by Kali Wallace
There was a police car parked in front of the house. The rain had turned to snow while she slept, and fat flakes drifted in lazy whirls. A man was standing beside the car, speaking into a radio. There was a fine dusting of snow on his broad-rimmed hat.
Sorrow scrambled out of bed and ran down the stairs. Mom and Grandma were in the kitchen with Sheriff Moskowitz.
“Hello, Sorrow,” the sheriff said. He offered a quick smile, but his blue eyes were solemn. “Did we wake you with all our stomping around?”
Mom was standing by the back door, dressed in her coat and boots; she was holding her hat and gloves. “Go back to bed,” she said, her voice sharp with impatience.
“What’s wrong?” Sorrow asked. “Where are you going?”
“There’s another fire,” Mom said. “It’s the cider house.”
Sorrow gaped at her. “Our cider house?”
“One of the Abrams girls saw it from her window,” the sheriff explained. “The firemen are down there now. They’ll get it under control.”
“I need to go out there,” Mom said.
“I’ll take you out once we’re sure it’s safe. One fire in the area could be an accident, but two makes me think somebody might be doing it on purpose.” Sheriff Moskowitz looked first at Mom, then at Grandma. “Are you sure you haven’t seen any strangers around lately? Kids from town looking to make some mischief?”
“No,” Mom said. “We haven’t seen anyone, and that’s not going to change no matter how many times you ask. I’m not going to wait—”
“Miss P?” the sheriff said to Grandma. “Seen anybody around?”
Grandma shook her head, and Sorrow braced herself, tense from head to toe. She wanted to run away to her room but it was too late. The sheriff was already turning to her. She shrank under his gaze.
“And you?” he said. “Did you see any strangers in the orchard today?”
She hesitated before shaking her head exactly like Grandma. Julie wasn’t a stranger. She was Patience’s friend, but that was a secret, and Sorrow wouldn’t reveal her sister’s secrets.
“All right. Is Patience here? She might have seen something.”
Mom reached out and pulled the back door open; cold air flowed into the kitchen. “It’s the middle of the night. She’s asleep, like Sorrow should be, and I’m not going to wait here for you to decide when I get to see what’s happening on my own land.”
“I’d like to have a word with Patience first,” the sheriff said.
Mom started to say something, but Grandma moved her hand, a quick tap of fingers on the tabletop. Mom sighed and shut the door. “Sorrow, go wake Patience and ask her to come down.”
Sorrow was only two treads up the steps when the front door opened and another police officer came in. He stomped his boots on the doormat and took off his hat. He was a younger deputy; his cheeks were pink with cold and there were snowflakes melting on his shoulders. He glanced at Sorrow as he passed. He held a radio in his hand.
“Geoff,” he began.
The sheriff held up his hand. “Go ahead, Sorrow. Get your sister for us.”
Sorrow ran up the stairs, but she stopped on the top step to listen.
“They think there was somebody trapped inside,” the deputy said.
An awful silence fell over the kitchen.
“What?” Mom said, as sharp as the sound of wood cracking.
At the same moment the sheriff said, “Are they sure?”
“In the cellar. They couldn’t tell until—”
“That’s impossible.” Mom’s voice. “Who would be in our cider house? Nobody goes in there.”
“M-ma’am,” the deputy stammered. “The firemen said—”
“We’re not going to jump to conclusions,” said the sheriff. “We’ll need some more help, so start waking people up. But keep your mouth shut until we know more, do you understand?”
A faint “Yes, sir” from the deputy. The narrow dark hallway felt like a box around Sorrow, pressing from all sides, and her lungs hurt so much it was hard to breathe.
“There’s got to be a mistake,” Mom said. “Nobody would be—this isn’t—it has to be a mistake.”
“Let’s not panic until we have all the information,” Sheriff Moskowitz said.
Sorrow raced down the hall to knock on Patience’s door. Softly at first, then more insistent.
“Patience?”
There was no answer.
“Patience? You have to wake up. The police are here.”
Still no answer. She pushed the door open.
“Patience, Mom said you have to . . .”
She felt the yawning hollowness of the room as she fumbled for the light switch.
The covers were mussed up, the pillow dented, but Patience’s bed was empty. Sorrow leaned into the room, looked in each corner. The room was small, like Sorrow’s, with no closet. There wasn’t anywhere to hide.
“Patience?”
She checked the bathroom, Mom’s room, even her own room, still filled with eerie blue light. She looked in Patience’s room again, even peeked under the bed. There was no sign of Patience anywhere. A nervous flutter beat like butterfly wings at the back of Sorrow’s throat.
She ran down the steps. “She’s not here!”
There was a long silence. The deputy’s mouth was hanging open.
“That’s not—” Mom began, but she stopped. “She hasn’t gone anywhere. I would have heard. I would have . . .” Mom pushed by Sorrow to get to the stairs, ran up with heavy, echoing footsteps. “Patience! Patience, come down here!” She sounded both too loud and too far away. Sorrow flinched when Mom’s boots hit the steps again and she returned to the kitchen. “I don’t know where she went. She must be—”
“Ma’am,” said the deputy. His radio crackled with incomprehensible noise.
“No,” said Mom. She shook her head. “No. I’ll look in the barn. She’s probably—she keeps books there. She’s, she’s . . . she’s gone out.”
“Mom?” Sorrow’s voice wobbled. “Mom, where’s Patience?”
“Verity,” the sheriff said.
Mom only shook her head and whispered no again.
“Verity.” The sheriff’s voice was low. “We don’t know—”
Mom lunged for the back door and yanked it open. In a flash she was outside. The sheriff ran after her.
The deputy gave Grandma an apologetic look. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll be—we have to—”
Then he was gone too.
Sorrow wanted to follow, but Grandma caught her around the shoulders before she took one step.
“Let me go!” Sorrow said, twisting and tugging. “I want to go!”
Grandma’s hold was too strong. She shut the door firmly, pulled Sorrow into her lap, and held her tight. Sorrow was too big to sit in her grandmother’s lap, too big to be coddled and cuddled like a baby. But she gave up struggling and snuggled her face into Grandma’s shoulder.
“Grandma? Where’s Patience? Where’s Mom going?”
They sat there together, Grandma silent and Sorrow sniffling, in the anxious quiet of the farmhouse, until the sheriff’s deputy returned with the news.
The firemen had found a body in the cider house. It was Patience.
23
JUSTICE LOVEGOOD
1856–1939
WHEN JUSTICE WOKE before dawn and felt the cold in the air, deeper and crueler than it had been the day before, she considered not getting out of bed. The old house, the old blankets, her tired old bones, they were no protection against a cold so deep, and the long years of her life stretching behind her no shield against what it meant.
It was too cold, too early. The fruit had only just ripened on the trees, and already it was frozen. There would be no harvest this year. It was only the first of September, but winter was here to stay.
The year was 1919, and in the span of half a decade Justice’s family had shrunk from a noisy, boisterous crowd of daughters and sons and husbands and wive
s to a small, quiet knot, barely enough to fill the house anymore. The most recent to pass had been her niece Charity, gone in her sleep a few days ago, now buried beneath the first early frost.
With Charity gone they were three: Justice, her daughter, her granddaughter.
Today the morning was even colder.
Justice dressed in the half-light of a gray dawn, pulled on an overcoat patched at the elbows, and stepped outside. There was a line of footsteps already scraped through the frost, and when she saw it despair washed over her again, thicker and blacker now, a fog as heavy and dark as a midwinter storm. She had not heard her daughter Faith rise from her bed in the night. She had not heard her walk down the creaking stairs and through the door that squeaked on its hinges. If she hadn’t been so tired, her back so sore from wielding a shovel the day before, she might have heard. They had buried Charity yesterday, although she had been slipping away for much longer, ever since three telegrams had arrived, one cruel blow after another. All three of her sons, barely old enough to be called men but old enough to go to war, were gone.
Justice was an old woman, and she felt old in every limb, every joint, but until that summer she had not thought herself old enough to see her grandsons die. They were only boys. Boys with uniforms and guns, but still children in her heart. Neither had she thought herself old enough to hold Charity while she wept, to watch her grow pale and silent as summer turned toward fall, to see the moment her spirit failed, to count the days until her last breath.
It seemed so very unfair that the longer she lived, the more grief clung to her like long evening shadows, a weight no new dawn could chase away.
She followed Faith’s path, although she knew where it led and what she would find at the end. She plucked apples as she walked and found every fruit on every tree, and all those fallen to the ground, frozen solid, bitter pale flesh turned hard as stone. She flung the first few into the orchard with furious force, but dropped the last one, tired, feeling foolish for her outburst, impotent in her anger.
They had gathered only three bushels before Charity died and the first frost came.
Three bushels. Justice walked through the orchard in old shoes worn thin at the soles, and in her mind she counted: jars in the root cellar, strips of meat drying in the shed, goats in the pen, firewood stacked beside the barn, what she could ask of neighbors and what would be offered, coins in the metal tin on the shelf, and three bitter bushels. It did not add up to much.
The ground dipped into the hollow, the cold deepened, and the cemetery grove was just ahead.
Justice and her twin, Righteous, had given birth within days of each other, and they had mixed up their babies long ago, laying them side by side in the same crib one night. It was said a mother ought to know if the child suckling at her breast was her own and not her sister’s, but they hadn’t, and they had laughed about it. Their grandfather, old and forgetful by then but still doting on his great-granddaughters with a white-whiskered smile, had fashioned tiny bracelets for each girl, a single glass bead on a leather tie. Red for Charity, blue for Faith, and a laughing hope the right baby had got the right bead. The girls had grown up as though they were a second set of twins, sisters rather than cousins, and they had married a pair of brothers and raised their own children as siblings—Charity’s three boys, all killed near the German border before Armistice, and Faith’s daughter Joyful, the one who remained, once spoiled as a beloved little sister, now an only child, prone to singing and talking too loud to fill the silence her brothers had left behind.
When Righteous had died, Justice had thought she could not survive without her twin, her other half. She had been killed in what all claimed was a hunting accident, never mind that it had happened in broad daylight, on a clear day, not half a mile from the border of the Abrams farm.
But somehow, achingly, tiredly, as though her bones were hollowing out with every passing year, Justice had endured. She had lived when her sister could not. She had their daughters to care for, and an orchard to protect.
Faith had not been able to do the same. She lay now on her sister’s grave, atop the mound of soil not yet settled. She was wearing only her nightdress, and her feet were bare. Her hair was as dark as polished wood, her skin the same pale blue as the ice-cracked dawn sky.
Justice stood beside the grave for a long, long moment, looking down at both of her girls. One curled like a child on the ground above the grave, the other buried below, and she thought: If a single bird dares loose a song, I will shatter. If a single breath of wind disturbs the crackling dry leaves, I will begin to scream and I shall never stop. The silence was her armor, its reaching tendrils snaking through her ribs to turn her tired old heart from muscle to stone. If it broke, she would too, and the pieces would be too scattered to ever come together again.
She knelt beside her girls, knees cracking, and brushed the frost from Faith’s skin. The flesh was still soft, still pliable. Faith’s eyes were open, her face angled upward, as though she were gazing at the ash tree she had, only yesterday, planted for her sister. She looked older in death, waxy and hollow.
Justice’s knees ached and the sting of frost crept through her old dress and overcoat. She could stay, if her body did not find the strength to rise. The blood could grow sluggish in her veins. Her breath could crystallize. The ground was frozen. They would not be able to bury Faith until spring, and the orchard would mourn. The winter would be long and bitter. How many deaths, how much grief would it take to bring about a winter to last forever? How cold could the orchard become before tears turned to ice, carving tracks down cheeks?
She could stay with her girls.
But in the house her granddaughter, Joyful, would be rising to set a fire in the stove and heat yesterday’s porridge, and she would be singing, singing like the first brave robin to emerge after a snowstorm, singing though her heart was broken, and Justice could not make her eat breakfast alone.
Justice wiped the tears from her cheeks—almost scalding on her fingers—and rose.
Three bushels of apples would last longer with only two mouths to feed.
24
SORROW WOKE GROGGY and disoriented. Her muscles were sore, and when she bent her legs the sheet rubbed over the raw skin on her knees. She felt the same sting on her palms when she touched the scrapes. Her head was pounding, but she remembered running, and falling, and night and cold and—
Her chest squeezed so tightly she couldn’t breathe. She kicked free of her blankets and sat up, dropped her feet to the floor and bent over her knees. The room pitched and swam. She shut her eyes until the dizziness passed.
Julie. She had forgotten.
The cold. The eerie quiet. The smoke in the air, the fire in the cider house.
And Julie, hanging in the cellar, dead.
The last of Sorrow’s sleep-muddled confusion fled, and she remembered everything. She had spent too many minutes frozen in panic and indecision. Shouting Julie’s name. Trying to reach her from above, trying to find a way down into the cellar. There was no ladder, nothing to climb, no way except jumping, and if she did that, she couldn’t get back out. Finally Sorrow had run back to the house as fast as she could, tears streaming down her face and sobs shuddering through her. She had been dialing 911 when Grandma came out of her bedroom—Sorrow had made enough noise to wake her—and it was Grandma who fetched Verity while Sorrow shakily, haltingly, told the dispatcher what she had found.
Julie, who had been alive and smiling only hours before, her hand warm as she passed the photograph to Sorrow, her eyes the color of the sky.
You made her cry, Cassie had said, but Sorrow hadn’t seen it. Not in the café, not in the cemetery. Not once in the brief time they spent together had she looked at Julie and seen misery. She should have seen. She should have known.
Sorrow shoved the window casement open and breathed in the crisp morning air until the sudden surge of nausea subsided. It wasn’t as cold as it had been the night before, but a chill lingered in the a
ir, and during the night, clouds had gathered over the valley. They must have rolled in after she returned to the house. She remembered glinting stars above the dark orchard, clean and bright in the cold. She sucked in another breath—it was just cold enough to sting her throat and send a shiver over her skin—and shut the window again.
Feeling shivery and off balance, as though the earth had tilted while she slept, Sorrow rose and dressed. She had the absurd, embarrassing thought that she was putting on the wrong clothes and she ought to choose more carefully. What were you supposed to wear the day after you found somebody dead? The sheriff had come to the house last night, after Sorrow made the call, but she was likely to return today. Sorrow would have to talk to her again. She would have to talk to Verity. She wanted to go back to bed, pull the curtain over the window and a blanket over her head, keep her door closed and the unseasonal cold shut firmly outside.
Sorrow rubbed her eyes again, took a deep breath, and went downstairs. The kitchen was empty; there was a used bowl and mug in the sink. Through the screen door she saw her grandmother walking the perimeter of the garden. Grandma stopped every few steps to examine the plants, bean stalks, tomatoes, pumpkins, squash. It didn’t look like there was any frost over the garden and lawn, but there was a damp sheen to everything the sun had touched.
Cold at the end of June. Witch weather. Sorrow’s heart ached.
Sorrow should go out to join her. Offer to help, ask if there was anything she could do. But she couldn’t figure out what her first words should be—what were you supposed to say on a morning like this? She couldn’t even decide if she wanted to eat breakfast. Make tea. Do her chores. Call her parents in Florida. Call Dr. Silva. Walk out to the orchard to see if the police were still there. Walk down the driveway and down the road until the air warmed and the clouds cleared. Keep walking and never come back. Do something. Do something.
