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day.
    Anna was a block off, a half block, up the marble stoop. She was running up both flights of steps; she was out of breath, Katherine could hear her. When she opened their bedroom door, her face was flushed. She shut the door behind her. Laughed.
    “A bobolink, Katherine,” she said. “Hurry. Close thewindow.” Speaking as if Katherine hadn’t just been roused from a fever, as if she hadn’t only but recently summoned the strength to stand at all. “Oh, honestly,” Anna said when she saw Katherine not moving, watching her. “Darling.” She slipped the box onto her bed, then crossed the room and shut the window. “You’re looking well,” she declared, staring deep into Katherine’s eyes.
    “I’ve been sick all day. Where were you?”
    “Jeannie Bea knows all the cures. I only know how to amuse you.”
    “Amuse
me?” Katherine repeated. “Where did you go?”
    “I’ve been trying to tell you. Stop asking questions, and I will.”
    Anna crossed the room again and collected the box from her bed. She held it firmly with both hands, but gently, too. “A bobolink,” she said. “For you.” And now like an illusionist with a practiced trick, she freed the box of its slightly askew lid—such a strangely hued box, Katherine thought, so like Anna to be out there toting a bigheaded color. Into her free hand, Anna scooped up the bobolink and let the bird stretch one wing and settle, let the bird flaunt the bright coal-blackness of its feathers, the drifts of snow-white across its small, proud back, the straw-colored drift down its back. The bird cranked its head right, and blinked.
    “Come on, bird,” Anna encouraged. “Show Katherine what you’re made of.” Katherine could see the pulsing heartin the bird’s elastic chest, the cinders of fear in its eyes. Quietly, sweetly, Anna began to hum until the bird gave up its song, which wasn’t shrill and wasn’t haunting, just a daylight summer song.
    “He’s a soprano,” Anna said.
    Katherine closed her eyes and took a long, dry breath. She thought of Cape May, just a week before, and the promises she’d thought the sisters had made to each other. “Where did you get him?”
    “By the river. The Schuylkill. Oh, Katherine. It was such a day!” Anna moved toward Katherine and brought the singing bird closer. It spread and settled its wings but made no move to fly.
    “By yourself?” Katherine leaned away from Anna and against the window harder.
    “No,” Anna said, her words growing sharper. “Not actually. Bennett was with me.”
    “Isn’t that nice?”
    “Yes. In fact it was.”
    The bobolink was growing restless in Anna’s hands. She turned from Katherine, slipped across the room, and lowered the bird into the box. She slid on the lid, leaving enough room for air, then turned back around to Katherine, hands on her hips. There were dull green stains on one elbow of Anna’s dress. The choker she often wore was missing.
    “I thought Bennett was working,” Katherine said flatly.
    “I went to the bakery to find you something sweet. I thought that maybe it would help, maybe it would make you feel better. But Bennett said that maybe you’d like wildflowers instead, that the shop was slow, that he could come with me. I came home. I got the hatbox. You were sleeping. He met me in the park.”
    “You came in and out and I didn’t hear you?” Astonished, Katherine searched her memory, but the morning was oceanic, elastic, a blur. The morning had been Jeannie Bea, and her mother’s voice in the hall, her father’s dark suit, a cool compress on her head. The morning hadn’t been Anna.
    “You were talking to yourself in your sleep. Katherine. Darling. You had a fever.”
    “Wildflowers,” Katherine said unhappily. “In a hatbox.” She turned and stared out the window, where outside Marty and his cousins were gathered on his stoop, their game of penny toss over.
    “It was the biggest box I had.”
    “Weren’t you afraid someone might see