“Reasons don’t matter. We’ll send force next time.”
Adam returns to the window, to watch the giant painting dry. He’s still standing there when his wife returns from Connecticut. “What is it?” Lois asks.
“A message. From a friend.”
And for the first time, it hits her, the truth of what the newspapers have been saying. The pictures of the charred mountain lodge. The dead woman. “Member of Radical Eco-Terror Group Charged.”
DOROTHY SLIPS into her husband’s room early one evening to check on him. He has made no sound for hours. She comes through the doorway and, in the instant before he hears and turns toward her, she sees it again, as she has so often in these spare, short, accelerating days: that look of pure astonishment at a performance unfolding just outside the window.
“What is it, Ray?” She comes around to the bedside, but as always she can make out nothing but the winter yard. “Was there something?”
The twisted mouth moves into what she has learned to see as a smile. “Oh, yes!”
It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.
She spades her arms under his wasted body and draws him toward one side of the mechanical bed. Then she walks around to the other side and gets in next to him. “Tell me.” But of course he can’t. He makes that chuckle in the back of his throat that could mean anything. She reaches for his hand and they hold still, as if they are already the carved figures on top of their own tomb.
They lie for a long time, staring out across their property where hunter-gatherers made their way for millennia. She sees plenty—all the various trees of their would-be arboretum, their buds at the ready. But she knows she isn’t catching a tenth of what he is.
“Tell me more about her.” Her heart pumps harder at the taboo question. All her life she has flirted with craziness, and still this new winter game of theirs feels worse than scary. Strangers are out tonight, wandering, knocking on their door. And she lets them in.
His arm tightens, and his face does change. “Moves fast. Will-fed.” It’s like he’s just written Remembrance of Things Past.
“What does she look like?” She has asked before, but needs the answer again.
“Fierce. Fine. You.”
It’s enough to get her back into the book, and the yard opens like two pages spread in front of her. Tonight, in the growing darkness, the story runs in reverse. A succession of girls, younger and younger, head out the back door and into the miniature, simulated world. Their daughter at twenty, on spring break from college, in a sleeveless tank top that reveals a horrible new baroque tattoo on her left shoulder, sneaking out to smoke a joint after her parents have fallen asleep. Their daughter at sixteen, swilling cheap grocery store wine with two girlfriends in the farthest dark corner of the property. Their daughter at twelve, in a funk, kicking a soccer ball against the garage for hours. Their daughter at ten, floating across the grass, catching lightning bugs in a jar. Their daughter at six, heading out barefoot on the first seventy-degree spring day with a seedling in her hands.
The image appears against the shadowy trees. It’s so vivid that Dorothy is sure she’s seen some model for it somewhere. This is how read-aloud goes now, the two of them holding still and watching. Who knows what the lifelong stranger in her house is ever thinking? She does, now. Something like this. Something exactly like this.
The paper cup has sat on the kitchen windowsill of her imagination for so long now that Dorothy can see the brown and cyan curlicues of stylized steam printed on it and read the word beneath the design: SOLO. A mass of eager roots has punched through the waxy paper bottom, in need of more world. Marvelous long serrated leaves—American chestnut—paw at the air on their first trip outside. Dorothy watches the girl and her father kneel at the edge of a freshly dug hole. The fretful child chops at the dirt with a trowel. She administers the sacrament of first water. She steps away from the planting, back underneath the