by Kali Wallace
Sorrow turned to the north, took a breath, and climbed the hill.
By the time she reached the summit, her heart was racing and her calves were burning. She stopped in the shade at the edge of the clearing.
The oak that grew atop the hill was a massive black-barked monster, towering over the whole of the orchard. Its leaves were as big as dinner plates, its branches as fat around as whole trees. Bulbous knots protruded from its lumpy, deformed trunk. It was ugly, misshapen, and had been struck by lightning more times than anybody could count. Verity had once told Sorrow the black oak looked as it did because it absorbed all the blights and diseases that threatened the orchard, gobbled them up like a ravenous beast and swallowed them down into the soil where they could do no harm, and Sorrow, wide-eyed and credulous, had believed it. It was the biggest tree in the orchard, the biggest in all of Abrams Valley. Nobody knew how old it was; it had been towering and ancient already when Rejoice Lovegood first came to the valley.
The oak was surrounded by a barren patch where no grass or shrubs ever grew, and in a curve around one side of the clearing were six ash trees. They were very old and very tall, all the exact same age: one for each of the children Silence Lovegood had slain. Their father’s family had insisted the children be buried in town, far from their mother and the stain of her wickedness. Silence’s daughter Grace, the only survivor, had planted the ash trees for her siblings years later.
Silence herself was buried at the base of the oak beneath an uneven rectangle of white stones. She had neither a headstone nor an ash tree. She had only the roots of the black oak wrapped around her in a tangled cage.
They had come up here together the day before Patience died. Sorrow remembered the dull, cold dread she had felt about going back to the house and how important it had been to convince Patience to walk a bit longer. She remembered leaving the cemetery and hurrying around the hill, both wanting and not wanting a glimpse across the meadow to the burned Abrams barn in the distance.
Sorrow walked the perimeter of the oak’s clearing to the northern side. The apple trees were too tall, the orchard too lush for a view from this spot, so she picked her way down the slope until she met the orchard road. From there she could look along a wide gap between rows of apple trees and see the Abrams house on its hill: tall, white, a blinding spark on the landscape. The new garage stood beside it, the one that had replaced the old barn—it was whole, of course it was whole, but for the briefest flicker of a moment Sorrow saw a black wound in the corner where fire had eaten it away.
There, below, was the meadow on the property boundary between Lovegood and Abrams land, and there was the fence that separated them. From this distance the double strands of wire were no more than the merest pencil sketches. The Abrams side was mowed in long sweeping lines; on the Lovegood side the meadow was choked with grass and wildflowers so thick the leaning fence posts were half-hidden.
At the western end of the meadow was the old stone well where George Abrams might have died, and might still remain, rotted away to a skeleton. It was small and round and innocuous, its weathered lid a circle of silver wood.
And there was the cider house.
14
A MEMORY WAS a thing with no shape, no mass, but indescribable weight. Words spoken in cold winter air, secrets shared, a sprint, a chase, a smile, a favor, these things had their own gravity, distorting everything around them like the heaviest star, shaping time and space even when the heart remained hidden.
Sorrow and Patience had walked through the orchard together a hundred times, a thousand, in every season, in drizzling rain and blazing sun, howling wind and whipping snow. Every one of those walks was compressed to a single pinpoint of a single day: the last day of Patience’s life.
But all Sorrow felt now, standing at the edge of the meadow, was a nervous tremble in her chest. She should have come down here sooner, to this quiet place where Patience had died.
The cider house was a black ruin cupped in a meadow of vibrant green. Eight years of wind and rain and snow had washed the stench of smoke away, stamped the ashes into dirt, polished the blackened boards to a sheen. Wildflowers bloomed in the rich tangle of grass around it, and a thicket of trees huddled at its back. It was about half the size of the barn, with one story above the ground and a cellar below. The fire had brought down one of the long walls and half of the roof, but the rest of the building remained, a crooked, leaning skeleton of blackened boards and beams. There was grass growing inside, reaching for sunlight through the tumbling walls. A few yellow and pink flowers stood out against the charred wood.
Verity hadn’t had the building torn down, but the forest was slowly reclaiming it anyway.
There was a hole in the wooden floor; it had been there before the fire. At some point in the past the boards had rotted and the cider press had smashed through to the cellar. Sorrow and Patience had been forbidden from playing inside ever since Patience, a courageous thirteen years old, had decided to build a balance beam across that hole in the floor. She couldn’t find one board long enough, so she had tried to nail two together and ended up sticking her hand on a protruding nail. It punched right through her palm, and Verity had had to take her to the urgent care clinic for stitches and a tetanus shot.
It would have been fine—Patience thought it was cool, having a hole in her hand; she kept shoving the bandage in Sorrow’s face to show off—but Mrs. Roche had seen them going into the clinic, and she had mentioned it to their neighbors the Johnsons, and the Johnsons, who were newcomers to town, had carelessly told Mr. and Mrs. Abrams. After a visit from child services, questions from the social worker, and a tearful apology from Patience, Verity had put a padlock on the door and forbidden them from playing in the old ruin again.
The sheriff said Patience had fallen into the cellar.
Sorrow was never supposed to hear that. She had crept out of bed to listen from the stairs when the sheriff was talking to Verity and Grandma in the kitchen.
Patience must have fallen into the cellar through that gaping hole in the floor. She was knocked unconscious, and the roof collapsed. Julie Abrams had seen the fire from her bedroom window and woken her parents to call 911, but by the time the firemen arrived it was too late.
Sorrow had never questioned it, that story she’d overheard as a child, but she knew now the sheriff had probably made up the unconscious part to be kind. Patience would have been trapped in the cellar whether she was awake or not, whether she was injured or not. She could have been screaming for help. Nobody would have heard. The Abrams house was too far away, the road even farther. The cellar was at least ten feet deep. She wouldn’t have been able to escape.
Sorrow looked up at the remains of the cider house roof, where rafters and beams were broken at burned, spiky ends. She brushed her fingertips over the wood, almost expecting—it was stupid—almost expecting to feel cold winter wind breathing through the gaps. She closed her fingers into a fist, squeezed her eyes shut to chase the sensation away.
Sorrow lifted a hand to scratch the side of her neck—brush a hair away, or a spiderweb—and she stilled, suddenly tense, nerves sparking. She turned. The meadow was empty. Grass rippled on both sides of the wire fence like the pelt of a slumbering creature, a gentle breeze caressing shades of green from light to dark to light again. Up the hill the Abrams house gleamed in the sun; its redbrick chimney was an artery on the side.
It was too hot to be wandering around out here in the orchard, collecting ticks and a sunburn in exchange for nothing but more questions, waiting for the kaleidoscope contents of her memories to shake into some kind of sense. There was nothing of Patience left in the cider house. Sorrow could stare into that patchwork of darkness and light for hours and it wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. It was only a ruin.
She strode away from the cider house, aiming for the shade of the apple trees, but just as she dipped from sunlight to shadow, something caught her eye. She stopped again, turned, cast her gaze ove
r the meadow.
There was something on the well. A small object perched right on the rim.
She looked around, her skin prickling into goose bumps. She was alone in the meadow. She had been all along.
She kicked her way through the high grass, her shoes squelching in hidden pockets of mud. The well was about waist-high, and it had been boarded up for as long as Sorrow could remember, a double layer of solid hardwood planks bolted securely into the masonry and stone. She had never known before why it was covered. She didn’t like knowing now. It had always seemed such a harmless thing, squatting there in a meadow of rich green, part of the landscape.
Perched on the edge of the cover was a single white rock.
Sorrow reached for it, but she stopped a few inches shy, curled her hand into a fist to steady it. It was one of the stones from Silence Lovegood’s grave. There were no chalky white stones like that anywhere else in the orchard.
She remembered watching Patience’s hands, thin and winter-pale, gloves stripped away in spite of the cold, her long fingers moving with nervous energy as she passed the stone back and forth between her hands, back and forth, back and forth, constant motion while the rest of her was so still, and her voice tight and unwelcoming—
There had been somebody else in the orchard that day.
15
EIGHT YEARS AGO
THERE HAD BEEN somebody else in the orchard that day, but when Sorrow followed Patience out of the cemetery grove, it was so quiet they might have been the only people in the world.
They skirted the hill in the center of the orchard, staying well above the meadow and the fence line. For that Sorrow was grateful. Patience didn’t always heed their mother’s warnings to stay as far from the Abrams property as they could, and normally Sorrow enjoyed the little thrill of disobedience she got from ducking through the wires past the No Trespassing signs or chasing frogs around to the forbidden side of the pond. But today, looking at the Abrams house across the wind-scalloped field of snow made Sorrow’s insides squirm like a knot of worms.
From this far away the burned corner of the Abrams barn didn’t look like much, only a black bite chomped into the red. The sheriff had said nobody had been hurt; the Abrams didn’t have any animals. All that had been damaged was the hayloft where Cassie Abrams had her playhouse.
“What are you staring at?” Patience asked. She was several steps ahead, already climbing the hill.
“Do you think they’re going to catch who did it?” Sorrow asked.
“Probably,” Patience said with a shrug. “You don’t have to worry about it. It’s nothing to do with us.”
She started walking again. Sorrow sniffled, wiped her nose on her coat sleeve, and went after her. The snow was deep on the north-facing slope. Sorrow followed in her sister’s footsteps, stretching her legs to reach each punched-through hole, until the ground leveled, the trees opened, and a whirl of wind bit at her face. They had reached the black oak.
The clearing around the oak was slick with hardened patches of ice, but the ground above Silence Lovegood’s grave was bare and muddy. Patience picked her way over the ice, choosing each step carefully, but Sorrow ran past her and threw herself into the trunk of the oak. She climbed up onto the fat, knobby roots that curled from the ground like monstrous snakes and hopped her way around the tree, keeping one hand on the trunk for balance.
“Is this where she killed them?” Sorrow asked.
Patience knelt beside Silence Lovegood’s grave to move the white stones back into tidy lines and pick away stray leaves and twigs. “You’ve heard this story a million times.”
“I like it.”
“Because you’re a morbid kid,” Patience said.
Sorrow didn’t know what morbid meant. “Am not.”
“You are too. You already know how it goes.”
“This is where she killed them,” Sorrow declared. “Her very own children, six of them. All but the littlest girl, Grace.”
“She ran away and hid in a fox burrow until she heard the townspeople calling for her,” Patience said.
“You just made that up,” Sorrow said, laughing. “That’s not part of the story.”
But Patience didn’t laugh. “It doesn’t have to be part of the story to be true. Close your eyes. Try to imagine it.”
Patience looked so serious and so earnest that Sorrow did as she said. With her eyes closed she wobbled on the tree root, put a hand out to steady herself.
“She had to hide somewhere,” Patience said. “She was so scared. She ran and ran and ran until she was lost in the forest. She couldn’t hear her mother shouting for her anymore. She found a little burrow and she crawled into it. It was quiet and dark and there were roots and dirt crumbling all around her.”
Sorrow opened one eye to look at Patience. “How did she fit?”
Patience tossed a handful of matted leaf debris at Sorrow’s shoes. “It was cozy,” she said. She looked around, then lowered her voice. “You know, if you dig down deep enough, this dirt is still red and sticky. That’s why nothing grows in this clearing.”
A shiver chased down Sorrow’s spine. “Nothing ever?”
“Nothing except this oak, because it drinks up the blood.”
Sorrow plucked off her glove to touch the tree with her bare hand. She thought it might be warmer than it ought to be. She might feel red sap gulping through the wood. She snatched her hand away.
Silence Lovegood had been left alone when her husband, John Derry, died in 1816, during the coldest summer anybody could remember. It was so cold Enoch Abrams and his brothers Gideon and Zadock convinced the town Silence was using witchcraft to curse the whole valley. Only the Lovegoods, they claimed, had the power to manipulate the seasons with their unnatural command over life and death. The story was one of Sorrow’s favorites. She especially liked to whack at the scarecrow in Grandma’s garden, pretending to be little Grace Lovegood chasing the Abrams men away with a rake, shouting, “Za-dock, Za-dock!” with a thwack on the second syllable, over and over again.
Silence Lovegood had denied she was a witch, but the cold summer, the failed crops, the unseasonal frosts that crackled through the forests in June and July, it all scared the townspeople too much and nothing could change their minds.
“I think it’s stupid,” Sorrow said.
“What is?”
“She didn’t have to kill them. She could have moved away.”
Patience gave her a look that said she was deciding if what she had to say was too grown-up for her little sister. Sorrow hated that look.
“It wasn’t that simple,” Patience said. “As awful as it is, I think she thought she was protecting them.”
“Yeah, but”—Sorrow made another loop around the tree, hopping faster this time—“she wasn’t. That’s stupid. You can’t protect somebody by hurting them. She could have taken them to live somewhere else.” Sorrow tried balancing and jumping to the next root on one leg. It was harder than using both, but she was sure she could do it. “Why didn’t she just go somewhere?”
“Sorrow.”
The warning in Patience’s voice made her heart skip. When Sorrow rounded the tree again, Patience was on her feet, and there was somebody else in the clearing.
“Julie,” Patience said.
A teenage girl stood between two ash trees. Julie was the older Abrams daughter. With her blond hair dyed in pink streaks, a puffy purple down coat, and red tights, she was a vibrant rainbow of color in the gray orchard. Julie was the same age as Patience, and until December she had been away at boarding school. Mrs. Abrams had told everybody Julie was taking a break because she had been working so hard. Mom said Julie had been kicked out.
Julie stepped out from between the ash trees. The wind curling through the clearing tugged at her pale hair. “Hey,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” Patience asked.
Sorrow looked at her sister in surprise: she wasn’t used to hearing such a sharp tone from her.
“Nothing,” Julie said. She kicked at a clump of ice. “Walking. I saw you come up here.”
“You’re trespassing. You can’t be here.”
Julie rolled her eyes. “Seriously? You’re going to be like that?”
“I’m not being like anything.” Patience shifted her weight from one foot to the other and passed a small white rock quickly from hand to hand. “You can’t be here. This is private property.”
“Why do you care?” Julie snapped. “Are you gonna call the cops on me?”
“I might,” Patience said. “You know they were already here.”
“Yeah, our place too, looking for the dumbass who tried to burn our barn down. My parents are freaking out like they’re going to find an arsonist lurking in the woods or something. It’s so stupid.”
“You need to leave,” Patience said. She closed her fist around the white rock, and for a second Sorrow thought she was going to throw it at Julie.
Julie’s face went through a complicated change, flashing from surprise to hurt to something harder. “You’re serious.”
“Yes. You have to go.” There was a tremor in Patience’s voice. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I can’t believe you. Do you treat all your friends like this?” Julie asked, then laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. “Oh, right, I forgot. You don’t have any other friends.”
Patience’s face was pale, her lips pinched, and her voice tight when she said, “We’re not friends.”
Sorrow knew at once, with the certainty of a thunderclap, that Patience was lying. Julie was telling the truth. They were friends. They weren’t even supposed to talk to each other. Mom didn’t have many rules for Patience and Sorrow, but that one was absolute: they could not be friends with the Abrams girls. And Patience had broken it.
“That is so dumb.” Julie rubbed at her nose; the tip was pink. “You want to let our stupid families dictate every fucking aspect of your life, you go right ahead.”
