22
Life in the trees had its moments. Some were even joyful, like the time I swung down on the rope with Little Levi in my arms and he laughed so hard that he threw up. But we were never for a second without fear of being found, nor without our watchers, up in the treetop crow’s nests we had built from split logs to be strong enough to hold two.
I sat that afternoon in the shade of a giant sycamore tree with Little Levi on my lap, him playing with my long hair, which fell to my waist in yellow waves. Whenever I held him against me, I thought of holding the red vase with Levi’s bones on the night before we’d officially become refugees and fugitives. How in a way I had wanted his bones inside of me, his bones for my bones, and now I had them, sprung from my womb.
Little Levi had not com
