Maya Burke’s father showed up two weeks after her twenty-second birthday, in a most unexpected way: up through the earth. No, he hadn’t sprouted out of her mother’s perfectly-cut back lawn like an eager sapling, dusted himself off and greeted her at long last. But maybe it was the next best thing – an artifact he’d left behind, a window into the past, a past which had been like a blank slate. The finding represented her first real experience of the man, except for a few glimpses she’d had of him through the hazy vision of a newborn, back when he lived in Plainfield with her mother. Just before he disappeared.

Livingston, the poor little guy, was there too, in a bundle at her feet, his fur looking like trapped smoke behind a thick plastic wrap she’d rolled him in just minutes earlier— an improvised burial shroud. When Maya had awakened that morning the old cat wasn’t under the blankets but huddled beneath the bed, behind her hiking boots, still and quiet as a stone. The vet’s prediction had been accurate almost to the day.

Looking down at the rough construction, she thought: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Then she shook her head. Those were just words; they didn’t do much to quell the ache of loss rolling around in her gut.

Sniffing back tears, she scanned the yard from the back porch all the way out to where the woods spilled over the chain-link fence. Where should she put him?

The wooden handle of the shovel resting on her shoulder, she wandered around aimlessly, hoping to luck into the perfect spot. But after a while she stopped. No. That’s exactly the wrong way to do this. What she needed was help—a direction, a sign. A message, saying here.

She had read about people who believed that the souls of the dead are sometimes drawn to their own funerals, and move stealthily among the living, hungry to know who had come to pay their final respects. Maybe there was a feline afterlife, Maya surmised, and if she stilled herself sufficiently, she’d be able to sense Livingston’s spirit there around her. Then he could provide the direction she sought.

Determined, she started again across the grounds, having flung open the doors of her perceptive abilities, and listened intently for that sign. She walked within the contours of yesterday’s still crisp lawnmower tracks, as the bottoms of her jeans skimmed the soft grass.

Quickly she fell to calm, surprisingly fast, oblivious to the minutes ticking away, until miraculously the little voice in her head—the one chattering on about just how foolish this was, how strange she was for trying it— okay, yes, it was her mother—stilled completely. She marveled at the feeling of lightness that accompanied the calm, as if she’d thrust off a heavy weight that had been burdening her.

And then it happened. She felt something, an ever-so-gentle tug toward the far end of the lawn, as if someone had pinched her shirt at the shoulder, pulled, and quickly let go.

She halted in mid-step, drew a quick breath, held it. Was that real? Did that just happen? Before she could even consider the answers to these questions, again she felt the gentle pull, and now, with it, a shiver dancing up her spine.

Her gaze drifted across the lawn.

There—beside the old oak tree.

She ran over, her eyes drawn to a small section of grass, and stood there staring down at it, the adrenaline shooting through her like a current, her mind razor-sharp and alert. Then quickly, instinctively, she wheeled around in search of her mother. It would be just like Muriel to show up now, figure out what was happening and steal away the moment. But she wasn’t home yet, and wouldn’t be until evening.

“Okay, here goes,” Maya said, wasting no time. She placed the shovel tip on the grass and stepped down hard, watching with satisfaction as the blade slid into the earth. She yanked up the first mound of sod, feeling the muscles in her arm strain with the weight, and dumped it on the grass.

She worked at it for some time, lifting out the lumps of dirt and grass, tossing them into a fast-growing pile, wincing as the metal edge bit into the sole of her tennis shoe. When she paused to catch her breath, her neck and forehead glistened with moisture. But when she looked down, the hole wasn’t wide enough, and she thrust the shovel in again.

Dink.

What was this?

Again she pressed down.

Dink.

Oh, great, she thought. A rock. Or worse, a gas line. So much for her psychic abilities. She probably would have done better just choosing the spot at random.

But no—she looked closer now, saw a glimmer of metal sparkling halfway down the hole. She dropped down to her knees, reached in and brushed the loose dirt away, watched the shiny spot grow into a flat surface. But when she dug her fingers under it and pulled, it wouldn’t budge.

I know, she thought.

She dashed over to the tool shed and grabbed a hand spade from the wall, then ran back to the hole and scraped a gully around the object until its shape and substance became apparent: a metal box. Staring at it, she did what she always did, for she couldn’t help it—lost herself in quicksilver fantasy, this time imagining herself an archeologist toiling in some forgotten corner of the world, unearthing the defining artifact of an ancient civilization that had divined the meaning of life on planet Earth. You’re in the big time now, baby, she thought, grinning, imagining the fame and fortune, the TV appearances, the interviews, and best of all, the chance to get out of Plainfield.

Then she gazed down at Livingston, and her grin melted away.

The dictionary-sized box came out easily. She laid it on the grass, brushed off the dirt, sat down beside it. It was old, delicately beautiful. Etchings covered its surface, intricate patterns cut lightly into the silvery metal, web-like designs interlaced one upon another. A metal clasp hung invitingly on the front. Wasting no time, she lifted it up and opened the box.

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 drumbeat she could feel all the way down to her toes.

She lifted the book out, inhaled deeply, opened the leather cover.

“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 indescribably powerful words that reached forward from the past to seize her.

To my daughter Maya, with love from your father.

She exhaled—finally.

“This isn’t happening,” she said. “This is not happening.”

Maybe magic does exist, she thought. Maybe even God . And maybe He answers prayers, even those that live deep within, unuttered, unknown even to the mind.

The name was written on the inside cover.

“Ben Ambrose.”

She stared at it, unable to look away. Was this a dream?

Until this day Maya had known nothing of her father, had seen no sign or evidence of him on the Burke property or anywhere else. No dusty ring or lost wallet behind a basement wall-unit, no papers yellowed with age at the back of a file box, no photos—no, there was one, a snapshot she had pulled from the back of an album when she was five, which she had stupidly given it 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 park bench, the tall buildings of a city rising up behind them.

She 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 was desperate to learn about. 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 ended after only ten pages. An ocean of empty white followed, and she felt a pang of loss for what those pages might have held.

“Glass half full, Maya,” she reminded herself for the millionth time.

She fell back on the grass and lay there as if happily drunk, looking up at a Maryland sky that was heavy with clouds, feeling the winds of late summer dance across her skin, hugging the slender volume tightly. She would savor it beyond her wildest imaginings.

But not yet. First, there was the sad task: Livingston.

His exit was an entrance as well, bringing her father to her. One into the earth, one out. Maybe life was like that, an even exchange through a revolving door, a zero sum game. She wanted to ponder that awhile, but not right now; now she was struck by the strangeness of the mechanics of what had just occurred. How had she managed to find this lucky spot beneath the creaking branches of the old oak tree? What happened?

She hadn’t exactly found it—it found her. She’d simply unplugged her pinball machine of a brain for a few minutes and waited. And then, the tug. The miracle. And she’d stayed with it, let her feet follow the flow, freely, as a leaf zigzags to the ground. By releasing. By trusting.

But there was more. She had watched herself doing it, as though a part of her consciousness had broken free and was looking on from a few feet away. It was impossible yet true. When the shovel had hit metal this witness part of her had seen it all.

Suddenly a piercing anxiety stabbed at her. Her face darkened. She began to tremble. She put the journal aside and let herself fall to the ground, then roll over, burying her face in the grass. The horror was coming. Damn, damn, damn. Why now? The clouds, the air, the beautiful day, the whole world started to shift away from her, become distant and blurred, and her body felt edgy and uncomfortable, like a high voltage was coursing through it.

No. Not now.

The anxiety attacks were always like this. They struck when intense emotions overtook her. It was almost predictable, the arrival of this pall, this dread, this blackness. And here it was again—even after something good!—a frightening sensation that had been stamped into her back in the dim mists of childhood, when her mother would scream at her and slap her, blaming her for things she hadn’t done and often didn’t even understand. Maya had defended herself from Muriel by disappearing inward, into the caverns of her mind, where it was safe.

But the mind, which had been her protector, had grown into a tyrant, and the best way to free herself from it was to detach—separate from its insistent and useless warnings, those horrible ever-looping programs intended to protect her from the events of long ago, which had no reality anymore.

Gathering her resolve, she forced her attention away from it, focused instead on the body, on the concrete: the warmth of hands and feet, the solidity of torso, the smoothness of skin. Keep the attention there; loosen the tyrant’s hold. Concentrating hard, she felt, with the whole of her being, the flow of air in and out of her lungs, and each breath became a small step to safety across a high and treacherous bridge.

She rolled over and lay on her back, and breathed like this for several minutes, pressing out her belly, holding it, feeling it return. The reeling mind started to slow, which she could sense in a tangible way, despite what it wanted to do: rage. At life. At God. At Muriel. At the world.

The torrent soon diminished to a trickle, then mercifully melted away completely. Sighing with relief, she lay there with her arms splayed out, the way she often did after a long bike ride, then slid herself up on one elbow and ran her hand across the grass, feeling each blade reach up to caress it. Matter stills mind, she thought. Always remember that.

She looked out now past the fence to the dense woods beyond it, grateful for those beloved, stolid emissaries of the natural world, the trees. Her wonderful trees. Dancing in the wind as if in celebration. She loved them. She loved the land.

Then she turned the other way, toward the south, to the sea of cookie-cutter homes that rolled on and on, filling up most of Plainfield, and beyond.

Before Muriel had married Maya’s father twenty-three years ago, great fields of wheat and corn filled the sixty-acre property of rolling hills in northern Baltimore County, just beyond the suburbs. When Muriel inherited the farm from her father, she sold everything—all but two acres. To the ten-year-old Maya, who had flung herself into many happy hours ranging over the grassy fields in search of arrowheads or playing hide and seek with friends, the sale of the land taught her that the things she 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 had no idea why, and had long ago learned not to ask.

She picked up the journal and placed it back in its box, then she took up the matter of the plastic bundle at her feet. Staring at the dark shape inside, she spotted the end of a whisker, and sadness welled up in her. She grazed her lips lightly over the plastic.

“Don’t be afraid, sweet boy,” she said, lowering him down. “You’re free now.”

She took up the shovel again and began filling in the hole, straining with the weight of each toss of dirt. As the soil slapped against the plastic with an ugly splattering sound, tears ran down her cheeks. She smoothed the last of the soil over the top and pushed a tiny wooden marker into the ground,Livingston, Amazing Guy.

A breeze pulled through the backyard, stirring the leaves of the oak tree. Maybe it would carry his spirit to a place of greater comfort. As she made her way back to the house, she thought, one precious thing gone, another tucked safely under my arm.

She wanted more than anything to stay home, to be alone, to read her father’s writings. To understand the past. Her past. The pull was intense but she could see Josh’s car in the driveway. There was something he wanted to talk about, and so her father would have to wait.

Back in her room, she slid the box to the back of her sock drawer. Later, she thought, with excitement.

She washed up and pulled on a sweatshirt, tossed back her long auburn hair, which spilled down her back in long, loose curls. Standing at her bedroom mirror, she noted how brightly her teeth contrasted against 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. It was not her favorite quality.

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

She glanced quickly at her sock drawer, then at the empty bed. Then she grabbed a sweater and headed out.

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