The Dove

A few weeks ago, on one of the coldest days of the winter so far, a bird came into the apartment. This happens sometimes. Mom keeps a bag of birdseed in her room to feed the neighborhood birds, and she uses the slight open space next to the air conditioner as a sort of take-out window. And sometimes, especially on very cold days, a bird will finish eating and take that extra step and come inside. We’ve had birds come to visit for an hour, or an afternoon, or a day or more. They’re usually too fast to be caught, flying across the living room to the bookcase in the hall, and then the light fixture in the dining room, and the refrigerator in the kitchen, eventually making their way back out the same way they came in.

But this bird was different. He was a kind of dove, grey and white, larger and slower and much more frightened than the other birds had been. Mom was able to catch him right away, but before showing him the way out she wanted to show him to me. She brought him into the living room, and when she relaxed her grip, just a little, he flew from her hands up to the curtain rod by the window. After a few moments of rest, as we watched, he stepped away from the curtain rod to fly away, and instead hit his head on the ceiling, over and over again. He kept flapping his wings and propelling himself up and down, caught in a strange loop, until he was finally able to break the pattern and reach the safety of the curtain rod again.

It was awful to watch each time he made a new attempt. I screamed, and Mom tried to catch him, and I covered my eyes in horror as I heard his wings beating against the ceiling again and again. When I opened my eyes, I noticed that there was blood on the ceiling, little dots of red where he’d done his latest dance, and when I looked up at him, standing there on the curtain rod, I could see blood on the feathers of his head. We kept trying to convince him to let us help him, but he was terrified and couldn’t think straight and couldn’t trust anyone; and I could relate.

I left the room at some point, to rest, or escape, and by then he was resting too, standing on the curtain rod, facing the wall. When I came back into the room after my nap, hours later, it was quiet and I assumed he’d escaped on his own, like all the other birds. And then I looked up. There were red dots spattered across the ceiling, from one side of the room to the other, marking every attempt he’d made to escape, and every time he’d found the ceiling where he expected to find sky. He wasn’t standing on the curtain rod anymore, though, and he wasn’t on top of the bookcase in the hall, or the light fixture in the dining room, or the refrigerator in the kitchen. And then I saw him, one foot on the sewing machine, flapping his wings, falling in slow motion down to the floor.

Mom wrapped him in a piece of fabric and carried him to the window in her room and set him down on the ledge next to the air-conditioner. I was afraid that if he took a step, he would just fall, but he was able to fly and landed on the cold ground in the backyard, stunned, but breathing. And when we checked later, he was gone, hopefully because he was able to fly away on his own.

I’d like to believe that he made his way home after that, where his wound could be tended with loving care, and he could consolidate his new life lessons – about accepting help when you need it, and taking a breath when the strange dance of panic starts to take over – but these lessons are so hard to learn.

The window in Mom’s bedroom is now kept closed, though the birdseed is still placed on the windowsill each morning for whoever needs it. These bird visitations had always seemed like a gift in the past, but this one made it clear that wild birds are not meant to live indoors, even for a little while. They need space to fly. Or a helmet. A helmet would be great.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?