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the leaves and the treetops waved against the sky. I went to where the trees stood tight together, the ground between piled with branches and old husks. Birds lived in the tops of the palms, and other things lived in the dead branches and husks, rats and lizards and all kinds of bugs. If it was quiet you could hear them move.
    I looked at the pile, trying to think of parrots and cages. There were parrots in the trees—probably right then, above me—but that wasn’t what Robbert meant. If I was looking at palm trees, I should be thinking something else . But I couldn’t think of anything. I turned around. On the far side of the meadow stood Robbert’s building.
    Halfway back I left the path and entered the grass, bending until it rose above my head. Crickets launched themselves around me. At the edge of the grass, I squatted lower. Robbert’s building stood on cinder-block stilts. I crept behind a stilt so no one on the other side, if they looked underneath, could see me. Most of Robbert’s back windows weren’t windows anymore at all, but mesh-covered exhaust vents, for machines. The only window left was right where I stood. I looked in.
    This was the back room, all cabinets and boxes, but the door was ajar, and beyond it lay the foot of Robbert’s bed. The white sheet had been kicked away—which I knew because I could see the foot that had kicked it, now strapped with white bandages. I heard different machines, and I wondered if any of them were helping the girl.
    Irene came through the door and I ducked down. I heard her flipping switches and peeked up. She held a dark page up to the light, and the page became a picture of a gray arm with white bones. The girl’s arm, though it wasn’t really gray. We’d seen bird’s bones, and fish, even rats. But those bodies had feathers or scales or fur, a covering. Were the bones inside her really white? Were there the same dark pages of me? Irene snapped off the lamp and walked out. I retreated to the grass. It was almost time.
    • • •
    I reached the yard almost exactly when Eleanor and Isobel did. Robbert rose from where he’d been sitting on the kitchen steps, swatting dust off the seat of his pants. When he saw Caroline wasn’t there, he looked off toward the beach, then climbed onto the porch and looked again.
    “Stay here.” Robbert jumped off the steps and broke into a jog. “Stay!” he called over his shoulder, and disappeared.
    We stood in the yard, thinking about where he’d gone.
    “If something was wrong he would have called for Irene,” said Eleanor. “But he didn’t. That’s because of Veronika not coming back before. Caroline might have decided something new was more important, too.”
    “Except Robbert is also afraid of the water,” Isobel said. “He told me to stop at the end of the path, before I reached the dock.”
    “Did you see a boat?” asked Eleanor. “Maybe the two men in the picture have come looking for her.”
    Isobel shook her head. “I saw a storm petrel.”
    “Maybe the two men drowned,” said Eleanor.
    We turned at the wheeze of the classroom screen door. “Where is Caroline?” Irene called.
    We pointed to the beach. Irene went to the edge of the porch and craned her head, but you couldn’t see the beach path from there, so she came to us—none of us saying anything, since she wasn’t saying anything—and went on her toes. Irene dropped to her flat feet and frowned.
    “Go sit on the kitchen porch, all of you. Stay there.”
    The kitchen steps meant we still weren’t using the classroom, where the girl was sleeping. We got halfway to it before we realized Irene was gone. We stopped to watch her disappear, as if Irene’s leaving had become another problem we’d been set to solve.
    “Caroline is the parrot,” said Isobel. “And there’s something else on the beach.”
    “Or the beach is the parrot,” said Eleanor. “And something happened to Caroline.”
    We couldn’t know which until Robbert or Irene