“You got up here!” said a woman. “Good for you.”

They turned to look. It was the mother of the Eastern European family. Her English was confusingly accentless: not American nor English nor Scottish. “I wore the wrong shoes,” she said, lifting her foot to display a white sneaker half-browned with mud. “I didn’t understand.”

“No,” said David.

“Still it’s lovely. Puffin therapy,” said the woman. “They call it so.”

“I can understand that,” said Louis. He turned to look at the puffins. “They’re peaceful. They give you a sense of peace. Don’t you think, David?”

Well, yes, David looked at them and he felt better and he resented them. The birds indeed had the curvilinear heads of his father’s family. He could believe that they thought things, which he had never believed about birds. (Some people love animals for how alien they are—that was Louis—others for how like—that was David.) Already he had convinced himself that momentarily forgetting his name was something his father might have done any day of his life.

Little brothers. Fraterculi. His mizpocah. No brothers but puffins, no uncles but puffins, no cousins. He wanted to call his mother.

“It lifts your heart,” his father said to the woman, who answered, “All nature does, no?”

“No,” said David. He didn’t want it to be all nature. He wanted it to be something you had to travel for, a fairy-tale journey: a boat, another boat, a treacherous approach, an unhappy revelation, a comic one.

“Perhaps,” said Louis.

“Cormorants,” said David. “They’re not uplifting.”

“They are!” said the woman. “When they fly—”

“I’m not interested in birds when they fly,” said David. Then, to change the subject, “Where are you visiting from?”

“Tomorrow we fly ourselves. To Helsinki.”

“That’s home?” Louis asked.

“That’s home.”

“Ah,” David said, “you’re Finnish.”

“Finnish,” said Louis. “Like a fish.”

“Just so,” said the woman. “Ah, here are my people.”

Here they came. They seemed to have multiplied during their time on the island, led by the girl, laughing. She saw Louis, and waved, then her mother, to whom she ran. She said something in Finnish, a language David did not understand and therefore found irksome.

He repacked the bag, the glasses, the cheese with one wedge cut out. He drank as much of the bottle of water as he could, to make the bag lighter. For a flashing moment he thought, Maybe I’ll just walk off the cliff, then, Maybe Dad will—he didn’t want either of these things; it was all disaster or triumph for him, as usual. Why is life so easy for some people? he wondered, as he had many times in his life, though this time he wanted an actual answer. He thought it might be something you could study for.