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.
* * *
? ? ?
As Bird pushes the back gate open, there’s a sudden scurrying, a blur of brown and a flash of white: a rabbit, startled while browsing in the overgrown lawn. It darts to a gap under the fence and disappears, and Bird picks his way through the grass. The weeds are waist high after three years of neglect and nearly cover the path; here and there a branch, grown leggy and bare, plucks at his sleeve like a beggar asking for alms. A story comes back to him: a castle, all covered in a rose briar. So thick nothing could be seen of it, not even the flag on the roof. All the princes struggling to fight their way through. When the rightful prince came, after a hundred years, the hedges made a path for him. Once he had loved that story, once his mother had told it to him and he had believed it, every word.
As he looks around, memories hover close before alighting on his shoulders like dragonflies. They’d had flowers here, before: lavender, and honeysuckle, and huge purple puffballs, his father’s favorites. White roses the size of his fist that fat golden bees wriggled into. Vines with purple star-shaped blooms. Here there had been vegetables, curling squash with hairy leaves and sprawling tomatoes. His mother’s green rubber boots, treads caked with mud. His had been orange. Once he’d been stung and his mother had pulled his wrist to her mouth, sucked the stinger from his skin.