They reached the inlet as the sun came up.
It came up all at once, the way it does over the ocean, a red rim and then a gold bar and then the whole sky catching fire, and as it did a line of brown pelicans came gliding in from the south, eleven of them, skimming the face of the waves exactly the way Eli had said they would, an inch above the water, never flapping, riding the air the waves pushed up. Eli made a sound Laura had never heard him make before, something between a laugh and a gasp, and pointed, and didn't say anything at all.
And then, on a sandbar not thirty yards away, where the inlet water ran out over the flats, something moved.
Two birds. Black heads, white bellies, long orange beaks like carrots. They were walking along the edge of the water, stabbing the mud with those bright beaks, and as the sun hit them Laura could see, even without binoculars, a yellow eye ringed in red.
Eli didn't move. He didn't breathe. He raised the new binoculars very, very slowly to his face, and held them there, and Laura watched his hands, which were shaking.
"American oystercatcher," he whispered. "Two. A breeding pair, I think. Dad. Mom. That's a lifer."
"Happy birthday, buddy," Mark said softly.
Eli lowered the binoculars and turned around. His face was wet, and he was smiling, the whole of his face open to the light, and he looked from his father to his mother and back again as if he were checking that they were both really there.
"I almost didn't see this," he said. Not angry. Just stating it, the way he stated everything. Data.
"I know," Laura said. "I'm so sorry, Eli."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he held out the binoculars.
"You look," he said. "Second one's on the left. By the shell."
She took them. They were heavy and warm from his hands. She raised them to her eyes and found the sandbar, and the shell, and the bird beside it, impossibly sharp and close and bright, and the orange beak and the yellow eye and the red ring around it, and for a moment she could not see anything at all because her eyes had filled.
"Do you see it?" Eli asked anxiously. "Mom. Do you see it?"
"I see it," Laura said. "I see it, sweetheart. I see it."
Eli opened his notebook to the target list at the back, and took the pen from behind his ear, and while his mother and father stood on either side of him in the cold sand with the sun coming up over the Atlantic, he checked the second box, pressing so hard that it came through on the other side of the page.
THE END