by Kyoko Mori
Keiko and I are the same age; we used to be close friends. We walked to elementary school wearing matching hats, mittens, or shoes that we had begged our mothers to buy. I brought her to church so we could spend our Sundays together. Several times I punched Kiyoshi because he had teased Keiko and made her cry.
We don’t go to the same school now. She is finishing up at the public junior high school down the street and in April will be going to the big senior high school a few miles to the west. Since seventh grade I have been at Christian Girls’ Academy—my mother’s and Mrs. Kato’s alma mater—which has junior high school, senior high school, and college all on the same campus. But that’s not why we are no longer friends. It’s because ever since seventh grade, Keiko has been two different people.
On weekdays she is a studious girl, walking to school in the blue uniform, her hair in tight braids; on weekends she looks like the girls on magazine covers, her face heavily made-up, her hair in big curls. The few times we went shopping together in downtown Kobe, more than two years ago, Keiko smiled and made eyes at the clerks at record stores, young men in blue jeans and white shirts. The giggly and nervous way she talked to them was nothing like the quiet, stuck-up manner she had with the women clerks in dress shops. As we walked down the street, she was constantly fidgeting and whispering to me. “Don’t look now,” she would titter breathlessly, “but that boy over there? He’s watching us. I wonder which one of us he finds so fascinating.” I stared straight ahead, pretending not to hear. I had to grit my teeth to keep from hissing, “Shut up. You are embarrassing me.” Oblivious to my irritation, Keiko kept giggling even though there was nothing remotely funny.
That wasn’t all. If it had been just her silliness, I might have gotten used to it in the end. I know plenty of girls at school who are silly out in public where there are boys. I can learn to ignore that, especially if the girls are considerate and smart when we are alone together. But one Sunday, Keiko came over in a tight black T-shirt and a red miniskirt, her face made-up and her nails painted a bright red. When I came home from church, she was sitting in the living room with my father while my mother was preparing tea in the kitchen. Keiko was talking to Father in that overly sweet, giggly voice she used with the young men at record stores. She hadn’t gotten up to help my mother or insisted that Mother, too, sit down. I was so mad I almost asked her to leave, right then. If I had gone over to the Yamasakis’ house and Keiko had been out, I would never have sat down with Dr. Yamasaki as though I were an important guest while Keiko’s mother worked in the kitchen like a maid. That afternoon, in my room, Keiko said, “For an older man, your father is quite good-looking. No wonder he is so popular with women.” “Where did you hear that?” I asked, my voice going sharp. “Oh, everyone knows,” she said, waving her manicured hand like what she’d said was nothing.
I never asked her over again, and when she called, I always had an excuse ready. She caught on before long and started giving me the cold shoulder, too. Now we don’t even say hello to each other in front of our houses.
Putting down the coffee cup, Keiko stretches her arms over her head in an exaggerated gesture. Maybe she is pretending to be a bored, pretty actress. I look away; my eyes hurt from scowling.
Turning back from the Yamasakis’ yard to ours, I catch a glimpse of something fluttering on the grass. A cluster of leaves, I think, or a dried-up flower head from last fall. But this thing keeps moving in the same place—back and forth on the grass and then upward a little. I step over to the window, shading my eyes with my hand. Soon I can see what it is—a bird, greenish brown and bigger than a sparrow. He keeps hopping on the lawn and trying to fly up to one of the forsythia bushes Mother had planted along the fence. Every time he reaches a branch, he falls off, his wings beating hard. His legs must be hurt; he can’t hold on.
In a few minutes, that bird will be too exhausted to get up. Outside, it is warm enough for Keiko to sit on the patio in her sweater, but too cold for a small bird to lie on the damp grass. I wonder if Keiko sees him from her patio, much closer than I am to the fence. But it won’t do the bird any good to be seen by her. Keiko was always a big coward about any living thing—equally afraid of butterflies and spiders, little rabbits and garden snakes. I once made her cry by showing her a rubber tarantula; she couldn’t touch it even after she knew for sure that it was a toy. She would faint if she had to touch a wild bird. That bird would be dead in twenty minutes, half an hour, if Keiko were the only person around.
I turn away from the window and walk back to my desk. Pulling open one of the drawers, I grab the shoebox in which I have been keeping the three letters Mother sent to me in care of the Katos. Quickly, I dump the letters back into the drawer, punch holes in the lid with my pen, and run downstairs with the empty box in my hand.
Keiko is still on the porch. We stare at each other briefly but say nothing. I run to the forsythia bush just as the bird lands on a low branch. Immediately losing his balance, he hangs upside down with one foot, his wings going wild and a brown crest standing up stiff on his head. His feathers underneath the crest and on his chin are ink black. I know what kind of bird it is—a Japanese waxwing. Mother and I used to see flocks of them swarming around the Russian olives and camellias in our backyard in late winter and spring; they flew only a few feet above our heads and darted in and out of the trees, eating the buds, flower petals, and even new leaves. I glance at the line of trees in the back but see nothing.
On the ground, the bird is hopping on one leg; the other one folds up and down, with the toes curled into a tight ball. He begins to pump his good leg and to flutter his wings, getting ready to fly to the branch again. Every few seconds, he makes a thin, lisping sound, like a barely audible whisper.
I am only five or six yards away, but the bird seems too intent on his jump to notice me. I begin to crouch down, slowly and quietly. What if he bites me? I think as I take a small step. Immediately, I am ashamed to be such a coward. The waxwing is barely larger than my hand. If he bit me with all his strength, he couldn’t hurt me.
Taking a deep breath, I swoop down on the bird just as he is flying up. My timing is right. I close my left hand around his back, my fingers holding the wings shut. The bird gives out a sharp screech and turns his head, his mouth opening to screech again and again. I slowly bring my right index finger to his mouth, and he does bite me, but his mouth is soft. It doesn’t even pinch. I bring him up closer to see. There are splashes of red edging his wings and tail, and just for a second, I think of blood. But that is another foolish thought. The red spots are his markings, like the black patches on his throat and under his crest. The bird’s heart is beating fast against my fingers, his legs pumping hard. There is nothing broken or cut, no blood, no bones sticking out. Whatever is wrong with the bird, he isn’t going to die, at least not right away. Still, my heart begins to beat faster, too. “Small animals are very delicate,” I remember my father saying in his calm, reasonable voice. “You have to accept that they die easily.” The bird screeches; his voice is high and shrill like a whistle saying Hurry! Time is up. Quickly, I slide him into the box, close the lid, and run across the yard. Keiko is openly staring at me now, but it’s no time to worry about her.
The bird begins to make dry, scratching noises inside the box, his wings beating against the cardboard. Even through the lid, I can hear his cries.
“I’m only trying to help,” I tell him. “We’re going to get someone to look at you.”
Carefully I walk around the outside of the house. Grandmother is still at her samisen, singing along with the tune now. Her voice is more like a croak, partly because that is the style of singing, but also because she has a low, choked-up voice. Father is staying in Hiroshima, working at an out-of-town branch of his insurance company, which is based in Kobe. More and more he gets assignments to work in Hiroshima and is gone even on weekends. Both Grandmother and I know why. His girlfriend, Tomiko Hayashi, lives in Hiroshima, upstairs from a bar she owns. Father stays at
her place almost every night; now that Mother is gone and Grandmother has come to care for me, he has no reason to spend time here. But just like my mother, Grandmother would never mention Father’s girlfriend to me. Instead, she twangs her angry music on the samisen and scolds me every chance she gets.
If Grandmother knew what I was doing now, she would be mad. “Animals,” she would say, squinching her eyes in disgust, “are full of fleas and diseases. Don’t ever touch that bird. Just let him die.” In her house in Tokyo, she used to set little live traps for mice, only to drown the mice in a bucket of water and throw them into the trash. Whenever I stayed with her, I got up early every morning to check the traps; if there was a mouse in any of them, I took the trap to the farthest corner of the yard and turned it upside down. The mouse scurried away and disappeared in the grass or under rocks, spared from Grandmother’s bucket at least for another day. If we had mice in our house, I’m sure she would kill them in the same way. She used the live traps only because they were easier to clean than the kind that broke their necks.
* * *
Carrying the shoebox, I walk as fast as I can. I know just where to go, and it isn’t far. About half a mile up the hill from my house there is a veterinarian who takes care of wild birds. Everyone in Ashiya knows about her from the occasional newspaper articles in the summer, when she takes care of the baby swallows, sparrows, and thrushes that people find on sidewalks, apparently having fallen from their nests. Bird Woman, as people call this veterinarian, is a spinster and the only daughter of a well-to-do family. Though I have never visited her clinic, my mother and I used to walk past it on our way to the woods that border our city to the north.
Running up the last few blocks, I arrive at her clinic in a few minutes and stand in front of a black iron gate, over which hangs a sign, MIZUTANI ANIMAL HOSPITAL AND WILD BIRD SANCTUARY. The white stucco building inside the gate has two stories and rose-colored slates on the roof; it’s a little bigger than our house. Bird feeders hang from hooks outside every second-story window.
No one comes out after I ring the bell. The doctor may be gone because it’s Saturday. The waxwing is still rustling around inside the box, but he has stopped screeching. Maybe he is getting weak and tired. I ring the bell again and again.
Because I am so intent on the door, I don’t see the woman who must have come out of the side gate of the house next door until she is standing a few feet from me.
“Looking for me?” she says, smiling. She is a thin young woman dressed in a white linen blouse and blue jeans, her hair very short, almost like a little boy’s bowl-shaped cut. Her bangs, trimmed straight across her forehead, emphasize her large brown eyes and straight nose. Long silver earrings dangle from her earlobes. “Are you here to see me?” she asks again.
“No. I’ve come to see Dr. Mizutani.”
The woman laughs, tipping her head backward, not covering her mouth with her hand the way other women do. Her silver earrings are shaped like parrots with long tail feathers. “So you don’t think I’m Dr. Mizutani,” she says, still laughing, narrowing her eyes. Her small, delicate-looking mouth stretches into a grin.
I can’t stop staring. This woman is too young to be a spinster, or a doctor for that matter. She looks more like a college student, though she must be a little older than that. Reading newspaper articles about her, I always imagined her to be forty-five or fifty, short and fat, dressed in sensible brown suits like many of my teachers at school. I never thought she would be a young woman—maybe twenty-eight or thirty at the most—thin, long-legged, pretty. The doctor stops laughing and raises her left eyebrow. “What can I do for you?” she asks.
Feeling stupid, I stick the shoebox into her face and say, “Here. I’ve found a bird. A Japanese waxwing. Something is wrong with his foot.”
Dr. Mizutani takes the box in her hands. Her fingers are long, her nails cut short and left unpolished. She is wearing a silver ring, but not on her ring finger.
“Let’s go inside and take a look,” she says, opening the gate.
* * *
I follow her through the waiting area, past the small examination rooms, and into a back room that holds shelves of bottles, a large double sink, and a long counter where the doctor places the shoebox. She turns on a bright white light.
“Is the bird going to fly out of here?” she asks, her hand on the box lid.
“He might. There is nothing wrong with his wings, nothing I can see anyway. But his foot is hurt. He kept falling off the forsythia branches in my yard.” I pause and then add, “I live just down the hill.”
The doctor opens the box with one hand and scoops up the bird with the other. Gently turning her small wrist, she holds him upside down to look at his legs. His injured foot stays curled tight while the other curls and opens. The doctor coaxes open the injured foot with the tip of her little finger and keeps looking, squinting slightly. After a while, she holds the bird out to me. He has not screeched the whole time. His mouth opens and closes, but no sounds come out, except for a barely audible hiss.
“See this foot? It’s swollen a little, redder than his right. There is a small cut between his toes, and he’s lost one of his nails. Can you see that?”
I nod.
“He must have gotten his foot caught in something. Some kind of wire.”
Most of the houses in my neighborhood have white wire fences, like the one between our house and the Yamasakis’. One of them, maybe even ours, must have hurt the bird. “Will he be all right?” I ask the doctor.
“I hope so.” Dr. Mizutani takes a cotton ball, dips it in water, and cleans the bird’s cut. “It doesn’t look too bad. It’ll probably heal.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
The doctor shifts her hand so the bird is right side up, his crested head peaking out from between her thumb and index finger. His brown eyes look alert. “Aren’t you a little too young to be so pessimistic?” the doctor says and smiles. A faint line appears on the left side of her mouth.
“I’m fifteen,” I tell her.
The doctor raises her eyebrows, as if to say, So? “Birds can live with one good foot. Once in a while, you’ll see pigeons and doves with some of their toes frozen off—one of their feet will look like a stub. Those birds can still perch so long as they have one good foot. Of course, it’s a strain on that foot, so I’d prefer to see this bird use both of his. His cut doesn’t look so bad. He should be all right if he doesn’t get an infection.” She pauses, as if to make sure I am paying attention, and then goes on. “Birds usually don’t get infections because their body temperature is so high—they can easily fight off bacteria—but we’ll give this one some antibiotics to make sure. It won’t hurt him.” The doctor rummages on her shelves to find a small bottle. She turns back to me, the bird still in her hand—almost as if she had forgotten it, in the way someone will forget about a favorite bracelet she wears all the time.
“Are you going to take care of this bird until he gets better? You can take him home if you want to.”
“Me?”
“You found him. I’ll show you what to do. It won’t be hard.”
“But I’ll just kill him,” I protest, “I mean, by mistake. I can’t even grow houseplants.”
“This is a bird, not a plant,” Dr. Mizutani points out, as if that explained everything. “Are you right-handed or left-handed?”
“Left,” I reply, surprised to be asked. People usually assume that everyone is right-handed.
“Give me your right hand, then. You’ll need your better hand to hold the syringe.”
I reach out. She opens up her palm slowly. I close my fingers around the bird’s back, holding the wings shut.
“Good.” The doctor mixes a drop of the medicine with two drops of water and puts the mixture into a syringe, which she holds out to me. I take it in my left hand. “Now, make sure his head is between your thumb and index finger of your right hand, so you can steady him if you need to.”
“Okay.”
> “Put a drop of liquid on the side of his beak. You see, right at the corner where his beak starts, it looks almost like he has lips?”
“Yes.”
“Put a drop right there.”
I squeeze the syringe carefully and see the liquid bead up. The bird begins to drink, scarcely opening his beak. I know he is drinking because his black throat flutters. He blinks a couple of times.
“Give him the rest of it, one drop at a time. There should be only two or three more drops.”
The bird continues to drink, fluttering his throat, not at all struggling with me now. I can’t believe that I am holding a wild bird, making him drink from a syringe. The doctor watches me. After I am done, she says, “Great job. You have a natural touch.”
I put down the syringe but keep holding the bird, his feathers smooth and silky against my palm.
“You don’t have to give him any more medicine until tomorrow morning,” the doctor says. “He only needs a drop every day, so you could put it directly into his mouth, but it’s better the way I showed you.”
“Why is that?”
“You have to be very careful when you put water in birds’ mouths. A drop too much could drown them.”
“Birds can drown in the water in their own mouths?”
“Yes, but you don’t have to worry about that. This bird isn’t going to open his mouth for you anyway. He’s not a baby.” The doctor goes into another room and comes back with a plastic pet carrier, its bottom lined with a paper towel. “I don’t use metal bird cages for wild birds,” she explains. “The wire is hard on their wings.” She opens the door of the carrier for me to put the bird inside. I reach in and slowly open up my hand. Leaning on one leg, the bird hops to the back corner and stands there, tilting his head to one side.