One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  “Why me?” I ask, wishing she hadn’t told me all the particulars. If she had simply announced, “We have to keep these birds separated. There is no other way,” then I wouldn’t have known any better. If the bird dies, I won’t be thinking that I should have done something else to keep him alive.

  “You have to decide,” the doctor says in a low, patient voice, “because you are the one who will feed these birds. I can’t give you that responsibility unless you know everything I know. I would be lying to you otherwise, holding back an important truth. I can’t do that.” She purses her lips and shakes her head. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

  Looking from her to the bird, I know she is right. The bird has gone back to sleep, head slumped down. Just for a moment, I imagine a beautiful gray bird flying in a flock of brown sparrows, all of them chirping happily. But I push that thought away.

  “Show me how to feed him,” I say. “I’ll try my best to make him live.”

  The doctor nods.

  I put the bird in my right palm and pick up the syringe with my left hand. The bird opens his eyes but does not beg for food. He stays limp, except for his tiny feet scratching faintly against my palm. Through the warm, thin skin, I can feel his heartbeat. I open his mouth with my thumb and index finger, just as I had pried open the crow’s mouth, only being more careful because the grosbeak is so much smaller. The doctor shows me how to insert the syringe and pump in the food until the bird’s neck bulges out. Then I clean him as I did the sparrows, clean the nest, too, and put him back. Dr. Mizutani says nothing, but I know she thinks I am doing a good job, that I have made the right decision.

  * * *

  The crow squawks and hisses when I peel the bandages from his leg.

  “He’s coming along all right,” the doctor says, holding him with her leather gloves and examining his leg. “Last year, I had a black kite whose broken leg got infected. I taped him up and gave him antibiotics, but his leg shriveled up. It looked like a mummy’s leg—he could never use any part of it. I had to put that bird down. This crow looks much better.”

  To be worse than the crow the other bird must have looked pretty bad. The crow has been shedding or picking out his tailfeathers until only a few are left. While the doctor holds him, I tape his leg and then put a white envelope around his remaining tailfeathers so he cannot pick them out. He looks ridiculous—like a bird made of paper and sticks.

  “We’ll take off the tape next week and start working with his leg,” the doctor says. “He needs some stretching exercises to get that leg working again. But we can put him in an outdoor cage now. Maybe he’ll be happier there and won’t go on pulling out his own feathers.”

  Putting the crow back in the pet carrier, we take him down the hallway to the backyard. Though there are no fences between the two yards, anyone can see where her parents’ yard ends and hers begins. Theirs has hedges and clusters of low, groomed pines and dwarf yews. A flagstone path winds around the raised beds overflowing with pansies, spring mums, tulips. In the back, there is a little pond surrounded by yellow daffodils. Her yard is nothing like that. Her trees—maples, ash, rhododendrons, cedars—have never been groomed or trimmed. Instead of a lawn, she has wildflowers sprouting everywhere, and about ten birdfeeders, several birdbaths, and a few brush piles scattered around the place. Under the tallest maple tree in the back, there are two walk-in cages with their tops covered with a tarp. Each cage is at least half the size of my bedroom.

  We bring the crow into one of the cages and let him out of the carrier. The cage has many branches rigged up at different heights, but the crow stays on the ground, pecking at the grass, his head like a hammer going up and down. We fill the water dishes and bring him food: cut-up fruit, pieces of meat, cat food soaked in water.

  “I’m going to cut up one of those frozen rats for him,” the doctor says, “but only after you’re gone.” She winks. “He’s ready to tackle that. Crows are great scavengers in the wild.”

  We walk back to the clinic, where I feed the sparrows and the grosbeak again. The doctor shows me how to mix the food in a blender.

  “I have another blender, so you can have this one.” She begins to fill a big box with everything I might need—syringes, ice-cube trays, a little ice chest for carrying the food. “I’m going to drive you to school and back every day,” she says, “so you can bring the birds and feed them. For the first week, you’ll have to bring them to your classes and feed them every twenty minutes or half an hour. Will that be a problem?”

  I shake my head. I can sit in the back row of the classroom, the heating pads plugged into the wall. Whenever I have to, I will quietly get up to shoot the food down the birds’ throats.

  “My teachers won’t mind,” I say. It’s true, they won’t. Most of them will think I am doing a good thing. Though I have just stopped going to church, stopped being a Christian, I am glad to be going to Christian Girls’ Academy. At the public elementary school I attended until sixth grade, my teachers made me stand in the back for talking out of turn or failed me on tests because I forgot to put my name on top, even though I had a perfect score. They never allowed any of us to leave our chairs during class, unless we were really sick. Even then, we had to first raise our hand and ask. That was their idea of discipline. My teachers at Christian Girls’ Academy let me do almost anything because I am a good student. They don’t stress discipline all the time. The three words they use instead are freedom, respect, and love. We can act on our own free will, they tell us, so long as we respect God and love our neighbors. Except for the God part, that still sounds like a good idea to me.

  “Once the birds are a little bigger,” the doctor says, “you can take away the heating pad, and you can feed them once an hour.”

  “You don’t mind driving me to school?”

  “Of course not. I don’t expect you to take the train with birds in boxes. You’ll still save me a lot of time and work. It’s hard to feed these birds every half-hour while I’m trying to look at someone’s yapping dog.”

  I imagine arriving at school every morning in Dr. Mizutani’s red truck and meeting her outside the gate at the end of the day. None of my friends gets a ride to school. Even the twelfth graders don’t drive to school because only the teachers and the college girls are allowed to park their cars on campus.

  “Thank you,” I say, starting to smile. “This is going to be great.”

  * * *

  On the way back to my house, I ask Dr. Mizutani the question I’ve been waiting all morning to bring up.

  “Do you mind if I ask my mother to send her letters to your clinic instead of to the Katos’?”

  She takes her eyes off the road momentarily to look at my face.

  “My father doesn’t want me to hear from her,” I explain, “so she’s been sending her letters to the Katos’. It’s a secret—a lie, even. In a way, it’s wrong.”

  “I suppose it is,” she frowns. “But your father has no right to forbid you to see her, much less to hear from her.”

  “Will you help me hear from her, by accepting her letters?”

  Dr. Mizutani sighs. “What about the Katos?” she asks. “They don’t want to keep a secret for you and your mother?”

  “They don’t mind. But I don’t want to ask them because I’m not going to their church anymore. That’s why I came earlier today. I stopped going to church. I won’t be seeing much of the Katos from now on.”

  “Do they know that?”

  “Not yet. But they’ll know soon when I go to tell them. Maybe tonight.”

  “You decided to stop going to church because—”

  “Because I don’t believe in God.”

  We don’t speak for a while. In front of my house, the doctor parks the truck and turns off the engine, but neither of us moves.

  “Do you believe in God?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says. “I never have.”

  “Are you a Buddhist?”

  “No. I’m nothing.” She pauses and the
n smiles a little. “Maybe you’ll laugh, but watching birds fly is about the closest I ever come to belief. When I see a rare bird in the woods—a paradise flycatcher, say, which has a long black tail and blue rings around his eyes—I can almost believe in miracles. I feel blessed to be at the right place at the right time, just to catch a glimpse. But even common birds make me happy. I love the black spots on the tree sparrows’ cheeks and the white bars on their wings. Each bird is so beautiful and perfect. That makes me believe in something, though I’m not really sure what. I believe in everything and nothing, in a way.”

  I remember the waxwing flying out of our pet carrier in the woods, swirling up into the air and disappearing among the trees. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “You do? My father thinks I’m crazy when I say that birds are my religion. He and my mother are Buddhists. They believe they’ll join the ancestral spirits when they die. They’ll never tell me this, but I think they are sad because when they join the spirits, there won’t be anyone for them to watch over.” Though she tries to smile, a sigh escapes from her lips, and her eyes look sad. “There won’t be anyone in my father’s family after them—after me. We are the last three. I think that bothers my parents, especially my father, when he thinks of his own death.”

  “Are you ever afraid of dying?” I ask. “Do you wake up in the middle of the night worried about it?”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Sometimes. Not enough to want to believe in God or Buddha or the ancestral spirits. Besides, people are afraid of dying even if they believe. They are sad to see their friends die even if they believe that the friends are in heaven or with the ancestral spirits or whatever.”

  I nod. “I know. Both my mother and Mrs. Kato cried at their best friend Mrs. Uchida’s funeral though they believe she is with God. They cried almost as much as my friend Toru, Mrs. Uchida’s son, who doesn’t believe.”

  The doctor lays her hand on my arm lightly. “I’ll be more than happy to have your mother send her letters to my clinic.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that I’m disobeying my father and grandmother and lying to them?”

  “No, not really. I only wish you didn’t have to lie to them. But maybe that’s none of my business.”

  “Well,” I say, “I’m relieved you don’t think I’m a big liar or a bad person, somehow.”

  “Just promise me one thing,” she demands, looking into my eyes. “If you decide that you want to see your mother, you’ll tell me. You’ll ask for my help.”

  “I will,” I assure her, though there is nothing she can do to help me. Even Dr. Mizutani wouldn’t be able to get my father or my grandmother to relent. If she tried to talk to them, they would think of her as a pushy woman, the spoiled daughter of a rich family who should mind her own business. She wouldn’t get very far trying to persuade my mother, either. Of course, my mother, unlike Father and Grandmother, would understand the doctor’s good intentions; still, she would go on believing that I am better off with Father. How can she help it? She is right. She doesn’t want me to quit school at fifteen to work in Grandfather’s embroidery shop or to go to another house where I might spend my whole day—my whole life—stirring indigo vats, threading looms, or making purses out of loom waste.

  * * *

  Toru is already waiting in the car when I arrive at the parking lot at seven. We drive to a park near his house and sit on the swings. The Emperor’s Forest is only a few blocks away. The tops of pine trees rise above the apartment buildings that went up a few years ago while Toru was in Tokyo. I think of all the sparrows and thrushes that must be sleeping in those trees. The sky is completely dark. We have been talking about my baby birds.

  “I only have to feed them during the day,” I explain. “Except when they’re eating, they just sleep. The sparrows sleep piled on top of one another. I feel sorry for the grosbeak. He’s all alone in his little box.”

  “You were always so tender-hearted,” Toru says, smiling.

  “No, I wasn’t,” I protest, my cheeks feeling warm.

  “Sure you were. Remember how you made me bury my butterfly collection?”

  In spite of myself, I shiver at the memory of Toru—he must have been thirteen or fourteen—holding a large yellow butterfly in one hand and a long needle in the other. The butterfly squirmed for a second and then went limp. I had been thinking that it was sick and he was trying to make it well, giving it some medicine with the needle. When I realized what he had done, tears filled my eyes. I cried until he said, “I’m so sorry.” He showed me the big glass case of the butterflies he had collected, and the two of us went to the backyard to bury them.

  “Until that day, I really loved my collection,” he says.

  I shrug. “I don’t see much point in sticking pins into things.”

  “It wasn’t about right or wrong. I just didn’t want to see you cry. I liked you too much for that.”

  In silence, we ride the swings back and forth. Their blossoms gone, the ornamental cherry trees in the park are leafing out. The new leaves make lacy patterns against the white lamplight. Now and then, cars pass on the street in front of the park, their headlights snaking through the dark. Except for that, the neighborhood is completely quiet. When I was younger, on quiet nights like this I used to worry that the Second Coming had already happened and everyone but me had been lifted up to heaven. I would sneak downstairs to peek into my mother’s room. She never closed the door all the way, so I would see her sleeping under the covers and be relieved. It wouldn’t be so bad, I think now, if everyone else in the world had been lifted up to heaven or onto some spaceship, leaving the two of us here. I continue to move back and forth, dragging my feet now and then to keep from swinging out too far or too fast.

  “If I tell you a secret,” Toru asks suddenly, “will you keep it to yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  He stops his swing, takes a deep breath, then blurts out, “There’s a girl in Tokyo—I think about her a lot.”

  I pull hard at my chains, making them squeak. A sick, chilly feeling starts in the pit of my stomach and spreads fast, as if my heart were pumping ice water through me instead of warm blood. In a voice that I scarcely recognize—a tight, polite voice—I ask, “What is her name?”

  “Yoshimi,” he says. “Yoshimi Sonoda.”

  The way he stops after her name, he doesn’t have to say anything more. He just sits there as though he is watching the sound of her name float around, little glittering stars only he can see. After a while, he smiles at me and says, “In a way, you remind me of her. She is very kind and tender-hearted, but strong, too. And intelligent.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “She is studying to be a pianist and composer. Her family is well-to-do. After she finishes college next year, they might agree to send her to Europe to study, if they don’t decide to marry her off.”

  A little warmth comes back into my cold hands at the mention of her going to Europe or being married off. But I have never met this girl. I shouldn’t be so happy to hear about her going away. I clench my fists around the swing chains, wishing I could get up and walk out of the park—to be alone, at least, to feel miserable in private.

  “Yoshimi doesn’t know how much I care for her,” Toru continues. “She probably thinks we are just great friends. She doesn’t know—” He trails off, so I finish the sentence for him, trying to keep my voice level.

  “She doesn’t know that you are in love with her.”

  “That’s right.”

  Another car passes by, throwing a net of orange light onto the road.

  “You’re probably wondering why I haven’t told her.”

  I nod, although I wasn’t.

  “Just before I left Tokyo, I had a feeling that maybe she liked me, too, that she was waiting for me to say something, to ask her to be my girlfriend. But I couldn’t.”

  “Because you were leaving?”

  “Partly. But more than that, I didn’t want to stand in her way
. She already knows what she wants to do with her life. She’s going to be a famous pianist and composer. I don’t have any plans for the future. All I have are some goofy ideas about traveling around. Those ideas don’t go with how I feel about her. How can I travel all over the world alone and be with her at the same time? It’s ridiculous. Some days, I want to spend the rest of my life with Yoshimi, and other days, I daydream about being all alone in some desert. That’s how confused I am. So you can see why I couldn’t ask her to be my girlfriend. I hate being such a good-for-nothing, confused guy.” Toru pauses and sighs. “The last time we saw each other, I put on a happy act about how nice it was for us to be friends. I said we would write to each other, we would read the same books and talk on the phone about them. It wouldn’t matter if we never saw each other again, I claimed, because we would still be great friends. I feel sick when I think about the stuff I said to her, all of it dishonest.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I offer. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him slumped down in the swing, a big frown on his face. I want to put my arms around him and tell him that things will work out—that’s what he would do for me if I looked like that. But I don’t. My gesture would be false, just like the things he must have said to Yoshimi.

  “We do write letters and talk on the phone, but we don’t say anything serious. What you said last week about your mother’s letters reminded me of that.” He tries to smile. “Besides, you two have a lot in common. Most pretty girls I know are stuck-up, silly, or nice but boring. You and Yoshimi are different. You are the two most serious, most thoughtful girls I’ve ever met in my life.”

  “But I don’t think I’m so pretty,” I protest. I am not being modest. Sometimes in the mirror, I recognize my mother’s large, pretty eyes and long eyelashes, but they peer out at me from under my father’s very dark eyebrows. My face, unlike my mother’s smooth oval face, is sharp and thin like my father’s.

  “Yoshimi doesn’t, either. She laughed when I told her that she was beautiful.”

  I’m not laughing, I want to say, but I feel too sad to be making a flippant comment.