Mara does not call during work hours unless something is bleeding, on fire, or legally complicated. I answered with my mouth still full and said, “Hey, what’s up?” And all I heard was wind and her breathing like she had been running. You need to come home right now. There is a tone people use when they’re trying not to panic. That was her voice.
Tight, controlled, failing. What happened? Just come home, Eli. I did not even shut my computer down properly. I grabbed my keys, mumbled something to my manager about a family emergency, and drove faster than I should have on a two-lane county road that already makes me nervous in the rain. It was clear that day, blue sky, bright birds probably chirping somewhere.
Meanwhile, my stomach was folding in on itself like bad origami. When I turned on a pine hollow road, I knew before I saw it. There is a way a landscape feels wrong when something old has been removed. Like when someone takes a picture off the wall and you can still see the cleaner paint underneath. The six sycamores along the eastern edge of my property were gone.
Not trimmed, not damaged by a storm. Gone. 40-year-old trees, tall, thick, the kind that lean just slightly toward the sun like they have been listening their whole lives. My dad planted three of them when I was a kid. The other three came later, but they grew into a single wall of green that framed my house and blocked the ridge above me from staring straight down into my backyard.
