The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  Sorrow was halfway through her first week in Vermont. It was Wednesday and, according to her phone, exactly 4:47 p.m.

  “Drama,” said Kavita, leaning on the counter to stare through the store’s front window. “So much drama. It never ends.”

  Kavita’s mothers, Helen and Jana Ghosh, owned the store. This was the second shift Sorrow had worked for them, after Verity had volunteered her labor to fill in for an employee who was backpacking through Nepal. Sorrow wondered, a little guiltily, if Verity was trying to shuffle Sorrow into town and away from the farm during her visit. She didn’t think it was deliberate—didn’t want to think it was deliberate—but that only meant it was something she couldn’t even imagine asking about. She also didn’t know the first thing about hiking or camping, but then neither did most of the people who came into the store. Kavita’s older brother, Mahesh, was technically working too, but he had retreated to the back room to text his girlfriend, which was, as far as Sorrow could tell, how he spent 99 percent of his time.

  Sorrow had a book open on the counter before her, a field guide to wildflowers of New England. She had been trying to remember all the plant names she used to know by heart—regional common names only, never any Latin designations—but she let the book fall closed to watch the scene across the street.

  The postmaster was arguing with two women. He was the same man who had held the position eight years ago; Sorrow recognized his short stature and elfin ears but didn’t think she had ever known his name. The women were stooped and sweaty, with bulging packs on their backs and bandannas over their hair. One of them was shaking a hiking pole. The postmaster crossed his arms resolutely. The hiking pole shook some more. A family of tourists in shorts and T-shirts scurried around the argument.

  “They’re mad because the post office closes?” Sorrow asked.

  “Because it closes too early for the smelly trail crowd to hitchhike their way into town for their resupply runs,” Kavita said. “This happens at least twice a week. Somebody doesn’t read the message boards and sends their stuff to General Delivery, and then they get here and realize Grumpy McAsshole over there has locked up already. Right now he’s trying to tell them their phones have the wrong time. Look, they’re pulling them out to compare.”

  “This is so exciting I don’t think I can stand it,” Sorrow said, and went back to her book.

  She was midway through a page about wild trillium when her phone beeped. The incoming text was from her stepsister, Andi.

  Hey, what’s up, vermonster?

  A burst of surprise, followed by a twinge of guilt. Sorrow hadn’t texted Andi since she’d landed. She had been telling herself—for three days—that she would definitely get around to it before Andi noticed. Too late for that now. Sorrow stared at the words for a moment, then put her phone away without answering.

  “Once the show is over, you can probably knock off,” Kavita said. “The moms won’t care. It’s always slow once the day-trippers are gone for the night.”

  “I was hoping to get a ride home after close.”

  “That works too. Oh, look.” The argument outside the post office was ending with the two hikers storming away and the postmaster victoriously watching their retreat. Kavita twisted her long black hair up off her neck. “It always ends the same way. Postal goblin, one; Appalachian Trail hopefuls, zero. They never win. We tell them they should send their resupplies here instead, but there are always a few who don’t listen.”

  “Sucks for them,” Sorrow said, disinterested, and she went back to her wildflower book. She had picked it off the store’s rack when the flow of customers slowed in late afternoon, thinking only that she wanted to remember, a half-formed idea telling her that if she could fill the hollow spaces in her mind where she had once kept the names of flowers and trees, the patterns of the weather and the rhythm of the seasons, the rest would come back too. Maybe not all at once, in a flash of revelation, but she had to start somewhere.

  Kavita wasn’t quiet for long. “Oh, hey, it’s Mrs. Eyebrows.”

  Sorrow looked up again. There was an elderly woman standing outside the store, her crown of tight gray curls just visible above an array of North Face and Marmot decals on the glass. She moved a couple of inches to the side, revealing her face and the high-arched eyebrows that were more pencil line than hair.

  “That’s Mrs. Roche,” Sorrow said. She would recognize those eyebrows anywhere. “She used to live down the road from us.”

  Kavita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I know. Everybody still calls that place the Roche place, even though that couple from Texas owns it now. Same way they still call our place the Radcliffe place. It’s like nobody in this town has ever heard of property changing hands.”

  Sorrow’s phone beeped. Another text from Andi: Give me a call when you get a chance. We need to talk about the shit going on at home.

  She once again put it away without answering. “They called it the Radcliffe place even when the Johnsons lived there. It would be easier if you just changed your name. Is she going to stand there all night?”

  “Who knows? The only time she’s ever come in was for our grand opening. She wanted to meet ‘those nice lesbians from New York.’ I doubt she—ooh, she is.”

  Mrs. Roche pulled open the door and stepped inside, and she looked around for a moment before her gaze settled on the counter.

  “Sorrow Lovegood!” she exclaimed. “As I live and breathe!”

  Sorrow smiled. “Hi, Mrs. Roche. It’s good to see you again.”

  “Look at you,” Mrs. Roche said. She looked a lot older than Sorrow remembered: her steel-gray hair was thinner, her skin sagging around her face, her shoulders stooped. She came forward with her hands held out but dropped them when Sorrow didn’t move from behind the counter. “You look just like your sister.”

  The words struck Sorrow like a blow in the chest.

  She had been expecting people to recognize her. Mrs. Abrams in the parking lot, others around town. She had been expecting you’re the Lovegood girl, the looks and the whispers, the leading questions about why she had come back.

  But she hadn’t been expecting this. She wasn’t prepared for somebody to look at her and see Patience.

  “Thank you,” she managed, and her smile was frozen on her face, brittle and tight. “How’s Mr. Roche?”

  “He passed a few years ago,” Mrs. Roche said. “You’re so kind to ask.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Sorrow only remembered Mr. Roche as a cardigan sweater and a puff of pipe tobacco; he had rarely joined his wife when she visited the Lovegoods.

  “Is there something we can help you find, Mrs. Roche?” Kavita asked.

  Mrs. Roche adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder. “Oh, no, I just wanted to stop in and say hello to Sorrow. We worried she might have forgotten all about us.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward slightly. “You know about the fire, of course. It was a terrible tragedy.”

  Kavita glanced at Sorrow, as though confirming that Sorrow was, in fact, still standing right there and could hear Mrs. Roche just fine. She twitched one shoulder in an apologetic shrug. “Yeah, I’ve heard about it.”

  “Patience was just the sweetest girl,” Mrs. Roche said. “I think about her every day. You must miss her so much.”

  “I do,” Sorrow said, because what else could she say? I think about her every day was what people said about someone they hadn’t thought about in years.

  “It’ll do your mom a world of good to have you around,” Mrs. Roche said. “There’s too much sadness in that old orchard. Maybe you’ll even convince her and your grandma to come out for the battle this year.”

  Sorrow blinked. “The battle?”

  “You know. The battle. You must remember.” Mrs. Roche gave Sorrow a concerned look, and Sorrow’s heart began to beat faster. It was bad enough to think Verity might notice gaps in her memory, but this was Mrs. Roche. If Mrs. Roche noticed, the whole town would be discussing Sorrow’s post-traumatic amnesia by
tomorrow. “We do it every year, right there in the park,” Mrs. Roche went on, waving toward the store’s front windows. “It’s our best festival. Well, not as good as the harvest, but every town has a harvest.”

  “Oh. Right. I saw the sign,” Sorrow said, with a rush of relief. Not something she had forgotten, then, only something she had never experienced in the first place. “We never went when we were kids.”

  Not to that festival or any others, May Day or the harvest, Thanksgiving or the holiday lights on Main Street. Sorrow had only known what they were missing when Patience tried to convince Verity to take them into town. Verity had always refused. She didn’t need the town to tell her how to mark the passage of the seasons, she would say, and Patience would roll her eyes and huff and say that wasn’t the point, the point was to see people, and not be stuck in the orchard alone all the time, and it wasn’t fair that they didn’t even get to try, not even for a little bit. Sorrow had always dreaded the times when Patience would ask to do something their mother would refuse. On a good day the refusal would come with stony silence. On a bad day it would end with a slamming door and a gaping dark stretch of time when they didn’t know when Verity would emerge from her room again.

  “There was really a battle here?” Kavita asked.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Roche, but she added, “a very small one. It was really more of a disagreement between families.”

  “It was a bunch of farmers with pitchforks,” Sorrow said.

  Mrs. Roche conceded the point with a small nod. “But that’s where it all began, you know. The feud between the Lovegoods and the Abramses. You know all about that.”

  Kavita slanted a glance toward Sorrow. “I’ve heard a little. I didn’t think it was a big deal, like, historically.”

  Mrs. Roche leaned forward eagerly. “Oh, it may not seem that way now, but I promise you us old folks remember when it was different. When we first moved to town back in—it must have been 1978, goodness, where do the years go—we weren’t here a week before some of the ladies from church stopped by to warn us about walking through the woods after dark. They made sure we understood it wasn’t safe, not with Devotion Lovegood prowling her property with that great big shotgun of hers, and Eli Abrams doing the same on his side of the fence, each looking for any excuse to shoot and call it a hunting accident.”

  Kavita laughed, but it had an uncertain edge to it. “Seriously?”

  “As the grave,” Mrs. Roche confirmed. “It did get a bit better when Devotion passed, God rest her soul, but then it got right nasty again when Henry Abrams had his accident. He was never as mean-spirited as the rest of them, and when he was alive he did what he could to keep his brother Eli from doing anything rash.” She paused and gave Sorrow a thoughtful look. “I’m sure your mom’s told you about all that. It wasn’t an easy time.”

  “A bit,” Sorrow hedged. She knew almost nothing about her great-grandmother Devotion, but she didn’t know if it was because she had forgotten or because she had never known in the first place. “I was a little young for that kind of story when I left.”

  Mrs. Roche patted her hand. “Of course. And I expect it’s difficult for her to talk about, all things considered. She was such a trouper when your grandma needed help.”

  Sorrow only nodded, because Mrs. Roche was still giving her a look like Sorrow ought to know exactly what she was talking about, and the last thing Sorrow wanted to do was admit that Mrs. Roche knew more about her family than she did. It might not matter in a normal family or a normal town, but she was Verity Lovegood’s daughter, and the one true thing everybody knew about Verity was her obsession with her own family history. Mrs. Roche would have a week’s worth of gossip fuel if Sorrow let on there were big pieces she was missing.

  “What’s this festival like, anyway?” Kavita asked. “How do you celebrate a battle?”

  “We reenact it every year,” Mrs. Roche said.

  Another laugh, this one less uncertain, and Kavita said, “Small towns are so weird.”

  Mrs. Roche poked her with a long, knobby finger. “Don’t be like that. It’s a great deal of fun. This year it’s the kindergarten’s turn. There’s a pie contest too. I’ll be looking forward to seeing both of you there.” She pointed at each of them in turn. “And you bring that handsome brother of yours along.”

  “Please don’t let him hear you say that,” Kavita said. “His ego’s big enough as it is.”

  “Give your mother my regards, Sorrow, and your grandma.” Mrs. Roche hitched her purse on her shoulder and turned toward the door. “I’ve got to get going. I promised Barbie Rheingold twenty-five cupcakes for tomorrow and I’m out of wrappers.”

  She turned to leave, but she was only a few steps from the counter when the door opened and two girls came in. They were teenagers, maybe sixteen or seventeen, one white with her blond hair cropped into a spiky pixie cut, the other Asian with red streaks in her black hair. The blond stopped abruptly just inside the door; her friend bumped into her shoulder before stepping around and smiling brightly at Kavita.

  “Hi, Kavita,” she said.

  “Hi, Ellie,” Kavita said.

  “Is—”

  “He’s not here.”

  “—Mahesh working today?”

  Her blond friend snickered, and Ellie blushed. “Oh. Well. Okay. Tell him I said hi?” She offered a little wave to Mrs. Roche. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Mrs. Roche said. “How is your grandfather doing these days?”

  “He’s all right, I guess.” Ellie shrugged, and a beat later she remembered to add, “Thanks for asking.”

  “Did you need something?” Kavita asked.

  “No, I mean, we just came to say hi, so . . .” Ellie’s face was furiously red now. She looked around for her friend, who was flipping idly through a rack of shirts. “Let’s go. Cassie?”

  The name, spoken so casually, felt like an electric spark. Sorrow had rarely thought about Cassie Abrams in the years since she’d left. She didn’t think they had ever interacted much—they were forbidden from playing with each other—except for those few times their paths had crossed in town, and Cassie had snarled some insult about Sorrow’s patched clothes or messy hair, and Sorrow had slunk away in shame. She remembered Cassie vividly as a little girl on a snowy day, a vision of pink and red, but the image had no context. Ribbons in her hair. Hands on her hips. Mrs. Abrams had always dressed her up like a doll, earning coos and compliments from ladies in town that had made Sorrow glower with envy.

  Sometime during the intervening years, that little girl had evolved into a teenager with spiky hair and raccoon-like eye makeup and punk schoolgirl clothes. If Ellie hadn’t said her name, Sorrow wouldn’t have recognized her at all.

  “Wait,” Sorrow said. She stepped out from behind the counter, aware of Kavita and Mrs. Roche watching her curiously. “You’re Cassie Abrams?”

  At the door, Cassie turned. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m Sorrow. I live next door—I mean, used to live—”

  Cassie narrowed her eyes. “You’re Sorrow Lovegood.”

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  “Why the fuck would you ever think I’d want to talk to you?” Cassie yanked the door open; the bell jangled cheerily.

  “Wait, what?” Sorrow said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Cassie looked back at her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Uh, I work here,” Sorrow said.

  “Not here, god, I mean here. In town. What are you even doing back here?”

  “I’m visiting my mother and grandmother,” Sorrow said. Her heart was thudding painfully. She shouldn’t have said anything. She didn’t know why she had to say anything. “Not that it’s any of your business. Why do you care?”

  “Are you kidding me? After all the shit your family has done to mine?”

  “I don’t know what—” Sorrow’s voice was shaking now, a tremble in her throat and in her lungs. “I don’t
know what you mean. What did I ever do to you?”

  Cassie stepped forward so fast Sorrow stumbled backward, knocked her elbow into a clothing rack. Ellie said, “Cassie, come on,” and reached for her sleeve, but Cassie twisted out of reach. Mrs. Roche was watching, wide-eyed, her lips shaped into a soft O. Sorrow didn’t lose her balance, didn’t fall, but still she felt a wash of vertigo, as though the floor were tilting beneath her and the walls changing around them, rippling like water, shifting from colorful to dark, from bright to shadowed.

  She blinked rapidly, steadied herself, and Cassie was right in front of her.

  “You know, it’s almost been normal around here,” Cassie said, jabbing her finger at Sorrow, stopping just short of touching her. “With you gone and your mom finally on some fucking meds—”

  “Holy shit, Cass,” Kavita said.

  “But now you’re back and everybody is all, oh, look at her, how brave she is to come back after such a terrible tragedy, boo-fucking-hoo, like they’ve all forgotten that there wouldn’t have been a tragedy if your sister hadn’t been a complete psycho going around setting shit on fire for fun.”

  The floor dropped from beneath Sorrow. There was a roar in her ears, thunderous as a storm, but every one of Cassie’s words came through clearly.

  “What?”

  “Oh, please,” Cassie said, rolling her eyes. “Like anybody believes that stupid story about a stranger setting those fires. Awfully convenient they could never find him.”

  “You don’t—you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sorrow’s hands were shaking; she clenched them into fists at her sides. “My sister didn’t—she wasn’t like that. Patience didn’t do that.”

  “Oh my god, you’re just as delusional as the rest of your family,” Cassie said. “It must be nice to live so far fucking removed from reality. I just hope you don’t like playing with matches too.”

  Cassie swept toward the door before Sorrow could respond. She dragged Ellie outside, and they were shapes beyond the glass, silhouetted against the evening sun, and they were gone.