By the time I broke into a stand of old-growth redwoods, my muscles were spent and my clothes were damp with sweat. The trees were hundreds of feet tall, toweringly still. Hap had told me once how trees as old and big as these only took one breath a day. How if I really wanted to understand them or even a single tree, I had to be there in the moment it breathed.

“Really?”

“Sure. Oceans breathe, too,” he said. “Mountains. Everything.”

I dropped in the center of the ring of trees, down into the litter of needles and dust and lichen. It wasn’t prayer, exactly, but something Eden had emphasized over the years. When things got hard and you felt shaky, she liked to say, you could hit your knees wherever you were, and the world would be there to catch you.

I’d had too many mothers, and not enough mothering. Eden was the closest I’d ever gotten to feeling like a real daughter. And now she was gone. I stilled myself and waited for faith to come, for some sign of how to go on without her, but nothing arrived. Nothing except waves of chills from my own cooling sweat, and a sadness that seemed to settle into the spaces between the trees, between the trunks and branches, between the needles and leaves, between the molecules. It climbed inside my body and curled up tightly under my ribs, like a fist made of silver thread.

Finally I stood on weak legs and began the long walk home. It was well past dark when I got there, no porch light on, and all the rooms dark. When I went into the kitchen and turned on the lights, Lenore flinched. She’d somehow clawed her way up onto Eden’s chair at the table, and as I stepped closer she flared, her feathers plumping around her neck in an angry collar, as if she was protecting the space.

“You hungry?” I asked.

Glaring silence.

I found the bag of dog food and put a few pellets out for her on the lip of the chair anyway, but the minute my hand drew close, she flapped out with her good wing, neck feathers bulging, just missing me.

I hit her without thinking. Her body was far more solid than I expected, thick and unbending as something carved of wood.

She struck back instantly, stabbing the flesh near my thumb with her beak, both wings up now, even the broken one.

“Stop it!” I raised my hand again, knowing I’d crossed a line. No one was supposed to hurt animals, ever. Eden would have hated to see us like this, but I found I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t back down.