With the room done, there was nothing to do but wait. Soon, Eric and the kid would arrive. We offered them a lift home—first Gigi, then Anum, then me, so as not to seem uncharitable by comparison—but Eric insisted the cab ride would give the kid space to decompress. Sure, we said, eager to seem casual. In reality we were catatonic on the couch, clearing bags of peanut butter pretzels by the fistful while Family Feud reruns played.
Yesterday we were just roommates. Today, we would become parents.
“Should I pop them in the freezer?” Gigi asked. On the table was a small village of milkshakes. They scraped a line through the dewy styrofoam with their blunt fingernail.
Beside them, Anum held up her phone screen. A haloed blue dot darted down 81 South. “They’re a few miles away. I don’t want them to get icy.” Earlier, she panic-bought six milkshakes from Wawa, all random flavors, in case the kid had an allergy or was picky. From their cores a cold, artificial vanilla diffused through the room.
Traffic turned rancid; there was a fender bender near the exit. When Eric finally arrived, kid in tow, Anum ushered them both toward the cups, by then their contents more milk than shake.
“Um,” the kid said, looking to Eric for help, “no thank you. I’m not hungry right now.” He wrung his hands where they dangled at the edge of his small, round stomach, the stomach of a fed kitten. “Ma’am,” he added.
“He’s lactose intolerant,” Eric said. He slung the kid’s stained Jansport over his shoulder then slipped up the stairs, probably to piss and/or avoid the awkward fanfare, as fathers were wont to do.
Gigi winked at the kid. “Don’t worry, I’m nonbinary and vegan. Way more annoying.” He showed no indication of understanding. He seemed to be trying hard not to stare at Gigi’s teal box braids, nor at Anum’s hijab. Chunky gold hoops sprouted from its lower pleats, clutched to her lobes like a bushel of gilded bananas.
I kneeled and offered my hand to him. He shook it with a sort of crab-claw grip. I told him my name was Dom. I don’t know why. I’d wanted to shed Dominique for a while, molt its feminine scales, but hadn’t found the courage for a public rebirth. This was the immediate effect of the kid: the truths we normally hid from each other broke ground, reaching like seedlings toward light.
Upstairs, Eric unpacked the Jansport into the sole dresser we managed to poach from a curb, still reeking of new paint. The room was similarly thrifted: a spaceship rug piloted by a dinosaur, a mega-blanket of mismatched baby quilts that Gigi stitched together with embroidery floss. There was a beetle-shaped lamp whose abdomen illuminated with the pull of a chain, a Twilight alarm clock—“the movie is nine years old, just like you!” we joked, twisting the dial to play its twee song. The kid had been instructed, or maybe compelled by his own instincts, to appease us. He radiated a desperate gratitude, nodding vigorously at each new thing. It was startling to see a child so aware of the need to appear happy.
Show and tell over, we buoyed in the middle of his room, ogling one another like sharks. The kid coughed into his fist.
“If it’s okay,” he said, sounding like a tiny old man, “I’d like to lay down for a while.”
Of course, we told him, and hurried out. We’d be downstairs if he needed anything.
Outside, we watched the sun unspool. We passed around the shakes and a spliff, hoping the breeze would dull the smell. The kid’s bedroom window overlooked the backyard, which was unruly with summer’s first cucumber vines, cone-shaped weeds encircling the fire pit.
Eric produced a thin binder of the kid’s files. His first name was Bird, for Larry Bird; middle name Michael, for Michael Jordan; last name Brown, for his mother, though now he was biologically bound to take Eric’s: Bird Michael Maccabee.
Gigi passed him the spliff. “He looks like you,” they said, pointing to a wallet-sized school picture of the kid. Against the smoky green background his blond bowl cut gleamed white, the tips of his big ears curling away from his scalp.
“Yeah. Unlucky.” Eric’s chuckle was dry, loathsome. At least he already dressed like a father, with his bleach-holed shirts and old denim, his furry arms streaked faintly with dirt.
I wanted to change his name. A kid named Bird was fodder for bullies.
“It’s the only thing left that’s truly his,” Anum said. She wouldn’t look at me so I’d understand that my logic annoyed her, that, per usual, she disagreed with me.
“They’re really not sending anyone here to check on him?” I turned to Eric now. “How do they even know the house is habitable?”
“Lowkey isn’t,” Gigi snorted, “they still haven’t sent someone to fix the faucet. Or that spot on the stairs where the carpet is coming up.”
“We could be serial killers,” I said, “or predators.”
“There’s no one coming to check. I asked. Otherwise I’d’ve hid the weed,” Eric said.
“And no one else wanted him?”
Anum scowled. “Jesus, Dominique.”
“I don’t mean it like that.” Though I did, a little. It was unbelievable to me that no other relatives had appeared from the woodwork. “Who does this kid spend holidays with?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’ll spend them with us now.” Red streaks glowed where Eric rubbed his face.
Beneath the fairy lights, I poured over the file. There were immunization records, a birth certificate, report cards, a note from a teacher calling him shy and bright. A manila envelope of baby pictures showed Bird posing alone, hugging a stuffed bear or chasing bubbles.
The last item was a copy of the letter Eric received from the district attorney. It was the same one we originally framed as a prank, months ago, incredulous at the idea—Eric, a father? When the paternity test came back positive he sobbed for days. I stowed the letter in the utility closet, struggling to remember why it ever seemed funny.
It was wrong of me, but I looked for traces of mischief in Bird’s blue eyes. I expected him to be wrong somehow. But no, he was polite if not sheltered, which made the situation sadder. Once he had a mother who loved him, and now he had us.
Co-parenting as a chimera—this was the idea. Unite our many heads and limbs toward the task of nurturing Bird until, come August, fourth grade began.
We only needed to survive the summer.
As roommates, our cycles of sleep/wake/work were staggered, dictated by our graduate classes, or, during the summer, our crummy temp jobs. Chores lived on a whiteboard and were completed asynchronously. We figured the kid was, at a baseline, another responsibility we could divide into quadrants. How hard was it for four people to keep one child happy, fed, safe?
Bird’s days began early with Gigi for breakfast, study games they copied from their part-time summer camp gig at the local Montessori school, house tasks like collecting the mail or turning the compost. Anum stayed with him after her opening barista shift. She was grave about her self-appointed post in Arts, Culture & Cuisine, alternating lessons on cooking and drawing. The house, as insanely curated as Bird’s bedroom, was an apt muse for the latter. It was ancient and rent-controlled, housing decades of graduate students from the nearby university. The decor reflected as much. A battle royale of stolen street signs versus flea market paintings, scrawled-on postcards from past residents whose lore was long forgotten.
Each day, at lunchtime, while gravy simmered or bread rose, Anum let Bird choose a piece from the walls to mimic. She lent her own supplies to the task. He especially loved oil pastels and their potent, waxy colors. There was a folksy triad of butterfly-winged cats in the stairwell that he redrew in several techniques, push-pinning each new attempt around the originals like a halo of trick mirrors.
In the early afternoons, before his graveyard shift as a security guard, Eric shepherded Bird through the world of men. He organized playdates, documentary screenings, story time at the local library. Bed and bath time duty were rotated, but the hours just before dusk belonged to me. I was tasked with “cultivating an appreciation of the natural world.”
Longhand for: it’d be me, the kid, the trees, and the squirrels.
It was well known that people and their rules confused me. Among my cohort I had an unfriendly reputation, which hardly mattered in sustainability management, but stung all the same. My own parents were lifelong academics who spoke to me like their office manager. In the summers, they fussed over their manuscripts, too busy to play my kind of pretend. Childhood was long and singular, with the soft smiling underside of leaves for company.
It is a grave skill, loneliness. One either learns to swim with the current or drown. This was my subject to teach.
There was a nature preserve not far from the house. It was a dry June; the grass hissed as we walked the network of trails. Bird liked to collect the water that leaked from his bath faucet into an old bucket, then haul it in his bike basket to feed the wildflowers. He took great care in measuring the broad white petals on the budding rue-anemones with a retractable silicone ruler Gigi gave him. In a big journal, gifted from Eric, he recorded how many millimeters the wrinkle-leaf goldenrods had grown since the evening before. He described, in the convoluted metaphors Anum encouraged, how they looked more like bouquets of skinny shucked corn with each passing day.
To me these little assignments were intrusions. The others were caught in a popularity contest, haunting him with their agendas. Sometimes, as Bird searched the creek for froglets to sketch, sunlight through the leaves fell over him in a pattern that reminded me of bruises.
All I had to offer were snacks. I carried them with me everywhere. Bird seemed to sense them on me, his ears trained to the sound of single-use plastic. In the center of the reserve, a ravine where the hemlocks grew thickest and the loam churned into mud, we would sit together on soggy upturned logs and share one small, noisy snack. Rather than gorge, he savored.
The last bite he left for whatever in the ecosystem passed by. Coin-colored ants marching through pine needles, the tight trembling sphere of a warbler hunting for worms: all took what he offered.
We saw hunters, too. The reserve was overrun by white-tailed deer that feasted on the native flora. The county shelled out hunting permits like candy. Whenever Bird saw reflective vests in the tree line he reached for me, punctuated the air with a small sharp breath.
Once, a fox emerged from the wooded path. It approached nose-first, drawn to the smell of food. At first I mistook it for a dirty lost Dachshund—the tail was ratty, the body oblong—mange, I read later, made foxes diurnal—but it was swift in approach. Before I could shoo it away Bird outstretched his arm. The fox bared its tiny incisors enough to let its slim gray tongue eject and wipe the last crumb from his fingertips. Just as quickly it was gone.
Returning home, I hesitated on the brick stoop. I wasn’t sure what he would tell the others. I had not protected him.
He grabbed my pinky with his and tugged.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I know sometimes we have to keep secrets.”
Though I, apparently, did not.
It happened like this: Gigi and Bird were practicing verb cards. Over the course of the month he relaxed; he periodically asked for hugs. From the deck Gigi pulled a picture of red-capped mushrooms with white spots, a hand poised to pluck—forage, defined the card, searching to obtain something precious.
Then: at lunch, steaming plates of risotto fogging Bird’s new glasses, the frames thick and shiny like a tangelo, he asked Anum if one needed a permit to forage food from the ground. Was it a thing anyone could do? Yes, she said, anyone, even him. People belonged to the earth and the earth belonged to people. Hadn’t I taught him that by now?
This was how a full afternoon became dedicated to picking mushrooms from the sopping wet ground: chanterelles and penny-bun boletes and lion’s mane and indigo milk caps with their startling purple gills, a single orange wedge—chicken of the woods—as big as his foot, which he fanned my sweaty face with, giggling. He frolicked through the bush like Little Red Riding Hood with her bundle of bread, no longer preoccupied by what might be trampled underfoot.
Greedy—the word flashed through me. It dawned on me how we might ruin him, how we may have already.
We shared a bag of cashews and a Twinkie, the vibrant sponge mashed from the bike ride. Bird searched my face for approval while he ate, ecstatic with harvest. “The foraged learns to forage,” he mumbled, smacking his lips, pointing to his bounty of mushrooms. “The foraged becomes a forager. Foraging!”
I asked what he meant.
“Like you,” he said, “and me.”
“Like me?”
“Like all of you. How you foraged me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. He leaned forward and wiped a smudge of cream from the tip of my nose.
“You guys went out in the world to look for something precious.” He giggled again, bashful, and made troughs in the dirt with his heels.
“But we didn’t,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that Eric may have told him something other than the truth. “You are precious, absolutely, but we didn’t know about you for a long time. Someone told us.”
At home, in the storage closet beneath the stairs, I showed him the original letter. In the moment it made sense to me that he should know, that he deserved to know. The letter was framed in a rectangle of gauche looping gold, the glass veiled in dust. Inside was a piece of printer paper, which read:
Dear Eric Wayne Maccabee,
Bird Michael Brown, DOB 06/17/2008, is under the jurisdiction of the State of Kansas as a child in need of urgent care. The mother, Splendid Brown, currently awaits sentencing. She named an Eric Maccabee of Blacksburg, VA as a possible father. We have completed a search and all possible matches are receiving this letter.
If you know Splendid Brown and are a putative father for the above-referenced child, please contact my trial assistant, Miranda Pino, at the enclosed number, so we can be in touch.
Sincerely,
Patricia A. Tubb
EAM/bp
“What does that mean? Sentencing?” he asked.
“It means she went to prison.” I didn’t know the charge.
“Oh, okay.” he said. He slid the letter back into its resting place. “Thank you,” he said, then hugged me. I patted his back while tears soaked hot into my shirt.
The others suspected something, though to my knowledge Bird made no mention of what he learned. In fact it was the absence of information, I think, that alarmed them.
Of Gigi’s homemade word scrambles he opined freely. He wasn’t shy in his complaints about the difficulty of Anum’s art assignments—Monet’s Impression, Sunrise and its deceptively layered pastels, versus how well Do Ho Suh’s transparent sculptures transferred to his tiny origami models. He told Eric when he thought an exhibition was good or bad.
Of our time together he said little, even when prompted. Only that he found it relaxing.
And yet—
“He started the fight. He refuses to tell me why.” Eric debriefed us at dinner. Barely two days had passed. Bird was asleep upstairs, a bag of frozen peas slack against his temple.
There was a skirmish at the playground with an older boy. He was a lanky tween from next door who we sometimes saw on our way to the reserve, when he took his own moody laps. Even with the front door closed, yells could be heard from inside the house; his mother sometimes threw things, I knew, lamps, hairdryers.
At the playground, Eric heard the punch connect before he saw it. The screams were shrill—a girl, he thought, had fallen from the slide. “I couldn’t believe Bird was the one standing over him and not the one on the ground.” The older boy didn’t have the chance to retaliate. It was his little brother who hit Bird on the head with a bulbous kiddie bat, begging him to stop.
Gigi paced the kitchen while the rest of us watched. “Congrats, guys. We’re raising a bully.”
“Calm down, Geeg,” Eric said, who flinched when they swerved on him.
“Don’t tell me to ‘calm down’, Eric, I swear to God.”
“Alright.” His hands flexed in his lap even as he sat still, as if it wasn’t already obvious that they had been covertly fucking for weeks. The living room brush-bys, the tag-teamed bedtime routines. Whatever parent-kink shit is going on there, leave me out of it, Anum had muttered to me while we watched them flirt by the kitchen sink, Bird caught in the middle on his step stool, concentrated on the soapy pan in front of him. Perhaps he thought that another secret to keep.
“Do you know what he said to me this morning?” Gigi said, still fuming. “He said our time together is arbitrary, since he’s starting school soon. Arbitrary. A word I taught him, by the way.”
“He said something to me, too, that he’s not worried about making friends,” Eric said. “I thought he meant it in a sweet way. Like, ‘I have you guys and that’s enough’, sorta thing.”
They looked at us expectantly. I shook my head. Anum, by contrast, had a faint expression of amusement.
“No complaints so far.” She stirred her spoon through the last dregs of her soup. “Although—” and here she paused as if I might chime in. When I didn’t, she continued. “We talk a lot about where food comes from, what it means to eat sustainably. He saw a chicken truck while we were driving down the highway the other day, one of those eighteen-wheelers where they stack cages on the back.” He asked her where the chickens were going, and she told him: to the slaughterhouse, and, eventually, the grocery aisle. He asked, too, if boy chickens died more than girl chickens. She didn’t think so, but offered that egg factories often killed boy chicks since they couldn’t have babies of their own. “After that I asked if he still wanted to eat meat. He said yes, but wants to understand how it happens.”
“How what happens?” Eric asked.
“How they die,” she said, licking broth from the back of the spoon. “The process of killing and cleaning an animal before it’s eaten.”
“I call bullshit. There’s no way he came up with that idea.” Gigi pointed at Anum. “This is exactly why I said we should raise him plant-based.”
“Did he really tell you this?” I asked.
“Not in so many words, and not chickens specifically, but yes.” She nodded toward me. “The hunters in the reserve. That’s what he asked about. He wants to shoot a deer.”
Eric did that man-lowers-voice-to-convey-gravitas thing. “Not happening. He just punched a kid. We’re not letting him shoot a gun.”
Anum shrugged. “I saw my uncle slaughter a goat for Eid once. I was a little younger than Bird is now. It was horrific, obviously, but I understood that there was respect involved.”
“Yeah, great, like we need to keep that cycle of abuse going,” Eric said, “besides, he’s too young.”
“He’s not. Resident children under 12 only need the company of a licensed adult.” I had already pulled up the restrictions on my phone.
“And also fuck you,” Anum added, brandishing a finger, her chiffon tunic rippling. Gigi threw up their arms, declaring that the whole thing was too much.
They continued to bicker. I tuned them out. I wasn’t interested in arguing over whether or not Bird was ready. I was too enthused by the idea that I could give him something they could not, a thing he wanted. I had entered their rat race after all; I didn’t care, too thrilled imagining that, if the four of us were somehow in danger, if he was faced with the prospect of saving just one, he might, after the required beats of humility, choose me—the sacrifice of one lonely little god.
A special sort of tunnel vision consumed me; in that moment I would have granted him any request.
This was what parents meant, then, when they recited the same platitudes across eternity: I would do anything for my kid. Anything, as in all, as in everything, no matter the toll.
That day the preserve was unrecognizable, trading the warm wash of golden hour for dawn’s pearly lilacs. I kneeled on the cool asphalt to button the blaze orange vest up to Bird’s throat. The few other hunters in the parking lot strolled past in a way I couldn’t decide was leisurely or threatening. One, with his own son in tow, stalled by the treeline until I returned his solemn nod.
“It’s your hair,” Bird said, sensing my confusion. He touched where I tucked my braid beneath the rim of my hat. “They think you’re my dad.”
“Sorry,” I said, not sure how else to respond.
“Why?” He yanked on the tongue of his boots. Later, collecting the clothes he deposited beside the bathtub, I would find a tick trapped in the weave of his wool sock, writhing and reaching for skin. “That’s what you are, right?”
I let him carry the rifle—unloaded—and it bounced against his back as he walked. I told him I wasn’t a man. Being in the forest made the saying of it more painful. I had never lied like that before, with the trees as witness. Anyway, technically, Eric was his father.
He was quiet for a while, thinking. When we arrived at an empty deer stand, he climbed the wooden ladder confidently. I joined him on the platform and took the rifle off his back.
“Anum said nobody will ever replace my mom.” His gaze stayed on me, watching how I slid back the bolt, pushed the magazine into the chamber. “That means you have to be my dad. Only if you want to.”
The buck posed the same way the fox did, less than thirty yards away. Regal beside a flowering dogwood tree, its four points framed the scope’s bullseye, waiting for Bird to sink the trigger.
He asked me if I thought it would hurt. If the buck would feel pain before the black.
“Yes, there will be some pain—” he had been lied to enough, “—but after that, the opposite. He’ll go bounding off into deer heaven, where the other deers will welcome him. And it’ll be you who set him free.”
The buck still stood frozen, waiting. The rifle was level, Bird’s finger slack against the trigger. But he wouldn’t do it. He knocked the butt against the platform gently enough to startle the buck, and it bounded away.
When I asked him why, walking home, he shrugged, mumbling under his breath so that some of the words were lost: “Hasn’t had a chance to be a man yet.” I never plucked up the courage to ask who he meant.
