The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  When she reached the cemetery in the western hollow, Sorrow skidded in a patch of snow and tumbled into the fence. She caught her balance and righted herself before climbing to join Patience on the other side.

  “You won,” Sorrow said, panting for breath.

  “Someday you’ll beat me,” Patience told her, but she didn’t mean it. Patience liked winning.

  Patience wandered along the fence, looking up at the naked branches and the gray sky. Sorrow wound through the middle instead; she wove figure eights around the ash trees, starting with the oldest and tallest at the grave of Rejoice Lovegood and cutting diagonally through the grove to the youngest tree at the grave of their great-grandmother. At the base of Devotion’s tree, Sorrow jumped for the lowest branches. Her mittened fingers caught briefly on the bark, her boots scrabbled on the trunk, and she dropped to the ground again.

  Patience, moving at a more leisurely pace, took a few minutes to catch up.

  “Is that where Grandma will be buried when she dies?” Sorrow asked, pointing to the space beside Devotion’s grave.

  Patience’s green hat was a bright spot of color against the shades of brown and gray. “Don’t say that. Grandma isn’t going to die anytime soon.”

  “I was just wondering.” Wondering, and imagining the whip-thin ash sapling they would plant above Grandma’s grave. Her headstone would be white and clean, not yet greened by moss, and her name would be carved in neat block letters: Perseverance Lovegood. As the years passed the ash would grow straight and tall like the others, another sturdy sentinel for the grove.

  “Someday she will be, I guess,” Patience said. She looked up at the gray sky, into the gray orchard. “We’ll all be here eventually. Let’s not talk about that.”

  “I was just wondering,” Sorrow said again. A tickle of guilt curled in her chest. Grandma would live for a long time yet.

  “Well, stop wondering,” Patience said. “And don’t let Mom hear you talk that way. It’ll upset her.”

  “I know,” Sorrow said, and then, because she couldn’t help herself, “I wasn’t the one who upset her yesterday.”

  There was a flash of anger over Patience’s face. “That’s not the same thing. That’s not even close to the same thing.”

  “She was really upset,” Sorrow said.

  Patience threw her hands up. “That’s why it’s so stupid! It shouldn’t even be a big deal. It’s just school. Everybody goes to school.”

  “We don’t.”

  “That’s the problem,” Patience said. “Why does Mom get to decide that for us?”

  “Because she’s our mom.” Sorrow’s heart was beating quickly. She wished she hadn’t said anything. She wanted to jump the fence and run into the orchard. Patience knew better. She knew not to ask about school, or to bring up what Dad said about how they lived, or to ask about anything that would upset Mom. She knew not to push and push until Mom fled the kitchen and closed herself in her room.

  But that was exactly what she had done yesterday. Patience had broken all of her own rules.

  “She says it’s safer this way,” Sorrow said.

  “Safer than what?” Patience asked. “Safer than never doing anything? Never going anywhere? Maybe Mom and Grandma are happy to stay here forever doing the same things over and over again, but I feel like—” She made a frustrated noise and slapped at the trunk of an ash tree. “I feel like every time I want to do anything different this stupid orchard is reaching out to pull me back. Like I’ve got the roots all tangled up here”—she tapped her chest, right over her heart—“and I can’t get away. Don’t you ever feel that? How hard it is to breathe?”

  Sorrow stared at her sister, too afraid to answer. She had never heard Patience talk like this before. She didn’t sound like Patience at all, but Mom. If Sorrow closed her eyes, she wouldn’t have known the difference, and that scared her as much as the sheriff in the kitchen, as much as the gaping darkness of the cider house, the dull echo of a door slamming closed, and the aching cold winter nights that made it feel like spring would never come.

  Patience let out a frustrated sigh. “Never mind. You’re too little to understand anything.”

  “I understand,” Sorrow protested, although she didn’t know what Patience meant.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of it? Being stuck here where we can’t even talk to anybody?”

  She was looking at Sorrow for an answer, but when Sorrow tried to imagine talking to strangers in town, or kids her own age, taunting words echoed in her ears and a door slammed shut in her mind. She squirmed under the weight of Patience’s earnest gaze. She didn’t know what Patience wanted her to say.

  “They would be mean to me,” she said finally, her voice small.

  Patience’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

  All the things Sorrow was worried about buzzed around her mind like bees. She couldn’t even begin to name them all, so she didn’t try, and only nodded.

  “Well, I wouldn’t let them,” Patience said. “You would just tell me who was being mean, and I would stop them.” Her voice softened with concern. “Is somebody being mean to you?”

  Sorrow pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  Patience’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Sorrow mumbled, kicking at the base of Devotion’s ash tree.

  “Okay. But you know that if somebody is bothering you, you can tell me, right? I won’t tell Mom. Are you sure there’s nothing?”

  “I’m sure,” Sorrow said, letting the word drag out. “You don’t have to keep bothering—oh!”

  “What is it?” Patience asked.

  Something glinted in the dormant brown grass at the base of the tree.

  Sorrow bent to pick it up. It was a pair of wire-framed eyeglasses. One of the round lenses was missing, and the other was split down the middle by a crack.

  “Look,” she said.

  She held the glasses out to Patience, who looked at them for a moment, then glanced at the base of the tree where Sorrow had found them. “Did you just find those right there?”

  “Yeah,” Sorrow said. “In the grass.”

  Patience took the glasses from her gingerly, turned them in her hands, then hooked the arms over her ears and looked down her nose at Sorrow. “I say! I can see clearly now!” she exclaimed, her voice warbling with a fake accent. “Fetch me the mail, butler. I must know if the queen is inviting us for tea today.”

  Sorrow giggled. “The queen doesn’t want to have tea with you.”

  “Here, you try.” Patience took the glasses off and settled them gently onto Sorrow’s nose. “Be careful. If that glass breaks it’ll stab you in the eye.”

  “Ew, gross.”

  The glasses were too big for Sorrow; she tilted her head back to keep them from slipping down her face. “I say!” she said, mimicking Patience’s accent. The one lens distorted the cemetery grove around them, making everything big and blurry. She took the glasses off. “I don’t like them. Everything looks funny.”

  “That’s because you don’t need them to see, silly,” Patience said. “Aren’t you glad you came out here today? You found the first favor of the spring.”

  “No, it’s—” Sorrow stopped herself. “Yeah. The first.”

  She unzipped her coat to tuck the glasses safely into the inside pocket, and as she did she pressed briefly, quickly, on the small lump of the favor she had found yesterday. The one she could feel tucked against her ribs like an ember. The one she was keeping secret. The puff of air she let in made her shiver before she got her coat zipped up again.

  “Are you cold?” Patience asked.

  “No.” Sorrow’s cheeks stung and her nose was running, but she wasn’t ready to go back to the house, where Mom would still be in her room and the day would stretch long and quiet. “Can we go see the witch’s grave?”

  “You shouldn’t call her that,” Patience said.

  “That’s what everybody calls her.�
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  “Everybody who? You don’t even know that many people.”

  Sorrow shrugged and pretended Patience’s words didn’t sting. “I want to go to her grave.”

  Patience relented. “Fine, but only for a little bit. It’s colder than I thought out here.”

  13

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Sorrow took her phone down to the end of the driveway. It was half past noon in California, which meant Andi would likely be in the middle of her lunch hour, and that meant the conversation would have a natural time limit.

  She sat on the top rail of the fence and scrolled down to Andi’s number. Then she stared at her phone until the screen went dark. She wished she had a way of knowing before she called what the problem was, and what Andi’s mood would be, so she could prepare herself.

  She and Andi had always gotten along well enough, once Sorrow had gotten used to the loud, chatty, know-it-all older girl who had crashed into her life after she moved to Florida. Dad and Sonia had only been dating when Sorrow first went to live with him, but somehow their fledgling relationship had survived the unexpected arrival of a grief-stricken little girl, and before long Sonia’s family had welcomed Sorrow as one of their own. When she was feeling generous, she was grateful for that, how easily they had accepted a weird, quiet girl who was prone to disappearing into the backyard to hide under shrubs for hours on end.

  When she wasn’t feeling quite so generous, she wondered if it had been so easy for them because her arrival had been barely a blip in their lives, if the worst thing that had ever happened to her—something so huge and so terrible it had cracked her world right down the middle, opening a chasm she still didn’t know how to bridge—had been nothing more than a minor adjustment for them.

  She wasn’t feeling particularly generous today. There was too much wriggling around in her mind already. Cassie’s accusation and Verity’s story and, most of all, her memories of Patience, those small rough gems offering proof that she had been right, that coming back here was the best way to remember, but she couldn’t make sense of them yet. She needed more. She needed to hoard and polish and study every new memory, turn them over in her mind until the shape of what was missing made more sense. Talking to Andi wasn’t going to help her do that. But she made the call anyway.

  Andi answered right away. “Hey.”

  “Hey. I got your texts.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, do I know you? This number belongs to somebody I used to know, but I haven’t heard from her in a million years.”

  Sorrow was regretting the call already. “Very funny.”

  “Yeah, no, not really,” Andi said. “I was beginning to think you’d been eaten by a bear.”

  “I was at work last night,” Sorrow said.

  “How can you have work? You’re only there for a month.” There was noise in the background on Andi’s side of the call—a busy street, chattering voices—but Sorrow couldn’t picture what kind of restaurant she might be in or what street she was walking down.

  “I’m helping some neighbors at their store. Just a couple of shifts a week.”

  “So you’re not actually that busy,” Andi said.

  Sorrow bristled. “This is a farm. I’m busy all the time.”

  “What, are they making you do manual labor?”

  “Nobody’s making me do anything.” Sorrow closed her eyes. She was not going to let Andi under her skin. “What did you want?”

  “Wow. Okay. So we’re gonna be like that.”

  “No, I—” Sorrow let out a huff of breath. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—it sounded urgent?”

  “But not urgent enough for you to answer right away.”

  Sorrow had been assuming that Andi was just being Andi, overly dramatic and self-centered. A year ago Sorrow would have known, but it was different now. Andi lived across the country, Dad and Sonia were barely tolerating each other, and everybody was expecting Sorrow to have some kind of breakdown before their eyes. Now, for the first time, she felt a genuine nudge of worry. “Did something happen?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Andi answered. “That’s what I want to ask you! What’s going on at home?”

  Sorrow’s worry vanished like a burst bubble. “You want me to tell you what’s going on at home.”

  “Well, Mom isn’t telling me anything. She just keeps saying everything is fine, like she always does, but we know that’s bullshit.”

  “You want me to tell you what’s going on at home,” Sorrow said again. “You mean the home that’s like two thousand miles away from me.”

  “Yeah, but you were there last—”

  “The home that you’re so worried about you decided not to come back even for a visit this summer.”

  “I have work,” Andi snapped. “It’s important. I didn’t just decide to go off and play in the woods for the summer.”

  “I’m with my family,” Sorrow answered. “I know that’s not important to you, but you could at least pretend it matters.”

  She didn’t remember sliding down from the fence, but she was standing in the grass now, and her hands were trembling. She hadn’t wanted to bring any of this with her to Vermont. She already felt like she was being split in half across miles and years, tugged both ways by families that would never understand each other. But Andi didn’t care about any of that. She had never even asked why Sorrow was coming back to Vermont.

  “You’re not being fair,” Andi said. She was always first to break the silence.

  “I’m not being fair?”

  “You were supposed to keep an eye on them.”

  “They’re adults,” Sorrow said. “What the hell could I do? They don’t need a babysitter.”

  “Well, that’s good, since you’re not doing it anyway.”

  “You’re just as far away.”

  “You can’t expect me to drop everything in my entire life.”

  “But it’s okay to expect me to do that.”

  “I expected you to at least make an effort,” Andi said, exasperated.

  “Right. I have to do it. Because what you’re doing is important, but all I’m doing is playing in the woods.”

  “Yes! No! I don’t know! I thought maybe you would try, since you’re the whole reason they’re—”

  Andi broke off suddenly. Sorrow felt numb all over, numb and empty and too light, as though she would float away if she let herself.

  “I’m the reason they’re fighting,” Sorrow said. “You can go ahead and say it.”

  “I don’t mean—”

  “Yes, you do. But it doesn’t matter. They don’t tell me anything. Not even when it’s all my fault.”

  “Have you even asked?” Andi demanded. “Or did you just decide to fuck off to Vermont for the summer with no explanation and who cares what the rest of us think?”

  “I’m not—”

  “I don’t care,” Andi said. “I don’t care! I don’t know if you did something or your dad did something or you’re just both being selfish assholes, but I don’t care about your stupid reasons. I just hope you fucking fix it when you get around to it. I’ve got work to do.”

  Andi hung up.

  “What the fuck.” Sorrow glared at the phone, but Andi didn’t call back.

  Andi’s accusation—suspicion, whatever it was—wasn’t anything Sorrow hadn’t been carrying for months already. It had been there at the back of her mind since that day in March when they had all surrounded her after the party, worried and angry and rightfully unsatisfied by her explanations. It had been there every time her father looked at her like he was afraid of what she would do next, and every time Sonia looked at her like she no longer recognized her. It had been there when she had told them both, ignoring the hurt and fear in their eyes, that the only way they could help was to let her leave.

  Hands shaking, eyes stinging, Sorrow slipped her phone into her back pocket and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, willing the tears not to fall. She couldn’t stand here on the side
of the road all day, but if she went back to the house now, with red eyes and a red face, she would look like she had been crying, and Verity would know something was wrong. Sorrow didn’t talk about her Florida family with her mother, not about fights and problems. It was simpler to keep her two families as separate as she could—or it had been, when there had been little reason for their jagged, ill-fitting edges to meet.

  She kicked through the grass along the fence, making her way back to the driveway, but instead of heading to the house, she left the packed dirt and stepped into the trees.

  This was the oldest part of the orchard. These few acres between the house and the road were where Rejoice Lovegood had planted her first trees and nurtured them through hot summers and frozen winters. She had been alone then, before she met her husband and bore their daughter, Fearful, before Clement Abrams or any of the other white neighbors had arrived. There had been an Abenaki village down at the far end of the valley, Rejoice alone at this end, and nothing but forest in between.

  According to the old stories born in the feverish depths of puritanical imagination, Rejoice had fed these oldest apple trees her own blood when it looked like they might not survive, and that was why they had endured so long.

  Sorrow breathed in the scents of soil and moss, mud and grass, and the ever-present memory of apples. She tried to let the orchard soothe her as she walked, tried to let the sunlight and the canopy of green draw out the ache in her chest like poison from a snakebite. Two squirrels chased each other up a tree in a chattering burst. It was a beautiful afternoon, hot enough to make the shadows welcoming.

  The day couldn’t be more different from the last time she and Patience had walked together in the orchard.

  Sorrow’s steps faltered, and she exhaled softly, let the memory settle like snowfall over her thoughts. That cold day at the clawing, blustery end of winter. She had been bundled up in boots and gloves, skidding on soggy patches of snow as she chased after Patience with no hope of catching her. That girl she had been, not once suspecting how little time she had left with her sister, she had wanted to see the witch’s grave.