The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  DEDICATION

  FOR MY SISTERS, SARAH, ALIA, AND LILY

  FAMILY TREES

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Family Trees

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Kali Wallace

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  BEYOND THE WINDOW the morning was bright and glittering, the sky a breathless blue, and the hotels on Miami Beach jutted like broken teeth across the water, but all Sorrow could see was the orchard. There were trees whispering behind the walls of the office, and she almost believed if she turned—if she was quick—she would glimpse their sturdy thick trunks and rustling dead leaves from the corner of her eye.

  “Your father is very worried about you,” Dr. Silva said.

  Sorrow rubbed her arms and looked away from the window. That cool breeze touching the back of her neck, that was only the air conditioner.

  Dr. Silva was, as ever, perfectly composed in a pencil skirt, a cream blouse that complemented her dark skin, and heels so high Sorrow wondered how anybody could walk in them without risking ankle damage. Sorrow had seen Dr. Silva regularly when she first moved to Florida, but it had been two years since her last appointment, and the doctor had moved her practice from a hospital in Coral Gables to a Brickell skyscraper overlooking Biscayne Bay. Boats crawled through the no-wake zone far below, and cars glinted like jewels on the bridges.

  Sorrow was leaning in the corner of the leather sofa, her legs sticking painfully to the seat. Dad was in the waiting room, probably paging through a glossy travel magazine, checking his email, checking the time. He had made the appointment, gotten Sorrow out of bed, fixed her breakfast, taken a day off work to come with her even though she was perfectly capable of driving herself. Sorrow’s stepmother, Sonia, had watched it all with worried eyes and a concerned pinch to her lips, but she hadn’t argued or interfered. She hadn’t offered any opinion at all except to say, “I think that’s a good idea.”

  Dr. Silva was waiting for an answer. Sorrow thought about rolling her eyes, didn’t. Thought about giving an unimpressed snort. Didn’t. The silence stretched. There wasn’t a trace of impatience on Dr. Silva’s face.

  Finally Sorrow said, “I can’t stop thinking about my sister.”

  It was the first time Sorrow had admitted it out loud since the party, and once she started, the words were tumbling out: she had been thinking about Patience when she disappeared that evening from her grandparents’ house on the edge of the Everglades, and she had been thinking about her day and night since then. She thought about Patience when she woke in the morning and when she tossed and turned in bed at night, when she went to school and when she came home, when she hugged her stepsister, Andi, good-bye at the airport, when Sonia asked about her day, when she shrugged away from her father’s concern. She had been thinking about Patience when she was blowing off meeting her friends, when she was supposed to be doing her homework, taking a trigonometry exam, writing an English essay, and she had been thinking about Patience when her teachers had called Dad and Sonia into the school to discuss the recent decline in her already unimpressive academic performance.

  Every day, every moment, she was thinking about Patience in their mother’s orchard in Vermont, her long brown hair and soft hazel eyes, how she had loved racing playfully through the apple trees while Sorrow tagged along, always smaller, always slower. In her thoughts the seasons turned around them in a film-reel flicker of color—winter brown to pale spring green, summer’s deep mossy shadows to autumn’s blaze of red and gold—and no matter how hard Sorrow tried, no matter how desperately she reached, Patience was always just beyond her grasp.

  She had been thinking about who Patience would have been, if she had lived.

  There were blank spaces in Sorrow’s memory surrounding the day Patience died. Where before she had always let her thoughts skitter away from those days like roaches fleeing a sudden light, now she turned in to them, examined them, unflinching, and all she found was a thicket of shadows obscuring her view, a tangled wall of branches between her and the past. Nothing she did helped her push through. All she had were questions and the long-ago echo of nightmares tinged with fire.

  “Why can’t I remember what happened?” she asked.

  Dr. Silva, her voice as calm and deep as the cloudless sky, said, “Memory is imperfect, Sorrow, even in the best circumstances. Your sister’s death was a terrible trauma, and the effects of such a trauma, especially at such a young age, they last a long time. You might never remember everything.”

  “It’s been eight years,” Sorrow said, and there it was again, the whisper of wind through remembered trees all around her, the imagined shadows reaching up the walls and bending onto the ceiling. “I don’t have nightmares anymore.”

  “Why is it so important to you?” Dr. Silva asked. “What do you think will change if you remember?”

  It wasn’t enough to sketch in those terrible days with what others had told her. Dad hadn’t even been there when Patience died; he had visited only a few times a year throughout her childhood. She could never talk about it with her mother; their phone conversations were carefully light, deliberately casual, and they never, ever mentioned Patience. A girl who couldn’t remember, a man who had been hundreds of miles away, a woman who would not even say her daughter’s name. A few lines of empty fact: unexplained fire, unexpected tragedy. It wasn’t enough.

  Dr. Silva was speaking, but her words were a murmur at the edge of Sorrow’s awareness. Sorrow was staring out the window again at beaches and bridges and keys, and what she was seeing was the orchard not as it would be now, in the first blush of spring with apple blossoms opening pink and white, but as it had been before Patience died. It had been winter-gray and barren, the naked branches of the trees silver in the moonlight, the nights so bitterly cold she felt it still as an ache in her chest.

  The Lovegoods of Abrams Valley, the family of her mother and grandmother and the long unbroken braid of women before them, they had always lived and died by stories they told, their remembrances held dear long after most families would have let old names and old deeds disappear into history.

  “I want to go back,” Sorrow said. “I need to go back to the orchard.”

  Patience deserved that. She deserved to be remembered.

  2

  REJOICE LOVEGOOD

  ?–1790

  DAWN CREPT OVER the mountains, and the land breathed. She felt it beneath her, a living thing, as she climbed the hill away from the cabin. The newest saplings, one year old, were knee-high now on the cusp of summer. The hills were mottled brown and gr
een, shapes indistinguishable in the murky half-light before sunrise, but the sky was an extravagant smear of pink and orange and gold, such glorious colors they felt like fire in her eyes, embers beneath her skin.

  At the summit of the hill waited the gnarled old oak. It was a magnificent tree, so broad and so towering she had thought it might have a story, a history, some weighty reverence due to its great age and imposing height, but the villagers had laughed when she asked. It was only a tree, they said. A tree in a sea of trees, a world of trees, but even so, she had not the heart to cut it down. It would stay here. She would clear the hill around it, bring her apple trees up the south-facing slope in clean curving rows, over the top and down the northern side. By the end of this summer she would have this hill ready for her rootstock. The land was stubborn, the roots hard as iron and the stones plentiful, but her stubbornness, she had learned, was greater.

  Last year’s planting had the look of spindly sticks, offering a shy spattering of leaves as they broke from their winter dormancy. Those from the year before, no longer saplings but still skinny as colt legs, were branching into proper little trees. The oldest, the first she had planted, they were three years old, and their branches were innumerable, their early-summer leaves lush and supple, and their blossoms as shy and pink as a smile.

  Four years now she had toiled alone in these dark woods. That first winter, after she had cleared the land and planted her precious roots, but before she had known if even a single apple tree would take, she had huddled in her cabin as the wind snaked through chinks in the mud. She had been barely more than a girl when she crossed the sea, spring-fresh and unformed, not yet twenty years of age, and though she felt ancient in her heart as the cold closed around her, old as the mountains in her bones, she had wept like a child when the storms wailed. Wept for the girl she had been and the misty green hills she had left behind, wept for the family across the sea that would never again speak her name except in shame and, someday, perhaps, regret. She had wept until she was scraped raw inside, empty but for the leaden weight of every memory of the life she had left, the grasping thorns of every choice that had brought her to this bleak and howling place. When darkness fell she poured rivers of tears into the wood and soil and stone beneath her, a well of loneliness that felt as though it would never run dry.

  But slowly, slowly, winter had broken its hold on the mountains. Gray skies cracked apart to reveal searing blue, and the call of songbirds and drone of insects chased away the mourning wind. Spring came with a crush of green, a blush of pink, and she did not have time to weep anymore. She had work to do. The tears she spilled had nourished the land, softened it for her ax and spade, flowed through the earth, feeding her trees both wild and tame. Her sweat sank to join it, her blood as well, so much through that first year, so often, the land might have been an extension of her own body, flesh and stone, water and blood.

  The wind turned, a gentle breeze tugging at wisps of unbound hair. The work never stopped, but she allowed herself this small luxury of watching the sun rise. Today the dawn was joined by a hint of smoke in the air. It had become a familiar scent these past few days, and she wasn’t yet sure how to feel about neighbors planting themselves so close. She had met them yesterday. A man and his family, grim stern-faced folk lately of a plantation in Massachusetts. The boys were strapping and strong, the wife unsmiling and silent; one of the sons, a child of about ten, had spat on the ground and glowered, mumbling witch to the earth before his mother herded him away. The man had asked to speak to her husband, her father, her brother, each question lifting his voice and brow with increasing disbelief that he had come so far into the mountains to find a woman alone on a piece of land she had cultivated with her own hands, and no man to rule her.

  She had told him she was a widow—handily dispatching the imaginary husband she had invented to secure the land—and she had watched the calculating spark appear in his eyes. Her land was rich, the soil good, and most of all it was already cleared. Her apple trees were young but thriving. His own land promised years of toil to come.

  She patted the trunk of the magnificent oak and felt its warmth beneath her fingers, its welcoming strength. She had acres to tend, and the sun was rising. The smoke of the neighbors’ fire was as delicate as spider silk against the brilliant dawn. The man would be waking with avarice in his heart and deception in his eyes. As the summer bloomed he would try to clear her along with the shrubs and stones and snags, as though a woman were no more than another obstacle on the landscape.

  But she had shed tears and blood to make this land a part of herself. She was not so easily frightened away.

  3

  SORROW RESTED HER forehead against the window as the plane descended. Lake Champlain glittered in the sun, deep blue dotted with small boats like scattered toys. Burlington at its shore barely looked like a city. No skyscrapers, no lanes of highway glinting with traffic, no suburban sprawl stretching to the horizon. She had looked it up: the entire state of Vermont had roughly one-quarter the population of Miami-Dade County.

  Everything was small and strange and unfamiliar. She hadn’t been sitting by the window when she flew away eight years ago. All she remembered of the day she left were tree-lined roads blurred through tears, her father a stiff and quiet stranger beside her, a hollow ache in her chest that felt like something had been torn away, and not understanding, not really, that she wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time.

  Her eyes were hot, her head heavy, but her insides were an electric tangle of nerves. For three months she’d been pushing and planning for this trip. Telling Dad and Sonia that letting her go was the only way they could help. Enlisting Dr. Silva to argue on her behalf. Reassuring herself, over and over again, in every way she knew how, that it was what she needed to do, that when she was standing on the ground in Abrams Valley, breathing the summer mountain air beneath a clear blue sky, the gaps in her childhood memories, all those empty spaces edged with thorns, would collapse on themselves, and she would remember. She scarcely dared think about what she would do if it didn’t work, if her month in Vermont passed and nothing changed.

  She had left Miami in the muggy darkness before dawn, after managing barely an hour of restless sleep. Right up until she passed through security she had been expecting Dad to change his mind. All through the days leading up to her leaving, through the drive to the airport in the morning darkness, the walk through the terminal, there had been words perched on the tip of his tongue, a single breath from being spoken, but in the end he’d only said, “You don’t have to stay if it’s not what you expect.”

  Sorrow had hugged him good-bye, told him she would be fine, and fled into the security line.

  The pilot advised the flight attendants to prepare for landing. A few rows up a toddler shrieked excitedly. Trees gave way to open fields, open fields to an expanse of asphalt. The plane landed with a jolt and a rumble. When it rolled to a stop and the clatter of seat belts filled the cabin, Sorrow pulled out her phone, texted a single word to her father—landed—because he would call if she didn’t. After a moment, she texted the same to her stepmother, Sonia; she couldn’t be sure anymore that what she told one of them would reach the other.

  She scrolled through messages from her stepsister, Andi, from her friends, from her cousins, but she didn’t want to go through a dozen have a safe trip! and don’t get eaten by a moose! texts right now, not from the same people who had reacted to her trip with varying degrees of skepticism and doubt, peppering her with invasive questions: “But your mother, is she okay now? Is she seeing a doctor? Is she medicated?”

  Sorrow’s Florida family had always treated her family in Vermont as an artifact of ancient history, a distant, troubled past to be occasionally puzzled over, mostly ignored. They thought it charming that Sorrow could name her ancestors back twelve generations—but only the women, rarely the men—and didn’t that tell you what you needed to know about her mother’s side of the family? They knew her parents had never be
en married, hadn’t even lived together for more than a few months around the birth of each daughter, but they didn’t like to judge, that wasn’t what they were saying, sometimes these things happened. None of it was important anyway. It was all so long ago. There was nothing there worth going back to.

  They had never known Patience.

  To them, she was a concept veiled in tragedy more than a person, a sad story to be shared when Sorrow was out of the room. Heads shaking, voices low: She had an older sister once, you know, up in Vermont, but the poor girl died. Sixteen years old. There was a fire.

  The airport was small, so it was only a few minutes before Sorrow was standing beside the baggage claim, tapping her fingers against her leg, waiting for the belt to move.

  She looked around the room, the milling people, the families and reunion hugs.

  She didn’t see her mother. She looked again.

  The flight was on time, even a few minutes early. Maybe Verity hadn’t gotten to the airport yet. The baggage belt chugged to life, and the passengers crowded closer. Maybe she was parking. Maybe Sorrow was supposed to meet her outside. Verity had only said she would pick her up; they hadn’t decided on a meeting place. Maybe it was a longer drive than Sorrow remembered—she wasn’t even sure what she remembered. Narrow roads, green mountains, blue sky, an ache in her throat that had taken weeks to fade, but no sense of time, no sense of distance.

  She spotted her bag, bright blue, and wrestled it off the belt.

  “Sorrow.”

  She turned, and there was Verity.

  In Sorrow’s memories of her childhood in Vermont, she could not recall her mother ever wearing anything other than a skirt or a dress. Even when she was working in the orchard or garden, Verity had worn long skirts, usually handmade, often patched so many times they looked like one of Grandma Perseverance’s quilts. She had never even owned a pair of jeans, as far as Sorrow knew. None of them had. It was one of the things that had earned Sorrow and Patience relentless mockery from kids in town. The adults hadn’t been much better, wondering aloud if the Lovegoods were Amish or Mennonite or their own particular brand of backwoods weird, and what was their mother thinking, dressing them like that? If their father was around she wouldn’t get away with that, but the Lovegood women, they didn’t have much use for men, did they? Sorrow had never known how to respond. The women in their family did things their own way. That was all she had known when she was a child.