Keeping Birdie Warm

A Florida Gothic

Mama said the doll was mine now, that’s why I held her.

Her name is Birdie. She came up out of the floor the same night the water did, and I have learned that you do not ask things that come up out of the floor where they have been. You hold them. You let them get warm against your front, where the warmth of you lives, and you say nice things in a low voice so they stay calm.

Birdie likes my voice. I can tell because when I sing, she stops moving her little hands.

The house went under in the spring. Not all at once. The yard went first, then the porch, then the bottom step, and Mama kept saying the words people say, the men are coming, the water will turn, just stay up high with me, baby. We went up high. We went to the second floor and then to the part above the second floor that does not have a name, the part with the slanted boards and the nails coming through, and we waited for the men.

The men did not come.

But the water did.

It came up through the boards like it was looking for us. It came up brown and slow, and it smelled like “insides”, and Birdie was in it, floating, her one painted eye open and her other eye gone, and she lifted her arms to me the way babies do. So I took her.

You take a baby that lifts its arms. Everybody knows that.

She was cold for about an hour. Then she was the same as me. Then she was warmer than me, and I understood that the warm was not coming from the room, because the room had no warm left in it. The warm was coming out of me and going into her. I could feel it leave through my front, a slow pull, the way the bath drains when you lie still and let it. I told myself it was love.

When you are small, you call a lot of things love that you don’t understand.

Mama stopped talking on the third day. She did not stop being there. She just went quiet and let her mouth hang, and her skin went the gray that fruit goes, and I held Birdie up so Mama could see her, because I thought it might help. It did not help Mama. It helped Birdie. Birdie drank the looking. I do not know another way to say it. Birdie took the part of Mama that used to live behind her eyes and Mama got smoother after that, smoother and stiller, like a photograph of herself.

I am the only warm thing left, so I am careful with it.

I have learned what Birdie is. She is not a doll the way you think of a doll. A doll is empty and stays empty. Birdie is empty the way a stomach is empty, which is to say she is asking, all the time, in a small voice under the floor. She asks and I give. I gave her my warm first because I had plenty. Then I gave her the feeling in my toes. Then the feeling in my left arm, the one that holds her, which is why I do not set her down. If I set her down she would have to find the warm somewhere else and there is nowhere else. Just Mama, who is finished. Just me.

Last night, something underneath my skin came loose.

I felt it travel. It went from the soft place under my jaw, down through my neck, into my chest, and it gathered there and then it went out my front and into Birdie, and Birdie’s painted mouth, which has always been only a curve of red, opened. Not wide. Just enough to be a mouth and not a painting of one. Inside it was the brown of the water. She did not bite. She is past biting. She just opened so I would understand that she can, and then she closed again and pretended to be cloth.

I sang to her after that for a long time.

This morning I caught my reflection in the part of the water that has gone still in the stairwell, the part that has stopped looking for us. My face is changing. My cheeks are getting the smooth that Mama got. My eyes are getting the painted look, the look of an eye that has been drawn on and not grown. And Birdie, when I hold her up next to my face, Birdie is getting fuller. Pinker. There is a softness coming into her that used to be in me.

We are trading places. That is the thing she came up out of the floor to do. One of us has to be the warm one and one of us has to be the held one, and she has been held long enough, and I have been warm long enough, and the water is not going to turn, and the men are not coming, and there is no way out of here.

Every house on this row has a child in the high part holding something that used to be a child. I know because at night, when the water is still, I can hear them singing too. We are all keeping our dolls calm. We are all running low.

When I am cloth, and she is the one holding me, I hope whoever finds us up here is able to lift her arms when I reach.

You take a baby that lifts its arms.

Everybody knows that.