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Henry let out a short, broken laugh that sounded more like a wheeze than anything. John did not know what to make of it—what it meant, what emotion it held. Everything had been so uncertain since the fall. He searched Henry’s face, riddled with patches of dead skin and salt stains. His eyes, though glassy and almost glazed over, were still so, so blue. John wrung out a wet rag.
“A bird—here,” Henry said after wetting his cracked lips with a touch of his tongue. “I couldn’t remember the last time I saw one.”
Passing the cloth on Henry’s forehead, John found it burning. He thought of the seabird sketch nailed to the wall of his berth. Henry had always been quite fond of them.
“That was one of the things that bothered me, I think, when we kept going north. No birds. The sky, it was—is—so quiet.”
“Mr. Darwin would have been sorely disappointed,” John said. He turned slightly to dip the rag in the basin of cool water by the cot, wrung it, and brought it back to Henry’s face. The laugh was so weak, he could have easily missed it.
“Not much to document here,” he replied, a bead of blood peeking through a crack in his lips from his smiling. “God, the sky of South America—”
A violent shiver cut him off. John placed his free hand on his shoulder. Henry held on to his blanket tighter.
“We could barely hear each other speak, sometimes,” John finished for him. Lessons on the main deck or on a beach, stolen little moments here and there, quite often interrupted by the flocks flying overhead. Henry nodded.
“I’m happy I got to see one more.”
John ran his fingers through Henry’s hair. “Me too,” he said. “Me too.”