Bird box

The children, Malorie thinks, didn’t take off their blindfolds. That was the first living human voice they’ve ever heard other than one another’s. Yet, they didn’t listen to him.

Yes, she has trained them well. But it’s not a nice thing to think about. Training the children means she has scared them so completely that under no circumstances will they disobey her. As a girl, Malorie rebelled against her parents all the time. Sugar wasn’t allowed in the house. Malorie snuck it in. Scary movies weren’t allowed in the house. Malorie tiptoed downstairs at midnight to watch them on television. When her parents said she wasn’t allowed to sleep on the couch in the living room, she moved her bed in there. These were the thrills of childhood. Malorie’s children don’t know them.

As babies, she trained them to wake with their eyes closed. Standing above their chicken wire beds, flyswatter in hand, she’d wait. As each woke and opened their eyes, she would smack them hard on the arm. They would cry. Malorie would reach down and close their eyes with her fingers. If they kept their eyes closed, she would lift her shirt and feed them. Reward.

“Mommy,” the Girl says, “was that the same man who sings in the radio?”

The Girl is talking about a cassette tape Felix used to like to listen to.

“No,” the Boy says.

“Who was it then?” the Girl asks.

Malorie turns to face the Girl so her voice will be louder.

“I thought we agreed you two wouldn’t ask any questions that have nothing to do with the river. Are we breaking this agreement?”

“No,” the Girl quietly says.

When they were three years old, she trained them to get water from the well. Tying a rope around her waist, she wrapped the other end around the Boy. Then, telling him to feel for the path with his toes, she sent him out there to do it on his own. Malorie would listen to the sound of the bucket clumsily being raised. She listened to him struggle as he carried it back to her. Many times she heard it fall from his hands. Each time it did, she made him go back out there and do it again.

The Girl hated it. She said the ground was “too bumpy” out there around the well. She said it felt like people lived below the grass. Malorie denied the Girl food until she agreed to do it.

When they were toddlers, the children were set at opposite sides of the living room. Malorie would roam the carpet. When she said, “Where am I?” the Boy and Girl would point. Then she’d go upstairs, come back down, and ask them, “Where was I?” The children would point. When they were wrong, Malorie would yell at them.

But they weren’t often wrong. And soon they were never wrong at all.

What would Tom say about that? she thinks. He’d tell you that you were being the best mother on Earth. And you’d believe him.

Without Tom, Malorie only has herself to turn to. And many times, sitting alone at the kitchen table, the children asleep in their bedroom, she asked herself the inevitable question:

Are you a good mother? Does such a thing exist anymore?

Now Malorie feels a soft tap on her knee. She gasps. But it is only the Boy. He is asking for the pouch of food. Midrow, Malorie reaches into her jacket pocket and hands it to him. She hears as his little teeth crunch the once-canned nuts that sat on the cellar shelves for four and a half years before Malorie brought them up this morning.

Then Malorie stops rowing. She is hot. Too hot. She is sweating as much as if it were June. She removes her jacket and places it on the rowboat bench beside her. Then she feels a small tap against her back. The Girl is hungry, too.

Are you a good mother? she asks herself again, handing over a second pouch of food.

How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can’t lift their heads to gaze upon them?

Malorie doesn’t know the answer.

twelve