Chapter 1

The boy’s name was Alder. He was eleven and a half years old, and he had lived in the house at 15 Rollingwood Drive since before he could remember. In fact, he had been born there. In the bathtub, to be exact, something his mother liked to tell visitors to the home, something that Alder had been proud of until about two years ago when, suddenly, he was not.

Once, there had been three people who lived together at 15 Rollingwood Drive: Alder, his mother, Greta, and his father, whom everyone had called Canary because of his voice.

Alder had been just three years old when his father died, taken by a short, sudden illness. He had no memories of his father or his father’s voice, except from the recordings he had left behind. Sometimes Alder wished that the recordings had been left for him alone, but the truth was that Canary’s voice was quite well known, as he’d had a brief but brilliant flame of success, earning enough money before he died at thirty-one to ensure that Alder and his mother would never have to worry too much about money, as long as they were careful; as his mother liked to tell Alder, they had “a comfortable nest egg” upon which they could rely, as if that was all he needed to know.

Sometimes, though, when Alder was entirely alone, and when the room was very dark, and when he was no longer awake but also not yet quite asleep, he felt that he could remember something about his father—the smell of him, a sort of sharp burning like a just-smoked cigarette mixed with the fresh scent of new-cut grass.

Alder was not sure if that was a real memory. He could have asked his mother, for she was the kind of person who would tell him the truth whether he liked it or not. But he never shared this scent memory with her, partly because it was the only thing he had of his father that he didn’t have to share with anyone else, and partly because it might not be a real memory at all, a possibility Alder did not know if he could bear.

The house at 15 Rollingwood Drive was small but neat. The floors were wood—scratched in some places; sun bleached in others, like under the wide front window and in patches where light shone through glass arches in the green door. The furniture, most of it, had been in the house as long as Alder could remember—the pink velvet couch in the front room that slumped a bit in the middle, where it had been sat upon the most; the wooden TV stand, with all the electrical gear atop it—the TV, of course, and the cable box, and Alder’s gaming system, and various remote controls, which Alder’s mom called “the clackers” even though they didn’t clack.

In the afternoons, the front room was kept cool by the wide green foliage of the walnut tree outside. Though it technically sat in the neighbors’ yard, it leaned toward his, as if it wanted to be closer. It cast its helpful shadow onto Alder’s house, and that shadow was a comfortably reliable presence, growing and shrinking as daylight waxed and waned.

The fern that squatted and spread on the small round table next to the couch had lived there a long time too, but not as long as Alder and his mother; she had given him the fern four and a half years ago, for his seventh birthday, when Alder had gone through a short phase during which he considered a future career as a horticulturalist, after learning the term and thinking it sounded very important and interesting. After a few months, it had become clear that Alder was perhaps not horticulturally blessed, when his mother had to save the fern from a near death by thirst. She’d moved it then from his bedroom to the front room, where she could “keep an eye on it,” and Alder had felt vaguely relieved to have escaped the burden of having to keep the plant alive.

Aside from the couch and the electrical things and the fern, the house was filled with all the usual stuff—books and puzzles and stacks of papers. Old coffee tins full of pennies and buttons and nails. Baskets full of knitting stuff. And an opossum that wasn’t alive anymore, but once had been, named Mort.

Mort had been an anniversary gift from Alder’s dad to Alder’s mom, before Alder had been born. Alder knew the story by heart: how his parents (before they were parents) had taken a trip to Seattle, where they toured the Space Needle and roamed Pike Place Market and stumbled upon Ballyhoo Curiosity Shop, a strange place in the basement of a building that boasted, among other things, a large set of insects preserved in clear resin, a variety of skulls and antique dolls, and an assortment of taxidermy, including a two-headed calf, a wall-mounted raccoon hind end, and Mort.

“I don’t know why the opossum struck us as particularly funny,” Alder’s mom had told him. “There were many other things, odder things, in the curiosity shop. But something about him—his teeth maybe, the way it almost looked as though he were smiling—sent both of us into an absolute hysteria. We were laughing so hard, we had to leave the shop. But a few months later, on our anniversary—our one-year wedding anniversary, to be exact—when I opened the box Canary put on my lap! It was that same opossum, smiling up at me.” At this point in the story, Alder’s mom always looked fondly at the opossum, who ruled over the front room from his position on the top shelf of the bookcase. “Your father had called the shop and paid for it by phone,” she would say. “And here he is, even though Canary isn’t.” And then she’d stare a moment longer at the opossum, and then she’d blink, and she’d come back to the present moment, back to Alder. And she’d pat him on the knee or pull him into her side or kiss his forehead and stroke his hair.

Sometimes, when his mom wasn’t around, like when she’d trust him to stay alone while she ran to the grocery store, or the odd occasions when he’d find himself awake early on a Sunday morning while his mother was still asleep, Alder would move a kitchen chair near to the bookcase and climb up to take a closer look at the taxidermied opossum.

“Mort,” Alder would whisper, and he’d click his fingernail against a glass eye.

Of course, the opossum never answered.

Aside from that front room, there were the bedrooms—Alder’s, his mother’s, and a third, which was technically a bedroom even though it had no bed; the kitchen; the big bathroom (with the bathtub in which Alder had been born) and one small bathroom (with just a toilet and a sink); the eating nook attached to the kitchen; and the small rectangular dining room, where Alder did his homework and where he and his mother put together puzzles. The music stuff was in the dining room, because that was where they usually listened. The record player and records, and the newer stuff, too, the speakers that could play music streamed from a computer or cell phone.

It was at the dining room table, usually in the evenings, usually while puzzling, that Alder and his mother listened to his father’s songs. In that room too hung the one portrait of the three of them, posed in front of the huge, beautiful walnut tree in the yard—Alder in the foreground upon his mother’s lap, a fat round white baby with a shock of near-black curls and big, dark, blue eyes, framed by embarrassingly long lashes; his mother, hair longer then than now, dark blond with a touch of strawberry redness, parted in the middle and falling around Alder like a cape, a bright smile on her face, her eyes turned down toward the baby on her lap; and Canary standing behind them both, looking straight into the camera with a broad, happy grin, a hand on each of his wife’s shoulders. His brown hair was brushed back from his brow. He wore a lustrous beard. He was—they all were—so very much alive.

It was folk music, Alder’s mother told him, that Canary made. Alder sort of loved to listen to his father sing, and sort of hated it at the same time. His father had played the banjo, accompanying himself as he sang.

Wandering down the railroad tracks away from my sweet home

Wondering on the railroad tracks where I next will roam

Whispering on the railroad tracks why the wind has blown

Wandering down the railroad tracks away from my sweet home

Each note from the banjo was a wail, a twang, a whisper. And when Canary joined in, half the sounds out of his mouth weren’t words at all, they were more like crooning and cooing and chirping. Maybe that was why they called him Canary; though his voice was deep and rich, not high and sharp, still, the rise and fall of it could tell a story, even without any words. And the banjo told its story too, as if to answer Canary’s call. Slow, then fast, then slow again.

And Alder would sit, a puzzle piece in his hand, listening, as if maybe this time the song would have new words, better words. Words that meant something. But it never did.

In any case, other than the fact that his father was dead, Alder’s life was rather unextraordinary; he lived in his comfortable house, surrounded by the things he loved—the music and the bathtub, the pink couch and the puzzles, the clackers and Mort, with the walnut tree’s gentle shadow and with his wonderful (though sometimes embarrassing) mother, at 15 Rollingwood Drive.

This was true, at least, until late summer, when the girl moved in next door, and Alder, for the first time in his relatively quiet life, experienced what it felt like to be truly furious with someone.