Mouthful of Birds(8)

“What the hell?”

“You’re taking her.”

She went to the desk and started to flatten and fold the empty boxes.

“My god, Silvia, your daughter eats birds!”

“I can’t do it anymore.”

“She eats birds! Have you taken her to the doctor? What in hell does she do with the bones?”

Silvia stood looking at me, disconcerted.

“I guess she swallows them, too. I don’t know if birds . . .” she said, and she stood looking at me.

“I can’t take her.”

“One more day with her and I’ll kill myself. I’ll kill her, and then I’ll kill myself.”

“She eats birds!”

Silvia went into the bathroom and locked the door. I looked out through the picture window. Sara waved happily to me from the car. I tried to calm down. I tried to come up with something that would help me take a few stumbling steps toward the door, praying that in the time it took to reach it I would go back to being an ordinary man, a fastidious and organized guy who was capable of spending ten minutes in front of a shelf of cans in the supermarket, making sure the peas he’s buying are really the most suitable ones. I thought about how, considering there are people who eat people, eating live birds wasn’t so bad. Also, from a natural point of view it was healthier than drugs, and from a social one, it was easier to hide than a pregnancy at thirteen. But I’m pretty sure that until I reached for the car door handle I went on thinking, She eats birds, she eats birds, she eats birds, on and on.

I brought Sara home. She didn’t say anything on the way, and when we got there, she unloaded her things by herself. Her birdcage, her suitcase—which she and her mother had loaded into the trunk—and four shoe boxes like the one Silvia had brought from the garage. I couldn’t bring myself to help her. I opened the front door, and I waited there while she came and went with everything. After I’d told her she could use the upstairs bedroom and waited a few minutes while she settled in, I had her come down and sit across from me at the dining table. I fixed two cups of coffee. Sara pushed hers to the side and said she didn’t drink anything brewed.

“You eat birds, Sara.”

“Yes, Dad.”

She bit her lips, ashamed, and said:

“You do, too.”

“You eat live birds, Sara.”

“Yes, Dad.”

I remembered Sara at five years old, sitting at the table with us and fanatically devouring a squash, and I thought we would find the way to resolve this problem. But when the Sara I had in front of me smiled again, I wondered what it would be like to have a mouth full of something all feathers and feet, to swallow something warm and moving. I covered my mouth with my hand the way Silvia had done earlier, and I left Sara alone before the two untouched cups of coffee.



* * *





Three days passed. Sara spent almost all that time in the living room, upright on the sofa with her legs pressed together and her hands on her knees. I left early for work and endured the hours searching the internet for infinite combinations of words like bird, raw, cure, adoption, knowing that she was still sitting there, looking out at the yard for hours on end. When I came back to the house around seven and saw her just as I’d pictured her throughout the day, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I felt like leaving and locking her in, hermetically sealed, like those insects I’d hunted when I was little and kept in glass jars until the air ran out. Could I do it?

When I was little I went to a circus once, and I saw a bearded woman who put live rats in her mouth. She held one there for a while, its tail wriggling between her closed lips while she paraded before the audience, smiling, her eyes turned upward as if it gave her some great pleasure. Now I thought about that woman almost every night as I tossed and turned, unable to sleep, mulling over the possibility of checking Sara into a psychiatric hospital. Maybe I could visit her once or twice a week. Silvia and I could take turns. I thought about those cases when the doctors recommend the patient be isolated, keeping him away from family for a few months. Maybe it would be a good option for everyone, but I wasn’t sure Sara could survive in a place like that. Or could she? In any case, her mother wouldn’t allow it. Or would she? I couldn’t decide.

On the fourth day Silvia came to see us. She brought five shoe boxes that she left just inside the front door. Neither of us said a word about them. She asked where Sara was, and I pointed her to the bedroom upstairs. Later, she came back down alone. I offered her coffee. We drank it in the living room, in silence. She was pale, and at times her hands shook and made the cup rattle in the saucer. We both knew what the other was thinking. I could have said, This is your fault, this is what you’ve brought us to, and she could have said something absurd like This is happening because you never paid attention to her. But the truth is, we were both very tired.

“I’ll take care of that,” said Silvia before she left, pointing to the shoe boxes she’d brought. I didn’t say anything, but I was deeply grateful.



* * *





In the supermarket, people loaded their carts up with cereal boxes, sweets, vegetables, and dairy products. I stuck with my canned foods and waited quietly in the checkout line. I went to the supermarket two or three times a week. Sometimes, even if I had nothing to buy, I still stopped there on my way home. I took a cart and walked through the aisles thinking about what I could be forgetting. At night, we watched TV together. Sara sat upright in her corner of the couch, and I sat at the other end, sneaking a look at her every once in a while to see if she was following the show or had her eyes glued on the yard again. I fixed food for us both and brought it to the living room on two trays. I put Sara’s down in front of her, and that’s where it stayed. She waited for me to start eating and then said: