by Kali Wallace
Sorrow dug Julie’s photograph out of the top drawer. She had stashed it there earlier, in the same spot where, with the laughable solemnity of a child, she had always hidden her most secret favors. She couldn’t remember now, what those secret favors had been. When she walked through her old collection in her mind—the tiger, the watch, the beads and coins and lady’s fan—she felt as though she was still grasping into dark places, reaching gingerly into corners and cracks, not even knowing what she was looking for. She felt a space where something ought to be—small and solid, tucked in her pocket—but like every other gap in her memories, every time she focused on it, it was as though a thicket of branches closed over the past.
It wasn’t growing any less frustrating, the longer she was in Vermont, to have her own mind be so unyielding, even when she was only trying to remember things that mattered as little as trinkets she had found in the orchard.
She dropped onto the bed and examined the picture in the lamplight. How strange it was, to be looking into a corner of her mother’s past she hadn’t even known existed before. There were no lost memories here, no murky mental traps to find her way around, no flaw like the fog-filled canyon running through the center of her own mind. There were only secrets of the mundane variety. Two women who were once close enough to sit with their shoulders and knees touching, their heads thrown back in laughter, their hands drifting toward each other, no longer.
Sorrow set the photograph aside and turned off the light.
When she woke later she was shivering violently. It took a moment for her to register the cold, and in those few sleep-muddled seconds she saw blue lights flashing on the white dormer ceiling.
Her heart thumped in fear and she blinked rapidly, shook her head so fast her hair rasped against the pillow, and the glow was gone—a stray wisp of a memory. There was no light through the window but moonlight. Sorrow fumbled for the quilt at the foot of the bed, pulled it up to her chin and kicked her legs to generate heat. Only after a minute or two of groggy confusion did she realize she ought to close the window. She rolled up onto her knees to reach for it. Her breath was an opaque puff, and the orchard gleamed silver. The moon was sitting low over the trees, casting long, sharp shadows.
Sorrow’s hand stilled on the window frame.
She had left the window open every night since she’d arrived, because the upstairs of the house grew unbearably stuffy during the day. The nights were cool in the mountains, but never like this. It wasn’t supposed to be this cold. It was the end of June.
Sorrow slid the casement down and it dropped with a snap. She checked the time on her phone: half past midnight. The house was quiet. Completely, totally quiet. She sat in the center of her bed with her quilt wrapped around her, looking from the window to the door. She didn’t know what to do.
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold, and the bite on her skin, the ache in her ears, they sparked something in her memory. Blue lights through the window. She had forgotten before, what that looked like, how it felt to wake and see her bedroom cast in shifting colors all wrong, but she was remembering now, the cold and the light, those sensations long buried. There had been voices in the kitchen.
She pushed herself out of bed and winced over the cold floor. She opened her bedroom door, paused to listen. There were no voices. No visitors. She shook her head. She was not going to confuse past and present.
Down the hall Verity’s bedroom door was closed. Sorrow slid her feet along the floorboards and stopped in front of it. She remembered this too: standing here. Smaller, younger. Her nose cold and running from being outside. She was going to ask Mom for a story.
She had opened the door. Something small and white had crunched under her foot.
Sorrow reached for the doorknob, and the door wavered before her, like a pond in moonlight, disturbed. She stopped, fingers resting on the cool metal. Her chest hurt. She hadn’t noticed the panic rising, but there was a racing fear squeezing her lungs with every breath. She didn’t want to open the door. She had to. She didn’t want to. She turned the knob.
She squeezed her eyes shut. The cold didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything.
Witch weather.
It didn’t mean anything.
But the words were whispering through her mind, whispering and slithering, echoes of women overheard in town, men at Patience’s graveside, taunts and rumors, gossip milled for years and years. An early frost: witch weather. A late spring blizzard: witch weather. Years of hardship remembered generations later. Failed crops. Harvests eaten through with disease and rot. Unseasonal, unnatural, suspicious, wrong. That’s what happens when you anger the Lovegoods, and, boy, those women are easy to anger. That was what they said in town, half a joke.
But that had never been what the Lovegoods said among themselves. The orchard did not shudder in response to every sling or slight. The witch weather wasn’t revenge.
It was the orchard’s way of mourning.
Sorrow pushed the door open.
Verity’s room was lit by moonlight. Sorrow could just make out her shape on the bed. Curled on her side, only taking up half even though she slept alone. Her back was to Sorrow.
Sorrow took a step forward, then another. Her third landed on a board that creaked loudly and she froze, her heart thundering. Verity didn’t stir. Sorrow couldn’t tell if she was asleep. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t making any noise. She couldn’t tell, she couldn’t hear, she had to know—
Verity snorted softly and let out a low whuffling breath.
Relief hit Sorrow so hard she stepped back, right onto the creaking board again. She waited until she heard another breath, and another. The gentle inhale, the soft exhale. Verity was fine. She was only asleep.
Sorrow backed out of the room and shut the door quietly. Adrenaline and cold racked her entire body, made her hands shake and her teeth chatter. She picked her way down the stairs and into the kitchen. She filled the kettle and set it to boil on the stove. As it warmed she paced anxiously around the kitchen, tried to decide if she wanted to start a fire or not. She didn’t think she would be getting back to sleep anytime soon, even if she could find a way to get warm. By the time the water was boiling and her tea was steeping, Sorrow was so annoyed at her own indecision she stalked over to the woodstove just to have something to do besides fret.
She started piling kindling and balled-up newspapers into the woodstove, but when she reached for the long lighter she stopped. She might be doing it wrong. It was all too easy to imagine smoke billowing out of the stove as the paper crumpled to ash. So easy, in fact, that as soon as the idea came into her mind she couldn’t shake it. She would do it wrong, she would make a mistake, the fire would rage out of control, it would engulf the kitchen, chew away everything bright and new. It had never been her chore anyway, starting the fires, that had always been Grandma’s—
Grandma. Sorrow jerked away from the stove so quickly she slammed her knee into the iron door. “Fuck,” she whispered. She rubbed at the sore spot as she scrambled to her feet and limped down the hall to Grandma’s room. She paused only a second before opening the door.
The curtains were drawn tight, blocking out the moonlight, and Sorrow had to blink for a few moments to let her eyes adjust. The room smelled of flowers and earth and laundry detergent. It was quiet. Grandma was a featureless shape on the bed. It was so incredibly quiet. Sorrow’s heart, already racing, stuttered with anxiety. She needed to see. She needed to be sure. She reached for the light, stopped with her fingers on the switch.
A loud snore rumbled from beneath the blankets.
Heart still thumping wildly, Sorrow shut Grandma’s door and returned to the kitchen. She picked up her tea, but the first sip was too bitter, almost metallic, and she set the mug down. She started toward the woodstove, changed her mind, turned on her heel. Verity was fine. Grandma was fine. She was fine. All three of them were alive and well. She didn’t know where this discomfort and restlessness was coming from. She felt as
though she had woken in ill-fitting skin, and with every minute the sense of wrongness grew stronger. Verity was fine. Grandma was fine. She was fine. It was so cold.
Sorrow pulled the back door open. Everything was silver in the moonlight. She couldn’t tell if there was frost on the garden. Grandma would be crushed if her garden was wrecked by frost in the middle of summer. Sorrow grabbed a sweater Verity had left draped over a kitchen chair, jammed her feet into her sneakers, and darted outside.
Her breath was a bright puff of mist. Everything was the wrong color, silver and gray and black. Grandma’s garden looked like it had been carved from marble.
She stepped down from the porch and crossed the lawn. Her shadow was long and wavering, and the grass was damp with cold dew—not crackling with frost. She touched the top leaves of one beanstalk, holding the baggy sweater against her chest as she leaned forward. She half expected the leaf to snap when she brushed her finger against it, but it gave, still perfectly supple. She touched others with the same trembling fear. None of them were frozen and stiff. It wasn’t cold enough to frost. Not yet.
Sorrow straightened and looked around, casting her gaze over the barn and the chicken coop and the dark edge of the orchard tipped with silver. She ought to check the apple trees too.
She twitched her knees, but she couldn’t bring herself to take a step. Blades of grass tickled her ankles. The orchard at night had never frightened her when she was a child; she wasn’t going to let it frighten her now. But it was cold, and she would rather be back inside, drinking her tea, calming down, going back to bed.
A soft breeze rose. The air was bitingly cold; it laced through the knit of her sweater and sent a shiver through her entire body. Leaves turned in the garden, rustling quietly, and more distant, more softly, the trees in the orchard did the same.
The wind stilled, and it was quiet.
There were no crickets. She didn’t hear any night birds or owls. No crackle of small nocturnal creatures scurrying along the ground. She couldn’t hear the peep of the frogs that sang in the soggy field below the house.
The orchard was absolutely, achingly silent.
The stillness lasted seconds, minutes. The only way Sorrow could measure the passage of time was in the racing of her own pulse.
Witch weather. She moved her lips as the wind rose again. She heard it before she felt it, chasing through the leaves in the orchard like an approaching rainstorm. The touch of cold on her skin, on her bare legs, through the sweater, that came after. It stung her ears and made her eyes water and carried with it, faintly, the scent of smoke.
Sorrow spun around, poised to run, fear stinging like ice all over her skin. There was a fire nearby.
The rational corner of her mind was thinking: It was a cold night. It was a fireplace or woodstove. She was in the mountains, surrounded by farms. It didn’t mean anything. It could be anywhere, drifting on that unsteady wind. Next door or a mile away.
She tilted her head and breathed in.
The wind was from the north.
To the north lay the cider house.
Sorrow was striding across the lawn before she made a decision. There was something wrong in the orchard. She could feel it in her chest with every painful heartbeat, in her lungs with every shallow breath, in her skin and in her bones, the echo of a deep old ache rising from the soil and the roots and the ancient mountains. She had known from the moment she woke up.
When she reached the old dirt road around the field, she broke into a run, hit the edge of the orchard, and flashed from moonlight to shadows. She ran north, tracking the smoke and the wind, and slowed to a walk only when she rounded the hill and the road tilted down toward the meadow between the Lovegood and Abrams farms.
The wind was soft and teasing, tugging at her hair, chilling her sweat-damp skin. The scent of smoke was stronger now. She couldn’t see if there was a tendril rising from the chimney of the Abrams house across the valley. All she could see was the front porch light, a glint on the other side of the moonlit field, so bright that even at this distance it stung her eyes, and in the space between wincing and looking away she had a disorienting memory of looking across this same valley, seeing light shining from several windows of the Abrams house, smelling smoke in the air.
She pressed her fingers into the stitch in her side and sucked in ragged, gasping breaths that tasted of iron, and she started down the hill.
When the cider house came into view, she stopped.
In an orchard awash in silver moonlight, the cider house was a black hole, a gap in the night, but there was a weak, wavering light inside. There was a fire in the cider house.
Sorrow charged down the hill, heedless of the uneven ground. Branches snagged her sweater and grass whipped her bare legs, and her feet pounded so hard she felt every step in her teeth. She stumbled twice, fell the second time, but she was scrambling to her feet before the sting of pain on her palms and knees registered.
She stopped at the edge of the meadow. Warm yellow light danced nimbly over the interior of the ruin, casting the charred black boards with a golden sheen. Smoke rose through the shattered roof—the thick, fragrant kind that came from burning damp wood. Sorrow took a few faltering steps forward. She didn’t know who was in there. She didn’t know how bad it was. She didn’t have any water; she couldn’t put it out herself.
She should go back to the house and call 911. She needed a closer look. She needed to see if somebody was inside. The sweat on her skin grew clammy in the cold. She began to shiver. She had to do something.
She crept through the meadow, and as she drew nearer she saw the light was coming from the hole in the floor. The fire was in the cellar.
Sorrow stepped over the bottom of the broken wall and tested the floorboards. They didn’t bend, didn’t give, so she stepped gingerly inside and slid toward the hole. A board creaked beneath her, loud as a shot, and she stopped. The cellar was about ten feet deep, and there was no ladder. She had no way to get down.
She took several breaths before dropping to her knees. She covered the last few feet to the hole at a crawl.
“Hey.” She stretched her neck out to look in the cellar. She heard the fire crackling softly. Gentle heat caressed her face. “Hello? Is somebody down there?”
The rising smoke stung her eyes; she wiped the tears away and leaned out farther. The fire was small and contained within a ring of charred debris.
“Hey!” Sorrow said, louder. She dipped her head, trying to see all corners of the cellar. “Hey, if you’re down—”
There was somebody right below her. She jerked back in alarm.
Blue jeans, red shirt.
Shoes that didn’t touch the ground.
“Hey, are you—”
She had to be wrong. She needed to be wrong.
She looked over the edge again.
Shoes that didn’t touch the ground, blue jeans, red shirt. A curtain of blond hair obscuring half of a mottled but familiar face.
It was Julie Abrams. There was a rope around her neck, the other end knotted to a beam, and a toppled stack of apple bushels beneath her. The flickering firelight cast a warm flush over her skin, but she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t swinging or twisting. She wasn’t struggling or choking or gasping. She was dead.
22
EIGHT YEARS AGO
THE RAIN BEGAN in the afternoon and continued into the evening, and the lights flickered off after supper. Patience lit lavender candles and set one in every room, filling the house with small circles of light. Sorrow usually liked the house in candlelight, the shy dancing shadows on the walls, but that night she tensed with every lash of rain and gust of wind.
The third or fourth time she jumped and looked out the window in alarm, Patience noticed and laughed. “What’s got you so jittery?”
“Nothing,” Sorrow mumbled. She didn’t dare admit she was afraid the candles would topple and set the whole house on fire, that she couldn’t stop thinking about that burned corner of the Abra
ms barn and how wrong it had looked, that big chunk of building gone, as though a massive beast had taken a bite and left a black wound behind.
Mom had gone up to bed shortly after dinner, and a little while ago Grandma had set her pen aside and closed her leather journal before going to her own room. It was only Patience and Sorrow now. Patience had been forcefully cheerful all afternoon, ever since they had returned from the orchard, acting like nothing had happened. She hadn’t even glared or pinched Sorrow to remind her not to say anything. Sorrow, true to her word, hadn’t mentioned Julie when Mom asked if they’d had a nice walk.
“It’s only a storm,” Patience said.
“I know,” Sorrow said, but another gust of wind rocked the house and she tensed, every inch of her body aching with worry. She shoved her chair back and stood. “I’m going to bed.”
Patience turned a page in her book. “Take a candle up with you, but make sure you blow it out before you fall asleep.”
“I know,” Sorrow said. “I’m not a baby.”
“Good night, baby,” Patience said.
Sorrow stuck her tongue out and stomped up the stairs. She dutifully brushed her teeth and used the toilet and changed into her pajamas, and when she was alone in her room, with the door closed and the window rattling ominously, she blew out her candle. She had placed the eyeglasses from the cemetery on her dresser with the rest of her collection, propped up on the back of the small wooden tiger. She could see them even now, in the dark, as a pale circle where the one cracked lens reflected the weak light from outside.
A little while later, through the angry splutter of the storm, she heard footsteps on the stairs: that was Patience coming up for bed. Even later she thought she heard a door open, and footsteps in the hall again, but quieter, but she only had time to wonder if it was Mom or Patience before she fell asleep.
It was still dark when Sorrow woke, but her room was bright with light dancing over the ceiling. She frowned up at the shifting pattern of blue and white. She didn’t want to get out of bed. She had thought the weather was turning and spring was on its way, but outside the cocoon of her blankets her bedroom was cold, so cold her nose was running and her ears ached. She could see the bright lights even when she squeezed her eyes shut, so she pushed herself up onto her knees to look outside. There was a layer of frost over the inside of the window. She swiped a small circle clear.
