The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  The breeze died. The night was heavy and humid again, and the orchestra of crickets surged all around. Sorrow dropped the leaf and swiped her hand on her shirt, brushing away the sensation of it pinched between her fingers. She was tired. Her nerves were overloaded. She was going to be eaten alive by mosquitoes if she stayed out any longer. She marched up the driveway through the tunnel of trees. Ahead the farmhouse shone like a lighthouse glimpsed across the ocean at night.

  6

  EIGHT YEARS AGO

  THE DAY THEY buried Patience was cool, the sky a brilliant, aching blue. The apple trees in the Lovegood orchard still had not bloomed, and the ash trees in the cemetery grove remained leafless and brown. Nothing had been right since Patience had died. It was supposed to be spring, but there was no sign of it in the orchard.

  Patience’s grave was at the end of a row next to their great-grandmother Devotion Lovegood, a woman she had never known. That spot at the end of the row should have been Grandma’s. Sorrow had always imagined it would be Grandma’s.

  There were only a few people at the funeral. There was no preacher. The gravedigger and his assistant stood a respectable distance away; the tires of their yellow backhoe had pressed muddy tracks into the earth. The men were quiet now, but before, as the small family had been gathering, Sorrow had heard the young man whisper to the older that the witch weather seemed to be breaking, and the older man had hushed him with an elbow to the side and a wary glance at the barren trees. It would have delighted Sorrow before, to hear men from town murmuring nervously about her orchard’s strange weather, but now it only made her sick to her stomach. A man from the nursery had brought an ash sapling in a cloth sack. Dad and Grandma would plant it later, after Patience was in the ground.

  Sorrow stood between Dad and Grandma. Nobody spoke. The Lovegood women did not bury their family members with empty words and meaningless prayers. Their only ceremony was giving the dead back to the earth and planting a new life to mark its passage. That was what Mom had said one day in town, when they saw a long funeral procession on the road. Sorrow had marveled at how a dead person could have known so many people, enough to fill all those cars.

  Mom was there too, at Patience’s graveside. She wore a plain gray dress Sorrow had never seen before. At her back was a man in white and a woman in a dark skirt. The woman was a doctor. Sorrow had overheard Dad saying to Grandma that Mom was only allowed to come to the funeral if she was supervised, and she would go back to the hospital after.

  Later, when the funeral was over, Mom would say good-bye to Sorrow. Sorrow would reach for her, wanting a hug, but Mom would flinch away. Her voice would be flat and dull and tired. When she was gone Sorrow’s stomach would cramp and her head would hurt and Dad would try to take her hand, but Sorrow would pull out of reach. She would walk back to the house behind Grandma, and she would notice how Grandma looked into the orchard, her eyes sad but her chin lifted in hope, as though she expected winter’s grip to finally break now that their tears were shed and Patience was gone.

  In the morning, Dad would put a suitcase full of Sorrow’s things into the trunk of his rental car. Grandma would hug Sorrow, kiss her forehead, give her a quilt folded into a neat square, and only then would Sorrow understand that she was leaving. She didn’t want to go. She couldn’t leave Grandma alone. The garden wasn’t sprouting. The orchard wasn’t blossoming. She couldn’t leave. She would shout and fight and kick, clawing at her father when he tried to wrestle her into the car, slapping her grandmother away when she tried to help. She would hurt both of them, and herself, when she fell to the ground and scraped her knees and wailed. Only when she had tired herself out with fighting and crying would Dad lift her into the car.

  Grandma would stand by the driveway and watch as they drove away.

  “Your mother is very sick,” Dad would say as they left Abrams Valley.

  It was what everybody had been saying for days. Doctors and police officers and the social worker in her pink suit as she sipped tea in the kitchen. They asked Sorrow if she was hungry, asked her if she had clean clothes, asked her how much her mother slept, how much she ate, how often she got out of bed. She didn’t know what to tell them. Patience had always warned her not to talk to strangers, but Patience was gone and Sorrow didn’t know what to do. It was easier not to say anything.

  As they left Abrams Valley, Dad would say it again: “Your mother is very sick.”

  And he would say, “Your grandmother thinks it’s best if you come stay with me for a while. Just until she gets better.”

  And Sorrow would feel cold and small and hollowed out inside. Grandma was sending her away.

  Tomorrow Sorrow would stare out the car window and she would remember pictures of palm trees and alligators in a library book, Patience tracing her finger all the way down to where Dad lived, and she would be too afraid to speak. Lovegoods didn’t leave the orchard. In all of Mom’s stories, every tale she had shared of their family when they cuddled together by the fire on cold winter nights, nobody ever left. Sorrow hadn’t even known they could. Mom had never said. Sorrow had never been to the airport before. She had never left Vermont, never ventured beyond the bounds of Abrams Valley. The orchard and the farm and the town were the only world she had ever known. She would remember Patience in the cemetery grove, not a shape in a white sheet but a living girl, her cheeks pink with cold beneath the spring green of her knit hat, and she would understand what she hadn’t understood before, and it would feel like a tangle of branches and vines wrapped around her heart, growing through her veins and squeezing her lungs. With every mile the distance tore at the underside of her skin like soft grass roots ripped away, until there was nothing left in her father’s rental car but a hollow shell of a girl, rigid with guilt and fear and a future looming over an unknown horizon, all of her warm, messy, pulsing, breathing insides left behind in the orchard.

  Her father wouldn’t look at her. He would be holding the steering wheel so tight his knuckles were white, and he would say, “If she gets better.”

  But that was tomorrow.

  Now, in the Lovegood cemetery, Patience was wrapped up in a white sheet, and she was in the ground, and Dad was whispering that it was okay to cry, it was okay, but all Sorrow could feel was the sour ache at the back of her throat where a scream was gathering, growing like a summer storm, but instead of letting it loose she swallowed it down, down into the pit of her stomach, and locked it away beneath the fear and the suffocating sadness, buried it beneath the rich tumbling dirt, down with the roots and the worms and the darkness and the quiet.

  7

  ANNE LOVEGOOD

  1836–1894

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for her mother to find her. Anne scrubbed the tears from her face; she didn’t want Mother to know she had been crying. She was sitting against the big oak on the hill with her back pressed against the trunk, her knees hugged to her chest, the small wooden tiger Father had carved for her gripped in one hand. She was too old for toys, but she carried it everywhere with her now, a little piece of home tucked in her pocket like a talisman.

  When she heard footsteps approaching she straightened her legs and lifted her chin. Mother stepped into the clearing around the oak. She spotted Anne, but before she approached she looked around, up into the branches of the massive old tree and down at the soil. She scuffed her shoe into the dirt and nudged a white stone, turned it over with her toe before bending to pick it up. The clearing around the oak was bare, without a single speck of grass, only a scattering of small white stones.

  “I know you’re not happy here,” said Mother. “I know you miss your father. I know you miss your friend Mary too.”

  Anne, fourteen years old and ashamed of her tears, sniffled wetly. “I never wanted to leave. I told you I never wanted to leave.”

  It was not, perhaps, the truth, but Mother let the falsehood pass unremarked. Anne had believed it an adventure when her parents had first announced that Mother and Anne were leaving Mussoorie for
America, while Father would stay behind to finish his work with the Survey of India. She had been so excited, and her dear friend Mary excited for her, even though it meant they would be so far apart from each other. Anne had bid farewell to her father and her home, and she and her mother had wound out of the Himalayan foothills, crossed the sweltering lowlands until the mountains were no more than a shadow of memory behind them, all the way to Bombay and a ship waiting there.

  Only when they were aboard the ship and the continent was sliding from sight had Anne’s breath caught, her heart stuttered, and she understood: She would never see India again. Her father would be continents away. Her best friend, Mary, would be on the other side of the world, and they would never again walk arm in arm through the gardens, never again share notes and secrets, whispers and laughter. Anne was leaving, and she would never return.

  Whatever she had imagined of Vermont during the long journey, it was nothing like the lumpy, tree-choked land around her. Mother had spoken of mountains, but these small, forested humps were disappointing compared to the towering pinnacles they had left behind. The town was dull, captured in the bottom of a valley rather than spread gloriously upon a ridge like her beloved Himalayan hill station, and its people were grim and suspicious. They all knew Mother—but her name was spat derisively from scorn-twisted lips, and the sight most presented to Anne was that of turned backs or scowling faces. Anne could have sworn she heard one woman mutter, “Witch-spawn”—so unexpected, so barbaric and provincial, she had nearly laughed. She would have laughed if she could have told Mary, if there hadn’t been thousands of miles between them and nothing but ink and paper to span it, if she hadn’t seen the pinched look on Mother’s face and felt a seasick uncertainty about what to do.

  The orchard itself was the worst of all, worse than the mountains that weren’t mountains, worse than the townspeople who muttered and glared. The house was wrecked and filthy, having been claimed and abandoned by a succession of failed farmers since Mother’s childhood, full of broken furniture and cobwebs and animal nests. The whole property was an ugly, overgrown place, its trees stuck in every season of the year from barren winter to leafy high summer—sometimes all on the same tree, pink blossoms hanging from the same branches as orange autumn leaves. Everywhere, the air stank of rotting apples. Mother had mentioned building a cider house for pressing cider, and the very thought made Anne gag.

  Mother was right. Anne was not happy here.

  Finally Mother said, “Your father and I thought you would like—”

  Anne snorted, a rough unladylike sound. “You didn’t even ask me. Father would never have sent me away if you had asked.”

  Mother sighed, and when Anne glanced up she was pinching the bridge of her nose. Her eyes had been bothering her more and more lately. Even with the eyeglasses she had bought in London, she still squinted over every page by candlelight, peering close to the letters and deeds that had dragged her on this long journey, back to a home she had not seen since she was a child. She looked tired now, aged ten years rather than mere months since they had left home.

  Father was supposed to join them someday, when the British Army was done with him. Anne had walked the perimeter of the Lovegood land—Mother’s land, she refused to think of it as hers—every day already, holding in her hand the magnetic compass given to her as a parting gift from Surveyor-General Waugh himself, who had tugged at her braid and chucked her chin and told her to practice her sums like a good girl. She promised herself she would fill dozens of notebooks with carefully collected angles and azimuths and calculations before Father arrived, even if she was the only one who understood what they meant. There was a school in town, but it was run by the pastor’s wife and full of dim-witted farmers’ children, all smaller than Anne by a head and not a one of them knowing the difference between a sine and a cosine if their lives depended on it.

  But if Anne was expecting an apology, an admission of error from Mother, she was to be disappointed.

  “I know this is not what you are accustomed to,” Mother said. She still wasn’t looking at Anne as she spoke. Her gaze was fixed instead on the ground at her feet, where white stones lay half-concealed beneath fallen leaves. “To be quite honest, I had not thought I would ever come back. When the solicitor’s letter arrived, I very nearly burned it.”

  Anne had read the letter Mother was talking about. She wasn’t supposed to, but she had sneaked it from Mother’s valise while they were aboard the ship. A lawyer in America had written to Mother to tell her that her property in Vermont was the subject of extensive legal challenges, and did she wish to appoint a representative or perhaps settle the matter by offering the land for sale?

  Mother had not wanted to do either. She was going to deal with the matter herself.

  “You should have burned it,” Anne said miserably. “I want to go home. I hate it here.”

  Fresh tears rose in her eyes; she swiped them away. There was no sense hiding them now. She wanted Mother to see how afraid she was of forgetting the sound of Father’s voice and the tickle of his whiskers against her cheek, the glimmer of sunlight on Mary’s hair and how warm her hand felt clutched in Anne’s, the way the mist crawled through the foothills to make an island of the hill station, as though the rest of the world had dropped away. There was a hole in Anne’s heart, a raw wound, and she did not want to hide it anymore.

  Mother lifted her eyes from the ground to the sky. Beyond the oak’s broad branches, patchy clouds were gathering together to blot out the blue.

  “My sister taught me to climb this tree,” she said.

  That was the very last thing Anne had expected her to say.

  “You have a sister?” she asked.

  “I did, once,” Mother said. She pressed her palm against the trunk of the oak. “I had four sisters and two brothers.”

  “I never knew,” Anne said quietly. Mother spoke so rarely of her family and her childhood that Anne imagined it as a forbidden puzzle box full of long-kept secrets, always locked away, hidden.

  “I scarcely remember them,” Mother admitted. “For many years I had thought I’d forgotten them, but I’m remembering more, being back here. I was the youngest. The last to learn to climb. Prudence was the eldest. She was the one who taught me.”

  A thousand questions trembled in Anne’s chest, but she spoke only one: “Where is she?”

  Instead of answering, Mother gathered her skirts and sat beside Anne on a large woody root. She took a breath as though steeling herself to speak—but that was nonsense; Mother was sharp and clever and stern, never unsteady, never uncertain—then another, and a third, and with every inhale Anne felt her expectation grow.

  “They’re gone,” said Mother. “All of them. They died when I was young. For a long time I thought—I thought it better that I never speak of them. I thought it better to never say their names. To forget them.”

  Anne said nothing, too afraid of shattering the fragile stillness around them. She was holding her wooden tiger so tight her fingers trembled.

  “I was wrong,” Mother said. “I was wrong to let myself forget them. I know that now. It is better, I think, to tell their story—to remember who they were. To remember who they came from. Who they could have been, if they hadn’t died that summer. It was the coldest summer anybody could remember—so cold there was frost in July, and none of the crops grew.”

  Anne drew her legs to her chest again and rested her chin on her knees to listen.

  8

  SORROW WOKE BEFORE dawn’s first light crept over the farm. The morning was clear, the air cool on her bare arms. She blinked up at the dormer ceiling. The rooster crowed again—her unwelcome alarm clock—and downstairs the screen door squeaked opened and clattered shut.

  At home on a Sunday morning nobody would be up before nine, but this was a farm. Verity and Grandma had always been early risers. Sorrow sat up and blearily rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  Her childhood bedroom hadn’t changed much in eight ye
ars. Same bed, same dresser, same ladder-back chair in the corner with old wood showing through peeling blue paint. When she was little she had hung her dresses on a string stretched across the wall—there was no closet or wardrobe. The nails were still there, but the string was gone. The sheets on the bed were new, a little stiff, but the quilt was the same soft pink-and-green one that had been in Patience’s room for years before she had noticed Sorrow coveting it. The pattern of green pinwheels and pink starbursts had made Sorrow feel like she was lying in a field of flowers.

  She smoothed her hand over the faded cotton, the worn seams, the delicate stitches in intricate, curling designs. Grandma’s handi-work. In a corner on the back side she would have stitched her artist’s signature in white thread, the letters so small they were barely a bump: Per.Love. That was how she had always signed her work, because Perseverance Lovegood was too many letters. Tourists used to stop into the quilting shop looking for new Per Love designs. They probably still did.

  Only after Sorrow had dressed did she notice her favors were gone.

  Every year when she was a child, as the weather warmed and the last snow melted, she would begin to find little treasures throughout the orchard, nestled in the roots or tucked into the crooks of branches. She had found small animals carved from wood, fine pearl buttons that shone in the sun, scuffed glass beads on leather strings, and shiny pennies from long ago. A frail metal lady’s fan with the finest filigree. Wire-framed eyeglasses with one lens broken out. One summer she had found a pocket watch with a cracked face and the words To George, Love Forever, From Catherine engraved on the inside. She had dug it from summer-dry dirt on a hot sunny day, but it had flung drops of dank water all over when she’d swung it on its chain. Months later it would still speckle the chest of drawers with gritty droplets. She had made a nightly ritual of wiping it clean.