One Bird

by Kyoko Mori

  Take good care of yourself. Please write soon. I miss you.

  Your mother, Chie

  Reading the letter the first time, I am relieved that my mother sounds much less upset than I expected. But as I read it twice, three times, I am not so sure. How do I know that what she says is what she really feels? Maybe she is very upset but is not telling me, pretending to be calm and reasonable, as she often does. Besides, even if she were sincere, I don’t know what she means by wishing me happiness more than faith. If she really believed in God, if she thought believing in Jesus was the only righteous way to live and go to heaven, shouldn’t she want me to have faith more than happiness? After all, Jesus always told the disciples that those who believe in him will be persecuted, poor, or unhappy in this life. Shouldn’t my mother want me to be unhappy and faithful?

  Folding the letter, I put it away in my desk drawer. Words are cheap. It’s easy for Mother to wish in a letter for my happiness. If she really thinks that I shouldn’t be alone in my time of doubt, why doesn’t she demand to see me? If I were sick and dying, surely she would ask my father to make an exception, to let her see me. Isn’t my loss of faith just as serious as being sick—at least for her, who still believes? Isn’t that a reason for her to talk to me in person? Instead, all she says is that I should visit Mrs. Kato, as though visiting one or another were the same thing.

  On the windowsill, the three sparrows are crying out for food. I get up to feed them with the syringe and then pick them off the sill with my hands. When all three are inside the carrier, I take out the grosbeak, pry open his beak, and pump in the food that keeps him alive against his intentions.

  * * *

  In the evening, sitting in the car with Toru, I keep thinking about his mother. She didn’t lose her faith even while she was dying and leaving behind her children. Maybe her faith gave comfort to my mother and Mrs. Kato, but to me, her believing is the saddest part of it all. She died believing in a kind God who didn’t even exist.

  The raindrops collect on the windshield and then trail down like silver tears. We are in the park near Toru’s house, the same place as last week and the week before. The rain keeps us from getting out this time. The small space inside the car is like the inside of a tent in a storm, dry and safe. I start thinking about all those desert island questions. If you were going to be shipwrecked on a desert island, which one book would you bring, which one record would you want to hear over and over for the rest of your life, which one person would you want to live with? Maybe Toru would be that one person for me, but I know I wouldn’t be for him. He would choose Yoshimi Sonoda. If she couldn’t be with him, he might even ask for his brother before me. But that’s all right, I tell myself. If I could have any wish granted in the world, it might be to have Toru talk about me the way he does about Yoshimi. But I am determined to get over feeling that way about him so I can still be his best friend—the person he might choose after Yoshimi, after his brother. Those desert-island questions are stupid anyway. In real life, most people would bring a how-to book about building tools and shelters rather than the Bible, or the Tale of Genji, or the complete Shakespeare, or whatever they say. Most people would not want to spend the rest of their lives seeing only one other person, either. Given the choice between that and being completely alone, people might even choose the latter.

  “I got a letter from Yoshimi,” Toru says, staring into the windshield.

  “What does she say?” I ask.

  “She told me that one of our friends, Michio, is going to paint houses this summer. He wants a partner.”

  In silence, I watch the raindrops trailing off.

  “Yoshimi thought I should write to Michio or call him and ask him if I could be his partner. I can probably get a place to stay for the summer.”

  “That’s good,” I manage, sounding blank and stupid. “Will you go?”

  “I don’t know.” He turns sideways in his seat to face me. “I can’t decide what she means by inviting me. Is she telling me to work with Michio so I can spend the summer in Tokyo and we can see each other? Or is she just thinking that I must need a job?”

  “She must want to see you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m sure she loves you. How can she not?” My voice trails off weakly, and suddenly there is absolute silence in the car. In the dark, small space, we can almost hear each other breathing. Toru is looking straight at me. Something comes into his eyes—an understanding, a kindness, but I’m not sure. I might be imagining it.

  “Megumi,” he says, his voice softer than usual. He leans forward a little, as if to touch me.

  I don’t let him. I pull back toward the passenger’s door and shrug, almost knocking my shoulder against the window. “Look at it this way,” I say in the chattiest, most reasonable voice I can manage. “You are an intelligent and considerate person. You are fun to talk to, and thoughtful. Most of the girls in my class would have the biggest crush on you. I would, too, if we hadn’t grown up together. So why would Yoshimi be different? You said she is an intelligent girl. Well, she is bound to see your good points.”

  Toru tilts his head and smiles. The concerned look is gone from his eyes.

  “Anyway,” I add, talking fast and businesslike, “it doesn’t matter if she is just telling you about the job out of friendly concern. Once you are in Tokyo, you’ll be able to see her and decide for yourself how she really feels.” Taking a deep breath, I smile—feeling terrible, but better in a way, too. As my mother taught me a long time ago, if you keep doing the right thing even if you don’t really feel like it, you’ll soon begin to feel right about it, too. When Kiyoshi and I used to fight, my mother convinced me to apologize to him even if I was still mad, even if I thought the fight was as much his fault as mine. I would grit my teeth and say, “Listen, I’m sorry,” and then, seeing the relieved look in his eyes, I would feel genuinely forgiving. What I’m doing now is no different.

  “You should go,” I tell Toru. “You know she wants to see you.”

  “But I don’t know what I should do if she does like me. I still don’t want to stand in her way. I haven’t given up my dream of traveling around the world by myself. So I might not tell her how I feel after all.”

  I shrug. “Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. You can decide when the time comes. After spending the summer with her, you’ll have a clearer idea. No matter how it turns out, it would be better than wondering about her from far away.”

  He nods slowly. “I guess you are right,” he says. “I should give Michio a call.”

  “If you don’t,” I continue, “you will always wonder what might have happened if you had called him.” I smile encouragingly, in spite of the cold, sinking feeling in my chest. I try not to think of the summer I have been envisioning—the two of us walking on the beach at night, talking and laughing while the waves crash in.

  * * *

  When we drive by the church on our way up the hill, I notice the light on at the rectory. Keiko and Kiyoshi would not be sitting in the playground, in the rain. Maybe she is inside the rectory, drinking tea with his family and asking Pastor Kato questions about the things he said at the Bible study meeting. I picture her in a white blouse and a dark skirt, with a lacy cardigan buttoned up to her throat. She would smile in such a pretty and earnest way at the pastor. When she laughs, she would cover her mouth delicately with her hand so that even Mrs. Kato would think what a nice girl she is.

  Toru lets me off a block away from my house, and I walk back, holding my umbrella above my head. At the Yamasakis’ house, Keiko’s window is dark, so I know she must still be at church. I’m angry at her, especially when I remember the self-righteous way she berated me last week after not having talked to me for two years, but suddenly, as the cold wind makes my umbrella nearly sway out of my hand, I miss her, too. I miss the days when she and her older sisters played hide-and-seek with me in their house—Keiko and me hiding together in the dark oak cabinets and holding our breath. Thei
r mother always gave us snacks at precisely three o’clock in the afternoon. Every fall, Mrs. Yamasaki’s family sent a box of huge pink apples from their farm in northern Japan. They were sweet, juicy apples—nothing like the hard Red Delicious and sour green Granny Smiths we bought at the store. Keiko and I ate the cold, quartered apple slices and drank her favorite drink, lemon tea with just a touch of sugar. Had we continued to be friends, we might have gone to the movies downtown and then stopped for tea afterward—she would have sat bolt upright, curling her fingers just-so around the cup, in that delicate way of hers. It all could have been so different.

  In our house, my grandmother is working in the kitchen and my father is away. Because she believes that I have been to church, she does not come out to greet me as I take off my wet shoes in the foyer. Even when I go into the kitchen to say hello, she says nothing; pretending that I am just a speck of dust or an insect, something unworthy of her attention, she continues to wash the wineglasses in the sink. Once a week, she takes all the unused wineglasses out of the cabinets and washes them because she believes that dust gets inside the cabinets. Rinsing them one by one, she stacks them next to the sink; they look like an outcropping of glaciers.

  “Can I help you dry them?” I ask, standing behind her. If I tried to be kind to her, maybe I would start feeling that way, at least a little.

  She looks at me for a brief second and then turns her back. “No,” she says.

  “It would be no trouble,” I offer.

  “You don’t dry them the right way,” she pronounces.

  “Maybe you could show me how.”

  She shakes her head. “I want you to go upstairs and take off your wet clothes and hang them up. You must have some studying to do—some homework you didn’t finish because you spent your Sunday going to church and helping that spinster doctor up the hill.”

  What more can I do? I know Grandmother is mad at me for being gone all day, never spending time with her. She must think it’s insincere of me to come back late and offer to help her with the dishes, as if I really cared. Maybe she is right—I don’t care about her. But that isn’t my fault. I wouldn’t be trying to avoid her all the time if she were nicer to me.

  I turn around and march up to my room. My father is in Hiroshima again. He has not come back even once in the last week. More and more, I think Dr. Mizutani is right. It isn’t fair that my mother had to give me up, that she had to go so far away. If my father was going to leave our house and get Grandmother to care for me, he could have left in the first place. My mother and I could have stayed here, and he could have given us money, just as he gives Grandmother now.

  My grandmother is wrong about one thing—I had finished all my homework on Friday night. Closing the door behind me and turning on the light, I change into my pajamas. While I’m pulling my pajama top over my head, a rustling noise starts up in the corner, where the birds are in their pet carriers. It goes on a few seconds, stops, and then begins again—a dry, scratching sound as though some animal were trying to dig through paper. I finish changing and go to the corner to see.

  Inside their carrier, the three sparrows are sleeping, lined up side by side on a branch, their beaks tucked under their wings. It still amazes me how they can sleep perched like that and not fall off. One sparrow opens his eyes for a second and then shuts them again. The rustling noise starts up again.

  Afraid to look, I bring the other pet carrier over to my desk and sit down first. I imagine a disaster—the grosbeak flapping around in agony, trying to dig his way through the plastic, or worse still, some other animal, maybe a mouse or a rat, eating his bloody carcass. My heart beating hard, I look in.

  The berry box is empty. The bird is perched on the box’s edge, his two feet grasping the cardboard. While I watch, he turns his head and slowly runs his beak through his wings. He is preening his feathers, combing them with his beak till every feather and down is aligned exactly the way he wants it. Only then does he turn his head to look forward again, shifting his weight a little. He doesn’t want to stay still. Raising his right foot, he leans sideways to scratch his head with his toes; losing his balance, he falls back into the nest. Immediately he crawls back out, his claws digging furiously through the tissue paper. Perched again on the rim of the nest, he leans on his right leg and stretches his left leg backward. His left wing fans out gradually till every feather is spread out. He holds the stretch for a few seconds and brings the left leg forward again. The wing folds up as neatly as a fan. Looking straight at me with his brown eyes, he shakes, ruffles his feathers, and peeps just once.

  I am sitting in front of the pet carrier with my mouth wide open. How do I thank a bird for leaving the nest, for not giving up and dying? The first thing tomorrow, I will give him more branches to perch on, scatter seeds and berries in the cage for him to peck at. I watch him for another minute—my grosbeak perched on the nest he has just left, getting ready to sleep on his feet. “Go to sleep,” I say to him as I rise to turn off the lights. For just a moment in the dark, with wild birds sleeping only a few feet away from me, I believe that in spite of everything I am happier than I have ever been.

  Chapter 9

  WOODEN DOLLS

  In my dream, I am sitting alone in a big drafty house, waiting for my family to arrive. My mother and father, Grandfather Kurihara, and Grandmother Shimizu have all promised to come, but everybody is late. The house is cold. I have been waiting for a long time.

  The room is empty except for a big cabinet in the corner. Through its glass door, I can see the four thumb-size dolls arranged in a row in front of a gray ceramic bowl. Mrs. Uchida, I remember, had a doll her mother had made from scraps of old kimono and her own hair, which she had cut after her husband’s death. Mrs. Uchida kept that doll in a glass case with two tiny ceramic bowls—one holding water and the other some grains of rice—because that was how her mother had instructed her to keep the doll, feeding its spirit. Kiyoshi, Takashi, and I used to dare each other to sit alone in the room with the doll. I was the only one who was never afraid, though none of us had reason to be. Unlike Mrs. Uchida’s mother, we were Christians. We didn’t believe that dolls had spirits.

  Standing in front of the cabinet, I realize that the four shrunken figures, though they look nothing like them, are my mother, father, Grandfather Kurihara, and Grandmother Shimizu. They have agreed to be turned into dolls so that I will be spared. The bowl in the back does not contain grains of rice. It holds Grandmother Kurihara’s ashes, the only thing left of her.

  You didn’t have to do this, I say to my family through the glass door. You are stuck inside a cabinet together, and you never even liked one another.

  The dolls say nothing back to me. Their faces have sad expressions permanently carved in wood. The evil spirit they’ve bargained with has no intention of keeping its promise. Soon it will find me here. I must make my escape now. Picking up my coat from the floor, I go out the rickety front door. Outside, the ground is shaking from an earthquake. I step carefully, paying attention to the cracks that keep forming all around me.

  * * *

  When I wake up, my face is wet with tears even though I don’t remember crying in the dream. The windows are gray with early light. I remember what day it is—the first Sunday in May. Today, my grandfather is holding a small gathering at his house to commemorate the third anniversary of Grandmother Kurihara’s death. My mother must be up already, working in the dark and drafty kitchen of their house, preparing tea, rice balls, dumpling soup. I picture her tired face. While steam rises from the kettles on the stove, Mother would roll out a thin floury skin on the cutting board, spread a spoonful of minced herbs and meat, wrap and seal each dumpling with her strong fingers, as carefully as she would an important letter. Thinking about her makes me so lonely.

  Grandmother Kurihara has been gone for three years already. The last time I saw her, almost four years ago, I had no idea that I would never see her again. Both of my grandparents were in good health. My mother and I
spent our August with them, just as we had done every year. The only thing different about that summer was me—I was irritable with Grandmother even though she was the same as always. All her life, Grandmother Kurihara was a great worrier. Sometimes in the middle of dinner she would turn to my mother or me and insist, “You are getting too thin. Eat more.” If we talked to her on the phone and our voices sounded even the tiniest bit wrong, she would ask, “Are you catching a cold? You sound like your throat is sore.” Half the time it was just a bad phone connection. Until that last year, my mother and I used to laugh about Grandmother’s unnecessary worrying; I never thought much about it.

  That August, for the first time, I kept snapping at Grandmother. No matter how often I reminded myself that she meant well, I couldn’t help shooting her mean looks or ignoring her when she spoke to me. One night near the end of the visit, Grandmother told me to put on a sweater because it was cold in their old house. She reminded me at least ten times, but I refused to get one; shivering from the cold, I continued to read my book. Finally, Grandmother brought her quilted jacket and handed it to me. I didn’t accept it. Worse than that, I tossed it clear across the room and screamed at her. “I don’t want a jacket. It’s August. I’m not cold. I hate your ugly jacket. Why can’t you leave me alone?” Grandmother stared at me, her whole face crushed into a big, hurt frown. She didn’t say anything. The next moment, even though I was the one who had hurt her, I got up and ran out of the room, pretending that the whole thing was Grandmother’s fault. I went to bed in a great sulk. When I apologized in the morning, Grandmother said, “No, you don’t have to apologize. I shouldn’t have nagged you.” Her voice was very quiet, and her eyes looked almost as if she were afraid of me or my temper.