There was no way for my mother to know about the bird in the well. No one knew. No one had ever known. Not Ben. Not even Mark or Penny. No one. Ever.
I closed my eyes and saw it, heard it: the broken blue jay at the bottom of the well, its screeches echoing through time and space, finding their way back to me.
IT HAD HAPPENEDabout a year or so after my father died. His suicide had left me wrecked and angry all the time. I didn’t want to process or try to make sense of things. I was eight years old, and my world had been turned upside down and inside out. I wanted to hurt everything around me.
In addition to the constant anger, I felt alone in a way I never had before. My mother’s drinking escalated without my dad there anymore to run interference, to keep her in check. She took to day drinking, and when I got home from school in the afternoon, I never knew who’d I find there. A kind mother who’d baked cookies and wanted to go to town so we could visit the bookstore or get new art supplies, or a drunk mother, angry as a hornet and looking for someone to sink her stinger into.
I was always exhausted when I got home from school: it was mentally and physically draining to pretend all day, to play at being a good and happy girl, a straight-A student whose mother didn’t drink, whose father hadn’t killed himself, whose back wasn’t covered in scars.
Ben had changed too. He was around less and didn’t have much time for his little sister anymore. He had either soccer or basketball practice every day after school and wouldn’t come home until dinnertime, and usually not even then, choosing to go eat at a friend’s house and play video games, maybe even spend the night. When he was home, he locked himself in his room after dinner to do homework and play video games and wouldn’t open the door when I knocked and called out to him.
But I didn’t have sports or friends to keep me after school, so on the days my mother greeted me in the front hall, reeking of gin, saying, “I’m afraid I’m not quite myself today,” I took that as a warning to get out and stay out. I went out into the woods, no matter the weather.
I’d drop off my school bag, put on sturdy boots, and grab Ben’s BB gun.
It was stored in the back of the hall closet along with my dad’s old red-and-black-checked wool hunting jacket—one of the few pieces of hisclothing my mother hadn’t thrown into Hefty bags and hauled off to the Salvation Army. I’d put on the huge jacket that I was lost inside, grab the gun, and slink out the back door in the kitchen, crossing the backyard. Our house, a large two-story colonial painted slate gray, felt like a prison I was escaping from. Even with the lights on, the house always felt dark and cold, as if it were made of damp stone and not hundred-year-old wood. The curtains were always closed and the windows never opened: the house was stuffy and airless, like being in a tomb.
My mother’s studio was at the rear of the house in what had once been the old enclosed porch. You got to it through a door at the back of the dining room. The back door in the kitchen led out to the patio—this was the door I’d sneak out of carrying the gun, quietly easing the door closed and running across the patio, then the lawn and toward the woods that lined the rear of the property.
I never let myself turn and look back as I walked away. To catch my mother’s attention as I made my escape was bad luck. I kept my eyes on the trees and my hands wrapped tightly around the gun as I moved, feeling both her and the house itself watching me.
The woods behind our house went on for miles. There were old logging roads where people rode dirt bikes and four-wheelers in warmer weather and snowmobiles in the winter. But I stayed off the roads, making my own path through the dense forest, exploring.
I’d walk for hours, shooting at anything that moved. Or anything that didn’t. I shot upNO TRESPASSINGsigns. Old beer bottles. Aimed at squirrels, chipmunks, birds, although I never got one. My aim was terrible.
About a mile behind our house, off a long-forgotten trail, I’d discovered an abandoned cellar hole where a house once stood. I never told my mother or brother about it. I never took either of them back there to show it to them. It was my secret discovery, a place that was mine and mine alone.
The crumbling stone foundation was shot through with saplings and layered with decades of leaf litter. I’d found things in and around wherethe old house had stood: a rusted pot, an old glass bottle, a silver spoon, a metal button. I used to imagine the family who might have lived there once, and in my mind, they were the mirror version of our family: a mother and father, son and daughter. I told myself they’d been happy. They’d had a good life. They’d stayed together and loved each other very much. Then, when the unfairness of their imagined happiness felt like it was too much to bear, I conjured terrible things to have happened to them: a flu, a fire, a murder-suicide. I took away their happily-ever-after ending and made it gruesome. And now I was standing, literally, in the ruins of their lives, feeling very pleased with myself.
Behind the cellar hole was an old well, a circle of stone that went down about forty feet. It was dried up—no water at the bottom, only a carpet of rotten leaves. I’d drop acorns and pebbles down just to watch them plunge to the bottom without a sound. I made little figures out of twigs, forming arms and legs, small bodies bound together with grass. I’d line them up along the edge and push them in just to watch them fall.
Sometimes I’d talk to the well, shout down into it, my own words echoing back out at me. I talked to my father, mostly, raging at him. “WHY, WHY, WHY?” I shouted. “HOW COULD YOU LEAVE US?” I’d yell and cry and think about how his arms around me had felt solid and safe, about the huge paintings he did that he saw whole worlds inside, about how he’d called me his Moppet. “I HATE YOU!” I’d yell down as if he now resided there like a magic toad living at the bottom of the well.
Then I’d wipe the tears from my eyes with the sleeve of his scratchy wool jacket, pick up the gun, and go back to shooting.
I never expected to hit anything.
I dreamed of it, though.
I wanted to hit a wild creature. To make it suffer.
I felt something sick and poisonous inside me, and I thought that if I could just hurt something else, it might make my own pain less severe. That it might somehow make things better.
But when I actually hit the blue jay, saw it fall from the spindly aspentree, hop around trying desperately to fly, its wing badly damaged, it didn’t feel cleansing or cathartic. It felt like I’d become a monster.
I stood over it, watching it flutter and hop in circles, screeching.
My heart banged in my chest, a frantic bird of its own. My hands on the gun were slippery with sweat and ached from gripping it so tightly.
I tried to kill the blue jay. To put the poor squeaking creature out of its misery. I found a big rock, held it over the bird, but couldn’t bring myself to drop it.
Eee-eee-eeewent the bird, frenzied, flapping in circles.
But it turned out that I was not a killer. Only a maimer of innocent creatures.
I took off my father’s coat, then my sweatshirt, which I used to wrap up the frantic bird, thinking I should run home, try to find a vet or a bird rescue center. Call some adult who could help me.
But that’s not what I did.
