Inside the courtroom, fluorescent lights glare from the dropped white ceiling. I blink to refocus, trying to make out the faces of the jury in the blur. Lawyers scribble notes and tap on their laptops. They take out papers from one file and shuffle them into another. The jury seems tired. They swivel in their chairs or stare at the ceiling. The judge looks on, his chin propped up with his hand, his body swallowed in his black robe.
Ian holds my hand while the prosecutor opens his case. He tells the jury about the fibers found in Blaire’s apartment and car and how they match those found on Lark’s clothes.
“And that’s not all,” he tells the jury. He paces and gestures, drops his head for dramatic effect. “DNA evidence links Lark’s blood to a knife found in his apartment, the very knife that he used to stab her here. . . .”
The lawyer taps the left side of his chest, the same place where Nyetta says Lark was stabbed, where Nyetta said the wound is, the one she had to see so Lark wouldn’t turn into a tree. I shudder and feel sick. Ian and I turn to each other. It’s true. What Nyetta told us is true.
We stay all day, listening to details of Lark’s death, how the knife collapsed her lung, how semen was found on her leg, how her body entered hypothermia stage two, how her skin turned puffy and blue in stage three, how it took hours to die.
I listen to everything, storing facts in one corner of my brain while another remembers the last time I saw her alive, lumbering up her driveway days before she died. I was upstairs in my room, drawing windmills and empty fields, lonely farmhouses, canals lined with bare trees. A landscape I don’t even know.
LarkLarkLarkLarkLarkLarkLarkLarkLark . . .
Her name pulses in my head like a heartbeat. Memories and images fall into slots. I see her pour her body into a perfect back dive, entering the clear blue water with barely a splash. I see our footprints in the mud, her damp hair hanging down her back as she runs in front of me. Smells of sunscreen and cut grass waft through the woods. Only a few feet away was where she would die.
* * *
Days later, after the evidence, the testimonies, the witnesses, and the questions, after the closing arguments and the guilty verdict, I take Ian to the place in the woods where Lark and I used to throw stones at the islands. Thousands and thousands of tight little buds burst above us on silvery branches. Here and there, between outcroppings of rock, bright shoots sprout, bold and insistent. We wander the woods, trying to find the exact tree where she died. We place our hands on one after another, feeling deep into the tiny ridges of bark for her pulse.
“Here!” calls Ian.
A tall elm clings to bare rock. Roots snake between stone and bury themselves deep in the earth. I put my hands next to his.
“Look,” he says.
I peer into the bark and there she is, her face through the wood. She’s startled and fraught, like she’s been grabbed by the hair or caught in a trap. Her eyes stare into mine. Her breath rasps. Her heart beats faint and fast beneath my hands.
“We know, Lark,” I say. “Let go of Nyetta. Let us be the ones to set you free.”