“The veterinarian isn’t there every day,” she explained. “And I’m sure his schedule is fuller than yours. Aren’t you happy the bird will regain its freedom after so long? You used to worry it would never fly again.”
“It’s not fair how every time an important event comes up, something gets in the way or I’m told I can’t do it. I’ve never seen a heron released into the wild.”
“You’ve seen me release other birds. We released one a few months ago after it flew into our window and lost consciousness.”
“That’s not the same thing!”
Sedge tried to calm him down. “The release itself probably won’t be anything special. I’m sure it’s no different from watching a heron fly up out of a field.”
“If that’s all it was, no one would care. You’re celebrating its return to freedom.”
“You have responsibilities now,” Mariko reminded him. “You have to get used to that. And learn to make sacrifices. This one’s hardly worth getting upset about.”
Under his breath Riku said, “Why do I even have to work when I’ll soon move to Echizen? Maybe I’ll ask Inoue-sensei to give me the day off.”
Sedge discouraged this. “Your mother is right that you have to learn to make sacrifices. And not take these kinds of disappointments personally.”
“She’s not my mother. And you’re not my father.”
“If that’s how you feel,” Sedge said, “why are you living here?” As soon as he said it, he wondered where his own anger came from—his lack of compassion.
Mariko touched his leg beneath the table. It wasn’t the gentle squeeze he was used to.
“She’s forcing me out at the end of this month,” Riku said, his voice rising. “I’m only stating the truth.”
“That’s not at all what I’m doing, Riku.”
“And after I made it a cage and spent all night by its side . . .”
He rose from the table and marched toward the genkan. Jamming his feet into his shoes he turned and said to Sedge, “On the way to the baths, have you seen the herons in the rice fields? On the right side of the road, four or five often stand in them.”
At the intersection down the street, the road leading out of the village ran downhill if one continued straight, and sloped more steeply turning left. Mariko’s house was higher up, closer to the mountains, while below it the ground leveled out in a valley where for centuries villagers had cultivated rice.
“I haven’t, no.”
“I can see them from Inoue-sensei’s studio. Sometimes they come so close I could run outside and grab them.”
“I wouldn’t advise it,” Sedge said.
Riku slid the front door open. “It’s so unfair,” he muttered toward them as he went back outside and returned to the kura.
Sedge tried to put Riku’s disappointment out of his mind, but it kept returning. Until now, the heron was the strongest connection Sedge had made with Riku. Saving it had been important to them both. It wouldn’t take much to bring him along Sunday morning, and if it made him happy to see the heron fully healed and given its freedom, wouldn’t that be an appropriate reward for the care he gave the bird? All their talk about sacrifice was right, but they’d made their point clearly, and he didn’t doubt Riku had taken it to heart.
A few minutes later, to break the silence that had fallen over the room, Sedge said, “Maybe we could call Mr. Inoue and ask him to give Riku Sunday morning off. Couldn’t he make up the hours later?”
Mariko’s eyes widened. “No, you were right that he can’t take these disappointments personally. He needs to learn that the world isn’t out to get him. And that he has to take a different view to life. I’m sure there are bird releases at that reserve fairly often.”
“But he has a connection to that heron. It’s obvious he felt betrayed by us. This would be a simple way to reverse that. There’s no harm in it, is there? What does he do at the studio, anyway, besides keep the place tidy?”
She closed her laptop and turned to him. “Of course I’d like to bring him with us. I’m sure it would make him happy—and give us a bargaining chip with him if we needed it. But he has an obligation to Mr. Inoue. He went out of his way to give Riku a job, and Riku’s only been there a few weeks. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t go, either.”
She smiled appreciatively at his suggestion. “To show our solidarity with Riku? No, we were right to tell him what we did. He quit school and is working now. If he doesn’t learn to behave like everyone else he’ll never get anywhere.”
“Couldn’t we at least try?”
She shook her head. “We can always make it up to him later.”
He drew back slightly as tears pooled in her eyes. She was an excellent mother to Riku but being an authority figure wasn’t in her nature.
“Let’s drop it, then. It’s just one of those ‘it can’t be helped’ moments, right?”
“Shō ga nai,” she murmured, nodding gently. “Shō ga nai.”
Mariko rolled off of Sedge and onto her futon. Turning to her in the dark, he traced the contours of her, lithe and hilly. Beneath his fingers, wherever he touched, she was perfectly pliable, entirely receptive to him.
She drew away when the bathroom door downstairs opened and shut. Sedge hadn’t heard the back door open, which normally squeaked in its sliding frame. They remained silent, facing each other, listening for a telltale creak of the staircase or the floor in front of the room.
They had stopped pretending to sleep in different rooms after the incident with Riku one month ago. Believing he would never repeat what he’d done, Mariko refused to let Sedge install a lock. But as a precaution, when privacy was a concern, she asked him to move a small set of wooden drawers before the door.
“Do you think he was inside all this time?” Mariko said. “The light outside didn’t turn on. Or did you see it?”
“No, I didn’t,” Sedge said. “He knows he’s not to sleep in the house anymore.”
Sedge moved to the edge of the back window and peered outside. He knew that the motion-detecting light, after it came on, was set to turn off again quickly. He might simply not have been paying attention to it.
