The Aviary

When you check into the Aviary, they take away your shoelaces, phones, pens, headphones, purses, wallets, aspirin, keys, and plastic bags. Then, they give you a cockatiel; everyone gets a cockatiel. They name it for you; they name it after you. It says all this right in the brochure. It’s the morning of day 5 and my brain feels like a mangy, buzzing porcupine. My cockatiel, Alice L. Karp, sits on a rusted copper perch in a rusted copper cage that dangles from the ceiling. The single bright peach circle on her butter-yellow cheek is so perfectly formed it looks like a design flaw. Not one thing in nature is perfect, and that’s easy to forget.

In an opposite corner, I sit upright on my own human perch, a cocoon-brown twin bed made, I’m pretty sure, from an upcycled gym mat. Numbly, dumbly I glare at the bird. Alice is blank as ever, soundless, motionless soul-crushingly blank as ever. When I leave here, my glare says, I won’t miss you.

“Alice,” says Coach Yelena— this is what they want, for us to call them ‘coach’—over a series of boney, tinny knocks; she’s got rings on every finger, the worst rings. I only remember them because they were just so incredibly ugly. The postcard-sized window on the door is too high for me to see anything. But Yelena’s voice is muffled and I can tell she’s too close to the door. I picture a smudge of her bright coral lipstick on the empty white surface.

She knocks again, the tinny sounds more urgent this time. But I can’t muster any urgency to answer. Because I don’t even want to be here. Because this was all my mom’s idea. But after what I’d done to her, it wasn’t like I could say no. So, here I am at bird therapy. Just because I’m here, doesn’t mean I have to like it, though. Also, the heat. It’s thought-stoppingly hot. Sweat-moons in the armpits of my gray shirt, droplets sliding down my spine. Maybe it’s April outside but it’s the dog days of August inside. My hair slicks against my neck and down my back. I stretch my hair tie on my wrist. I hold it like that—like I’m about to fire an arrow—a couple seconds before letting it snap against my wrist. It hurts, but not enough.

“I’m here,” I say, my tongue feels like a weighted blanket.

“There’s a meeting in ten minutes,” she says.

“What meeting?”

“An impromptu meeting. In the Reflection Dome”

“About what?”

Coach Yelena doesn’t answer for three seconds. Then she sighs and her voice shakes. “It’s very important.”

“Why?”

“Wanted to give you a head’s up, since the Reflection Dome is all the way down the hall.”

“What is this,” I begin but stop because I lost my curiosity. “Got it.”

“Do you need help walking?” She asks.

I lower my eyes to normal-looking legs. “Nope. Getting ready now.”

All getting ready means is straightening out the pant-cuffs of my sweats and pulling my ash-blond hair into a droopy bun. There are no mirrors, which is fine by me, I’m not a giant fan of seeing myself. Besides, I already know that I look like paper pulp in human form, gray and grayed-in, from head to toe.

“Good, good,” Yelena says.

“Thanks.”

She’s still there, leaning against the door, not clicking away. After a throat-crackle of hesitation, she adds, “I’m checking with everyone. If they need help with…anything,” According to Coach Yelena’s staff bio on the website, she is a noted empath. That’s all it says, ‘Dr. Yelena Petrova is a noted empath.’

“Okay.”

But she’s not checking with anyone else, she just doesn’t want to “other” me. On check-in day, just before my mom left, Coach Yelena made a big speech about how the Aviary doesn’t “other” anybody. Then she turned sharply to my mom. “We’re very anti-othering here. You can be absolutely sure that no one will other Alice because of her, you know, legs.” And Mom, who just wanted everyone to treat her damaged daughter with kindness, ate it up.

My mother hangs so much hope on The Aviary. What better follow up to a weeklong coma resulting from a botched suicide attempt than bird therapy? Is apparently what she thinks. I had never heard of The Aviary but in two seconds, Google told me all I needed to know. In the mid-19th century, the campus had belonged to the Quakers. In the early 20th century, it was bought out and turned into a children’s insane asylum and in the mid-70s changed hands when it was sold to a body artist named Henry. Bird therapy is the brainchild of one of Henry’s acid trips. That’s the rumor anyway. I rattled all this off to my mom, I tried to reason with her, even as we reached the Aviary’s iron gates. I pointed out the bronze plaque just readable under a swath of moss, welcoming all the earnest Quaker boys: ‘You are now under the instruction and in the care of Friends.’

“But that’s lovely,” my mom said, gripping 10 and 2 a little tighter.

The Malibu winded around algae-scattered ponds and soccer fields with wild grass high as my thighs. We pass parking lot rubble and shut-up buildings with scary-beautiful doors, falling-apart porches. These could have been dorms for the Quaker undergrads or experimentation labs for the asylum kids. The bare branches of trees swayed ominously against the stark white sky.

Finally, we arrived at a bright blonde-brick one-level with, according to Google, three sub-levels of basement. Hopefully, another rumor. We parked in the freshly paved lot, right next to a manicured soccer field. We were quiet; there wasn’t any ‘right thing’ to say in a situation like this. So, we just got out of the car and started walking, she with her perfectly normal walk, and me with my freakshow strut.

“Don’t clomp,” My mom says gritting her teeth, clenching my shoulder. “Stop clomping.”

But, of course, I can’t stop clomping. Clomping’s kind of my thing. And she has to know this, after listening to my clomping for 25 years, she has to know this. My mom would never admit it, but I embarrass her. With the clomping. She takes my hand or clenches my shoulder and the shame is electric, a closed circuit between us.

My legs are stiff, clomping freaks and when they try to act normal, they’re even more embarrassing. Like when I sit, the toes on each foot nearly face each other. And then I stand and it must look like I’m trying to hold my pee. And my walking, if you could even call it that, is humiliating. When I walk my knees kiss each other like drunken European friends. They’ve been this way since I made my very premature debut in the backseat of my father’s Crown Vic, two freaky bullies holding me back from all the things. My dad couldn’t accept it, and even though she stayed, even though she’d swear otherwise, my mom couldn’t either.

Although the lot was empty Mom parked in one of the last rows. So, she had a lot of time to complain about my clomping. At the sidewalk she dropped my bag between us, grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me toward her. She looked me in the eyes and clenched my chin, the smell of rosemary wafted from her wrists. “This is going to be a great thing for you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Say it.”

“This is going to be a great thing,” I said as if everything I read off the internet only slightly terrified me.

“For you,” my mom said.

“For me,” I said.

Something made me turn around. Like something spooked me, like I just knew to turn and look. Across the parking lot on the soccer field, a woman wearing an oversize white seater and denim shorts stood holding up a sign full of bursting bright pink bubble letters: THE AVIARY DOESN’T FLY WITH ME.

“See that?” I asked my mom, gesturing toward the lone protestor. “The Aviary doesn’t fly with her. Why do you think that is?”

Mom opens her mouth slightly, she’s halfway between objecting or surrendering. But the Aviary’s door swings on its hinges and the woman I’d soon call Coach Yelena, rushed out waving her hands with a fervor that frightened me. The wind swept her blonde hair from her face revealing the most pronounced Widow’s Peak I’d ever seen. It could break records, her Widow’s Peak.

“Now remember,” my mom said, glancing behind her quickly, aware of Yelena’s stilettos clicking ever closer. “Be open, Al. I know this place is not your style, I know it’s unorthodox, but I believe in it for you.”

“I know,” I said, insufficiently, as Yelena’s clicking stopped.

“Ah, the Sidewalk of New Beginnings!” She said lifting my bag, most of which would be left at reception until I graduated from bird therapy, however anyone did that. I looked down and noticed the stone mosaic of a wild-rayed sun beneath our feet.