The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

Kavita let out a short breath. “I, um . . .”

  Mrs. Roche said, “Oh, my goodness. That was—well.”

  Sorrow’s head was pounding and her skin was prickling all over. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She had known Patience. That wasn’t the kind of thing a person could forget. She might forget a day or a string of them, names and faces, but she hadn’t forgotten the shape of who Patience had been. Sorrow had known her own sister.

  “I don’t know about that girl,” Mrs. Roche said. She muttered something else, an excuse and a good-bye, and she was gone too.

  Somewhere beneath the shock and embarrassment and creeping anger, Sorrow knew Mrs. Roche was probably racing away to tell everybody she knew what she had just seen. The Abrams girl and the Lovegood girl, right there in the store, you should have seen. The whole town would hear about it.

  Kavita began, “So that was—”

  Before she could finish, Mahesh stuck his head out from the back room. “What was that? Was somebody here?”

  Kavita glared at him. “Wow, seriously, could you be more clueless?”

  “What? I thought I heard somebody,” he said.

  “Your stalker was here, along with Cassie, who totally just flipped out on Sorrow here for . . . something.” Kavita looked at Sorrow. “I take it you guys weren’t friends back in the day.”

  She was striving for an easy tone, like Sorrow wasn’t rigid as a statue beside her, still gaping at the door where Cassie had just left. Sorrow made herself take a breath, then another. She opened her hands, flexed her stiff fingers, imagined she heard them creaking like tree branches.

  “No,” she said. “We didn’t even know each other.” But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t how it worked between their families. They had been forbidden from speaking to each other, but they had known each other, the way trees on opposite sides of a fence could grow together for centuries, roots and branches intertwined. “We weren’t friends. And what she said, it’s not true.”

  A long pause. Kavita leaned against the counter.

  “What?” Sorrow said. “Have you heard that from other people?”

  “No,” Kavita said quickly. “I mean, yeah, we’ve heard about the fire. And your sister. Ethan told us about it. But not what Cassie said.”

  “What did Cassie say?” Mahesh asked.

  Kavita ignored him. “It must’ve been really hard,” she went on, slowly, like she was giving Sorrow a chance to speak.

  Sorrow looked down at the floor, stared unseeing at the carpet.

  “I can—no.” Kavita stopped herself. “No. I can’t imagine what that was like. I can’t imagine it at all. It must have been terrible.”

  Sorrow managed a nod, a faint “Yeah,” scraped from her throat, but she didn’t know what else to say. Since she had arrived in town she had been bracing herself for the recognition, for the moment when eyes lit up with understanding and lips pursed with unspoken words: Oh, she’s that girl, the other Lovegood girl, the one they sent away after—you know. Mrs. Abrams, Mrs. Roche, they had both proved it true. They looked at Sorrow and saw not a sixteen-year-old girl visiting family for summer vacation, but the echo of a tragedy.

  But she hadn’t expected this. She wanted to run after Cassie and call her a liar, grab her and shake her and make her admit Patience could never have started the fire that killed her. She could refute what Cassie had said until she was blue in the face. She could shout it from the rooftops and prove true everybody’s suspicions about the Lovegood family’s lack of sanity.

  But she had no proof. She didn’t even remember the fire.

  She wanted Cassie to be wrong. She wanted it to be a lie.

  But she didn’t know.

  11

  KAVITA AND MAHESH dropped Sorrow off at the end of the driveway, and she walked up to the house through the tunnel of maple trees. Ethan’s Jeep was still parked in the driveway, and inside Grandma and Verity were fixing dinner.

  “We got a bit of a late start,” Verity said. “Chicken pot pie in about forty-five minutes. Go tell Ethan he’s staying for dinner.” She was scrubbing a cutting board in the sink, her hair drifting about her face in wisps.

  Sorrow hesitated. She had been bracing for questions about her day, thinking of ways to answer without mentioning Mrs. Roche or Cassie Abrams.

  But Verity only looked up and added, “I think he’s in the barn. Okay?”

  “Yeah.” Sorrow pivoted back to the door. “Okay.”

  The barn was about a hundred yards from the house, across the broad expanse of lawn and beyond the tangle of Grandma’s garden. The door was open a crack, a bar of yellow light slanting out. As Sorrow approached there was a rumble from inside: an engine, spluttering.

  She pushed the barn door open wider; the wheels on the track loosed a rusty shriek. The barn was stuffy, still hot from the heat of the day, and dust tickled her nose. It had been decades since the building had housed animals, but the scent of hay lingered. Ethan was leaning over the engine of the old green John Deere tractor. He looked up when Sorrow came in.

  “Hey.” His Red Sox hat was pushed back and there was a smudge of grease on his forehead.

  “Hi,” Sorrow said. “I’ve been commanded to command you to stay for dinner. At least it sounded like a command.”

  “It’s that late?” Ethan said. “I, uh, I didn’t realize. I’ve been . . .” He gestured with a wrench, knocking it into the tractor with a loud metal clang. He had the radio on low: an AM sports station. Yankees versus Orioles. Yankees up by two. “Mostly not fixing this.”

  “Does it still run? It’s been dying for years.”

  Ethan shrugged. “Sort of. I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

  He didn’t particularly sound like he wanted company, and Sorrow had delivered her message, so she turned to leave. “Verity says it’s forty-five minutes until the food is . . .”

  There was a pile of cardboard boxes just inside the door.

  She hadn’t noticed. She had come into the barn to fetch this tool or that a few times since Monday, and she hadn’t ever noticed the boxes just inside the door. The barn was full of junk, had always been full of junk. The floor and stalls and shelves were so packed Sorrow was used to looking over the clutter without seeing it.

  Patience. Something in her heart thrummed like a plucked string. Grandma’s handwriting in black marker on brown cardboard. Patience, Patience, Patience.

  The boxes were sealed with cracking tape and darkened by water stains at the corners. Something had chewed through the side of one. A mouse, maybe, its entire family too. Patience would have laughed at that, mice living in her clothes like creatures from a fairy tale, nibbling apart the seams to make a nest.

  Sorrow stepped around a rusty red wheelbarrow and reached for the top box. The tape came away easily, brittle as ashes. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a bulky gray sweater. Sorrow brushed her fingertips over the fat stitches. It had been Verity’s before Patience claimed it. She would wear it on chilly mornings like a robe; its sleeves were so long they had covered her hands, except for the holes where her thumbs punched through. Sorrow inhaled, yearning for the scents of woodsmoke and cinnamon tea, but she smelled only engine oil and hay.

  “Sorrow?” Ethan’s voice, hesitant.

  She wasn’t going to search through Patience’s things with an audience. She wasn’t going to search at all, because she wasn’t trying to find anything. A box of matches. A lighter. A helpful note detailing how much she loved starting fires. Sorrow hated that she was even considering it.

  She folded the box closed and regarded Ethan thoughtfully. She didn’t know anything about him except that he didn’t like his family and he put up with her mother’s eccentricities. The brief conversations they’d had over the past few days had been about work around the farm, nothing more. If Andi were here she’d be rolling her eyes and dismissing Ethan as too quiet and boring to talk to, but Sorrow thought it more likely he just liked being left alone. That was fine with
her. They didn’t need to be friends. All Sorrow wanted was somebody who could answer a question.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “It’s kinda personal.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Not personal about you.” Sorrow left the boxes by the door and wound her way through the clutter to stand beside the tractor. “It’s more about my family. That kind of personal.”

  Ethan set the wrench down and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Okay.”

  “I know we don’t know each other, but I can’t ask Verity or—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, laughing a little. “What is it?”

  “It’s about my sister. You know what happened to her.”

  Ethan leaned against the tractor’s large front tire; the yellow paint on the wheel rim was almost completely rusted away. “Yeah. I do. I remember when it happened.”

  “What do you remember about it?”

  “Not much,” he said. “Just people talking about it. My aunt and uncle took Cass and Julie out of town for a while because they were so upset. Mostly Julie, I guess. She’s the one who saw it from her window, and she was . . . not okay. She got really quiet after that and never really came back. That’s mostly what I remember.”

  “Do people really think . . .” Sorrow swallowed, pressed on. “Do people think Patience started the fires herself?”

  A few seconds passed before Ethan answered. “Where did you hear that?”

  It wasn’t quite the vehement denial Sorrow had been hoping for. “At the store today.”

  “Somebody just came up and said that to you?”

  “Well. Not somebody. It was Cassie.”

  “Oh, god, of course it was.” Ethan took off his hat, ran a hand through his hair, put it on again. “I should have guessed.”

  “Why? Has she said stuff like that before?”

  “Not that I’ve ever heard, but she’ll say whatever’s going to stir up the most shit, whether or not it’s true.” Sorrow’s skepticism must have shown on her face, because he added, “The last thing she said to me, right after I started working here a few months ago, was that I was a traitor to our family and should be disowned.”

  “That seems . . . extreme,” Sorrow said. “Even for our families.”

  “It’s not like we’re close. I don’t care what she says.” But there was a bitter edge to his words, and Sorrow wondered if Cassie had upset him more than he wanted to admit.

  “But is Cassie the only one who thinks that? About my sister?” she asked.

  “I think most people figure the police were right about what happened,” he said.

  “You mean that it was some random drug addict or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But most people isn’t everybody,” Sorrow pressed. “Cassie must have gotten it from somewhere. What about Julie? What does she think?”

  “Julie never talks about it,” Ethan said. “Not ever. Cassie probably said it just because she knew it would bother you. And, honestly? If there was any chance my aunt and uncle thought your sister was responsible, the whole world would have heard about it.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Sorrow admitted. Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had once called the police because Grandma had been walking too close to the property line; they would never have let something like possible arson go, no matter how tragically it had ended.

  “Why does it matter?” Ethan asked. “Do you—is that what you think happened?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Sorrow said quickly. “I was just wondering why she would say that. Wondering if that’s what people think.” She didn’t like the way Ethan was looking at her, like he was trying to figure out what she wasn’t saying. She took the coward’s way out and promptly changed the subject. “So you working here really does upset your family?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t care,” Ethan said. “It’s still better than letting my dad think he can decide for me.”

  “You’re doing it to piss off your dad?”

  “It’s working. He hasn’t spoken to me in months.”

  “That’s a good thing?” Sorrow said.

  “You’ve clearly never met my dad if you have to ask that.” Ethan didn’t even try to hide the bitterness in his voice that time, and Sorrow had the uncomfortable realization that in trying to deflect the conversation from herself she had pushed it into territory that was painful for him.

  “I don’t think I ever have, actually.” In Sorrow’s mind one Mr. Abrams was indistinguishable from the other: blond hair, polo shirts, nice cars. “Does that mean working here was your idea? Not Verity’s?”

  “No, it was mine,” Ethan said. “And I asked Miss P first. I mean, I sort of—she would never admit she needs help with anything, even though she’s like seventy years old, so I kinda let her think she was doing me a favor. She’s always been nice to me, even when I was a little kid. Verity took some convincing.”

  That wasn’t how Verity had made it sound; she had talked about hiring an Abrams like it was some kind of coup. And Sorrow hadn’t questioned Verity’s version of events. She hadn’t even wondered if she’d needed to.

  “I think I sort of forgot what it was like,” she said. “Our families. I mean, I remember, but it was always just . . . you know, stories. Ancient history.”

  “People don’t really forget ancient history around here,” Ethan said. “You know they still call it ‘witch weather’ when there’s an early frost or a bad snowstorm.”

  The words whispered an echo in Sorrow’s mind, a long-ago memory of bright colors and spice cake—the yarn and fabric shop where Grandma sold her quilts. Two women talking in low voices: This chill in the air, it’s witch weather. Locals. Sorrow had seen them in the store before. They had shared a glance, a purse of the lips when they realized Sorrow was eavesdropping from behind a shelf, and the subject changed. She had known what they meant, and at the time it had made her feel proud, that those two women in the shop would blame the weather on her family.

  There was a crunch of footsteps outside the barn. Verity appeared in the doorway. “There you are. I thought you’d gotten lost.”

  “Between here and the house?” Sorrow said.

  “Well, you are a city girl now.”

  “No need for a search party.” Sorrow glanced at Ethan. “We were talking tractor repairs.”

  “I thought I told you not to bother with that piece of junk,” Verity said.

  “It’s only about fifty percent junk,” Ethan said. “Maybe seventy-five. The rest still works.”

  “It’s almost as old as I am.” Verity stepped into the barn and rapped on the hood of the John Deere with her knuckles. “I remember when we got it. We had to replace the one my grandmother drove into the pond.”

  Sorrow was certain she had misheard. “She did what?”

  “She drove the old tractor into the pond. The one over in the northwest corner?”

  “I know which pond,” Sorrow said. “I’m more interested in why your grandma drove a tractor into it. On purpose?”

  “Absolutely. She was trying to make a point.” Verity’s smile was a flicker, gone far too quickly. “The pond is right on the property line, and she didn’t like that Eli Abrams—that would be your grandfather.” She nodded at Ethan. “She didn’t like that he kept pulling up the fence posts to claim the whole pond for himself, so she got on her tractor and rode down there and plowed right over the new fence he’d put up.”

  “I think my grandfather told me about that when I was little,” Ethan said. “Only in his version she tried to run him down first. He really didn’t like her.”

  “Well, she might have killed his father, so he had his reasons,” Verity said.

  Sorrow laughed, a short startled sound, but Verity’s expression didn’t change, and Ethan only looked uncomfortable. The walls of the barn swallowed her laugh into an uneasy silence.

  “Are you serious?” Sorrow looked between the two of them. “You’re
serious. Is that true? She killed him?”

  Verity didn’t answer right away, so Ethan said, “I don’t know if it’s true. I only know what Grandpa Eli used to say, and he was . . . you know. Not all there. Alzheimer’s. He was always saying Devotion Lovegood drove his father to an early grave. He loved to blame a whole bunch of stuff on her and Miss P, like stupid stuff they obviously . . .”

  Ethan trailed off. He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck, and he glanced at Verity with a look Sorrow understood all too well. That was the look of somebody who knew he had said the wrong thing but didn’t know yet how Verity would react.

  “But he said stuff like that all the time,” he went on quickly. “He was blaming communism on your family too, in the end. All kinds of stuff. Nobody listened to him.”

  Verity’s expression hadn’t changed. It hadn’t changed at all, and her stillness made the hair on Sorrow’s neck stand up. Verity was looking at Ethan, her expression carefully blank, and his face was growing redder, and Sorrow almost felt sorry for him, definitely would have if her heart weren’t racing, if there weren’t a weight on her chest, if she could blink, if she could look away, if every muscle in her body weren’t tense with waiting to see what Verity would do.

  Verity moved her hand, turned slightly, and for a heartbeat Sorrow was absolutely certain she was going to storm out of the barn. She would return to the house and thump up the stairs to her room. Sorrow could already hear her door slamming, that angry clap echoing through the house, a sound she hadn’t heard in years but had never, ever forgotten.

  But Verity didn’t leave. Slowly she unfroze, melting from a tense statue to a flesh-and-blood woman again, and she tapped her fingers idly on the tractor, a nervous, arrhythmic drumbeat. She said, “We can’t claim responsibility for the communism, but he wasn’t entirely wrong about George Abrams. He and my grandmother hated each other, and they had good reason for it.”

  “What kind of reason?” Ethan asked—too eagerly, Sorrow thought, too quickly, but she had believed the same once too, that asking Verity to delve into one of her cherished stories was the best way to smooth over an uncertain moment.