That evening, after eating smoked, grilled, and baked salmon, along with Aunt Mall’s yummy salmonberry dessert, Uncle Cliff skiffed them back to town. The girls brushed their teeth and climbed into bed, Josie complaining about the smell of fresh paint, but falling right asleep.

Nicky turned over in her bed and parted the curtains. She set her chin in her hands and scanned Sky River Valley.

The trees made an evergreen blanket between the slopes of the mountains; a shadow line appeared where Sky River ran through. Nicky rested her forehead against the cold glass, watching the pointed tips of the spruce and hemlocks sway in the breeze. She could still feel in her palms how the bark stopped resisting her, how the ridges had melted beneath her skin. The bolt of blue had left her feeling cleared out, quiet, and hopeful, such a contrast to the dizziness she felt on the skiff. But the idea of meeting the Three Guardsmen tomorrow, and the Old Yellow Cedar, frightened her. They were only trees, yet when Sven and Clete talked about them, they seemed alive, almost like people.

It was coming up on nine o’clock, and the sun was setting over the canopies. Unlike the fields of corn in Pennsylvania, which moved in waves in the golden sunshine, as if some dragon blew hot breath across the stalks, these trees seemed to wobble to their own particular beat. Some made gentle ellipses, while others remained still. Nicky wondered if this was because of how the branches fit into one another, or how the roots folded together, like some melody. The sensation of energy when she slipped inside the spruce almost felt like music, the spell of her father’s brass slide moving over the steel strings.

She turned over, pulled the covers to her chin, and imagined herself as a bright green sapling pushing out of the dark soil. Her two arms shot out smooth branches as her trunk rose into the air. Bark spread over her legs, ridges appearing as they fused into a single taproot. A salmon finned at the base of her trunk, a deer paused to smell the tips of her needles. Far in the distance, a bear lumbered along the banks of the river, leaving impressions in the moss as he moved toward her. All around she could feel a gentle popping in the soil, thousands of twitches moving up from the roots into her core.

Trees have no central nervous system. How could they communicate? Unlike in Pennsylvania, where trees grew in patches left between fields, the spruce and hemlocks and cedar of this valley made one dark green blanket. How could they not be connected beneath the soil? And if they were connected, how could they not be communicating, working together like a family, like one big nervous system?

Of course the mother trees would recognize their young, taking care of the saplings, sending nutrients through the network Clete told her about to make sure their children grew up safe and healthy. All of it happening beneath the soil, which—like Clete said—was really no different from the ocean: a sprawling dark space that humans didn’t really understand. Where things happened so slowly that humans hardly noticed. Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s not happening, Nicky thought.

Nicky looked down at the covers, thinking of her own heart on the right side of her chest, pushing blood to her hands and feet and head. The swirl of liquid keeping her body moving and alert. How could she, this one single person, be expected to help this valley? To absorb all its sadness and strangeness while keeping her own her brain awake to the world, especially after losing her own mother? She scrunched her toes together, the muscles in the balls of her feet aching from pushing into the soil earlier that evening. She flipped up her hood, folded her arms over her chest, and gazed up at the attic rafters.

It wasn’t fair. The world was asking too much of her.

Nicky knew if she told Josie about what had happened with the spruce, her twin would laugh. “Some people pick cats or dogs or invisible friends to talk to. But you, Nicky—you talk to trees. When you’re old, you’ll have like forty trees around you instead of cats.”

“I hope so,” Nicky would respond. “It’s called living in a forest.”

No matter how they both evolved, Nicky felt sure that she’d always be in Josie’s life. She had always known, by the way their mother had reacted to each of them, that they moved through the world differently. Josie seemed much more at ease in her mother’s world of explanation—this happened because of this, and so forth. A world that left no room for imagination.

Now that their mother was gone, Josie’s decision to dye her hair, or become a vegetarian, or devote herself to yoga, or even drink coffee, struck Nicky as calculated rebellions she knew her father would reject. Her insistence on counting the days—the seconds, even—until she was eighteen, when she could be “free,” annoyed Nicky more than it annoyed her father. Why couldn’t she just appreciate the time the three of them had together?

Their mother had been deeply caring, a listener, always finding points in common with her patients, or anyone, really. Over the past few weeks, Nicky had watched Josie react in ways that made it clear she had no interest in what others were thinking or feeling. She just bent up her face, gave some rude response, and moved on.

As children, their mom had warned them against this, saying that one day their grumpy faces might freeze and become permanent. Nicky knew twins started out symmetrical, and over the years begin to reflect their sadness and happiness separately. She expected that her face would begin to show watchfulness, sadness, and even disappointment, while her sister’s would harden into a look of defiance. Her brow sloping, her eyes growing smaller. Josie the bulldog. Nicky the basset hound.

She closed her eyes. It was nice having a cousin on the island who was also quiet, and a little shy. She could see that Clete respected her, even treating her like some sort of wizard. Someone with powers to hear what others could not. To heal what others couldn’t.

Maybe I do have a special power, she thought. No. Josie the supersmart one, Josie the go-getter. When there was a problem, Josie always found a way out. Adults didn’t intimidate her. They were just another challenge to overcome.

Except here in Alaska, things seemed different. People seemed to respond to Nicky’s quietness and flinch at her sister’s brazen nature. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but this island felt like her place, even if she still wasn’t convinced that the trees had been expecting her.

Despite her fear of bears, and of the Three Guardsmen and Old Yellow Cedar, she found herself eager to wake up and walk with Clete into this valley so neatly framed by the glass of her window. She was beginning to trust the island, that it would take care of her and not let anything bad happen. Uncle Cliff, Aunt Mall, even Sven, seemed to glow with a sort of possibility, and goodness, and promise. Nicky had never felt that people other than her family truly cared for her. Here on the island, just by virtue of living on the Rock, as Veronica called it in her video, she seemed to earn the trust and admiration of others, maybe because she had chosen—or her father had chosen, more accurately—to come to the state and make it home.

Nicky squeezed her eyes shut, pulling the covers tight over her. Out in the dark, a raven chortled, getting comfortable in the branches for the evening. After a moment she rolled over again and scooted forward in the covers, gripping the sash of the window and lifting it open all the way. A gust of lemon-scented air blew in, spiced with something else—yellow cedar, she guessed. The oldest trees in the forest. The wet boardwalk below reflected the amber streetlight. The moon emptied its light over the valley, shading the treetops gray.

As she leaned forward through the open window, staring at the expanse of the valley beneath her, the trees themselves turned to bark, each one a scale attached to the trunk stretching the length of the valley. The crown lay invisible, somewhere beyond the mountains, stretching its branches to the edges of the island, while the roots curled under the streets of town. The roots reaching far beneath the boardwalk and cement to the ocean, where salmon charged about in the dark, searching for needlefish, waiting for a signal to return to the forest that bore them. To the trees that protected them from predators and saved them from floods. Trees that, each year, took back their spent bodies, which melted back into the banks of the river from whence they came.