“Do you suppose they’re here in winter, too?”
“They’re here year-round, but in winter their numbers decline. In the colder months they sometimes fly to Okinawa. They leave but come back.” He paused. “This vantage point is incredible.”
“I’m glad you like it.”
She led him to the shade of a large tree out of sight of the shrine, to a place presumably no longer on its grounds. They laid out a plastic sheet where they could sit and eat. She handed him a bento and took one for herself. She had made small portions of grilled chicken and sliced omelet, shredded cabbage and tomato, macaroni salad, two small onigiri, and a single slice of orange. Between them she placed their bottled teas.
Gazing over the landscape while they ate, she laughed unexpectedly; smiling at her, he asked what was funny.
“I came here once with Kōichi. But we didn’t make it to the top. It was raining and he only had geta on his feet. You can imagine how hard it would be to climb this hill in the rain wearing wooden sandals.” She paused. “This is the kind of place he and Riku might have come to, though. Just the two of them.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I guess he had a hard time being with me.”
They were quiet for a moment. “Even when Riku wasn’t around?” Sedge asked.
“When he and I were at home together, Riku was usually there, too. It was only at night that we were ever really alone. When we went to bed, I mean.”
Sedge tried to think of what to say—to connect her husband’s difficulty being alone with her to their usually being alone only in bed—but in the end he didn’t need to.
She continued: “He was never able to satisfy me was why, I think. When we went to bed, he was usually too drunk to do anything but collapse beside me and fall sleep. And he was too selfish to spend just one night a week not drinking.” She shook her head, and Sedge wondered if she regretted the life she’d wasted with him. “Then he found your wife, which I must admit amazes me. One thing that makes me feel less bad about him leaving is that I know he won’t satisfy her, either. Maybe you’ve noticed that I never call her his lover. It’s not just to spare you. I’m sure it would be a misnomer.” She grew more serious. “But maybe he’s different with other women, and that’s why he runs off with them.”
This news was not unwelcome, but it made Nozomi’s disappearance even more difficult to understand. Why would she run away with someone who drank as much as Mariko said, and couldn’t—or could only rarely—satisfy her physically?
“Riku swears he’ll kill him if he comes back to us.”
“Do you really think he would?”
“It’s hard to know. Riku hasn’t learned how to control his emotions. Their reuniting isn’t something I want to witness.”
An invisible passage through the air seemed to connect the river in the distance with the rice fields surrounding their hilltop. Several herons flew between them as Sedge and Mariko finished their bentos.
“Do you expect your wife to come back?” she asked him.
“It doesn’t matter to me anymore,” he said, only half-sure of what he was saying. Watching the herons he’d been tracking grow smaller, he added: “It’s hard to believe she could have severed her connections to everyone. No matter how much she might have wanted to get away, to put her life here behind her—it doesn’t make sense.”
“You didn’t get drunk every night, did you?”
“No,” he said. “We never had issues being alone.”
She laughed lightly, uncomfortably. “Lately Riku has become curious about sex. It’s not something I was prepared for. I’ve only been a mother—a stepmother, I mean—for five years.”
“He’s sixteen; it’s natural. But how do you know?”
Although she’d raised the subject, she hesitated to explain. Her hesitancy made him wonder if Riku’s sexual interest involved her.
“I recently bought him a membership to Yūyūkan, the baths near our house,” she said. “There was a reason for that.” Last month, she explained, when she was soaking in the bath at home, Riku started passing back and forth in front of the glass-paneled door. And though the glass is clouded, one can detect movement through it, and one can see the colors of a person’s skin and hair. Soon after this started, she discovered his semen on the shower floor two days in a row. There was no question in her mind that he’d meant for her to. And once, after Sedge had come over to teach her English, Riku tried to get in bed with her, saying a centipede had crawled into his futon and he was afraid to sleep there. When she made him leave, he had an erection. “There was no missing it because he stood staring at it for several seconds. I told him that if he ever did that again he’d have to find somewhere else to live. He quietly left, but a moment later the front door opened and slammed shut, and I knew he went into the kura to bash whatever he could find there. I thought he learned his lesson because he’s been better behaved the last few weeks.”
“That’s a terrible situation for you to be in,” Sedge said angrily. He was upset but somehow unsurprised by what she’d told him.
Tears started to collect on her cheeks. “It’s not that I mind him becoming a man,” she said. “He nearly is one already.”
“But it’s not normal to direct one’s sexual urges towards one’s stepmother,” Sedge quickly said.
“I just wish I hadn’t had him foisted onto me. Kōichi guessed right that if he abandoned Riku, I’d take care of him. All I ever wanted was a normal marriage. A man to say he loved me once or twice a year, a man who wanted to satisfy me if only just occasionally.”
They were the saddest words he’d heard her say. “Is that all you really want? You don’t feel you deserve more?”
“Deserve more? But that would mean I don’t appreciate all I already have. And I don’t want to be that kind of person.”
He put his hand on hers, and she leaned into him, her weight knocking them both to the plastic sheet. Their tea bottles spilled and rolled down the hill as she steered him on top of her, and in confusion he positioned himself to protect her from a cascade of leaves and branches that never came.
His eyes stayed open to take her in as she pressed her mouth against his and her hands shot up and down his arms and shoulders. She forced them under his weight to his chest then back around to squeeze his buttocks. Her hands as they worked over him brought him dizzily into her world, here on a wooded hill, while below them herons filled the distance between the water-filled rice fields and the blue rippling sea.
She sat up to undress, and when she had unbuttoned the top half of her sundress, she hurried it down before grabbing his belt and undoing it. He stopped her momentarily, because even with her passion unleashed he didn’t want them to race through this moment.
The scars from rescuing herons that she had told him about stood out raised and pink on her skin—two navel-like puckerings between her stomach and ribs, a slash beneath a breast, a furrow high on one thigh—and she fell toward him, preventing him from gazing at them longer.
They hadn’t fully undressed before he found his way inside her. She came so quickly it was almost impossible to think her husband had been unable to satisfy her.
He waited for Mariko to finish convulsing before pulling out of her. When only a small stream spilled forth from him she lunged toward him again, still hungry to give everything of herself. Her vigorousness surprised him, and he wondered if her husband had taught her to be this way, that she had to work so hard to elicit a response. He drew her closer so there was intimacy instead of only the act itself.
He was struck by how unlikely this moment was. And yet there was an inevitability to it, too. And a desperation that propelled it. Both of them were lonely and needed someone who understood that hollowing-out which being abandoned had made them suffer. He knew that what they were doing was healing to them both.
Afterward, as they lay in silence, he didn’t feel they had made love at all, though his feelings for her had come to approximate that.
Her hand traced a circle on his ribs. “We should go back in half an hour.” Almost as soon as she said this, her hand dropped and he realized she’d fallen asleep against his shoulder.
