Being alone is hard. When I was eleven and my parents split up, I felt really alone for the first time. My world was suddenly so different than it had been just the day before. My parents had been my best friends, and they were supposed to be best friends with each other too. When they told me they were getting a divorce, I just listened and tried not to react. Half my friends at school didn’t have both parents either, and I needed to act mature about it.
But inside, I was screaming.
If they weren’t really best friends with each other, then they probably weren’t best friends with me. And when I saw how they were looking at each other—my father red-eyed and so tired looking, my mother’s face stony except for lips she kept pursing like she tasted something bitter—I saw them for the first time not as parents, but as people. And it terrified me.
In the six months after that, I spent time with both of them, but it was always awkward. I felt like I was engaged in some kind of clumsy, terrible dance with both of them all the time. Don’t say the wrong thing, don’t mention the other one, don’t act like you like something too little or too much. We were all walking on eggshells made of glass, and each misstep left a scar on someone.
That’s why I understood when my father said he was taking a contract job in Australia for a year. I was going to miss him, but honestly the main thing I felt was relief. We all needed a break from whatever our family had become, and my hope was that when he came back, things would be better somehow.
Except he never did come back. He had been there just over a month when we got word that he had been killed in some kind of accident. I never knew more about it other than that we had to bury an empty coffin. My mother might have known more, but she was crying all the time for the first couple of months after he died, and after that it just didn’t seem worth bringing back up just to upset her all over again.
That’s the thing. I know my mother loved my father, whatever their problems might have been. And I know how hard losing him and then really losing him was on her. So I try to tell myself that it was just a mistake, a lapse of memory or judgment brought on by everything that happened, that caused her to not to give me the last gift my father ever sent me.
He had sent me stuff from the first week he landed in Sydney. Postcards, little books and toys he thought I’d like, things like that. But then they stopped. I had assumed he was busy or just had ran out of trinkets to send me for awhile. He still called and talked to me on the phone every weekend, and he sounded fine then, so I didn’t think much of it at the time.
But even then, I didn’t know or understand all the inner workings of my parents’ relationship. They would still argue and hold grudges, and in the days leading up to his death, things had reached the point where my mother would immediately hand me the phone when he called, an almost accusatory look on her face as I took the receiver, as though talking to my father was somehow a betrayal.
Even now, I think about things like that and I realize I didn’t know my parents as well as I thought I did. I still don’t.
The last six weeks have been rough for me, and harder on my mother. She had a major stroke, and while she’s been coming back from it, we were told she would likely never be fully mobile again. All things considered, she got off relatively light—having to use a walker is much better than being bedbound and unable to talk, which were the worse case scenarios the doctors were giving when it first happened. But she's still been having to make adjustments in her life. Her ADLs, as the rehab therapist calls them. Activities of Daily Living.
She had to build back up to brushing her own teeth and hair. It sounds easy enough, but fine motor skills were giving her more problems than the balance and strength she needed to get off the bed and grab the walker. And there are some things she just couldn’t do any more. I’d set up people to come over and clean, help her reach things she had a hard time with, and generally make sure she was okay when I’m was back home and three hours away from her.
I’ve spent the last few weeks with her trying to help her get acclimated to the changes in her life, but also trying to get the house more organized so workers could find what she wants more easily. I’ve gone through drawers and boxes, closets and cupboards, and more than once I’ve found some artifact from my childhood that made me smile or tear up a little.
Then last Thursday I was going through a guest room closet when I found a cardboard box I had never seen before. When I opened it, musty air blossomed in my nostrils as confusion and a kind of sad anger filled my heart.
It was packages from my father. Three of them. Things that must have come while they were fighting, things that she hid from me out of spite or pettiness or whatever dark emotion told her it was okay to keep reminders of a father’s love from their child. The boxes were well-wrapped and had never been opened, and in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, I found myself hoping that this was all a mistake. That these weren’t gifts from my father she had hidden from me at all.
But they were. The first was a small set of books about animals in the Outback. The second was a koala family that would link together with magnets to form a long chain. The third was a small, ornately carved wooden box.
The box stood out the most, both because it was unique and because it seemed like an odd gift for an eleven-year old girl. It was similar in size to a pencil box, and maybe my father thought I was getting old enough I’d want to keep jewelry in it or something. It also stood out because of the suggestion that something might be inside. It had thick metal hinges on the back of the lid, and the front was secured by a hasp lock ran through with a flat piece of the same metal that secured the hasp when twisted horizontally.
I was reaching to turn the metal and undo the hasp when I noticed there was a small piece of yellowed paper underneath it in the box it had been shipped in. I felt my vision growing blurry as I saw my father’s handwriting on the note written there. It said:
I bought this from an old man who came to our worksite yesterday. Poor guy looked like he needed money to eat, and he said this box was special. He said there was a bunyip trapped inside it! I asked him what a bunyip was, and he just laughed. He said I should open the box and find out.
But don’t worry. I already checked it out before sending it to my girl. The only thing that is in there is a cool-looking river rock. But the box is neat too, right?
I miss you both a lot, and while I’m enjoying my time here, I’ll be glad when I’m back too. I’m so proud of my girl. We’ll all get through this. Love you, Daddy.
I wanted to go and confront my mother with the letter. Ask her how dare she keep something like that from me. That he didn’t just belong to her, and it wasn’t her choice whether I got to talk to him. How he had loved us both, and he was dead because she had pushed him away, and I fucking hated her for it.
I wanted to do all of that, but I wouldn’t. There would be no point to it. She was broken, almost past the point of mending, and all I’d be doing by hurting her would be making myself more like her. So I took a deep breath, gently folded up the note and put it in my shirt pocket, and then I opened the box.
The inside was unlined beyond whatever light varnish had been used on the wood itself, and as my father said, there was just a small rock sitting in there. It was very rough and porous, much like I would imagine rocks from some underwater volcano looking when you first brought them out into the air and the light. But part of why I thought that was because of the condition of the rock itself.
It was wet. It was visibly moist and sitting in a small pool of clear liquid like an ice cube plucked fresh from a drink. I involuntarily moved the box further away from my face as the realization of what I was seeing sunk in. How could it possibly be wet or even oily after all this time? Was it just a trick of the light?
I tilted the box and saw the liquid flow languidly in the direction of gravity before suddenly fading away. Within moments it looked as though all the moisture had evaporated. Tearing a piece of the shipping box off, I used it to experimentally poke the rock, moving it around the wooden box and looking for any sign of the liquid.
But there was nothing. It just looked like an old, dry rock now.
Deciding I had imagined it due to being upset, I closed the box and carried it with me back to my old childhood room where I had been sleeping. That night I told my mother that I was going to have to leave on Sunday. That I had spent as much time as I could spare.
The next morning I went down to the mailbox to get the mail and I noticed something strange on the mailbox door handle. It was greasy. I saw nothing on it, and aside from being slightly distasteful, I didn’t think much of it until I opened the door.
Sitting on top of the mail was a dead mockingbird.
I let out a little scream, but I made a point not to touch it. I’m a bit of a germaphobe, and I certainly didn’t want to catch whatever had killed that thing. In my initial panic, I wasn’t yet to the point of wondering how the bird had wound up in the closed mailbox, but more just thinking of ways to get it out. In the end, I just rolled over the outside trashcan and used a stick to rake the poor bird’s body into it.
It was as I was picking through the mail to see if any of it was worth salvaging that I started thinking more about the mechanics of it all. It had to be some kind of dirty practical joke. There’s no way the bird flew in there, closed the door, and then died. The house was out in the country, so neighbors were few and none of them would have done it. My mother didn’t have any real enemies that I knew of, and neither did I. So that left random kids or some nut either delivering the mail or coming by the house on a whim. Either way, I was going to try and make sure nothing like that happened again.
I called the post office, and while I was initially slightly harsh and accusatory, they just kept being reasonable and apologetic, assuring me that when our mail carrier, who had been at it for over twenty years, had delivered the mail about nine that morning, there had been no bird in there.
I then called the police, but they just politely laughed it off. Said to call back if there were any further signs of “disturbance”. I couldn’t necessarily blame them, but I was still frustrated. I really did have to leave soon, and the discovery the day before had just made it easier. But I still loved my mother, and I didn’t want some demented kid, or adult, fucking with her after I was gone.
I debated telling her about the bird as I walked back up to the house, and in the end I decided against it. It would only make her worry or give her ammunition to try and guilt me into staying longer. I would just keep watch for the next couple of days and see if anything weird popped up. The rest of that day was uneventful, and by the time I went to bed, I had half-forgotten about the bird already.
The next morning I couldn’t find my mother. I had searched her room, the bathroom, everywhere I could think. She clearly had gone somewhere, because her walker was gone too. After checking the house thoroughly, I went outside. That’s when I saw her lying next to the mailbox.
I let out a yell and ran to her, afraid she’d had another stroke or broken something in a fall. Just as I reached her, she sat up and her eyes found mine. She gave me a small smile.
“Hello, Collie. What are you yelling for?”
I came up short. She looked well…better than she had since the stroke…and her voice didn’t have the slight slurring lilt I’d had such trouble getting used to in the last few weeks. And Collie? She hadn’t called me that since I was a little girl. It was always “Colleen” with a clipped and almost formal tone.
I realized my mouth was hanging open and I closed it as I knelt down beside her. “You fell or something. I just found you out here. We need to get you to a hospital. Let them check you out.” As I was speaking, she was already standing up and waving me off with a light laugh. Her walker lay discarded in the overgrown ditch nearby and she was showing no signs of needing it.
“No, no need for that. I’m doing okay. I just…” She paused, looking up at the sky for a second before smiling wider and pointing at the mailbox. “I just came out to get the mail…figured I should try and do it myself…and I found that dead mouse in there.” She pointed to the ground near the mailbox post where a fat grey field mouse lay dead. “I picked it up, thinking it wouldn’t bother me to just toss it in the trash, but I guess I’m more…” She paused again, looking up for a moment before continuing. “Squeamish than I realized.” She let out a delighted laugh. “But I’m feeling fine now. Better than fine, really.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or worried, but what she was saying seemed to be true. She talked with sense, I saw no signs of confusion or lack of coordination, and she actually was moving and talking much better than she had before. I watched her carefully the rest of the day, scrutinizing her for any sign of a change, but she continued to move around the house like her old self again.
I’d made her promise to follow up with her doctor the following week, and to let me know if she started feeling the slightest bit odd. She said she would, but that she thought it was just one of those things. “It may be,” she mused, “that picking up that smelly little mouse was just what the doctor ordered.”
We stayed up late that night playing cards, and when I went to bed that night, I slept better than I had in a long time. I didn’t claim to understand it, but wasn’t that the definition of a miracle? I chided myself to just be grateful and hope that it held.
I woke up early the next morning just as the sun was coming up, and I tried to be quiet as I moved around my room and made my first attempts at organizing and packing up all the clothes I had brought. After a few minutes I realized I was hearing noise from the kitchen. My mother must already be up, and if she was in the kitchen, maybe it was a good sign that she still felt good.
I walked down the hallway toward the kitchen when suddenly I froze. I heard a soft, fast rasping sound that reminded me of a rattlesnake’s rattle. I looked around but saw nothing out of place, and the noise seemed to be coming from the kitchen anyway. It was fading but still present as I rounded the corner and saw my mother standing at the sink, looking out the window.
The noise seemed to be coming from her, as insane as that sounds. The feeling that she was somehow making the sound was reinforced when it cut off as she turned and looked at me, her eyes sharp and bright. “Good morning, sleepy head. I made breakfast.”
My mind was racing throughout the meal. I kept trying to think of some way to ask her about it, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t make me sound crazy or foolish. Yet as we made idle chit-chat and I talked about my plans when I got back to work, I came to realize the real reason I wouldn’t mention it to her.
I was afraid of her now.
Something was different than it had been before. More than her new found health and energetic demeanor, more even than the strange, dangerous sound I fucking know came from her before she realized I was there. She was just…wrong somehow.
By ten I had my stuff packed and was about to go inside for the last time to say good-bye. My hopes were that, given time and distance, I would realize I was just stressed and stir-crazy and I could go back to just being happy that my mother was okay. It was as I was turning away from the back of my car that I realized that, in the excitement of the day before, we had never gotten the walker from where it lay near the mailbox.
Seeing it made me feel a surge of guilt and relief. I was just being silly. Whatever the reason, she was doing better. She wasn’t shackled to this thing any more, and God willing, she wouldn’t ever have to…
I was bending down to pick up the walker when my gaze wandered to the storm drain that ran under the driveway. My mother’s dead eyes were staring back at me.
She had been stripped naked and stuffed into the drain, her body torn and broken in several spots but somehow dry and bloodless as well. Pushed in deep enough that I hadn’t seen her body the day before at the mailbox, but not so deep that I couldn’t see now that she had died screaming. I fell to my knees, my head swimming as I crawled toward her. Reaching out my hand, I touched her and she began to crumble away. I recoiled, and then trying to find a way to have proof, I fumbled for my phone. But by the time I had it out, her body was only so much pink, powdery sludge in the bottom of the storm drain.
I saw something out of the corner of my eye and turned to see the thing that looked like my mother staring down at me, her face looking concerned.
“What’re you looking for, Collie? Lost something in there?”
My hands shaking, I pushed myself to my feet and stepped back to the other side of the ditch. “I don’t know. I…I thought I saw something but I guess it was just my imagination.”
She chuckled raspily. “Yes, probably so. Just be careful messing around with things like that.” She gestured toward the drain. “Could find something dangerous in there.”
I tried to laugh, play it cool, but I couldn’t manage it. “I really have to get going. See you later. Bye.” I hoped that my tone was light, but I doubted it. It was all I could do to not run to the car, and as it was, I still gave her a wide berth and kept glancing back until I was inside with the doors locked. Twenty minutes later I had to stop at a gas station until I could stop shaking so bad.
Since yesterday, everything has been quiet…until a couple of hours ago. That’s when I got a text.
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