Chapter 1

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The cabin smelled the same.

That was the first thing Arjun noticed when he pushed open the screen door and stepped into the front room, his duffel bag thumping against his knee. It smelled like old pine and woodsmoke and the faint lemon of the polish Grandpa used on the kitchen table every Sunday, whether it needed it or not. It smelled like summers. It smelled like every summer Arjun could remember.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, just breathing it in.

"Well, are you going to stand there letting the mosquitoes in, or are you going to come give your old grandfather a hug?"

Grandpa was by the window, pulling the last of the dust sheets off the big green armchair. He folded the sheet in the careful, square way he folded everything — corners to corners, edges lined up — and when he looked up at Arjun his eyes did that crinkling thing they always did, the one that made the lines on his face deepen like rivers finding their old paths.

Arjun dropped his duffel and crossed the room and let Grandpa wrap him up in the kind of hug that smelled like old flannel and Old Spice and, somewhere underneath, like Grandpa himself — a smell Arjun couldn't name but would have known in the dark.

"You've grown," Grandpa said into the top of his head. His accent was still there, even after fifty-six years in Wisconsin. Not a put-on brogue, just the shape of certain words. *Grown* came out softer than an American would say it, the *r* tender.

"Two inches," Arjun said. "Mom measured me in April."

"Two inches." Grandpa pulled back and held him at arm's length and shook his head. "Two inches and already eleven. You'll be driving a car next."

"Grandpa. I'm eleven, not sixteen."

"Aye, well. Time plays tricks on a man my age. You look at a boy and you blink and he's a giant with a moustache. It's a thing that happens."

Arjun laughed. He always laughed more at the cabin than he did anywhere else. It was like the cabin had a different kind of air in it, the kind that made laughing easier.

"Is Maren here yet?"

"Coming tomorrow. Uncle Dave's driving her down from Eau Claire after the dairy show. She'll be here before lunch if he doesn't stop for cheese curds, which he will."

"He always stops for cheese curds."

"He always stops for cheese curds."

Arjun went and picked up his duffel and carried it into the little room at the back, the one that had always been his. The one with the window that looked out over the lake. The bed was made with the quilt Nana had stitched — the one with the patches of old shirts and dresses, the one with the block of blue cotton from Arjun's own baby blanket sewn near the middle. Arjun ran his hand over the quilt the way he always did when he first came in. It was like saying hello.

Through the window, the lake lay flat and silver in the afternoon light. Somewhere across the water a loon was calling — that long, lonely, water-running-over-stones call that Arjun had loved ever since he could remember. Nana used to say loons had swallowed the wind, and that was why their voices sounded the way they did.

Arjun sat down on the edge of the bed.

Everything was the same. The braided rug, worn thin where Grandpa's boots stood every morning. The shelf above the bed with the three books that lived there always — *The Sibley Guide to Birds*, a paperback called *Owl Moon*, and a little yellow volume of Irish poetry with Grandpa's name written inside the cover in his mother's handwriting. The framed photograph on the dresser, the one of Nana in a red sweater with binoculars hanging from her neck, smiling at something off-camera.

Arjun looked at the photograph a long time.

"Come on out, lad," Grandpa called from the kitchen. "I've a pot of tea going."

* * *

The lake was turning gold. Evening was coming the way it came up north, slow and patient. A heron was standing like a gray statue in the reeds at the far end of the bay, and Arjun watched it a long time before he spoke.

"Mom called from India last night," he said.

"Did she? And how's your Nana-ji?"

"Not good. The doctor says maybe a few weeks. Mom's going to stay until. You know. Until."

Grandpa nodded slowly. He didn't say *I'm sorry* or any of the other things adults said that didn't mean anything. He just nodded and looked out at the lake.

"Your mother's a good daughter," he said finally. "It's a gift, to be with a father at the end. Not everyone gets that. I didn't."

Arjun knew this. Grandpa's father had died in Cork while Grandpa was at a factory job in Milwaukee, saving for the ticket home, and the ticket had come too late. Grandpa had told him the story once, on a different porch, a different summer.

"She said to tell you hello," Arjun said. "And that she loves you. And she's sorry she can't be here this summer."

"Tell her I love her back. And there's no sorry about it. She's where she needs to be."

The heron moved. Just one slow step, graceful as a dancer, its long neck folded. Then still again.

"Arjun."

Something in Grandpa's voice made Arjun look up from his tea.

Grandpa was holding his mug in both hands, staring into it as if there were something important written on the surface.

"I need to tell you something, lad. And I don't want to tell you, but I have to, because you're a man of eleven years old and you deserve to hear a thing straight."

Arjun's stomach did a small, cold flip.

"Is it about Mom?"

"No. Your mother's fine. Your mother's your mother and she's as strong as a tree. It's about the cabin."

"The cabin?"

Grandpa took a long breath. He looked up and his eyes were tired in a way Arjun didn't think he'd ever seen them tired before.

"I'm selling it, lad. At the end of summer. It's already with a realtor. There's a family from Madison who's going to put in an offer, most likely. They'll have it signed by September."

The words were English. Arjun knew that. He recognized each one separately. But strung together they made no sense, as if Grandpa had spoken a sentence in a language that only sounded like English.

"Selling it?"

"I have to. The taxes have gone up three years running. The roof needs redoing. The septic's on its last legs. I can't keep it up on my pension, Arjun. I've tried. I've been trying for four years now, since your Nana went, and I've finally had to admit I can't."

"But —" Arjun's throat felt like someone had stuffed cotton into it. "But it's *ours.*"

"It was ours. Aye. It was."

"You can't just sell it."

"I can, lad. I have to."

"Where will you go?"

"I'll keep the apartment in Green Bay. I'll be fine. I'll have my books and my television and a neighbor who talks too much."

"But where will *we* go? In the summer?"

Grandpa looked at him then, properly looked at him, and his face had that folded-up look it had gotten at Nana's funeral, the look like a man holding something very heavy and trying to pretend the weight wasn't there.

"We'll figure something out, Arjun. We'll see each other. It's the cabin that's going. Not us."

"It's the same thing."

"It isn't. I promise you it isn't. But I know it feels like it is, tonight. I know."

Arjun set his mug down on the porch floor. His hands didn't want to hold things. He stood up from the swing and walked to the screen door and pushed through it and walked down the three steps and out onto the grass. The grass was cool. The lake was still gold. The heron was still there, still as stone, as if nothing on earth were happening at all.

Arjun walked down to the dock and sat on the end of it with his shoes off and his feet in the water. The water was cold. He didn't care.

He thought about Nana teaching him the names of birds on this dock. *Chickadee. Warbler. Kingfisher.* He thought about the smell of the tiny kitchen and the way Grandpa sang Irish songs while he made pancakes. He thought about the loon calls at night and the way Maren pretended to be scared of them but really wasn't and how they'd invented a whole game about loon-pirates when they were seven and nine.

He thought about losing all of it.

A loon called, far across the water. Another answered from closer in. Arjun's eyes stung, but he didn't cry. Not yet.

Behind him, the screen door opened and closed. Grandpa walked down the path and sat down beside him on the dock with his old knees cracking, and he didn't say anything for a long time. He just sat. The way Grandpa could sit. Like a person who had learned how to be present without needing to talk about it.

Finally, Grandpa said, "Your Nana would be sorry too."

"I miss her."

"I know, lad. I do too. Every blessed day."

The sun was almost gone now. The heron lifted itself suddenly, a great soft gray kite of a bird, and flapped slow and low over the water and was gone around the bend. Arjun watched it until the last gray smudge of it disappeared.

"Promise me," he said, "we'll have one more good summer."

"I promise you that," Grandpa said. "With everything I have."

They sat on the dock until the stars came out.

* * *

That night, in the little back room with the window over the lake, Arjun opened his journal. It was a blue one this year, with a stretchy elastic band. His mother had bought it for him at the stationery store in their neighborhood, the one with the Indian sweets in the window. He had started writing in it on the plane to Wisconsin that morning. He had already drawn a chickadee on the first page.

He wrote the date at the top of a new page, and then he sat for a long time and nothing came.

*Grandpa is selling the cabin. It is the last summer. I don't know how to say what that feels like. It feels like someone told me a color I've loved all my life is going to stop existing. Like they said, after September there will be no more blue.*

He stopped. He read what he had written. He added one more line.

*I will remember everything.*

Then he closed the journal and turned off the lamp and lay in the dark listening to the loons, and after a long time he fell asleep.

Maren arrived the next morning in a cloud of dust and cheese-curd grease.

Arjun was on the front steps of the cabin, eating an apple and watching a goldfinch work its way through the thistle patch, when Uncle Dave's pickup came rattling down the long gravel drive. The truck had one blue door and three red ones, and Uncle Dave had been meaning to paint it for as long as Arjun had been alive. Maren was hanging halfway out of the passenger window before the truck had even stopped, her braids flapping and her face already red from shouting.

"Arjun Patel-O'Connor!" she yelled. "You got tall!"

"You have cheese on your face," Arjun said.

"I have cheese in my *soul,*" Maren said, and kicked the door open.

She was twelve now, three months past her birthday, and she was taller than last summer by what Arjun would later measure on the workshop wall and find to be two and a half inches. She was also browner, freckled across the nose in that Minnesota summer way, and her hair — which had been plain brown in winter — had blonde streaks in it from the sun and the hayfield. She came at Arjun like a train and hugged him so hard his apple went flying.

"My apple."

"Your apple's a casualty of war."

"That's my breakfast."

"I have curds. I have so many curds. Dad bought six bags."

"Six?"

"He says you can't have too many curds."

"He's wrong."

"He says so too. He says that's the joke of being wrong."

Uncle Dave came around the truck with his enormous grin and a cooler in each hand. He was a big man, six foot four with a belly like a friendly moon, and he had a voice that carried across bays. "Arjun, my man! Get over here, give your old uncle a handshake. A man-handshake, now."

Arjun gave him a man-handshake, which turned into a bear hug, because Uncle Dave could not be prevented from bear-hugging people.

"Where's that old Irishman?"

"Kitchen," Arjun said.

"Grand." Uncle Dave hauled his coolers up the steps. "Brought venison from the freezer. And a pie your aunt made. And a sack of those little yellow tomatoes. Dad! Where you at?"

The screen door banged. Maren grabbed Arjun's arm.

"Come on," she said. "Let the grown-ups grown-up. I want to see the lake."

They ran.

* * *

It was a good morning. A blue sky morning with a little wind on the water and the smell of pine warm in the sun. They threw rocks off the dock and competed for splash size. They lay on the grass and watched a monarch butterfly work through the milkweed at the edge of the yard. They went around the cabin to the old workshop where Grandpa kept the canoes, and they pulled out the green one — Maren called it *the pickle* — and dragged it down to the water without asking for permission because they didn't have to ask for permission about the canoes, which was one of the best things about the cabin.

They paddled out to the little island in the middle of the bay, the one with the one crooked pine on it. They didn't land; the island was private property, technically, owned by a man in Chicago who came up twice a summer. They just circled it, as they always did, like it was a planet they were orbiting.

"So," Maren said, dipping her paddle. "Your mom's still in India."

"Yeah."

"How's your grandpa?"

"Which one?"

"The Indian one."

"Not good. Mom says maybe a few weeks."

Maren paddled for a while. "That's rough, man."

"Yeah."

"Are you sad?"

"I didn't know him that well. I met him three times. I'm sad for Mom. Mostly."

Maren nodded. Maren was the kind of person who could nod without making the nod into a thing. She just nodded, and then she paddled, and the nod did its job.

Arjun watched a dragonfly zoom over the water. Big one. Blue. It hovered and then shot away like a tiny helicopter.

"Maren."

"Mm."

"Did your dad tell you about the cabin?"

"About Grandpa selling it?"

"Yeah."

"He told me on the drive down."

"And?"

"And I think it sucks."

"Yeah."

"But I also get it."

Arjun stopped paddling. The canoe drifted. "What do you mean you get it?"

"I mean he's seventy-eight, Arjun. You know what my dad says? He says Grandpa hasn't been okay since Nana died, not really, and this cabin is hard for him. It's a lot of work. And it's full of her, you know? Full of all those paintings and her stuff. And the stairs are bad for his knees. And the taxes are eating him alive because the lake's all fancy now."

"So?"

"So maybe it's time."

"It's not *time.*"

"Arjun —"

"It's not time, Maren. It's our cabin. It's our *place.* Without it we don't — we don't have anywhere that's us. Your mom lives in Minneapolis. We live in St. Paul. Grandpa lives in Green Bay. The only place all of us are *together* is here. Without here we're just — scattered."

Maren looked at him for a long moment. The sun was on her freckled face and there was water on her cheek from the paddle drip, and she looked older than twelve for a second.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I hear you. I'm not saying it doesn't suck. I'm saying Grandpa isn't doing it to be mean. He's doing it because he has to."

"I didn't say he was being mean."

"You kind of did."

"I did not."

"You kind of did, Arj."

Arjun dug his paddle in hard and the canoe swung. "Can we not talk about it?"

"Sure."

"I just don't want to talk about it."

"Okay."

They paddled back toward the cabin in silence. Arjun tried to keep his anger alive, but the sun was so warm and the water was so blue and a family of mergansers was crossing the bay in a neat little line, and by the time they reached the dock the anger had shrunk down to a small, hot pebble in his chest. He put it away for later. He was not done with it. He just wasn't using it at the moment.

* * *

They had lunch on the porch — ham sandwiches and curds and the yellow tomatoes and cold milk. Uncle Dave told a story about a raccoon that got into the barn and ate an entire pie and was found asleep in a feed bag at dawn. Grandpa laughed until he had to take his glasses off and wipe them. Maren laughed too, the deep belly laugh she had, which always made Arjun laugh even when he was in the middle of being angry with her.

Then Uncle Dave had to go, because he had cows to get back to, and he kissed Maren on top of her head and shook Arjun's hand again and hugged Grandpa for a long time, and then his one-blue-door truck rattled back up the gravel drive and was gone.

The afternoon was theirs.

Grandpa had work to do in the workshop — he was sorting, Arjun realized now, sorting things to keep and things to give away, though he didn't call it that. He called it *tidying.* Arjun didn't want to think about what the tidying was for.

Maren rolled up her jeans to the knee and Arjun put on his old water sandals and they went wading out along the shore of the bay, poking at things with sticks. The water was cool on their calves. Minnows flickered in patches where the sun hit the sand. A leopard frog plopped away from Maren's foot and she shrieked and then laughed at herself for shrieking.

"Do you still keep a journal?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"What do you write about?"

"Stuff."

"Stuff."

"Birds, sometimes. Things Grandpa says. I drew a chickadee yesterday."

"Can I see?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a journal, Maren. If I wanted everyone to read it I'd write it on the porch wall."

Maren stuck her tongue out at him. Then she said, seriously, "I think it's cool. That you write stuff. I don't do anything like that. I just ride bikes and yell at chickens."

"You don't yell at chickens."

"I yell at them all the time. They're stupid. They run the wrong way."

"Chickens aren't stupid. They just have different priorities."

"Oh my god, Arjun, that is the most Arjun thing you have ever said in your life."

They waded around the curve of the bay. The shore changed; the reeds got thicker. There was a little inlet here, a place where the lake fingered into a marshy patch of cattails and rushes, and nothing much lived in it except frogs and the occasional painted turtle. The water here was shallower and warmer. Dragonflies stitched the air in patterns.

"Watch," Maren said, and she scooped a minnow up in her cupped hands. It flashed silver through her fingers and was gone.

Arjun was about to scoop one too when he saw it.

Something gray, in the reeds.

Something tall.

Something standing very still.

"Maren," he whispered.

"Dude, I almost had one —"

"Maren. Look."

She looked.

The heron was about fifteen feet from them, half hidden by the reeds, its long S-curved neck lowered so its body was almost parallel to the water. It was not hunting. It was just standing. Its yellow eye was fixed on them, and there was something in the fix of that eye that was not right.

"That's a great blue," Maren breathed.

"I know."

"It's not flying away."

"I know."

They were both absolutely still. Arjun's foot was halfway lifted out of the water and he was afraid to put it down in case the splash scared the heron. But the heron wasn't reacting the way herons reacted. A heron, if you got this close, should have already lifted off with that *squawwwk* they made, that big awkward pterodactyl sound. This one wasn't lifting off.

This one couldn't.

Arjun saw it then. The thing around its leg.

"Maren," he whispered, and he felt his heart drop like a stone down a well. "Look at its leg."

She looked.

"Oh," she said. "Oh no."

The fishing line was wrapped around the heron's right leg just above the foot. A loop of monofilament, ugly clear plastic thread, cinched tight and then tangled in a snarl. From the snarl dangled a broken length of line and, on the end of the line, a bright red-and-white bobber. The kind a kid would use off a dock. The kind a kid would lose in a tree and forget about, and the line would hang down, and a heron, hunting, would walk into it.

But that wasn't the worst part.

The worst part was the hook.

The hook was buried in the heron's leg. Not the foot — the leg itself, in the soft grayish skin above the knee joint. The flesh around the hook was swollen. A dark patch of blood had dried into the feathers. The heron was holding that leg slightly off the water, its weight on the good one, and there was a tremble in the good leg that Arjun could see from fifteen feet away.

The heron was not hunting because the heron could not hunt.

The heron was starving.

"Arjun." Maren's voice was very low. "We have to tell Grandpa."

"Yeah."

"Go. I'll stay and watch. I'll see where it goes if it goes."

"Okay."

Arjun turned, as slowly as he could manage, and started wading back the way they had come. Each step took a year. He didn't want to splash. He didn't want to startle the bird. When he was around the first bend of the bay he started to run, and the water was heavy around his legs but he pushed through and then he was up on the grass and he was running toward the cabin and his heart was hammering and there was a hot sick feeling in his throat and he was yelling before he even reached the porch.

"Grandpa! *Grandpa!*"

Grandpa came out of the workshop with a rag in his hand and a look of wide alarm on his face.

"What is it, lad? What's wrong?"

"A heron. A great blue. In the bay. It has a fishing line on it. There's a hook in its leg. It can't fly."

Grandpa dropped the rag.

"Take me," he said.

* * *

They walked this time, not ran. Grandpa set the pace. He said you didn't run at a hurt animal, you moved slow and you moved sure. He took his old leather hat off the peg and put it on his head. He brought a pair of binoculars.

When they reached the curve of the bay, Maren was crouched in the reeds a little farther back than Arjun had left her. She saw them and put her finger to her lips and pointed.

The heron was still there.

Grandpa put the binoculars to his eyes. He looked for a long time. He lowered them and handed them to Arjun, and Arjun looked.

Up close, the heron was terrible and beautiful. Terrible because Arjun could see now how thin it was — the breastbone sharp through the feathers, the neck bones too pronounced. Beautiful because it was a great blue heron and great blue herons were beautiful whether they were healthy or dying. Its feathers were soft gray and slate-blue, its crown capped with a dark crest, its eye like a small yellow planet with a black seed in the middle. The eye looked at them. The eye understood nothing and everything.

"Hook's deep," Grandpa said quietly. "Been in a while. A week, maybe."

"Can we help it?" Maren whispered.

Grandpa rubbed his jaw. "Not us alone. We'll need Marcus."

"Who's Marcus?"

"Wildlife rehabber. Fellow over in Birchwood. He and I have a passing acquaintance. He'll know what to do. We'll call him from the cabin."

"Can we leave it?" Arjun's voice was shaking. "It won't die while we're gone, will it?"

Grandpa looked at the heron a long time.

"It's been holding on a while already, lad. It'll hold on another hour. Come away now. Slowly."

They walked back, slowly, and when they reached the bend Arjun couldn't help turning and looking back one more time. The heron hadn't moved. It stood in the reeds like a gray ghost of itself, the red-and-white bobber hanging uselessly from its leg.

*Hold on,* Arjun thought, with all his might. *Hold on, hold on, hold on.*

* * *

Grandpa made the phone call. The cabin had an old rotary phone in the kitchen, the kind you had to dial with your finger, and Grandpa stood dialing it with the receiver pinned between his shoulder and his ear while he flipped through a small address book he kept in the drawer under the phone. Arjun and Maren stood in the doorway and listened.

"Marcus. Seamus O'Connor. Up at the lake, aye. We've a situation."

Grandpa explained. He spoke the way he always spoke on the phone, a little louder than he needed to, a little more formal. *Great blue. Adult. Line on the leg, hook embedded. Starving, aye. Half a mile from the house. Shallows. Reeds.*

He nodded. He said *aye* a lot. He said *I understand.* He said *how long from Birchwood?* and then *we'll be ready.*

He hung up.

"He's coming," Grandpa said. "Two hours. He'll bring the nets and the kit. We're to keep an eye on the bird. We're not to approach it until he's here. You two — listen. This is important. That bird is scared. That bird is weak but it is a wild thing and a wild thing that's scared is dangerous. A great blue has a neck like a spring and a beak like a spear. Marcus has had friends who got stitches across the face from a heron. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Arjun said.

"Yes," Maren said.

"We go to the bend. We watch from there. We don't go closer. Aye?"

"Aye."

* * *

The two hours were the longest two hours of Arjun's life so far.

They sat on the grassy slope at the bend of the bay. Grandpa brought a thermos of tea and three enamel mugs and a packet of biscuits. Maren ate three biscuits. Arjun couldn't eat. Every few minutes he'd raise the binoculars and check the heron. It didn't move. It stood. Once it tried to take a step and tipped sideways, and Arjun thought, wildly, *this is it, it's going to fall,* but it caught itself and went still again.

"Grandpa," Arjun said at one point. "How did it happen? How did a hook get *there?*"

Grandpa sighed. He was sitting cross-legged on the grass, which was something Arjun wouldn't have thought his knees could still do.

"Someone lost a line," he said. "Perhaps the bobber got tangled in a bush, and the line hung down, and the bird walked through it. Or perhaps the hook caught on a fish the heron took, and the fish came off and the hook stayed. Happens more than you'd think. It's not usually a malicious thing. It's a thoughtless thing."

"That's almost worse."

"Aye. It is."

Maren was pulling up clover and braiding it without looking at what her hands were doing. "People should pick up after themselves."

"People should, indeed."

"But they don't."

"Mostly they don't."

"So the heron gets hooks in its leg."

"Mostly, aye."

Arjun thought about this. He thought about all the fishing boats he'd seen on the lake over the years. He thought about all the hooks and lines and bobbers they carried. He thought about how many of those must be on the bottom of the lake right now, or snagged in branches, or floating in reeds. It suddenly seemed as if the whole lake was a minefield for birds, a web of hidden threats, and he felt a little sick.

The afternoon crept along. Clouds built up over the far shore, great white mountains of them, and then drifted east. A bald eagle circled the bay once, high up, and Arjun watched it through the binoculars and prayed it would not come down. (The eagle did not come down. It went on its way.) A red squirrel scolded them from a pine tree for fifteen minutes without taking a breath, or so it seemed.

Finally, at five minutes past three by Grandpa's watch, they heard the sound of tires on gravel up at the cabin.

"That'll be Marcus," Grandpa said.

* * *

Marcus was not what Arjun had expected. He had imagined somebody old — another version of Grandpa, maybe, bearded and wrinkled, with a fishing vest. Marcus was in his thirties, maybe. He had a shaved head and a beard so red it was almost orange, and he was wearing heavy canvas pants and tall rubber boots and a t-shirt that said BIRCHWOOD WILDLIFE RESCUE in faded green letters. He drove a beat-up white truck with a camper shell on the back, and when he opened the back he pulled out a long soft net, a towel, a duffel bag of tools, and a hard plastic crate the size of a small dog carrier.

He shook Arjun's hand like Arjun was a grown man.

"You're the boy who spotted the bird?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good work. Bird thanks you. Where's the bird?"

Arjun and Maren led the way. Grandpa came behind them, a little slower on the uneven ground. Marcus carried his gear like he'd carried it a thousand times. He walked the way Grandpa had told them to walk — slow and sure, like nothing was urgent, even though everything was.

At the bend, he stopped. He took out a small pair of binoculars and studied the heron.

"Adult male," he said quietly. "Maybe five years old. Been hooked a good while. You see how he's holding the leg up? That's bad. Good news is he's still standing. Heron that's lying down is a heron that's done."

Arjun's chest loosened a fraction.

"Here's what we're going to do," Marcus said. "I'll go around behind, through the reeds. You three stay here. When I signal, I'm going to come at him from the water side. He's going to try to move, and because he can't fly well, he'll step toward you. That's when I drop the net. Okay? Nobody moves fast. Nobody yells. Nobody runs. If it doesn't work the first time, we wait and try again. Birds like this, you only get a couple of chances before you lose them to exhaustion. So we do it right."

"Okay," said Arjun. Maren nodded.

"When I've got him," Marcus went on, "I'm going to hold his beak first. That's the most important thing. A heron's beak is a weapon. Don't come near him until I've got the beak. When the beak is secure, one of you — just one of you, the one with the steadiest hands — I'll ask to help hold him while I cut the line. Which one of you is steadier?"

Arjun and Maren looked at each other.

"Him," Maren said.

"Her," Arjun said at the same time.

"Okay," said Marcus. "Both of you then, in different jobs. Maren — you hold the crate ready when I say. Arjun — you'll help me brace the body. Seamus, you keep the dog-pole handy in case he gets loose."

"Aye."

"Any questions?"

None of them had any questions.

"All right," Marcus said. "Breathe."

They breathed.

And then Marcus disappeared into the reeds.

* * *

What happened next took about ninety seconds and felt like ninety years.

Marcus moved around the far side of the inlet, low and slow, and Arjun could only catch glimpses of his red beard through the cattails. The heron saw him — Arjun could tell by the way its head tilted, the yellow eye tracking the new shape. For a long moment nothing happened.

Then Marcus stepped forward.

The heron lunged.

Not away. *Toward* — it took two staggering, desperate steps on its one good leg and opened its great gray wings, and the wings spread wider than Arjun would have believed, five feet at least, a vast gray cathedral of feathers. It tried to flap. Tried to lift. Couldn't. The bad leg gave. It came down half sideways in the shallows, and Marcus was on it, the long net sweeping in a smooth arc, and then the heron was in the net, thrashing.

Arjun saw the beak. The beak came through the net like a yellow knife, stabbing at air, and Marcus caught it in one gloved hand just behind the tip, not squeezing hard enough to hurt, but firm, pinning. The net bunched. The wings beat once, twice. Then the heron went still. Not calm. Conserving.

"Arjun," Marcus said, in a voice that was calm the way a doctor's voice is calm. "Come. Slow. Kneel beside me. Put your hands on the body through the net. Gently. We're giving him pressure so he feels held but not crushed. Like swaddling a baby."

Arjun walked into the shallows. The water was cold around his ankles and he barely felt it. He knelt down. Through the mesh of the net he could feel the heron's body — hot, light, hollow, the feathers softer than he had expected, the heart inside going so fast it was almost one long hum.

"Steady," said Marcus. "Good. Maren, crate."

Maren brought the crate. She set it down with both hands.

"Seamus, the clippers and the forceps."

Grandpa handed them over.

Marcus worked the net aside, carefully, exposing the hooked leg. The leg was worse up close. The flesh around the hook was purple-black. The line had cut a deep groove, and the groove was infected, little yellow beads of pus, the feathers matted. Arjun's stomach turned.

Marcus was not bothered. Marcus was efficient. He snipped the line in two places and pulled the tangle free, working it around and away, and dropped the wad of monofilament into a bag at his hip. Then he looked at the hook.

"Barb's in deep. I can't back it out. I'll have to push it through."

"Push it *through?*" Maren said.

"Cleaner than backing it out. Less damage. It's going to look bad. It isn't."

Marcus took a small tool like pliers and gripped the shank of the hook. The heron's eye was still fixed on nothing, but Arjun saw the yellow iris contract — the bird was awake, aware, enduring.

"I'm sorry, fella," Marcus said, and he pushed.

The point of the hook came out through the other side of the leg. Arjun turned his face away for one second and then made himself look back. Marcus snipped the barb off with wire cutters — *click* — and then slid the rest of the hook backward, the way it had come in, and dropped both pieces into the bag.

The leg was free.

"Now we clean it."

Marcus cleaned the wound. He bathed it in a brownish liquid that smelled sharp. He wrapped a clean white bandage around the leg, quick and neat. He checked the bandage with two fingers — not too tight, not too loose. The heron's eye had softened a little now, or maybe that was only Arjun's imagination.

"In the crate," Marcus said. "Everyone back."

Together they lifted the heron, still loosely in the net, into the crate. Marcus slipped the net out. He closed the crate door. The heron inside made no sound. They stood up. Arjun's knees were shaking.

Marcus let out a long breath.

"Good bird," he said quietly, through the crate door. "Good bird. You did good."

Then he looked at Arjun and Maren and Grandpa.

"Now," he said. "We have a problem."

"A problem?" Arjun said. His voice came out thinner than he meant it to.

Marcus ran a hand over his shaved head. His eyes were kind but tired.

"Our rescue's at capacity. We've got a barred owl with a wing shatter, a fox kit with mange, two Canada geese I can't even get into now. We can't take another bird. Especially not a bird this size, which needs its own enclosure. I can drive him three hours south to the Raptor Center, but —" He checked his watch. "By the time I got him there it'd be evening, he'd be handled by strangers, and he's already stressed to a whisker. Honestly, his best chance is not moving him at all."

"So what do we do?" Maren asked.

Marcus looked at Grandpa. Grandpa looked back. It was one of those grown-up looks, the kind that had a whole conversation inside it.

"You're asking me to keep him here," Grandpa said.

"I'm asking if you *could* keep him here. Under my remote supervision. I'd come twice a week. You'd need to do the daily care. It's a lot."

"How much is a lot?"

"Morning feed. Evening feed. Bandage change every two days. Monitor for infection — which, full disclosure, he's already showing signs of. Quiet enclosure, dark, dry. Probably two to three weeks before he's ready for release. You have the space. The old workshop, maybe, if you can tarp off a section."

Grandpa rubbed his chin. He looked at Arjun. He looked at Maren.

"The lad's here for ten weeks," he said.

"Ten weeks is more than enough."

"And we have fish in the lake."

"You have fish in the lake, aye. Perch, bluegill — anything you can catch small and stun. A heron's diet's not complicated. The hard part's his temperament. He has to learn that you mean food, not harm. Otherwise you'll lose him to stress."

Grandpa nodded slowly. He turned to Arjun and Maren.

"Well?" he said. "This is yours as much as mine. What do we say?"

Arjun didn't even have to think about it.

"Yes."

"Yes," said Maren.

"Aye, then," said Grandpa. "We'll do it."

Marcus grinned. It was the first grin any of them had seen from him, and it made his whole red beard brighter.

"You three," he said, "are exactly the people who ought to have found this bird."

* * *

The rest of that afternoon was a blur of carrying and measuring and hammering and tarp-spreading. Marcus helped them set up a corner of Grandpa's old workshop as a heron enclosure. They pulled an old tarp down from a rafter and rigged it across one end, making a soft gray wall. They laid clean straw on the floor. They brought in a big galvanized tub, set it low, filled it with three inches of cool lake water — a place for the heron to stand, or sit, as he chose. They set up a perch too, a smooth branch wedged between two sawhorses, because a heron likes to be up off the ground when he can.

Marcus demonstrated the bandage change. He demonstrated how to hold a heron — wings folded in, beak controlled, one hand on the body, one hand above, always the beak first. He demonstrated how to feed. You dropped a small dead fish in front of the bird and you walked away. You did not try to hand-feed. A hand-feeder made a hand-imprinter, and a hand-imprinted heron could not be released, and a heron that could not be released was a heron that lived its life in a cage, which was no life at all.

"Remember," Marcus said, looking hard at Arjun and Maren. "He is not your pet. He is a wild bird. Your job is to keep him alive and make him hate humans enough to stay away from them."

"Hate us?" Maren said.

"Not *hate.* Ignore. Fear, a little. Respect. A heron that thinks humans are fine is a heron who walks into fishing lines. Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You give him the minimum care. You talk less around him, not more. No names — well, you can name him, all you want, but not to his face. I mean it. This isn't a movie. This is a wild life you're borrowing."

"Understood," Arjun said.

Marcus nodded. He looked at the crate — the heron inside was breathing evenly now, Arjun could see the ripple along the pale feathers — and he squatted down and spoke to the bird, quiet and matter-of-fact.

"You're going to stay with these good people a bit. They're going to fix you up. Don't give them trouble. Also, don't give them love. That's an order."

He stood and dusted off his hands.

"Let's get him in."

They moved the crate into the workshop corner. Marcus opened the door. Nobody spoke. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the heron — slowly, stiffly, with the terrible dignity of something broken trying not to show it — stepped out. One foot. The bandaged leg lifted, hopped. One foot. The other. He stood in the straw. He turned his long neck. He took in the tarp, the tub, the perch, the three humans and the old man standing very still by the door. His yellow eye rested on each of them in turn.

Then he lowered himself, very carefully, onto the straw, folded his legs under him, and closed his eyes.

Marcus breathed out. "Good."

"Good?" Arjun whispered.

"Good. He's resting. That means he feels safe enough to rest, which is better than I hoped. He's exhausted. Let him sleep. Don't come back in for an hour. Then try a fish. Small. Don't stare at him while he eats."

They backed out. Marcus closed the workshop door gently, leaving a gap for air. The four of them stood in the yard in the long golden light of late afternoon, and Arjun realized his legs were trembling.

* * *

Marcus left at sunset, with a phone number written on three different pieces of paper, one for each of them. "Text me every morning with how he's doing. If anything changes — infection worsens, he stops eating after day three, he gets lethargic in a new way — you call. You don't wait. You call."

"Aye," said Grandpa.

"I'll be back Wednesday with fresh bandage supplies and another dose of antibiotic. He got one in the wound today. He'll need another in three days."

"Thank you," Arjun said.

"Thank *him,*" Marcus said, jerking his head toward the workshop. "Birds like this, they find the people they need. It's how it works. Take care, all of you."

His truck rattled away.

Grandpa, Arjun, and Maren stood in the yard a long time. The sky was the color of a ripe peach. The lake was very still. Somewhere a loon was starting up its evening song.

"Well," Grandpa said at last. "We've a patient."

"We've a patient," Maren said.

"We better go catch a fish," Arjun said.

Grandpa laughed — a short, surprised laugh.

"That we better, lad. That we better."

* * *

They caught three fish before dark. Grandpa with his old cane rod, Arjun and Maren with hand-lines from the dock, using worms from the coffee-can bait stash. The fish were small — two bluegills and a perch, none of them longer than Arjun's hand. Grandpa stunned each one with a sharp tap against the dock post, quick and clean, the way Marcus had shown them.

"It's a kindness," Grandpa said to Arjun, seeing his face. "Quick and clean is kind. You understand?"

"Yeah." Arjun swallowed. "I know."

They put the three fish in a bucket and carried it up to the workshop. Grandpa opened the door quietly. Arjun slipped inside. He set the fish down, one at a time, on the straw about six feet from where the heron lay. Then he stepped back, walked out, closed the door.

They peeked in again at full dark, the workshop lit only by the cool blue of dusk through the cracks. The three fish were gone. The heron was standing now, head tucked down into his shoulders, the way herons stood when they slept.

"He ate," Arjun whispered.

"He ate," Maren whispered.

"Aye," Grandpa said. "Now he rests."

They closed the door and walked back to the cabin through the soft summer dark, and Arjun felt, for the first time in two days, something that was not exactly happiness but was a cousin of it.

* * *

*Today we did not lose a thing.* *We kept a heron alive for one day.* *Tomorrow we will try to keep him alive for one more.* *That is what we do now. That is the work.*

He drew the heron on the next page. He got the eye wrong twice and right the third time. The yellow around the black seed. The look that was a look and also not a look. An eye that had seen the whole inland sea and everything that lived in it and did not flinch.

Outside his window, the loons were talking across the bay to each other. One long note, then an answer. One long note, then an answer.

For eight days, Arjun woke up before the sun.

He had never been an early riser. At home, his mother sometimes had to knock on his door three times to get him out of bed. But now, in the little back room at the cabin, he would open his eyes in the blue hour and lie for just a moment listening to the loons, and then he would slip out of his quilt and pull on his shorts and a t-shirt and his water sandals, and he would go.

He would pad through the sleeping cabin, past Grandpa's bedroom door (Grandpa snored, a slow soft snore like a dog's sigh), and out through the screen door, easing it shut so it wouldn't bang. The grass was wet. The lake smelled different at dawn than it did any other hour — cooler, greener, like water remembering it had been rain. A bullfrog would chunk in the reeds.

He would go to the dock. He would take a hand-line and the bait can. He would fish for a small half-hour, sometimes less, until he had three or four minnows or a fat bluegill or two. Then he would take his catch up to the workshop.

Arjun would push the workshop door open six inches. He would step inside, keep his eyes on the floor, and walk to the feeding spot in the straw. He would set the fish down. He would not look at the heron. He would turn and leave.

And then, once the door was closed, he would walk around to the tiny knothole on the side of the workshop — the one he had discovered on the second day — and he would put his eye to it and watch.

The heron would not move at first. He would stand on the straw, or on the perch, with his head tucked into his shoulders, the yellow eye fixed at some middle distance, seeing and not seeing. The bandage would be a patch of white against the gray. For long minutes, nothing. The heron was an old priest saying his interior prayers.

Then, when he was certain Arjun was gone, he would unfold.

The neck would lengthen. The body would rise on its legs, slow, slow, a bird made of patience. He would walk to the fish. His great step was wobbly on the bandaged leg, but each day slightly less wobbly. He would cock his head. He would strike — that lightning-quick forward thrust, the beak stabbing, lifting, working the fish around so the head pointed down his throat — and *gulp,* the fish vanishing, a small round bulge traveling down the long white-and-gray throat and disappearing. Then another fish. Then, sometimes, a pause. Then the third.

When he was done, he would return to the straw or the perch, fold himself, close his eye, and be still.

And Arjun, his eye to the knothole, would feel something in his chest that was not like any feeling he knew.

*He's eating. He's eating. He's going to live.*

* * *

They named him on the second day.

It was Maren's doing, as Arjun knew it would be.

"Augustus," she said at breakfast, pouring syrup on a stack of Grandpa's pancakes so thick the pancakes were no longer visible. "He looks like an Augustus."

"Who's Augustus?" Arjun said.

"A Roman emperor."

"You know a Roman emperor?"

"I did a report. Fifth grade. He had a nose like a mountain."

"The heron's nose is a beak, Maren."

"It's a beak like a mountain."

"A beak like a mountain is not a phrase."

"Augustus II of the Cattails," Maren announced grandly, pouring more syrup. "Emperor of the Reeds, Scourge of the Minnow, He Who Walks on One Good Leg."

Grandpa, passing behind her with the coffee pot, cleared his throat.

"Marcus said no names," he said.

"Not to his face," said Maren. "We can name him among ourselves. He's our project, isn't he? People name their projects."

"Projects," said Grandpa.

"Spiritual projects, Grandpa. Emotional projects. A creature we are bonded with — "

"Maren."

Grandpa gave in the way Grandpa always gave in when Maren started declaiming — with a half-smile and a shake of his head. "Augustus, then."

And Augustus he became.

* * *

After the morning feed Arjun would go back to the cabin and eat his own breakfast. Grandpa made oatmeal most mornings, the proper Irish kind, slow-cooked with steel-cut oats and a little salt. You could doctor it however you liked — brown sugar, cream, honey, blueberries from the bush by the outhouse (they had no outhouse anymore, but the bush was still called the outhouse blueberry bush, because that was where it had been when Grandpa was a boy visiting his own uncle back in the 1950s, and the name had stuck and jumped generations). Arjun liked his with brown sugar and cream and blueberries all at once.

"You'll founder," Grandpa would say.

"I'm eleven, Grandpa."

"Eleven and a growing boy. Founder yourself, then."

Maren came down later, usually an hour after Arjun, her hair sleep-tangled and her face still creased from the pillow. She wore the same shorts three days running and when Arjun pointed this out she pointed out that he'd worn the same t-shirt four days running and he had no moral standing. Then she'd eat four bowls of oatmeal.

The wound.

The wound was the thing.

On day one it was angry purple with yellow pus. On day two, after the second dose of antibiotic Marcus administered on Wednesday, it was still purple but less shiny. On day four Arjun noticed, with a gasp he couldn't hide, that the pus was gone and the skin around the hole was just pink. By day six there was a faint scab forming. By day eight the scab had begun to flake at the edges, and the feathers were growing back, and there was a clean red-pink line where the groove had been, as neat as a pencil line.

"He's healing," Marcus said, through the phone, on day eight. "He's healing well. I'll come Thursday. We may not need to bandage much longer."

Arjun rewound the bandage. His hands didn't shake at all that day.

* * *

Afternoons, he and Maren had the lake.

They went swimming off the dock every day after lunch. They rowed the pickle-green canoe to the rocky shore on the north side of the bay and poked around the tidepools, which weren't really tidepools because it was a lake, but they were shallow warm pools in the rocks where polliwogs grew and crayfish skittered backward under stones. Maren caught a crayfish and named it Augustus the Second and let it go. She named every animal she caught Augustus the Second. By Thursday there were at least nine Augustus the Seconds out there in the lake.

They played the old games. They played Loon Pirate. They played I Know What Grandpa's Yelling About (a game in which they eavesdropped on Grandpa muttering to himself in the workshop and made up reasons for it — *he's mad at the wrench, the wrench insulted his wife, there will be a duel at dawn*). They played Name That Bird, which was harder because Arjun knew more birds than Maren did, so Maren changed the rules to Name That Bird Or Make Up A Bird Name, and then Arjun was at a disadvantage, because he would not make up bird names.

"Greater Yellow-Nosed Swoopington," said Maren, pointing at a swallow.

"That isn't a bird."

"It's a bird in *my mind.*"

"That's not what a bird is."

"Arjun. Do you know what an imagination is?"

"Yes."

"Then Greater Yellow-Nosed Swoopington."

On the fourth night, Maren said, "I could live here."

"Me too," Arjun said.

"I mean actually live. Forever. I'd keep chickens. I'd have goats. I'd grow up to be a woman of the lake and write terrifying letters to the newspaper."

"You'd need to go to school."

"I'd school myself. I'd do an excellent job."

"Mm."

"Why don't we live here, Arjun?"

"Because the cabin's getting sold."

It just fell out. He hadn't meant to say it, not like that, not with that sting in his voice. Maren winced. Grandpa, at the other end of the porch, didn't lift his head from his paperback, but Arjun could see him pause reading.

"Sorry," Arjun said.

"No," said Maren. "It's okay."

"I don't mean —"

"I know. I get it. It sucks."

Arjun looked down at his bare feet on the porch boards. A mosquito landed on his knee and he slapped it without aim.

"I keep forgetting," Arjun said. "I keep forgetting this is the last time. And then I remember, and it's like a punch."

Maren nodded slowly.

"When Dad sold my grandma's farm — my mom's mom, I mean, the one in Iowa — it was like that. I was six. I remember standing in her kitchen, and they were taking everything out, and I didn't know a house could be hollowed. And then we drove away and I never saw it again. That was eight years ago."

"Do you think about it still?"

"Sometimes. Not often. But sometimes. When I smell a certain kind of Bisquick I think about it."

Arjun laughed, despite himself. "Bisquick?"

"Her pancakes, man. Her pancakes were *a thing.*"

From his armchair, Grandpa chuckled. "Nora Lindgren's pancakes. Aye. Legend across four counties."

"*See,*" said Maren.

Arjun watched the fireflies.

"I don't want to forget anything," he said quietly. "That's what scares me. I want to remember every board. I want to remember the way the kitchen sounds when Grandpa's making oatmeal. I want to remember the loons. Not — not just that I heard them, but *how* they sounded. The exact how."

Grandpa put down his book. His reading glasses were on the end of his nose, and he looked at Arjun over the tops of them.

"Lad."

"Yeah?"

"That's why the good Lord gave you a journal."

"I know."

"Write the how. Write the how as hard as you can. A thing written well will come back to you when you read it, even if you've forgotten every other thing around it. That's the magic of the written word. Your Nana knew this. She wrote a journal every summer. Every single summer of our marriage. Fifty-four of them."

Arjun lifted his head. "Fifty-four journals?"

"Aye. Well. Not quite. Fifty-two, she finished. She was partway through the fifty-third the summer she went."

"Where are they?"

"In the workshop. In the cabinet with the glass door, bottom shelf. Under her paintings."

Arjun looked at Grandpa. Grandpa looked back, steady.

"I've been meaning to show you," Grandpa said. "Maybe tomorrow. Maybe you can go in and look."

"Okay."

"Aye."

A firefly landed on Maren's arm and stayed there, glowing on and off, for a long time before it flew away.

* * *

That night Arjun wrote in his journal for a long time. He wrote about Augustus. He wrote about Maren and how she was sometimes irritating but mostly funny. He wrote about Grandpa drinking his tea very slowly, always, as if each sip were important. He wrote about the smell of the kitchen. He wrote about a loon he had watched that afternoon — how it had dived and stayed down for forty-two seconds (he had counted) and come up in a totally different part of the bay, as if it had traveled under the water like a thought. He tried to write how the loon had called. He wrote *mooo-uhhhh-eeee,* which was wrong, and *hweeeoooohheee,* which was worse, and finally he wrote *it sounds like a flute that is also a memory,* and he looked at that line for a while and decided it was closer.

Then he wrote about Nana's journals. Fifty-two, bound, on a shelf he had walked past a hundred times.

He closed the book.

Outside, far out on the lake, a loon sang and a loon answered.

The workshop had always been Grandpa's place.

Arjun had not gone into Nana's corner of the workshop since she died. Not really. He had walked past it with his eyes averted. He had gone in to help Grandpa find a wrench and had looked at the floor. Once or twice he had glanced up and seen the paintings and felt the sharp small stab of her not being there, and he had looked away.

On the morning of the eighth day of Augustus, after the feeding, he went in on purpose.

He told Grandpa he was going to look at Nana's journals. Grandpa said *aye,* and didn't say anything else. Maren was still asleep.

The workshop was cool in the morning. A little light came in through the big south window, filtered green by the lilac that had overgrown outside the glass. The air smelled of sawdust and linseed oil and, very faintly, of the thin sharp scent that Arjun suddenly realized was watercolor paint, which had a smell of its own, like wet paper and something metallic.

He walked slowly past Grandpa's bench. At the end of the building, where the tarped enclosure now stood, Augustus was invisible behind his gray tarp wall. Arjun could hear him shift in the straw — a small rustle, no more — and he smiled a little.

Nana's corner was as she had left it.

She had been working on it the week she had the stroke.

Arjun stood in front of the easel a long time.

He had been seven when she died. He remembered her — clearly, not in the soft-focus way children were supposed to remember things. He remembered her smell (a kind of hand lotion she always used, a clean lavender with something underneath it that was just *her*). He remembered her laugh (quick and bright, a real laugh, not a grown-up chuckle). He remembered the way she said his name. *Ar-jun.* Not Arj, not sweetheart, not buddy. *Arjun.* Proper and warm at the same time. The way she had said names meant something to her.

He remembered, most of all, the summer he was six.

The summer she had taught him birds.

They had walked every morning, up the dirt road and back, and she had told him the name of every bird they heard or saw. *That's a chickadee. Hear her? Chick-a-dee-dee-dee. That's a chipping sparrow. Listen, now, that's a high thin trill. That's a kingbird, that black-and-white fellow with the white band on his tail.* She had a pair of binoculars and she had let him wear them. They had been too big for his face, and she had adjusted the strap for him, and the binoculars had knocked his chest when he walked.

He remembered the exact weight of those binoculars. Which was absurd, because what could a seven-year-old remember clearly enough to say *the exact weight?* But he remembered.

He reached out and touched the handle of one of her brushes.

He did not know what he had expected. He thought maybe the touch would hurt. He thought he would feel her absence like a cold. Instead the brush was just a brush, cool wood with a dried paint ferrule, and the world went on and he was still standing in the workshop.

He knelt down in front of the cabinet.

It was a tall cabinet with a glass door, set against the back wall, and he had seen it a hundred times and never opened it. He opened it now. Inside were Nana's paintings — the finished ones she had not given away — stacked carefully in an upright file. And on the bottom shelf, just as Grandpa had said, were her journals.

Fifty-two of them.

Arjun took out *2023.*

He held it in his hand a long time. He did not open it. He looked at the letters she had written on the spine, the small careful strokes of the *3.* She had always drawn her threes with a little serif at the top, a tiny flag.

Behind him, the workshop door creaked.

"You find them?" Grandpa said.

Arjun didn't turn around. He couldn't yet. He nodded.

Grandpa came over and stood beside him. He looked down at the journal in Arjun's hand. After a moment he lowered himself onto an overturned crate, which brought him close to Arjun's height without having to bend his bad knees.

"Have you opened it?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

"I don't know."

"Aye."

They sat with that for a while. The light through the lilac-draped window was very green.

"She wanted you to have them, you know," Grandpa said finally.

"The journals?"

"The journals, aye. She told me the fall before she went. She said, *Seamus, when I'm gone — don't bin them. Don't burn them. The boy will want them someday. Not right away. Give him time. But someday.* She meant you, Arjun. She had a feeling about you. She thought you were the one who would look after words."

Arjun's throat was tight. He could not speak.

"It's been four years," Grandpa said. "And I thought, perhaps, this summer."

"I'm only eleven."

"Aye. But you're eleven with a journal of your own, and a heron in the back of the workshop. I think your Nana knew what she was about."

Arjun opened the journal.

*2023. The fifty-third. Began April 5 at the apartment, spring still wet. Seamus painted the back door. A robin has made a nest in the crook over the shed. I have a feeling about this year — cannot say what.*

Arjun read it twice. He turned to the second page.

*April 12. Went to the doctor. He was kind. The results will come in a week. I am trying not to think about it, which is a foolish project.*

Arjun's eyes blurred.

He turned the page.

*April 19. The results are what I had suspected. The doctor used a small word for a very big thing. I am to begin treatment on Monday.*

He kept turning.

*April 23. Seamus has not slept. I tell him he is making himself ill on my behalf. He says he does not know any other way to be and I do not know whether to laugh or weep, so I do both.*

*April 30. Lilacs have opened. They smell of the cabin. I long for the cabin.*

*May 5. A cardinal in the feeder. Seamus has named him Alphonse. Seamus is dealing with this by naming birds, which is perhaps the most Seamus response available.*

Arjun let out a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob.

Grandpa's hand rested on his shoulder.

The hand was rough. The hand was warm. The hand was the hand that had helped him catch minnows for Augustus yesterday and had helped him change bandages and had held a towel over a heron's head, and it was the same hand that had painted the back door in April of 2023 when a robin was making a nest, and it was the same hand that had not slept while Nana was sick.

Arjun kept reading. He read *May* and into *June.* Nana's writing got thinner here — her pen strokes less sure — but her observations stayed sharp. She wrote about the warblers at the feeder. She wrote about the taste of the soup the neighbor had brought her. She wrote about Grandpa humming while he worked and how it pleased her. She wrote about Arjun. *Arjun calls every Sunday. His voice is deeper than it was in the fall. He described to me a yellow warbler he saw in our yard. I could see the bird in his telling. This is a gift.*

Arjun stopped reading. He closed the journal very gently. He held it in both hands.

And then, without warning, he was crying.

He had not cried since the day of her funeral, four years ago, and he had not cried hard even then — the crying had been a small neat trickle, socially acceptable, the crying of a boy who was trying to be brave in front of his uncles. This was different. This was the crying that had been waiting four years for the right place to happen. It came up out of him in a great heaving wave, and he bent over the journal, and his shoulders shook, and his face was in his hands, and he wept.

Grandpa did not say *there there.* Grandpa did not say *it's all right.* Grandpa sat on his overturned crate beside him and put one big old hand on his back, and with the other hand he held his own face — Arjun saw, through the blur, that Grandpa was also crying, silently, the tears running into his white mustache and disappearing.

They cried together. They did not speak. It went on a long while.

"She would be glad you cried, lad. She did not want you carrying that forever."

"I didn't know I was carrying it."

"Aye, well. That's the way of it."

Arjun wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

"Grandpa."

"Mm."

"Can I read them? All of them?"

"All fifty-three?"

"Over — over time. Not today. Over my life."

Grandpa smiled through his own wet eyes.

"Lad. That's the only reason she wrote them."

* * *

Arjun had no idea what that meant. He would spend years thinking about it.

At some point Maren appeared in the doorway, hair wild, still in her sleep-clothes, holding a pop-tart.

"Are we doing this?" she said. "Are we reading sad journals this morning? Because I want to be included if so."

"We're reading sad journals," Arjun said.

"Cool. Move over."

She flopped down on the floor beside them and Arjun read her a funny passage about Nana trying to teach Grandpa how to bake a pie, and by the end of it Maren was laughing and Arjun was laughing and Grandpa was laughing, and none of them noticed right away that the tarp at the back of the workshop was moving slightly.

"Hey," Maren said. "Augustus is watching us."

They looked.

Sure enough, a long gray neck had appeared around the edge of the tarp. A yellow eye, bright with interest or irritation, surveyed them.

"Sorry, Augustus," Arjun whispered.

"Your Majesty," Maren added. "Forgive our noise."

The neck withdrew. The tarp settled.

"He likes us," Maren said.

"He tolerates us," Arjun corrected.

"A heron's tolerance," Grandpa said, "is a thing you buy with eight days of small fish. Come along. Lunch."

They went in to lunch. Arjun carried Nana's journal — the 2023 one — with him, and set it on the shelf in his bedroom beside his own blue one, and left it there.

It was the first day of the summer that he had cried. It was also the first day of the summer that something inside his chest, which had been knotted for a long time and which he had not even known was knotted, felt — not untied, but loosened. A fraction. An inch of rope given back.

And it struck him, lying in bed that night with a pile of mosquito bites on one ankle, that this might also be true of places. That places might not entirely disappear either, if you wrote them down well.

He reached for his journal.

He began to write about the workshop. The exact angle of the lilac light through the south window. The smell of sawdust and linseed oil. The green on Nana's brushes. The way Grandpa's hand had felt on his back.

He wrote until his hand cramped.

When he finally turned out the lamp, the loons were singing, and he did not feel alone.

The next evening, after Augustus had been fed and the supper dishes were done, Grandpa made a pot of tea and brought it out to the porch. He brought three mugs. Arjun's mug, with the chipped handle and the faded blue rim. Maren's mug, the white one with the red chicken on it, because Maren always insisted on the chicken mug. And Grandpa's own mug, the tall heavy one with the shamrock.

"Sit," he said. "Both of you."

They sat. It was a gray evening — low clouds over the lake, the water flat and pewter, a quiet steady drizzle not yet arrived but gathering itself somewhere above the far pines. A chipmunk scolded from under the porch. The loons were silent; they were silent when weather was coming.

Grandpa poured. He doctored each mug. Milk first, then tea from the pot, then a spoonful of sugar. He knew how each of them took it; he had known for years; he never asked.

"Tonight," he said, when he had settled into his chair with his own mug in his lap, "I am going to tell you some stories. If you have any objection, you may voice it now."

"No objection," said Maren.

"Arjun?"

"No objection."

"Aye. Good."

"I was twenty-two years old when I left Ireland."

Arjun settled himself. He had heard parts of this story before, but never from start to end.

"I was the youngest of seven children. My father was a butcher in a small town in County Cork. You know County Cork — I've shown you on the map. It's in the south, where the land rolls and the sea is never far. My father was a good man who worked hard and was bitter about everything and drank too much on Fridays. My mother was a better woman than he deserved. She read poetry. She quoted Yeats at the breakfast table. She did this mostly to irritate my father, who preferred the racing form. It pleased her when he got annoyed.

"There was not much work in our town in those years. My brothers had all left before me — two for England, one for Australia, one for the factories in Dublin. My sisters had married and moved away. I stayed the longest, because my mother was not well, and because I was the youngest, and because I was afraid.

Grandpa sipped.

"I had a cousin in Milwaukee. Tommy. Tommy ran a garage. He had written to my mother to say there was work in America for a lad with hands. I had hands. I crossed on a ship called the Britannic. Six days on the water. I will never forget the smell of that ship. Diesel and cabbage. They fed us cabbage three times a day. I have not eaten cabbage willingly in fifty-six years.

"I arrived in New York in March of 1968 with eighteen dollars in my pocket. I took a bus to Milwaukee. Tommy met me at the station. He was a large loud red-faced man who hugged me so hard he cracked a rib. That was my welcome to America."

Maren laughed. "He cracked your rib?"

"He did. I had it taped for two weeks. I couldn't laugh without weeping, which was inconvenient, because Tommy was a very funny man, and everything he said made me want to laugh. That was my first American pain.

"I worked at Tommy's garage for a year. I fixed engines. I learned how Americans swore, which is a different thing from how Irishmen swear, and takes a little study. I made friends with a young Polish woman who worked at the bakery across the street, but she married a dentist, which was the right choice on her part. I moved north to Green Bay in '69 because there was work at a Ford dealership and the pay was better.

"And in Green Bay, one evening in the autumn of 1969, I went to a church social, because my landlady insisted I must meet Catholic people and not become lonely. And at this social there was a young woman in a green dress, sitting by herself at a table, drinking a glass of punch and looking, quite honestly, as bored as a person could look at a church social.

"That was your grandmother."

He stopped. He took a breath. When he spoke again his voice was softer.

"Her name was Maura Callahan. She was twenty-one. She taught kindergarten at St. Willibrord's. She was sharp as a new knife and funnier than she was pretty, though she was also very pretty. I sat down beside her. I said, You look as though you are suffering. She said, I am, in fact. Please tell me a joke. I told her a joke my brother had told me on the docks the day I left Cork. It was not a clean joke. She laughed so loud the priest came over to see what was the matter.

"We were married in May of 1970. It rained on our wedding day. She said afterwards it was Irish weather — that the country had come with us. We bought a little house in Green Bay. We had one daughter, your Aunt Claire, who is Maren's mother, and we never had another child, which was a sorrow we kept quietly between us.

"We found the cabin in 1978. A man was selling it for very little because his wife had died and he couldn't bear to come up any more. We bought it for less than the price of a new car. Maura painted the kitchen. I rewired the workshop. We came up every summer for forty-five years. We came up even when the girls were grown. We came up even the year Maura had cancer and finished her treatment in June — she said the cabin was part of the medicine.

"So you see, when I tell you I am selling the cabin, I am not telling you something easy. I am telling you something that is eating me. I would rather cut off my right hand than sell this cabin. But I cannot keep it any longer. That is the truth."

He had been looking at the lake the whole time. He turned now, slowly, and looked at Arjun.

"Do you understand, lad?"

Arjun's eyes were wet. He nodded.

"I understand."

"You may still be angry. That is allowed."

"I am still a little angry."

"Aye. Good. That means you loved the thing. Anger is love with nowhere to go."

Maren, in the chicken mug's glow, said, "Grandpa, that's beautiful."

"I didn't make it up," said Grandpa. "An old priest said it to me once. I have been saving it for an occasion."

They sat quietly for a while. The drizzle had begun now. It hushed against the porch roof, a tiny soft drumming.

"Grandpa," Arjun said.

"Mm?"

"Tell me something Nana used to say. Not the big things. Just — a little thing. A thing only she said."

Grandpa smiled. His eyes got far away.

"She used to say, when she was about to do a thing she didn't want to do — well, the world won't spin itself. I never knew where she got that from. She would get up from her chair and stretch her back and say, well, the world won't spin itself, and then she would go do the dishes or the laundry or whatever it was. It became a sort of motto in the house."

"I like that."

"And she used to call me old goat when I was being stubborn. Which was often."

"Old goat," Maren repeated, delighted.

"And —" Grandpa's voice caught a little. "And she used to say, about you, Arjun — when you were small — that one sees the world twice. Once with his eyes and once with his heart. I don't know why she said it. I think she meant something about your being of two countries. Or perhaps she just meant you were a thoughtful child. Either way. She said it."

"Sees the world twice," Arjun repeated quietly.

"Twice, aye."

The rain thickened. A little wind came up and blew a spray of drops onto the porch screen. Grandpa set down his empty mug and got up, slowly, with his knees cracking, and went into the cabin. He came back a moment later carrying a small cloth-wrapped bundle. He sat back down and set the bundle in his lap.

"Before I forget."

"What is it?"

"Your Nana's bird journal."

Arjun stared. "I thought — you gave me the 2023 one. The diary."

"Aye. This is different. This is the journal she kept of the birds she saw. Her life list, more or less, but not a list — a book. She drew them. She wrote about them. She started it the year we were married and she added to it every year. It is a big book."

He unwrapped the cloth.

The journal was leather, cracked at the spine, worn smooth at the corners. It was thick — much thicker than the diaries — and when Grandpa handed it to Arjun it weighed surprisingly heavy in his hands. The front cover had been tooled once, but the tooling was now faint, the remains of a flower pattern and her initials.

"She wanted you to have this one too. Not someday. Now. Before I forget, I said, because I nearly did — I nearly let another summer pass without giving it. I am eighty minus a few, and the years do slip me. But here. It is yours."

"Grandpa."

"Aye."

"Are you sure?"

"She wrote it for someone who would love it. You are that someone. I am sure."

Arjun opened the journal.

A Book of Birds. Begun this spring by Maura O'Connor, on the occasion of her marriage to Seamus O'Connor, who does not know a robin from a crow but who is willing to learn.

Arjun laughed, startled.

He turned the page. Another bird. A chickadee, with its name lettered beneath in her hand, and below that a paragraph about the chickadee in their yard who came to the feeder every morning at the same time and whom she had named Mr. Whitman, because he contained multitudes.

Arjun turned the page again. A barn swallow. A blue jay. A cedar waxwing. A pileated woodpecker. Page after page. Some pages had only drawings. Some had drawings and paragraphs. Some had tiny feathers taped to the page, with a date and a location. Some had notes about seasons — first flock of geese south, October 3, 1974 — that were almost nothing, and yet somehow everything.

"Grandpa," Arjun whispered.

"Aye."

"This is —"

"I know."

They sat with the journal open across Arjun's knees for a long time. Maren crowded in on one side to see. She pointed. She asked what each bird was. Arjun knew most of them. The ones he didn't know, Grandpa did.

It was still raining. The porch was getting cold. They didn't move.

"There's more," said Grandpa. "Keep going."

Arjun flipped toward the back. He found, somewhere around the middle, a section in which Nana had been teaching someone. There were clumsy childish letters in brown crayon beneath her watercolors. Chikadee. Warblr. Bluberd.

"That's — that's me," Arjun said.

"Aye. The summer you were six. She put you to work. You did the spelling, she did the painting, you fought over the brush. She laughed about it for years."

"I remember."

"You remember right."

Arjun could not speak for a while. He held the journal.

"Grandpa."

"Mm."

"I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything, lad. It's yours. It was always going to be yours. It just waited for you to be old enough to lift it."

The rain on the roof was steady. Somewhere in the wet dark, a loon finally gave voice — one short, round call, almost a cough, testing the weather. Another loon answered.

Much later, when Maren had gone to bed, Arjun sat with Grandpa in the almost-dark on the porch. A single yellow bulb burned above the door. Moths crowded it. The rain had slowed to a patter.

"Grandpa."

"Mm."

"Can I ask you something?"

"You may."

"How do you — how do you stop being sad about Nana? Or do you not stop?"

Grandpa was quiet for a long time.

"I don't stop, lad. I've not stopped. I won't stop. That is the honest answer."

"Oh."

"But the sadness changes. That is the other honest answer. When she first went, the sadness was a whole country. I lived inside it. I could not see out of it. I did not know there was out. Now — four years on — the sadness is more like a small island in a larger sea. The sea is my life. The island is there, always, and I visit it often. But I don't live there any longer. I live in the boat."

"The boat."

"The boat that goes around the island. The boat is this. You. Maren. The heron, at the moment, in my workshop. A cup of tea. The sun on the porch boards of a Tuesday morning. A grandchild crying on his knees in front of a cabinet with my wife's journals in it. All of it. The sea is wide. The island is small. That has been the trick of it."

"Huh."

"I'm not a philosopher, lad. I'm a mechanic. I have the thoughts a mechanic has. I make up metaphors with boats in them because I know boats."

"It's a good metaphor."

"Your Nana would have said it better."

"Maybe. But you said it."

"Aye. I said it." Grandpa reached over and patted Arjun's knee. "Now bed with you. Augustus will want his breakfast before the sun's proper up."

"Okay."

He stood up. At the door he stopped.

"Grandpa."

"Mm?"

"There's an Irish blessing Nana liked. Would you say it?"

Grandpa closed his eyes.

"May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. The rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of His hand."

Arjun said it back in his head.

"Thank you," he said.

"Go on, now."

That night in bed Arjun held Nana's bird journal against his chest and did not open it. He would open it tomorrow, and for all the tomorrows of his life. Tonight, holding it was enough.

He thought about an island and a sea. He thought about Augustus with his wings folded in the straw. He thought about Grandpa at twenty-two, coming down the gangplank of a ship called the Britannic with eighteen dollars in his pocket, and about Nana in a green dress at a church social. He thought about two grandfathers — one he had hardly known, in a city he had never seen in India, and one sleeping two rooms away. He thought about his mother, who was holding her own father's hand while that father was dying, and how he had not been able to help her because he was eleven and the ocean was wide.

He thought about what Grandpa had said. Anger is love with nowhere to go.

His anger about the cabin was still there. He checked it the way you check a bruise. Yes, still there. Yes, still sore. But tonight it felt less like a stone and more like an island. An island he would visit sometimes. The rest of the time, the sea.

He said a prayer his mother had taught him when he was small — a Bahá'í prayer she said at bedtime, simple and short, something about being near and being heard. He did not say it all; he said only the first line, which was the one he always remembered. Then he said the Irish blessing Grandpa had just recited, slowly, in his head, trying to get every word.

He fell asleep with the journal in his arms.

Outside, a loon sang.

Zoe arrived on a Wednesday morning with a pair of binoculars around her neck that were bigger than her face.

Maren had ridden her bike into town the afternoon before, and when she got back she announced, with the air of a person announcing a national holiday, that she had met someone Arjun had to meet.

"Her name is Zoe. She's twelve. She knows everything about birds. I mean everything, Arjun. More than Grandpa, even."

"Nobody knows more than Grandpa."

"Zoe does. I brought her up in conversation with the lady at the coffee shop because I saw a heron drawing on the community board, and the lady said, oh, that's Zoe's, Zoe's obsessed, Zoe's mom could bring her over tomorrow. So she's coming. I already said she could."

"You already said she could without asking me."

"Yep."

"Maren."

"Arjun."

"Fine."

* * *

Zoe came in a small blue SUV driven by her mother, who waved at Grandpa through the windshield and then reversed down the drive and left. Zoe stood in the yard in hiking boots and a bright yellow shirt with a puffin on it, and she waved with her whole arm the way some people do when they mean it.

"I'm Zoe," she said. "Maren said there's a heron."

"Hi," said Arjun. "I'm Arjun. Yes, there's a heron."

"Cool. Can I see?"

"You have to be quiet."

"I am quiet. I am a very quiet person. I just look louder than I am."

Arjun liked her immediately.

She had Down syndrome, Arjun realized as she came closer — he'd had a classmate with Down syndrome in second grade, a boy named Dylan, and he recognized the shape of the eyes and the wide warm smile. But he also realized, after about thirty seconds of talking to her, that this was not a thing he needed to think about as much as he had thought he would. Zoe was Zoe. Zoe was a person who wore a puffin shirt and came with binoculars and had, as it turned out, actually memorized Sibley's entire North American guide. Zoe was a person who knew things Arjun didn't know.

"Great blues," she said, as they walked carefully up to the workshop, "can stand still for an hour. An entire hour, Arjun. Did you know that?"

"I believe it."

"They can eat frogs, mice, snakes, and even baby ducks. But they mostly eat fish. I think baby ducks is cruel, but herons don't know what cruel is, so I forgive them. Do you know their wingspan?"

"Six feet, I think?"

"Six and a half on a big male. Did you know the female looks almost identical to the male, which is unusual for birds? Usually the male is showier. But herons are feminists. In heron terms."

Maren was snorting behind her hand.

"Herons are feminists," Arjun repeated.

"Egalitarian," Zoe corrected. "That's a better word. I'm working on it."

They reached the workshop. Zoe put her finger over her mouth — she took it seriously, quiet, more seriously than Maren had — and they slipped in.

Arjun led the way to the knothole on the tarp. He stepped back. Zoe stepped up. She pressed her eye to the hole and stood there for a long time. She did not fidget. Her entire body was listening.

After maybe two full minutes, she pulled back. Her cheeks were pink.

"He's beautiful," she whispered.

"He is."

"How long since the hook came out?"

"Eleven days."

"Is he flying short flaps?"

"Not yet. He flaps when we come in to change the bandage but only to threaten us. He doesn't try to lift."

"You should let him practice soon. Open the workshop for short times, see if he'll step out. The leg muscle atrophies fast. Did Marcus tell you that?"

"No. He just said two more weeks."

"Talk to him about it. The leg needs work. Walking helps."

Arjun stared at her. He had the distinct and slightly uncomfortable sensation of being corrected by someone who knew more than he did. He found that he liked the sensation. He was used to being the one who knew things, in his class at school. It was interesting to be the one who did not.

"Okay," he said. "We will."

Zoe nodded briskly, satisfied. "I can come back. I can come every day if you want. I'll ask my mom. She thinks fresh air is good for me. She'd let me come every day for a heron. She'd let me come every day for a sparrow."

"Every day is fine."

"Good. Now can I see the lake? Maren said there's a canoe."

* * *

For the next two weeks, Zoe was part of the days.

She did not come every day — her mother made her keep two days for rest, a rule she grumbled about — but she came four and five days a week, and on the days she came she was a version of sunshine that Arjun could not remember encountering before. She brought things. She brought a field guide to dragonflies and a pair of plastic bug cases. She brought a thermos of iced tea her mother had made (a particular kind with peach in it, which Arjun had never had before, and which became, silently, the taste of that part of the summer). She brought a list of birds she was tracking and she annotated the list every day. She brought songs.

Zoe liked to sing. Not performatively — just while doing other things. She sang while wading in the shallows. She sang while drawing in the sketchbook she always carried. She sang often without realizing she was singing. She had a soft strong voice that moved around in the folk songs her mother had taught her and the hymns her grandma had taught her and also, for reasons Zoe could not fully explain, the jingles from commercials. She would be sketching a kingfisher and quietly singing an ad for a brand of insurance.

Arjun discovered two things about her quickly.

Maren, to Arjun's surprise, was the one who seemed most thoroughly at home with Zoe. Maren was big-hearted; Maren was loud; Maren did not have subtlety. Zoe had no use for subtlety. They matched. They made loud plans together. They bounced off each other the way two tennis balls bounce off each other in an empty room. Arjun, quieter by nature, was a third sort of companion — the one who wrote things down and listened and occasionally interrupted to correct a bird call.

* * *

They took Zoe's advice and began walking Augustus.

On the thirteenth day, with Marcus's blessing (they had called him, and he had said, "Yep, good thought, let him stretch, five minutes in the yard, low-stakes, two of you at a distance"), they opened the workshop door at dusk, the quietest hour, and stepped well back.

For a long time, nothing happened.

Augustus stood in the back corner of his enclosure. They could see his shadow shift. They could see the yellow of his eye when he tilted.

Then — slowly, so slowly — he came out.

He stepped onto the doorframe. He stepped onto the grass. He held his bandaged leg at first — the bandage was lighter now, only a thin one — and put his weight on the good leg. He cocked his head at them, the three humans sitting very still at the base of a pine tree thirty feet away. He took another step. Another.

He walked three yards out into the yard. He lowered his head. He nibbled at a sprig of grass without really meaning to. He lifted his head again. He gave a small, dry cluck — the first sound they had ever heard him make, a sort of throat-clear. He walked three yards back.

He stood at the door of the workshop and looked at them for what felt like a long time. Then he turned and walked back in.

"Oh," Zoe said, very softly. "Oh, he's so good."

They went in after a few minutes. Augustus was on the perch. He had, in their absence, hopped up onto the branch. This was a new thing. The leg was strong enough for a hop.

"He's going to be okay," Arjun said.

"He was always going to be okay," said Zoe. "But now we can see it."

* * *

In the afternoons of those two weeks, the three of them took the canoe out onto the lake. Zoe was, she confessed, not a good swimmer — she wore her life vest buckled all the way — and Arjun made sure she was in the middle of the boat, steady, and she kept a pair of binoculars trained on the reeds of the far shore and called out birds.

"Kingfisher! Belted kingfisher, male, at the dead branch, two o'clock!"

"I see him," said Maren.

"I see him," said Arjun.

"Bufflehead. No — merganser. Common merganser, female, shoreline, drifting."

"Got her."

"And —" Zoe squinted. "Wait. Oh. Oh. Arjun. Look."

He looked.

A heron. A different heron, not Augustus. A wild one, coming in low over the far bay, its wings heavy, its long legs trailing behind. It landed in the reeds at the mouth of a stream. It stood still. It was hunting.

"They're everywhere," Zoe whispered. "Once you start looking, there are so many. Do you know how many there are on this lake? I bet there are twenty. I bet there are more. There's a rookery three miles north. Their chicks will have fledged already. These are the ones who aren't raising kids, they're just — they're just living. Just fishing. Just being."

Arjun watched the heron.

And that would be good. That would be the correct ending. That was what getting better meant.

His chest did the familiar tightening.

But not as hard as before.

* * *

On the last afternoon Zoe came that second week, she was quieter than usual. They had been sketching at the kitchen table — Arjun had shown Zoe Nana's bird journal, which had made Zoe cry a little and then laugh a little and then very carefully, very respectfully, turn every page — and in the afternoon she had gotten tired, and they had gone to the dock with the peach tea. She was lying on her back on the dock looking up at the clouds.

"Arjun."

"Yeah."

"Why are you guys leaving at the end of the summer? Maren said the cabin's getting sold."

Arjun rolled onto his side. Maren was up at the cabin helping Grandpa with dinner.

"My grandpa's too old to keep it up," he said. "Taxes and stuff. He's selling it after Labor Day."

"Oh. So I won't see you next summer."

"I guess not. Not here."

"That's — that's sad."

"Yeah."

Zoe thought for a while. A cloud that looked like a very fat sheep drifted across them.

"Will you write to me?" she said.

"Write to you?"

"On paper. My mom says letters are a thing people still do. We could do it. I'd like to know what happens to you. And I'd like to tell you things about the birds here. I could be your bird reporter. I'd do a good job."

Arjun felt the odd little ache he had learned, this summer, to recognize — the ache of an ending beginning to happen.

"I'll write to you," he said. "I promise. And I'll write well, because — well. Because you deserve good letters."

Zoe smiled. Her smile was big.

"Okay. That's a contract. You signed a contract."

"Fine."

"I'm going to tell my mom about the contract."

"Okay."

The fat-sheep cloud became a long-tailed-cat cloud. Then a loaf of bread. Then nothing.

"Arjun," Zoe said again, after a long while.

"Yeah."

"Is it sad? About your grandma?"

He was quiet.

"It's sad," he said. "Yeah. It's sad."

"My grandma died last year. Not my mom's mom. The other one. Grandma Ruth. She was really old. She made cookies. She liked me."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I mean it's not okay. I mean — " She frowned at a cloud. "I mean people say it's okay because they don't know what to say. But it isn't. It's sad. And then other stuff is good. Both things."

"Yeah."

"Both things, Arjun."

"Both things, Zoe."

They lay on the dock until her mother came to pick her up.

* * *

That night Arjun sat on his bed with three open books in front of him. His own journal. Nana's 2023 diary. Nana's bird journal. He had been reading a little bit of each every night for a week. He was careful with them. He did not want to race through them. He thought he wanted to have unread pages of Nana left for a long time.

Zoe said, both things. I think that's the truest thing anyone has said to me all summer. Maybe in my life.

He closed the book.

He got up and went to the window. He opened it. The cool lake air came in. A loon called, three bays over. Somewhere, Augustus was in the workshop, alive, resting on the straw. Somewhere, his mother was in India with her father. Somewhere, his other grandfather was maybe already gone — she had said on the last call that it was very close now. Somewhere, a cabin he loved was going to be sold in five weeks.

Both things.

The infection came on the eighteenth day.

It came fast. In the morning the leg looked fine. By afternoon there was a red streak running up from the wound, a thin angry line along the grayish skin, and Augustus was holding the leg higher than he had held it in a week. By evening he had not eaten his fish, and he was hunched on the straw with his neck tucked down and his eye half-closed.

Arjun, looking through the knothole, felt a cold drop into his stomach.

"Grandpa," he said, at the workshop door. "Grandpa, come."

Grandpa came. He took one look.

"Phone," he said.

* * *

Marcus drove the hour and a half in just over an hour. His truck sprayed gravel coming down the drive. He came into the workshop with his bag and his hands already washed and cold from the drive.

They had Augustus out of the enclosure within a minute. Towel over, body held, beak controlled. Marcus examined the wound. He did not say anything for a long time, and his face was the face of someone who was concentrating very hard and trying not to let his feelings show.

"He's got an infection under the scab," Marcus said finally. "There's a pocket. I can drain it but it's going to be ugly. And the streak up the leg — that's bad. That means it's starting to spread."

"Can you fix it?" Arjun's voice was thin.

"I'm going to try. I've got a stronger antibiotic in the truck. I was hoping I wouldn't need it."

He drained the pocket. Arjun made himself watch. It was ugly. It was worse than ugly. A clear yellow fluid came out and then — something more. Arjun held the tray for Marcus because there was no one else to hold it. Maren was in the doorway with her hand over her mouth. Zoe was not here — she had not been here for two days, her mother had told them Zoe had a cold, she would be back Saturday — and Arjun was simultaneously glad and sorry she was not here.

When Marcus finished, he rewrapped the leg, gave the injection, and stood up. He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist.

"Here's where we are," he said. "He's got an infection that's decided to fight. He's had one round of antibiotic. I've just given him the second. I can give him the third on Saturday. But herons — herons are delicate. They carry their weight light on their bones. An infection like this, it can go either way. I'm being straight with you. He might pull through. He might not."

"He has to pull through," Arjun said.

"I know you feel that. But listen to me, Arjun. I need to say this. This bird has had better care than ninety-nine percent of hurt birds ever get. You guys have done everything right. If it goes the wrong way, it is not your fault. It is the infection's fault. Do you understand me?"

"Yeah."

"Say it back to me."

"It's not my fault."

"Thank you. Remember that. Because this is the hard part, and you have to remember."

* * *

That night Arjun could not sleep.

He lay in his bed and listened to the loons and tried to imagine Augustus out there, alive, hunting in some clear water, his wings spread, his yellow eye bright. He tried hard. But the picture kept sliding off into a different picture — Augustus crumpled on the straw, eye closed, breathing done.

No.

He got up at three in the morning. He took his flashlight. He crept out of the cabin. He walked down to the workshop in his bare feet on the cold grass.

He opened the door a crack. He did not go in. He stood in the door and listened.

Augustus was breathing. Arjun could hear it, very faint — a tiny soft rasp. Still there.

Arjun sat down on the ground just outside the door and put his back against the wall.

He did not pray, exactly. He was not sure he knew how. But he thought of his mother, who prayed. He thought of the Bahá'í prayers she said in the mornings, the murmuring he had heard all his life and barely noticed, the way the sound of her voice had shaped his life like water shapes stone. He thought of one line she said often — something simple, about a listener who was near. He thought the line, silently, as hard as he could, aimed at nothing and at everything. Near, near, near.

He thought of Nana, too. He thought of her, because he had been thinking of her so much lately, and because she had been a person who loved birds, and he thought if she was anywhere, she was near birds.

Don't let him die, he thought. Please. Please.

The workshop was quiet.

He did not know how long he sat there. Long enough that the sky turned from black to charcoal to a first hint of blue. Long enough that the loons had started their dawn chorus. Long enough that his feet went numb.

He got up. He peeked through the knothole.

Augustus was still in the same place. Still hunched. Still breathing. Still there.

Arjun went back up to the cabin, climbed the stairs on silent feet, got into bed, and slept two hours.

* * *

The next morning Maren was the first to ask.

"Is he —"

"Alive. Still hunched. Not eating."

She exhaled.

Grandpa came in with his tea. He looked at Arjun. He looked at Maren. He looked at the breakfast table, which was untouched.

"Eat," he said. "Both of you. Eat breakfast."

"Grandpa —"

"Eat. I am saying this as a man who has lost things in his life and has learned to eat breakfast anyway. You will be no good to that bird with no food in your belly. Eat."

They ate.

* * *

The second day was worse.

Augustus ate one fish. Only one. He left the other two in the straw. He stood up on his good leg, staggered, and sat down again. His eye stayed closed for longer stretches.

Arjun spent most of the afternoon on the floor of the workshop near the enclosure — not inside the tarp, Marcus had said no — just outside it. He had his journal open. He was trying to draw. He was not doing a very good job.

Grandpa came in. He sat down beside Arjun, slowly, bracing himself on the workbench.

"Lad."

"Yeah."

"I need to say a thing to you. And I don't want to say it. But I am going to say it because I love you."

Arjun looked up.

"He might not make it, Arjun."

"He'll make it."

"He might not."

"He has to."

"He doesn't have to, lad. He is a wild bird. He has been sick and hurt and he is old enough that we do not know what else is going on in him. He might make it. I hope he will. But he might not."

"Then what was all of it for?"

"All of what?"

"All of this. All the fish. All the bandages. Zoe telling us about walking him. Marcus driving up here an hour and a half at ten o'clock at night. What was any of it for if he just — if he just dies?"

Arjun's voice had broken on the last word. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Grandpa was quiet for a long time.

"Arjun."

"What?"

"Can I tell you something I think is true?"

"I guess."

"You can love something without owning its ending."

Arjun dropped his hands. He looked at Grandpa.

"What does that mean?"

"It means — we gave the heron what we could. We did everything we could do. The doing was the love. The love was real whether or not it works. We do not get to decide how it ends. We only get to decide how we did it. And we did it as well as we knew how."

"But —"

"No but, lad. Listen. This is hard. This is the whole hard thing. If we only love what we can control, we don't love much, because we don't control much. Most of what we love, we will lose. That is the rule of the world. I have lost your Nana. You will lose me. You will lose the cabin. You will lose, eventually, everyone and everything. What will remain is the loving. The loving is the thing. Not the keeping."

Arjun's throat was a hot stone.

"That's a terrible rule."

"Aye. It's a terrible rule. And it's the only rule there is."

"Then why love anything?"

Grandpa looked at him for a long time.

"Because the alternative," he said, very softly, "is not loving. And I have tried both. And loving is better. Even when it hurts. Loving is better."

Arjun was crying now — quietly, trying not to shake. Grandpa put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close, and Arjun leaned into the old flannel shirt and smelled the old Grandpa smell and cried into it.

Augustus, on his straw, took a long slow breath.

* * *

They did not know, that evening, whether Augustus would live. They did not know the next morning, when his eye was still mostly closed and his feathers were dull. They did not know that afternoon, when Marcus came back (for the third antibiotic, a day early, because he could not stand not to) and said, "We'll see. We'll see."

They did not know for a very long night, in which Arjun slept in fits and woke every hour or two to listen.

But on the morning of the third day, at sunrise, Arjun went to the knothole and looked in, and Augustus was standing on the perch.

Standing.

On the perch.

His eye was open. His yellow eye, bright. He had preened. The gray of him was, very faintly, cleaner than it had been. As Arjun watched, Augustus extended his good leg and stretched it — that slow delicate deliberate stretch that herons do, a thing that is closer to dance than to exercise — and folded it back. He turned his head. He saw the knothole. He saw Arjun's eye at the knothole.

He blinked.

Arjun let out a sound that was half a sob and half a laugh. He ran. He ran up to the cabin in his bare feet, across the wet grass, and he burst through the screen door.

"He's up!" he shouted. "He's up! He's on the perch! He's up, Grandpa, Maren, he's UP!"

Maren came down the stairs three at a time, pajama pants and all. Grandpa came out of the kitchen with the spatula still in his hand.

"Blessed be," Grandpa said. He sat down. He actually sat down on the kitchen chair as if his knees had gone out from under him. "Oh, blessed be."

They all went out to the workshop. They stood outside it quietly. They did not open the door. They did not go in. They just stood there, three people in the dewy grass, and looked at the workshop, and knew that the heron inside it was standing.

Maren started laughing first. Her laughter was loud and a little unhinged.

"He's UP!" she yelled.

A loon, on the lake, called back.

Augustus turned the corner.

That was the phrase Marcus used when he came on Saturday and examined the leg and declared the infection in retreat. "He's turned the corner. The streak's gone. The pocket's clean. I'm going to give him one more dose today and we'll taper from there. This bird decided he was going to live. Birds have to decide. You can't decide for them. He decided."

"He decided," Arjun repeated.

"That's right. You can thank him for it."

"I think we'll thank you, too."

"Oh, you can thank me. I am very thankable. But also him."

The days after the turning of the corner had a kind of holy quality to them. Arjun noticed it. Maren noticed it. Zoe came back — her cold had cleared — and noticed it before anyone said anything about it, because Zoe noticed everything.

"The light's different," she announced on her first morning back. "Everything is shining."

"Everything isn't literally shining, Zoe."

"Everything is a little shining, Arjun. Look at the grass."

He looked at the grass. The grass was, in fact, shining.

* * *

Augustus ate. He ate all three fish in the morning. He ate all four fish in the evening. Marcus said he could have more if he wanted them, and Augustus wanted them. Arjun, Maren, and Zoe fished for him in rotation. Grandpa fished too, but Grandpa's fishing was mostly sitting on the dock with his cane rod and a paperback and a cold glass of tea, and his catch was slower. The fish they caught were small and clean and Augustus ate them. He began to walk again, more. His bandaged leg was now an unbandaged leg, the skin pink where the fresh feathers had not yet come in, but intact. He put weight on it. He did not limp so much.

On the twenty-second day, with the workshop door propped open at dusk, Augustus walked out into the yard of his own accord. He did not hesitate this time. He walked out into the middle of the grass, stretched both his wings — slowly, to their full span, a vast gray pair of opening fans — and folded them again. He walked in a circle. He stood. He looked at the lake. He walked back to the workshop.

"He's testing the flight muscles," Zoe whispered.

"He hasn't flown," said Arjun.

"He will soon."

* * *

He flew for the first time on the twenty-fourth day.

It was a short flight. A lift, really — two heavy flaps, the great wings pushing air, and then he was three feet off the ground, then five, and then he drifted ten feet and landed, all of it in a single long shallow arc, as if he were testing water. He landed on the grass. He tucked his wings. He looked at them.

Arjun said, quietly, "Oh. Oh my god. Grandpa, he flew."

"Aye," said Grandpa. "He did."

Augustus walked back to the workshop. He went inside. He hopped up to his perch. He closed his eye as if the whole thing had exhausted him.

"He won't go yet," said Zoe. "He needs a few more days. But he's going to go."

"How do you know?"

"I know."

* * *

Four more days passed.

Each evening he flew a little farther. Four feet off the ground. Seven feet. The full length of the yard in one long beautiful flap. He landed neatly each time. He walked. He ate. He preened. His feathers, which had been dull on the day of the infection, were now a clean slate-blue, with the fine smoky trim of his breast feathers shining.

He was a great blue heron.

He looked like one of the paintings on Nana's walls.

Arjun spent hours with Nana's bird journal. He found, in it, a page for the great blue heron — she had painted one, of course, because she had painted most of the birds, and the painting was done from a photograph she had taken, of a heron standing in this very same bay forty years ago. The heron in the painting had the same yellow eye. The same dark crest. The same slow dignified posture.

Great blue heron. The oldest-looking bird in the world. A friend says they are the reincarnations of philosophers, because of how they stand and contemplate. I suspect the philosophers would be flattered. Seamus calls them "the lake's patience." I think he is right.

Arjun copied the last sentence into his own journal.

The lake's patience.

* * *

On the twenty-ninth day Arjun woke in the dark and could not get back to sleep. He got up. He took his journal. He sat on the porch with a blanket around his shoulders and waited for the sun.

It came slowly, as it did in Wisconsin, a long patient pearl-gray unfolding. The loons called. A mist sat on the lake. Far out, he saw a long gray shape lift from the reeds and flap heavily across the bay — not Augustus. Some other heron, some wild one, going about its life. Arjun watched it disappear behind the island with the crooked pine.

He thought, then — and it came clear to him for the first time, like ice water — that the cabin was going to disappear behind an island too. That was how it was going to be. Not a loss exactly. A disappearance. Into a place where he could not see it and could not visit it and could not keep it. But it would still be going about its life. The cabin would still, somewhere, exist. Just, not for him.

Both things, Zoe had said.

The heron is going to fly. The cabin is going to be sold. Both are right. Both are sad.

He thought a while.

But only one of them is alive. The heron has the better ending.

He thought a while longer.

Maybe I'll learn to let the cabin go the way I'm learning to let Augustus go. As if they're the same thing. Maybe they are the same thing. Everything I love is going to fly away, eventually.

He stopped. He did not like that line. He crossed it out, then un-crossed it. He left it.

* * *

Marcus came on the thirtieth day, which was a Thursday. He took Augustus out of the enclosure one last time. He examined him all over. The leg was clean. The feathers were full. The weight — Marcus could feel it through his gloves — was good, healthy, not heavy but not light. Augustus threatened him with his beak in a way that was energetic and real, not desperate.

"He's ready," Marcus said.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

"Saturday," said Marcus. "Saturday morning, first light, at the lakeshore. That's when we release him. Quiet. Just your people. Nobody else. He's ready to go. We should not make him wait."

"Saturday," Arjun repeated.

"Saturday."

Grandpa put his hand on Arjun's shoulder. "Aye, lad. Saturday."

Arjun swallowed.

"Can I invite Zoe?"

"Zoe can come. Zoe has earned her seat."

"Okay. Saturday."

* * *

That night Arjun lay in bed and could not sleep for a different reason than he had been not-sleeping all summer. It was not anxiety. It was not dread. It was a wide-awake, expectant feeling — the feeling of a person waiting for a sunrise. His heart was full the way a cup is full.

Augustus was going to fly.

He thought about Augustus's first day. He thought about the hook in the leg and the bobber hanging ridiculous from the thread. He thought about the first time he had seen the yellow eye. He thought about the infection, the long night, the morning the eye had been open again.

Both things, he thought. Both things.

He did not cry. He was, surprisingly, not sad. He was something else he did not have a word for yet. Something more like the feeling Zoe must feel when she woke up in the morning and knew there was going to be a day and in the day there would be birds.

The loons sang. He listened.

He slept.

Saturday morning came clear.

No mist, for once. The lake was dark blue, and the pines on the far shore were black, and above the black pines was a stripe of new sky, gold shading to rose shading to blue. A single star was still out. A bullfrog gave one slow chunk in the reeds and went silent. A fish jumped.

Arjun was up before anyone else, as he had been nearly every day that summer, and he walked down to the shore of the little cove where they had decided to do the release. He stood a moment. He breathed in. The air smelled like water and pine and something he could not name that was only lake-air on a summer morning with a particular quality of light.

He sat down on a flat rock at the edge of the cove.

Grandpa came next. He came in his old slippers, with a flannel over his pajamas, and he sat down beside Arjun on the rock without saying anything, and handed him a mug of tea. Arjun took it. They drank.

Maren came down in actual clothes — jeans, a t-shirt, hair in a hasty bun — and she sat beside them with a mug of cocoa. Zoe arrived at six o'clock exactly, her mother's blue SUV grinding down the drive, and Zoe came along the shore in her yellow puffin shirt and her binoculars around her neck, and she sat down on the other side of Arjun.

Marcus came last. He came with the crate. He walked slowly so as not to jostle the bird inside. He set the crate down at the water's edge.

Nobody spoke.

Marcus looked around at all of them. The sun was just over the pines now. It laid a long gold streak across the water.

"All right," he said, very softly. "Arjun. Come here."

Arjun stood up. His legs felt light. He walked to the crate.

"You're going to open the door. Don't lift it off the ground — just open the door. Step back as soon as it's open. All the way back. Don't hover. Don't reach. Don't cheer. Just watch."

"Okay."

"You ready?"

"Yeah."

He knelt down. He put his hand on the crate door. He paused. Through the wire mesh he could see one yellow eye, looking at him.

"Goodbye, Augustus," he whispered.

He opened the door.

He stepped back.

He sat down again on the rock.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Augustus stood in the crate, not moving, head tilted. Arjun could see the neck through the open door. He could see the dark crest.

Then, slowly — so slowly that Arjun almost could not breathe — Augustus stepped out.

One foot. Two. He stood on the sand at the edge of the lake. He turned his head. He looked at the water. He looked at the sky. He looked, briefly, at the five humans on the rock thirty feet away.

His yellow eye, in that moment, rested on Arjun.

Arjun felt it. Felt the look. Felt something pass between them that was not a word and not a thought, just a — an acknowledging. You. Me. We were in this together for a time. Now it is done.

Augustus took three slow, deliberate steps down the sand. He spread his wings — the great gray wings, five and a half feet across, maybe six — and he lifted.

The first flap was low. The second took him higher. The third, higher still. He cleared the reeds at the edge of the cove. He cleared the branches of the willow that leaned out over the water. He rose above the lake. He did not fly fast. He flew the way herons fly, steady and slow and impossibly graceful, his neck folded, his legs trailing, his wings cutting the air in that long unhurried rhythm that was older than anything Arjun knew.

He flew out over the bay. He flew in a long wide curve. He flew toward the island with the crooked pine.

Arjun watched him.

Arjun watched him until the long gray shape was no more than a smudge, and the smudge curved behind the crooked pine, and then he was gone.

He was gone.

Arjun did not know he was crying until he felt the tears on his chin. He did not know he was laughing, also, until he heard the sound coming out of his own throat, a strange broken sound that was somehow both. Maren, beside him, was also laughing, her shoulders shaking. Zoe was clapping her hands silently, not to make noise, just because her hands needed to clap. Grandpa was crying too, his old face wet, his mouth smiling.

Marcus stood at the water's edge with his arms folded, looking at the place where Augustus had disappeared. He said, very softly, "Damn. That never gets old."

Arjun kept laughing. Kept crying.

Alive, he thought. Alive. Alive is what he was meant to be.

* * *

Afterwards, they walked back up to the cabin in the new sunshine. Grandpa made pancakes. Maren made bacon. Zoe set the table. Marcus, who had said he could not stay, stayed for breakfast anyway. He ate six pancakes and four strips of bacon and talked to Grandpa about the difference between two-stroke and four-stroke outboard motors and about a fox kit he was raising who had started playing with a tennis ball, and Arjun, across the table, sat in a kind of happy fog and listened.

At one point Grandpa caught his eye.

"All right, lad?"

"Yeah."

"Truly?"

"Truly."

Grandpa nodded. "Good."

* * *

Later, after Marcus had driven off and Zoe's mother had come and gone, Arjun went back to the cove alone. He wanted to see it. He wanted to see the place Augustus had left from, the way one returns to the place where a momentous thing has happened, even if the thing has happened already and cannot be un-happened.

The cove was empty.

He sat on the flat rock. He looked at the sand where Augustus's feet had printed. The footprints were still there — three-toed, big, evenly spaced — leading down to the water and then ending where the wings had taken him up.

He looked at the footprints a long time.

He closed his journal.

A breeze moved the willow branches. A dragonfly zoomed across the cove and out, past the edge of where Arjun could see.

He stayed on the rock until his mother's voice — no. His grandfather's voice, calling him for lunch — pulled him back up the path to the cabin.

The last week of summer was strange.

But it was also strange because of the packing.

Grandpa had decided, gently, that the three of them would do it together. There were not many things at the cabin that had to go. Some furniture was going to the new family, as part of the deal. The sheets and towels and pots and pans would stay too. What had to be packed were the personal things — the pictures, the books, Nana's paintings, Nana's jars and brushes from the workshop, Grandpa's own books and boots and the little brass clock on the mantel that had been his grandfather's in Cork. All of that would go with Grandpa to Green Bay. A small pile; a significant one.

They packed in the mornings, before it got hot. They packed to music. Grandpa had a small radio on the kitchen counter that picked up a public station from Wausau that played classical music, and the music wound through the cabin as Grandpa wrapped plates in newspaper and Maren labeled boxes in her big round handwriting and Arjun sorted photographs into small stacks.

The photographs were the hardest.

There were hundreds. They were in shoeboxes in the attic, unsorted, old and new jumbled together. Arjun spread them on the kitchen table. Here was Nana at thirty, tanned brown, laughing on the dock. Here was Arjun at two, wearing a diaper and a cowboy hat and nothing else. Here was Uncle Dave holding a fish as long as his forearm, looking about sixteen. Here was Grandpa with his mustache still dark, carrying a canoe overhead, barefoot on the grass.

"Grandpa, is this you?"

"Aye. That would have been '84."

"You look like a movie star."

"I looked like a man who had too much hair and didn't know what to do with it. That was my only look."

Arjun picked out photographs to keep. Grandpa said he could keep as many as he wanted. He picked one of himself and Nana, the one he had always liked, in which she was showing him something in a book and he was leaning in close, and the top of his head of dark curls was just visible next to her white head. He picked one of himself and Grandpa in the canoe. He picked one of Maren and himself at ages maybe seven and eight, holding up a bucket of minnows and grinning like they had won an Olympic medal.

He put that one on top.

* * *

Maren was quieter that week than she had been all summer.

Arjun noticed it. He asked her about it once, as they carried a load of boxes to the porch for Uncle Dave's pickup to collect.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"Truly?"

"Truly. I'm just — I don't know. I think I've been trying to be the practical one about this all summer, and now it's the last week, and I'm mostly just sad."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"Me too."

"Yeah."

They walked to the porch. They set the boxes down.

"Arjun."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to miss this. I'm going to really miss this."

"Yeah."

"I thought I was fine about it because I'm usually fine about everything. I'm the person who is fine about everything. But this time I wasn't fine, I was just not-thinking-about-it, and now I'm thinking about it and it turns out I was never fine."

"Okay."

"I'm not telling you this to complain. I'm telling you because you've been sad all summer and I was being a jerk about it sometimes and I wanted to say —"

"You weren't being a jerk, Maren."

"I was a little."

"Okay, a little."

She snorted.

"What I mean is. I'm sorry. I see it now. And I miss it too."

Arjun looked at her. Her eyes were wet. He had not seen her cry more than once or twice in his entire life.

"Come here," he said, which was not a thing he would ever normally have said to Maren. And she came, and they hugged, awkwardly, in the middle of the porch with the boxes around their feet. A long clumsy cousin hug that was mostly elbows.

When they pulled apart, Maren wiped her face with the back of her wrist and said, "Don't tell anyone I cried."

"I will tell everyone you cried."

"Arjun Patel-O'Connor —"

"Okay, I won't. Unless you annoy me."

"Fair."

* * *

On Wednesday afternoon he came out of the workshop with a leather-bound book Arjun had never seen.

"Ah," he said. "I was looking for this."

"What is it?"

"Log book. From when we bought the cabin. The first summer. I used to keep track of chores in it. What I fixed, when. What needed doing next. I stopped after a few years. I'll not need it now. Do you want it?"

Arjun laughed.

"Yes, please," he said.

"It's yours."

* * *

On Thursday, the day before their last full day, Arjun went walking along the shore. Not the way he had been walking — with purpose, looking for fish for Augustus — just walking. He went past the cove where the release had happened. He went around the long side of the bay, farther than he usually went, to the little stream that ran into the lake from the north. At the stream there was a muddy patch where birds left prints in the soft ground. He knelt down.

Heron prints.

A set of fresh ones.

Three-toed. Big. Evenly spaced.

His breath caught.

He looked at them. He could not, of course, tell if they were Augustus's prints or some other heron's. He would never know. He would never know which heron was Augustus, anywhere he went for the rest of his life. That was how it was supposed to be. That was the deal.

But he allowed himself — just allowed himself — to think it might be him. For a moment. For the duration of the moment.

He stood up. He took a smooth stone from the edge of the stream and put it in his pocket. He didn't know why. He only knew that he was going to have few pieces of this place to take home with him, and the stone, for whatever reason, had chosen him.

He walked back.

* * *

On Friday night — the last night — Grandpa grilled hamburgers on the back patio and Maren made potato salad and Arjun made lemonade and they ate outside under a sky that was moving through the colors of a late summer sunset, all of them, one after another. Peach. Gold. A strange violet-pink that only happened at the end of August. Then a blue that deepened and kept deepening until the first stars came out.

Zoe came for the dinner. Her mother let her stay until ten.

Zoe had brought a present. It was wrapped in tissue paper. She held it out to Arjun with both hands.

"What is it?"

"Open it."

He opened it.

Arjun could not speak for a second.

"Zoe," he managed. "It's beautiful."

"I know."

"It's really beautiful."

"Yeah. I worked hard."

"I'm going to hang this on my wall at home."

"Good."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. You can send me letters. With pictures of your wall."

"I will. I promise."

"Shake on it."

He shook on it.

* * *

They caught fireflies in the yard after dinner. Not to keep — they never kept them, Grandpa had rules about things like that — just to catch and let go. Arjun and Maren had been doing it since they were small, and Zoe joined in, slower but determined. Grandpa sat on the porch and watched them. The fireflies came up out of the grass by the hundreds, then the thousands. It was one of those nights when the whole yard was the night sky.

Maren caught one and opened her cupped hands to show Zoe. The firefly glowed on her palm — green-gold — and then lifted and drifted up, a little spark.

"It's like sending a letter," Zoe said.

"What?"

"A firefly. Going up. It's like sending a letter. You caught it and you let it go."

"Zoe, that is a poem."

"I know."

"You should write that down."

"I am writing it down. In my head."

They caught fireflies for a long time. Zoe's mother came and sat on the porch with Grandpa and had a cup of coffee, and the two of them talked quietly about the town and the fall, and then she called Zoe, and Zoe came over, and Arjun hugged her.

"Bye, Zoe."

"Bye, Arjun."

"Both things."

"Both things."

The blue SUV pulled up the drive and was gone, and the fireflies went on.

* * *

Maren, who had one more day and one more night than Arjun — Uncle Dave was picking her up on Sunday, and Arjun's dad was picking him up on Saturday — stayed up with Arjun on the porch long after Grandpa had gone to bed. They did not talk much. They watched the stars. They listened to the loons.

"Arjun."

"Yeah."

"Promise me something."

"What?"

"Promise me we'll still see each other. After this."

"We'll still see each other. You know we will."

"I know. I just. I want you to say it."

"I promise. Thanksgiving. Christmas. All the usual stuff. And you're coming to St. Paul next spring break, right? You said you were."

"I said I was."

"So then."

"So then."

She put her head on his shoulder.

"I love you, cousin."

"I love you too, cousin."

"Don't tell anyone I said that either."

"I'll tell everyone."

She laughed, tired. A loon called.

* * *

The morning Arjun left the cabin, the sky was bright blue.

He had not slept much. He had lain awake listening to loons, and to the small creaks of the cabin, and to the hum of the refrigerator, and to every small sound, and he had tried to hold each sound in his mind as if he could save them.

He got up and put on his clothes and went down to the dock one last time. He sat on the dock with his feet dangling in the water, which was cold now, end-of-summer cold, not the soft warm water of July. The morning mist sat on the water. A painted turtle poked its head up near the dock and looked at him and disappeared.

He said every goodbye. He said them all. He did not want to miss any.

Then he sat a long time in the mist and did not say anything.

* * *

Breakfast was pancakes and bacon and oatmeal for Grandpa, who insisted that the last breakfast be what he called a proper breakfast. Arjun ate too much. He was leaving in an hour and he knew his stomach would be uneasy in the car but he ate anyway because he wanted to eat Grandpa's pancakes one more time on this porch.

His dad's car came up the drive at ten. His dad got out. He looked tired — he had driven from St. Paul since six — but he looked happy to see Arjun. He hugged him. He shook Grandpa's hand and then hugged him too, and Arjun noticed, for the first time maybe ever, that his dad was shorter than Grandpa. He had never noticed that before.

"Mom called last night," his dad said quietly to Arjun, while Grandpa was talking to Maren in the doorway. "She's coming home on Tuesday."

Arjun nodded.

"Grandpa —" He couldn't quite say it. His voice wouldn't.

"I know, buddy. She called me too. He passed Wednesday. Peacefully."

"Oh."

"She said she was with him. She's okay. She wants you to know she's okay. She loves you."

Arjun nodded. He was not sure what to do with this information. It was too big to process standing in the driveway. He put it aside, carefully, the way you put aside a glass of water on a shelf.

Grandpa came out with his duffel bag. Arjun's dad put it in the trunk.

Then they were all standing in the driveway, the four of them. His dad. Grandpa. Maren. Arjun.

"Well," Grandpa said.

"Well," said Maren.

"Grandpa," Arjun said.

"Aye, lad."

When he pulled back, Grandpa's eyes were wet.

"The cabin was a place," Grandpa said, low enough that only Arjun could hear. "You and I are still us."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I know."

"Good lad."

Grandpa reached into his pocket. He brought out a small thing wrapped in tissue. He put it into Arjun's hand.

Arjun unwrapped it.

It was a brass compass. Old. Heavy. The case was worn smooth. When he opened it, the needle wobbled and settled.

"That was my father's," Grandpa said. "He gave it to me the morning I left Cork. He said, you cannot get lost if you know where north is. I have not needed it in fifty-six years. I think you might like to have it."

"Grandpa."

"No protest."

"Thank you."

"Thank me by using it. Go somewhere. Now and then. That's all I ask."

"Okay."

"Good."

He hugged Maren. Maren was crying and pretending not to be. He pretended not to notice. He got in his dad's car. His dad started the engine. They rolled down the gravel drive.

Arjun looked back.

Grandpa was on the porch. Maren was beside him. They were both waving. The cabin was behind them — the cabin with its screen porch and its green door and its red chimney that needed mortar — and the lake was silver behind the cabin.

Arjun lifted his hand.

They went around the curve in the drive.

The cabin was gone.

* * *

His dad did not talk for a long time. He let Arjun have the silence. Arjun appreciated that. He stared out the window at the passing trees, the pines and the birches, the occasional flash of a lake through them, the old signs for motels and bait shops. He did not cry. He had thought he would. But he had cried so much this summer, actually, that he seemed to have used up his crying for the moment. What he felt was quieter than crying.

After about an hour, his dad said, "Your grandpa was all right?"

"Yeah."

"I worry about him."

"Me too."

"I know it's been hard for him to decide about the cabin."

"Yeah."

"Your mom and I were thinking. Next summer maybe we rent a place up north somewhere. For a couple of weeks. Take Grandpa."

Arjun looked at his dad.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Nothing fancy. Just — a cabin somewhere. Somewhere with loons."

"Yeah."

"We were going to tell you at the right moment. Maybe now's the right moment."

"Yeah. Now's the right moment."

"Okay. We'll plan it."

Arjun looked back out the window.

Both things, he thought. Both things.

They drove. His dad put on music. The light got long across the fields.

* * *

That night Arjun sat in his own bed in his own room in St. Paul, which he had not seen in two months, and which looked strange to him — smaller than he remembered, and also fuller of his own things than he remembered. His school backpack was still against the wall where he had dropped it in June. His clothes were still in the drawer. The poster of a barn owl Nana had given him for his eighth birthday was still taped to the wall over his desk.

He put the framed heron drawing Zoe had given him on the nightstand. He put the brass compass next to it. He put the smooth stone from the stream next to that. He put Nana's 2023 diary and Nana's bird journal on his bookshelf, side by side, where he could see them from the bed.

He opened his own journal.

THE LAST NIGHT AT THE CABIN (WRITTEN AT HOME)

I did not think I would be okay. All summer I thought I would not be okay. I am not all the way okay. But I am — I am something. Something I do not have a word for.

The heron flew. The cabin sold. Grandpa is still Grandpa and is safe. Nana's journals are on my shelf. Mom is coming home on Tuesday. My other grandpa, who I did not know, is dead now, and that is sad for my mom, and I will be there when she gets off the plane, and I will hug her for as long as she needs.

I am writing these down here so I do not forget them. I want to be able to read them when I am older.

He stopped. He looked at the page. He added one more line.

You can love something without owning its ending. That is the sentence of my summer. That is the sentence I want to carry.

He closed the journal.

He turned out the light.

He lay in the dark and, for the first time in two months, there were no loons.

There was the hum of a car going down the street. There was the bark of a neighbor's dog. There was the distant rumble of a train.

He thought he would have trouble sleeping.

But he did not.

He thought of Augustus going over the water. He thought of Grandpa on the porch, waving. He thought of his mother, somewhere at thirty thousand feet, flying home.

He slept.

* * *

Priya came home on Tuesday morning.

Arjun's dad and Arjun drove to the airport to meet her. They stood at the curb outside baggage claim, and when she came through the automatic doors pulling her suitcase, she looked smaller than Arjun had remembered her. She looked older. Her hair had some gray in it that had not been there when she left in May. Her eyes were dark and deep and very tired.

She saw Arjun.

She dropped the suitcase handle.

"My boy," she said.

Arjun went to her. He went fast. She was hugging him before he got there, somehow — her arms had decided before her brain did — and she held him. She held him hard. She held him for a long time. She smelled like airplane and like the particular perfume she wore, which was a jasmine perfume his father had bought her fifteen years ago and which she still used, and she smelled also like something he could not quite place but which was India. Maybe a spice she had carried in her clothes, or the air of the place, or the particular tiredness of someone who had sat beside a dying father for three months.

"I missed you," she said into his hair.

"I missed you, Mom."

She pulled back. She looked at him. She took his face in her hands.

"You grew."

"Two inches."

"Two and a half, I think. Look at you."

She was crying but she was also smiling and those two things did not seem to bother each other.

His father took the suitcase.

They drove home.

* * *

That night she sat in the living room with Arjun on the couch beside her. His father was in the kitchen making tea — not Irish tea, the way Grandpa made it, but chai, the way Priya made it, with cardamom and cloves and milk and a great deal of sugar.

Priya told him about her father.

She told him about the hospital in Chennai. She told him about the small sunny room where he had died. She told him about the last afternoon — how he had been quiet all morning, and then in the afternoon he had opened his eyes and looked at her and said her name, and he had not said her name clearly for three weeks before that. She told him he had not been frightened. She told him she had sung to him.

"What did you sing?"

"A song he used to sing to me. A lullaby. In Tamil. I didn't remember all the words but he seemed to know I was trying."

"That's good."

"It was good."

She put her hand in his.

"I'm sorry I couldn't be with you this summer."

"You were where you needed to be, Mom."

"Arjun."

"That's what Grandpa says. He said you were where you needed to be."

"Did he? That's kind."

"Mom."

"Yes."

"I have something to show you."

He went to his room. He came back with his journal. He sat back down next to her. He put the journal in her lap.

"I wrote about the summer. The whole thing. There's — there's a heron. There's a heron in it."

"A heron?"

"Yeah. It's — just read. If you want. You don't have to."

"I want."

She opened the journal.

She read.

Arjun sat beside her on the couch and he watched her face as she read. She read slowly. She ran her finger down the pages. She smiled at some parts. She laughed, a soft single laugh, at something on about the fourth page — he could not see what. She came to a part that made her lift her hand to her mouth. She came to another part where her shoulders went still.

She came to the end.

She closed the journal.

She was crying, very quietly.

"Oh, my love," she said. "Oh, my love, this is — this is beautiful."

"It's for Nana, mostly. I mean. I think. And for Augustus. And Grandpa. And Zoe. And the cabin."

"And for you."

"Yeah. And for me."

"Arjun."

"Yeah."

"I want to tell you something that is very Bahá'í of me and you can roll your eyes if you want."

"I won't roll my eyes."

"I believe — I have always believed — that the souls of the people we love do not leave us. That we go on knowing them. That the knowing changes, but the love is permanent. Your grandmother Nana. My father now. They are not far. They are in a different room. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"And the love we give to living creatures — like your heron — that love also goes somewhere. It becomes — it becomes part of the world. It is not wasted. Not a drop of it. Do you understand?"

"Yeah."

"So all the love you have poured out this summer — for your grandmother and your grandfather and for Augustus and for the cabin — none of it is lost. It is somewhere. In you. In the heron. In the air. In the lake. It all still exists."

"I believe that."

"Do you?"

"I think I do. It's what Grandpa was trying to say, too. In a different way."

She smiled.

"Your grandfather and I have always said the same things in different languages. He calls it Ireland. I call it the Faith. But we are both talking about the same forever."

"Yeah."

She put her arm around him and pulled him against her shoulder.

"You are a good boy, Arjun Patel-O'Connor."

"You're a good mom."

"I know."

He laughed.

"Mom."

"Yes."

"Tell me a story about your dad. Something silly. From when you were a kid."

"He would have liked you," she said.

"I would have liked him."

"You did. Those three times."

"Yeah. I did."

* * *

Later that night, after his parents had gone to bed, Arjun slipped out of his room and went to the window in the hallway. The window looked east, toward the middle of the city, and past the city, toward the huge dark field of the sky.

The moon was up. A big almost-full moon. It sat above the houses and the streetlights and the lit-up Target sign on the corner of Snelling, and it looked, Arjun thought, like the same moon that had sat over the lake all summer. Because it was. Because there was only one moon. He had known that since he was five but tonight the knowing felt new. One moon. One moon for Grandpa in Green Bay and for Maren in Eau Claire and for Zoe in her house in town and for Marcus driving home late from some other rescue somewhere and for Augustus — wherever Augustus was — and for himself here at the window.

One moon, and under it everyone he loved.

He stood at the window a long time.

The moon did not move that he could see, but it was moving — slowly, as moons move, as the earth turns under them. It was moving just as Augustus had moved that morning over the water, slow and steady and sure.

Arjun put his hand flat against the glass.

The glass was cool.

Then he went back to his room, and he got into his bed, and he closed his eyes.

In the moment before sleep he thought he heard — very faintly, very far away, maybe only in his imagination — a loon.

One long call. One answering.

He smiled.

He slept.

THE END

* * *

Author's Note

This is a book about loving something you cannot keep.

I wrote it because I have loved places and people and creatures that have passed out of my life, and because I have spent many years learning — and am still learning — that the leaving of a thing does not erase the having of it. A summer is not less beautiful because it ends. A grandmother is not less loved because she is gone. A cabin is not less real because another family now owns it. A heron is not less ours because it flies away.

If you are young and you are reading this and something you love has left you — a person, a pet, a place, a friend who moved — I want you to know that your grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a kind of love. It is the shape your love takes when the thing it loves is no longer within reach. You can hold that love gently. You can write about it, or draw it, or tell someone about it. You do not have to stop loving what has gone.

Nature, I think, is our great teacher in this. Every heron that flies away, every leaf that drops, every firefly that blinks out in the grass, is a small school of not-holding-on. The natural world is not cruel when it moves and changes. It is simply being itself. We can learn from it how to be ourselves, moving and changing, open-handed, full of gratitude.

Thank you for reading. Go look at a heron, if you can. If you can't, draw one. If you can't draw one, close your eyes and picture a gray bird lifting off a lake at sunrise.

That is Augustus. That is all of us. That is love.

— Crimson Ark Publishing