When she reached Baby, Vera lost her footing. If she had wanted to find the tree, put her palm on its trunk, it wasn’t going to be here. There were no trees. The ground was black. There was a stack of sod, behind it another one and another. Bags of topsoil made a wall to the right of charred land. A backhoe, a trailer, a hulking of equipment waited in the background. Baby was running her hands along the sod’s brightest-green feathery grass.

“See,” Baby said. “Need to come up on it like a surprise.”

Vera felt uneasy.

“I seen this first, I had to lay down,” Baby told her.

Vera shook herself. She was trying to get herself staunch again. This might be one of the last nights to see this exterminated parkland, this earth before the sod.

“Baby, thank you for showing me this.”

“Hmm-mm.”

“But the night of the crash?”

“Different.” Baby whistled.

“What was it like? Tell me.”

“I got your tickets. Come on to the show,” said Baby, walking back into the trees.

Vera followed, and soon they came up on a rock the size of both of them.

“This where he like it. Right here,” Baby said.

Vera shone her flashlight into the clearing. She could see it perfectly from this vantage.

“We here,” Baby said. “We done. We hear it. He fall flat on this ground, right here. But I see. Three. Like Batman. First guy takes a stereo out. Other stereo, now three stereos, only the stereos are phones too. Talkin’ on ’em. Numbers. Ninety-two. Twenty-eight. Five. Forty-four. Eight. Eight.

“Then this, like, monster noise comes up, like, you know, when the train comes in the station? It’s here, right here.

“Next thing I know, Batmans gone, stereos gone, these here trees is all burning, but not like tree burning, more like metal burning or someshit. Leaves are, like, hissing, like snakes. My date, he’s all gone. Me, I take off for the lot. But I’m, like, all turned around and shit—and what do I see? Not Virginia. I see the D.C. side. Lincoln on his chair.

“Then, true fact, I look up and there she is. White woman in a tree. She got this big parachute twisted all over and she’s twirling—then, boom, she just stops. I say, ‘Lady, lady.’ But she can’t hear.”

Walking back, Vera saw the sign that said Park Closed Until Further Notice.

•  •  •

There was no explanation for Mabel’s passing out in the middle of the night in her garden. The doctors were stumped, and their tests were inconclusive. The best anyone could say was that she had suffered some kind of minor stroke. There was no evidence of it in all the neurological scans, but it was worth watching, because it could be a warning of a more serious stroke to come.