Bird imagines his own parents teaching him this: mud streaked, wading in the sea. Laughing together, the way he remembers. Reeling in a line heavy with prey. He wonders, suddenly, what time it is, what his mother is doing right now, if whatever she’s planning has already begun. Above them the sky stretches wide and flat and blue, but he scans it anyway, as if they might spot plumes of smoke drifting all the way from the city.
Crabs eat chicken? he asks, pushing the thought away, and Sadie nods. They eat everything, she says.
My mom told me once, she goes on, rocking back on her heels, about this thing that happened where she grew up. Sometimes, like one night a year, all the crabs get confused and run up on the shore. It’s like the tide and the phase of the moon, or something. A jubilee, it’s called. You wake up in the middle of the night and go down to the beach and the water is just full of them. They practically crawl out—you can just reach in and pull them out, bucketsful. She and her cousins and aunts and uncles used to do it. People would fill their trucks. And they’d build a big bonfire and cook the crabs and have a midnight feast, right there.
Wow, Bird says.
She said when she was a girl, she would go to bed in her bathing suit every night in summer and lie there awake in the dark, just praying for a jubilee.
Sadie is lost in thought, her eyes trained on something off in the distance.
She always said we’d go down some summer and visit that side of the family so I could meet all my cousins, but we never did.
Overhead a hawk circles, lazy, in the sky.
We’ll find her, Bird says. My mom, Domi—I’m sure they can find her.
They’ve been looking, Sadie says. I don’t know if she’s still out there.
He has never heard her sound so uncertain, and this disorients him.
If she’s out there, Bird says confidently, they’ll find her. His mother, he thinks, always keeps her promises.
This thing your mom is planning, Sadie says, this is it, Bird, it’s going to change everything.
The tiniest of pauses, before she continues.
I mean, it has to. Right?
The little hitch in her voice, like a splinter, snags Bird’s attention. Sadie’s eyes appear to be fixed on the horizon, but in the warm afternoon light they shine glass-bright, glazed with tears. His own eyes go liquid and hot. He thinks of everything his mother has told him, of all the years his father has been trying to protect him. Of the man in the pizza parlor, the man at the Common. The woman with her dog. Sadie’s parents, his mother’s parents. His father’s parents retreating from their lives, Mrs. Pollard crouched anxiously beside his computer, D. J. Pierce’s spit falling inches from his shoe. Everything that needs to be changed feels immense and immeasurable.
You know, he says. We could build a fire.
It works: her eyes come back from the realm of what if to what is. Right here? she says.
In the fireplace, Bird says. We don’t have any crabs, but we can have a fire.
* * *
? ? ?
Together, they lay out the wood. A small and concrete thing. My dad showed me how, Sadie says, he was a Boy Scout as a kid. He knew how to do lots of useful stuff, like tie knots, and find north using the stars. You stack it like a log cabin, like this. Dried grass, then sticks, then logs.
Bird flushes. His father has never taught him to do anything useful like this. Like the three little pigs, Bird says. Sadie laughs, and he feels an odd twinge of pride. It feels good, making someone else laugh.
Here goes, Sadie says, and lights a match with a quick grating flick.
The dried grass catches right away, and then the twigs, a burst of gratifying orange. Then the whole thing collapses and goes dark. Huff, puff, Sadie says. With a stick she sweeps the remnants of their fire aside. Let’s try again.
They rebuild the crosshatches of wood, and Bird looks for something to help it catch faster, and it’s then that he spots the stack of newspapers, set by the hearth. He reaches for one, begins to crumple it, then stops.
Look, he says.
The date on the paper is almost fifteen years old. The middle of the Crisis, they both realize. sixth straight day of disruptions roil dc; 400 arrested; 12 rioters, 6 officers slain.
A photo covers the entire front page: Washington, DC, ablaze, a crowd of people on the run. Attacking? Fleeing? They can’t tell, only that from the sharp angles of their bodies—arms and legs thrown wide—they are moving fast, forcefully, instinctively. They wear black, from the hats pulled low over their foreheads to the masks and scarves across their faces, all the way down to the lug-soled boots on their feet; they could be protesters or authorities, it’s impossible to say. On the pavement, almost obscured, lies a woman’s body, her face turned aside, blood matting her hair. In the background the Washington Monument juts like a single raised finger, dark against a smoldering orange sky.