My son disappeared from our backyard, and then the marks started showing up

Nataly cried so hard that my knees gave out, and I dropped to the ground in front of her.

She looked at me, eyes all wet and helpless and pissed off, and instead of getting pissed back, I just wanted to grab her and hold her.

Only I couldn’t, because I was busy pressing the chainsaw into the tree.

Then she started pushing me back, hard, and squeezed herself between me and the tree, like I wasn’t her husband anymore. Like I was the danger.

You need to understand about the tree.

It’s this old maple in our backyard. Big ugly thing, roots coming up through the grass like knuckles. When Eli was born, I wanted to cut it down because one branch hung too close to the house, but Nataly said it made the yard feel like a place from a children’s book.

That’s how she was, though. She could say a thing like that and make you believe it. So, we kept the damn tree.

When Eli learned to stand, we started measuring him on that tree. Not on the kitchen doorframe like normal people. Nataly would hold him still, I’d make the little line with a pocketknife, and she’d carve the date beside it.

Eli loved that stupid tree-measuring thing. Loved it.

Every time, he’d stand on his toes like we wouldn’t notice and go, “Big now?”

Every couple of months. Same thing.

Then one Saturday Eli was three, and I went inside for maybe two minutes.

Maybe less. I don’t know. Don’t ask me to know.

I was just getting my fucking coffee. Or my phone. Some stupid little nothing thing. I’ve told it so many times now, I’m not sure if I remember it happening or just remember telling it.

Nataly was in the kitchen.

Eli was in the yard.

The gate had a latch he couldn’t reach. We checked that latch. We bragged about that latch. “See? Safe.” Like idiots.

I swear, he couldn’t reach it. He couldn’t.

When I came back out, the gate was open and Eli was gone.

That was it.

No blood. No shoe in the grass. No car speeding away. Nothing. FUCKING nothing.

For the first few weeks, the whole town searched.

Everybody came out with flashlights and dogs and casseroles, acting like they were in some damn movie, like if they just cared hard enough they’d find him in a bush somewhere.

Then the casseroles stopped.

Then people stopped saying Eli’s name, like his name was a scab they were scared to pick.

And the world just kept going, which was the worst part for me. The pain only got bigger.

After a while, they started looking at us different.

Nobody said, “How do you lose a child from your own backyard?” Not to my face.

But they said other things.

“Are you sure the gate was locked?”

“Was he the kind of boy who wandered?”

“Three is old enough to answer if you call.”

Someone spray-painted WATCH YOUR KIDS on our fence six months after it happened.

I sweated like a pig and used half a can of thinner scrubbing that shit off before Nataly woke up.

Sheriff Harrow said it was probably teenagers.

Sheriff Ned Harrow was in charge of Eli’s case, which was a damn joke, because Ned Harrow wasn’t in charge of shit.

He was a loner, never married, soft as wet bread. Damp-looking. Pale little eyelashes, always blinking. He was short. Just a bit shorter than Nataly. And his voice had that sorry-sorry sound to it. Town gossip wasn’t kind to Harrow, I’ll tell you that.

“Let’s not get folks stirred up,” he’d say.

“Sometimes these things don’t have clean answers, Mr. Pohst.”

He never pushed anybody. Not the neighbors. Not the feds, who came and went so fast we barely learned their names. He never leaned on anyone, never got angry. He just stood there with his thumbs in his belt, waiting for the world to solve itself.

And I swear to God, Harrow was strange about Eli. I can’t prove it. I know that. But he was.

The first night, he stood in our kitchen staring at the photos on the fridge. Not quick, like a cop taking notes. Long. Quiet.

Eli in his dinosaur pajamas. Eli in the bath trying to eat bubbles. Eli on my shoulders at the fair.

I asked if he needed copies or something, and he just looked at me with that dumb useless face.

“No,” he said. “No, I got what I need.”

Later, he talked about how Eli called yellow “lellow” and that his swimsuit had a little whale on it.

I know cops remember details. Maybe I was just starving for someone to hate besides myself. I don’t know.

Nataly never hated him. She didn’t have room for hate, I guess. She was always the better person. The good one. She kept me sane.

I’ll admit it, I broke after Eli. Bad.

I drank too much. I slept on the couch just because the bed felt wrong, I don’t know… like I didn’t deserve a bed or something. I drove around at night looking for vans, peeking into yards like a perv. Looking for some weird bastard walking with a little kid who didn’t look like his. Sometimes I went all the way out to Charten County, like a crazy person.

I printed posters until the printer jammed, and then I put my fist through the wall because I needed to move some of the pain from the inside to the outside.

Nataly had it bad too.

She mostly kept it all inside, because that was Nataly.

She swallowed shit. That’s what she did.

Instead of falling apart where anyone could see, she cleaned something, fixed something, made food, folded laundry. Like if she kept her hands busy enough, nobody would notice she was bleeding too.

Sometimes I’d hear her crying in the bathroom at night, maybe because she thought I was too drunk or too gone to notice.

But that woman, God, she was strong in this insane way. Like even with her own heart smashed up, she still found time to patch everything.

The wall. My hand. Me.

“We don’t get to lose him and lose each other too,” she kept saying.

But her eyes told on her. There was something dead in them. Some light gone. And no amount of Nataly acting strong was gonna drag it back.

The only good thing was we stayed together. I guess.

Most nights there weren’t any words left. We just ended up falling asleep on the sofa, holding each other because letting go felt worse, with some trash TV blinking at us.

Then it started happening.

The first new mark showed up exactly one year after Eli vanished.

I was mowing the lawn and saw it.

A fresh little cut in the bark. Higher than Eli’s last mark.

Beside it was the date.

I actually had to sit down in the grass like an old man.

At first I thought Nataly had done it. Some grief thing. It made me angry, but I held it in, didn’t want to start a fight.

I was trying to drag my thoughts into a straight line, so I could tell her without breaking her that she had to stop. Then she came outside, saw my face, saw the tree, and made this tiny sound like all the air had been pulled out of her.

She touched the mark with two fingers.

“He’d be this tall,” she whispered, and her mouth stayed open after, pulling in these tiny broken breaths.

That’s when we realized someone in town was doing it.

Someone knew our private little ritual and was using it like a knife.

Who the fuck could be that cruel?

I called Harrow. He came out, looked at the mark, and went white.

I mean white.

Then he said, “Cruel kids, probably.”

I said, “Dust it.”

He said bark doesn’t hold prints well.

I said, “File a report.”

He said, “Of course.”

After that, the marks kept coming.

Every few weeks. Always a little higher. Always dated.

I put up cameras. One died before it caught shit. One gave me six minutes of static in the morning. One caught some stupid shadow by the fence. Probably a deer. Maybe a raccoon. A ghost. Who knows.

Ever since the marks started, I couldn’t even look at the tree.

But Nataly got worse in the other direction. She watered it. Checked the marks three, four times a day. Touched them like they were bruises.

I felt sorry for her, I did.

But I was angry too, because she was letting some teenage-prank asshole crawl right inside her head.

I wanted that tree gone.

I just couldn’t do that to her.

Harrow started coming around more too.

“We’re on it,” he’d say, always with that weak little voice of his.

“We’ll get the stupid teenage bastards.”

One evening I saw his cruiser parked by the high school after dark. No lights on. Just him sitting there.

When I knocked on his window, he almost dropped his coffee.

“Vandals,” he said.

There had been no vandalism.

The man was weird. I knew something was off with him, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

 

Then another mark appeared.

This one was fresh enough that sap was still shining around it.

I called Harrow. He told me maybe it was time we stopped “feeding the thing.”

The thing.

That’s what he called it.

That was when I decided the tree was coming down.

So I went outside. Just like that.

Surprised myself, honestly. I knew if I sat there thinking about it, I’d stall and hate myself and do nothing like always.

So I took the chainsaw.

Yeah, okay. I had half a bottle of whiskey in me.

The saw coughed once.

Nataly came out of the house screaming.

She ran across the yard barefoot, hair all over her face, yelling, “No, no, no… please!”

I said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

She grabbed my arm. I fell down to my knees.

“You’ll kill him,” she said.

For a second, the whole world just blinked off.

I thought, Jesus, Nataly finally lost it.

I was scared of that, honestly. Nataly had been too held together for too long, and nobody stays that held together for real.

Now she stood there sobbing at the tree, guarding it with her whole body.

I turned off the chainsaw.

Nataly covered her mouth, like she’d accidentally let blood spill out.

I looked at the newest mark.

Really looked.

It wasn’t carved in.

The bark around it was pushed outward, swollen and split, like something inside the tree had pressed one tiny finger through.

The date beside it wasn’t written either. It was made of little cracks.

“Nataly,” I said.

She fell back into the tree and made this awful sound, this broken animal sound, as if something in her was caught and begging.

“I didn’t mean forever,” she said, each word breaking on the way out.

I swear to God, that’s what she said.

She told me Eli had been crying that day. I had gone inside angry. She hadn’t slept right for too long. She said she was too lost inside herself. She said motherhood had eaten her and I didn’t look at her anymore unless Eli was between us.

She said her grandmother had taught her “old things.” Binding things. Safe things.

“I only wanted one quiet week with you,” she said. “I thought I could bring him back when I was better, when I could love him right. But every week I told myself I was almost there, and every week I needed one more.”

Behind us, someone said, “Jesus.”

Harrow was standing by the fence with a flashlight shaking in his hand.

I kept thinking, wake up, wake up, wake up.

But I was awake. My stomach was rolling, my knees were loose, and the whole yard tilted like I was about to faint.

“I knew something was wrong with it,” he whispered. “I KNEW.”

I looked at her and couldn’t stop myself. My voice kept getting louder, uglier.

“Get him out, Nataly. Get him the FUCK out.”

Nataly backed away from me like I’d raised my hand.

“I can’t,” she said.

“What?”

“I can’t. I can’t, I’m so sorry, but now it’s too late and I can’t.”

I laughed once, because it was either that or split my own head open on the tree.

“What the hell does that mean? Get our boy back. What did you do?”

She looked at the ground. Then at the tree. Then at me.

“It has to be replaced,” she said. “Someone has to. Someone has to go in.”

I stared at her.

And I know what my face did then, because hers changed.

For one second there was this horrible, naked silence between us. Husband and wife. Mother and father. Two people standing in a yard, both knowing exactly what needs to be done.

She lowered her eyes. “Yes.”

Something in my chest caved in so deep I don’t think it ever came back up.

 

It’s been three weeks since the chainsaw night.

I’m in the yard with Eli now, by the new sandbox I bought. He’s building a tower, or trying to. Mostly he’s just piling wet sand on wet sand. He’s four and some change. He seems okay. I guess it’ll take us years to know what this did to him.

Nataly sits beside us, near the corner of the sandbox, hands folded in her lap. Pale. Quiet. She only smiles when Eli looks up to show her some shiny stone. She’s a broken woman, or whatever kind of creature she is.

I still feel weak as hell, like something flattened in the road.

The hate is still in my chest, hot and thick, and when I look at Nataly I can’t even arrange my face into anything. She looks at me with those sad eyes, like she’s begging for mercy and accusing me of cruelty at the same time.

I then look at the maple tree, where just yesterday a mark split open high on the trunk, about the height of a man, a short man, just a bit shorter than Nataly.