Purple Knot

My mother’s birdwatching mania began with my fourteenth birthday, when she gave me a pair of exorbitantly priced binoculars she’d bought from an enthusiast in Lexington, Kentucky. They weighed as much as a Bible and hurt my neck

Photo by akashunnikrishnan

if I wore them for more than fifteen minutes. Almost immediately she reclaimed them and bought me a cheaper (and lighter) pair, and under the Kentuckian’s continued long-distance influence, we staked out eastern butterbills, Mexican snake-eaters, and greater pillowlarks in our old Subaru station wagon. One weekend she rented a cabin in Michigan so we could glimpse a rainbow mooncock (we didn’t see it, but we did spot a beautiful black-crowned night heron). Our avian résumé grew quickly, as did the Kentuckian’s influence and my number of unexcused absences from school, until at last we lugged our binoculars (we owned several pair now) down to Catspaw, Florida, to join our guru and his apostles in an attempt to glimpse one of the most elusive creatures yet: Drimble’s purple knot.

The drive south was one long quiz of Latin names, migrations, and wingspans. I have no real intelligence, but I do have a knack for memorizing useless information of this sort, which is the only way I survived this particular migration and the strange days to come. I can still list an unreasonable number of finches.

It was a tender age. I was, at the time, a rather chubby boy, and I wore my hair down to my shoulders. Kids at my school uniformly referred to me as “Roseanne,” from the sitcom, and a few could, by squishing their cheeks around their mouths, impersonate me with such accuracy that it would have impressed me if it hadn’t made me cry. My mom, to her credit, never shamed me for my homeliness and liked to braid and comb my hair, which she occasionally bragged about to strangers. In those years, my only prayer was a morbid one: that I would die long before her so I wouldn’t ever have to feel the pain of her loss. Her prebird period had been hard on her. While she made a good effort to appear happy for me, once every couple weeks she confined herself to her bed for a day or two, and I’d peek into her room to find her lying on top of her sheets, studying the stucco stalactites on the ceiling or staring blankly at informercials proclaiming the miraculous stain-removing properties of oxygen. But the bird-watching had changed something. I could commit a few bird-filled branches of the Tree of Life to memory if it made her happy.

The Kentuckian had given us an address near Venice, Florida, and after two days of driving and pointing out Cooper’s hawks, we arrived at a locked gate and entered the passcode he’d sent on the keypad.

“He doesn’t strike me as the gated-community type,” my mom said. Her intuition was not entirely wrong here.

The Kentuckian met us at the door. His name was Stilt Sandpiper, after the bird. A name I of course knew already but have so far neglected to say because it was so embarrassing. The name made sense, though. The man in front of me looked like a squash on stilts, the stilts being two long, calfless legs tanned the color of peanut butter.

“Dorothy! Finally! You look sensational.”

He gave my mom an awkward hug and squeezed my hand way too hard, as if he needed to demonstrate his superior strength to the fourteen- year-old boy before him. His fingers left long white marks on my fat hands, like the ghosts of bratwursts.

Stilt helped us with our bags and told us to make ourselves at home. “Welcome to the Nest,” he pronounced (I could hear the capitalization).

The walls were covered in 3D letters spelling words like beach and ocean. On an end table sat a single shell glued to a blank canvas. Stilt commanded me...