Our Missing Hearts (25)
And then it floods him. Rushing in as if someone has unstopped a plug.
A game they played, he and his mother, when he was very small. Before school, before he had any other world but her. His favorite game, one he’d begged her to play. Their special game, played only when his father was at work, kept as a secret between just them.
You be the monster, mama. I’ll hide, and you be the monster.
She’d taped sheets of paper to the walls and Bird drew cat after cat: with crayons, half-dried markers, pencil stubs. Simple cats, scrawls with ears, but still. Cats. Cats, all over his room. And then, when he tired of drawing, came the second part of the game. Inside his closet was a crawl space his parents had discovered when they’d fixed up the house. Too small, under the eaves, for anything practical, but his mother had kept it. For him. A perfect boy-sized cubby she’d furnished with a sliding panel, a pillow and a blanket and a flashlight. A dragon’s cave. A bandit’s lair. And sometimes, the cabinet in which the boy hid.
He would crawl inside and slide the panel shut and yawn loudly, then flop down and begin to snore. From outside would come a growl that peppered goose bumps up and down his arms. A series of snarling meows. Inside, Bird pulled the blanket over his head and shivered deliciously. After a few minutes it grew quiet, and he would crawl from the hot cubby back out into the closet and then the light of the room, and there, on the carpet: his mother on her back, arms curled to her chest. Deadly still. The mouth of every cat he’d drawn smeared with red.
He would run to her then and throw himself on her chest and she would catch him in her arms, warm and strong, and tickle him and laugh. Always, a moment of terror at seeing her there, and a hot rush of relief when she came back to life. Over and over they played it, this game, his mother indulging him again and again. So long ago that he’d forgotten. Kindergarten, new friends, new games arrived and swept it away. And then, after she’d gone, he’d packed that memory up, along with everything else he could, and left it behind in the house they’d once shared. Where maybe—just maybe, though he doesn’t even dare to think the words—perhaps he might find her again.
* * *
? ? ?
Something he’s never told anyone, even Sadie: he’s been there many times, over the years. It is just a few blocks from his new school, and though he’s supposed to come directly home, sometimes he detours, just a little, so he can walk past the old house. Just to see it. It is the only time he ever deviates from the path. Construction, he imagines telling his father, the main road was closed, I had to go around. Or: The police were detouring people—I dunno why. His father would never argue with that; he’s always reminding Bird to stay away from trouble, to avoid the police.
But his father never even asks. He is so certain Bird will always follow the rules, so confident in Bird’s unquestioning obedience, and on those days—standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the house where they no longer live, at its shaded-over windows like closed eyes—Bird resents it, this assumption that there could be nothing off his prescribed path that he wants or misses or needs.
No one has moved into the house in the past three years. His father hasn’t sold it—he can’t, without his mother’s signature, too—and no one seems to want to rent it, once they learn who’d lived there before. Every time Bird visits, it is just the same, windows obscured by blinds, tall back gate always shut tight. None of the houses in this neighborhood have front yards; the houses come right up to the sidewalk like pushy neighbors, elbowing their way in. A scraggly strip of grass runs between sidewalk and street in a threadbare ribbon, and this is the only thing that changes from visit to visit: first overgrown and tufty, then knee high and gone to seed, then buried under a bank of uncleared snow. One spring he visited and found it bristling with daffodils: he had forgotten his mother had planted them there, and their cheerful yellow—her favorite color—pained him so much that he did not come back again for a whole month, until the flowers had shriveled, leaving nothing but splayed stems and wilting leaves.
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.