Mockingbird

by Murray Rice

She’d heard birds chirping outside of her window and didn’t know if they were real. She looked outside, but she saw only snowflakes falling through the streetlamp. Her eyes closed while she picked at the skin of her palm, which was becoming chipped and calloused. She wasn’t aware she was doing it; she was only aware of the birds.

The songs came quickly, queued as if each bird were waiting its turn to sing. She tried counting the different calls. There were too many and it was too chaotic to keep track of. The bird-sounds persisted as she made her way through the windowless hallway, up the stairs, and into her mother’s room.

“I need a reality check.”

This was the term that she and her mother decided to use for times like these.

“Ok. What’s going on?”

The last word emphasized her mother’s Arkansas accent. It was a voice that belonged to a particular latitude — too-hot summers, slow and humid, the kind of heat that softened consonants and stretched vowels until they lost their edges. She had grown up inside that sound. It had been her sound too, once.

There was a girl in the hallway between classes, the first week of school after her move to Iowa. She had said something ordinary — she couldn’t remember what, only that it was nothing, the kind of thing you say without thinking. The girl had stopped and looked at her.

“Did you say —”

And then her own words back, softened into something unfamiliar, the vowels stretched and returned to her like something slightly broken.

She hadn’t known she had an accent until that moment. She hadn’t known her voice marked her, placed her somewhere specific, gave her away. The girl hadn’t been cruel exactly — just curious, the way you repeat something you didn’t quite catch. But she heard herself through it and something shifted. She started listening. To the other kids, to the way Iowa talked, to the flat, efficient way it moved through consonants without lingering. She started adjusting. Not all at once. Steadily, the way water finds its level.

She lost it by spring.

“Do you hear birds?” the daughter asked.

“It’s ten at night. Are you hearing birds?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t.” There was a long pause. A bird chirped.

“Did you take your medicine?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still symptomatic.” Her mother lit a cigarette. “You’re just going to have to wait this out. I promise you, there are no birds.” She spoke like a nurse who had other patients to see.

“Ok.”

The birds became louder as she walked down the stairs.

“Maybe if you look for the birds, they’ll disappear,” her therapist offered during a session one day. “Are the reality checks working?”

She had been seeing her for nearly a year. Each session began with the therapist settling the room, then leading a grounding practice she often mentioned learning in yoga — breathe in, breathe out, notice the body, stay present. Three minutes of calm before the questions started.

She told her therapist that the reality checks were assuring, in a way, but they weren’t helping her orient herself.

“Can you think of anything that might be triggering these auditory hallucinations?”

She couldn’t. Or she could, but the list was long and shapeless: the divorce, the move back in with her mother, the way Iowa still felt foreign after two years. The way she’d started to sound foreign to herself.

“And they started when you moved in with your mother. Around the time of the divorce?”

She nodded.

“Well, the two could be related…” Her therapist typed with two careful fingers, the uneven taps small and clinical in the quiet room.

“And you’re not seeing the birds?”

She wasn’t.

‘It was a voice that belonged to a particular latitude — too-hot summers, slow and humid, the kind of heat that softened consonants and stretched vowels until they lost their edges.’

In her room, as she stretched wool socks over her jeans, she decided to go looking for the birds, but first she pulled one of her birding books from the shelf. The books were a recent gift from her brother — a way, he’d said, to give herself her own reality check. He couldn’t explain the birds. He didn’t hear them either.

She thought of calling him but knew there was nothing he could do from out in the country where he lived. Her mother called where he lived BFE. She’d asked her what that meant one day on a drive through town, not long after he moved out.

“Bum Fuck Egypt.”

“Why Egypt?”

“It just means the middle of nowhere.”

“Egypt isn’t the middle of nowhere.”

“I don’t know, honey. It’s just what we called it.”

They both smiled. It was the kind of exchange that only worked in her mother’s voice — the drawl giving it permission to be funny. She had tried the same phrase once, since moving north, and it had come out flat, stripped of whatever made it hers.

“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing out there,” her mother added. “Rentin’ some run-down farmhouse when he could’ve stayed home.”

“Did you move here because of dad?”

Her mother drew on her cigarette. “His dad was the same way.”

She watched the snow out the window.

She had never seen snow before they moved to Iowa. It never snowed in Arkansas and their dad never brought them up for a visit. Not until he re-enlisted. Then they were in Arkansas almost every summer break to visit their grandma, his mom — a woman whose voice was the origin of his, the same vowels, the same unhurried pace, though softer. She had loved that voice without knowing why.

Sometimes she would say words out loud that she remembered him saying. “Y’all come back now,” she said into the honeysuckle air one of those summers. It was without music. A bird sang.

She opened one of the books: Native Birds of Iowa. She knew most of the birds by heart: House Finch, American Goldfinch, Downy Woodpecker, Blue Jay, Red-winged Blackbird, Song Sparrow — the Mockingbird, the one that never sang its own song. She had a checklist. Each name settled something — gave the sound a shape, placed it in the world. This was what the books were for. Not the birds exactly, but the naming. The way a name made a thing real.

She turned to the Mockingbird entry. The book listed it as uncommon this far north. A rare sighting. She read that it had no song of its own — only the songs of other birds, reproduced with such precision that even the original singers were sometimes fooled.

She looked up from the page. She picked at her hand.

She thought of her father. He had signed the papers the spring before he enlisted. She wasn’t sure she could place his voice anymore — only that it was southern, and that it had come from somewhere she no longer had access to.

It started before Iraq, before the letters stopped — before, even, the last phone call, which she could no longer place in time. She wanted to love him still. She did love him still. The birds grew louder.

She put on her final layer and went into the night.

She opened the door to the deck. The snow she had watched fall from her window had begun to accumulate, crunching under her feet as she stepped onto the lawn. All the trees in the backyard were stripped bare months ago. She eyed each branch for any sort of bird, any of the many varieties she had heard, but each branch was empty, barren.

While scanning the trees, she realized she had stopped listening. The moment she did, the cacophony returned. One call after the other. She looked frantically at each bare branch, turning her head at the switch of each call, until the sound seemed to circle her head. Overwhelmed by the rising clamor, she turned from the trees and headed for the deck.

On the railing stood a single bird.

It switched from one call to another.

Then another.

Then another.

The bird looked familiar — grey with a white belly. It was a Northern Mockingbird. Uncommon this far north. A rare sighting. She stood very still.

It pranced on the railing, not noticing the girl. Or noticing and not caring, all while switching from one call to another, mocking each sound with perfect pitch. It had no voice of its own. It only had everyone else’s.

“Well, hello Mr. Mockingbird. I thought you were in my head. You sound like so many different birds. I guess that’s why you’re called a mockingbird, huh?”

“Well, hello,” the bird said. Its black eyes looked directly at her.

The last word emphasized his southern accent.