by Kali Wallace
Sorrow stopped looking for spring leaves and began looking for favors instead. In the pocket of her skirt, she was carrying the eyeglasses she had found in the cemetery, as she had carried them every day since Patience had died. Sometimes she took them from her pocket and put them on—carefully, as Patience had shown her—and squinted at a world that was half clear, half fractured, blurred almost beyond recognition.
She didn’t like that they were the last favor she would ever find while walking through the orchard with Patience. It gave her a cold, squirmy feeling in her stomach to remember how she had told Patience she didn’t like them. She could never take that back now.
There should have been more favors by now. Even if the weather wasn’t warming like it should, even if the trees weren’t budding, there should have been something. If she found a pretty seashell or polished stone, something bright and colorful, she could bring it to Mom and cheer her up. But the orchard didn’t offer so much as a single Indian Head penny.
What she found instead, nestled at the base of an apple tree, were the corpses of two little birds.
Sorrow stared down at them for a long time, a curious hollow ache growing inside her.
They were tiny, no more than a few days hatched. Scattered around them were the remains of frail blue eggshells.
She lived on a farm, in the woods; she had seen dead things before. Last winter during a bad snowstorm a buck with broad antlers had been caught on the fence between the orchard and the nature preserve. Mom hadn’t found it until it was already dead and the meat spoiling. For weeks every eastward turn of the wind had carried a foul, septic stench. Birds had picked at the corpse until it had shrunk down to a saggy sack of fur and bones.
No predator or accident had killed these chicks, only the cold. They had hatched expecting springtime warmth, found bitter clinging winter instead, and died before they had a chance to live.
A burst of song drew Sorrow’s attention upward. There was a nest huddled in the tree, and hopping along the branch beside it was the mother bluebird. She jumped back and forth, back and forth, her wings fluttering anxiously, chirping out a question to anybody who could hear. Each time she reached her nest she looked into it again, as though she might find it not empty that time.
Sorrow shoved a pile of leaf debris over the chicks and hoped the mother bird wouldn’t find them.
She walked north, toward the cider house, an uncomfortable tickle of guilt making her glance over her shoulder every few steps. She wasn’t allowed to go near the ruined building, but she didn’t want to get too close anyway. She only wanted to see, even though she hated the way it looked, so burned and broken. She stopped halfway down the hill. Slid to the ground with her back to an apple tree and hugged her knees to her chest.
The cider house was a smudge of black through the naked trees, a hole where light and color ought to be. Half the roof was caved in, but the building hadn’t collapsed. The meadow was brown and yellow, free of snow but still winter-dormant, and the grass all around had been churned up by fire trucks and police cars. The ambulance had taken Patience away after the firemen put the fire out.
They had known it was her at first by the dress she wore and the barrettes in her hair, later by tests they did in a laboratory.
Sheriff Moskowitz had explained that to Mom and Grandma when Sorrow wasn’t supposed to be listening. He asked if Patience had a boyfriend. He asked if they had seen Patience talking to strangers. He asked if she had ever sneaked out or lied about where she was going. He asked if they had any idea what she would have been doing out in the orchard that night. To every question, Grandma shook her head silently and Mom said, “No, nothing, no,” repeating herself until the words became meaningless sounds.
Nobody asked Sorrow anything. She expected it every day, for the sheriff to return to the house and demand to speak with her, for him to sit her down and look at her with his sad eyes and say that he knew she was lying, he knew everything, and it was time for her to tell him. And when he did, the secrets Sorrow had been holding inside would crack open like a hornet’s nest.
But a week passed, then another, and the sheriff did not ask. He said hello to her when he came to the house, ruffled her hair fondly, but he never looked her in the eye and said he knew she was hiding something.
She watched the Abrams house for a long time. Their car was parked outside, but Sorrow didn’t see anybody. Mrs. Roche had said they would soon be leaving to stay with Mrs. Abrams’s family in Boston, because Julie was so upset from seeing the fire she had been crying and crying for days. The other Mr. Abrams and his family were going to watch the house while they were gone. A blue tarp fluttered over the burned corner of the barn, lifting and falling with every gust of wind like a creature breathing. The Abrams fields were brown near the fence, but farther away their land was greening as the weather warmed. Bushes along the driveway erupted with small white flowers. A pair of jays chased each other across the meadow, dipping and diving, and swept into the woods.
The sight made Sorrow’s insides ache. She didn’t want to look at it anymore, but she didn’t want to go back to the house either, where everything was cold and quiet and wrong. She wanted to run into the mountains and hide and never come back, the way Grace Lovegood had when her mother had killed her sisters and brothers. Run away to crawl into a fox’s burrow, alone and scared until she heard the shouts of townspeople looking for her. Then she must have crawled out of her hiding place and—
Sorrow didn’t know where she went next. She had never heard the rest of the story. She didn’t know who had taken care of Grace after her mother was hanged, if there had been anybody at all.
She could ask Mom. Sorrow stood slowly and brushed dried leaves from her skirt. When she got back to the house, she could ask Mom to tell her the rest of the story. She hadn’t asked for a story since before the fire, but Mom wouldn’t refuse, no matter how sad and tired she was. She never refused a story. Sorrow would bring her a cup of tea sweetened with honey and climb into bed next to her, and Mom would sit up with the pillow bunched behind her, her voice growing less hoarse and less distant the more she talked, and when she was finished they would go downstairs together to help Grandma make chicken and biscuits for dinner.
Emboldened by her decision, Sorrow ran back to the house. By the time she reached the fallow field, she was breathless with excitement. She knew how to help Mom now. She skipped along the dirt road and up the hill. The day felt a little warmer than it had before, the sun a bit stronger. She knew this was the right thing to do.
Grandma was sitting on the back porch with her quilting frame. The needle was still stuck in the fabric, untouched.
“I’m going to ask Mom for a story,” Sorrow said.
She yanked the screen door open, and Grandma reached out, her knobby fingers beckoning.
“Grandma?”
Grandma gestured her closer. She pulled Sorrow into a hug and pressed a kiss to the side of her head.
Sorrow squirmed away. “I’m going to get her to come down for dinner. You’ll see. I promise.”
She was halfway up the steps before she remembered she wanted to make tea, so she had to go back down, set the water to boiling, and find Mom’s favorite mug, the one she had bought from a potter named Eulalie at the farmers’ market. Patience had always called it the Eulalie Mug, but Sorrow didn’t know if it was okay to call it that anymore. She didn’t know if it would make Mom smile or cry. She decided she wouldn’t call it anything, not until Mom did first.
When the tea was finally ready, she carried it upstairs, wincing when a few hot drops sloshed over the side. She opened the bedroom door with her free hand.
“Mom?”
Mom’s room was dark and stuffy; she must have closed the window and drawn the curtains after Sorrow left. In the faint light from the hallway she could barely make out Mom’s shape in the bed.
“Mom, I brought you tea. With honey.”
Sorrow’s boot crunched on something on the floor.
She looked down.
It was a small pill, now ground into white powder. There was another one a couple of steps ahead. A small orange bottle lay on the floor beside the bed. Sorrow set the tea on Mom’s bedside table and picked up the bottle.
“Mom, you dropped your medicine.” She shook the bottle; there was only one pill left inside. “Mom?”
Sorrow reached for her shoulder to shake her awake. Mom groaned softly but didn’t open her eyes.
“Mom? Come on, Mom, wake up.”
Sorrow’s heart began to beat quickly. Her hands were shaking. There was a line of spit trailing from Mom’s mouth, glistening and wet on her jaw.
“Mom? Please wake up. Mom?”
Sorrow shook her again. Mom didn’t even groan this time.
“Grandma!” Sorrow ran into the hallway and shouted from the top of the stairs. “Grandma, Mom won’t wake up! Grandma!”
Downstairs the screen door opened, then snapped shut, and Grandma was hurrying up the stairs. She pushed past Sorrow and perched on the edge of Mom’s bed. Grandma shook her shoulders, patted her cheeks gently.
“I tried that.” Sorrow’s eyes were hot with tears and it was hard to breathe. “I tried that already!”
Grandma picked up the pill bottle and shook it, just as Sorrow had done.
“It was on the floor,” Sorrow said.
Grandma dropped the bottle onto the bed and grabbed the pen and notebook she wore around her neck. She scribbled some words and shoved the page at Sorrow.
Go to Abrams. Tell them to call ambulance.
Sorrow stared at the words on the page. “The Abramses? But—”
Grandma shook the page. When Sorrow still didn’t move, she stuffed the note into Sorrow’s hand and turned her to the door with a shooing motion: Go.
Sorrow ran. Down the steps and out of the house, around the yard to the driveway, and she sprinted through the orchard so fast she felt every jolting step in her bones and her teeth. She knew Mom would hate that she was going to the Abramses, hate that she was inviting them into family business, but she didn’t stop, didn’t even pause, and in a flash she was stumbling down the hill to the cider house meadow. She cut herself twice ducking through the barbed wire fence, and blood blossomed on her hand and wrist as she sprinted through the field on the other side.
Then she was pounding on their door, and Mr. Abrams was answering. His eyes went wide with surprise and his voice was booming and scary, but Sorrow could barely understand the words. He guided her inside, bewilderment etched all over his face. Sorrow had never been in the Abrams house before. Mr. Abrams seemed tall and alien and terrible, looking down at her, waiting for her to explain herself. Sorrow sucked in several breaths before she remembered Grandma’s note. She handed the crumpled paper to Mr. Abrams, and her legs gave way as he read it over. He asked her twice what was going on, but she couldn’t answer. He shouted for Mrs. Abrams and ran to the phone. Sorrow thought, as she wheezed through the taste of iron at the back of her throat, that she needed to tell them Mom was sick, needed to tell them that she had never seen Mom so still and so limp. Mom would hate it. She would hate it more than she hated anything, that Sorrow was here asking the Abramses for help, but Sorrow didn’t care. She didn’t care if Mom hated her forever and ever as long as they helped. She needed to make them understand. She had never seen Grandma so scared.
29
PRIDE LOVEGOOD
1914–1980
WHERE ONCE THERE had been a narrow muddy track, carved up by two hundred years of cart wheels, there was now a ribbon of level, graded dirt wide enough for two vehicles to pass. Every step Pride took stirred up a cloud of dust around her ankles. The day was warm, summer’s last glimmering, but autumn had begun to turn the mountains gold and red.
The seven miles between town and the Lovegood orchard had seemed a tiny distance when Pride was a child, when her feet had been so swift there was nobody who could beat her in a footrace, not even boys who were three or four years her senior and propelled by stubborn arrogance. It felt a lot longer now. She ought to have hitched a ride from where the Greyhound dropped her off in town, but nobody recognized her anymore, and every face she’d seen had belonged to a stranger.
It was hard to remember their names now, those sulking boys with dust on their faces. It didn’t matter. She was sixty-six years old, and there was cancer in her brain. She had told the doctor, in his grim little office lined with posters of human bodies stripped down to component systems, that she would like to spend her last days in the mountains rather than a sterile hospital room. Her doctor had smiled a sad smile, too ancient for his barely-six-years-out-of-medical-school face, and he had said, “Go home. Go while you still can.”
So here she was, walking along a dirt road on a late summer day, and the air tasted green, smelled green, felt green in the sticky-slick sweat that gathered beneath her clothes. The orchard was waiting for her, right where she’d left it.
Fifty years away and her memory was hazy. She remembered Ma and Dad and their musician friends drinking smuggled Canadian whisky on the back porch. There had been laughing, carrying on, drifting smoke. The twins, nine years old and wild as animals, shouting that they were going for a swim in Peddler’s Creek. The baby had been crying. She remembered that well enough. Baby Devy crying her little head off like she wouldn’t ever stop.
But she must have stopped, at some point, because Pride remembered quiet too. A suffocating silence at dusk. Dad and the men hissing at each other, counting bullets. Fear curdling in her stomach, fear and anger and a desperate swallowed scream. Ma in the doorway with her shotgun, her sharp face illuminated when she struck her lighter, and smoke curling around her head like a veil.
The crack of a shot echoing through the twilight.
Pride had stopped walking. There was a phantom ache in her shoulder: the kick of a shotgun. A pain she hadn’t thought she would ever forget. Her finger had twitched before she told it to. A silhouette had crumpled in the darkness.
She rubbed at her shoulder, arthritic fingers massaging a bruise that had faded fifty years ago, and she scuffed one foot forward, then the other, creaking her old limbs into motion again.
She stood now at the turn to the Lovegood farm. The trees were heavy with apples; their sharp, sweet scent filled the air. Another couple of weeks and it would be time for the harvest.
She walked up the drive through the tunnel of sugar maples, and with every step she half expected the twins to come whooping from the house to greet her. Cherish taller and faster, Charles two steps behind.
But the twins were gone. They had been dead for more than fifty years, and she remembered how pale their bodies had been, laid out side by side in their best clothes. After Simon Abrams and his wretched brother had ambushed them in the woods, Charles had died at once, but Cherish had lingered a few days longer, going mad with fever until she finally slipped away to join her twin. Charles’s funeral shirt didn’t fit right; the bullet had caved in his skinny chest. It had started raining the day he died, rained all through that Bloody July, and it was raining still the day the twins were buried together in the cemetery grove. Pride had stood beside their little graves and felt the roots of the old ash trees reaching up for her from beneath the soil, imagined them wrapping around her ankles, dragging her down, down, never letting go.
The baby was the only one left now. Devotion had a daughter and a granddaughter of her own. They had exchanged letters over the years, but Pride had never returned, and, as far as she knew, Devotion had never traveled more than ten miles from the Lovegood farm.
When she reached the house, Pride bypassed the front door—they had never used it anyway—and walked around to the back. The garden was rich with autumn bounty: cornstalks shoulder-high, gourds and pumpkins tumbling from beneath blankets of leaves. The door to the barn was open, but there was nobody about.
Pride had one foot on the porch step, one hand on the rail, when she saw Ma’s lighter.
It was sitting there o
n the railing, set upright in the center of the board. Her mother’s old naphtha lighter, the one Dad had given to her after they’d gotten paid for their first successful whisky shipment. It had cost a pretty penny because it was engraved on the side: To My Joy, With Love and Music, Rosie. That was what they had called Dad in the clubs and speakeasies. Rosie for Rosenthal. The newspapers had loved that, when he was arrested: A Lawman’s Rosie Murder!
The lighter was just sitting there on the porch rail, like Ma had set it down to slip inside for a minute, and any second now she would come back out with a hand-rolled cigarette pinched in her fingers, barking orders, making plans.
“The girl found that.”
Pride turned, and for one trembling heartbeat she was looking into a mirror. She was the elder by ten years, but in their decades apart she and Devotion had crept toward a median. They were both old women now, their wood-brown hair gone to gray, skin wrinkled around the eyes. Pride wore her hair short, cropped close to her head ever since her first hospital stay; Devotion had a long braid twisted over her shoulder. Pride was wearing a soft tracksuit in pale yellow, clean except for the clinging road dust. Devotion wore rubber barn boots, trousers patched at the knees, a plaid shirt rolled up at the elbows. Joyful and Rosie’s girls, the one who left and the one who stayed.
“The girl?” Pride asked.
Devotion jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “My grandbaby. She was playing down by the pond.”
Yesterday, Pride would have been hard-pressed to remember the sound of her mother’s voice, so smoky and deep and beloved in the clubs, but she heard echoes of it in Devotion’s words. Ma had stopped singing after the police took Dad away.
“What are you doing here?” Devotion asked.
“I’m sick,” Pride said. Even now she couldn’t bring herself to say dying. People told her she was supposed to be brave in the face of cancer, but she was only tired. She was so tired. “I wanted to come back one last time.”
