is made of trapdoors, each moment plunging you into a memory. That his wife is dead is one thing; that she died in such a harrowing, inexplicable manner is another. That phone call. We’ve found a body part. We suspect it belonged to Aurelia. And then, the morning he had to drive to a morgue alone and identify her body. No, not her body—a carcass. Bloated, broken, and waxy from time in the water, picked at by animals before a farmer found her.
The ground still shifts beneath his feet when he thinks about it. And yet he hasn’t told anyone about how she was found. Not her family, not his. How could he speak of such a thing? How could he ever begin to scale such horror with mere words?
As he sits in the woods he recognizes the impulse that rises up in him as he scans the trees, the unquestionable certainty that any second now, Aurelia will walk through the clearing with her camera in one hand and a handful of pine cones for the baby in the other. She’ll be smiling, her faced flushed with whatever new scene she’s managed to snatch with her lens. The sun will rest on her blonde hair, which trails behind her in gold waves.
Instead, the small figure of Gaia reappears then through a prism of trunks, running toward him with something cupped in her hands, and the re-realization that his wife is dead, that the sweet, innocent girl bouncing toward him will grow up without her mother, rains down on him like a shower of burning oil.
“Look, Daddy! Look!”
In a moment she is there, breathless from the run and excitement, and he sees what she has found: a baby bird, about three inches long, fuzzy-headed, eyes bulging out of livid red skin, legs hooked like claws.
“Is she dead, Daddy?” Gaia says, panicked.
She allows him to scoop the nestling gently from her hands into his own warm palms, where he inspects it closely. One tiny eye creaks open.
“No,” he tells Gaia. “Not dead at all. Where did you find it?”
She turns and points in the direction of the woods. “By that tree.”
“On the ground?”
She nods. Coco seizes fistfuls of his sweater to haul herself to a standing position, then reaches over to pluck the bird from his grasp.
“No, Coco!” Gaia yells. He tries to jerk his palm away from Coco, but she manages to plant her hand heavily on its head, prying a small but distinctive “cheep” from its mouth.
“Did she hurt it, Daddy?” Gaia says, her eyes glistening with tears, and before he can reassure her she throws a fierce look at her sister. “Naughty Coco!”
“Ma-ma-ma,” Coco answers happily.
“It’s still moving,” he says, turning toward a shaft of bright sunlight to inspect the bird more closely. “He looks very tired. I expect his mum will be looking for him.”
Both he and Gaia raise their eyes to the canopy above, as though a mother bird will appear, searching for her lost chick. When no such bird appears, they turn their eyes back to the helpless creature in his palms, which is now opening and closing its beak as though making an effort to talk.
“We should get her something to drink,” Gaia offers. “And perhaps some food. I can look for worms. Should I look for worms, Daddy?”
He tells her instead to take him to where she found the bird in the first place. With one arm he scoops up Coco onto his hip, then trudges across the crisp carpet of leaves and twigs after Gaia, who meticulously retraces her steps to the precise location where she found the baby bird at the foot of a towering pine tree.
“I think I can see a nest!” Gaia announces, craning her head so far back she almost falls over. “Up there, Daddy! I think its mummy is there, too.”
That the nest is there at all, much less with mother bird in situ awaiting the safe return of her lost chick, is unlikely. But Tom plays along, sharply aware that the bird’s rescue is accruing symbolic weight with each passing second, as though the crack in the planet caused by Aurelia’s death can be mended by returning this bird to its own family, its own mother. No matter how much he believes that he is able to accept this most terrible of losses, he cannot undo the sensation of being mightily off-kilter, at once accelerated and freeze-framed, and he recognizes the sudden burst of longing in his