I dug while Clare marked the depth with a stake. Checking Daniel's sketch on her phone. She'd photographed it and kept it. Janet kept the coffee coming. Dorothy at some point quietly unfolded a lawn chair and sat down like she was watching something worth watching, which I suppose she was.
When the hole was the right depth and width, Clare helped me lower the sapling in. She held the trunk straight while I backfilled around the root ball. And then she tamped the soil down with her hands. Not her feet the way people do when they want to feel the thing they're doing. She stood up and looked at the tree.
Small, young. Not much to look at yet, honestly. Just a thin trunk and a spray of early buds, weeks away from leafing out. Nothing like the tree it was going to be in 5 years, in 10 years. In 20.
But it was planted. It was in the ground. It was alive and it was in exactly the spot Daniel had sketched on a piece of paper and left on a shelf in a locked workshop. Waiting for a future that he had planned for even when the future stopped including him. Dorothy started clapping from her lawn chair.
Janet laughed a real laugh short and surprised. Clare turned and looked at both of them and for a moment her face did something I hadn't seen it do in all the month since that Tuesday in October. She smiled. Not the almost smile from the morning after the arrest. A real one, the kind that gets to the eyes.
Thank you, she said. Both of you, all of you. She looked at me when she said the last part. I just nodded. We ate Dorothy's food on the porch.
It turned out to be banana bread. Still slightly warm, which is one of those things that is exactly right for exactly the right moment. And the four of us sat in the March sun and didn't talk about the investigation or the trial or Gerald Puit's guilty plea or Terren Wik's 18-year sentence or the still active homicide investigation into Evan's death. We talked about the tree. Janet asked what kind of maple it was and I told her it was a red maple and Clare said that was right because Daniel had written red maple on the sketch very specifically and Janet said that made sense because red maples turned color early in the fall.
Some of the first to change and Clare said yes. She knew that and she said it in a way that made it clear Daniel had known it too when he chose it. Dorothy asked how tall it would get and I said in 20 years probably 35 to 40 ft. And Dorothy put her hand on her chest and said she probably wouldn't see it at 40 ft. And Clare said, "Well, then we'd better be here for whatever we do see." And Dorothy said yes, she suppose that was exactly right.
At some point, Janet went inside to get more kafi. And Dorothy wandered back to her own yard. And Clare and I were sitting on the porch steps with the tree visible in the yard and the filled sinkhole invisible beneath the ground. I got a call from the EPA last week. Clare said the contaminated site the remediation process has started.
They're saying it'll take 3 to 5 years to fully restore the soil and groundwater. That's fast. Actually, for that scale, that's what they said. They said the documentation Daniel assembled made the remediation planning significantly faster because they could pinpoint exactly where the contamination was concentrated and how it had moved through the soil over time. She looked at the yard.