Our Overnight Bird

Our home has many creatures, notably our two homeschooled kids, ages nine and fourteen. When we got home from ninja training yesterday, the eldest confronted my son.

“Why did you go in my room and knock things off the highest shelves?” She fumed, teen fist clenching and unclenching.

He denied everything.

Now, he did tend to take her fidgets and markers, when he was littler. She was still touchy about it. He had a small child’s loose relationship with reality, and with taking responsibility.

I intervened, mainly to keep him from getting pummeled.

“Show me what you mean,” I said, guiding her upstairs to her room.

“Can I come?” He sensed a rare chance to be permitted into the forbidden territory.

She had already tampered with the crime scene, righting the disarrayed items. A row of chapsticks, a watercolor, some trinkets, had been scattered around the room. You subconsciously memorize all the clutter in your intimate spaces. To her, the place had been ransacked.

“Was there an earthquake today?” She remembers when she was two, at the blue playground, like a dump truck rumbling through the neighbor’s garden.

A few months ago a tiny bird, maybe a nuthatch, got in the open front door. We flung wide the doors and windows, as it fled us, finally going out a window in the first room we saw it.

This experience being fresh in my mind, I was ready to blame the pig.

A pig lives in our house. Burger was our practice child; we kept him alive for a few years and we said, Well, let’s try this with a human. Now he is old, blind, and smelly. He was litter trained back in our condo, but we soon got a house and he was housebroken immediately, like he already knew. Pigs are intelligent. Burger could learn many tricks, except he is the stubbornest creature in the house besides the kids. We had special stairs built on our patio for him, three extra wide ones, so he can situate his hooves between each step. So, I did not suspect him of messing up her room.

But, as my scoutmaster would say, Burger was born in a barn. We installed a flap in our sliding glass patio door, one for Large Dogs which makes the remaining passage for humans very narrow. Burger in his grumpy blindness sometimes uses his powerful truffle-rooting snout to slide open the human door, if we fail to latch it. And yesterday we did.

We homeschool, so most days we travel all over Northern Virginia for various classes, field trips, and play dates. Yesterday we went to a friend’s house for geography and lunch. We killed an hour in teen goth mall shops before heading a couple towns over to the enrichment center for Riparian Biomes, hacking foam sheets with box cutters into dioramas of rivers. Then over a couple more towns to a gym run by a former American Ninja Warrior. It’s not a bad life, and we feel very fortunate. Well, who can tell what my kids think? I’m just saying, we were out all day. The pig could have let this bird in at any time in there.

“What if bird?” I said to my daughter.

We found a few things out of place around the house. The roller derby rookie of the year award in a laundry basket below my wife’s trophy shelf. A large succulent named “Dumbo the Aloeplant” dangling on the rim of its pot, dirt scattered on the shelf next to the Christmas tree. Yes, we already put it up. Family came before Thanksgiving, so we slapped a few lights on the plastic tree and some early gifts under it.

With no sound or sight of the bird itself, we figured it went out how it came in.

A few hours later my teen even apologized to little bro for being ready to pulp him over a chapstick. I was proud. I even prodded him to say, “Thanks,” or even, “That’s okay, it was bird.” Last summer at the neighborhood pool when I was launching my son in the deep end, he landed on a little girl in a life vest. We said sorry, promising to be more careful.

“What do you say?” The girl’s mother said to her. Man, what DO you say, when a guy almost drowns you with someone else’s flying butt? “Take a long walk off a short diving board?”

When mom got home from work we all wanted to tell her the same story: A bird. She noticed more stuff out of place. Ironically, several seasonal felt birds were toppled. They all have little outfits, like the one with antlers, name tag “Bells.”

At dinner, we talked about how my daughter’s D&D classmate was absent for two days. It was probably “Bobby” who knocked over all the stuff. Bobby did it while we were out, and he skipped school the day before to plan his crime.

Around bedtime, I noticed a Lego reindeer tipped over on a dusty shelf in my room. Straightening it up, I saw little marks in the dust, birdie footprints. I looked again at the trophy shelf, and by the chapsticks. More tracks. It was the first time I felt sure it had been a bird. I said I thought I heard some rustling. My nine-year-old said I was scaring him, so I dropped it, hoping (in vain) he wouldn’t wake me up at three A.M. with some nightmare.

“The bird is here,” he said into my sleeping ear with the gray morning light. Maybe he was messing with me, or having another dream. “It was tweeting outside my door.”

I got up and followed him from room to room, as he told me I just missed it. I opened the patio door.

“He’s on the tree. He’s upstairs,” I propped open the storm door.

“He went down the hall.” Luckily everyone had slept with their bedroom doors closed, but the guest room stood open. Inside, I finally saw it, a brown and yellow Carolina Wren with a long thin curving beak. The sort of bird my daughter would call “just a silly little guy,” or a “funky little funker,” but she’s committed to a Zoomer bit about how birds aren’t real, all replaced years ago with government drones.

We shut ourselves in the guest room with the wren. He flitted from corner to corner while I closed the closet, opened the blinds and lifted the window sash. My son got on all fours and did a wiggling dance, gone feral with the electric tension of the moment. I fought the Millenial urge to go get my phone to take a picture.

I pitied the wren. Yesterday was mild, so I doubt he meant to come into this weird forest, all dead ends, seeking shelter. Daylight savings is over, we got back from class after sundown. He probably wore himself out and then quietly went to sleep in a closet overnight.

Now he was really scared, and I worried he would hurt himself. He flew to another window, trying to land on the cheap plastic blinds, but he flailed down between the shades and window pane, to the sill behind the desk. He got out and hopped across the floor and under the bed, toward the open window.

When the nuthatch had finally gotten out of the house, it flew across the room and clean through the open window. But this wren hopped up onto the lip of the windowsill for a second. I froze, in his dumb panic would he fly right back into our faces?

And then he was gone.

At breakfast, we found another dislodged plant, glittery black with a purple spider glued to a leaf (one of our year-round Halloween decorations), and all the Lego figures knocked off the kitchen window into the sink. I reached down into the garbage disposal to feel around for a tiny Lego chameleon. Any time I do this, I think, What if the disposal suddenly turns on? What if someone flips the switch beside the window, thinking it’s a light? What if they teasingly pretend to do it, but slip and really hit it? What if I do it to myself, possessed? I couldn’t find the chameleon.

“Our friend Bobby is a government drone,” my wife told me over coffee. We found some bird poop on the dining room sideboard.

“This is why people used to believe there were ghosts,” I said, wiping up potting soil.

“You have to write about this,” she told me. Caught up devising a narrative for the random events, we were ten minutes late for my daughter’s eleven A.M. appointment. Five of those minutes were spent finding some second-string sandals for her, because Bobby had pooped in her flip flops.