33

IT WAS A SUNDAY MORNING in the fall. The fire had ravaged the valley. The trees that lined the eastern ridge of mountains had been scorched all the way along the river, all the way down to Deen. The town had nearly caught fire as well, but the townspeople had fought it, and the wind had changed, and that storm had finally come in. Mr. Jinn’s farm was reduced to ash, as were our house and barns and most of the fields. It was a fire unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and even the green things had caught.

But small signs of life reappeared: tractors had dug out new foundations, and structures rose from the desolation. My father had decided to rebuild, and the new farmhouse was taking shape. It seemed like my father knew more than he was letting on—there was no other explanation for his lack of questions. Why didn’t he ask about my injuries? Why didn’t he talk about Mr. Tennin’s sudden disappearance? In any case, it looked like our new home would be finished before winter. The leaves of the trees on the western mountains, unaffected by the fire, had turned red and yellow and orange, as if the whole mountainside was ablaze.

Abra came to the partially rebuilt house as she had been in the habit of doing on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes we would walk out to the Tree of Life and sit there with our backs against the hard wood, surrounded by the blackened poles of burned trees and the smell of an old fire. But every Sunday that we went out, we found more and more signs of life. The animals returned, creeping through the barren trees, and the tiny green plants created a haze over the gray ash. The trees would be replaced. Life would come up out of that dead ground in the spring.

Everything felt like recovery. Everything, that is, except the Tree of Life. It somehow looked even more lifeless than the other burned trees.

We never said much when we went out there. Mostly we just waited for something, although we weren’t sure what.

On that particular Sunday afternoon, about three months after the day the angels fell, Abra and I looked through Mr. Tennin’s box again. We sat on the porch and examined all the articles, paged through the atlas. We tried to find the pattern in the appearance of the Tree of Life, but it all seemed so random, those strange trees that sprang up all around the world and then were killed or died under mysterious circumstances.

“Look!” Abra said, pointing toward the church.

Icarus meandered along the road, his tail tall and curling.

“The cat,” I said, and the strangeness of that entire summer seemed somehow summed up in those two words. We watched as he disappeared behind the church, walking slowly through the decimated forest toward the river.

“Maybe there isn’t a pattern,” Abra said, her attention back on the articles and the atlas. “Maybe there’s no way of telling where it will appear again.”

I shook my head. “But Mr. Jinn knew. He knew it was coming here.”

Mr. Jinn’s farm was a mystery. When no one showed up to claim it, he was officially declared dead and the farm was eventually auctioned off. We never found out what had happened to the real Mr. Jinn—the man, not the angel who took his name. New people moved in, strange people nearly as private as Mr. Jinn had been. But their neatness extended outside the house, and as the years passed, the grounds of the farm eventually looked immaculate. Silent and lonely, but immaculate.

We studied the contents of Mr. Tennin’s box and made maps and charts and long lists of numbers, but we didn’t get any closer to figuring it out.

I walked with Abra all the way out the lane. My dad must have been burning debris somewhere, because there was smoke in the air—the smell of fall, the warning of winter. It took me back to the day the angels fell. The smell of wood smoke always did after that.

“Let’s go say hi to Lucy,” Abra said. In those months after the fire, she had taken to calling my mom by her first name, and something about it seemed right, as if she was one of us, a friend, walking right there beside us.

So we went up Kincade Road, into the forest, all the way to the cemetery, and as we meandered among the stones, Abra let her hands rise up from her sides as if she was flying.

At my mother’s grave, we sat down. I told Abra all of my favorite stories about my mom, and she listened, even though I had told them all to her before. I felt that sense of peace again, a peace I couldn’t explain, that what had happened would be okay, and anything that wasn’t all right would be made right before The End.

I remembered Mr. Tennin’s words, and I tried hard to believe them.

Death is only a passage.

Death is just the exchanging of cloaks.

Death is not a destination.

Death is a gift.

I grabbed a red leaf and held its stem in one of my scarred hands. The wind had blown it all the way from the western mountain, where the trees were still alive and in their full autumn glory. Suddenly, a cloud of those leaves from the other mountain swept into the woods and swirled around us, red and yellow and orange, like fire.