, The fall before they died, my husband and daughter had been in a short film my husband made with his silent film class called The Magic Tree. Besides studying and writing about old films, my husband used the antique movie cameras he collected to have his classes at the college try their hand at a short silent film or two. In The Magic Tree, the first title card explains: After his family is killed in a railroad accident, a man wanders without hope. Intheopeningshot,heiswalkingthroughadeepforestwithhisfewprecious family mementoes in a sack. The man is my husband, made up with his eyes so wildly corked in, so dark, he looks like he had spent his grief in a coal mine. The film is dark, grainy black and white. I remembered my husband complaining about the difficulties he had shooting it. The late fall sun in Indiana had barely been up to the task of lighting the old-fashioned, insensitive film stock he used forreasonsofauthenticity.Theclasstimehadmadeforalateshootingschedule. My daughter had complained about how cold it had been in the woods in her thin cotton costume. Still, the film had turned out to be beautiful, so striking I was surprised when I saw it projected at the school, the pianist playing some Erik Satie to set the mood. Each leaf on the ground, each bare branch seemed etched on the screen. We watched, me, my daughter, my husband, his class, holding our breath. Aftertheannouncedwandering,theman,passingbyamassiveoak,stumbles over a rock with an inscription: 3 17 What you have loved What you have lost This tree returns He offers the tree all his money, pressing oversized bills onto the rough bark with both hands, his every gesture telegraphing desperate. Then he opens his sackandtakesoutthelastremindersofhisfamily,asmallwhitestuffedbearand a picture of the daughter—our daughter—with his wife. The wife is one of his students, dressed for the period in a trailing white dress, her hair piled on her head. In the framed photograph, she sits with my daughter smiling in her lap. The man tosses first the stuffed bear, then the photograph, and they disappear mysteriously into the tree. Then out of the tree—magic!—step his wife and his daughter. My daughter looks younger than eight in a white sailor suit. The father hugs his wife. His daughter. They hug and hug—such joy. Then he tries to lead them away, but the wife pulls back, shaking her head. She kneels and brushes some leaves away from the rock and shows her husband the rest of the inscription: Whatever you have loved Whatever you have lost This tree returns But at great cost Inlifeandinmagic,alwaysthereisthefineprint,thesub-clause,wewouldall be wise to read. At this point, students in the audience gasped. No matter that the film was sentimental, no matter that it was hand-cranked and slow. Loss is loss, even to an audience of twenty-year-olds. The husband and wife exchange a long look. Then, hand in hand, the studentas -wife, then the daughter, and then the husband disappear into the tree. My daughter and my husband there, then gone. Together in this alternate reality, smiling, as they disappear, one after the other, through the magic of the camera into that thick, unyielding oak. The night before I left for New York, I watched the film on video again and again, and all I could think was, “Why can’t I go with them?” Though I knew the rock was carved and painted Styrofoam, and the tree was an oak in the city 18 park behind our house, it was all I could do to keep from running into the night to find it. Near dawn, I put the tape away and got ready to leave. Most of my bills were paidautomatically,deductedfromourcheckingaccount.Myhusbandhadbeen keen on that. The others—bills I picked out from the mail scattered on the floor inside the front door—were mostly things an empty house could live without, like cable TV and magazine subscriptions. I wrote notes on the bills, canceling them. I left a last check for my cleaning person with a note telling her I wouldn’t needheranymoreandwrotetheinsufficientwordsThanks for Everything!inink on the bottom. My husband had been raised to be careful with money and had always kept six months of our salaries in savings. I moved all that money from savings to checking. After the accident, I’d taken sick leave for the rest of the spring semester, so I was still getting paid every month even though...