the evidence produced in discovery. He has no court experience to speak of, and criminal law was always his worst subject. But the argument he lays out before the jury is as clear as a row of Lombardy poplars. In silence, he walks his lifelong partner through old and central principles of jurisprudence, one syllable at a time. Stand your ground. The castle doctrine. Self-help.
If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to.
His few syllables are mangled and worthless. She shakes her head. “I can’t get you, Ray. Say it some other way.”
He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.
His face turns the color of sunset, scaring her. Her arm goes out to calm him. “No worries, Ray. It’s just words. Everything’s fine.”
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
At that thought, the vessels in his brain give way, the way that earth does when roots no longer hold it together. The flood of blood brings a revelation. He lifts his eyes to the window, to the mysterious outside. There, two life sentences pass in a few heartbeats. The seedlings race upward toward the sun. The varied trunks thicken, shed, fall, and rise again. Their branches rush to enclose the house and punch through its windows. At the stand’s center, the chestnut folds and unfolds, girthing out, spiraling upward, patting the air for new paths, new places, further possibilities. Great-rooted blossomer.
“Ray?” Dorothy’s arms reach out to keep him from convulsing. “Ray!”
She’s on her feet, knocking the stack of books on the bedside table to the floor. But in another moment, another look, emergency turns into its opposite. Her throat clamps shut and her eyes sting, as if the air were full of pollen. She thinks: How can it happen now? We still had books to read. There was something the two of us were supposed to do. We were just beginning to understand each other.
At her feet, on the floor, is The New Metamorphosis, by the author of The Secret Forest. It was on the top of the pile of read-alouds, waiting for the readers who’ll never get to it:
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .
Dorothy touches the corpse’s bewildered face. Already it has started to soften, even as it grows cold. “Ray?” she says. “I’ll be right there.” Not fast enough, at the speed of her own need. But at the speed of trees, very soon.
DARKNESS SETTLES IN. Mission Dolores Park’s inhabitants change, as do their purposes. But even these night visitors cut a path around Mimi. She leans forward, hands in her lap like two tender figs. She bows her head, weighed down by liberty. The lights blaze in front of her. The skyline turns into sublime allegory. She dozes and wakes, many times.
Her left hand starts up again, tugging at the ring finger of her right. She’s like a dog unable to stop gnawing at its own foot. But this time, it yields. The jade band slips over her age-swollen knuckle and pops free. A weight flies up and out of her, and she cracks open. She sets the green circle in the grass, the one round thing amid a bedlam of growth and splitting. She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some