They wait until no one is around.

She looked at her father. There was a line of flour dust across his forehead where he’d taken off his baking cap. He sipped from the cardboard cup, a bamboo fishing rod in the other hand. He had the smallest smirk on his face. She crossed her arms; she was determined to see the birds fly into the lake.

I’ll wait, she said.

Suit yourself, he shrugged.

He thought it wouldn’t last long, a day or two, that she’d grow bored—but he didn’t really know his daughter. Each evening for the next two weeks, she went to the lake after supper and waited with a heavy flashlight, a pair of army binoculars, a winter coat, a thermos of hot chocolate (her mother’s touch).

Finally, her father had to confess; Ana’s mother made him do so.

Frank, she asked one night over dinner. When are you going to tell her?

Soon, soon, he said.

Francis?

Okay. Okay. Her father put down his fork and turned to Ana.

They don’t go under the lake, he said.

Who doesn’t?

The birds. They don’t spend the winter under there. They fly south in winter. They go away.

Ana stopped chewing her food.

I don’t believe you, she said.

Her father threw his hands in the air and turned to her mother.

See?

It’s your fault, Frank, her mother observed.

He tried again, leaning down to her level at the table.

Honey, I made it up, the stuff about the lake, it’s not true.

Daddy lied! Peter shouted.

Peter! her mother scolded.

Ana started eating again. He could say whatever he wanted. This time, she didn’t believe him at all.

After dinner, Ana put on her boots again and walked to the lake. Her father joined her as a kind of penance. All that autumn, until December, each evening after dinner, he went with her, with his own thermos of black coffee, his Chesterfields, his coat. In the end, Frank Gathreaux rather enjoyed those twilight vigils with his daughter, waiting for nothing at all, even though he complained about them to her mother at the time.

Decades later, when Ana told friends the story, she added a final twist that Frank Gathreaux would’ve appreciated: it turned out there was a kind of nighthawk, the Common Poorwill (Phalaenoptilus nuttallii), that hibernated, half frozen, not at the bottom of a lake but in moist hollows in the high California desert. She found this out in graduate school one night in the library, reading an article in American Birds. She’d wanted to tell her father. Did he have any inkling? She’d never know. He’d died years earlier, unexpectedly, a coronary on the golf course on a December afternoon. Ana was nineteen years old at the time. He’d made it to the sixteenth hole.