Maya stared down into the hole and saw that it wasn’t deep enough. She had spun so much plastic wrap around Livingston that the old cat’s body had grown into a kind of cocoon that would not fit into the twenty-inch grave. She paused and just stood there holding the shovel, trying not to look at him. But she couldn’t help it. Even with all that obscuring, she could see the tips of his whiskers pressed up against the plastic. The trace of his matted tangerine coat.

She swiped a tear-stained sleeve across her cheek, disappointed in herself. She was a mess. Teary, sweating, unmoored. Why was she sweating? A year ago, when she was running a five-fifteen mile, she’d have dug this hole in a few minutes without even a pause. But now her chest was heaving, and she’d hardly even gotten very far.

She lifted up the shovel for another plunge but then stopped and glanced over at the house. Scanning for her mother. It would be just like Muriel to show up while she was destroying this nice patch of grass near the old oak tree. But it was only four-thirty. There was a good forty-five minutes until Muriel would pull into the driveway, burst through the front door and clomp across the wood floor toward the liquor cabinet, and then anything was possible.

She touched the shovel tip to the loose dirt at the bottom of the hole and stomped down on it, grateful for the hard soles of her Doc Martens. She dug the little pyramids of sod out and tossed them into a fast growing pile. She had decided not to mark the little guy’s grave, after all. Better to keep the whole thing hush-hush. Save the carved driftwood on which she’d penned, “Livingston, Trusted Companion” in the precious-things hatbox she stored under her bed. Then she could hold it in her hands from time to time, and remember. Interestingly, the hatbox was the very object that he was leaning against when the earthly life passed out of him.

A cooling breeze pulled through the backyard as she settled into a rhythm. Her mind drifted pleasantly. But soon she found herself coming back to how she had found this spot. The more she thought about it, the stranger it seemed.

She had been standing at the back door wondering where to dig when she decided to ask the universe to guide her. Feeling a sense of rightness, she did something she had been increasingly trying out these days: opened herself up. Slid her chattering mind to the back burner, and listened.
Silently she had walked the grounds, feeling the slight drag of the bottoms of her jeans on the grass. Methodically she kept to the contours of yesterday’s still-crisp lawnmower tracks. Time passed. Her mind stilled. Then it happened. The thing she would never forget.

There was a tug at her sleeve, pulling her forward. She froze. Standing halfway between the house and the back fence, before she could even consider what was going on, there was another little pull. The other world reaching into this one. Electric fear coursed through her arms and legs. She jumped.

Her gaze drifted across the lawn.

There—the old oak tree.

The giant thrusting up into the Maryland sky called to her. She waited. She listened. But her destination wasn’t the oak tree. It was a section of grass just beyond it. She ran to it, feeling a buzz of certainty in her every movement.

And now, having wrapped up the cat and found a place to put him to rest, here she was, stepping down on the shovel. Digging into the moist ground.

Dink.

What was this?

She carefully probed.

Dink.

She crouched down to look. A glimmer of metal sparkled through the dirt. She fell to her knees, reached in and brushed it clean, and watched transfixed as the shiny spot grew into a flat surface. Then it became clear she was looking at the top of a box.

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

She placed the box on the ground, then clapped the loose dirt from her hands. Kneeling down on grass-stained knees, she stared at it for a full minute. Then she did what she always did, for she couldn’t help it: lost herself in quicksilver fantasy. 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 unobstructed world, long before technology would arrive and make people narrow, lazy of mind and materialistic.

She examined the box. Etchings covered it, intricate patterns cut lightly into the silvery metal, web-like designs interlaced one upon another. A metal clasp hung on the front. Wasting no time, she lifted it up and opened the lid.

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 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 words that reached forward from the past to seize her.

To my daughter Maya, with love from your father.

She exhaled.

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

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

A name was written on the inside cover.

“Ben Ambrose.”

Was this a dream?

Until this day Maya had known nothing of her father. She’d seen no sign or evidence of him on the Burke property or anywhere else. No dusty 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, the snapshot she had pulled from the back of an album when she was five, which she had given 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 the kinds of matters she yearned to know. His life of two decades ago, what he did, what he knew, what 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 sudden pang of loss.

Glass half full, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time.

She fell back on the grass now and lay there just absorbing it, gazing up at a sky heavy with clouds, feeling the spinning winds of late summer dance across her skin. She hugged the slender volume tightly. She would savor it beyond her wildest dreams.

Livingston’s exit was an entrance too, then, bringing her father to her. One into the earth, one out. Maybe life was like that, an even exchange through a revolving door.

She wondered, how had she found this lucky spot beneath the creaking branches of the old oak tree? What really brought her here?

She hadn’t found it — it found her. She’d 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 remembered now. She had watched herself doing it, as though a part of her had broken free and was looking on from a short distance away. When the shovel hit metal this witness part had seen it all.

Suddenly a piercing anxiety stabbed at her. Her face darkened. She began to tremble. She lay the journal aside and let herself lay prone on the ground, then rolled over, burying her face in the grass. Damn it. Not now.

The clouds, the air, the beautiful day, the whole world — everything began to shift away from her. Blurred. Her body felt edgy and uncomfortable. She braced herself.

The anxiety attacks were like this. Intense emotions brought them on. And here it was again—even after something good!—a frightening sensation that had been stamped into her back in the fog 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 defended herself by disappearing inward, into the mind. Where it was safe.

But over time the mind had grown into a tyrant, demanding a price for its protection. Her defense from it was to detach—separate from its insistent and obsolete warnings. They had helped when she was a child. But not now. Not for ages.

Gathering her resolve, she forced her attention away from it, to the body, to the concrete: the warmth of hands and feet, the solidity of torso, the smoothness of skin. Keep the attention there and loosen the beast’s hold. Concentrating, 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 lay on her back and breathed like this for several minutes, pressing out her belly, holding it, feeling it return. Soon the torrent diminished, then melted away completely.

Relieved, she lay there, her arms splayed out, a starfish on the grass. She slid herself up on one elbow and ran her hand along the cool green shoots. Matter stills mind, she thought. Always remember that.

She looked out now past the split-rail fence to the woods, grateful for calming influence of the trees. Beloved emissaries of the natural world. Wonderful non-confrontational flora. Look at them dance in the wind.

Then she turned the other way, to the south, to the sea of identical 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.

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. 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 fields in search of Indian arrowheads or playing hide and seek with 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 picked up the bundle that was Livingston and grazed her lips lightly against it. “Don’t be afraid, sweet boy,” she said, lowering him down. “You’re free now.”

She took up the shovel 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 streamed down her cheeks. She smoothed the last of the dirt and soil over the mound and hoped that Muriel would assume it was the gophers at work again.

Walking back to the house she saw Josh’s car in the driveway. She didn’t want to go out. She wanted to stay home and read her father’s writings. The pull was intense but Josh had been insistent: he wanted to talk about something. Maybe that was true. You never knew with Josh.

Back in her room, she slid the box to the back of her sock drawer.

She washed up and pulled on a sweatshirt, tossed back her long auburn hair, which spilled down her back in long, loose curls. She kicked off the Doc Martens and pulled on her trusty Converse All Stars. 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. 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 had 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.

She glanced quickly at the sock drawer, feeling one more pang, then grabbed a sweater and headed out.

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