Colors

Prologue

"More toys!"

The shouts of a happy, young child are never something that causes you to wince. But today was a tough day. And right now, John's loud shrieking are acting like the sound of a hammer pounding down on railroad spikes.

"Okay, buddy... let Daddy go get some medicine for his head. Be right back with some more toys."

Little John seems to be satisfied with that... for now. I walk out of the bathroom, down the hall, into the living room, then into the kitchen and open up the cabinet where we keep the Tylenol. Opening the bottle, I take out two, go to the sink, get out a glass, fill it with water and take the two white pills. I finish the water, and I hear John's voice call out again.

"Dada...are you?"

"I'm right here, buddy. I'll be right there. Daddy's almost finished."

"Are you?" was John's way of asking "Where are you?" which couldn't be cuter. Just finishing the tall glass of water makes my head feel slightly better, so I put the glass in the sink and head back to the bathroom. I open up the cabinet in the bathroom where we keep the bath toys and toss a few more animals and cars into the bath.

"No... Dada... want that one." John is pointing to a rubber Lightning McQueen card he loves to play with. I smile down at him and toss it into the bath, watching him grin and begin playing with the toy.

This day though. Watching Michael get fired at work was not fun at all. But he had stolen the printer paper and was caught in the act. And even though the paper was worth very little to the company, Daniel was clear when he addressed this in his memo. Any stealing of any company property would result in immediate termination. That was it.

Still, seeing him getting ushered out was quite the sight. Christina had our oldest son, Reid, tonight. They were at the circus having a mother/son date. I had agreed to take care of John, our youngest, so they could reconnect tonight. Christina had been doing a lot of traveling lately.

"Dada! I'm ready to get out!" John's voice shocks me back into coherence.

"Okay buddy, okay... one second. Let me get a clean towel."

"I want... I want... I want the froggy towel."

John's little stutter in his speech was cute but at almost three years old, I am starting to wonder if we shouldn't get him tested for some sort of speech therapy. He communicates fine though, probably nothing to worry about. I get the froggy towel out from under the sink and get John out of the tub, placing him on the bath mat and drying him off before putting the towel around him and picking him up.

"Just you and me tonight, buddy. You can pick all the books tonight, okay?"

"Okay Dada. I want... Little Blue Truck book."

Little Blue Truck was a favorite. As was Polar Bear, Polar Bear and 5 Hungry Penguins. We walk from the bathroom, through my bedroom and into John's bedroom, which is attached to ours. I already have the sound machine on and his pajamas laid out. I lay him down on the changing table and finish drying him off, asking him about his day at school to distract him.

I put his pajamas on and pick him up and we go over to the chair and table in the corner where we read books in his room. We sit down and and I reach and get Little Blue Truck to read and as I do, I bump into another set of books and knock them over. John spots one of them and immediately calls out, "Colors! Colors! I want Colors book!"

Another favorite. So I grab Colors and begin reading it.

A green bird with a pretty blue head

Beals, Maine

December 18, 2019

"C'mon... start up, damnit."

The sky is the color of a dimly lit tent canopy from the inside. The air surrounding the 2011 blue Ford F-150 belonging to Dr. Sally Thayer is cold and the truck is refusing to turn over. Sally sits in the driver's seat, head resting on the cold leather of the steering wheel, silently begging for the truck to start.

She turns the key again, and the engine seems to spark with life momentarily, only to stop before attempting to start it up again. She lifts her head off the steering wheel and stares into the horizon, eyes fixed on the sun just starting to come up, casting a ruddy glow to the new-fallen snow surrounding her truck.

She had forgotten to plug the engine heater in last night and now she was paying the price. It might be awhile before it's warm enough to get this engine going. Clearing her throat, Sally tries one more time to get the engine started, fails and then grabs her laptop bag, phone and gets back out of the truck. She trudges through the snow in the same way she came to the truck just a few moments ago, back towards her home on Great Wass Island.

Dr. Sally Thayer is one of the foremost ornithologists in the United States and a learned scientist and researcher. She graduated first in her class from Butler University with her undergraduate degree and was an Oxford scholar. She had been published more times than she could count and had written four books that had been bestsellers. She was selected for President Obama's Council on Scientific Studies and had led the charge in getting more scientific exploration into school curriculum nationwide.

And yet, despite all her success in life, she still couldn't manage to remember to plug in her engine heater and heat her truck's engine up enough to start up to go to work.

She re-enters her house and tosses her laptop bag into a chair by the door. She lays her cell phone and keys by the catch-all basket in the kitchen and heads to the coffee maker. It's one of those one-cup-at-a-time coffee makers, and so she inserts another pod into the machine, places a coffee mug under the dispenser, and hits BREW. The sound of the coffee brewing is the only sound in the house until her cell phone rings.

Sally reaches for the phone, glancing at the screen to see if she recognizes the number. She does. She presses the green “ANSWER” button.

"Truck won't start. I'll be late this morning."

The voice on the other end of the call isn't unkind, and seems mildly amused. "Third time this month that you've forgotten to plug your engine in. I'm starting to think that age is catching up with you, Sally."

The voice belongs to Dr. John Maxwell Thayer, Sally's ex-husband and research partner at the Great Wass Island Preserve.

Sally's head dips down a bit, while she keeps the phone in place on her ear, and she lets out an audible sigh. The voice of her ex-husband being amused at her incompetence isn't brightening her day.

"You know, if I had a research partner who wouldn't waste time at the office, I wouldn't have to come in so early to get the important work done." Sally's voice was tense and almost genuinely angry. Almost.

Their marriage had been a good one for most of the time they were married. They had too much in common though, and soon each person’s idiosyncrasies got on their nerves to the point that they couldn't stand to be around each other. But, being the co-heads of the 3rd largest wildlife preserve in the United States meant they couldn't just stop working together. So for better or worse, they decided to stick it out as business partners, even if that meant they had to keep working together. Sally's only solace was that she could at least go home alone every night and not have to hear that insufferable snoring.

The male Thayer chuckles, which only raises Sally’s hackles on the back of her neck even more. “There’s more to life than burying your head in books and looking for new bird species, Sally. But then you never did like to mix things up all that much, did you?”

This was true. Sally had become enamored with her work so much that she left all pretense of a social life behind. Their two kids, now both grown adults in graduate school in England, rarely visited Maine, and she hadn’t dated in over two years. Her marriage had left her worried that she couldn’t really be comfortable around another person for any length of time that didn’t involve accomplishing something at work, and so she dove headlong into her real passions, writing and ornithology.

“Look, I’ve got the car plugged in now, I’ll work from home until the thing is ready to drive and then I’ll be into the office later.” Sally annoyingly dropped the phone from her shoulder, catching it in her hand, and could hear her ex-husband laughing softly as she hit the “END CALL” button. Placing the phone down onto the counter, she goes back to the coffee maker, takes the coffee mug out from under the dispenser, and sips the warm liquid in the quiet of her house.

The sun had come up completely now, and the sunlight was streaming through her kitchen window right by her kitchen sink. This was her favorite spot in the house. The morning light dappled through the trees in such a beautiful way, it filled Sally will a calm she rarely got anywhere else.

And that’s when she saw it.

In the pine tree, about 30 feet up from the ground on a branch, was a bird she had never seen before.

Dr. Sally Thayer was blessed with one of the world’s best photographic memories. It’s one of the things that made her such a remarkable ornithologist, because she could see 50 different birds that resembled each other and tell them apart in seconds. She could recognize the shape of their beak, the pattern of their feathers, how their feet worked when they hunted or borrowed for worms, any distinguishing feature.

And this bird was one she had never, ever seen before.

It was fairly large, maybe about two pounds by the looks of it, with a large blue head, black beak, black eyes, and a beautiful green body that made it almost completely blend in with the evergreen pine needles. The head made it stand out, a color of azure blue that rivaled the most brilliant summer sky she had ever seen. It stood on the branch, turning its head from side to side. It hopped on the branch and did a 180, facing away from Sally, and when it did, she noticed its tail was long and black, long black feathers that were at least a foot long.

Sally grabbed her phone to try and zoom in and take a picture of it, but just then it took off. Sally immediately ran out the kitchen door to the back porch and scanned the sky, phone in hand. She stood there, motionless, not daring to breathe, for what seemed like minutes. She heard some terns cawing in the distance, but other than that, it was eerily quiet in the woods behind her house. She could see the water’s edge in the distance as well. But no sign of the bird.

She immediately went back inside, finished her coffee quickly, placed the mug into the kitchen sink and headed back out the front door. She unplugged the car from the outlet it was plugged into, stepped into the driver’s seat and started the car. After a few tries, it cranked up and she started the heat, turning the radio on to NPR. As she put the truck into reverse to back out of the driveway, she looked in her rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of the bird she had spotted now on her mailbox at the end of the driveway.

Sally’s breath caught in her throat again, as she grabbed her phone, put the car back into park, leaving it running, and slowly got out of the car. The bird was now only about 20 feet away, and she could see it was gorgeous but also somewhat deadly-looking. Its beak, she could see now, was curved downward, to indicate she was a predator bird of some kind. And the bird’s claws were larger than she could see before.

Stepping carefully on the driveway, she made her way slowly towards the mailbox. She raised her phone to snap a picture of the bird, again very slowly, and snapped one just as the bird took over again, soaring high into the sky. She tried to catch it in flight a few times but wasn’t successful. She watched it take off towards the mainland in awe; it really was a striking creature.

Thinking back now, it’s difficult to remember any bird she had seen that had that much green on them and was that large; most birds that had green in their feathers were smaller birds like hummingbirds, or tropical birds like parakeets and parrots. To see something that more resembled a hawk but with that stunning color green on it was almost unbelievable. And those long black tail feathers!

What in the world had Dr. Sally Thayer discovered?

Shaking herself out of her own thoughts, she turns back towards her truck and climbs in, putting it back into “reverse” and heads out of the driveway. Her thoughts are all about guides and computer programs on birds when she gets to her office at the Great Wass Island Preserve and Ornithology Center. Taking her laptop out of her bag, she sets it down onto the docking station, opening it up and powering the laptop on. She spies her ex-husband wandering the hallway adjacent to her office and motions for him to come into her office.

“Yeah? What’s up Sal’?”

“Sal” is what he always called her when they were married and old habits die hard. The name still grated on her every nerve, which is probably why he refused to stop calling her that.

“Check this picture out.” Sally tosses the phone to John. John stares at the phone a few seconds and says, “This is still locked. All I see is your wallpaper.”

Sally comes out from behind her desk, knocking over a cup of pencils on her desk by accident. She curses audibly which causes John to chuckle just as audibly. She grabs the phone out of his hand, types in the unlock code and pulls up the Photos app on her phone. She finds the picture of the bird on her mailbox and says, “Here, this. Check this out.”

John takes the phone and eyes the photo slowly. Taking his index and thumb, he pinches the screen to zoom in, then zooms back out again, moving the picture around on the screen to view it at different spots. His eyes widen slightly and then he locks the phone back and hands it back to Sally.

“Interesting. I’d think it was some new sort of tern but for those tail feathers.” John’s confidence was another one of things that got on Sally’s last nerve. He never assumed anything but that he had the full story and all the facts and he was right no matter what.

“It’s not a new tern, John. It’s way too big for that.” She unlocked the phone again, with the photo still displayed, and shoves it in John’s face. “Look at how big it is compared to the mailbox. It’s gotta be a few pounds, look at the chest, and the curved beak.”

John peers at the photo again, as if seeing it for the first time (again), and clears his throat. “Oh yeah, I see that now... well, what do you think it is, Sal?”

Sally had to work hard to not allow utter content to escape from her lips. “That’s what I want to find out. It certainly has the look of a tropical bird, so it shouldn’t be here at this time of year, or really any time of year, but that beak tells me it hunts for prey, which would be unusual for this area as well.”

John hands the phone back to Sally and says, “Yes, yes, I agree on all that. Look, the boys and I were going to order food from Libby’s for Christmas lunch. Let me know what you want from there and I’ll make sure they get it ordered for you.”

Christmas lunch, thought Sally. That’s right, it was almost Christmas again. The Center would be closed from Christmas Eve til after the New Year, and the staff always gets together for a staff lunch the week before. That’s this week, thought Sally.

“Get me the crab cakes and lobster claws, if you don’t mind. Thanks John.” Sally goes back around to her desk and sits down, opening up a few things on her computer to signal that the conversation was over.

John smiles a little and says, “Sure thing. We’ll do it Thursday, okay?”

Sally simply nods at John as he leaves.

Sally opens up a few windows on her computer, including her email and a few bird-watching programs. She also opens up Google Chrome to a few forum websites for bird watchers she likes to go to when she spots something she thinks is new to an area. She grabs her phone and opens up Google Drive, uploading the picture to her personal account there, and then opens up Google Drive on her computer, transferring the file to her desktop.

She logs into BirdForum.net, the best forum for bird watchers, and logs into her account. She sees she has some personal messages but she ignores those for now. She heads over to the forum marked “New/Unusual Sightings” and click the link to enter the forum. Immediately, she begins to see new posts from the last few days and notices a familiar trend:

“What is this? Green bird with black tail feathers!”

“Never seen this before... look at that beak!”

“What a gorgeous blue head on this bird... and that tail? What is this?”

Immediately, Sally begins to check on the locations for the posts, all with accompanying pictures of birds that match her image almost perfectly. She begins to jot down some locations on a legal pad laying next to her keyboard.

San Francisco, California

Edinburgh, Scotland

South Africa

Sally’s mind begins to race with many thoughts, but the most pressing one is “Where did this bird come from?”

———————

After posting her picture of the unusual bird to the forum and logging off, Sally went into the staff kitchen to fix some coffee. One of her co-workers, an analyst named Henry, was also fixing himself some coffee. The two exchange a pleasant glance, and Sally grabs the nearest coffee mug from the group in the cabinet and pours herself some coffee, starting to head out of the room then Henry speaks up.

“Um, ahem... sorry... did John tell you we are ordering from Libby’s for Christmas lunch?” Henry’s voice was meek but masked a deeper strength.

Sally turned and grinned back amicably. “Yep, thanks. I told him what I wanted so if you’re placing the order, you can get that from him, okay?”

Henry’s eyes widened knowingly and he nodded. “Sure, eh, no problem Doc.”

Most of the researchers at the office called Sally “Doc,” and she liked that quite a bit. It wasn’t easy for her to put herself through school. Lord knows the student debt was a bitch to pay back, but it was worth it, because she was one of the few people she knew who could say that she was doing the thing she was born to do.

Ornithology might be a boring science for most folks, but to Sally Thayer, it was the most amazing of all sciences. The variety of birds she’s seen and cataloged during her travels have made for a remarkable journey, and it would appear she wasn’t done.

Heading back into her office with her fresh coffee mug in hand, she sits down at the desk and refreshed the forum window she was on. Eight more posts in the last 10 minutes about that bird! Sally couldn’t believe it. And they were all over the world, not just concentrated in one or two locations or hemispheres. They seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.

Something was definitely going on.

Sally spent most of the day tracking the forum posts and researching online about the bird. She went through hundreds of listings of bird species found in the last 50 years and couldn’t come up with anything that even remotely resembled this creature. And considering how widespread the sightings were, it couldn’t be that someone had been keeping this bird a secret for all these years only to release them into wild at various locations around the world.

Something had been niggling at the back of Sally’s mind all day that she couldn’t quite shake. The thought pervaded her mind more and more as the day wore on and by the time she was ready to pack up and head home, it was all she could think about.

What if these birds aren’t from Earth?

The thought that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life would be a species of bird and not some sort of humanoid had barely even scratched the surface of anyone’s mind, but for Sally, it was a logical assumption. The fact that for years and years, nothing had been seen of these birds and then to suddenly be everywhere, it defied any logical conclusion that the birds could be from Earth or have developed here.

The bird’s unique plumage, color patterns, and beak suggest that it had never, ever been seen until very recently, and the fact that it had been seen in nearly every corner of the world meant that it didn’t adhere to traditional migratory patterns or had any one particular home.

Sally packed up her things in her office and headed towards the door. There, she ran into John again. John smiled almost automatically, a smile that still made Sally tinged with anger. John reached for the closest of the two glass double-doors.

“After you, Sal.”

Sally pushed past him and into the cold evening air. Sally walked down the steps of the office complex and out towards the parking lot. She could feel John not so far behind, walking slower than she was. His phone rang and he took it out to answer it. Sally quickened her pace when she realized he was talking to his new wife, Maria. His honeyed tone and affectionate words made the pit in Sally’s stomach grow.

Sally threw open her truck’s door a bit harder than she intended, and tosses her leather laptop bag into the passenger’s seat of the truck before climbing in. She let her head rest on the steering wheel as she closed the door to the truck, causing the most perfect silence to be created inside the vehicle. She was normally the last one to leave tonight, and with the exception of her ex-husband, that was once again true today.

She sat in the truck, head resting on the steering wheel, trying to steady her breathing. She reached into her pocket after a few seconds and put the key into the ignition. She felt tears well up in her eyes but she didn’t try to hold them back. After a few seconds, she was bawling uncontrollably, body shaking with the sobs, a cough here or there when her nose got clogged up from the crying. She reached over in the middle of the truck between the two front seats and grabbed a box of Kleenex and began to blow her nose, making a loud honking sound as she did.

She dabbed her eyes a bit and blew her nose a couple more times as the sobbing subsided. She took a few more steadying breaths and then started the truck. She switched on the headlights and that’s when she saw them.

Right in front of her truck, not more than 10 feet away, were around a dozen of the blue-headed green birds she had seen that morning and that she had been tracking all day online. A dozen of the most beautiful and frightening creatures she had ever seen. They were perched on a parking rail, some looking at Sally’s truck, others glancing around. She sat there, awed by their beauty, for what seemed like hours, although it was likely just a few minutes.

Do I dare get out and try to snap a few more pictures, Sally thought to herself. None of them had moved since she started the truck and turned on the headlights, but surely a noise as loud as a truck door shutting would send them off. She reached for her phone and took a few pictures through the grimy windshield of her truck but they weren’t any good. To really get a good shot, she’s going to need to get out of the truck.

Sally sat for a few more moments then decided it was time to test her luck. She left the truck running and reached for the truck door handle and pulled up. The door eased open and Sally carefully climbed out of the truck, leaving the door mostly open. Then she walked carefully over to the front of the truck, raised up her cell phone and began shooting a video. Instinctively she began to narrate the video in as quiet a voice as she could muster.

“This is Dr. Sally Thayer, Director of the Great Wass Island Observatory and Ornithology Center, it’s December 18th, 2018, and this is a bird species I have never, ever seen before.”

With that, the birds, as one, take off from the parking rail and leap into the sky, flying just inches above Sally’s somewhat crouched position. The birds whiz past her quickly, but Sally keeps her mind about her and continued to film, turning to follow them up into the dimly lit sky. As she watches them leave her sight, she realizes she’s not breathing at all. She exhales and inhales deeply, her breath making fog in the cold air, and she stops the video recording on her phone. She stands up, and then leans onto the truck. That’s when she finally sees John, standing no more than 10 feet away beside his car in the parking lot.

“Looks like we’ve got some work to do this week”, is all John says as he makes his way to the driver’s side of his car and gets in. The fact that he didn’t use “Sal” in his statement was all the proof Sally needed to know John was taking this as seriously as she was.

Sally shakes her head a bit, turning to watch the last remnants of the birds escape her sight in the increasing darkness, then slides her phone back to her pocket, locking it as she does so, and climbs back into her truck. Starting up the vehicle, she rests her head again on the steering wheel, exhaling a deep breath. Lifting her head up finally, she puts the truck in “reverse” and backs out of the parking space. Pulling out of the parking lot, she throws her headlights on and begins mindlessly driving home.

As she pulls into her driveway, she notices a package on her front step, a brown box about the size of a full grown collie. She puts the truck in park, grabs her briefcase and heads to the front door. She reaches down to pick up the box and realizes it’s heavier than she can carry on her own. She reaches into her briefcase and gets her house keys, unlocks the front door, throws the front porch light on, and looks down to see if she can tell who the box is from. The label says “Big Sur Ornithology Center” and she straightens up.

“Michael”, Sally whispers.

Dr. Michael Thorne was a colleague and someone Sally had a mild work crush on for years. The box must be full of papers or books or findings or something, Sally thinks to herself. Sally steps around the box and into her house, going into the kitchen, lays her briefcase down on the kitchen counter, heads towards her garage and opens the door. She turns the garage light on and looks around, then she spots it... the hand truck. She goes and grabs it by the handle, lifting it up with such vigor that she nicks the wall by the door and scrapes some of the drywall off. She curses to herself and more carefully makes her way to the front door.

She goes outside, placing the hand truck under the front of the box, and lifts it over the threshold of the house, closing the door behind her. She wheels the box into the kitchen (the room in the house with the best light) and places it in front of the kitchen table. She manages to flip it over, and notices it’s really well taped. Standing up, she goes to get a sharp knife from the knife block on the counter, and then returns to the table. She opens the box quickly, not noticing that she’s stopped breathing.

She pries open the two flaps on the top of the box and there’s a note at the very top of the package. It’s from Michael, in his handwriting:

Sally, I hope you’re well. I wanted to send you all I have on this most unusual finding. Mark discovered the bird first, and we started keeping watch 24 hours for this thing... it seemed to only show up at sunrise and sunset for us. I’ve been checking online at various points and these things are all over the world, which cannot be a coincidence. I’ve made copies of all my findings and I wanted you to have them. Send me copies of whatever you have on this new species. And if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry, you will. All my best, Michael

Sally takes the letter and holds it to her chest for a moment, closing her eyes and remembering the last time the two of them were together. It was 2013, at the NAOC in Boston. Michael had been leading a symposium and had asked her to attend because he was nervous. She gladly did so, and thought he did a remarkable job. They had gotten dinner at Marliave afterwards and he had been utterly charming. Of course, the two bottles of expensive wine had made him even more attractive and charming, but it was such a special night.

After the conference, they had lost touch for a while, and Sally had gone through her divorce. Michael was a confirmed bachelor and would never have tried to get Sally to cheat on her husband, but Sally would’ve jumped at the chance had the opportunity presented itself. Needless to say, her work crush had blossomed over the years in her heart to something just short of epic romance.

Behind the note from Michael was a gaggle of pictures of the bird, and Sally regained her composure and shook herself out of her remembrances. She laid the note on the kitchen table, reaching into the box and pulling out more than a dozen pictures of the new bird in various locales. Each picture had a day and time on the back of it, with some of them dating back more than a year!

How can this be?, Sally thought to herself. Dr. Sally Thayer considered herself someone in touch with her work, and for her to be so blind to her day-to-day activities that she completely missed this new species was unsettling for her. She flipped through the pictures quickly and confirmed that every photo was the same kind of bird she said today.

She laid the pictures down onto the table on top of the note from Michael. Behind those were more pictures sticking out of notebooks and notebooks of detailed notes from Michael and his team. She decided to visit these later. She took the pictures and the note from Michael and went to pour herself a glass of wine. Taking her glass of wine, she took the note and papers into her living room and sat down in the large, overstuffed chair that faced the television. She mindlessly turned the TV onto the news. She sips her wine, reading the note from Michael again and heaving a big sigh.

Taking another sip of her wine, she turns her attention to the TV where the broadcaster on MSNBC is speaking.

“...recapping our top story, news out of our nation’s capital today as President Kilgore was rushed from his golf game to an underground bunker. We have confirmation that an imminent threat to the President’s life was confirmed and the Secret Service took the President to an undisclosed bunker location for his safety. Military forces around the US were put on high alert, and the terror threat level was elevated to reflect the current state. Reports from the White House indicate that President Kilgore is in no immediate danger at this time and that the FBI and CIA are monitoring all channels for suspicious activity. Again, recapping our top story, President Kilgore moved to an undisclosed location but is continuing his duty as President at this time....”