Henry wishes, thinking about his mother, about her house and those perfect gorgeous birds in her backyard—as he walks out to the barn, already grateful for the quiet and the dark, the long expanse of blank white snow he has to cross—Henry wishes he could sit outside with her under the stars. He wants to sit and explain to her, as he never did when she was alive, how beautiful it was, when he was little, body flat and still on the high, wet grass of their backyard, the squish of soil: a flock, a pack, a bunch of birds would swoop down and up, soar by, and he’d stay quiet. How they all moved together in one fluid bunch, as if they were a larger organism, not quite separate, as if they intuited one another’s needs, their wants.

Everything he reads about this behavior focuses on efficiency, sensing and responding to the various magnetic pulls beneath the earth, but he’s not interested in efficiency, has always hated the idea of it. It feels like more than that, and that’s the part he wants to get right in his work—the part he wishes he could explain to his mother, to maybe ask her to help him understand it: the beauty of it, the inexplicable impossibility of their togetherness. How it cannot possibly be only about the wind and energy conservation. Eons before this, augurs used to divine omens in these flight patterns—he wishes he could tell his mother—it’s a simple fact of nature but also otherworldly, as close as he will ever get to faith.

Once, after they had lost their father—Henry’d just met Alice, Martin and Tess had gotten married at city hall and had a small party at a restaurant, Josh and Kate were just out of college—they all went camping on the land where Henry lived with Alice in the yurt he’d built. Helen planned it. Helen talked to each child individually and over a period of weeks until she’d convinced them all to come, to take trains and rent cars and take off work. Henry and Alice lived up on a high ridge that overlooked a pond, and they all had their own tents. They brought big jugs of water and they built fires and they sat outside and talked and, against everybody’s better judgment, they had fun.

The last night, Helen laid out blankets on the ground and forced them all to stay up late. They kept the fire going until close to midnight, and then she put it out and made them all stretch out on the ground. Mom, the boys said. They weren’t boys, of course, but they sounded like it, when they said her name like that. Just do it, she said. Jesus. Can’t you just do as I say when I ask? And Martin rolled his eyes, and Henry laughed and touched her up by the shoulder, and she smiled because she knew that they’d all finally give in. They lay down then, the lot of them, Tess annoyed and tired but also wanting all of them to like her, Josh saying something about ticks. But then a rush of stars had burst before them. You could make out the whole Milky Way from where they were. And minutes passed, and they all kept looking up, and a second shower of stars burst, shocking in their brightness and speed, appalling in how close they felt.