She was deliberately cruel to him. Still, Yoshi left her gifts—origami cranes, salt-rimed shells, a chipped cup filled with beads. Once, he snuck in and hung a string of paper lanterns on the twisted coast oak. They swung in crazy arcs when the wind came up. She ran a finger along their powdery edges and left them to melt in the rain. The shells she crushed underfoot, the beads she spilled in the grass. Every so often, one would catch the light and glitter, an unwanted reminder.

She knew what she was doing, tearing the wings off a crane and rolling the pieces into a tight ball: establishing boundaries. She didn’t need him. But there was another bird in its place the next morning—turquoise, its wings a filigree of ballpoint tattoos—and another the morning after. If she wasn’t careful, the house would fill with paper birds. She would open the windows and watch hundreds of frail blue wings rise, beating. Yoshi’s cranes.

Her husband—her ex-husband—wouldn’t have left a trail of origami on the walk or a pyramid of bruised persimmons on the windowsill. He was strictly flowers and chocolate—conventional, practical, steady. Then again, not so steady. She’d come home and found the suitcases in the hall, carefully aligned, and his papers stacked in boxes.

“You’re early,” he’d said, aggrieved.

They’d been through so much together—school, debts, moving, his father’s death, her mother’s illness-—she’d thought they were both in the habit of weathering. They slept in the same bed. They sat at the same table. They barely needed to speak. After so many years, they knew each other’s thoughts. And yet she hadn’t conceived of him leaving.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and had, at least, the grace to hang his head. But she noticed he was wearing his dress shoes, had taken care not to crush them in the packed bag.

She let him go without a fight. She let everything go: the apartment, the car. Friends drifted away. She was careful not to care; that was how you got hurt. She bought the cottage, its cramped rooms falling into disrepair. She worked. It was fine. A small life was a habit, like silence, like drinking from the carton or sleeping in your clothes.

Six months later he remarried, her ex. He and his new wife had twin girls. He’d always said he didn’t want children. Really, he hadn’t wanted them with her.

Yoshi was a surfer. TV crews followed him along the beach, stumbling in the sand, and into the water in rocking skiffs. In Japan, his face was on billboards for toothpaste, and there was a Yoshi comic-book character, a superhero with “water power.” When he told her this, he put his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest.

“You see. Super Yoshi. Like Superman.”

She’d seen him surf on TV, although she hadn’t let on. The screen was filled with a giant curling wave and, suddenly, skating out of the cave of water, there was Yoshi, crouched over his board, balanced on an impossible liquid skin. His hair was plastered to his head, his lips parted. He worked the board along the curved wall, and up and over its frothy lip. He made it look easy.

“Like falling,” Yoshi said. “Maybe, like flying.” He skimmed the flat of his hand along her breast, demonstrating. His hand-board carved three tight turns and spun out. He made Matchbox-car crashing noises.

She could imagine the sensation of being swept along by a wave, something like sledding surely, but she couldn’t picture what it would feel like to swim toward a twenty-foot wall of water. To know that its weight could bear down on you, could stand between you and the air, and to dive into it for no good reason—that she couldn’t understand. Why take such a chance?

“The wave comes, you stand up. No problem.” He laid his head on her chest, and slid aside. “Always, more waves are coming. Always, you stand up,” he said into the sharp wings of her shoulders. He stroked a strand of hair snaking on the sheet between them.

He’d been looking for help with English; her name was on the list of tutors at the university. But she wasn’t taking students and, besides, when she opened the door to him the wind came up, spinning a cloud of leaves into the hall and a vortex of dust. He was unkempt; mess followed him like a hurricane or a wild dog. She shut the door firmly.

Still, he wooed her, fixing the broken slats on the gate and the rotting floorboard in the deck, cutting back the tangle of ivy and jasmine slung over the sagging apricot tree like a shade. He would not leave, was impervious to her evil looks and pronounced silences. She drew invisible lines and he stepped over them. Don’t touch me, the tight lines of her body said. Don’t finger the cloth of my shirt when you stand beside me. Don’t put the palm of your hand on my back. When my hair falls into my eyes, don’t push it back. And don’t kiss me. In the end, though, he wore her down and explored her like a map, unfolding and smoothing her ridges, while she lay quietly, refusing to touch him, refusing to speak.

In bed, he straddled her and listened to her heart. He tapped a beat on her shoulder.

“Boom, boom, boom. Taiko,” he said. “Big drum.”

She slid out from under him and walked naked to the window. Jasmine hung heavy in the damp air. Yoshi stepped behind her.

“Look.” He reached around her, pointing. His skin was warm. “See the moon. You know the story?” His rested his chin on her shoulder. “There was a princess, Kaguyahime. She came down as a baby. She was beautiful, like you, hey?” Each of his eyes held a perfect, pale, round reflection. “Many men wanted to marry her. She said, ‘No, no, no.’ Even to the emperor. ‘No, no, no,’ because she must go back to the moon. And she goes, and forgets. The emperor, he does not want to live. Very sad story.”

A car backfired. The wind lifted her hair and let it fall.

She knew how tides worked. The moon and the earth attracted one another. The earth held everything back but the water.

Yoshi put his fingers around the haloed moon, and, squinting, played at pulling it from the sky.

“For you, see?”

When she realized she was pregnant, for an instant she was filled with joy. But by the time she put a name to the feeling it had vanished.

It was a cruel joke, coming so late, and with this boy. Terrible things happened to the infants of older women: deformities, disease. The risks were astronomical. And she knew the threat her genes held. She’d sat with her mother in the gray room and watched the shell of her body shake with the effort of breathing. Her mother’s oncologist had taken her aside and said, “When this is over you need to think about yourself.” Then it was over, and she’d had the funeral to manage, and afterward the loss, the terrible loneliness, and, finally, the guilt: she was glad it was over, glad for both of them. It wasn’t until months later that she remembered the doctor’s remark and realized that he hadn’t meant she needed to take care of herself, but that she might face the same awful ending.

Cancer, it was in her, or might be, lurking. Her ex-husband had known it. Perhaps that was the reason he hadn’t wanted children. If so, it had gone unsaid, but it was a sensible precaution. Bad enough that she had to face the prospect of that gray room, but to pass on the uncertainty?

Better not to be born than to have everything taken away. Better a quick end.

She would do it, end the pregnancy. She would.

Yoshi, on his back, spread-eagle on the mattress, eyes closed: “Inside a wave, whoosh, it’s noisy, like a falls.”

She couldn’t help herself. “Like a waterfall?”

At the sound of her voice he rolled on his stomach and stared. She turned away.

“Yes, like a waterfall. Like a cold room, with water falling.”

His visa was expiring. She was glad.

“Maybe I will overstay,” he said.

“You can’t,” she said. She would turn him in. They would make him go. “We’re at war.”

“With Japanese people?”

“Still. It’s not possible.”

He would teach her to surf. It would be fun, he said. It would be easy. He’d show her how.

The thought was ludicrous. She was too old. She was ungainly. But he was leaving. He didn’t ask for much.

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

She gave in.

He flashed the shaka sign, grinning.

The beach was gray. A couple, bundled against the cold and fog, walked a pair of trotting dogs. The slick, dark form of a seal rolled in the distance. It was early and windless, and the water was flat and waxy. Only faint swells marked where the waves would roll later in the day.

He had her practice on the shore.

“Ah, you’re goofy,” he said, and when she frowned, pointed down. “Your feet, see? Right foot forward. Goofy.” He was teaching her English now.

He waded out and waited, chest deep. She paddled toward him, shivering as seawater slid under the neoprene.

Yoshi, grinning, slapped the water. “Okay, okay! Ready for a big ride!”

He faced her toward the shore. His eyes were shining. His face glowed.
The board rocked under his hands. She might fall, she thought. She might break into pieces. She might do all the wrong things.

“I’m scared,” she said.

There were pale purple crescents under his eyes, smudges like old bruises. There was a web of fine lines. She thought of him sitting alone at a table in his apartment, folding sheets of bright paper. She thought of him climbing the mossy fence in the dark, reaching up through a tangle of sharp leaves to hang a strand of lights.

“I’m afraid.”

Her nose was running. Her eyes were tearing. She could barely see the water. The beach was misty and she could barely see the sand.

“I can’t do it.”

“You can.” He brushed the wet hair out of her eyes. “Remember? Super water power.” He looked over his shoulder at the wide mouth of the bay behind them. “A good one is coming. This one is the right one for you, I think.”

The swell caught the board. Yoshi, alongside, pushed the board forward, grunting. And as it glided, she slid her feet along the soft foam deck, set them beneath her, and stood. It was like flying.

“Look what I’m doing,” she thought. “Look at the amazing thing I’m doing.”

And in that moment, arms outstretched and pitching forward, she felt a quickening, a small but certain invisible tightening. She’d waited too long.

The board wobbled, and she tipped backward. The sea closed around her. Then she was rising like a paper bird in a draft. Such a brief ride, she thought, as hands drew her to the surface. She found her feet. She took a breath.

Laurie Seidler’s stories have appeared in or are pending at Storyglossia, In Posse Review, Hobart, Toasted Cheese and other literary journals. A former reporter, she is completing an MFA at California College of the Arts and edits VerbSap.com. She lives in San Jose, CA, with her husband and son.