The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  They did not talk about Patience.

  Verity didn’t say her name, not once, and Sorrow couldn’t bring herself to say it first. Every time the word crept toward the end of her tongue, she caught herself and stopped, frustrated and uncertain. And, every time, she felt guilty for her own reaction. She had been here only a couple of hours. They were getting to know each other again. There would be time enough to talk about Patience later.

  After dinner was finished and the dishes washed, Verity said, “You should call your father.”

  Sorrow made a face. “I texted him earlier.”

  Landed when the plane touched down, and yes in response to him asking if Verity had picked her up. She had hoped she could get away with that, at least for this evening. She wanted to feel like she was here, feet solidly on this once-familiar ground, before the fishing-line tug of home pulled at her again.

  “Call your father,” Verity said, unimpressed. “He’ll be worried about you.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Verity just kept looking at her, so Sorrow gave in. “Fine. Fine! I’ll call.”

  Verity assured her the only place on the property she would get a cell signal was the end of the driveway, so Sorrow fetched her phone and went outside. The farmhouse had a landline now—they had never had a phone when she was a kid—but there was no way she was having a conversation with her father where Verity and Grandma could overhear.

  The sun had set, and the sky was streaked with wispy clouds lit from below in hues of pink and orange and red, a brilliant palette above the shadowed humps of the mountains. The evening was warm, but it would cool off overnight. The green closed around Sorrow as she started down the driveway between the rows of sugar maples. Like all the trees on the farm, the maples were old, so old they should have stopped producing syrup long ago, but somehow they endured.

  In the autumn the maples would turn a brilliant blazing red, but for now they were as green as everything else in the valley, a deep, deep green fading into black with the encroaching twilight. Sorrow felt a nervous flutter in her chest thinking about how dark it would be when the last sunlight was gone. It was never dark in Miami, not even when a storm knocked out the power, and it was never quiet.

  She stopped at the bottom of the driveway to check her phone. No service. Took a few more steps, past the fence, right up to the edge of the asphalt. The road smelled of tar and oil, still radiating the heat of the day. There, at last, a weak signal appeared. Sorrow called her father.

  Dad answered right away. “Sorrow! I was just about to call you.”

  He might have been telling the truth, or he might have been just about to call the same way he was just about to stop traveling so much for work, or just about to plan a trip with Sorrow to visit her stepsister, Andi, at Stanford. During one of the rare times when Dad and Sonia’s recent coldness had erupted into yelling, Sonia had shouted, “You’re never where you need to be! You’re never here!” Sorrow, hiding in her room and pretending to do homework, had felt a crushing mix of embarrassment and anger and hurt. He was her dad, and he wasn’t a bad person, but Sonia was his wife, and she was right, and Sorrow hated knowing she was right almost as much as she hated all of the petty disappointments.

  “I just wanted to let you know I’m here,” Sorrow said. “At the farm. I made it just fine.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  A pause. The television was on in the background: the gentle roar of commentators speaking over a cheering crowd, a sound so familiar Sorrow felt a pang of homesickness. Phillies hosting the Giants at home. Sorrow strained to hear, but if Sonia was home, she wasn’t saying anything—and Sonia wouldn’t be watching a Phillies game without saying anything, usually several anythings, many of which could not be repeated in polite company. A year ago it would have been a Saturday night date for Sorrow and Sonia, to watch the game and eat takeout and curse the players for their many mistakes.

  But by the time the season had started this year, Sorrow had been so wrapped up in her own worries she hadn’t noticed until it was too late that Sonia hadn’t said a word about spring training or games in months. The few times she had wanted to approach Sonia with takeout menus on game night, she had stopped herself, cringing with uncertainty. She didn’t know if they did that anymore. Sonia didn’t make a point of being home for games. She didn’t offer up tickets as a way to have a girls’ night when Dad was out of town. Everything had changed, and neither of them had said a single word about it.

  “So everything is okay?” Dad asked. “What have you been up to?”

  “Nothing,” Sorrow said. “Just dinner. I haven’t even unpacked. I’ve only been here a couple hours.”

  “Well, I know, but—it’s okay?”

  “It’s fine,” Sorrow said. “Why wouldn’t it be fine? I’m in Vermont, not Syria.”

  “Sorrow.”

  Sorrow squirmed at the scolding note in his voice. “Really. It’s fine.”

  “And how’s—”

  Don’t ask, Sorrow thought urgently. Don’t ask.

  “How’s your mother doing?”

  “She’s doing great,” Sorrow said, a shade too loud. “Really good. Everything looks great around here. You wouldn’t believe the renovations they’ve done. It looks like something out of a magazine.”

  She winced, fully aware she was laying it on thick and Dad would see right through it. But it wasn’t just that he was asking. It was the way he was asking: cautiously, almost hopefully, like he was fully expecting Sorrow to beg to come home tomorrow.

  “You’ll have to send me pictures,” Dad said.

  “Yeah,” Sorrow said. “Where’s Sonia? Is she there?”

  “She’s out at dinner with friends,” Dad said.

  “Oh. Okay. Sounds fun.” Sorrow wanted to believe Sonia was out with her friends. She didn’t want to think Dad was covering up that she had gone to stay with her sister, finally giving up the happy-couple pretense now that Sorrow and Andi were away. She wanted to believe it so desperately it hurt, but she didn’t dare ask for fear of what her father’s answer would be. “Tell her I said hi.”

  “You should call her tomorrow,” Dad said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And let me know right away if there are any problems.”

  “Really, Dad?” Sorrow said, exasperated. “Come on. There aren’t going to be any problems. It’s going to be fine.”

  “But if you need anything—”

  “I know! I know.” Sorrow craned her head to look up at the sky. “I’ve got to get back in to help clean up.”

  “Okay. Enjoy your visit, sweetie. I love you.”

  “Yeah. Dad, do you—”

  The words caught behind Sorrow’s teeth.

  Do you even remember her? That’s what she wanted to ask. It was unfair. It was the wrong time. She’d spent three months pushing her father and his concern away; she couldn’t spring the past on him now like none of that had happened, however much she needed to know: Do you remember Patience? Am I allowed to talk about her? Verity won’t even say her name. We’ve talked about a hundred things and she hasn’t once said her name.

  The words were there, behind her lips and on her tongue, but she said nothing.

  “Sorrow? What is it?”

  It wasn’t her father she wanted to ask anyway.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Love you too. Talk to you later, okay?”

  They exchanged good-byes and good nights, and Sorrow stared at her phone until her father’s picture blinked away.

  The long tunnel of trees along the driveway was barely green anymore, and the first stars were coming out, bright pricks of light twinkling in the restless air. An engine rumbled, and headlights shone around a bend in the road. Sorrow stepped farther from the asphalt as the car passed. Somebody was heading down from the mountains, probably hikers whose day had run long. The car was gone in moments, and the road was dark again. A mosquito nipped at her arm. She slapped it flat, wiped the smudge on her jeans.

  It wasn�
��t that she didn’t know what her father was worried about. She knew exactly what he was worried about. She knew exactly why he and Sonia had been so stiff with each other lately. She knew why Andi hadn’t come back from California for the summer. She knew why all of their conversations now turned into awkward exchanges of questions and avoidance. She knew why her father had become more overbearing and Sonia more distant. For months Sorrow had been making herself smaller and smaller, trying to duck between them like she was dodging raindrops, and she knew exactly who was to blame.

  She knew it was her fault.

  It had started the day she had accidentally gone missing. It hadn’t been intentional, no matter what anybody believed. She hadn’t meant to make them worry.

  They had been at Sonia’s parents’ house for a spring break party. Mima and Abu lived way out on the outskirts of Miami’s metro area, at the fringe where suburban sprawl gave way to the Everglades. They had moved out there after decades in Little Havana, when Mima finally convinced Abu that she would be happier in her retirement with a piece of land to tend and a pair of binoculars for bird-watching. The party had been a noisy, crowded affair: music blaring, coolers packed with ice and beer, food-laden tables sinking into the soft grass, adults barking out warnings every time the kids tumbled too close to Mima’s garden, and Andi, home from college for the week, basking at the center of it all like a queen on a throne.

  Sorrow had wandered around with a Solo cup of Diet Coke gone flat, ignoring the cousins who tried to pull her into a soccer game, letting aunts and uncles and friends stop and ask her about school, ask her if she had a boyfriend or maybe a girlfriend, ask her if she was proud of Andi, if she was thinking of going to Stanford too, after she graduated, wouldn’t that be fun, both of them out in California? Smiles, nods, murmurs of agreement, but what Sorrow was thinking was that she had two more years of high school ahead of her, and even then she would never be Stanford material. She was an average student, never having quite recovered from a rocky start to her formal education. Thanks to Verity’s homeschooling, she had begun school in Florida capable enough in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but while she’d had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history, geology, and ecology of the Green Mountains, and the uncanny ability to name every one of her maternal ancestors stretching back to the middle of the eighteenth century, her awareness of other topics had been somewhat lacking. Even worse, she’d had no idea how to sit in a classroom when she would rather be outside, or how to take a test when she would rather be collecting beetles and flowers. She hadn’t even known she was supposed to come back inside after recess. She had learned how school worked, reluctantly, begrudgingly, and when she was older she found biology and environmental science classes she enjoyed, but she would never be a top student like Andi.

  And that afternoon at the party, after her face started hurting from being prodded into stiff smiles for hours and there was no sign anything would be winding down, Sorrow had slipped away. She’d rolled a bike out of the garage—the one Abu was supposed to be using for exercise, doctor’s orders—and rode away down the tree-lined road to where the pavement ended and the dirt began and she couldn’t hear the music and laughter anymore. She hadn’t meant to go far or stay away long, but there was always a tantalizing glimmer of water through the cypress trees, and all she could hear was birds singing and insects humming. At the end of one dirt road she found the remains of an old orange grove—a small one on a few soggy, ill-chosen acres—and she leaned the bike against a tree to look around. The property was abandoned, the trees draped with Spanish moss. She didn’t see any Trespassers Will Be Shot on Sight signs warning her away, so she took her chances and spent some time exploring the old grove, breathing in the rich scents of greenery and decay.

  Daylight faded, and the shadows around her grew deep and dark, but she didn’t leave, and into that breathing silence came a thought she hadn’t let herself think in years: Patience would have loved this.

  The unfamiliar trees, the dark water, the chattering bugs, the flat ground unwrinkled by even the slightest hill, and seeping from it a sense of history both vivid and alien: it was like nothing Patience had ever known, nothing she had ever had a chance to see. She would be twenty-four now—no longer a girl but a young woman—and that had stopped Sorrow in her tracks. All the questions everybody had been asking her all afternoon, they were things Patience had never even been allowed to contemplate, every one of them a path she had never been able to follow. Sorrow was two months past her own sixteenth birthday and already venturing into territory Patience had never had a chance to explore. She had been doing it all along, ever since she left Vermont, but it had never taken her breath away as it did that evening, when she realized her own life now stretched longer than Patience’s ever would.

  She didn’t know what Patience would be doing now, had she lived. She didn’t know what she would be like, what choices she would have made. If she would have stayed in the orchard in Vermont like their mother and grandmother, or if she would have fled for college, travel, adventures elsewhere in the world. If they would be friends as well as sisters, or if they would be such different people they would have no point of connection. She didn’t know. There were days when she could barely remember Patience, when her entire childhood in the orchard had the feel of a dream slipping away after waking, fading into a blur of unfamiliar colors. She feared someday her memories would be gone for good.

  Sorrow hadn’t realized anybody would miss her from her grandparents’ party until she heard the whelp of a police siren and saw blue and white lights flashing through the trees. Shouts echoed: her name, called over and over again. The party had broken up to search for her. Andi was furious, Sonia confused and annoyed, but Dad, he was the worst, because between hugging Sorrow and saying, “We were so worried,” and “Don’t you ever do that again,” he looked at Sorrow and saw the tears on her face and heard the stammer in her voice, and it was as though she had gone into the Everglades a daughter he knew and come out a stranger, and she had looked right back at him and seen a man as unfamiliar as he had been the day he took her away from Vermont.

  No matter what she said after, however she reassured him, the damage was done. Her parents were looking at Sorrow but they were seeing Verity’s illness, with her bottle of pills and her hospital stays and a long, long family tree of twisted and diseased branches. Dad made therapy appointments for her and called every day when he was traveling. He began to check her homework, worried anew over her usual academic disinterest, and when Sorrow complained to Sonia, Sonia only said she wasn’t going to get between Sorrow and her father. Sorrow quickly learned that answering “Fine” when either of them asked how she was doing would only invite more questions, more digging, cautious looks and careful smiles, and it was all so overwhelming she caught herself thinking maybe Dad was right. Maybe there was something to find, if she cracked herself open and peered inside. Maybe there was a time bomb ticking away behind her heart, buried in that black hole of her memories, the ones edged with nightmares of fire. What kind of person couldn’t even remember her own sister’s death? Had to learn it instead like a lesson in school, a recitation of facts, because her own truth of it was gone?

  Something crunched on the road’s gravel shoulder to the left, down the hill toward the Abrams farm. Sorrow’s heart skipped, and she turned, stared hard into the shadows. There was a shape in the distance, a few hundred feet away. Her breath caught. There had always been bears wandering through the orchard in the summer and autumn, chomping happily on fallen apples before waddling away. Patience had given them names: Sir Scruff, Lady Furrington. Plump lazy creatures who never bothered anybody. Nothing to be afraid of. Still, Sorrow’s heart was hammering.

  Then the shape moved, and a pale light sliced through the dusk.

  Not a bear, then, unless the bears had taken to carrying phones on their forest rambles. Sorrow pressed her fingers to her sternum, willing her heart to slow down.

  From this distance, in t
he twilight, she couldn’t make out anything about the person on the roadside, but she saw when they turned. A stillness fell between them. Her skin crawled. She had been spotted.

  Headlights appeared on the road, and Sorrow took a step back, but the car lurched to a stop before it reached her. In the sudden blinding glow Sorrow saw a short skirt and bare legs, a shimmery shirt nearly translucent in the light, a flash of blond hair. Abrams hair, the same crown for every head all the way down their line. A car door opened, music spilled out with bright catches of voices and laughter, and the girl climbed in. The sound of the door snapping shut echoed through the valley. The car pulled a sharp U-turn and headed back toward town. The red taillights faded.

  Sorrow started back up the driveway. The maples were dense with leaves now. They had been barren the day she left.

  Her steps slowed. A cool breeze snaked through the trees, turning leaves in the arched branches overhead. She rubbed her arms to chase away a sudden chill.

  Not even a week ago, at their last appointment before she’d left, she had told Dr. Silva that she couldn’t even remember her sister’s funeral. What kind of person did that make her, she had asked, that she couldn’t remember putting her own sister in the ground? Dr. Silva had assured her there was no betrayal in not remembering, no failure on her part, but Sorrow had been unconvinced.

  She was still unconvinced, and she grasped at this flicker of knowledge like a lifeline: the trees had been bare. It was only the vaguest shimmer of an image, more impression than thought, but the longer she held it, the more certain she became that she could feel the spring cold on her face, stinging and sharp, the sun too bright, offering too little warmth. Shoes that didn’t fit right. A dress that itched. The earth soggy beneath her feet where snow had melted away.

  The air stirred again, and a single leaf fluttered down from the maples. Sorrow bent to pick it up. In the evening gloom it might have been blazing autumn red rather than rich summer green. She twisted the stem, watched it turn, wondered if it would be supple or crackling dry if she closed it in her hand.