He continues to observe the nest while outside the dusk thickens around the pine trees, three of them, and the single sugar maple that roots itself in the soft, sandy soil, surrounded by a sea of poison ivy. From the nest there is the glint—some gold, more silver—of quivering wings. The nest is a dark brood of shadow in the upper corner, but he can visualize their formation, huddled against each other—maybe for warmth, although it’s still warm outside. The sky is clear, speckled with stars, and it will get cooler in a few hours when, as usual, he comes back to examine them again, before he tries to go to sleep. They’ll be still, shivering slightly, their feelers probing, testing, aware, alert in their slumber. He’ll feel the oddness of his observational pattern. This is the second night he’s come to the window—with Andrea supine on her bed, wrapped in milky-white sheets—to look them over one last time before he goes to bed. In the afternoon he came up to examine the nest, watching as they entered and exited through the crack, positioning themselves on the flange of aluminum before launching out into the haze over the yard, dropping slightly before striking out with precision, as if they knew exactly where to go.

And maybe they did. There was a persistence to the way they came and went. In the summer heat the nest was half full, or half empty. The lucky ones returned with bits of food, green leaf parts, and even, in one case, an offering of a spider—which the workers chewed vigorously and shoved into the cells. (In the cells the larvae could be seen wiggling softly.) That afternoon the nest served to remind him of their last time together, as a family, when he and Lydia had attended the Hook Mountain Elementary School spring concert and heard Andrea playing her flute with the band. A morass of notes, most off-key, somehow cohered into a song called “Hot Cross Buns.” Mr. Frank, the band director, was pounding his baton up and down so vigorously that it was clear he did so to keep the audience’s attention on him and away from the atrociousness of the band. But now he’s feeling odd about his reaction to the nest. He leans close to the glass and whispers to them: O ye who find within the brain stem the semblance of orderly existence! O ye who shall inherit the earth. O ye brutally adaptive creatures!

Certainly he has been deprived of sleep, not only because of tensions caused by the pending divorce but also by the noise of his daughter’s breathing, which was caused by sleep apnea, by large adenoids—most likely—that were creating a disturbance in her breathing patterns, deep silent moments when the breath ceased before her involuntary systems kicked in and she took great sucking gasps of air that woke him up—if he was lucky enough to be asleep. His friend Jenks had made the diagnosis and stated that she had probably been suffering for a few years.—You’re just noticing this now, Russ, because you’re up at night and aware of her breathing. And no, I don’t think this has anything at all to do with family tensions. It’s not a psychosomatic reaction of any kind.