Sometimes she was surprised they’d lasted as a couple, not just for a year or two but fifteen now, both of them growing into their lives like fingers fitting gloves. Russell had been made the head of the collection and went to conferences around the world. And she had published papers on migration and zugunruhe, and biogenic magnetite in the brains of migrating Savannah Sparrows. There was a time when they’d tried (halfheartedly, without success) to have children. But that had passed. And after a sense of failure and defeat, they had recovered and a new feeling emerged, a deepening that drew them closer in ways subtle and profound—both tied more to their work than before. They bought a plot of land in upstate New York and camped there some weekends, in a green nylon tent, dreaming of the house they were in no rush to build and one day retire in. True, Russell was often gone, traveling, and she was often lost in her own labwork; and their attentions to each other had attenuated to a comfortable neglect; yet they were not unhappy. Russell was a cushion, something solid to press against. Was that not love? Predictability, knowing where each of them would be. A GPS reading. A way of orienting through the turbulence of the world? Their life went on, unthoughtful, unmindful, until that morning the call came, and she thought, Russell, my Russell. Why had she not known where he’d be?

Something now about the library on Trachis Island reminded Ana of the collection rooms, the smell of fumigants, the waxed floors. Books, birds—both of them preserved. In the collection rooms, the living rubbed against the dead all the time, all those birds entombed inside aluminum drawers like seeds or husks dried long ago; and in the old library, the books were like that too, with foxed pages inside cardboard covers. Was it this that gave her the smallest sand grain of solace? The dark wood? The leaded-glass windows, the upright piano in the corner?

Russell told her one night after making love in the empty halls of the museum that if you listened carefully, you could hear all the dead birds in their display cases communing with each other.

What does it sound like? Ana asked.

Esperanto, he replied. Only for avifauna.

I see, she said.

Actually, it’s a kind of low humming.

He’d tried to look serious, but he was joking, of course. And yet Russell did, on one occasion, confess to believing in ghosts. Not the Esperanto-speaking kind, or stuffed animals in glass cases speaking with their syringes. But real ones. Real ghosts.

You’re not serious? Ana had asked, raising one eyebrow.

Well—Russell nodded—if you must know, I am.