Back in the lab, she collected all her sparrows—even Rothschild, who’d recovered over the winter and was healthy again. She brought them in one cage down to the lobby, where Armand went outside to hail a cab. The streets were already wilting in New York City, the sky a wash of brown. The Mister Softee truck on Washington Square kept playing its idiot theme.

Armand held the cab door open and helped her inside with the cage.

You are going with all of them?

Yes, she said.

He leaned down to the cage and waved to the birds au revoir, then closed the door and stepped back to the curb.

The driver wore an olive turban. The sun fell through trees along the Belt Parkway. Some people were flying box kites beside the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. She directed the driver all the way out to Jamaica Bay, along the Cross Bay Boulevard, and into the wildlife refuge. The afternoon was growing old. Ana paid the driver and climbed from the cab. He asked if he should wait, and she told him no, don’t bother.

She hoofed her cage to the farthest point of the refuge. Some late birders looked suspiciously at her caged sparrows. The breeze was stiff off the channel. When she’d walked as far as she could, she set the cage in the sand and opened the wire door. The birds didn’t fly right away. They hopped around and seemed to sniff the breeze. That was the strange thing. Even Rothschild stayed put.

She walked away and sat at a distance on a park bench, shivering, and didn’t watch on purpose. The sun was a pale red ball dropping through smog, the towers of the city already lit up in the west. Planes kept looming out of Kennedy. In another twenty minutes, all her birds had flown.

Twenty-One

In summer on Trachis Island, the beach plums blossomed, the blue flag, the marsh forget-me-nots. Ferries churned in the harbor. The summer crowds returned in increments. All over the island, houses were opened, aired, storm windows replaced with screens. Everywhere lay reminders of the crash: the military trucks, the Jeeps, the new construction of Quonset huts at the naval yard. The ferries brought tour buses from the mainland, more than ever before, filled not with the usual island hoppers but with people who’d come specifically to see the site of the crash. Who would have predicted such a grim attraction at Caginish Point? During the high season the ferries grew so overbooked they had to add two extra sailings each day.