So We Look to the Sky

by Misumi Kubo

  “Nana’s sick in bed with the flu, so I’m going in by myself today.” Takumi stood up.

  “Okay, have a good day,” I said as I washed up. Rinsing off the plates with hot water, I found I was humming to myself. Mitchan came in carrying a tray stacked with dirty breakfast dishes.

  “Wow, your humming is majorly out of tune,” she said, laughing.

  It was then I heard the sound of something breaking outside the house.

  Mitchan and I looked at each other, then rushed to the front door. Outside, Takumi was crouching down with his hands covering his face.

  “What is it?” I reached down and shook his shoulder, but he brushed himself free of my hand and ran inside. I stared after him, watching him kick off his shoes and go hurtling up the stairs like a chased man. Mitchan came up beside me, holding a plastic convenience store bag that had been lying outside the door, and handed me a small lidded pot.

  The pot was the size of a large teacup, and the lid was cracked—maybe as a result of Takumi dropping it, or maybe it had been like that already. I’d seen this kind of pot many times before, when I’d visited families’ altars to light incense for the spirits of the babies that had died, both at the hospital I’d used to work in and here at the clinic. It was a small urn, designed to hold the cremated remains of babies and children. Realizing that, my hands began to tremble, and the cracked lid fell to the ground. Inside the urn was a small piece of folded paper with writing in smudgy black crayon. Written in a deliberately childish hand, the note said, The bones of yours and Anzu’s child. The urn also contained a couple of gray-white bones. Standing next to me, Mitchan peered inside the urn.

  “They’ve washed them clean and stuff, but I’m pretty sure they’re just chicken drumsticks.” She dropped the urn inside a vinyl bag and pulled it tight. “Honestly, people can be so fucking cruel. It’s a good thing it’s garbage day.” And with that, she went running off in the direction of the garbage collection spot in her sandals. Standing there outside the house, I felt something cold and wet land on my face. I looked up to see snow, half mixed with rain, falling from the thick, overhanging layer of cloud. From that day on, Takumi stopped coming out of his room again.

  In the supermarket, even when I was supposed to be shopping for stuff to make food for the patients, my eyes would always land on the ingredients for Takumi’s favorites. There I’d be, thinking about making gyoza dumplings with plenty of garlic or burgers with slivers of burdock root inside, and then I’d come back to earth and remember I didn’t have time to be rustling up such fancy things when the clinic had been chockablock for weeks. Instead, I’d take out the list Mitchan had given me and check it again.

  Takumi hadn’t just stopped leaving his room—he’d more or less stopped eating, too. Always wearing the same tracksuit, the only times he would stumble dizzily out of his room were to use the bathroom or to get a drink, and then he’d always disappear back inside immediately. When I glanced at him, I could see his eyes glinting sharply beneath his overgrown bangs. Now, when Mitchan barged in unannounced to vacuum his room, he stayed curled up on his futon, not moving an inch. Observing this, Mitchan had made the most of one of Takumi’s bathroom trips to slip inside his room and root out all the scissors and cutters in there, which she concealed in her apron pocket.

  “You just never know what might happen,” she said to me gravely when she came downstairs. Her eyes weren’t smiling.

  Even when I was supposed to be concentrating on helping women give birth, that crayon-scrawled note and the little urn where it had been hidden would sometimes flash into my mind, and I’d find myself thinking about the person, whoever it was, who had made such elaborate efforts to show their malice. Couldn’t they turn that energy toward doing something positive in their own life? I would think to myself. In the evening Mitchan would send me to the supermarket, saying it was important for me to get out of the house at least once a day.

  As I was traipsing down the path, I heard a bicycle bell in front of me. I looked up to see Dr. Liu, wearing a heavy-looking black coat. He had stopped his bike in front of me.

  “You look like a ghost,” he announced loudly. “And you forgot to come and pick up your medicine. If you’re heading to the station, come by on your way home.”

  He rode off without waiting for a reply, his gray scarf flapping in the wind.

  Not long after, I was making my way up his flight of stairs. With my backpack full of groceries and a tote bag over my shoulder with a bunch of scallions poking out from the top, I found myself struggling to catch my breath. I opened the door to the pharmacy, and Dr. Liu stuck his head out from the back room.

  “I’ll get you some tea and something sweet. Just sit yourself down there for a moment.”

  It was pleasantly warm inside, and though I worried about what the temperature would do to the meat and fish I was carrying, I set the groceries down on the floor. A violin-and-piano piece was playing at low volume on the stereo. I removed my coat, sat down on the chair, and rested my head back against the wall.

  I rarely watch television or turn on the radio. For years, I’d spent all my time listening to the moaning of mothers and the wailing of newborn babies. I stared at the speakers on the shelves in front of me, pretty fancy looking for a Chinese pharmacy, and thought suddenly of my dad. The year I’d started school, my dad had bought an enormous set of speakers about as tall as I was at the time, and he got into a huge fight with my mom about it. As it turned out, he’d spent nearly his entire bonus on those speakers.

  My dad would play all kinds of things—Nat King Cole, Sergio Mendes, Andy Williams, Claude Debussy, folk music from far-flung countries—and ask me, “What about this one?”

  Whenever I replied that I didn’t really like it that much, he’d look really sad.

  “It’s nice music, no? It’s a lullaby by Ma Sicong.” Dr. Liu took a seat opposite me. “He was a wonderfully talented composer, but his scores and records were all burned during the Cultural Revolution.” Saying this, Dr. Liu gestured to the tea and cookies arranged on a small glass plate he’d placed in front of me. “My father had a tough time back then.”

  “In the Cultural Revolution?”

  “Yes. He was a doctor of Western medicine, you see, but he was suddenly ordered to study Eastern medicine, in Beijing.”

  “So the Cultural Revolution really did happen.”

  “That’s right. It all really happened.” Dr. Liu spoke quietly, his eyes cast down. “Then, while my father was away in Beijing, my mother got ill and died.”

  “Oh, dear . . .”

  “But not everything that starts out bad stays that way forever. It was through watching my father that I decided also to study medicine. Although of course in my case, the loyal son eventually ended up as the prodigal one. So things that start out well don’t stay that way forever, either.” Dr. Liu grinned, flashing me his white teeth. Then he took a deep breath and began intoning in a low voice, as if he was reciting a magic spell, “If you can’t shake yourself free of a bad thing, then stay holding onto it. One day you’ll find it suddenly flipping, like a counter in that game Othello. Some day or other, that will happen. It will happen with what your son is dealing with, too. Try to think of it as something like this.” As he spoke, Dr. Liu snapped his fingers. “No smaller, no bigger than that. Something like—like a pollen-carrying bee brushing up against a flower.”

  I averted my gaze from Dr. Liu, who was seeking out my eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, “If I could really feel like that, it would be great.”

  Just then my cell phone began to vibrate. It was Mitchan, calling to tell me that two of our women had gone into labor and were currently heading for the clinic.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come right away.”

  I hung up, zipped Dr. Liu’s medicine into my backpack, and hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders. Somehow, as if automatically, I felt power flowing into my solar plexus.

  “You look different, your eyes look diffe
rent all of a sudden,” Dr. Liu remarked. “It’s good to have that, when you’re working. But you have to let that go sometimes.” Dr. Liu deftly wrapped up the cookies in a paper napkin, and tucked them into my coat pocket. “From time to time, you should drink good tea and listen to music,” he said and, reaching out a slender finger, touched the scar on my right cheek. Then he added, “With me.”

  I ran back to the house to find Mitchan on the verge of tears.

  “Doctor, they’re both really close!”

  I crammed the food I’d bought into the fridge and bolted up the stairs to get changed. The meal Mitchan had prepared for lunch lay untouched in the hall, so I opened the door to Takumi’s room. The duvet had been thrown back to reveal the rumpled sheet underneath. I touched it with my hand and found it cold. The down jacket he always wore in winter was still hanging on the wall.

  “Doctor!” I heard Mitchan calling from downstairs.

  Both women would most likely give birth in two or three hours. There was no way I could leave them and go off in search of Takumi. I waited until there was a gap between contractions, then snuck off to where Mitchan wouldn’t hear me and tried calling Ryota at home, but nobody picked up, and the phone just kept on ringing. Most likely he was at work. I thought of calling Miss Nomura, then thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to give a heavily pregnant woman extra cause for concern. I even thought of calling Takumi’s dad, but after deliberating for a while, abandoned that plan, too.

  For the moment, I thought, I’d just concentrate on making sure these two women gave birth safely. I told myself that he wasn’t the kind of kid to go and kill himself. I looked in on the two women in turn, the one whose birth Mitchan was supervising and the one I was overseeing. It seemed very probable they’d give birth around exactly the same time. I led Mitchan into the hall.

  “You’re okay to do this by yourself, right?”

  Mitchan gave a little nod, but when her hand gripped my arm it was trembling.

  I went back into the room where my patient, Mrs. Ohashi, was. In between contractions, I spoke with her to try and relax her. If you could get a woman giving birth to smile, things generally went better. We talked about the weather the previous day, the nice bakery near the station, and what her husband did for a living. In breaks between that intensely mundane conversation, the baby was making its way down the birth canal.

  As she winced with pain, Mrs. Ohashi turned to me and asked, “Why did you decide to become a midwife?”

  “When I was a kid, I visited the countryside where my dad had grown up and watched a cow giving birth.”

  I pictured the scene as I spoke. It was the house owned by one of our relatives, who kept cows. My mom was nagging at me, trying to get me to go home, but I refused to leave until the calf was born. I stayed there, crouched down and clutching at the iron railings, my eyes fixed on the scene. I remembered the calf’s foreleg thrusting its way out of the mother’s body, and the steam coming off the calf’s body, glistening and moist with amniotic fluid.

  Somehow, even at that age, I’d been spellbound. It seemed so different from anything I’d experienced in lessons or on TV. It was something that was made of life itself. I remembered the first time I’d watched a woman giving birth, how fascinated I’d been by the warmth of the amniotic fluid that came gushing out of her body. Human lives that had begun in water so warm, so soft, finally coming out into the world. I wanted to be in the place where that was happening, always. Even if it meant not sleeping, missing meals, not making money, I wanted to be where the births were.

  “You’re amazing, though! Doing this job, and having a child of your own,” Mrs. Ohashi said, her face scrunched up in agony. I had no way of telling her that my own child had run out of the house and was now missing as we spoke.

  Mrs. Ohashi finally gave birth at around 11 p.m. When I looked into the next room, I saw that Mitchan’s face looked even more rigid with fear than the face of the woman in labor.

  I went up by her side and whispered in her ear, “I’ll swap in for a bit, if you like. You go and take a rest.”

  When I spoke to Mrs. Yamada, her expression softened. Mitchan opened the screen door softly and went out the room, her eyes lingering on Mrs. Yamada. When I went into the kitchen to find her a little while later, I saw her eyes were red and puffy.

  “What’s wrong, Mitchan?”

  “I can’t do it the way you do,” she sniveled. “Whatever I say just makes her more nervous.”

  “Everyone’s been down that road, Mitchan. Me included.”

  “I just get so frightened.”

  “So is everyone. I still get frightened, would you believe. I still pray inside, for it to go okay.”

  Suddenly, a place popped into my mind. For some reason, I felt sure Takumi would be there.

  “Mitchan, I’m here, okay. But today I want you to do this one by yourself. Call me only if you absolutely need me.”

  Mitchan stared at me for a few seconds with swollen eyes. She moved over to the kitchen sink, splashed her face with water, dried it off with a handkerchief, slapped her cheeks, then made off toward the back room.

  I could tell from the noise of Mrs. Yamada’s screams, which were getting louder and louder, that the awaited moment wasn’t far off. I could hear Mitchan’s words of encouragement, too. Around the time a new day began, I finally heard the sound of a baby crying. I opened the screen door to see Mitchan, drenched in sweat, getting ready to cut the umbilical cord. I put my hands on her shoulders from behind, and she turned around, startled.

  “I totally missed you coming in!”

  “You see, you can do it. All by yourself.”

  “Please don’t make me cry.” Mitchan looked at me desperately. “I’m feeling close enough as it is. I want to be able to see what I’m doing.”

  I made sure everything was okay with Mrs. Yamada and her newborn baby, then entrusted the two new mothers to Mitchan and made to leave the house.

  By the door, I whispered to Mitchan, “Takumi’s disappeared.”

  “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.” Mitchan looked as if she was going to cry again. I put on my backpack, into which I’d stuffed Takumi’s down jacket, a flashlight, and a flask containing hot green tea, and set off down the pitch-black bicycle path.

  When Takumi had been small, he’d often had a high temperature. There had been several times when, like today, I’d had to put off seeing to him because I was too busy with the births. Once I was done, I’d put Takumi, drowsy with fever, on my back and run down the road to the emergency pediatric ward. I may have delivered babies as a profession, but when it came to raising kids I was a total amateur. I pretended I knew what I was doing—that as long as Takumi grew up following my example, things would turn out okay, but underneath all that, I was a ball of worry. If I were being honest, I’d have to admit that when Takumi’s dad left, and later when those photos of Takumi got out on the net, I’d felt at a complete loss and had taken refuge in the busyness of my work to get through. My skills and my career as a midwife weren’t the slightest help in knowing how to deal with that kind of stuff. I’d been a mother for fifteen years, and I was just as uncertain about the choices I should make as ever before.

  I pedaled through the center of our small town, now utterly deserted, then raced along the narrow road running by the side of the pear orchards. The closer I got to the mountains, the fewer streetlights there were and the chillier it felt. I parked my bike by the bottom of the flight of stone steps. The moon was bright, but no sooner had I stopped than it disappeared behind a cloud. I got out the flashlight from my backpack and shone it at my feet so I could see where I was going as I climbed the steps.

  When I had dipped heavily into my savings so I could start up the maternity clinic, which I hoped would enable me and Takumi to get by, I had felt every single day as if the heaviness of the responsibility of birthing children was crushing me. The owner of the clinic I’d worked in previously, who’d been so good to me in so many ways and was a
s happy for me as if the clinic I was setting up were her own, passed away right before it opened. It felt as if I were being thrown into a raging sea in the middle of the night, with only Takumi for company.

  Whenever I’d had any spare time back then, I would come to this shrine and pray. I prayed for all the children I’d delivered so far, for the ones I hadn’t been able to deliver, for the ones who’d died right there in my hands, and for the ones I was going to deliver from now on. I used to go flying up this flight of steps in a single spurt, but now I came to a halt less than halfway up, gasping for breath. When at last I made it to the top, I passed under the shrine’s red torii gate and slowly moved the flashlight around, lighting up the grounds. Gusts of wind stirred the beam of light shining on the leaves of the trees, distorting it into eerie shapes. One of the dried leaves at my feet flew up and hit me in the face. There was a tremulous sound coming from somewhere, like the call of a mountain bird or the groans of some huge creature. My earlobes and my fingertips were throbbing with cold. I walked slowly around the grounds until my flashlight hit upon a familiar pair of green sneakers, over by the hut where people purified their hands and mouths with water. I drew closer to find Takumi sitting on the ground, his head buried between his knees.

  I went up to him silently, took his down jacket out of my backpack, and draped it over his shoulders. Squinting in the glare of the flashlight, Takumi slowly raised his head. Dirt and dust had stuck to his tear-stained face, making it look very dark. He stared at me for a while with glazed eyes, as he had done when he was feverish, then said, “Mom.”

  “You’ll scare the babies if you cry that loud.”

  “It’s okay. Only the gods are listening here.”

  Then Takumi’s face began to crumple, and his mouth gaped open. For a second there was a gasp of air, and then his voice rang out across the mountain, like his throat was splitting open. I walked away from him, stood in front of the main building, and put my hands together in prayer. After a while, I began sensing eyes on me, and when I lifted my head to look I saw the moon poking its round silver face from between a gap in the clouds. I stayed there with my hands clasped in prayer until Takumi stopped crying.