Abigail
.
During the weeks leading to our trip to see my father, my son asks me and my husband to play grocery store. He’d played the game in pre-K and now that he’s off for the summer, he’d like us to fill in for his friends.
“You’re shoppers and I’m a tomato,” Danny says. He curls into himself on the couch, his blond hair hidden behind thighs and torso. “Now poke me and say I look tasty!”
We always do as he asks, though Cal sometimes takes the liberty of tickling Danny’s bare feet.
“Now get a knife,” Danny says, and we pretend our forearms are sharp blades. Before we can saw slices of flesh off our child’s body, he unfurls and springs up. “No, Daddy!” he yells each time. “I’m a boy, Mommy! Don’t cut me!”
Each time we play, my husband and I collapse onto him, relieved. Cal—a good sport, a good dad—hams it up, begging our son to forgive us for misrecognizing him. I try to emulate Cal, but even I can tell my prayers for forgiveness are too sincere.
***
Lately, conversations with my father have revolved around Abigail. Abigail is a turkey vulture at the bird sanctuary where my father has volunteered since he moved up to Wisconsin a year ago.
“She’s a sweetheart,” he says during today’s video call. “Eminently teachable.”
As usual, my husband and son linger in the frame of the Zoom screen while my father asks them perfunctory questions. (“What are you learning in school?” he asks my four-year-old, who responds by yelling, “Spiderman!”) When the topic shifts to Abigail, Cal and Danny wander to the playroom.
“She could free-fly after six weeks of training,” my father says. “Six weeks! It took Walton six months!”
I could ask who Walton is—the kestrel or the screech owl, perhaps—but I do not want my father to be disappointed that I don’t remember, so instead I express amazement. As soon as possible, I change the subject to our upcoming trip. Cal, Danny, and I have not seen my dad since he moved to the cabin he and my mother bought just before she got sick.
“Should we bring pillows?” I ask. “Bug spray?” These are questions I would have asked my mother. My father has never had patience for logistics.
My father nods absentmindedly. “Bring your binoculars,” he says. “We’ll look for eagles near Mink River.” I make a mental note to add a pair to my Amazon cart.
***
Before it was birds, it was books. Melville, Whitman, Wright. He and my mother had been professors of literature for nearly 40 years, had in fact fallen for each other during a Keats seminar in graduate school. Austen and Alcott wrote my bedtime stories, Frost wrote the poems I memorized as a kid. My father would drill me on titles and movements over dinner, the questions growing harder and harder until my mother reminded us our food was getting cold. “That’s my girl,” he’d say when I was right (and I was almost always right).
The quizzes persisted long after I declared a kinesiology major, effectively ending my literary education. They persisted after he retired and after my mother’s cancer diagnosis gave us plenty else to talk about. Indeed, they ended only with my mother’s death and my father’s decision to live on the delicate peninsula that separates Green Bay from Lake Michigan.
Now when I tell him what I’m reading—nonfiction, mostly; a Brontë novel every once in a while—he changes the subject to Abigail’s insatiable appetite for frozen rats.
***
Frank, the founder of the bird sanctuary, says my father is his favorite volunteer. My dad’s passion is palpable, Frank says. Visitors rave about the birdwatching hikes he leads.
Like the retirees who attend these outings, my son proves to be an excellent audience for my father’s obsession. Within twenty-four hours of our arrival, we’ve entered the sanctuary three times, and Danny knows the backstory of each resident raptor. After two days, he can differentiate between Hilde and Rupert, the two long-earned owls, and list the order of operations my father must follow when he scrubs down Abigail’s mew each Monday night.
I see myself in Danny, the way his little body inflates when my dad is near. When my father tests Danny’s knowledge of birds over dinner on our third day, my skin grows prickly. “Time for a break,” I say, tapping the table next to Danny’s plate. “Let’s work on this burger.”
***
My family vacationed in this part of Wisconsin when I was a kid, so at my and Cal’s insistence, we spend time outside the sanctuary, visiting the places I recall from childhood.
We hike and picnic, visit the rocky tip of the peninsula, pick sweet cherries at an orchard. Each night we make s’mores as dusk settles and when Cal takes Danny inside to wipe marshmallow off his cheeks, I sit on the porch with my father, listening to him talk about his volunteer duties and the birds he’s checked off his life list. Here and there I tell him about our lives back home—Danny is playing soccer, Cal is getting promoted at work—and he nods to show that he heard me. When we are done talking, we listen to the humming grasshoppers in the woods beyond the cabin.
On the fourth day, we spend an hour watching goats graze the steep sod roof of a busy Swedish café. As we wait for a table, I try to tell Danny about the time a petting zoo goat tried to eat my mother’s sweater, but he is distracted by a pair of blue jays flapping in a nearby tree. When we finally sit down to eat, my son looks at me slyly and tells me that vultures poop on their own legs. When I say that we don’t talk about poop at the table, he shakes his head and looks at my father. “Oh, Mom,” Danny says. “It’s just a fact.”
My husband and I glance at each other, eyebrows raised. I’ve always been “Mommy,” never “Mom.” For the rest of the day, the single syllable rattles around my chest.
***
On our final evening, we visit Abigail one last time and drive to a beach to watch the sun set across the water. We are early, so Cal plays catch with Danny, and my father and I watch the water lap at the shore.
“Remember To the Lighthouse?” I ask. “The waves?”
My father grunts. “Of course,” he says.
I am about to recite a passage—the only one I recall from the novel—when he points to a flock of birds over the water. “White pelicans,” he says. “There were hardly any a few years ago.”
I watch the lot of them flying in formation across the pink and orange sky. “Mom would’ve loved this,” I say, and my father shakes his head.
“Hated birds,” he said. “Even the beautiful ones.”
***
When we return home, Danny asks to play vultures.
“You’re Abigail,” he says to me, “and I’m your baby.” I flap my arms as though they’re wings.
“You’re a hawk stealing me from the nest,” he says to Cal, and Cal grabs our son by his armpits, letting the boy’s short legs dangle in front of him.
“Now you drop me because I wiggled out of your talons,” he says, and when Cal releases him onto the couch, Danny unleashes a wail that twists my heart and sends me to my knees. For a millisecond I am sure he’s fallen on his head and snapped his neck, but then he sits up and looks at me.
“I didn’t fall for real, Mom,” he says. “I’m a boy, remember? I’m a boy, not a bird.”
