Trees fight for life. If you climb to the high, rocky places, where the soil’s been stripped by the beating of the winds, day and night, you’ll see the pines hanging on, their roots crawling into the splits between the stones and wrapping tight around them, like the crew of a ghost sailing ship, desperately clinging forever to the lines as they ride through an eternal storm.

This love of life that we go on about, how precious it is and such, is just a mechanism. Spiders and flies, blades of grass, and bacteria have it. Any form of life that doesn’t have it gets wiped out. Ipso facto, it’s built in, like spark plugs in an internal combustion engine. We spend endless hours wondering if our life will be short or long, good or bad, worthwhile or worthless, then death comes, and we have no idea at all.

—

The Lexus stayed behind me. Sure enough, when I turned off the county road, onto Shanty Road, up into the hollow, she followed.

I stopped at #46, got out, and waited, blocking the way.

It was Maddie. She stopped. I pointed at the driveway. She started to get out of her car, her mouth moving in full yelp. I shook my head, “No,” and pointed again. She started to yell, with outrage, that I had her phone and I had to give it back. I said, “If you want to talk to me at all, you’ll go in there, and you’ll wait.”

“But you have my property!”

“If you follow me up, I’ll shoot you with Miz Bloom Carter’s gun. With her prints all over it and all over the cartridges. I’ll shoot out your windshield, I’ll shoot out your headlights.”

She pouted. Got back. Turned on the engine and started to go where she’d been told.

“Wait,” I called. I walked up to her window.

“You want your phone back?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“What’s the password?”

“What? No. I can’t.”

“Based on our exchanges to date, I need to know if you’ve done anything more to put me in danger. And yourself, for that matter. You can tell me or you can wait until I get my hacker to do it. Which might take a couple of weeks.”

She wanted that phone back. She told me the password.

I told her to wait where she was. Then I drove up to my house. I went to the rock, lifted it, opened the box, got her phone and its vital parts. I went to the house, hooked it up to my laptop, and did a backup of everything except her music, which was not to my taste. If it left a trace, a blip for the eighty seconds or so that it took, so be it. I’d seen my own phone be confused for longer than that, frequently thinking it was at its ancestral home in Cupertino before it registered it was in the Catskills. When the transfer was done, I took the phone apart, and walked down the hill.