radiating veins are said to cure the sickness of forgetting. Adam doesn’t need the cure. He remembers. He remembers. Ginkgo. The maidenhair tree.
Its leaves leap out sideways into the wind. The Suburban creeps away from the curb and noses into traffic. Adam twists around to look through the rear window. There, as he watches, the whole tree bares. It falls from one moment to the next, the most synchronized drop of leaves that nature ever engineered. A gust of air, some last fluttered objection, and all the veined fans let go at once, releasing a flock of golden telegrams down West Fourth Street.
HOW FAR can a leaf blow? Over the East River, to be sure. Across the shipyard where a Norwegian immigrant sanded down the massive curved oak beams of frigate hulls. Through Brooklyn, once hilly and forested, full of chestnuts. Upriver, where every thousand feet along the waterfront, on every high-water mark he can reach, the shipbuilder’s descendant has stenciled:
Above the submerged letters, stands of new buildings compete for something like the sun.
OFF TO THE WEST, across a distance that would take a forest tens of millennia to cross, an old man and woman journey into the world. Over the course of weeks, they’ve invented a game. Dorothy heads outside and collects twigs, nuts, and shed leaves. Then she brings the evidence back to Ray, and together, with the help of the branching book, they narrow down and name another species. Each time they add a stranger to their list, they stop for days to learn everything they can. There’s mulberry, maple, Douglas-fir, each one with its unique history, biography, chemistry, economics, and behavioral psychology. Each new tree is its own distinct epic, changing the story of what is possible.
Today, though, she comes back inside, a little baffled. “There’s something wrong, Ray.”
For Ray, deep into postmortem life, nothing will ever be wrong again. What? he asks her, without saying a thing.
Her answer is subdued, even mystified. “We must have made a mistake somewhere.”
They retrace the branches of the decision tree but end up out on the same limb. She shakes her head, refusing the evidence. “I just don’t get it.”
Now he must croak out loud, a single, hard syllable. Something like, Why?
It takes her a while to answer. Time has become something so very different for them both. “Well, for starters, we’re hundreds of miles out of the native range.”
His body jerks, but she knows the violent spasm is just a shrug. Trees in cities can grow far from anywhere they might call home. The two of them have learned as much, from weeks of reading.
“Worse than that: There’s no range left. There aren’t supposed to be more than a handful of mature American chestnut trees left anywhere.” This one is almost as tall as the house.
They read everything they can about America’s perfect, vanished tree. They learn about a holocaust that ravaged the landscape just before they were born. But nothing they discover can explain how a tree that shouldn’t exist is spreading a great globe of shade across their backyard.
“Maybe there are chestnuts up here that no one knows about.” A sound comes out of Ray that Dorothy knows must be a laugh. “Okay, then we have the ID wrong.” But there’s no other creature in all their growing tree library that it could be. They let the mystery rankle, and keep on reading.
She finds a book at the public library: The Secret Forest. She brings it home for read-aloud. She gets as far as the first paragraph before having to stop:
You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .
A page or two may take them a day. Everything they thought their backyard was is wrong, and it takes some time to grow new beliefs to replace the ones that fall. They sit together in silence and survey their acreage as if they have traveled to another planet. Every leaf out there connects, underground. Dorothy takes the news like a shocking revelation in a nineteenth-century novel of manners, where one character’s awful secret ripples through every life in the entire village.
They sit together in the evening, reading and looking, as the sun glints chartreuse off their chestnut’s scalloped leaves. Every baring twig seems to Dorothy like a