My parents first explained what death was to me when I was three years old, seated at the kitchen island in our old house on the stools that used to make me feel tall. So tall.
“When somebody dies,” my mother had told me, “it means we can’t visit them or see them anymore because they’re far away, in Heaven. But they’re still looking down and watching us.”
Per reports from my parents, I took this information in stride. When they explained that my grandpa had died, and that I wouldn’t be able to visit him anymore, I said I understood. I was too young for any real sense of grief, and by the way my parents were telling it, Heaven wasn’t too bad. My grandfather was a distant part of my life at best; he was a functioning alcoholic who died of liver failure and lived five hours away, but still, a toddler loves her grandpa. Perhaps in an attempt to make up for all the failed years with my mother, he showered me with attention and gifts any time we were together. What I remember most about him to this day is his love of owls. He had little stone figurines of them, wooden sculptures, books, stuffed animals. He gave me a large puppet of a snowy owl that I could stick my hand up and turn the head all the way around, around, and around until it went in a circle.
I was three, so I don’t remember, but my mother tells me that about a week after my grandfather’s death, she heard my voice murmuring across the hall in the middle of the night in my bedroom. When she asked me what I was doing the next morning, I told her flatly, “talking to grandpa.”
“What do you mean?” she asked me, her face going white.
“He comes to visit me when I sleep,” I told her, happy as ever. “He sends the owl to talk to me.”
Needless to say, my mother was shaken, but she thought this might just be the normal process for a three year-old. Maybe this was I needed to cope. Maybe I was dreaming about him, and it could be a sweet story she could tell me for the rest of my life.
She has told it to me, 20 years later, but it’s not a sweet story.
For weeks, I continued to tell her that I spoke to Grandpa at night, that he would visit me as a white owl and talk to me about school, her, and something called “the pact.” According to her, I never really explained what “the pact” was, and would have no way of knowing really what the word “pact” even meant at my age. The most cohesive thing I would ever say to her was that “Grandpa needs the pact to get his heart back.” I asked her if she ever got visits from Grandpa. She did not.
Eventually, my mom brought it up with my grandmother. Grandma had never been one to dwell on the past or let anyone think she needed a man in general, so she was blaise about it. If she was so concerned, she told my mom, or thought it was some kind of unhealthy coping mechanism, she should just go in my room at night and see what I was doing. If I was just muttering in my sleep, my mother could rest assured that I was only dreaming. If I was up and talking to the wall or my toys and pretending they were my dead grandfather, maybe then she could call the child therapist.
So in the summer, in the middle of the night, my mother got up and crept down the hall to my bedroom. She leaned her ear up against the cracked-open door and waited, and when she heard me start to speak, she went in immediately, expecting to see me babbling at the wall or spinning my puppet around.
Instead, what she found was me in the nook of my bedroom by a window that faced a scraggly old dogwood tree, standing on my tiptoes and leaning against my bookshelf. In the tree, just an inch from the glass, was a snowy owl.
I grew up in Delaware. We do not have snowy owls. In fact, aside from apparently this period in my life, I have never seen a single owl.
She was understandably freaked. When she tells the story, she says she was frozen for a moment just watching as I prattled away about preschool and the latest Disney movie and what I wanted to be for Halloween to the huge bird outside my window.
“For a moment,” she always says, “I even thought he might talk back.”
It noticed her. The moment she stepped in the room, she told me, the owl’s yellow eyes locked onto hers, and its pupils narrowed until they were almost invisible, leaving just two yellow disks like harvest moons behind. It waited until I was finished talking to it, and then, when I turned around to grin at my mom and say, “Look! It’s Grandpa!”, it turned its head all the way around, around, and around until it came full circle and revealed a beak replaced by a wide slice through the bird’s face full of human teeth stretched into a gruesome smile.
“Like a jack o’lantern with a person’s mouth,” my mother told me with a shudder. I have never been able to get that image out of my head.
Its eyes were still completely yellow.
“Grandpa says to make the pact,” I squeaked to my mother. She tells me that the owl hadn’t said anything.
The story usually ends there. All that my mother has ever said after that is that she knew then that, whatever I was speaking to, it was not my grandfather. She felt it in her bones, she says.
My mother pulled me away from the window and held me to her chest with my face against her while the owl smiled at her, unblinking, unmoving. Perhaps it was only a minute, or perhaps an hour, but eventually, the owl retched something up that fell off the tree onto the grass, then spun its head back around and flew off. It flew, she tells me, like a something whose wings were too heavy and cumbersome to support it. Not like an owl, but like a vulture. The next day she sent my father out to investigate the pellet it had vomited. My dad does not believe in God or ghosts, but he maintains the pellet looked like “hair soaked in blood,” and that it contained dozens of what looked like human teeth.
They boarded up the window.
We moved two years later for unrelated reasons, and I have never lived anything like what my parents tell me about what happened when I was little, but I believe them. They don’t tell it like a story; they tell it like a nightmare. Yesterday, digging through the attic to find room for my college stuff, I came across that old puppet and turned its head, just for fun. It went around, and around, and around, and then stopped. Wouldn’t budge. I swear, in that instant, I heard a “hoot” from outside, and five human teeth fell out onto the floor.
I have a picture, if you don’t believe me.