birds were already feathered and beginning to stand up in their nest—something they do a few days before they can hop out—so we thought they would have no problem. From the beginning, one of them was mean, snapping at me while I fed him, gaping and hissing at the same time. The other bird was sweet, always peeping at me with a wide-open mouth. I named the mean bird Rie and the nice one Haruko—after my two grandmothers. Maybe that was what jinxed the nicer bird, being named after my dead grandmother. One morning I got up to feed the birds and found him slumped over, his body already stiff, his legs held straight and brittle as two twigs.

  “It isn’t anything you did,” the doctor said, holding the dead bird in her hand. “Baby birds just die sometimes. This one might have had a small infection or maybe he couldn’t digest his food. It could have been anything.”

  “You don’t think the other bird killed him?”

  “No,” she said, turning the bird around, under the lamp. “I don’t see any abrasions or cuts.”

  I didn’t tell her about naming them after my grandmothers. That same afternoon, the mean bulbul left his nest and began to hop around. He didn’t seem to mind being alone at all.

  Dr. Mizutani comes out while I am raking the floor of the cage and refilling the water dishes.

  “Good job,” she says, coming inside. “Everyone looks good.”

  Inside the other cage, the crow begins cawing.

  “We should let him go,” the doctor says, pointing in his direction. “He is as ready as he is going to be.”

  “Where will we take him?”

  “We’ll just let him out in my yard. I thought about bringing him back to the mountains, near the house where he was found. But it’s been a long time. I don’t want him to get caught in a trap again or go to those people’s house where they were going to kill him.”

  The crow, who has been pecking at the ground, flies up to a branch as soon as we walk in. His wings make a sound like a heavy coat being dropped on the floor. He caws and eyes us suspiciously, no doubt thinking that we are going to catch him again to hold him and make him stretch his legs. He turns his head sideways and begins to preen his feathers. The leg he broke looks a little thinner than the other, but not much. Dr. Mizutani and I notice it only because we know what happened to him. He isn’t favoring that leg anymore. Because he has had plenty of food, he is fat and his wing feathers are glossy. Anyone else would think he was just an ordinary crow—maybe a little ragged around the tail, but sometimes they are like that.

  Dr. Mizutani picks up his food dish, walks out of the cage, and sets the dish on the ground several yards away. I follow her, propping open the door with an extra branch. We back away to the middle of the yard and sit down at the picnic table, where the doctor eats lunch during spring and summer.

  After a while, the crow comes down from the branch and walks around on the ground. He stands in the doorway but does not come out. Instead, he goes back up on a branch. Repeatedly, he flies up and down, forward and sideways, always veering away from the open doorway. It takes him almost ten minutes to figure it out. Finally, he swoops down from a branch and then flies up through the door, flapping his wings hard and circling higher and higher. With great commotion, he flies around the yard a few times and lands in Dr. Mizutani’s maple tree.

  “He’ll probably hang around here for a while,” the doctor says, shading her eyes as she peers at the bird. “When you feed the other birds, make sure there’s some food in his dish and the birdbaths have water. He’ll come back to eat.”

  The crow is still in the tree, going kaah, kaaah, kaaah, when we go inside.

  * * *

  As I turn the corner onto my street, I catch a glimpse of someone coming out of my house. Even from a block away, I recognize Keiko in a long gray dress, her hair put up in a bun. Her back is toward me as she closes the door. Turning around quickly, I retreat around the corner and run down the hill. She wouldn’t have seen me or heard me.

  What is she doing at my house? I wonder as I slow down to a walk and enter a small park. Sitting on a bench by the drinking fountain, I wait for ten minutes before heading home again.

  There is no trace of Keiko when I come back to the house. Going into the foyer, all the same I know that something is wrong. My grandmother is in the kitchen. I hear the pots and pans clattering. Usually she does not make that much noise doing housework. My heart begins to beat faster, and I feel sick to my stomach. For just a moment, I consider
going outside again. Maybe Grandmother has not heard me come in. I can still run away. But where would I go? Sooner or later, I will have to come home.

  Taking off my shoes, I walk down the hallway to the kitchen. Grandmother stops the water and begins to dry her hands. Even after her hands are dry, she keeps rubbing them with the towel. On the kitchen table, there is a crystal bowl full of strawberries—the bowl in which Keiko’s mother sometimes sends over fruit, cookies, or flowers, sharing the gifts that her husband’s patients have sent to their house. When my mother was around, she gave back the bowl in a few days filled with homemade cookies or cakes, returning the neighborly gesture. My grandmother just brings back the empty bowl, cleaned and polished to perfection. I think it’s rude, but it hasn’t discouraged Mrs. Yamasaki. She usually sends one of Keiko’s older sisters with these gifts; I’m sure Keiko ordinarily doesn’t volunteer to come to my house.

  Grandmother Shimizu finishes drying her hands and then, to my surprise, tosses the towel in the sink instead of hanging it up. “Sit down, Megumi,” she barks at me.

  I sit down, but she doesn’t. Dizzy with worry, I want to lean forward and hold my head in my hands.

  Standing a few feet away from me in her gray kimono, my grandmother says in an icy voice, “I have just called your father and asked him to come home. Do you know why?”

  I shake my head no, already wanting to cry. I know that Keiko’s visit had something to do with my grandmother’s anger. For her to call my father at his girlfriend’s house on a Sunday afternoon, Grandmother must be very, very upset. Still, it is unfair of her to ask me if I know why. Of course I don’t.

  “I’ve asked him to come because you are a liar, Megumi,” she clamps her mouth shut and breathes hard through her nostrils like an angry horse.

  Avoiding her eyes, I look again at the strawberries in the bowl; the ones on the bottom are squashed against the glass. They might as well have been poisoned.

  “You don’t go to church anymore,” Grandmother continues. “Instead, you go driving at night with a boy—an older boy.”

  I wish I could march out of my house into the Yamasakis’ and grab Keiko by the collar of her prim long dress. What a hypocrite she is, to come to my house pretending to bring a gift from her mother, when all along, she must have been looking for the perfect chance to tell on me. I regret all the years I spent thinking of her as my best friend.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” Grandmother demands.

  Nothing, of course. She is right—I have lied to her. What I have done must look completely wrong to her. It’s no use explaining that Toru is my childhood friend. Grandmother doesn’t care about my childhood friends. I look down at the polished wood of the kitchen floor, wishing I could just disappear.

  “That is not the only thing,” Grandmother hisses. “You have been receiving letters. Letters we specifically forbade you to receive.” Reaching inside her obi, she pulls out the six letters my mother has sent to me. “You were scheming to talk to her on the telephone.”

  I jump up from my chair. Suddenly, I am so angry that I can hardly breathe. Grandmother had no right to take and read my mother’s letters. She shouldn’t have gone into my room looking for them even if she suspected me of lying. And Keiko, too—how dare she talk about those letters, repeating a secret she must have heard from Kiyoshi, getting me in trouble and ruining my chance of ever hearing from my mother again? Even God, if he existed, would tell her to mind her own business.

  I step forward and snatch the letters out of my grandmother’s hands. She winces; a dark red spreads over her face and neck as she stands, glaring at me. I can hear her breathing harder. If she were younger, she would try to grab me or hit me. Maybe she would try even now, but I am too fast for her. I back away from her reach.

  “You have no right,” I scream. “My mother never meant for you to read her letters.”

  “You lied to me,” she repeats.

  “That makes no difference. You gave me no choice.” I am clenching two tight fists, the fingers of my left hand squeezed around my mother’s letters. I want to step up to Grandmother and punch her. I imagine her doubled over with pain, her shriveled hand clutching her broken jaw. It would be so satisfying to see that. But the thought frightens me, too. What if I caused her to have a heart attack and to die? She would keel over, gasping for breath. I turn the other way and walk quickly to the back door.

  Standing with my hand on the door, I remember that my shoes are in the front foyer, but it’s too late. I run out to the backyard in my socks, then jump over the fence into the Yamasakis’ backyard. Keiko must be in her room, doing homework or maybe reading the Bible. I want to shake her and yell at her until she has to cry and beg me to stop. But that won’t change anything. Besides, just the thought of seeing her face sickens me. So I run across the yard past her mother’s shrubs and flowers, jump over the fence into another backyard, then another, until I come out on a street. It is a mild spring day, but the pavement feels cold through my thin socks. I start running up the hill toward Dr. Mizutani’s, moving too fast to avoid the small pebbles that hurt the soles of my feet. As I run, I think about the narrow, winding mountain paths my mother and I used to walk on. No matter how careful we were, we couldn’t help kicking some stones and pebbles behind us as we walked—causing them to slide off the steep cliff to the side. I feel as though I am falling headlong down the cliff in an avalanche of gray pebbles and dust. I will never see my mother again. My life will never be the same.

  * * *

  Dr. Mizutani is reading a book in the small study inside her clinic, in the back of the examination room. “Megumi. What is wrong?” She gets up from her big maroon chair and walks toward me as I stand in the doorway.

  “I need help,” I tell her. “I’m in trouble.”

  Putting her hand on my back, the doctor guides me to the maroon chair. “Sit down,” she says, gently pushing me down into the seat. She goes out and comes back with a glass of water, which she hands me, and pulls up another chair for herself. “Take a sip of water first, all right?”

  I take a drink and then start telling her everything. Halfway through, I realize that I am clutching my mother’s letters in one hand and the glass of water in the other. I put them down on the carpeted floor and continue talking.

  “Grandmother said my father was coming home to talk to me. They’ll never let me see Toru again or hear from my mother. Maybe they will forbid me to see you, too. I’ll be all alone.” I have to pause, to keep from crying.

  Dr. Mizutani doesn’t say anything for a while.

  “It’s not fair,” I add, “the way my grandmother and father can order me or forbid me to do things. They can take away anything from me. Anything I like—my mother, my friends, even my school.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be like that,” the doctor says, her eyes wide with sympathy.

  “It is like that,” I insist. “Now that they know I’ve lied to them, I’ll never see my mother again, and my grandmother will talk my father into making me change schools, too. She’ll say I became a liar because I wasn’t getting enough discipline at my school. She hates my school because my mother went there. She’ll send me to a public school now. She’s been nagging him about it for months.”

  “You don’t have to do anything your father says, if you believe that he is wrong and you are right. You can protest if you are truly convinced.” The doctor looks into my eyes, as if to impress me with the truth of her statement.

  “But I have to live with him and Grandmother,” I explain, suddenly irritated with Dr. Mizutani. How can she think everything is so simple? “So long as I live in their house, I have to do what they say.”

  “I get the feeling,” the doctor says, frowning, “that you don’t even like living with them.”

  “Of course I don’t,” I yell, forgetting that I haven’t told Dr. Mizutani much about my father or grandmother. “I don’t like living with them,” I repeat in a softer voice, trying to calm down. �
�My grandmother is always in a bad mood and my father is seldom home. But I have nowhere else to go. My mother and grandfather would worry more about me if I had to live with them. So long as I am with my father, they know that I have a good future. They gave me up so I won’t be poor and fatherless, but now, I’ve ruined it all. Maybe my father will even disown me.” I take a deep breath and try to sit still without beginning to cry. “He will send me away to live with my mother and grandfather, and be a burden to them. Or maybe he will keep me with him but forbid me to ever see them again. I don’t know what he will do. All I know is I’m in trouble. No matter who I live with, I will never be happy.”

  “What would happen,” the doctor asks, “if you asked—if you insisted—that every year you live with your mother during the summer and your father during the school year? Doesn’t that seem more reasonable?”

  “My father would never allow that,” I answer, irritated. Doesn’t the doctor understand what I’ve been saying?

  “What choice would he have if you insisted?”

  “He would say that I could live in his house and obey his rules, or else I could stop being his daughter. He would disown me.”

  “Your father is never going to disown you,” the doctor says. “It would mean losing you forever, never seeing you again.”

  “I don’t know if that would bother him. I don’t think my father loves me very much.” The doctor doesn’t say anything, so we sit in silence for a while. What I said isn’t exactly true. I remember the finches Father bought me after inadvertently killing my canaries. I picture his stiff smile and hear the thin voice in which he asks me, “So how are you, Megumi?” On the few occasions when he is home and Grandmother begins to criticize me or talk about making me switch schools, Father changes the subject or ignores her, pretending to be too tired or distracted to continue the conversation. That is the only way he knows to defend me or take my side. His weak attempts anger me; all the same, I can’t say he does nothing or he doesn’t care. “Well, that isn’t true,” I am forced to admit to the doctor. “My father doesn’t love anyone very much, not the way my mother does, or Grandfather Kurihara. Even Grandmother Shimizu loves him more than he loves her. Still, Father probably loves me and Grandmother Shimizu as much as he can love anyone—of course, that isn’t a lot.”