One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  “As time goes on, maybe each of my close friends will experience something that makes her different, too. When that happens, I think I will be understanding, just as they have been. To me, that is the most important thing about being a high school student in 1975: wanting to be different and wanting to be included, to have friends. It is possible, however difficult. That’s what I want to remember in the year 2000 about myself as a high school student. If I were writing myself a letter to be opened in the future, I would remind myself not to be ashamed or afraid of being different, because my true friends will always try their best to love me.”

  Noriko is getting up and picking up my tray, to bring it back to the counter for me. Mieko is motioning for me to get up. It’s time to go. Noriko and Mieko know that I’m stunned by winning the contest; they are trying to make me hurry up without rushing me too much.

  Right after I wrote my essay, I felt that I had been falsely hopeful in my conclusion, that my essay was a kind of lie. As I follow my two friends out the door to our fifth-hour class, I see the truth of what I had written: There are many kinds of lies just as there are many kinds of truths. Most lies are inexcusable—the lies we tell to gain an unfair advantage or to avoid punishment—like my pretending to my father and grandmother that I was going to church instead of meeting Toru, that I wasn’t hearing from my mother—even those, I suppose, are wrong. But the hopeful lies we tell our friends and ourselves may not be always so bad. They turn out to be the truth sometimes—like my mother insisting that Grandmother Shimizu cared about me, or my writing that my friends loved me at a time when I felt too lonely to really feel that way. When my mother told me she planned to come back in the spring, maybe she was lying to me in that same way, hoping—though in this case, she could never be right—that it would miraculously turn into a truth. That isn’t the same as lying to hurt people.

  Walking down the hallway to my class, I am sure of one thing: No matter how much I change between now and then, I won’t be embarrassed by my own words. If I were to read my essay again in the year 2000, I would remember the waxwing singing in my room as I wrote it, the lonely cricket noise he was practicing, to call a whole flock from miles away. I picture my words flying around inside the dark trunk with the words of the other high school students—students who must be as thrilled as I am to have been chosen. If we could all meet up somehow, we would stand on the shoreline waving, while with the swirl of a hundred wingbeats, our words begin their migration into the future.

  Chapter 12

  A SWAN’S WING

  Of all the stories my mother used to tell me, my favorite was about a girl whose six brothers had been turned into swans by an evil stepmother. To free her brothers, the girl had to gather nettles and sew them into magic shirts; she could not speak or laugh until she was done. At the end of the story, her six swan brothers came flying just as she was going to be burned at the stake as a witch. The girl threw the finished shirts over the swans, and immediately, the swans changed back into her brothers and rescued her. But the girl had run out of time before she could sew the left sleeve of the last shirt, so her youngest brother was missing his left arm. Where his arm would have been, he had a swan’s wing.

  Though the story ended with everyone living happily ever after, I used to wonder about that boy with the swan’s wing. I imagined him living in a palace with his brothers and sister, dancing to an orchestra every night, entertaining other princes and princesses. He would dance with only one arm; inside the left sleeve of his brocade jacket, he would cradle his delicately folded wing. Only when he was alone, perhaps late at night in the palace orchard, he would slip off his jacket and slowly spread out his wing in the moonlight, revealing the white feathers. I was never sure whether he would be admired or pitied for being different from his brothers. I wanted to know if he was happy or sad when he looked at his wing. Would the wing remind him of the hardships he and his brothers had suffered under the evil spell? Or would he miss his days of flying? Would he be saddened to remember the seven years his sister spent gathering prickly nettles and sewing them, being mistaken for a witch but unable to defend herself with words, just to turn him back into a boy when he wanted to be a swan? I know that wasn’t the important thing about the story, but I couldn’t stop wondering. Often with stories the unimportant parts are the ones I like to think about.

  * * *

  I’m remembering the story again as I walk into the outdoor birdcage at five on Tuesday morning. Standing on the folding chair I have brought from the clinic, I reach up to the highest branch where the three sparrows are sleeping. Perched side by side on a branch, they look like three apples or pears and are as easy to pick because they can’t see me in this dim light. One by one, I lift them in my hand and put them inside the pet carrier. By the time they wake up and begin to flutter around and chirp a little, I have already closed the door. I throw a pillowcase over the carrier to quiet them.

  The brown-eared bulbul screeches at me a few times from his perch near the door of the cage, but in a few minutes, he, too, goes back to sleep. The Japanese grosbeak shifts his weight but makes no noise. Outside the cage, the yard is completely quiet. There are no lights in Dr. Mizutani’s clinic or in her parents’ house next door.

  I sit down in a chair and close my eyes, waiting for the sunrise.

  The weather is expected to hold for the rest of the week. On Saturday, Dr. Mizutani and I will take the bulbul and the grosbeak to the mountain path where we let go of the waxwing in the spring. Till then, they need a few more days to practice eating the berries I tie up to the branches, the seeds I scatter in the grass at the bottom of the cage.

  “You can let the sparrows go tomorrow. Take them outside the cage and let them go. You are in charge,” she told me. “I’ll probably be sleeping.”

  I thought about asking Toru to come with me. I went to see him at home last night because I hadn’t returned in time for our regular meeting time on Sunday. Takashi was home, too, so the three of us sat in the backyard trying to name the constellations we had learned in school long ago. None of us could remember much except the Big Dipper, the North Star, Cassiopea’s Chair. After Takashi went in to do his homework, Toru and I talked for a long time; he doesn’t work on Mondays. He told me he planned to head for Tokyo in early June, about a week before I leave Ashiya to stay with my mother and grandfather. At eleven, when he drove me home, I almost asked him if he wanted to get up early and come with me to watch the sparrows fly away. He would enjoy seeing them.

  But I thought of the two of us sitting inside the outdoor cage and waiting for sunrise, being quiet together. It wouldn’t be right. He would be thinking of Yoshimi, whom he will see in less than a month, while I would sit a few feet away, my heart beating the way it does sometimes when I am with him and we are quiet. It’s different if we are talking. Then I can say the right things, regardless. I can tell him how glad I am for him and mean it, too, for the most part: I am his friend, I do want him to be happy even if that means not seeing him all summer. But being quiet is another matter. Then I can feel him thinking about Yoshimi, and that makes me lonely even if he is sitting next to me. I don’t want to feel like that. I should be happy, not sad, on the day the sparrows fly away.

  Besides, if I were going to be with anyone at all, it should be Dr. Mizutani. Toru had nothing to do with my raising the sparrows. He wouldn’t know about those early mornings I would turn on the light in my room to start my first feeding—how my heart would flip over and my stomach would feel queasy when I saw the birds slumped together in their sleep. Each time, I was sure that at least one of them had died during the night. Only Dr. Mizutani would know how I had felt then, every inch of my body tense with worry.

  Maybe in the fall, if Toru comes back from Tokyo as he plans to, we will walk in the woods to look for wild birds. Dr. Mizutani has promised to visit me every weekend in the country, to walk with my grandfather and me in the woods to see the birds. She will bring me all the baby birds people might give h
er, and I can raise them in my grandfather’s house. “They have the same birds in the country, and much more,” she said. “I’ll help your grandfather build you an outdoor cage.” If Toru comes back in the fall, I can teach him about birds. And if he doesn’t—well, I won’t think about that until it happens, except that I will visit Takashi now and then, to make sure he is all right.

  * * *

  At six-thirty the sun is up. The sky has changed from gray to white and then to light blue. The grosbeak ruffles his feathers, stretches, and flies over to the east side of the cage, where the sun is hitting one of the branches. Perched on the branch, he begins to preen his feathers. Overhead a flock of crows comes flying down from the mountains, cawing loudly. Soon the crow in the yard will wake up and flop down from the maple tree, looking for the few bits of food I have left in his dish.

  Getting up from my chair, I uncover the pet carrier and pick it up. The sparrows begin to flutter and chirp inside. The bulbul is watching me from his perch. I shoo him away with my hand, and when he flies to the other side of the cage, I exit quickly, closing the door behind me. The sun is hitting the stretch of grass where Dr. Mizutani’s yard borders her parents’. I walk over there, hold the carrier over my head, and pull open the door.

  Immediately one sparrow flies out and soars straight toward the maple branches. In just a few seconds the other two swirl up into the air, heading for the maple tree to join the first one.

  Putting down the carrier, I shade my eyes with my hand. For a while I can see all three birds in the maple, flitting from one branch to another. Then they take off together, dipping halfway down to the ground and then soaring up. Fluttering their wings a few beats and then pulling them in, the birds dip and rise, dip and rise, in the irregular way all sparrows fly.

  I raise my left arm and begin to wave as the birds disappear over the neighbors’ house, and my eyes ache from staring into the sky. I know they will be back among the flocks of sparrows in Dr. Mizutani’s yard—eating the seeds from the feeders, splashing noisily in the birdbath. Only I will never again be able to tell them apart from all the other young sparrows, the hundreds of this spring’s babies with their streaky breasts and pinkish legs. So even after I can no longer see my sparrows, I keep waving in the direction of their flight. If they could look back, they would see the blurred motion of my arm—a rough, repeated outline in the air, the closest thing I can manage to a wing.

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  Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Publishers since 1866

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, New York 10011

  Henry Holt is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Copyright © 1995 by Kyoko Mori

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd.,

  195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  ISBN 0-8050-2983-4

  First Edition—1995

  eISBN 9781466876736

  First eBook edition: June 2014