“Birdies!” Sam wriggled his hand from mine, flapped his arms, and chased a flock of gulls swooping down the family hill.

“Whoop! Whoop!”

I latched the gate behind us and flapped after him. He giggled and led me through goldenrods up to his shoulders. On the run, I tamped my brow, beading in late September heat, and scanned the picket fence, bowing but still intact. For a moment, time seem to have hovered and my childhood lingered for his. But the gulls broke the spell fast, gliding past the rear fence and the cliff, leaving us behind, weaving their shadows on the lake, trumpeting their freedom.

“Awwwk! Awwwk!”

I turned just in time for Caroline, her black curls astream, to tumble into my arms, flapping, panting, and laughing. Sam dashed onward, his Indians cap bobbing on his darkening curls. A cloud of dandelion fluff arose. He reached for it in mid-stride but managed just to fan it away. He cackled and chased it further downhill.

“I swear, Fred,” Caroline wheezed, “he turns his feet just like a Buehler.”

“Yeah,” I rasped, “away from this house.” I’d hardly been older than Sam was now when I’d begun to climb the fence and hide at the lake for hours, avoiding Mom’s consoling hugs, coveting the bobbing boats, dreaming of catching up to Dad.

I helped Caroline up to the patio and into a rusty glider. It snickered like our bathroom scale. She dug out the insulin kit from her purse. From here, Erie’s waves looked like ripples but sounded like wrecking balls. A poplar I used to climb on the cliff must have slid away sometime, roots and all.

“There they are!” Sam came chasing the blotchy white gulls up the hill as fast as he’d chased them down it.

“Good eyes, pal.” I squinted at the backlit birds. They were claiming a sagging gutter on the three-story Tudor, which generations of Buehlers had raised on the crest like a levee. “I used to think how brave the fledglings were, flying up there, halfway to the sky.”

“And now?” said Caroline.

A few of them began strutting like sentries. “Now it’s the parents who seem brave, leading them there.”

Dad had suddenly offered us the house the other day. “You’ll make better use of it than I’ll manage, frankly,” he’d rasped from a girlfriend’s blustery dock in Cape Hatteras. “Especially if you have more kids.”

It was a funny hint from a man who’d grown scarcer with each new son and grandson. “Thanks,” I’d replied, “but Caroline’s still recovering from Sam, you know.”

“She seemed to like the place, though.”

So we’d spent two hours inspecting it with new care. She’d stroked the iron balusters. I’d poked the spongy plaster. We’d both huffed and puffed after Sam on the stairs. My strongest memories of Mom were of her herding my kid brothers and me up and down them, pausing by a window for breath, angling her thickening frame toward the empty horizon.

Sam began to roll down the hill, shrieking with fear and glee. Caroline filled a syringe and tapped it. A bubble rose to freedom.

“So you’d turn the place down?“ she said.

“Oh, put it this way: You know how most places shrink as you get older?“ I cupped her shoulder. “I’m 38, and this one’s still growing.”

“The apartment’s shrinking meanwhile.” She swabbed a fold of her belly. She’d seemed like Mom’s opposite at first, tireless, fearless, and fatless, but I was starting to worry that opposites might meet. She kept working, playing, and eating with the same abandon as before Sam and the diabetes.

“Well, here we go.” She aimed the needle.

As usual, I turned away and heard her hiss as though the shot were letting out air. “Sam?” I called.

“Peekaboo!” The cap was sticking out from the gap between Mom’s old rose trellis, now usurped by wild grapes, and the side fence, which bordered a dirt lane cutting through the cliff to the lake.

“Come out where we can see you.” He snickered and stayed put. Caroline chuckled, leaving the discipline to me, the old runaway, as usual. “I mean it!” He bolted, tripped on a fallen vine, and rose squealing.

“Oh, dear,” said Caroline, sheathing the needle, gesturing for a hug.

“Come, pal,“ I said, gesturing to share it. He snorted and fled to a knoll. There he paused for once, watching the gulls mill overhead in ones and twos and dozens. “Safety in numbers,” Mom used to say. More to lose, I thought now. With the sort of solicitude he’d spurned from us lately, he filled his cap with grapes and offered them to the gulls. They whirred past without a glance, going nowhere fast.

“Nice idea, anyway,” I said.

“You’ll make a good daddy, Sam,” said Caroline. “Like your own.” I laughed. He grimaced. She blinked. “I want another child.”

“Bang! Bang!” Sam brandished the cap at the gulls. “You’re dead!” Did he even know what the word meant? Then he squished the cap on his curls and scampered away, drops of grape juice trickling down the back of his neck.

I took Caroline’s hand. “But the doctor…”

“Said wait. I know. Until I’m too old, at this rate.”

Something came rumbling down the lane: a willowy young woman in yellow Spandex spurring a mountain bike toward the lake. I instinctively tightened my gut, for which there was less excuse than Caroline’s. Birds, boats, women – something pretty was always coming and going here.

“Sam!” called Caroline. He was at the rear fence already, working a picket loose.

“Stop!” I cried. He tittered and slipped through the gap. We sprang up. “Wait,” I hissed to her, “I’ll get him.” I reached the fence in seconds, but he was already flapping toward the cliff. Far too big for the gap, I clambered over the pickets. My shirt snagged. I kept running. What would I do if I caught him in time: drag him back or whisk him as far as I could from this overgrown house, where my family had multiplied and divided?

At the brink, he suddenly veered down the gentler slope to the lane. His cap fell to the dust, and grape mush tumbled out. A gull circled toward the bounty. A comrade watched from the weeds. Sam stopped and pondered the birds from the middle of the lane. For him, it seemed, time was still hovering. For me, it was swooping.

Sure enough, over the thumps of my feet and lungs and heart, I heard the biker rumbling back from the lake. I lunged for Sam. He bolted to the shoulder. I landed face-first in the dust.

“Wait right there!” I scrambled to my feet. He laughed at my shirt. It was grimy and torn. Then he stared at my chin. It was raw and bloody to the touch.

“Daddy?” He dashed back into danger and gave what he’d been refusing lately to take: a hug. “You OK?”

“Better, thanks to you.” I whisked him to the far shoulder. The first gull shrieked and raced past us. The second pounced on the abandoned grapes. The biker passed with a shower of grit and a thud. I turned Sam’s head away, but he slipped free and stared. A bloody wing fluttered and fell. He buried himself in my belly. I wrapped my arms around him, wishing parents could give life for keeps.

Caroline hugged us both, having cleared the fence somehow. “I must be crazy,” she gasped, giving me a tissue from her pocket, wiping Sam with another. “One child’s more than we can handle.”

Sam stamped his foot. “I want a brother!”

“Oh, sweetheart!” Caroline cradled his head, exposing a ruddy curl I hadn’t noticed before in either side of the family. “It might be a girl, you know.” She chuckled. “The Buehlers are overdue.”

The surviving gull regarded its late rival for a moment, then joined the other birds on the gutter, rising by instinct, not choice.

“We’ll talk,” I said. We held hands, crossed the lane, helped each other over the fence, and began to work our way up the hill.