“The birds are always watching,” Mama used to say. We had a bird cage in nearly every room of the house. The parakeets in the living room seemed more at home than I did. The lovebirds in the kitchen reminded everyone how bonded they were every time you tried to make dinner. The dining room was free of her pets, with the intention of not making guests uncomfortable. Mama could not accept that we never had guests. Her taxidermied finch found its place in my bedroom, right on the windowsill. When I was younger, I tried to make it fly out of the window a number of times, but it always found its way back inside. The dead ones were always replaced, even if they could not be found. The smell of our bungalow in the summer heat was pungent even from down the road.
Mama’s room was the worst. The canaries rarely remained in their cages and would flutter around the room uncontrollably. The sick ones would slam themselves into everything. The bursts of bright yellow and orange were never-ending. “My stars,” she would say dreamily, as she admired them bouncing between the walls.
For my sixth birthday, as many children have, I asked for a dog. She cackled for days, weeks. Instead, I received a kiss on the cheek and a brand new bicycle. “When you’re all grown up, you can have a dog in your house,” she told me. I grew up, got a job, and applied to college. Zero acceptances. No dog. I stayed home and took care of aging Mama. The chain-smoking, combined with the stench of our home, left her coughing all day long. Mama never went to the doctor, but you could tell she was sick. The ringing in my ears was incessant, as was the hacking from Mama, and the chirping from the birds. For years, my coworkers, friends, and occasional romantic partner, insisted that I move out. But they didn’t understand. There was no one left to care for her.
On one of her bedridden days during a harsh winter, Mama begged me to clean the cage of the parakeets. She could not confess that they had not been cleaned in years, but rather pleaded with me to have mercy on the birds. I brought each bird to her room, one by one, letting them free on her chest. The fourth and final parakeet nudged itself into her neck. She cooed at them, petting them eagerly and showing incredible newfound strength as I shut the door behind myself.
The cage was better than expected. There was only one set of remains nestled away in the corner, which I scooped into a shoe box for Mama. She liked to keep all of her pets. The soiled paper stacked at the bottom was glued into place and only came free after chipping away at the sides with a butter knife. Mama insisted on using newspaper as a cage liner, as we would never run out. I could barely make out the date on a chunk directly in the middle, reading September 19, 1999. The smell penetrated my nostrils, but after two and a half decades, it barely phased me. I continued to read the scattered words, dates, and headlines throughout the mucky newspaper. The next fragment had my name on it.
I cleaned each cage in the house and made myself a puzzle. Mama was simply overjoyed that she was surrounded by the birds, trilling with them and caressing them as I worked to decipher the barely legible scraps I collected. After hours of searching, it was complete. ‘Congratulations! You have been accepted into Michigan State University! Welcome to the Class of 2002.’
I told Mama I was going to the store to get more newspapers. “Go on, the birds will take good care of me until you get back.” I spent that night at my coworker’s house. And the night after. After thirty-two nights of sleeping on his dingy blow-up mattress, I signed the lease on my own apartment.
The call from the sheriff came almost exactly a year later. I was on a campus tour. His voice was firm, grounding, “The deputies found her in her bedroom. Neighbours called about a wellness check. You know, about the smell. They thought it was the pets.”
“And the birds?” I questioned.
“Dead too,” he cleared his throat before continuing, “and a couple of crows came in through the window after she passed. But don’t you worry about that, funeral homes these days can fix things like that right up.”
Mama always left her bedroom window open. Her stars never left, but she prayed for new ones to join us and come through there to start their new life in our home. I have joined the Undergraduate Class of 2011 at Michigan State University, and my roommate does not seem to like me, or perhaps it is just my decor. The stiff finch from my childhood bedroom has found a new home in my dorm.