Riku returned to the house for dinner. He brought a backpack with towels and a hairbrush to take to the baths after eating. When Mariko bent forward to set their food on the table, the ibis swung before her neck, appearing even more to be flying.
“Where’d that come from?” Riku said, reaching for the pendant and pulling it toward him, forcing Mariko to lurch forward against the table.
“Let go,” Sedge commanded, grabbing Riku’s other arm.
Riku did as Sedge told him to, but his scowl made clear he disliked Sedge raising a reproving voice and touching him. Surely he knew he could have upended the table and hurt his stepmother, and that he might have broken the pendant or its chain. Before Sedge could demand that Riku apologize, Mariko insisted that everything was fine.
“You should know better than to act that way in front of others,” she told Riku.
Sedge said, “He shouldn’t act that way, period.”
There was hardly any table conversation that evening—only the sounds of Riku forcing his food down as quickly as possible. When he finished, he pushed his rice bowl away and stood up. He surveyed the mess he’d made, which was more salient beside Mariko’s and Sedge’s organized bowls and dishes.
“Gochisō,” he muttered, announcing he was finished. After retrieving his backpack, he returned and said to Mariko, “I need some money.”
“You’re going to the baths?” she said. “There’s a thousand yen on the shoe cabinet. Take that if you want. But I’ve already bought you a pass. You don’t have to pay to get in.”
He left the table without explaining his need for money. At the genkan he stuffed it in a pocket, stepped into his shoes, and disappeared into the darkness outside.
“He’s a complicated kid,” Sedge said. “But it’s easy to see he craves attention. And it’s obvious there’s nothing worse to him than being criticized—even if you’re not explicit about it.”
“He’s not all bad, though. If he were, I’d force a different living situation on him.”
“How would you do that?” Sedge refrained from asking why she hadn’t done this yet if there had always been this option.
“His paternal grandparents live in Echizen. It’s not so far from here. Riku goes there every summer for the O-bon holiday and stays the first week of the New Year. Last year, they told me they could take him off my hands if he became a problem. They’re good people, but Riku isn’t the boy they know from the past. He’s nearly an adult now, and they’ve both grown frailer. They could use Riku’s help on their small farm. Although he’s fond of them, he’s at an age where they couldn’t control him. I’m afraid of what he’d do.”
“What do you think he’d do?”
“I mean the havoc he might wreak. They’re well into their seventies. He would never suspect the damage he was inflicting on them.”
“And how is the situation here acceptable for you to deal with?”
“He’s my responsibility. And when he’s being good, I love him very much and want to be as good a stepmother to him as possible. Weren’t you difficult at his age? I know I was sometimes disrespectful to my parents.”
“Of course I was. But there were lines I knew never to cross, and I didn’t. With Riku, if there are lines holding him back, he either can’t see them or doesn’t respect them.”
“He does have an awful temper. And he gets so jealous sometimes. It’s awful when it happens because it takes him a long time to calm back down. I hope you’ll be understanding with him. I’m sure he’ll be some trouble, but he needs time to adjust to you being around. Even if he doesn’t see you as being his father—which he won’t, of course—you’re still a figure of authority in his eyes. I’m afraid he’ll project his feelings toward Kōichi onto you. But I’ve told him many times that you’re not the same person, and he always assures me that he understands.”
Sedge made a silent promise to exert a positive influence on both their lives.
He didn’t tell Mariko, but he’d begun to worry about what problems might result from moving in with them. Who could say that she and Riku, and even the entire town where they lived, wouldn’t eventually reject him the way Nozomi’s family had? What was more, who could say that what Nozomi had done to him couldn’t happen again with Mariko? With Riku between them from the start, their relationship had become even more fragile than when Sedge was living at the ryokan.
Although he disliked thinking this way, the fact that both Mariko’s parents were dead, and only an estranged brother remained in her life, reassured him. He and Mariko only had each other to rely on. If not for Riku, he would trust more not only her but also the kind of future that was opening to them.
Riku largely left them alone over the next few days. He clearly relished the privacy of the kura, especially after finishing dinner and returning from the baths, as well as Mariko’s agreeing to let him transform it from a two-story, Taisho-period storage building to his own living quarters. Although he had recently destroyed much of the interior in a fit of anger, because he had started to view it as his own, he was slowly developing a more adult attitude about taking care of it. Whether he disliked the house’s atmosphere with Mariko and Sedge always together, or if he was being respectful of their own need for privacy, Sedge didn’t know. But Sedge was heartened by his early days there, and indeed Riku showed signs of the “good kid” Mariko had described.
On the second floor of the house were three rooms. The largest was Mariko’s bedroom, its wooden floors, white walls, and exposed ceiling beams a sign of recent renovation; the other two were traditional tatami-floored rooms that no one used, adjacent to one of her bedroom walls. She suggested that Sedge use the farthest room from hers so Riku might believe they were close but never intimate. She also suggested that she and Sedge go to bed at different times in case Riku ventured upstairs and had a chance to confirm their living arrangement. In the middle of the night Sedge and Mariko always found their way to one another’s futon and slept together until an alarm went off at half-volume, a half hour before Riku awoke to prepare for school. The separate room and nighttime schedule were pretenses Sedge agreed to, though he knew Riku would inevitably learn the truth.
Like most people in the village, Mariko didn’t lock her front door if she was home, even if she was sleeping. There had never been a need to, for the village was safe. After his first week living there Sedge insisted they lock it at night, however, and instead leave the back door unlatched. It was closer to the kura, which would make it easier for Riku to go to the toilet. They installed a motion-detecting light facing the back door, too, as a safety precaution.
Sedge bought a used bicycle and rode into town when the weather permitted, getting them takeaway sushi from Saraku and going as far as Ōkami-no-Ie, behind the Yamanaka Lacquerware Museum, to buy pastries for their weekend breakfasts. When it rained, he walked with an umbrella to Yamanaka-za, which allowed him to peer inside the sake and crafts shops along Yugekai Road, to stop occasionally to buy local vegetables, honey, and fresh croquettes and talk with the friendly shop owners, and even to soak up the atmosphere at the shrines and Buddhist temples he passed. He avoided Takahashi and Yuki, though he expected to bump into them sometimes in a town as small as Yamanaka Onsen. But this never happened, and a part of him was glad for it.
One of the job interviews he’d arranged was canceled at the last minute, which depressed him for several days. The one he went to, in Fukui, proved a troublesome commute without a car, and when that interview went poorly he celebrated his failure with a one-cup of sake on the train home. He had received no responses to other applications he’d sent two and three weeks earlier.
These developments left him with no clear options going forward. He worried this would bother Mariko, too.
16
Sedge and Mariko fell instinctively into a routine in which they did things together when time allowed—before and after her workday, and on weekends when she wasn’t running errands or taking care of Riku and her house. Lying together at night, Sedge felt her speaking for him as she explained that his presence was an endless source of excitement to her, and how everything they did together made her happier.
“I feel the same way,” he said.
One after another, they recounted what these instances included: their evening walks to the village Hachiman shrine and its two-thousand-year-old ōsugi trees; the elaborate meals they cooked; their gardening in the small plot between the back of the house and the kura; their visits to the sake bar in front of Hasebe Shrine where they drank, made friends with local people, and watched old samurai movies the owner played on a small TV; their birding competitions in the village.
“I wonder if the time we’re spending together bothers Riku,” he said. “My being here has turned his life with you on its head.”
“He does seem lonely. But I always ask if he wants to join us and he only ignores me. I suppose he thinks I should know what he wants and how he feels without my asking him.”
“He chooses to be like that. Nothing we do will change it.”
“I’ll continue to ask him, though. It’s the least I can do. I want him to be happy, too.”
On a Sunday in the middle of June, however, she failed to ask Riku to join them on a birding trip around Wagatani Reservoir.
“Why didn’t you invite me?” Riku griped. He was in the dining room finishing breakfast and had been talking to them about turning the kura’s second floor into a bedroom, reserving the first floor for exercising and playing video games.
