The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  4

  SORROW DEBATED FOR a full minute whether to say anything, but she couldn’t keep quiet.

  “What was that all about?”

  Verity adjusted her grip on the steering wheel, twisting both hands over the vinyl with a soft creak. “It’s none of her business what you’re doing here.”

  “She was only saying hi. It was no big deal.”

  “Why are you defending her?”

  “What? I’m not—I’m not defending anybody.”

  Sorrow pressed her hands to the seat beneath her legs to keep them from shaking. She hadn’t even been back in Vermont for a couple of hours, and already she’d said something that had pushed Verity’s mood from warm and cheerful to prickly and dark. She didn’t know what she had said that was so wrong, and not knowing gave her a sickly, despairing knot in her stomach. She needed to know. She couldn’t let herself fall into this cycle again. She used to know how to navigate her mother’s mercurial moods, the pitfalls and traps of life with a woman who could tumble into a black spiral of despair at the merest push, but she didn’t know anymore. She had always followed Patience’s lead, but Patience was eight years gone and Sorrow was alone now, grasping desperately for reminders of everything she had once known about keeping the peace.

  “I wasn’t even talking to her,” she said slowly. Cautiously. Calm voice, no anger. She could do this. “I was just—should I have ignored her? Not even said hi?”

  A long pause, then Verity said, “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  It was exactly what Hannah Abrams had said not five minutes ago.

  “You don’t remember.” Verity’s voice was suddenly quiet, a drop that felt like the earth opening up beneath them. “You don’t remember the kind of trouble they used to make for us. For our family.”

  The words felt like a barbed accusation. Sorrow wanted to deny it, refute it, spit out a defense. She did remember. She remembered police coming to the farm sometimes. A social worker as well, a round woman with an unflattering pageboy haircut, and she recalled clearly how thin-lipped and pale Patience would be when the woman left, how Verity would vanish to her bedroom and close the door, and how Grandma, forever silent, would sit in the kitchen by the woodstove for long hours through the night. She remembered whispers following her and Patience around town, and Patience tugging her away before she could hear what was being said—she remembered that so clearly she felt the phantom sensation of Patience’s fingers grasping hers, warmth and pressure and comfort, the aching deep certainty lodged somewhere beneath her heart that her sister would keep her safe.

  “I guess there’s a lot I didn’t understand,” she said slowly. It felt like half trembling confession, half desperate apology, but it was as far as she was willing to go.

  “You were a child,” Verity said. She took a breath, let it out slowly. “I never wanted you to worry. There were times I was so afraid they would . . . The right person would listen to them, to the things they said. I was so afraid of losing you.”

  Sorrow looked away, a flush creeping over her skin. It wasn’t the Abramses who had taken her away in the end.

  “They can’t do anything now,” she said.

  “It’s not that simple, Sorrow.”

  They fell into silence as they left the town behind. Houses on the outskirts gave way to run-down trailers and weathered barns, unwelcoming wooden fences and pickup trucks with political bumper stickers, road signs marred by bullet holes. Those things had always been there; there was unhappiness and hardship everywhere. But as a child Sorrow had rarely paid attention to life outside the orchard, and until she left she had never traveled anywhere beyond Abrams Valley. Her world had been so small, her understanding of it even smaller.

  They passed the turn to the property that used to be the Roche farm; there was a new mailbox with no name on it. The sight of it brought back a memory, sudden and clear: Mrs. Roche, in their kitchen, scolding Verity about how irresponsible it was to let her daughters run wild. She should send them to the public school in town and buy them nice clothes and shoes. She should let them make friends. It wasn’t right, said Mrs. Roche, to dwell too much in the past. Verity had barely said a word, but Mrs. Roche hadn’t noticed. Patience and Sorrow eavesdropped from the stairs, their shoulders pressed together, and when Mrs. Roche was gone, Patience had fanned herself and swanned around the house mimicking Mrs. Roche’s Southern accent until Sorrow was doubling over with laughter and Verity’s stony silence cracked into a watery smile.

  After the Roche property was the Abrams farm. The long driveway was paved and lined with flowering shrubs and short lampposts. The house looked the same—huge, rebuilt and remodeled so many times the original farmhouse was barely visible—but the detached garage hadn’t been there before.

  What Sorrow remembered standing in its place was an old barn, deep red and looming, the door into its hayloft gaping like a Cyclops’s watchful dark eye.

  “They used to have a barn, right?” she asked.

  “They tore it down,” Verity said. “The fire, remember? The first fire.”

  There it was again, the prickly flush of embarrassment, almost shame. She hadn’t forgotten. Not that. Not that. She might not remember the weeks before her move to Florida, the days surrounding her sister’s death, but she knew the recitation of facts her father and therapist had given to her, and what she knew was this: There had been two fires that March eight years ago, one in the Abrams barn, the other in the abandoned Lovegood cider house. The first fire had damaged the barn but had not harmed any people or animals.

  The second had killed Patience.

  When she was little, Sorrow had suffered nightmares every night for months, always about the same thing: falling into a bottomless pit while fire raged around her. Her father assured her she hadn’t been present for either of the fires, she had been safe at home in bed, but she imagined her sister’s last moments so vividly, so many times, she believed could feel the crackling heat and taste the smoke. The nightmares had faded, become a reminder more like a toothache than a terror. It had been years since Sorrow had woken in a panic, screaming for help.

  Dad said the police believed Patience must have seen the fire or smelled the smoke—even though the cider house was far from the house, and it had been the middle of the night—and was trapped when she went to investigate. Nobody had ever been blamed or arrested.

  When Sorrow had begun to realize how little she remembered, she had tried to research it, look up articles and information online. Abrams Valley had a weekly newspaper that mostly reported on trail clean-up volunteer days and high school football games, and the fires had been in the news—the sudden death of a teenage girl was a shocking tragedy for so small a town—but all Sorrow learned was that the police believed both fires had been started by a drifter or an addict trying to keep warm. There had been a meth lab bust on Mill Run Road a few months before, and locals were convinced big city outsiders were bringing trouble into their quiet little town. It had been a bitterly cold winter. Nobody in Abrams Valley locked their outbuilding doors. Who knew what somebody off their head on meth or heroin would do if they were caught out?

  Sorrow had hoped, when she started looking, there would be something Dad had neglected to mention, something that explained why Patience had been outside, why she hadn’t called for help, why she hadn’t woken their mother or grandmother. But nothing she found filled in those blanks.

  There had been a fire. Patience died. It was maddening, simplistic, and hollow, but that was what Sorrow knew.

  The Abrams house and garage passed out of sight. On the opposite side of the road was the stretch of land that had once belonged to the Johnsons. They had moved a few years ago—gotten tired of the winters, Verity had reported during a phone conversation, and the property had passed through a couple of different owners since then. There were two horses grazing in the field, a big gray and a smaller bay, both flicking their ears and tails at flies.

  “Who lives there now?” So
rrow asked, grasping for something to fill the silence.

  “The Ghosh family,” Verity said. “Jana and Helen. They moved here from New York last August. They have two kids about your age. Jana wants you to give her a call if you’re interested in working a little. I know you’re only here for a month, but they’ve got an opening for a few shifts a week while one of their regulars is traveling.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Sorrow said, but she was barely listening. She hadn’t remembered how long the seven miles between town and the orchard could feel. It was as though the mountains were closing around her, the valley deepening, the trees crowding the road.

  “They bought one of the outdoors stores, and they’ve been doing pretty well with it. If you want . . .” Verity trailed off, the words fading into a soft ending.

  Sorrow’s heart began to beat faster. She sat up straighter. She wanted to tell Verity to stop the car. She needed a moment to catch up. A chance to breathe. She wasn’t ready. Eight years was barely a blink for the town, less than a flicker for the mountains, but it was half of her life, and she wasn’t ready.

  The road bent around a curve, and there was the orchard.

  Long lines of trees passed in a flicker of light and shadow. The pink and white flowers were gone and the apples hadn’t yet swelled, so there were only the green summer leaves in endless rows. Before the road dipped again, Sorrow saw the ragged crown of the black oak, sitting like a watchtower atop the hill. At its base would be the grave of their ancestor Silence Lovegood, who had murdered her own children two hundred years ago and been hanged as a witch. The tree’s massive shape was so etched in Sorrow’s memory she could have drawn it with her eyes closed, needing nothing but fingers and feel to re-create branches she and Patience had climbed countless times on summer days that had seemed to last forever.

  Sorrow couldn’t see around the shoulder of the hill to the remains of the cider house. It was hidden from the road. Once a ramshackle wreck, now a charred ruin. Verity had never mentioned tearing it down. Sorrow had never asked.

  Verity turned in to the driveway. The wooden fence was unpainted and crooked, as it had always been, and there was no gate. There was no name on the leaning mailbox; everybody knew whose farm this was. The drive was unpaved and rutted, a narrow track through a green tunnel of sugar maples.

  In Sorrow’s memories, through all the years she had been away, the little white farmhouse had faded, seeped into the gray rain of that last cold spring, leached of warmth and color. She expected it to be smaller, shabbier too, the paint peeled away, the front lawn patchy and brown.

  But the house was in better shape than it had ever been during her childhood. The white paint was fresh, the shutters robin’s-egg blue. The lawn was rich deep green, a little high, but not choked with weeds. Flowering bushes grew along the front of the porch in bright bursts of breathtaking color. She had known Verity and Grandma were fixing up the place, but she felt a pinch of betrayal to see how neat it was now, how clean, how colorful. The farm hadn’t spent the past eight years sinking into dilapidated disrepair in her absence, crumbling in reality as it was in her memory.

  It didn’t look like a place where a family could have been so easily broken apart.

  Verity turned off the engine. “Well. Here we are.”

  The car was too small, the air too thin. Sorrow fumbled with her seat belt, pushed the door open. The moment her feet touched the ground, a wave of dizziness washed over her, as though the earth itself were recoiling from her touch. She clung to the car, squeezed her eyes shut, and swallowed back sudden nausea. She waited for the ground to settle.

  “Sorrow?”

  She opened her eyes. The sky was blue and clear, the trees so green it hurt to look at them. The day was hot and muggy and everything smelled of grass, of earth, of living, thriving things. Leaves rustled in a gentle breeze. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, pressing long shadows into the ground. The orchard was beautiful. She had forgotten that, somehow, lost the loveliness in all her memories sharp with killing frost, murky with mud and matted dead leaves. It was beautiful.

  The storm door squeaked open. Eight years and nobody had oiled the hinges. Grandma Perseverance stepped onto the front porch.

  “Sorrow,” Verity said again. She was at the back of the car, tugging at Sorrow’s suitcase. “Okay?”

  Sorrow took a deep breath. “Yeah.” Another breath. “Fine.” The words came from the top of her lungs, high and shaky.

  Verity dragged her suitcase toward the house. Grandma was smiling. She was smaller than Sorrow remembered, fragile as an autumn leaf, but she was smiling.

  Sorrow closed the car door. The air was warm and sweet. She could do this. This had been home once. This had been her entire world.

  She went to the porch and hugged her grandmother gently, so gently, afraid of holding too tight, and she exhaled.

  5

  THEY ATE DINNER at the kitchen table, the three of them and an empty fourth chair. Their plates were full of roast chicken, potatoes, early greens from the garden, a meal so familiar the scent of it made Sorrow’s heart ache.

  The room around her didn’t have the same effect at all. The kitchen had been completely remodeled: new cabinets, new appliances, new flooring, new paint. The woodstove was in the same place, but it was sitting on an expanse of colorful tiles rather than crooked, soot-stained boards. The kitchen was in what had been the first building on the property, a small, dark log cabin that hoarded warmth like a dragon. Their ancestor Rejoice Lovegood had built it when she was first planting the orchard, but those carefully hand-hewn logs were exposed on only one wall now. The rest had been plastered and painted the color of daffodils.

  Verity listed all the changes to the house with unmistakable pride, as though she were introducing Sorrow to a new friend. The house did look good, Sorrow couldn’t deny that, but still she felt a pang of discomfort. She didn’t know where Verity’s remodeling urge had come from; she didn’t remember her mother ever replacing or improving anything in their home. But that had obviously changed, and changed drastically. They had made everything new in Sorrow’s absence. It didn’t feel like her childhood home anymore.

  “We’re just about done inside,” Verity said. “What do you think?”

  “I like the tile especially.” Sorrow pointed with her fork, feeling a bit ridiculous, but it was all she could think to say. She couldn’t get away with silently nodding forever. “It looks like a flower bed.”

  “It was a pain in the butt, but I guess it was worth it.” Verity was smiling when she said it. She had barely stopped smiling since they had arrived. “I had to learn how not to accidentally cement myself to the floor.”

  “It barely even looks like the old cabin anymore,” Sorrow said.

  It was the wrong thing to say. Verity’s smile faltered, and Grandma’s hand curled into a half-formed gesture.

  “But you can still tell it used to be,” she added hurriedly. “This was always my favorite room. Remember how we used to . . .”

  They used to pass long winter days when the snow was high and the temperature low here in the kitchen, always the warmest room in the house. Sorrow and Patience would play Pioneers: baking inedible bread in the woodstove, rearranging the cabinets to count supplies, darting outside for firewood, gasping in the cold and hurrying back inside. They had taken turns sitting at the window with a rolling pin, pretending it was a flintlock rifle and calling out warnings when an imaginary Abrams emerged from the snowy orchard. When there was nothing else to do, Patience had been happy to indulge Sorrow in games that were far too young for her. They were good memories, full of laughter and warmth and light.

  But Verity was largely absent from them. She had spent most winter days up in her room, with the door closed and the curtains drawn.

  Sorrow took a sip of cider, felt the soft burn in her throat. She looked from her mother to her grandmother, back to her mother. It wasn’t Verity’s fault she had colored so many of Sorrow’s good memories da
rk with her illness. Sorrow knew that. She could march through all of the rational, responsible, mature explanations in her mind, her own thoughts blending with Dr. Silva’s calm voice. But right now, sitting in the kitchen of her childhood home, which looked nothing like she remembered, too afraid to even speak her sister’s name lest it drop into a well of silence, none of it helped.

  “I like it,” she said weakly. “It’s cozy. Are you about done? Or is there more to do?”

  With a barely concealed look of relief, Verity began to tell Sorrow about the changes they had been making around the property—replacing the roof of the barn, fixing the fences, planning a new chicken coop—her description of every project peppered with praise for the unfailingly helpful Ethan Abrams. Sorrow wanted to ask, but didn’t, how they were able to afford all of the improvements and hiring help to do them. She was certainly no expert in the economics of running a farm, but she knew they had canned food obsessively when she was a kid, mended clothes as though fabric were spun from gold, saved every nail and board for reuse. There had been nights she had gone to sleep with a pit of hunger in her stomach, and days when neighbors had dropped by unannounced with homemade muffins or hot soup. It seemed impossible now, with a bounty of food spread before them and home improvement plans stretching into the future, but growing up as the poorest family in town—or at least the most visibly lacking by modern standards, rich only in history and land and old apple trees—with one of the wealthiest families right next door, that wasn’t something Sorrow had ever forgotten.

  Grandma contributed in her own way to Verity’s chatter over dinner, nodding and pointing, scribbling a few words on the notebook she carried for that purpose. Sorrow had once been able to follow her grandmother’s manner of speaking easily, but she had lost the knack. She found it disorienting to keep up, and dismaying for how little she understood.

  They talked about the garden, they talked about the fences, they talked about the trees, they cleaned their plates and emptied their glasses. Verity smiled again; Grandma laughed her silent laugh. Sorrow felt her way into a rhythm of asking questions and letting the answers fill her vague recollections with color and light.