“Now,” she said. “The old ones, old like me, and the small children—the innocent—can tell you the air feels like silk. The softest silk. We feel it coming. I was gonna say something last night, but, well … I wanted to wait for it to really be here. You seemed too sad to tell you that something that wonderful might happen and then it not happen. Because you see, sometimes all the right things can be here and the jubilee still not happen.”

Then she wrote and related the following points as if she were a teacher and there were a blackboard on the wall:

2. There must be a low water-surface temperature.

3. There must be an incoming tide.

4. Predawn.

5. Summer.

“All these things can add up to a jubilee, but they don’t have to. Scientists say it’s the low oxygen level that makes all the shrimp and fish and crab run to us, run to the surface, to sacrifice. But they can’t explain why sometimes it’s just a shrimp jubilee or just a flounder jubilee. That’s the thing of the Holy Spirit—you can try and explain it all away, but then there are some things that have no explanation, that are mystical and perfect, things that no list in the world will make clear.” She looked directly at me now, her face young. “Life … exactly the same. Some things are beyond our understanding.”

I nodded, because that was all I could do.

“Some people use this list to remove the mystery. But there is only so much that can be proven. Why would anyone, ever, want to remove the mystery of life?”

“Not me,” I said. “Never. Not that. What’s left without the mystery, the unseen?”

Birdie smiled at me as if I were twelve years old and I’d brought home a straight-A report card.

“When I was little,” Sadie said, “I used to have bad dreams about being lost underwater where I couldn’t find my way up or down, and I couldn’t breathe.”

“Unfortunately that sounds like my real life,” I said, attempting humor but missing by a million galaxies.

“I always woke up before I burst through the surface of the water.” Sadie smiled at me. “But, you—you’ll burst through any day now.”

“Yep.” And the laugh was real. “And get caught in a net.”

Birdie laughed in that quiet, sweet way of a mother. “Most swim free,” she said as she ripped the paper off the pad and headed for the trash can.

I touched her arm. “Can I have that?”

“The list?” Birdie asked.

Sadie laughed. “Remember, Mom, Ellie is obsessed with lists.”

I poked Sadie with my foot. “That’s not why. I want it to remind me that some things can’t be explained with a list.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Sadie stood. “In fact, I think I have said that.”