That was the thing. She was tired. She had been tired for thirteen years, and lately it had begun to feel like something more than tired, like a weight she had been carrying so long she could no longer remember what her arms felt like without it.
Thump, thump, thump, went Eli's heel upstairs.
Laura got up from the kitchen table, rinsed her teacup, and turned out the light.
In the morning Eli was at the back window before she was out of bed.
She found him there at six-fifteen, still in his pajamas, a pair of cheap plastic binoculars pressed to his face and a spiral notebook open on the windowsill beside him. The notebook was green. It was his fourth one that year. On the cover, in black marker, he had written BIRD LOG VOLUME 4 and underneath, in smaller letters, PRIVATE (EXCEPT DAD).
"Morning, sweetheart."
"There's a downy woodpecker on the suet," Eli said without lowering the binoculars. "Female. No red patch. She's been here since six-oh-four. That's eleven minutes. That's a record for this feeder."
"That's great, Eli."
"It's not great, it's just data." But he was smiling, she could hear it. He lowered the binoculars and wrote something in the notebook in his cramped, slanting handwriting, the letters pressed so hard into the page that they came through on the other side. "Mom. Did you know the brown pelican was almost extinct in the sixties? Because of DDT. It made their eggshells too thin, and when the mother sat on the eggs they just cracked. There were only like a couple hundred left in some places. And now there's thousands. On the Outer Banks you can see them every day. They fly in lines right over the waves, like, an inch above the water, and they never even flap. They just glide on the air the wave pushes up."
"I didn't know that."
"I'm going to see them," Eli said. "And American oystercatchers. They have orange beaks like carrots and yellow eyes with a red ring. They're near threatened in North Carolina. There's only like three hundred breeding pairs. If I see one, that's a lifer. That's what you call it when you see a bird for the first time in your whole life. A lifer."
He turned the notebook toward her. On a fresh page near the back he had written OUTER BANKS TARGET LIST and underneath it, numbered, in his heavy hand: 1. Brown Pelican. 2. American Oystercatcher. 3. Black Skimmer. 4. Royal Tern. 5. Osprey (not a lifer but still). 6. Piping Plover (probably won't happen). Each entry had a small empty box beside it, waiting to be checked.
Laura looked at the list for a long time.
"That's a good list," she said finally.
"Eleven days," Eli said. "Then we leave."
She went into the kitchen and made coffee and stood at the counter with her back to him while it brewed, and she did not cry, because she had decided a long time ago that crying in front of Eli only confused him. He could not read faces well. Tears made him anxious, and anxiety made him loud, and loud made everything worse. So she did what she always did. She held it.