He strolls down the gravel lane, a thirteen-year-old American boy in Converse All-Stars, with dirt on his nose and blood on his hands. A child of the land that grew him.

Behind him someone shouts in surprise. Connor? One of them throws himself into the double doors, which shudder and quake and remain closed. His father yells Jack’s name. Now both of them hit the double doors, with a splintering crunch. A few pieces of wood go flying, but the lock holds. Jack turns back, halfway down the drive, to see if they will kick their way out—and that’s when he sees ropy greenish vines, slithering up out of the soil, long cables of root that crawl up the sides of the barn, run across the double doors in trembling threads, binding them shut. The next time the two men hit the doors, the panels barely move. The cords draw tight around the base of the barn, a net around a fish. Jack smiles and rubs at the queer feeling in the left side of his head. She promised she’d help.

The barn disappears in a silent, obliterating flash. A gust of wind picks Jack up like a leaf and flings him weightlessly into the sky.

22.

When Jack McCourt comes to, he is lying in a great feather bed of violet blooms. He has wound up in one of Beth’s flower beds, out in front of the cottage she shared with Connor. Sweet green fronds stroke his cheeks, and a fuzzy flower kisses his left temple. He can’t hear a thing, and there’s a trickle of blood running from one ear. He can taste blood in his mouth.

The barn is gone. It is hard to even look at the place where it stood. There is an orchid of light rising there, a stem of fire, with petals of flame spreading out from the top. The F-150 has been tossed a hundred feet to the east, a black charred wreck flipped on its side. One half of the farmhouse has collapsed in on itself, a balsa-wood dollhouse that has been kicked by a giant. Blackened beams stick out of the ruin, trickling smoke into the brightness of the day.

A part of Jack doesn’t want to get up. He has not felt so at peace since the morning he left the house with Bloom to go and see her family. There among the flowers, he feels as happy and comfortable as a child curled up beside his mother on a lazy summer morning. When he forces himself up at last, it’s with a lazy sigh of regret.