A minute later the bathroom door opened and shut again, and then the back door slid across its tracks.
“Do you want me to send him away?” she said.
He didn’t think she really meant to let him decide, and he didn’t answer. He was listening to Riku tramp back to the kura. This time the motion detector flashed on, and Sedge leaned back from where the light angled over the jutting rooftop into the room. Riku’s figure curled like a wave across the bedroom wall and shot across the curtain. Sedge moved further away from it instinctively.
Riku’s shadow had crashed into the room for only an instant, but it made Mariko gasp and set Sedge’s heart beating faster.
“It’s a shame he’s had to start life with so many setbacks,” Mariko said. “They never seem to stop.”
“It makes it hard to know what to do for him.”
“The apprenticeship in Echizen,” she murmured. “I guess all three of us know it’s his best chance to be happy.”
The frogs had fallen silent with Riku’s intrusion into the night, but a moment later, as the outside light shut off again, they resumed all at once the chorus of their croaking.
Riku didn’t speak to them Sunday morning, and though they didn’t see much of him before leaving for the bird reserve, he refused to respond to their greetings or attempted conversation. His behavior upset Mariko.
On the way to Katano Kamoike she apologized to Sedge for crying. “It’s true he doesn’t get to see and do the things he wants, not like other kids he knows. I should have let him come with us. I could have at least tried to arrange it with Mr. Inoue.”
He shared her regret, but it was too late now. “Are you going to feel the same way when it’s time for him to move to Echizen?”
“I hope not. But since he’s leaving soon, this was one of the last nice things I could have done for him. In another week and a half, he’ll be gone.”
Sedge tried to sound cheerful but his tone came out strained. “You’ll have every chance to see him again. He won’t even be an hour away.”
When they arrived at the bird reserve, they found a half-dozen people on the observation deck, viewing through the mounted telescopes the birds on the pond and in the marsh and trees. Gathered on the outside patio below were a handful of guests like themselves. The heron stood in a better designed cage than what Riku had built, though he had made his with the bird’s injury in mind, not its recovery or release. The heron’s head was hunched into its shoulders, and it stared at the outside world it would soon return to.
“Do you want to film the release with your phone?” Sedge said as they descended the stairs. “Or do you think Riku would only be resentful?”
She pointed to someone at the edge of the patio with a camera on a tripod. “It looks like the reserve plans to film it. If he wants to see it, maybe we can take him here to watch it before he leaves.”
The veterinarian waved and approached them. He thanked them for coming and introduced them as “the heron catchers.”
After the reserve’s director confirmed where he wanted the bird cage carried, the small group walked outside. Two volunteers lifted the cage by its hinged handles and walked past the patio into the grass. Their rubber boots sank into the wet ground, and the difficulty they had walking caused the heron to struggle to keep its balance. They were soon within a few meters of the pond, and, following the director’s orders, set the cage down there. One of them unlatched the front door.
The heron didn’t move. It simply stared out the opened cage toward the water, where in the distance dozens of waterbirds swam across the pond’s surface and flew between the trees. To the left and right, gray and white herons tiptoed through the watery grass and shallows, focused on whatever creatures they could find underfoot.
One of the volunteers tilted the cage forward and the other tapped on its bars to startle the bird back into the wild. The heron fell forward, stretching its left leg before itself while its right leg stepped outside the cage. It stood in the marsh-grass, still staring toward the pond. The volunteers hurried back to the observation building and, upon reaching it, waited with the others for the heron to decide where to go.
Only when a heron to the left squawked did it seem to recognize where it was and what its choices had come to be. It raised its wings in the ungainly way herons do when starting to fly, but once it lifted off it described a beautiful arc fifteen feet overhead as it circled over them, continuing toward more herons across the pond. It returned the squawk and received a reply from somewhere. Rising higher over the dark water, it flapped slowly above the treetops before veering in the opposite direction Sedge had found it. Behind it, to everyone’s surprise, was a duller colored gray heron, following the same path through the sky. It squawked, too, and in the distance the heron they’d released fell in line with it.
When Sedge and Mariko returned to the observation deck, they sat behind two telescopes, observing the birds gathered in the distance. Sedge hadn’t expected the heron’s release to be memorable, but it had been. It had overcome a lot to regain its freedom, and the memory of the bird’s graceful flight over the trees moved him again.
He regretted once more that he had been stricter with Riku than the boy deserved. Even though Riku had attacked him, he would be leaving them soon, possibly forever. Perhaps Sedge should have trusted him more—now, ten days before he was to move away.
25
“What are those people doing?” Sedge said as Mariko drove up within sight of her house. A group of neighborhood children and older neighbors had gathered in the street before Mariko’s door. Even Mr. Inoue was there, standing to one side by himself.
Mariko pulled into the carport while the people in the street stared at her in horror.
“What happened?” she called out even before she had closed her car door. Approaching Mr. Inoue she said, “Where’s Riku? Why isn’t he with you?”
“He was at first. That is to say, he came to my studio at eight o’clock like we arranged. For the first hour he swept and washed my studio floor, but then he disappeared. Eventually I found him outside, gazing down at the rice fields. But when I called to him he ran away. I took a few steps to check where he was going and saw him running toward some herons in the distance. I didn’t notice it at first, but when he raised his arm I saw he was holding a large pole with a baggy net behind it. It was bigger and stronger than a butterfly net and not the kind of thing one uses to fish with, either. It looked like he was planning to catch one of those herons with it—they’re protected, you know—so I started running after him myself, only I’m old and can’t move fast. I shouted toward my studio, and a few workers came out to see what was going on. When I looked back to the rice fields, the herons were lifting up around Riku and flying off over the fields. Before I knew it, he’d caught a straggler in his net. Worried about what he was going to do next, we watched him hurry off a different way, back to your house, with the heron slung over his shoulder. I called everyone back who’d come to help me, and we’ve been trying to figure out what to do ever since.”
“Where is he now?”
“You’ve got an adult gray heron in your house. All the kids had their noses pressed against the windows of your veranda, but Riku chased them away.”
Mariko fell to her knees. She bowed to him and to the neighbors in the street watching her. She apologized to them repeatedly until someone interrupted and demanded that she do something.
She ran to the front door. Sedge barely caught up to her before she threw it open and flung herself inside. He called Mr. Inoue over and suggested the two of them approach Riku.
They could see Riku sitting at the back of the far tatami room, hugging his knees to his chest and staring at them. The sun shone through the veranda windows, illuminating the transom overhead, where winged bodhisattvas carved in wood hovered above him, and the Buddhist altar’s gold interior reflected light onto Riku’s head and shoulders.
Standing at the back of the veranda was a gray heron like the one they had seen released that morning. It appeared extraordinarily large inside the house—and miraculously unhurt—and its talons clacked loudly as it stepped gingerly back and forth on the wooden floor. Feathers and bird excrement were visible around the front rooms, and the dried larkspur Sedge had once brought over was spread across the tatami like blue paint flung from a brush. On the top step leading into the house was the net Mr. Inoue had described.
“Why?” Sedge called out to Riku. He said it twice more; it was the only word that would leave his mouth.
“Maybe it was injured,” Riku finally mumbled back. “Like the one you found and brought home.”
“Mr. Inoue told me what happened. If it’s injured, it’s because of what you did.”
“It’s here now. What do you want me to do about it?”
The door behind Sedge slid open and Mr. Inoue slipped back outside. A minute later he was at the rear door, trying to pull it open. But it was locked.
