It starts like this: my son is having a hard time making friends at his new school, so for his 9th birthday, I get him a magic kit. My wife tells me that this will only make things worse, that he’ll be bullied. I know she’s right, but at least he’ll have something he’s good at. Passion, I say, is at the heart of everything.

The kit has the basics. A set of scarves, a pack of cards, a cane, a hat, and a cape. There is a trick lighter and a pair of handcuffs too, but my wife and I agree it’s best to keep these away from him, at least until he is older.

My wife leaves for a month on business. While she’s away, my son waits at the breakfast table every morning to show me new tricks. He fans the cards towards me without giving instructions; he silently pulls scarves out of his pockets. He struggles a bit with the showmanship of it. I don’t say anything about this. He’s always been a quiet kid, and he’ll have the rest of his life to develop his act. Inevitably, he pulls the wrong card, or a scarf catches on his cuff links, but I still clap. The least I can do is encourage him.

I’m not proud to say it, but we don’t spend a lot of time together, my son and I. I work overtime, and by the time I get home, it’s hard to give any more of myself. The results aren’t all bad. My son can do laundry, clean a bathroom mirror without streaks, bake a birthday cake, in his favorite flavor. His mother thinks I’m the one doing these things. I feel bad, but at least he’s not wandering the woods or pestering the neighbors. He’s learning how to be independent, curious, and I can only hope he does not resent me for it. 

One morning, at the breakfast table, he’s still in his hat and cape, but I don’t see the cards or the scarves, so I think he might be phasing out of the whole magician thing. Then he opens his backpack, and a dove flies out. I scream and grab a vase, not sure what I’m planning to do with it. My son watches on, close-lipped. Eventually, I find the sense to open a window to let the animal out. My son scampers out of the room, cape in tow.

The next morning, my wife returns. She gets in early and calls me downstairs. I almost don’t go. I am having a hard time. Some days are just like that, a heaviness pins me to the bed. When I finally make it down, I see a dove half-hopping-half-flying between our curtain rods, dripping water. My wife tells me it was in the kettle when she went to boil water for her tea. I grab a broom and jab at it half-heartedly. Eventually, it jumps down onto the counter and rubs itself against the paper towel roll. I am impressed. I didn’t know they could figure out stuff like that. My son is standing on the staircase in his underwear. He makes a kind of “ta-da,” with his hands, then sprints upstairs.

“Why did you buy him a bird?” My wife asks, pouring bleach into the kettle.

“I didn’t.”

The next week they appear in the cupboard, the toilet, my wife’s purse, the fridge. Nowhere is safe. They come in twos, threes, even fours, one in each coat pocket as I head to work. We can’t figure out where he’s getting them from. I ask the neighbors if they’ve seen him doing anything suspicious, if anyone is missing a dove. I go to all the pet stores in town. I check to see if he’s been ordering them online, I still have his computer password. I’m almost disappointed to find he doesn’t have a secret credit card or bank account. 

A month passes. There’s bird shit all over the house and a thick musk of feathers. We’ve doused everything in ammonia, which requires us to leave the windows open to air out the stench. It’s wreaking havoc on the heating system. We walk around in our coats and socks. 

I pull one out of a cereal box. My son looks me in the eyes without a word. He strokes the dove’s head. It coos, and I feel its heart beat between my fingers. He walks out the door and gets on the school bus, still in his top hat and cape. 

I let the bird out through one of the many open windows, just as I do all the others. It disappears into the cold, its wings a flutter of white, the sound of cards shuffling. I never see them again after they cross our threshold. 

“How did we not see it?” I say, turning over the cereal box, looking for hidden compartments. “There wasn’t even a bulge or anything.”

“Gerald,” my wife says, holding an o-shaped grain up to the light fixture, inspecting for feather fibers. 

I know. Something has to be done. But it’s not easy. It may not look like it to you, but I’ve never seen my son this happy. I’ve never seen him this anything; this is the most I have ever known of him.

That night, my wife and I lay awake in bed, shivering in our coats, even under the blankets. Somehow, we know the boy is awake too. A strange telepathy has developed between the three of us. I curl up next to her and tuck my hands into her snowpants. She’s worn the same brand of cotton underwear for twenty years, the elastic slack from my thumbing.

“Someone has to talk to him,” she says.

“Someone does,” I murmur into her back.

My wife and I draw straws. She holds them, and I mention that this seems unfair. She claims she can’t tell the difference between the lengths in her palms. There’s not enough nerve endings, she says. I believe her. She knows a lot about these kinds of things. Besides, she says, there’s only two of us, how could she influence me to choose the shorter one, even if she did know?

 I pull the shorter one.

I knock on my son’s door then open it. He’s lying in bed on top of the covers with his magician’s outfit on, everything except the hat. The glow stars on his ceilings give off enough light for me to make out his side profile. With his glasses on, he looks like a tiny Malcom X.  

I lay down beside him. 

“You’ve been doing a lot of magic lately.”

“Dove magic,” My son says, slowly opening his eyes. 

“Can you tell me how you do it?”

“No.”

I notice he’s arranged the stars above into constellations shaped like smiley faces. The room smells faintly of adhesive. 

“A magician never reveals his tricks, is that it?”

“I don’t know,” he says. 

My son gets up and stands by the window. I get up and stand behind him. I’m still a clear two feet taller than he is. I wonder how long this gap will remain. If he’ll ever stand over me. If I’ll ever understand him. 

Outside, the moon is full, and we can see our yard clearly. It’s our first winter here. Snow covers the pockets of earth where I imagine hearts and fur stew beneath, giving off heat in burrows and dens. We moved here in the summer, after my wife’s mother passed away. She had lived with us, at our old house, for seven years by then. It was hard on the boy, his own grandmother not recognizing him by the end. We thought a fresh start would be good for all of us. We buried her upstate where the rest of my wife’s family lives. At the funeral, I met more of my wife’s clan than I knew existed. Not to be crass, but there’s not a single other member of her family I’d date. Sure, there’s some good shared genes amongst them, a certain sensuous haven between the cheekbone and the brow, but everything else, it’s like they’re total strangers. What are the chances they could all be so different? It’s amazing, really. Even more odd was the blue they all wore. I don’t know if they coordinated it, if it’s a tradition or what, but they were all in a blue that was close to black. The night air beyond the window tonight is that same color. 

My son taps his magician cane against the window sill three times. Outside, a clump of snow falls from the bough of a tree. We stand like expectant fathers, he and I, and I get the sense that we are waiting for something grand; for our first spring in this new house, when the forest will teem with life.