He watches them in the morning after Andrea has left for camp, sipping his coffee, examining their activities, speaking to himself. O ye who have no weight on the world. O ye who can survive the simple redundant tasks! O ye who perform with precise grace! Touching his fingers to his lips. In the afternoon the heat is relentless, thick. The sun sits in the sky with acetylene brilliance, chalky and pure. The nest, he thinks, is a frightening soothsayer. Andrea is afraid of bees, wasps, and the smaller flying insects. Not so much a phobia—because certainly she goes to sea camp, and he assumes that she confronts insects there, in the fields, where they shoot archery in the morning before they go out to sail, sending arrows into round pads stuffed with hay. (Dad, even your own heartbeat can interfere with your shot; even your heart can mess you up, Dad, she said.) But she has a skittish fear of flying insects. He and Lydia used to trace the fear back to a moment in Spain. Locating the origin of her fear had seemed an act of deep love; the impossibility of parental detective work made it fun and infinitely complex. The original sting took place about thirty miles from Mojacar, in a small village in the Costa Blanca. Their house was up on a buff overlooking the Mediterranean. It was evening and the light drew low across the rubble as they followed the path along the road, past a few peripheral apartments, up around the switchbacks, to the flat mesa where the house stood, windswept, recently whitewashed, stark white in the fading light, surrounded by deep green vegetation. Up there the wind sang through the guy wires of a shortwave tower behind the patio. The villa was owned by a former patient, a retired Federal Reserve VP named Connors who had suffered severe wrist problems, carpal tunnel complicated by the early stages of arthritis. (It’s from moving all that gold around, he joked. The stuff is real. We’re not GS but we still have plenty of the heavy metal. Money is a weighty thing. I’ve thought a lot about this and I’m sure you’ll understand when I say that much of my job was beyond my own comprehension.) Along the back of the house, the white stone driveway was bordered with a flagstone wall. Each time they came home from the beach she mounted it and walked, stepping carefully. They stayed behind her, that evening, a few yards back, watching. The nest was in a crevice between two stones. This time, her foot hit the nest. The wasps stung the back of her neck—ah the pale, delicate skin! and the top of her feet—oh those tiny little feet! They held her and soothed her and explained that wasps weren’t bad or nasty or anything and that they were really nice. Funny bees. Good bees, they said. Bees were softer and bumbly. Bees were just as surprised and maybe as scared as she was, even more so, perhaps. From the bee’s vantage, you’re a big giant girl. You’re huge to the bees. Bees are scared of you. Scaredy-cat bees. They did everything they were supposed to do as good parents to make the situation clear, real, and understandable, and to shed light onto the complexities of the natural world, but she still cried too long and woke that night asking for help and, from that moment on, shied away from anything that moved like a stinging insect: flies, gnats, mosquitos, and even small birds. O ye sublime creatures, he whispers to the nest in the window. He wants to sing to them and examine them and shove his hand up there and touch. His fingers are long, elegant, beautiful. He looks at them, pressed against the glass. The wasps hardly notice. They glance, jitter a bit, but are much too busy to care because the day is heating up, and heat is their fuel, and they must move in exact correlation to the temperature. The sun lurks over the shed in the yard. The sun pounds against the dry grass. The trees jab the unmoving air. His fingers flatten against the window. The tips are longer than most. He likes to think there’s some predestination in their form. Yet he knows this isn’t true. Fate is like a reversible coat. Andrea’s fear has given him the obligation of removing the nest before they bring nightmares into a sleep already disrupted by her large adenoids.