arm of her father. And when the girl turns around and lifts her face, in this other life unfolding invisibly alongside the one that happened, Dorothy sees the face of her daughter, ready to take on all of life.
Two words up close to her ear explode the silence. “Do nothing.” The words are as clear as they need to be, telling Dorothy that her husband has been out there with her in that other place, or not far away. Much the same thought has just occurred to her. They got the thought independently, from the same startling sentence in the same startling book that they just read together:
The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.
“No more mowing,” Ray whispers, and she doesn’t even have to ask for explanation. What better inheritance could they leave such a willful, fierce, and fine daughter than an acre and a half of woods?
Side by side, in his mechanical bed, they lie and gaze out the window, where great snows pile up and melt away, the rains come, transient birds return, days grow long again, buds on every branch put forth flowers, and hundreds of seedlings push up wildly through the recidivist lawn.
“YOU CAN’T DO THIS. You have a child.”
Adam sits back on the love seat, toying with the black box on his ankle. Lois—his wife—sits across from him, palms on thighs, spine like a telephone pole. He sways, limp in the stale air. He can no longer explain himself. He has no answer. For two days, the two of them have followed that fact down to hell.
He stares out the window as the lights of the Financial District replace the day. Ten million points flicker in the falling dark, like the logic gates of a circuit cranking out solutions to a calculation generations in the making.
“A five-year-old. He needs a father.”
The child has been in Connecticut for only a day and a half, and already Adam can’t remember which of the boy’s earlobes has the nick in it. Or how the boy came to be five years old, when he was just born. Or how he, Adam, could be the father of anyone.
“He’ll grow up resenting you. You’ll be some stranger in federal prison that he goes to visit, until I stop making him.”
She doesn’t throw it in his face, although she should. He is, in fact, some stranger already. She just never knew. And the boy—the boy. Alien already, to Adam. For two weeks last year, Charlie wanted to be a firefighter, but soon realized that banker beat that in every measurable way. He likes nothing more than to line his toys up with a ruler, count them, and put them away in lockable containers. The only thing he has ever used nail polish for is to mark his little cars so neither parent can steal them.
Adam’s head swings back into the room, to the figure on the barstool across from him. His wife’s lips sour and her cheeks flush, like she’s choking. Since his arrest, she has begun to seem as vague to him as his own life did on the day he slipped back into Santa Cruz and began to simulate it. “You want me to make a deal.”
“Adam.” Her voice is a controlled skid. “You will never come out again.”
“You think I should condemn someone else. I’m just asking.”
“It’s justice. They’re felons. And one of them condemned you.”
He turns back to the window. House arrest. Below, the shimmer of NoHo, the flare of Little Italy, the country he’s now barred from. And farther away, beyond all neighborhoods, the Atlantic’s black cliff. The skyline is an experimental score for some euphoric music he can almost hear. Off to the right, out of sight, the twisted tower rises, replacing the gutted ones. Freedom.
“If it’s justice we’re after . . .”
A voice that should be familiar to him says, “What’s wrong with you? You’re going to put another person’s welfare before your own son?”
There it is: the ultimate commandment. Take care of your own. Protect your genes. Lay down your life for one child, two siblings, or eight first cousins. How many friends would that translate to? How many strangers who might still be out there, laying down their lives for other species? How many trees? He can’t begin to tell his wife the worst of it. Since