And then he hears footsteps, hurrying toward him. A small light clicks on, scattering golden sparks across his sight.
His mother, astonished. Holding out her arms. Throwing them around him. Her warmth. Her scent. The shock and wonder and delight on her face.
Bird, she cries. Oh Bird. You found me.
II
So here he is: Bird. Her Bird.
Taller than she’d expected; thinner. The last scrapings of baby fat nearly gone from his face. A lean, cool face, a skeptical face, a hard set to his mouth, a squaring of the jaw she can’t quite place. Not Ethan’s; certainly not hers.
Bird, she says. You’ve gotten so tall.
Well, he says, suddenly reserved. It’s been kind of a long time.
He doesn’t trust her, she can see that already: the way he lingers by the door, not meeting her eyes. Yet, she thinks. He doesn’t trust her yet. She flicks off the light.
We have to avoid attention, she says.
She can see him thinking, already: What is this place?
The hallway is narrow and behind her Bird’s footsteps slow as he picks his way between unfamiliar walls. A stutter-step, a pause. The soles of his sneakers scuffing the floor as he drags his feet.
This way, she says. Wait. Be careful, the floor’s uneven here. Watch your step.
She is speaking quickly, uncharacteristically chatty, words tripping over each other as they fall from her mouth, but she can’t help it.
I knew you’d figure it out, she says, as they make their way down the darkened hall. I knew you were smart enough.
How, he says.
At the entrance to the living room she stops and waits for him to catch up, and his hand brushes the small of her back, reaching for something known, something steady. She wants to take it in hers, to press it to her face, but she knows he’s not ready yet.
Someone told me, she says.
After the darkness of the hallway, the living room is blinding. Bird’s hand flies to shade his eyes, as if he’s stepped into blazing sun. She watches him bring the room into focus, taking it in piecemeal. The wallpaper, peeling off in strips, like old skin. A faded and fraying sofa hunched by the wall, a folding card table covered with tools. A single lamp minus its shade, naked bulb staring. She can see his eyes swiveling to the plywood nailed over the window frames, the blurry bull’s-eyes on the ceiling where the rain has seeped in. To herself, shaggy and overgrown, in ragged T-shirt and worn-out jeans. Hiding like a hermit in the murky darkness. It is not where he expected her to be. She is not who he expected, either.
You must be tired, she says. I’ve got a room ready for you.
* * *
? ? ?
She leads him upstairs, the orange-red stair runner muffling their steps. All the way up, square blotches in the wallpaper mark the places where pictures once hung.
Whose house is this?
No one’s, anymore. Careful. Watch your step. The banister’s broken here.
At the landing, she opens the door at the top of the stairs. A large room that clearly belonged to a small child, once upon a time: when she flips the light switch, the ceiling lamp features a clown’s face, a red-nosed screw holding the glass dome in place. In the corner a crib still stands, one side lowered, the mattress bare. She’s swept the room clean, but this cannot make it inviting. Part of the ceiling plaster has crumbled, exposing the slender wooden slats beneath, like bones. The windows are sheathed in black.
Garbage bags, she explains. To hide the light. We have to be careful—the neighbors think it’s abandoned.
Bird sets his bookbag on the floor, touches one hand to the plastic stretched over the window frame. She’s done the same herself many times, feeling the faint tremble as a car thrums by on the street below.
I set this up for you, she says. Just in case you made it. She smooths the sleeping bag laid out on the window seat, fluffs the small throw pillow at its head. I’m sorry I don’t have a proper bed. More comfortable than the floor, at least.
Bird shrugs one shoulder and half turns away. From outside, the thin wail of a siren worms its way through the plastic sheeting, growing louder, then fading again. If everything was different, she thinks, if she’d had all those years with him as she should have, perhaps this language would be less foreign. The language of those beginning to shed their childhood: all gestures and subtext, all reserve and disdain. Maybe she would have learned to understand it. She wonders if Ethan does.
Are you hungry? she asks, and though she’s quite sure it’s a lie, he shakes his head no. Just rest then, she says. We’ll talk later.
She pauses, then turns back.
Bird. I’m so glad you’re here.
* * *
? ? ?
As a toddler, he’d cried when other people cried. Certain songs on the stereo filled him with pins-and-needles tingling and moving even a finger would increase the agony. How unbearable, that Jackie Paper came no more. How tragic, that she was leaving home after living alone for so many years. How terrifying, to be the only living boy in New York. The music peeled his skin away, note by note, and the naked muscles throbbed and stung. Stop, mama, he would sob, make it stop, and Margaret, in horror, ran to the stereo and paused the music and folded him in her arms.
It stunned her, how hungry and wondrous he was at it all. He was a quiet child, watching intently, soaking everything in—the good and the bad, the joy and the pain. The pink nipples of the cherry tree swelling into blossoms. The dead sparrow folded up small on the sidewalk. The exuberant rush of loose balloons soaring upward into a wide blue sky. How porous the boundary was between him and the world, as if everything flowed through him like water through a net. She’d worried about him, moving through a rough world as a tender bare heart, beating out in the open where anything could cause a bruise.
This boy standing in front of her looks like Bird and sounds like Bird. She’d know him anywhere, that face. But there’s something between them now, through which she can’t quite see or hear him clearly, something opaque and hard, a layer of tortoiseshell. As if he’s standing, always, just beyond arm’s length. Something has scarred over in him. Oh Bird, she thinks.
* * *
? ? ?
Upstairs, Bird peeks out into the hallway. No light, only a faint gibbous glow on the wall from the single lamp downstairs. He tiptoes past dark room after dark room. In the bathroom, the toilet and sink are green-streaked and grimy; moss stretches from the rusty bathtub in a lush carpet. Only one other room seems to be occupied. A bare mattress lies in one corner, an old table lamp, shadeless, squats beside it on the floor. His mother’s room. The sharp scent of sweat in the air. His mother, who’d planted flowers in the sunshine and whispered stories into his ears at night, has somehow become this strange woman lurking in the shadows. He wishes his father were here, to explain this. To help him understand. To decide what to do.
Back on the landing, the light from downstairs seems dingy, like something reused, and he has to guide himself by his fingertips all the way down the hall and back to his own lonely room.
* * *
? ? ?
When Bird wakes, Margaret is sitting on the floor by his bedside. Feet curled under her on the worn carpet, her gaze resting softly on his face. As if she’s been studying him in his sleep, patiently waiting for him to wake. Which she has.
What time is it, he croaks. Under the darkened windows it’s impossible to tell if it’s night or daylight.
Just past midnight, she says.
She’s brought him a mug of instant coffee. Which he doesn’t like, she can see it in his face, of course he doesn’t like it, what kind of mother brought her child coffee, she should have brought something else, though coffee is all she has. She is out of practice at this, at everything. But the mug is warm and cozy in the chill of the room, and he struggles to a seat, sips it. She sips hers, too. Bitter, but comforting. Like strong medicine.