In the spring, my father calls to say a robin has built her nest in the fronds of the potted palm stationed on his front porch. The apex of the palm is nose-high. My father says he can put his own right up to the nest and peer in, and the mother bird doesn’t flutter. “She’s as calm as can be,” he says. “Lets me look right in.”

Soon her eggs are laid and my father keeps watch while she pecks beetles in the yard. I have a yard of my own for the first time since leaving my father’s house, after a series of apartments, the last of which I adored but gave up to sign a lease on a two-bedroom bungalow with a man I’d recently taken back. We broke up again before he managed to move in, and now the bungalow and its small front yard are mine.

I have a bird too. Mine is grey and white, all sharp angles and ticking head, flitting in and out of a small hole in the hedge growing against my porch. She has a mate, who stations himself on the porch rail farthest from the front door, his own triangular head tilting left and right as I step outside and turn to lock the door behind me. I hear a screech, and a flapping of wings, and the bird is upon me, beating down atop my skull.

Frantic, I swat at the thing, or things, for now there are two, and dash towards the street, where they assault me all the way to my car. Later, Google will tell me this is the northern mockingbird.

***

My parents stopped sleeping in the same room before I was five. Throughout grade school, and junior high, and my three years of high school, my mother slept on the bottom bunk in a set of heavy wooden bunkbeds in my room. Some years, a girlfriend of my mother’s would come live for us for a while and sleep in my brother’s room, and my brother would bunk with me, and for the sake of everyone, my mother would tolerate sharing a bed with my father. Eventually the girlfriend would go back to her husband or find her own place, and my mother would reclaim her bed bolted beneath mine.

She said it was because he snored. By the time I was twelve, I realized the four of us never did anything together as a family—there were the things we did with Mom, and the things we did with Dad—and gradually I understood my parents were separated under the same roof. By the time I was fifteen, I understood why.

***

 The mockingbird hides her nest deep inside the hedge. Her husband dances along the railings like a boxer, daring me to step onto the porch. He is ferocious and committed. I’ve taken to parking on the side street and walking up the back alley to my home, the front door unusable. I had been hiding under an umbrella to shield my head and shoulders from attack as I ran the twenty feet between my house and car, but it made a spectacle for my neighbors in the bright sunshine and I felt ridiculous.

In the backyard I smoke a cigarette and think about the man who never moved in. It was my decision that he shouldn’t. On the eve of moving day, I looked into my future and saw a shell of myself waiting for me, looked at him and saw too much of my father, the bad parts, a stream of others behind him starting with my very first boyfriend who’d been a heroin addict just like my dad. No, I’d said, you can’t move in.

Something about this one feels heavier, like the thing I set aside all those years ago has finally sunken through the earth like an collapsing gravestone and now I must dig it up.

***

I don’t know when he started again, really. My parents always drank, always went out. A skunky, smoky smell followed my mother around and drifted from the laundry room, where she got high before waiting tables at the Italian restaurant in the strip mall across the street. It happens slowly, a bump here, a fix there, someone holding at a party. It happens glacially if you’ve never stopped.

It began in the kitchen. When I was fifteen, there was never any food in the house. My brother worked part-time and came home with a footlong from Subway, my favorite in 1996. I drooled from the threshold of his bedroom door until he shooed me away. Go ask Dad for some money.

Growing up, my father was the yes parent. My mother, miserable with a lout for a husband, made me come home straight from the bus stop and clean the bathroom before I could dream of doing anything fun. I went to my dad for permission to walk to the store, or go out to play, or get my eyebrow pierced. But something had shifted in him, emptied like the bleak shelves of our refrigerator. The twinkle had dimmed from his eye. His bedroom door was shut. “What?” he barked when I knocked.

“Can I have five dollars to go to Subway?”

A pause. “I’m not made of money, Lydia.”

Growing up, he stuffed us. My father was the family chef. My mother has never been much of a cook, more likely to line a sheet pan with frozen spanakopita or popcorn shrimp and call it dinner. My father made elaborate nuclear family meals: meatloaf perfectly hand-shaped, served alongside a mound of homemade mashed potatoes and canned peas; angel hair spaghetti and meatballs with spears of Texas Toast, garlicky and buttered; creamy beef stroganoff, my personal favorite, slippery egg noodles and beef tips drowning in a thick, fatty sauce, my death row last meal request. I never knew hunger.

Slowly by my middle teens, the snack shelves dried up. Gone the two-liters of soda my brother and I guzzled like gasoline into beaters, gone the baked chicken and occasional steak and lunch meat and real cheese and vegetables and bananas and then all at once, nearly everything, replaced by a single packet of off-brand, discount grocery cheese product, a stack of plasticky pale orange squares that didn’t so much melt as liquify. There were sometimes packets of greyish ham, odd cans of beans or soup. Hot dogs. My father roared if we went through it too quickly. Food had become money, and money was dope.

But really it started with the phone. Before the kitchen shelves went bare, the phone line went dead. We switched our service to one of those companies popular in the nineties that would give you a phone line when the main provider cut you off. Our phone number changed every few months as we cycled through the phone company’s competitors. Sometimes I walked to the payphone down the road and sat on the sidewalk beneath it for hours, feeding its vertical mouth quarters so I could talk to my boyfriend.

When the gas got cut, my father knew how to turn it back on. He hid the meter under a bucket and kept the dogs in the yard so the meter man wouldn’t see. He could turn the water back on too, for a time. Until finally my mother got a second job, and then a third, and paid each of the bills herself. My father’s only remaining financial responsibilities were the mortgage and the groceries.

It started in the kitchen.

*** 

The mailman is unable to deliver the mail. I find him crouching in the neighbor’s bushes, shielding his head with his forearm, watching furtively for the birds. He tosses the mail onto my porch and I call to him from the door that this is fine, I understand!

Google says northern mockingbirds are incredibly territorial while nesting. They’re known to dive-bomb dogs lounging in their backyards, alley cats, and people. Supposedly mockingbirds can mimic hundreds of bird songs, as well as car alarms and ribbits, but all I’ve ever heard is the siren screech it emits as it missiles towards my skull. Google says they’re mean even when they aren’t childrearing, but the babies make it worse.

For the man who didn’t move in, booze makes it worse. And something else hidden beneath his skin, something hot and reactive. For the man who didn’t move in, I must be clean and chaste and sober. Even though he doesn’t even like those kinds of girls. He likes girls like me, and then he hates me for it. He hates that I did drugs as a teenager and that I’ve had sex and been in love before him. He says he wishes I started existing when we met. And now I can’t do anything right.

I think I only took him back because I wanted something to work, anything. Something to mend what is broken. I see a little bit of my father in all of them, and I remember how complex each person on Earth is, how vast and textured our makeup, how no one is all good or all bad and somehow this makes me stay.

*** 

My mother got up early to work those three jobs. She kicked me out of my room most nights around 10 p.m., unless she’d gone out. She knew all the taxi drivers at Veterans Cab by name; they ferried her weekly to Shockoe Slip and The Tobacco Company where she danced to Top 40 and sipped rum and Cokes. My father went out too, most Saturday nights throughout my childhood, to house parties with his aging biker friends. Around the time basic amenities started drying up at home, he began staying out late on weeknights too, sometimes several times a week, slipping into the house at 2 a.m. to find me on the couch watching Soul Train.

I was a natural insomniac. When my mother kicked me out for bed, I moved to the living room and spent hours watching late night TV and journaling. Sometimes when my father came home, he’d sit on the other couch across the room and talk to me. Maybe this was how I found out about the heroin. Maybe he confessed because he thought I’d understand—by this point I was sixteen and dating my first boyfriend, who was in and out of jail and rehab for dope. No one else in our house spoke to my father anymore; my mother had kept her communication to essentials for years, and my brother holed away in his private bedroom, ignoring the house crumbling around him.

Sometimes my father would gesture towards the television and comment on what I was watching. If he knew something about it, he would wax a bit, the sort of grandiose monologues intellectual drunks and junkies like to elocute. Sometimes he was in a pitiful mood and told me stories about his life and how he got to be the way he was. He told them like an apology,

“You want to know how I found out I was adopted?” he asked me one night, lighting a cigarette. “I was little, maybe eight. We were at the playground, the neighbor kids, and we started in on this one kid, picking on him, calling him names. We made fun of him for being adopted, you’re adopted, you’re adopted, you know how kids do. They did it back then too. And he ran home and I guess he told his mother because when I got home, my mother was waiting on the porch for me with a belt. She didn’t say a single word, just chased me all over that house beating the living shit out of me. And when she was done, when she had worn herself out, she looked at me and said, ‘You think it’s funny that little Jimmy is adopted? Well guess what, so are you.’

“Wouldn’t that fuck you up?” he pleaded. “Wouldn’t that fuck anybody up?”

*** 

The robins have hatched. My father is watching them grow. “I can sit right there on the porch and watch her feed them,” he tells me over the phone. “They’re so damn cute, you wouldn’t believe how scrawny they are.”

The mother bird is docile, patient. She flies away in search of insects and worms that she will partially digest in her own gullet before dropping into the gaping mouths of her three small children squawking weakly for more. My father loves animals. He loves to sit on his porch and tend to his potted plants, the ferns and the snake plant and the palm he is so proud to have been chosen by the robin. He reports when he spots a deer in the woods, or the odd coyote.

“I can’t believe you got a Disney movie over there and I’m stuck with the killer mockingbirds,” I say. “I can’t even see their nest.”

“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” he says.

“The mailman can’t deliver the mail!”

I have heard from the man who did not move in. He’s decided this is it, he’s moving to Philadelphia to stay with a friend. Sometimes he texts me when he’s been drinking. Sometimes it’s my thumb that’s the culprit. The mockingbird’s husband keeps guard from the porch rail, ever alert. He relieves his exhausted mate as she rests safely inside the hedge, protected by thickly woven branches and spiny, waxy leaves, all sealed by the watchful eye of her partner.

***

The first time I caught my high school sweetheart with his needle and spoon, I told him I loved him. He flushed his remaining dope down the toilet and we held each other on the floor of a hotel bathroom while our friends partied on the other side of the door. He vowed no more.

On Thanksgiving I picked him up after dinner in my 1979 Ford LTD, a massive blue tank of a car with two sofas for front and back seats. We drove down Hopkins Road toward the city, and as I hit the turn at Walmsley, my boyfriend rolled into the spacious floorboard below him, unresponsive for several seconds as I reached for him, my eyes darting to the road, inching over the yellow line. After a few seconds he stirred and pulled himself back onto the seat.

He begged his mother to buy him a digital camera for his birthday and she refused. “You’ll pawn it,” she reasoned. He’d pawned his stepfather’s power tools, the family game consoles.

“I won’t pawn it, I swear,” he begged. “I really want it, I won’t pawn it.”

His mother handed me the cash to get it out of the pawn shop when he, inevitably, pawned it. He had to be present to retrieve the pawn but I was to hold the cash. The transaction went smoothly until we left the shop and hit the parking lot. I weaved towards my car but my boyfriend kept walking, straight across Midlothian Turnpike towards one of the neighborhoods he scored dope in. I followed him, begging him not to go. I waited in the car after he pushed me away, for hours until the shop closed and the sun went down, and finally my boyfriend came stumbling across the parking lot. He said he’d overdosed in a Taco Bell bathroom and passed out for several hours. An employee had woken him up. This was not unusual at this point; either due to the potency of the dope he was injecting, or to the weak state of his drug-addled body, he overdosed nearly every time he shot up.

He nodded out on the drive to my house, where I led him to my bedroom and sat him on my bed to sober up. I was angry, and busied myself cleaning my room while the TV blared. After a few minutes I turned to find my boyfriend lying on my bed, blue-lipped with a still chest. I shook him, calling his name, and he flung open his eyes, drawing a gasping breath. I pulled him to his feet and into my car, racing to the nearest hospital. The woman behind the registration desk asked me bewildering questions about his health insurance while mysterious things happened behind a set of swinging double doors. My boyfriend appeared, alert and walking upright, muttering something about how he was fine and couldn’t afford this. On the drive home, I stopped at an Amoco, having rushed us to the ER on a red line of fuel. My boyfriend spent an unnerving amount of time in the bathroom at the gas station. He struggled for breath again as we pulled up in front of my house but refused to return to the hospital.

We went to N.A. meetings every week, the two of us a hinged pair. I went where he went, convinced I could keep him alive if I could only keep watch. People around us—our friends, his sister—confirmed my role. “You’re the only reason he’s alive,” they intoned.

He relapsed and decided to share at the midnight meeting. We killed time at a late movie, the 2001 slasher flick Valentine. My boyfriend went to the bathroom before the previews rolled. He got drowsy as the movie began and a faint snoring escaped from his throat. The gargle grew until the man in front of us turned around and snapped, “Can you wake him up?”

I was already trying. I pinched my boyfriend’s hand hard with the sharp tips of my nails. “If you can hear me, squeeze my hand,” I hissed in his ear. “I swear to God, J—, if you don’t respond, I have no choice but to go tell the cops in the lobby.”

There were two of them, clocking my panic as I charged past rows of cherry red popcorn machines and tile-like boxes of sugary sweets. “I think my boyfriend is overdosing,” I spat.

The EMT told my boyfriend if I had waited any longer, he would have died.

He kept trying to.

***

I let the man who did not move in come over. His touch is familiar, the tight curl of his chest hair, the routine we have perfected. He is still moving to Philly, but we talk about one day. We say words like maybe and future and time. He leaves under the cloak of night and the mockingbirds let him pass, but I take some comfort knowing they won’t allow him back after daybreak.

The birds are insufferable. It has been nearly a month and the mailman keeps skipping my house. I am tired of parking on the side street and creeping down the strange alley like a fugitive. I call my father. “Can you just come over and shoot it?”

My father laughs. He has shot worse but he balks at a mockingbird. “I don’t know about shooting it. The babies have to be ready to fly off soon, mine are,” he says. “Any day now, I think. She’s feeding them whole worms. You oughtta see it—she drops this whole worm in their mouth.”

“Any day now,” he says. “I think they’re going to fly off any day now.”

***

Soul Train was on when he came home. He sat on the couch across the room and dropped his face into his hands. I looked at him and waited. Something had happened.

My father had a friend who sold heroin and was also a junkie. Dicey combination. Since returning home from Vietnam, my father’s friends had been the dicey sort: bikers and ex-cons, Lebanese mafia, common street hustlers. The dealer who was also a junkie seemed to materialize around the time my father started using dope again in the nineties.

He tried to explain he’d accompanied his dealer friend to make a sale. It was a larger amount of dope and the dealer stood to make a decent amount of money. During the deal, the man making the purchase drew a pistol on the dealer and my father. My father, a trained Marine who served two tours in Vietnam and a lifelong criminal, yanked the gun from the man’s fist and promptly shot him in the face.

I was seventeen years old, at home on my living room couch watching Soul Train while my mother slept under the canopy of my mattress down the hall. On the television screen in my periphery vision, dancers lined up in two rows and formed a tunnel that people gyrated through, the tinny sound of R&B distant in my ear.

Somewhere inside my body a hand took this information and put it on a shelf.

***

“Hey hon,” my father’s voice croaks into my voicemail. “Call me when you get off.”

I call from my car as I swing onto the highway, driving home from work. The reception is bad, or his voice is breaking. I’m glad he called—the baby mockingbirds have finally taken flight. Mother and husband have moved on. I’m excited to share the news.

“Well,” he says. “I have terrible news.”

“What happened?”

“It’s awful. It makes me sick to even tell it.”

“Dad, what happened?”

“I was in my room last night, watching TV, and I heard this squawking over the television, I mean it was loud. Screeching, squawking, I could hear it over the sound of the TV. The baby birds. I thought oh my god, there’s a cat on the porch. I jumped up and ran to the door, and I open the door and I’m looking around on the porch for a cat or something, and there’s nothing there. And the birds are just screaming and squawking and I look up at them, and there’s a snake in the palm. There’s this massive fucking black snake hanging in the palm and it’s got a baby bird in its mouth. And I keep a Samurai sword by the front door, and it’s sharp, and I reach in the door and grab my sword and I’m whacking at the thing trying to cut it in half, but I can’t get the right angle on it, I’m just whacking at it. And then I see there’s another one! And it falls to the ground and I hit the other one, and Lydia—I look around and they’re all gone, they’re all dead, lying on the porch. They’re all dead.”

“They were about to fly away. There’s just—” his voice cracks –“there’s just no justice in the world.”

***

I don’t know if there is honor among thieves, but there is a bit to be found between addicts. The man my father shot lived and gave police some information. The dealer who was also a junkie took the fall for my father, because it was his shit deal, and because my father had a family.

My mother, who had been scorned by him before, believed my father was once again cheating on her when the dealer’s girlfriend called the house incessantly with updates from jail. My father entertained the dealer’s girlfriend long enough to assess he was in the clear and then began dodging her calls. No one knew about the shooting except the five of us, and whatever had been told to police, who never came looking for my father.

A couple of years later, when I was nineteen and my brother twenty, my mother fulfilled her promise to herself that she would wait until her children were grown and left my father. Her departure was long anticipated by everyone except my dad, who felt blindsided, and finding himself in his mid-fifties with three ex-wives, several children who didn’t speak to him, and a house that was finally being foreclosed by the bank after months of missed payments, he enrolled himself in the V.A. hospital’s methadone program. Over time, he kicked drugs and alcohol, a sobriety he mostly maintained until his death in 2022 at the age of 75.