He unwraps the cord from his wrist. His father’s hand at his back. I’ll make dinner in a minute, Xie says. Just going to take a walk. It’s raining, Erik says. I know. Slips out the back door. Trips over the back step. Curses. Hood up against the rain but he is soaked in a second. He walks into the backyard. The remains of summer’s strawberry and zucchini plants sunk in mud, surrounded by weeds, a mess. He unlatches the gate, slips down the narrow bank to the stream, which has swelled almost as high as the log that crosses it. He jogs over the log, careful of the moss, to the fence, higher than his head. NO TRESPASSING. He rolls back a flap of chain-link, his sleeve catching on the steel. He faces the trees. Breathes. The woods are a mile deep, two miles long, bound by the highway at the east, a local road at the west, the house at the south. To the north, in the clearing that used to be full of ash and oak, there is a field of wild grass. It’s not dark enough to see the light yet but it’s there. He doesn’t know where it comes from, some building in the clearing; he has never gone near it. He walks, arm out to touch the trunks as he passes. The wood is pure birch, Betula pendula, not native to the state, considered invasive in some places, crowding out slower-growing, longer-living species: trespassers, like him, creating a screen between Xie and the town, between Xie and everything else. A mile from any neighbor, twice that to the tiny downtown with its strip malls and craft shops and bars. He spent every day of his first summer here. Learned the names of the ferns, the flowers, the birds. Nuthatch. Barn swallow. Goldfinch. He had found his nest; he had wanted to disappear. Stupid. To think you could. He pauses at a trunk split in half by the last storm, its branches grazing the soil. The crown is still connected to the trunk by an arch of bark chalk-white on one side, bright yellow on the other, the sapwood and heartwood jaggedly exposed at the top of the break. He tugs a strip of bark from the wound and puts it in his mouth, chews. Finger deep in the cracked body of the tree, which is still alive, pumping the last of its sugars through the wood. A fox slides through the fallen crown, twitching the leaves aside. Weird nighttime eyes, rain combing its pelt close to its skinny haunches. Xie waits, bark bitter in his mouth, as the fox darts back into the brush. In its wake he sees something white in the juncture of two broken ferns; tiny bones, gently curved, with knobs like fists at either end: femurs. Picked clean. He puts them in the pocket of his hoodie. Walks home.

After dinner his father pulls a pack of cards from the sideboard Xie loves, teak with a satin finish that still shines. All their furniture is like this, simple, Danish, true vintage, inherited from Erik’s parents. His father shuffles, hands fast on the cards; he had paid for his wife’s engagement ring with the winnings from a single evening of poker. His mother used to say the ring would be his someday. An entire circle of diamonds. For the girl he was supposed to marry. He scoops up the dealt cards. More diamonds. His father frowning as he fans his hand. Shit, he murmurs. They won’t talk about the phone call, about school. Snap of plastic against the table. His thumb bleeding from where he pulled flesh away with the cuticle. Sucks it. Let him win. Pretend like you didn’t.