Maya stared down into the hole and saw that it wasn’t quite wide enough. She had spun so much plastic wrap around Livingston that the old cat’s body had grown into a kind of cocoon that she could not squeeze into the narrow little grave. She set him down on the grass and stood there a moment, fingering the handle of the shovel and trying to look away. But she could not do it, and the tears came. Even through all the obscuring of her improvised burial shroud, still she could see the tips of his whiskers and his tangerine coat matted beneath the plastic.

Push through it, she thought, wiping a damp sleeve across her cheek. She wasn’t just sad; she was confused and unmoored, and even though the day was cool—actually gorgeous—she was perspiring. Why exactly was she sweating? Why did it take so much energy to dig a simple hole?

She raised up the shovel for another plunge but then stopped and glanced over at the house, instinctively scanning for her mother. It would be just like Muriel to show up while she was destroying a nice patch of her precious lawn. But it was too early. Maya had a full hour before Muriel would pull into the driveway, burst through the front door and click across the wooden floor, straight for the promised land of the liquor cabinet. And then God help us all.

She touched the shovel tip down and stomped on it with all of her weight, grateful for the hard soles of her Doc Martens. She hoisted the little pyramids of dirt up and out, piling them neatly in a mound on the grass.

A gentle breeze pulled through the backyard as she settled into a rhythm. Her mind drifted. After a time she’d widened the hole by a good three inches on all sides but she wanted to make it a little deeper too for good measure. She clasped both hands around the handle and raised the shovel over her head as though she was going to harpoon a whale, and plunged the metal edge into the brown skin of the earth.

Dink.

What was this?

Carefully she probed now, tapping with the tip.

Dink.

Huh. She crouched down and looked. A glimmer of metal sparkled up through the dirt. Hmm, interesting. She fell to her knees, reached in and brushed it clean, and watched the shiny spot grow into a flat surface. It was the top of a box.

Digging with her fingers now, she scraped a gully around it and yanked it up. It came out easily, and the loose soil spilled down into the space it had occupied.

She placed the box on the ground and clapped the dirt from her hands and sat cross-legged before it. She just stared at it for a few seconds, and smiled to herself, the original purpose of the job at hand having fled far from her mind.

Etchings covered the lid, intricate patterns cut into the silvery metal, web-like designs interlaced one upon another. A clasp hung on the front.

As she reached to open it, she did what she always did, for she couldn’t help it: lost herself in quicksilver fantasy. Even in the milliseconds before the treasure was revealed, she imagined herself an archeologist toiling in some forgotten corner of the world, unearthing the defining artifact of a civilization that had accomplished feats only possible in an ancient and magical world. You're in the big time now, baby...

Indeed, she thought, shaking herself back to reality. She took a sharp inhale and pulled open the lid. Staring at its contents, her face lit up in wonder.

The treasure: a leather-bound notebook.

Buried in the ground.

In her backyard.

Breathe, she told herself. Relax. It’s not going anywhere. But her heart was pounding out a beat she could feel all the way down to her toes.

She lifted the book out and opened it.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

A white page, a handwritten sentence.

An impossibility.

There, sitting on her lap, was a crucial piece of a puzzle she had tried to solve for as long as she could remember. The page began with a single scrawled sentence, ten words that reached forward from the past to seize her.

To my daughter Maya, with love from your father.

She swallowed hard as she reached down and slid her fingers across the blue-ruled pages, skimmed a few paragraphs, saw what it was: his writings on exactly the kinds of matters she had yearned to know about since she was a child. His life of two decades ago, what he did, what he knew. What had happened.

She eyed it closer now, saw that the text was shorter than she had first supposed, for the intense handwriting stopped after only ten pages. An ocean of empty white followed, and she felt a pang of loss for what those pages might have held.

She shook her head, chastising herself. Glass half full, she told herself for the umpteenth time.

Until this day Maya had known nothing of her father. There was not a single sign or piece of evidence he’d ever set foot on the Burke property past or present. No old ring or wallet lost behind a basement wall-unit, no papers yellowed with age hidden at the back of a file box, no photos — no, there was one, a snapshot she had pulled from inside an old paperback when she was five, which she had proudly presented to Muriel. And that was the end of that. Somehow, though, the blurry image lived on in her memory: Muriel and yes, Ben, sitting on a bench, the tall buildings of a city rising up behind them.

She fell back on the grass and lay there a moment, hugging the slender volume to her chest and staring up at the sky. She was elated. But when she turned and saw the bundle that was Livingston on the grass a few feet away, her thoughts became a jumble of confusion. She nervously pulled at her hair. Was she happy or sad? She was happy and sad. She consoled herself: For starters, Livingston had been sick and dying and in pain and was now out of his misery. And two, his exit had served as an entrance, bringing her father to her. One into the earth, one out. Maybe life was like that, an even exchange through a revolving door. She would think about that, when she had time.

She sat up and glanced over at the house, instinctively scanning for her mother. It would be just like Muriel to show up while she was destroying a nice patch of her precious lawn. But it was too early. There was a whole hour before Muriel would pull into the driveway, burst through the front door and click across the wooden floor for the promised land of the liquor cabinet. And then God help us all.

She set the journal aside and picked herself up and patted the dirt and grass from her jeans. Then she set about finishing the grave.

As she worked, her mind returned to the same thing over and over: how she had found the spot. And the more she considered it, the stranger it seemed.

It had only been an hour ago but it seemed like a lifetime. She was standing at the back door, surveying the lawn, trying to decide where to dig when she thought, Why not drop out of the equation and not decide? Why not ask for help — from the universe, the beyond, God, whatever you wanted to call it. The point was, something that was not her. Then see what happened.

Feeling completely lit up yet strangely serene at the same time, she had walked the grounds slowly, keeping to yesterday’s still crisp lawn-mower tracks, and listening for a sign. Nothing happened for a time—not until she had reached the exact center of the lawn, where she felt a tug at the sleeve of her T-shirt, as though an invisible hand had pinched her, pulled and quickly let go. She froze in mid-step, caught in that timeless state of hyperawareness in which a single in-and-out breath takes an eternity to complete, and no detail is missed.

Then, another tug. She was being pulled toward … something. Her eyes locked onto a section of lawn near the old oak tree, as though being drawn to it, and she dashed over, feeling a certainty in her every stride. This is it, she thought excitedly.

And then—look at what happened. There was no doubt at all; she was led here. The hole now completed, she tenderly lifted up the bundle at her feet. She should have done a better, a more respectful job, wrapping him. But it was done.

“Don’t be afraid, sweet boy,” she said, lowering him down. “Now you can do whatever you want to. There’ll be lots of sofas to scratch in heaven, I’ll bet you.”

She took up the shovel again and began returning the earth to its proper place, straining with the weight of each toss of dirt. As the soil slapped against the plastic with an ugly splattering sound, tears rolled down her cheeks.

* * *

She sat on the old swing under the oak tree, which had somehow escaped Muriel’s campaign to obliterate the past, and opened the journal. A breeze danced across her arms and face. The rusted metal legs of the swing creaked as she pushed off.

The first thing she noticed was the handwriting: not pretty. A jumble of script and printing almost as tortured-looking as her own. She smiled. Proof, right off the bat, that she really did have a father—who, like her, apparently could not write a single sentence from one end to the other without all sorts of interference taking place.She recalled the times in school when her handwriting would get so intense she would poke the pen right through the paper—as thought he was working something out through her fingers. Her sixth-grade teacher joked that she should take up engraving. But it wasn’t funny. Her rambling letters to Uncle Buddy felt like Braille.

Now, for the first time, she viewed her handwriting not as a liability but as an inevitability. An inheritance. She slid her fingertips across the page as a sightless reader would, absorbing the little ridges and valleys, savoring them. Then she started to read.

Maya, you must believe that I love you with all my heart. That is the first order of business. Whatever has happened or will happen, this much is true: I am your father and always will be. I know there is much you will want to know. In due time, my love.

She stopped there, stunned. It’s just words, she thought, and turned her gaze back to the page.

You may feel anger toward me. If so, you are justified in it. But I am hoping that your hunger to know will triumph above all else, that you will be open to what I have to say.

There is no way to properly explain why I left. Why I had to. My reasons, which are—were—compelling, cannot match the disappointment you must feel in not knowing me. My hope is that this can change. My reasons for doing what I have done will soon become clear to you.

To tell you my story I must speak of a greater one, of matters not specific to you or I but shared by all. Here’s a small fact about me: it is difficult for me to separate myself from my work. For better or worse, I am that which I do.

It is early evening as I write to you in my study. Your mother cares for you in your room down the hall. You are a lovely runt of one, ruddy-cheeked and alert. When I look at you I am filled with awe. It never ceases to amaze me that after all my searching it is only through you that I feel the presence of a true divinity. For that I am already in your debt.

She lay the book on her lap and held out her hands and looked at them. They were vibrating. Her heart was racing, too. There was a lot going on—first Livingston and now this. She had to be careful.

She gazed out past the split-rail fence to the woods, taking in the trees. She had always felt that trees absorbed human emotions and somehow used them in some unknown way; and people, as a result, got to feel calmer as a result. And so she looked at the wavering trees, mentally going out to join them. And within a few moments she did feel the calming effect.

Then she turned the other way, to the south, to the sea of cookie-cutter homes that rolled on and on like a parasitic growth on the hills of Plainfield. The strip malls, gas stations and discount stores lay beyond, out of sight. She couldn’t see them but she knew they were there.

Before Muriel had married Maya’s father twenty-three years ago, great fields of wheat and corn covered the sixty-acre property of rolling hills in the northern part of the county. When Muriel inherited the farm she sold everything to the developers — all but two acres. To the ten-year-old Maya, who had flung herself into many happy hours ranging over the fields in search of Indian arrowheads or playing hide and seek with her friends, the sale of the land taught her a bitter lesson. The things you loved could be lost.

As for Maya’s father, Muriel never spoke of him. Not then, not now. Not ever. That part of her life remained buried. Maya did not know why, and had long ago learned not to ask about it.

She opened the journal and continued on.

My window looks out on the farm. A white picket fence snakes into the distance. Though I was an athlete in my youth, I now resort to long walks for exercise, which I do in the fields. My heart breaks as I write this, my daughter. But never mind. What must be, must be.

I am—was— a researcher at the university and elsewhere, and this is where it begins. Through my work I have stumbled (and that is the right word) onto a phenomenon of a most unexpected and fantastic nature, having to do with the way change comes about. By change I mean in all ways, from the small to the large, from the micro to macro, from the decision one makes about dinner to that of a nation that chooses to make war on another.

In the course of my work I have become certain of some things. I cannot give the details here but this much is true: a sweeping change of a cultural or societal nature is in the offing that will alter all the ways of the world. We are poised at the dawn of a period of tremendous upheaval and transformation, unseen in centuries. Monumental forces churn, even in this moment, as I write to you.

I tell you this because discord always accompanies change. All will feel it. You, dear daughter, must endeavor to understand that whatever confusion occurs is a precursor, not a goal, of the change. As the storm strikes, endeavor to look beyond its violence to the nourishment of the rain, for that is its greater purpose.

A car horn honked in the driveway. Josh waved to her. He revved the engine loudly, then cut it. He started to get out.

“No,” she called out. “Wait. I’ll be right there.”

He nodded to her and got back in.

Damn it, she thought, closing the journal. She hadn’t even had a chance to think about the strange things her father had written about. But there would be time for that later.

She glanced over at Livingston’s grave one last time. She’d done a good job of smoothing it over. Maybe Muriel wouldn’t notice, after all.

As she walked to the house carrying the box under her arm, she had to fight down the urge to go out and tell Josh that she wasn’t feeling well and that they should go out another night. She probably should have. But he had been insistent: he wanted to talk about something. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. You never knew with Josh.

Back in her room, she slid the box to the back of her sock drawer, washed up and pulled on a sweatshirt. She tossed back her long auburn hair, which spilled over her back in long, loose curls. She kicked off the Doc Martens and pulled on her trusty Converse All Stars, which always seemed perfect at the bottoms of blue jeans. There had always been a bit of hippie-girl in her; there wasn’t much she could do about it so she just accepted it.

Standing at the mirror, she noted how brightly her teeth contrasted with skin which had tanned deeply during the summer. She had full wide lips, liquid brown eyes with lashes that swept far out in a gentle curve, and a lively, expressive face that shouted out whatever emotion she was feeling. Being shy, it was not her favorite quality.

She stood there a moment too long, admiring the reflection of her slender, athletic body. She couldn’t help but notice the changes that had occurred over the last few years. The gawkiness that plagued her through her teens had transformed into five-foot-eight-inch stateliness. Her beauty was earthy and natural. She never used makeup; the perfume bottles that Muriel had given her over the years—mostly unwanted gifts from boyfriends—gathered dust in the bathroom cabinet.

Pulling her hair into a ponytail, she glanced quickly at the sock drawer, and feeling a last pang of regret, grabbed a sweater and headed out.

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