Bird box

As a boy, Tom’s mother used to brag to her friends that her son “refused to let a problem sit.” He tries to figure it out, she’d say. There isn’t a thing in this house that doesn’t interest him. Tom remembers watching the faces of his mother’s friends, how they smiled when she said these things. Toys? his mother would say. Tom doesn’t need toys. A tree branch is a toy. The wires behind the VCR are toys. The way the windows work. His whole life he’d been described this way. The kind of guy who wants to know how something works. Ask Tom. If he doesn’t know, he’ll learn it. He fixes things. Everything. But to Tom, this behavior wasn’t remarkable. Until he had Robin. Then a child’s fascination with the machinations of things overcame him. Now, standing beneath this tent, Tom can’t tell if he’s like the child who wants to figure out the tent or like the father who advises him to walk away from this one.

The men examine the thing, blindly, for many minutes.

“Maybe we could use this,” Tom says to Jules, but Jules is already calling him from a distance.

Tom crosses the street. He follows Jules’s voice until they meet up on another lawn.

The very first house they go to is unlocked. They agree they will not open their eyes in this house. They enter.

Inside is drafty. The men know that the windows are open before they check them. Tom’s broomstick tells him the first room they enter is full of boxes. These people, he thinks, were getting ready to leave.

“Jules,” Tom says, “check these. I’m going to search farther into the house.”

It’s already been twenty-four hours since they left their own house.

Now, with carpeting beneath him, he walks slowly through a stranger’s home. He comes to a couch. A chair. A television. Jules and the husky are barely audible now. Wind blows through the open windows. Tom comes to a table. He feels along its surface until his fingers stop at something.

A bowl, he thinks.

Lifting it, he hears something fall to the tabletop. He feels for it, finds it, and discovers it’s a utensil he didn’t expect.

It’s like an ice-cream scooper, but smaller.

Tom runs a finger into the scooper. There’s a thick substance in there.

He shivers. It’s not ice cream. And once, Tom touched something just like it.

On the bathtub’s edge. By her little wrist. The blood there was like this. Thick. Dead. Robin’s blood.

Shaking, he brings the bowl closer to his chest as he sets down the scooper. He slides his fingers slowly down the smooth ceramic curve of the bowl until he touches something resting in the basin. He gasps and drops the bowl onto the carpeted floor.

“Tom?”

Tom doesn’t answer at first. The thing he just touched, he once touched something like that, too.

Robin had brought it home from school. From science class. She kept it in an open coffee can full of pennies. Tom found it when Robin was at school. When he was searching the house for that smell.

He knew he’d found it when, just inside the rim of the can, atop the pile of coins, he saw a small discolored ball. Instinctively, he reached for it. It squished between his fingers.

It was a pig’s eye. Dissected. Robin had mentioned doing that in class.

“Tom? What happened in there?”

Jules is calling you. Answer him.

“Tom?”

“I’m all right, Jules! I just dropped something.”

Backing up, wanting to leave this room, his hand nudges something.

He knows this feeling, too.

That was a shoulder, he thinks. There’s a body sitting in a chair at this table.

Tom imagines it. Seated. Eyeless.

At first he cannot move. He’s facing where the body must be.

He hurries out of the room.

“Jules,” he says, “let’s get out of here.”

“What happened?”

Tom tells him. Within minutes they are out of the house. They’ve decided to work their way back home. A dog is enough. Between the tent and what Tom found in the bowl, neither of them want to be out here anymore.

They cross one lawn. Then a driveway. Then two. The dog is pulling Jules. Tom struggles to keep up. He feels like he’s getting lost out here in the darkness of his blindfold. He calls to Jules.

“I’m over here!” Jules calls.

Tom follows his voice. He catches up to him.

“Tom,” Jules says. “The dog is making a big deal about this garage.”

Still trembling from his discovery in the house, and still frightened, deeper, by the senselessness of the tent in the street, Tom says they should continue home. But Jules wants to know what the dog is so interested in.

“It’s a freestanding garage,” Jules says. “He’s acting like something’s alive in there.”