Chapter 8: Six Stumps
Dan came home at twenty past three with his graded quizzes and a plan to check the soaker hose, and he knew before he had turned into the driveway that the yard was wrong.
It was the light that told him first. His front yard at that hour had a particular dapple to it, the young canopy breaking the afternoon sun into coins on the grass, and the coins were gone. The light lay on the lawn flat and hard and uninterrupted, the way it had before he planted anything, and his stomach understood before his eyes did.
He got out of the car slowly.
Six stumps stood in a row where his trees had been, none of them taller than his ankle, each crowned with a fresh pale disc of cut wood, sawdust gathered around them in soft aprons of gold. The mulch beds had been raked β someone had raked, efficiently, the way you tidy a thing you are finished with β and long tire tracks pressed the side grass where a chipper had sat. A smell hung over the yard, green and resinous, the unmistakable smell of cut living wood, and underneath it, diesel.
The stakes were gone. Lily's painted stakes, gone. The soaker hose, cut in two places, lay coiled by the spigot like something that had been interrupted.
Dan stood in his own yard holding a tote bag of seventh-grade quizzes about the water cycle, and he did not shout, and he did not throw anything, and later he would be able to say honestly that the thought of shouting never really formed. What formed was a strange, ringing quiet in his head, and inside the quiet one clear instruction, in the voice he used on himself during laboratory emergencies: Slowly. In order. Don't touch anything yet.
Priya's car turned in behind his. He heard her door, heard her say his name in the flat voice of a person whose mind is declining to participate, and then she was beside him with one hand pressed over her mouth.
"Dan." She said it once more, differently. "Dan, who β the trees are β "
"I know," he said.
"They were here this morning. I saw them when I left. The serviceberry was β " She stopped. She was a pediatric nurse; she had delivered hard news in hospital hallways with her voice steady, and she could not finish the sentence in her own front yard.
The school bus sighed to a stop at the corner at four o'clock, and Lily came down Foxglove Lane at the loose-limbed amble of a twelve-year-old whose day had contained nothing worse than a pop quiz, her science folder tucked under one arm β and halted at the end of the walk the way you stop at the edge of thin ice.
She looked at the stumps for a long moment. "Dad?" she said. "Where are the trees?"
Neither of her parents found a sentence fast enough. Her science folder slid from under her arm onto the walk, its pages stirring in the small wind, unregarded. She walked forward, past them both, and knelt beside the third dogwood β Dogwood #3: slow but okay β and put her hand flat on the cut surface, and began to cry with the uncomplicated grief of a child, which is the kind that does not yet know it is supposed to be embarrassed.
Dan set the tote bag down on the grass. He knelt in the sawdust beside his daughter and put an arm around her shoulders, and over the top of her head he met Priya's eyes, and something passed between them that had no words and did not need any.
Then, gently, he got to his feet.
He walked the yard slowly, the whole of it, the way he had watered it a hundred mornings. He photographed everything: the stumps from above, the stumps from the side, the pale discs with their rings β young rings, so few of them β the tire tracks, the cut hose, the raked beds, the empty street where the truck had stood. He photographed the stump of the serviceberry with his own hand laid beside it for scale, and his hand was steady, which surprised him. Priya, understanding without being asked, photographed too, from the porch steps: wide shots, the whole yard, the house number showing clear on the mailbox at the edge of the frame.
It was on his second pass, along the fence line, that Dan stopped and looked up at the corner of the garage β at the small dark dome of the security camera he had installed two winters before, after a rash of package thefts, aimed where it had always been aimed: across the driveway, across the front yard, across all six trees.
The little red standby light was on.
"Oh," Dan said, very softly, like a man in his own classroom watching an experiment turn, against expectation, decisive. "Oh. Good."
Chapter 9: The Footage