What he knows from this: the house is still sitting empty. The perfect place to hide.
The next day, after school, instead of heading home, he follows the road along the curve of the river, back toward their old house. As he walks, a smattering of memories flare at each step, small bright stones lighting a path through the forest. There is the huge gray-brown sycamore, like an enormous elephant’s foot, which even together their arms could not encircle. There is the lopsided white house, two centuries old and all corners and additions: the mish-mosh house, he’d called it; his mother had called it the House of the Thirty-Seven Gables. There is the monastery behind its high sandstone wall, as impenetrable and imperturbable as ever. Monks live there, she’d told him, and when he’d asked what’s a monk, she’d answered: a person who wants to escape the world. All the landmarks of his childhood coming back, patiently pointing the way. For a moment he pauses before the great hollow of an old stump, disoriented, until he realizes: the big maple he remembers has been cut down. In the fall it had showered red leaves over the sidewalk, the smallest as big as his face. His mother had plucked one, poked two eyeholes, let him wear it as a mask. One for her, too. A pair of wood spirits, roaming the city. The tree must have been decaying from within all that time, rotting and crumbling like sponge. The tragedy of this nearly crushes him, until he peers inside and sees small green shoots rising deep within the ring of stubborn wood.
On their old street, each house is a different drab shade: tan, dirty cream, the washed-out gray of tattered laundry: as if all the color has leached away since his childhood. Slope shouldered, listing slightly to one side, they resemble old ladies, their clothing grown shabby and loose. There are garbage cans stowed behind fences, here and there a soggy newspaper, still in its plastic sheath, on the sidewalk—but it’s quiet. And then there it is again: their house, just as it has always been. Dusty green, like the underside of a leaf. Wooden steps leading to the porch, gracefully sagging, edges rounded with age. The front door, once cherry red, faded to the soft brown of aged brick.
If his father never sold the house, Bird reasons, then it’s still theirs. Which means it isn’t trespassing. Not, technically, breaking the rules. Still, he glances over his shoulder, scanning the street, as he picks his way through the weeds toward the gate and the backyard. The windows of the other houses glaring at his back.
* * *
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After his mother left, some of their neighbors had shied away from them. Before, they’d waved, said hello, maybe told Bird how tall he was getting, or commented on the weather. After: tight lips, the merest head nods. Darting inside quickly as if they’d forgotten something, or left the stove on. Once, in Harvard Square, Bird and his father had run into Sarah, who lived two houses down, who had sometimes brought them rhubarb muffins and borrowed Margaret’s pruning shears. She’d crossed the street as they approached, casually but quickly, as if there were a bus she needed to catch. The next time they saw her, on their own street, hauling in garbage cans after the truck had gone by, she didn’t meet their eyes.
Worse than the neighbors who ignored them: the ones who began to check on them. To see if you needed anything, one would say. Just dropping by, to see how you were doing. To see how you were holding up. What was it they were supposed to be holding up, Bird wondered, though eventually he realized it was themselves. It did feel that way in those early days, on the mornings when he’d learned to eat his cereal dry, because the milk in the fridge always seemed to have curdled: like they were puppets and the strings holding them up had gone slack. His mother had done all those things, but she was gone, and they would have to learn to survive on their own: a near impossible thing, those first weeks.
When the smoke alarm went off, the fire department arrived and his father had to explain: no, everything was fine, just the pancakes left in the pan too long. Yes, he knew the stove should never be unattended; Bird had called him into the other room; no, Bird was perfectly safe, everything was under control. Another afternoon, Bird fell off his bike at the corner and skinned both knees and ran back home, screaming, blood trickling down both shins: he was sitting on the closed toilet, sniffling, his father dabbing at him with a damp paper towel—it’s okay, Bird, see? just a scrape, not as bad as it seems—when the police arrived. A neighbor had called. The little boy, crying and alone. The bike abandoned, front wheel still spinning. Just wanted to make sure he wasn’t unattended. You know, with his mother gone. Just wanted to be sure someone was watching.
Someone was always watching, it seemed: when Bird went out without a hat and stood shivering at the bus stop; when Bird forgot his lunch and his teacher asked him if his father was giving him enough to eat. There was always someone watching. There was always someone wanting to check.
It’s probably nothing, but—
I just figured I should say something in case—
Of course I’m sure everything is fine, but—
Posters were starting to appear all around town then, all over the city. All over the country. United neighborhoods are peaceful neighborhoods. We watch out for each other. Years later, Bird would see Sadie pull a Sharpie from her jeans pocket and scribble over out for. Their neighbor across the street, who had never liked them, who said their yard was overgrown and their house needed painting and their car was parked too close to hers, took particular joy in calling in everything. When his father burned his hand on the cast-iron skillet and dropped it on the floor with a loud clang and a shouted oath, a police officer arrived fifteen minutes later. Report of domestic disturbance, they’d said. Was he in the habit of using profanity in front of his son? Would he say he had a temper? And to Bird, privately, out of his father’s hearing: Was he ever afraid of his father, had his father ever hit him, did he feel safe at home?
Every few days, menacing items would appear in their mailbox, or on their front steps: broken glass; bags of garbage; once, a dead rat. All-caps notes that his father tore down before Bird could read them. It was not long after that, he realizes, that his father had transferred to his new job, that he’d switched Bird to his new school, that they’d moved to the dorm. For the first time, he considers what might have appeared at his father’s work, outside his office, on the desks in his classrooms. What his bosses might have said, or not said, about it all.
Good news, his father had said, the university has agreed to let us use an apartment in one of the dorms.
His new job paid hourly, barely enough for food and clothes, not enough for Cambridge rent. But through favors and kindnesses, he’d managed to negotiate a safe place for them to live. At the top of a tower, buffered by a courtyard, a key-swipe, an elevator. A refuge from prying eyes.
* * *
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