PART I
1
An upscale new house in a simple old neighborhood. A girl on a chaise beside a swimming pool, who wants to be left alone. We begin our story here, in the minutes before the small event that will change everything. A Sunday afternoon in May when our neighborhood is still maintaining its tenuous peace, a loose balance between old and new, us and them. Later this summer when the funeral takes place, the media will speculate boldly about who’s to blame. They’ll challenge attendees to say on-camera whose side they’re on.
For the record: we never wanted to take sides.
* * *
Juniper Whitman, the poolside girl, was seventeen. A difficult age, no question, even if you have everything going for you—which it seemed to us she did. It’s trite to say appearances can be deceiving, so we won’t say that. We’ll say no one can be known by only what’s visible. We’ll say most of us hide what troubles and confuses us, displaying instead the facets we hope others will approve of, the parts we hope others will like. Juniper was hiding something, and she didn’t know whether to be ashamed or angry or just exactly what.
This new home’s yard was much smaller than Juniper’s old one—not even a third of an acre, when before she’d had three. Where was she supposed to go when she needed to get away but wasn’t allowed to leave? There was hardly any space here that was not taken up by the house and the pool, and what space there was had no cover. There was no privacy at all. At her previous address, Juniper had liked to sit among the tall longleaf pines at the back of the property, far enough from the house that she felt like she could breathe and think. She liked to be amid the biota, as the scientists call it. It made her feel better. Always had.
But the builder of this big, gleaming white house had cleared the lot of the stately hardwoods that shaded the little house that had been here, the house that had been demolished without ceremony and removed like so much storm or earthquake debris. Except there had been no storm, no earthquake. There was just this desirable neighborhood in the middle of a desirable North Carolina city, and buyers with ready money to spend. Just that, and now this great big house with its small but expensive naked yard and its pool and its chaise and its girl and her book.
Juniper thought the rustling noises she heard in the yard behind hers, a yard that still contained a small forest of dogwood, hickory, pecan, chestnut, pine, and a tremendous oak that had been there for longer than anyone in the neighborhood had been alive, came from squirrels. She wasn’t fond of squirrels. They were cute, sure, but you couldn’t trust them not to run straight under the wheels of your car when they saw you coming. And they were forever getting into people’s bird feeders and stealing all the seed. Juniper had a novel in her lap and steered her attention back to that. The story was good, and she’d become skillful at escaping into stories.
“Hey,” said a voice that was not a squirrel’s. Juniper looked up, saw a teenage boy standing at the edge of her backyard with a rake in one hand, the other hand raised in greeting. He said, “You must be our new neighbor. I’m about to clear out some leaves and saw you there, so, you know, I figured I’d say hey.”
His appearance was a surprise in two ways. Juniper hadn’t known anyone was nearby, so there was that. But even if she had suspected there was a person, a boy, a teen like herself, she would have expected him to look like her—that is, white. Everyone in her old neighborhood was white. Instead, he was black, she was pretty sure. Light-skinned, with corkscrew hair the darkest possible shade of gold.
“Hey,” she said. “Yeah. We moved in yesterday—my little sister and my parents and me.”
“You all from out of town?”
“No, just farther out in this town.”
He smiled. “Cool. Well, I didn’t mean to bother you. Just, you know, welcome.”
“No bother. Thanks.”
If this had been the extent of it, if they’d been able to greet each other and then leave it at that—well, everything would have been a lot simpler for everyone. To say the least.
2
North Carolina has a temperate climate. That’s a big part of its draw. Winter is mild. Spring arrives early. Yes, summers are hot, but fall brings relief and lasts a long time. The oaks keep their leaves well into December, and sometimes, when winter is especially gentle, some of the varieties—the live oak being one, with its slim, feather-shaped, delicate-seeming leaves—stay leafed throughout winter as well.
The boy who greeted Juniper that first day, Xavier Alston-Holt, knew a lot about trees. They weren’t a special interest of his; he was far more interested in music, and in particular, music made using acoustic guitars. Guitars, though, are made from wood, so when his mother talked to him in endless detail about various trees, their habitats, their residents, their qualities, their vulnerabilities (greedy homebuilders topping that list), he mostly paid attention. When his mother stood in their backyard taking video and crying the day the lot behind theirs was cleared, the day men with chainsaws and grinders started at dawn and continued until dusk and his ears rang for the rest of the night, he stayed there in the yard with his arm around her shoulders because that was what he could do for her. She’d done so much for him.
And so Xavier was not surprised, nor were any of us, that his mother was not eager to meet the new neighbors who’d bought the freshly built house behind theirs. Valerie Alston-Holt was not sure how to be friendly with the kind of people who would put up the money to tear down the old house and cut down the trees. All of the trees. “People like that,” she’d said more than once—for this kind of thing was happening throughout Oak Knoll now in varying degrees—“people like that have no conscience. It’s like they’re raping the landscape. Murdering it. Trees are life. Not just my life,” she would add, since her fields were forestry and ecology, “but life, period. They literally make oxygen. We need to keep at least seven trees for every human on the planet, or else people are going to start suffocating. Think of that.”
Xavier walked around to the wooded front yard where his mother was clipping peonies for display on a sick neighbor’s bedside table. The plant beds around their modest brick ranch, a house that had been built in 1952 and had hardly been updated since, were Valerie’s favorite things, second only to her son, and one tree, the massive old eighty-foot oak that dominated their backyard. You might not think a tree could mean so much to a person. This tree, though, was more than a magnificent piece of arboreal history; for Valerie Alston-Holt, it was a witness and companion. Its wide trunk was the first thing she noticed each time she looked out the windows into the backyard. It recalled to her many moments from the years they’d lived here, not the least of which was the summer night she had stood and pressed her forehead against its nubby gray-brown bark and cried while Xavier slept in his crib, the boy too young to know that God had just robbed them blind.
Six varieties of irises. Peonies in four different colors. Azalea, phlox, snowdrop, camellia, rhododendron, clematis, honeysuckle, jasmine—you name the plant, if it grew in this state, Valerie Holt had installed it somewhere on their plot. Tending her plants was her therapy, she liked to say, her way of shutting out the stresses that came with teaching undergraduates at the university—or more often, the stresses that came from dealing with the department head or the dean. The kids were actually pretty great. Curious. Smart. Political in ways she approved of—useful ways, ways that helped protect natural habitats, or tried to, anyway, and that was worth a lot. Young people were going to save the world from itself, and she was going to encourage them in every way she could.