On Trachis Island, Ana recalled all of this, particularly the afternoons beside the lake, the bronzed oaks, the icy breeze, the smell of his cigarettes. What came back as well was this: One afternoon she saw a blue and white bird hover and dive into the lake. She stood and shouted to her father: There it is! Something diving into the water. Something hibernating for winter!

A second later, the bird flew up again from the water, a silver fish in its mouth. It was a kingfisher, her father explained; and ever since then the Alcedinidae, the kingfishers, became Ana’s favorite family of birds.

Why did she recall all of this that night on Trachis Island? Was it the sense of expectancy, of waiting for something that would never show up as she had all those evenings in autumn beside the lake? Was it her father she was thinking about? The odor of his aftershave (Aqua Velva), his red woolen coat, the Chesterfields, the headlights winking across the lake at dusk? Did the loss of her husband bring back that other, original loss, as if one were tied to the other in a lineage of grief, like a country, a latitude, a landscape, she had to visit again? It was more than a week now since Ana had heard the news, and nothing had become any easier.

There was one other thing Ana recalled from that autumn on Lake Ronkonkoma years ago. One night her father looked up the word “migration” in The Book of Knowledge; they had the full set in the basement of their house. He wanted to prove to Ana at last that birds indeed did fly south in winter, and didn’t hibernate under lakes. She couldn’t recall what the chapter said about bird migration, or even if there was a chapter on bird migration. But she did remember him reading a definition of “migration.” “Migration,” from the Latin migratus, he’d read. To remove, to leave, to abandon one region for another.

The storm surge passed early that morning. The winds abated; the sky grew calm. The day broke chilly and brilliant. Kevin brought his coffee out to the stone terrace. Leaves and branches lay scattered across the lawn. The beach below looked rearranged, with a fresh shelf of sand spat up from the storm. The electricity had hummed back on sometime in the early morning.

In the kitchen, he took out a sack of potatoes, a bag of onions, a carton of eggs. Sheila Quinn had called earlier. Her basement had flooded, and she couldn’t make it in. Kevin had told her not to worry; he’d deal with breakfast and the room cleaning himself. He hoped he’d see her that evening.