No Birds Returning In Summer

In the video, a girl lay in the arms of the sticker-faced mom.

“Mommy, hug!”

“Alright. I’ll hug you.”

It was clearly Mandy’s voice.

We had dated for seven years. There was no way I could be wrong.

Someone commented a question in admiration.

[You’re so happy together, even after so many years. How did you keep your relationship fresh?]

Lance Clark, my friend, replied: The secret is in us staying busy for ten months apart from each other, then spending two months dating.

The blinding sun shone through the window to land on my screen.

My blood ran cold.

I had been with Mandy for seven years.

She always said that she was busy and had to go to meetings so that she could build our future.

It was normal for her to cancel our anniversary celebrations. Even for my birthday, she could only take out some time to have lunch with me.

I had complained to her in the past. “Can’t you even get a single day off?”

“We’re no longer kids. Some things are even more important than dates,” she said in resignation.

It was not that she did not have holidays, but because her holidays did not belong to me.

I went to Lance’s homepage.

For five whole years, he would update his account daily during July and August.

In the videos, Mandy would tell stories to the girl, build Legos with her, and clumsily pick her up to comfort her whenever she made a fuss.

In Lance’s videos, she was a perfect mother.

I scrolled down until I reached the videos from July of the previous year.

It was in Havaiki.

Mandy held the girl and laughed in the waves.

[The summer days with you two are the best summer.]

That was Lance’s caption.

This had been posted on the tenth of July.

On the same day, a truck went out of control and rammed into my car.

It got horribly bent out of shape, and all twelve of my ribs were broken. Many of my organs were also injured.

The hospital called her forty-seven times, but she never answered.

I lay in the ICU for two whole months and received three critical condition notices.

Mandy finally came during September.

She held my hand with regret in her eyes. “I’m sorry. The project was just too important. I couldn’t leave.”

I had been understanding toward her having her hands tied down in the past, but her mention of not being able to leave overlapped with the sunlight in Havaiki and the girl’s carefree laughter coming out of the video.

My stomach churned, and a feeling of disgust mixed with stomach acid rushed to my throat.

I rushed into the bathroom and gagged into the toilet.

I even vomited bile.

Martha, my mother, called me. “Andrew, are you serious about going through with the arranged marriage?”

She did not even hide her glee. “I’m glad that you’ve come around to it. Speaking of which, you’ve met your future bride before. Once she comes back next week, I’ll arrange for you two to meet. If you’re okay with it, you can get engaged straightaway.”

My mother had always looked down on Mandy and thought that despite coming from a normal family, she was far too ambitious to be a good match for me.

For Mandy’s sake, I had argued with my family plenty of times before, to the point of me almost severing ties with my parents.

Yet those arguments came back like a slap in the face. They had become utterly humiliating.

After I hung up, I booked the earliest flight to Tinseltown.

Mandy…

Since she did not want to come back, I was going to take a look at her summer days.