With this on her heart, she let the songs come, almost always humming first, and then letting the words flow in. They came in the dark, in the living room where she had gotten in the habit of ending her nights with a spliff, more weed in the balance each night.

When she smoked, she sang the cigarette song.

Coming in, coming in

Toxic things and poison

Going out, going out

Freedom once again

4. This was spoken by Grace Lee Boggs during her time in hospice.

chapter twenty-two: Alone

Dune lay on the couch in the living room under a blanket.

The vines between the houses were dazzling burnt orange. Earlier that day a hawk had landed up in the tree, near the top of the window, a smaller bird clutched in his talons. As Dune had watched, he had plucked the smaller bird clean and eaten all he could from its small carcass. He’d dropped it when he took off. Dune could still see some of the feathers caught in the bright vines. Change in the natural world was so beautiful, so inevitable. Why didn’t it feel like that, to be human?

The leaf got to be brilliant before it let go. Kama got no chance, Mama Vivian faded away.

Dune had eaten and there was nothing she needed to do, no one to care for, no one to call for her, no one to ignore her. She felt guilt as soon as she realized what she was feeling, before she let it crystalize into a thought. Her guilt wasn’t large enough to quiet the thought.

She was grateful to be alone finally, truly alone. She knew, in her bones that she was going to have to find people if she was going to survive. She knew that there were people, somewhere, people like her parents, like Mama Vivian, people who were making a way out of no way. And she would have to find them, and beg them to let her in, and find a way to let them in. She knew that.

But first she needed this curling in, this bright release of all the lives she’d loved and lost.

The next time Dune went to the basement, there were trees on the model.

Specifically, there was a leaf on a stem growing up from the gray lego plastic of her model yard. Another in the northeast corner of the model, which some small voice in her head noted was near Elouise’s street. And down by the river, new leaves.

They looked like trees, scaled against the small roads and game houses. They weren’t toys, weren’t plastic—they had sprung up there on their own.