Mouthful of Birds

by Samanta Schweblin

  She pointed me to my own sofa and I obeyed, because sometimes, when the past knocks at the door and treats me like the past four years haven’t happened, it turns out I’m still a dumbass.

  “You’re not going to like this. It’s . . . It’s intense.” She looked at her watch. “It’s about Sara.”

  “It’s always about Sara,” I said.

  “You’ll just say I’m exaggerating, and that I’m crazy and all that. But there’s no time today. You’re coming home with me right now, you’ve got to see this with your own eyes.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Plus, I told Sara you were coming, so she’s waiting for you.”

  We sat in silence a moment. I was wondering what the next step would be, until she frowned, stood up, and walked to the door. I picked up my coat and followed her out.

  * * *

  From outside the house looked the same as always, the lawn newly mown and Silvia’s azaleas hanging from the second-floor balconies. We both got out of our cars and went inside without exchanging a word. Sara was sitting on the sofa. Although she’d finished classes for the year, she was wearing her high school uniform. The way she filled it out, she looked like those porno schoolgirls in magazines. She was sitting straight up, legs together and her hands on her knees, focusing on some point on the window or out in the yard like she was doing one of her mother’s yoga exercises. She had always been fairly pale and thin, but now she seemed to be brimming with health. Her legs and arms looked stronger, as if she’d been working out for several months. Her hair shone and her cheeks were slightly flushed, like blush but real. When she saw me come in she smiled and said:

  “Hi, Dad.”

  Although my little girl really was a sweetheart, two words were all it took for me to realize that something was really off with the kid, and I was sure it had something to do with her mother. Sometimes I think I should have brought her to live with me, but I almost always think otherwise. Not far from the TV, beside the window, there was a cage. It was a birdcage—maybe a foot and a half tall—that hung from the ceiling, empty.

  “What’s that?”

  “A cage,” Sara said, and smiled.

  Silvia motioned for me to follow her to the kitchen. We stood by the window and she checked to make sure Sara wasn’t listening. The girl was still sitting bolt upright on the sofa, looking out toward the street as if we’d never arrived. Silvia spoke to me in a low voice.

  “Look, you’re going to have to take this calmly.”

  “Come on, Silvia, stop jerking me around. What’s going on?”

  “I haven’t fed her since yesterday.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “So you’ll see with your own eyes.”

  “Uh-huh . . . Are you crazy?”

  She told me to follow her back to the living room, where she pointed me to the sofa. I sat down across from Sara. Silvia left the house, and we saw her cross in front of the window and go into the garage.

  “What’s going on with your mom?”

  Sara shrugged her shoulders. Her straight black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she had thick bangs that hung down almost over her eyes.

  Silvia returned with a shoe box. She carried it level, in both hands, as if it held something delicate. She went to the birdcage and opened it, then took from the shoe box a very small sparrow, the size of a golf ball; she put the bird into the cage and closed it. She dropped the box to the floor and kicked it to one side, where it lay with another nine or ten similar boxes under the desk. Then Sara got up, her ponytail shining and bouncing, and skipped over to the cage like a little girl five years younger. With her back to us, standing on her tiptoes, she opened the cage and took out the bird. I couldn’t see what she did. The bird screeched and she struggled a moment, maybe because it was trying to escape. Silvia covered her mouth with her hand. When Sara turned back to us, the bird wasn’t there anymore. Her mouth, nose, chin, and both hands were smeared with blood. She smiled sheepishly. Her gigantic mouth arched and opened, and her red teeth made me jump to my feet. I ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and vomited into the toilet. I thought Silvia would follow me and start laying blame and ordering me around from the other side of the door, but she didn’t. I rinsed my mouth and face and stood in front of the mirror, listening. I heard them carry something heavy down the stairs. The front door opened and closed a few times. Sara asked if she could have the photo that was on the shelf. Silvia said yes, and her voice was already distant. I came out of the bathroom trying not to make noise, and I peered into the hallway. The front door was wide open, and Silvia was loading the birdcage into the backseat of my car. I took a few steps with the intention of going outside and shouting a few choice things, but Sara came out of the kitchen and onto the street, and I stopped short so she wouldn’t see me. They hugged. Silvia kissed her and put her into the passenger seat. I waited until she’d come back inside and closed the door.

  “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:

  “Excuse me, Dad.”

  And she’d stand up, go to her room, and gently close the door. The first time, I turned down the TV and waited in silence. There was a brief, sharp shriek. A few seconds later, I heard the pipes in the bathroom, the water running. Sometimes she came down after a little while, serene, her hair perfectly combed. Other times she showered and came down in pajamas.

  Sara didn’t want to go out. Studying her behavior, I thought maybe she was suffering from the beginnings of agoraphobia. Sometimes I took a chair out to the yard and tried to convince her to come outside for a while. But it was no use. Even so, her complexion continued to radiate energy, and she looked more and more beautiful, as if she spent her days exercising in the sun.

  Every once in a while, as I went about my business, I found a feather. On the floor beside the door, behind the coffee can, among the silverware, or in the bathroom sink, still wet. I would pick it up, taking care that she didn’t see me do it, and flush it down the toilet. Sometimes I stood watching the water carry it down. Sometimes the toilet filled up again, the water grew calm and mirrorlike once more, and I was still there looking, wondering if it was necessary to go back to the supermarket, if it was really worth it to fill the carts with so much garbage, and thinking about Sara, about what could be out there in the yard.

  * * *

  One afternoon, Silvia called to let me know she was in bed with a vicious flu. She said she couldn’t come visit us. She asked if I could manage without her. I asked if she had a fever, if she was eating enough, if she’d been to the doctor, and when I had her busy enough with her answers, I told her I had to hang up, and I did. The phone rang again, but I didn’t answer.

  We watched TV. When I brought my food, Sara didn’t get up to go to her room. She concentrated on the yard until I finished eating, then she looked back at the TV show.

  The next day, I stopped at the supermarket before going home. I put a few things in my cart, the same ones as always. I wandered the aisles as if I were doing a first reconnaissance of the store. I stopped at the pet section, where there was food for dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, and fish. I picked up some of the items and examined them more closely. I read their ingredients, how many calories they provided, and the amounts recommended for each breed, weight, and age. Then I went to the gardening section, where there were only plants with and without flowers, and flowerpots and dirt, so I went back to the pet section and stood there thinking about what to do next. Other shoppers filled their carts and steered them around me. The loudspeaker announced a sale on dairy products in honor of Mother’s Day, and then played a song about a guy who had all kinds of women but who longed for his first love, until finally I pushed the cart back to the canned-goods section.

  That night it took Sara a while to fall asleep. My room was below hers and I could hear her pace nervously above me, get into bed, and then get out again. I wondered what condition the room was in; I hadn’t gone up since she’d arrived. Maybe the place was a real disaster, a barnyard full of muck and feathers.

  The third night after Silvia’s call, before I went home, I stopped to look in the birdcages hanging from a pet store’s awning. None of the birds looked like the sparrow I’d seen at Silvia’s house. They were all brightly colored, and in general a little bigger. I stood there for a while until a salesman came over to ask me if I was interested in any of the birds. I said no, absolutely not, that I was just looking. He stayed nearby, moving boxes around and looking out toward the street, and then he realized I really wasn’t going to buy anything and he went back to the counter.

  At home, Sara was waiting on the sofa, upright in her yoga position. We greeted each other.

  “Hi, Sara.”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  Her rosy cheeks were fading, and she didn’t look as healthy as she had on previous days. I made my food, sat down on the sofa, and turned on the TV. After a while Sara said:

  “Daddy . . .”

  I swallowed what I was chewing and turned down the volume on the TV, unsure whether she had really spoken, but there she was, her legs pressed together and her hands on her knees, looking at me.

  “What?”

  “Do you love me?”

  I made a movement with my hand and accompanied it with a nod. The whole gesture together meant Yes, of course. She was my daughter, right? And just in case, thinking mostly about what my ex-wife would have considered “appropriate,” I said:

  “Yes, sweetheart. Of course.”

  And then Sara smiled and looked out at the yard for the rest of the TV show.

  We slept badly again, Sara pacing her room end-to-end, me tossing and turning in bed until I finally drifted off. The next day I called Silvia. It was Saturday, but she didn’t answer the phone. I called back later, and again around noon. I left a message. Sara spent the whole morning sitting on the sofa looking out at the yard. Her hair was a little disheveled and she wasn’t sitting up so straight anymore; she looked very tired. I asked her if she was all right and she said:

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Why don’t you go out to the yard for a
while?”

  “No, Dad.”

  Thinking of our conversation the night before, it occurred to me to ask if she loved me, but right away that struck me as pure stupidity. I called Silvia again. I left another message. In a low voice, making sure Sara couldn’t hear me, I said to her voice mail:

  “It’s urgent, please.”

  We waited, each of us at our end of the sofa, with the TV on. A few hours later Sara said:

  “Excuse me, Dad.”

  She went to her room and closed the door. I turned off the TV so I could hear better: Sara didn’t make a noise. I decided I’d call Silvia one more time. I picked up the receiver, but when I heard the dial tone I hung up. I drove the car to the pet store, looked for a salesperson, and told him I needed a small bird, the smallest he had. The salesman opened a catalogue with photographs and said that prices and food varied from one species to the next.

  “Do you like exotic species, or do you prefer more household ones?”

  I pounded the counter with my open palm. Everything displayed on the counter jumped and the clerk was silent, looking at me. I pointed to a small, dark bird that was moving nervously from one side of its cage to another. They charged me a hundred twenty pesos and gave it to me in a square, green cardboard box with little holes poked through it, and on the lid, a pamphlet from the breeder with the photo of the bird. They also tried to give me a free bag of birdseed, but I turned it down.

  When I got home Sara was still in her room. For the first time since she’d been in the house, I went upstairs and opened her door. She was sitting on the bed across from the open window. She looked at me. Neither of us said anything. She was so pale she looked sick. The room was clean and neat, the door to the bathroom ajar. There were some thirty shoe boxes in a neat pile on the desk, but flattened so they didn’t take up so much space. The cage hung empty near the window. On the night table, next to the lamp, was the framed photo she’d brought from her mother’s house. The bird moved and its feet scratched the cardboard, but Sara stayed still. I placed the box on the desk, and without a word I left the room and closed the door. Then I realized I didn’t feel very good. I leaned against the wall to rest a moment. I looked at the breeder’s pamphlet, which was still in my hand. On the back was information about how to care for the bird, and about its reproduction cycles. They emphasized the species’ need to be in pairs during warm months, and the things one could do to make the years in captivity as pleasant as possible. I heard a brief shriek, and then the bathroom sink turned on. When the water started running I felt a little better, and I knew that, somehow, I would make it down the stairs.