The rain lessens as the afternoon drones on, drops heavy from the eaves of the house. Eventually Olivia takes her teacup to the kitchen and finds Hewar standing at the window, looking outside. On his face is a smile that deepens his wrinkles, a pull of pure amazement, and her first thought is to get her camera to capture his expression. But then he sees her and motions her to him. There, outside the window on a wire, is a bird with dark, almost iridescent, black-and-green feathers tipped in yellow, giving itself a bath in the mist, its call dipping and rising and clicking from one song to the next. When it ruffles its feathers, its chest puffs out, sheened in purple, and when it stretches its wings, the feathers spread like many fingers.
By the time she hurries back with her camera, the rain has stopped, and steam seeps from the cement. But the bird is still there, shivering itself dry. She shoots through the glass, moving slightly to play with the depth of the wires. The bird is beautiful, but not what she wants. She wants Hewar. His reaction. Him but more than him. The reverberation. Because his joy—face open with childlike bliss and those large, lovely ears—affects her, and thus could affect others, and with that, this click of a camera feels like the beginning, like the first undulation of a wave. Hope shudders itself loose. She stands farther back to get him in the shot. Click. He turns to her, eyebrows lifted, expectant, asking her to share in what he loves.
And then he is talking, and Olivia realizes Delan is behind her, watching the bird as well.
“It’s what you call a starling,” Delan says. “Usually you see them in flocks. He’s telling you what they do, how they move in giant swarms, dancing in the sky. They move together, thousands of them.”
“A murmuration,” she says. “I’ve read about that.”
“Reading about it is like reading about love. You need to see it. To feel it. We’re talking thousands of birds, and not one bird leading. All synchronized but without a leader. Because each one connects, really connects, to its neighbors, to the ones around them. And with that, thousands move as one.”
From the hall, Lailan emerges. “Tell her,” Olivia says.
And so he does, with sweeping arm motions like someone casting a spell, and the girl’s mouth hangs open as she stares at the bird on the wire as if it were a representative of this wizardry. Olivia, too, is captivated. Drawn in by his flourish, by a moment in which there is just joy, spun from a tale and a telling. It feels good to laugh, as much as it feels wrong. Lailan, mesmerized, suddenly grabs on to the counter before anyone can stop her, kicking her legs till she’s at the window. The bird, startled, flies away.
Night, morning, afternoon. The rusted, inching turn of the world. Somehow it feels as though life is flaunting its continuation. Sun bright. Clouds triumphant. The world is gorgeous and unruffled and unnoticing. This is what she’s trying to reconcile: blinks of destruction amid beauty. Everything combined with the unfazed tick of the clock.
The picnic is still happening. Up in the mountains, but not where the fighting is. When Delan tells her this, his distinction falls short of comforting.
“Just key places is where they fight,” he adds, seeing her doubt. “High up. We don’t go there.”
So she finds mountain-appropriate clothes—tennis shoes, long pants, a lightweight shirt. And she feels guilty to do just this, to keep going and be the one to wake up when others do not. To wash her hair and decide what to wear and think of photographs and love and fears and a future. In the mirror, she spots her necklace. The tree of life. A reminder of an eternal connection between this realm and that, the tree’s branches touching the heavens. Every time you raise your arm, her father told her when he gave her the necklace, I see your mother reaching for your hand.
“It’s a choice,” Delan says when he finds her in his room, watching the street. “You’re thinking about what happened. But it’s a choice not to. You put it out of your mind.”
She turns to him. Thrown. His tone borders on demanding. Impatient. Body angled as if he’s ready to leave the room, as if he were ready to go from the moment he entered. “How,” she manages to ask, “is that even an option?”
“You, who wants to control everything, your thoughts too—you ask how?”
“Not this. This is different.”
“If you were to surrender after something like this, you would never live your life.”
Flippant almost. As if he’s just told her to deal with the fact that it’s hot outside. “Here,” she says, trying to keep her voice level, “that might be true. Because this happens. Things like this happen. But I can’t just do that.”
“Anywhere, this happens,” he says. “Where we live, you see a man fall on the sidewalk from a heart attack or someone who’s overdosed in a hallway—do you let it destroy you?”
“I let it affect me. Yes. And those are different than a bomb.”
“Death is death. The same outcome. You who saw your mother—”
“Stop,” she says. Anger splayed. Every inch of her pulses with it. She tries to breathe in, to clear a space within her for logic and rationale, but all she sees is this man she thought she knew, accusing her of being too soft. A man who’s suddenly callous in the light of tragedy. “My mother,” she says. “That did destroy me.”
“But this was not your mother. That’s what I’m saying. These were people you didn’t know. You don’t fold after this.”
“I’m not allowed to feel for people I don’t know? How dare you come after me for this.”
“Come after you? I’m trying to help!”
“By telling me to move on? To get over it? How can you just move on? How can
