The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

“Okay.”

  Grandma tapped the page with her pen, leaving tiny dots of ink beside I’ll talk to her about it. Then she wrote, What are you doing today?

  Sorrow carried her bowl to the sink. “I was thinking . . . I was thinking about cleaning up the cemetery a little bit,” she said. “Just the trash and stuff. Trimming some things. I don’t like that it’s . . . I want to clean it up a little. If that’s—”

  Sorrow stopped. She wasn’t going to ask if it was okay. This might not be her home anymore, but it was still her family buried in the cemetery grove. She didn’t need permission to care for their graves. She only wanted to do what her mother should have been doing anyway.

  Grandma looked at her for a moment, then wrote: It’s a good idea. There are leather gloves and trimming shears in the barn.

  “Right,” Sorrow said. “Yeah. I’ll need those.”

  She loaded the old metal wheelbarrow with supplies: spade and hoe, hedge trimmers and gloves, a black plastic bag for garbage. On a workbench she found a hammer and a Christmas cookie tin full of mismatched nails. It wouldn’t hurt to see if she could mend the fence, even though she didn’t have the slightest idea how to do that. The tools rattled and clanked as she pushed the load down to the orchard. The wheelbarrow’s wooden handles were rough, the tire going flat, and she was sweating before she was halfway through the orchard.

  The Lovegood cemetery in its hollow was a patchwork of cool shadows and misty morning sunlight, brown-barked trees and green leaves, white headstones and yellow ribbons and purple traps. Sorrow steered the wheelbarrow through a broken gap in the fence and set it down, rolled her shoulders, flexed her hands. A beetle rattled through the air and she started, turned, stared after it. She had looked up the emerald ash borer online, read a handful of articles about its infestation in New England, studied the pictures and lists of what to look for. Its larvae were responsible for the damage, carving snakelike mazes beneath the bark, cutting off the flow of nutrients, starving the tree from within.

  In the pictures the beetle was vibrantly green and shaped like the head of a spear, big-eyed and shimmering and so very tiny. It seemed impossible that such a small thing, and so beautiful, could cause so much damage.

  The Lovegood ashes were still healthy. Longer-lived than they had any right to be, sturdy and tall, and thriving. Sorrow pressed an open palm to the nearest, the one Rejoice Lovegood’s husband had planted for her, at her request, after her death.

  Sorrow and her family used to come out to the graveyard for night picnics sometimes, all four of them. They would spread blankets on the ground and gaze up at the stars, talking about this or that or nothing in particular. One such night in early fall, when the evenings were cool enough for sweaters and the mountains were washed in red and gold, Verity told them about a friendly argument the cider brewers had been having that day in town. One of them claimed it was the land, like the Abrams family had always believed, that made the Lovegood’s crop of Abrams Valley apples so perfectly bitter for brewing cider. The other had insisted it was the trees and their great age that made the flavor so strong. Verity had laughed as she told this story, a dry-leaf-rustle laugh, and said that it didn’t seem to have occurred to either of them that it was both the land and the trees together, sturdy roots sunk deep in soil, anchored to the earth and reaching for the sky, forever entwined. Grandma had moved her hand, a fluttering silhouette to encompass them, three generations lounging on a picnic blanket, and Verity had laughed again, more quietly, and she’d said, Yes, the family, we’re anchored here too.

  Sorrow had imagined them all as trees, their feet firmly planted and their arms spread wide, and she had kicked off her shoes to press her toes into the ground, giggling when the grass tickled her feet.

  She had not noticed if there was an edge of unease in Verity’s laugh, and she didn’t remember how Patience had reacted at all. It wouldn’t have meant anything to her, when she was a child, if there had ever been hints that her mother and sister chafed against the confines of their orchard and its history.

  Alone in the cemetery, Sorrow pulled weeds and collected trash, chopped at the plants crowding the headstones, kicked and tugged the fence posts upright. She started in the oldest corner of the grove and worked her way along the graves, creeping forward in time with her trimmers and her garbage bag. Her world shrank down to the closed rectangle of the cemetery. Grasshoppers leapt around her and mosquitoes settled on her skin, took flight when she brushed them away.

  The knot of anxiety high in her chest was still there, a living thing in her rib cage. She tried to focus on the dirt beneath her knees, the ragged tear of grass, the prickle of thorny leaves on her bare arms, but in her mind she kept replaying the fight with Verity. She imagined a hundred times what she could have said that would have been smarter, less cruel, more convincing, exactly the right thing she had needed to get Verity to talk to her, to have a conversation, share a piece of her past, open up rather than shut down. But no matter what she came up with, the replayed fight in her mind ended the same way.

  Her, saying things she wasn’t sure she meant.

  And Verity, fleeing to her room, closing the door.

  She was chopping clumps of grass from around Anne Lovegood’s headstone when something small and blue caught her eye. Sorrow tugged off her leather glove and parted the grass with her fingers. It was a glass bead on a leather string.

  Sorrow pulled it free of the grass, brushed away specks of dirt. Her heart was in her throat.

  She’d had one just like this when she was little, only that bead had been red, not blue. She had found it in Grandma’s garden one spring day. She must have been about five—young enough that she had been more use playing in the dirt than gardening. She remembered how excited she had been when the dark earth revealed the shiny red bead, the first favor of the year, and how she had whooped and run to show her grandmother. Sorrow had worn the red bead on its leather thong around her wrist the whole day. It barely fit, it was made for somebody even smaller than she was, so when it was time for bed she had taken it off and added it to her collection.

  She turned the blue bead over in her hands, watching the sun catch and sparkle in the glass. It wasn’t one of the favors she had lost, but it was a favor, and holding it made something jitter hopefully inside of her, an expectant feeling she had almost forgotten.

  She hadn’t imagined them. They were real. Lost, perhaps, the things she had cherished as a child, but real. She wanted to run to Grandma like she had before. She wanted to drop it into the grass and pretend she had never seen it—but as soon as she thought that, she felt guilty, absurdly, as though she would be betraying the orchard.

  Sorrow tucked the blue bead into her pocket. From Anne’s gravestone she moved to the next grave, the one belonging to a woman named Mary Covington. As a child Sorrow hadn’t questioned her mother’s explanation that Mary was Anne’s dearest friend. She knew better now, and she felt an amused sort of embarrassment at her childish naïveté—and a twinge of annoyance too, that Verity hadn’t tried to explain that Mary had been Anne’s partner. Sorrow would have understood, even as a child. Only family was buried in the Lovegood cemetery. After a lifetime together, Mary had outlived Anne by only a few months.

  Their daughters were next in the row: Righteous had died as a young woman, only twenty-three, but her twin, Justice, had outlived her by sixty years. Sorrow traced Justice’s name on the moss-greened stone. They had grown up to be young women together, but no farther. A child never looks into the future and sees the seasons rolling past with a part of herself missing, a hole where a sister ought to be, a space so vast and so deep it is as though a piece of the landscape has been scooped away.

  When she looked up she found the second favor.

  Perched in the roots of Justice’s ash tree was a small wooden tiger.

  It was her tiger. Her tiger, the same one she had found as a child. She knew before she crawled a few feet on her knees to reach for it. She knew before she held
its familiar shape in her hand, before she pressed her thumb to the space between its little ears, the way she always used to do when she was lonely and wanted comfort. It was exactly as she remembered, a terrific stalking beast made small and still, the ridges on its side an echo of the knife that had carved it. She must have looked past it a dozen times as she was hacking away at the weeds.

  She scrambled to her feet, tiger gripped tight in her hand, and she began to search in earnest for more favors. She kicked through the grass where it was high, circled every tree to examine the nooks and crannies of their roots, pulled herself up on her toes to look into low branches. Her excitement quickly gave way to disappointment, however, and the only other favor she found was a single silver button, pressed into the earth by her own footprint near the wheelbarrow.

  She dug the button out of the soil and cupped it in her palm with the bead. She shook them together, made a face at the paltry little rattle, and rolled them into the wheelbarrow beside the tiger. Her enthusiasm was gone. She was hot and thirsty, and every time she stepped from shadow to sunlight she could feel the heat on her shoulders, her arms, the back of her neck. She took off her Phillies hat, pulled her hair out of its ponytail and put it up again. She fanned herself with her hat for a moment, looking over the cemetery.

  And she stilled. Stopped fanning herself. Lowered the hat. The skin on her neck itched. Her shoulders tensed. Nothing had changed. The birds were still chattering, the insects still humming. No cloud had passed over the sun.

  But she felt around her a change like an indrawn breath. She turned slowly.

  There was somebody standing at the corner of the orchard.

  Her breath caught, the start of a word, but it wasn’t Verity. It was Julie Abrams.

  Sorrow exhaled shakily, feeling foolish for her nerves. Julie stepped over the fence, but she took only a few steps into the cemetery before stopping again. She was wearing a red shirt so bright it stood out like a vibrant flower blossom against the orchard’s layers of green. Sorrow walked over to meet her.

  “Hey,” she said. She twisted her hat, pulled it over her hair. She had thought, after Cassie’s outburst at the festival, Julie would be avoiding her for sure. She didn’t know how to feel about being proved wrong.

  Julie took off her sunglasses and fiddled with them. “Hi. Miss P said you would be out here.”

  “You were looking for me?” Sorrow said, then immediately felt stupid. “I mean, yeah. You, uh, you found me.”

  A flicker of a smile passed over Julie’s face, gone so quickly Sorrow couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined it.

  “I wanted to give you this,” Julie said. She reached into the back pocket of her jeans; Sorrow watched the way her thin arm bent, how her collarbone jutted under her skin. “I went looking for it after we talked the other day. It took me a while to find it.”

  It was a photograph. Four-by-six on glossy paper, a bright scene overexposed by too much light, the colors washed out by the glare. Two women were sitting on a low brick wall. They were both wearing sunglasses, but Sorrow recognized them immediately. It was Verity and Hannah Abrams.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.”

  “I told you,” Julie said. When Sorrow looked up she expected a smile, but Julie’s expression was solemn. “Photographic proof.”

  Verity and Hannah were sitting so close their shoulders were pressed together, their knees touching, and they were smiling widely. The photographer had caught them laughing. Verity was wearing a dress with a flowing skirt and loose sleeves, and her long hair was braided, altogether looking like she had accidentally wandered into the frame from a Woodstock retrospective, but Hannah was pure early nineties preppy: pleated skirt, square-shouldered blazer, blond hair teased and feathered around her face.

  “Holy fashion crimes,” Sorrow said. “How old are they? They look really young.”

  “Mom didn’t tell me,” Julie admitted. “But she didn’t move here until after she was already engaged to Dad, so she was at least twenty-one or twenty-two. I think your mom’s a few years younger, isn’t she?”

  Sorrow didn’t know the difference in their ages, but it was true that in the photograph Verity looked younger. She looked like a teenager—fresh-faced, long-limbed, slouching. Even captured in a frozen frame there was an easy way about her that Sorrow had never seen before. At first glance Sorrow might have thought Verity looked like Patience, but nowhere in Sorrow’s memories did Patience have that relaxed posture, that careless laugh, bright and summery as though she hadn’t a care in the world, leaning into another girl in a way that was cozy, almost intimate.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  Sorrow turned the picture over, but there was nothing written on the back. Turned it again and frowned as she studied the space around the two laughing girls. She didn’t recognize the brick wall on which they were sitting, nor the neat bed of flowers behind them, the trees arched at the edge of the frame. On the right side of the photo there were the vertical lines of a wrought-iron fence and a brick pillar with a sign on it, but Sorrow couldn’t read the words, and she couldn’t see anything beyond it. It didn’t look like any place in Abrams Valley.

  “No idea,” Julie said. “Maybe somewhere in Boston. That’s where my mom’s family lives.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “When I found it, I got yelled at for going through things that didn’t belong to me,” Julie said. There was a tired resignation in her voice, as though she was disappointed she even had to explain. “I found it in my uncle Henry’s stuff—he was actually our great-uncle. Grandpa Eli’s brother. He was the photographer in the family. We still have boxes and boxes of his pictures.”

  The name Henry nudged something in Sorrow’s mind. “He’s the one who died in a car accident?”

  “I guess. It was a long time ago.”

  Verity must have known him, to have been so at ease before his camera, but the other night in the barn, when she’d been talking about Devotion’s fight with George Abrams, she had only mentioned Eli, said nothing about Henry.

  “This is so weird to see.” Sorrow held the photograph out to Julie.

  “You can keep it.”

  “Really?”

  “Maybe you can get your mom to tell you something about it.”

  Sorrow laughed a little and shook her head. “I really doubt that. Not after, what, twenty-some years of pretending it never happened.”

  “She might change her mind,” Julie said. “People get so used to avoiding some things they don’t realize it would be better if they just . . . stopped. That what they’re hiding from isn’t as bad as what they’re doing to themselves by hiding.”

  “Somehow I doubt she’ll find that convincing,” Sorrow said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “I wanted to make sure it didn’t get lost,” Julie said.

  Then she was turning, walking toward the fence again, and Sorrow scrambled for something to say, something to keep her from leaving. She hadn’t noticed how the quiet of the orchard was weighing on her until Julie had broken it, but now that she did she didn’t want to be left alone with the trees and the rows of dead ancestors. She didn’t want Julie to walk away and take with her any chance she had of bringing up Patience again, of tugging at that one thread between them. Julie hadn’t even said Patience’s name, but Sorrow could still feel it echoing around them.

  “Hey, Julie?” she called. “Do you think we could . . . I’d like to talk about Patience, sometime, again? If we could?”

  But instead of answering with a yes, a no, a maybe, Julie looked at Sorrow for a long time, so long Sorrow grew uncomfortable under her gaze.

  Julie said, “I heard about what Cassie said yesterday.”

  Sorrow’s stomach twisted. “I never—”

  “It’s okay. I just wanted you to know—I didn’t think you were bothering me. Not like that. Cassie’s just . . . confused, and angry about a lot of things. But I didn’t mind. I don’t want you to think you upset me.”
>
  “Oh.” Sorrow nodded uncertainly. “Okay. I mean, that’s good, that I wasn’t . . . yeah.”

  “I just wanted you to know that,” Julie said, and she was walking away again, her blond hair gleaming in the sun.

  Sorrow watched her until she disappeared into the trees. She looked down at the photograph in her hand, two faces familiar but so unlike the women she knew them to be, and tucked it carefully into her back pocket.

  21

  VERITY RETURNED IN time to make dinner, and Sorrow made an effort to act normal at the table, but a day apart had not lessened the tension between them. Grandma kept looking at each of them with a pinched frown. It was a relief when the dishes were washed and Sorrow could escape to her room.

  When Verity came up for bed a little while later, she tapped on Sorrow’s closed door and said, “Good night, sweetheart,” but by the time Sorrow decided to answer she was already gone.

  The night was hot and Sorrow’s bedroom was stuffy. She kicked her quilt down to the foot of the bed, tugged the sheet up. Her window was open, but the air was humid and heavy, without the slightest hint of a breeze. There was a moth on the dormer ceiling above her, unmoving, a flat black triangle against the white paint. Somewhere outside, a bird chattered angrily, then faded, and the night was quiet.

  After arguing with herself for a couple of minutes, Sorrow rolled out of bed and snapped on the light. The favors she’d found in the graveyard were sitting atop her dresser, right where her collection used to be. She touched her fingertip to the smooth spot between the tiger’s ears. She remembered clearly where she had found it the first time: in the branches of the black oak on the hill, ten or twelve feet above Silence Lovegood’s grave. Patience had been teaching her to climb the tree and trying to get her to guess which of the branches had held the rope where Silence was hanged. Sorrow had grown annoyed with her sister—the tree wasn’t telling her anything, it was only a tree—but her annoyance had changed to smugness when she’d found the tiger, and Patience had admired it with just a hint of jealousy in her expression, and she’d said, “Maybe it’s telling you something different.”