The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

Sorrow had wondered what was behind Grandma’s decades-long silence, but only in the same way she wondered why the sun rose in the east, why snow fell in winter. She had never known her grandmother any other way, and like all children she had assumed the world she knew was the world that had always been. She had never pictured Perseverance in love, or heartbroken, or humiliated, just as she had never imagined that Verity had once dreamed about life beyond the orchard, had even reached out to take it, only to be pulled back.

  “Did Patience know any of that?” Sorrow asked.

  “Patience?” Verity said, surprised. “No. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  She asked because even though the hospital walls around her were modern and white and bland, even though she was miles and mountains away from the orchard, she was still standing in the ash grove where their family was buried. She was still squirming with alarm to hear her sister, her idol, the person she trusted to lead in every situation, telling her in a voice raw with desperation how much she wanted to escape, how she dreamed of leaving, but even her dreams were shackled by the roots of the orchard. In that moment, that cold morning on the last day of her life, Patience had understood something Sorrow had been too young to grasp: the stories were never just stories, and history was never only in the past. If they echoed loudly enough, those long-dead spites and long-buried hatreds, they weren’t a legacy but a cage—and she had wanted out.

  If only they had been a family who talked about what they wanted as much as they talked about where they had come from, Patience and Verity might have found that in common.

  “I know you think I was unreasonable,” Verity said. “And you’re probably right. Sometimes I feel like my whole life I’ve done nothing but make one wrong decision after another. I was only ever trying to protect you. All of you. I didn’t want Mom to have to face that kind of pain again. I didn’t want you and your sister to ever know what that felt like. There were days when it seemed like all I could do to keep you safe was keep you close. I thought we would be safe in the orchard.”

  “That’s not—” Sorrow stopped, and she didn’t say: That’s not rational. That doesn’t even make sense. That’s not how it works.

  The protests were there on her tongue, but withered before she spoke them. Verity knew that already. The regret seeped through every word she spoke.

  “How did . . .” Sorrow had to stop, take a breath. “How did Hannah end up married to an Abrams? After all that? How did she even end up in Abrams Valley?”

  “At the end of that summer she came to try to persuade me to go back to school,” Verity said. “I didn’t even—I refused to see her. I didn’t want her seeing how much Mom and I were struggling. I suppose she and Paul met while she was staying in town. I don’t know. I never asked. The next time I saw her they were engaged, and everybody in town was talking about how Paul’s fiancée had dropped out of law school to marry him. That bothered me, actually. That she dropped out to get married. She’s smart. She could have had quite a career.”

  “That’s what bothered you,” Sorrow said slowly. “That she quit law school.”

  “What do you want me to say, Sorrow? Hannah was always going to marry a man her family approved of. Paul Abrams may have been barely one generation removed from farmers, but at least they could trace their roots back before the Revolution. And I was always going to go home to the orchard. I had already decided to have daughters by then. Our lives were on different paths. I met your father when he was hiking through one summer.”

  Sorrow knew that part of the story: Dad was an Appalachian Trail hiker who never made it to Maine because he got distracted in southern Vermont. She had always imagined it as a summer fling that led to an unexpected pregnancy. She had assumed Patience was an accident, and her too, eight years later.

  “Michael and I were never going to want the same things,” Verity said, as though she knew what Sorrow was thinking, “but we both wanted you and your sister. You were supposed to come along a bit earlier, but these things don’t always go according to plan. Whatever else you think about the choices I’ve made, don’t ever doubt that. We always wanted you and Patience.”

  Sorrow’s face grew warm and she looked away quickly. She knew Verity wasn’t being entirely honest with her—there was heartbreak beneath her dismissal of Hannah’s callousness, hurt and embarrassment and regrets, the inevitable act of moving on. There was more to her history with Dad than their daughters and the eight years between them. But Sorrow could let her have these small lies. She didn’t have to tear the scar tissue away from every one of her mother’s old hurts. She had done enough of that already.

  Sorrow leaned forward to take the photo back. Julie hadn’t known the story behind that picture; she hadn’t known anything about it. To her it was a curiosity, an artifact of a forgotten age hidden away in an attic. Sorrow didn’t know why Julie would have taken time out of her last day alive to find it for her. Sorrow wasn’t anybody to her except the little sister of her long-dead once-upon-a-time friend. It probably didn’t matter. Julie was still dead. The girls in the photograph had grown into women who could barely speak to each other. Their families were still torn apart by rifts that would never mend.

  “You know,” said Verity, “I really hate this place.”

  Sorrow looked up. Verity was staring out the window. The view was unremarkable: parking lot half-filled with cars gleaming in the sun, strips of grass and trees locked in concrete curbs, roads pulsing with weekday traffic. Nothing from outside filtered into the room. Not the sounds of the traffic, not the heat of the day, not the scents of gas and asphalt and cut grass.

  “I hate this place,” Verity said again. “I hate the rooms. I hate the beds. I hate the food. I hate wearing this stupid thing on my wrist.” She plucked at the patient ID band. “I hate that the windows don’t open. I hate that the plants are plastic. I hate that nobody who’s here wants to be here. I don’t want to be here.”

  Sorrow opened her mouth, but Verity lifted a hand to stop her.

  “Let me finish. I hate this place so much I start thinking about leaving the second I get here. But as much as I hate being here, sometimes I need to be. I need . . .” Verity considered her words. “I need somebody else to make decisions for a while, when I can’t trust my own judgment. When I can’t trust that the way the world looks to me is the way it actually is. I know you think I’m selfish, but all I could think—I kept thinking about when Patience died. You were so worried all the time.”

  Sorrow nodded.

  “I hated that. I hated how scared you were. It wasn’t that I didn’t notice. I did. But everything was cold and gray. Everything I ate tasted like ashes. It was all dust. Nothing had any texture to it anymore. And sometimes—sometimes I start thinking like that again. Like nothing has changed. When it starts to feel like the world has gone flat and dull, it’s like my mind gets stuck on this wheel going around and around, and there’s no room for anything else. I can’t feel anything else. I don’t even want to. I didn’t mean to scare you. But I couldn’t . . .”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, both of them looking toward the windows, watching the day move beyond the glass. Sorrow knew what she was supposed to say. Her entire life had been rehearsing for this. She was supposed to reassure Verity she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. She hadn’t been scared. It was okay, it was really okay that in those few days after Julie died, when she had wanted so very badly for somebody to see how shaken she was, she had instead faded away to nothing more than an afterthought at the edge of her mother’s awareness. But it was fine. She was fine, Grandma was fine, they would be fine. She was supposed to say all of that, and mean it. That was what she would do if she could be a good daughter and granddaughter, the kind of person who could offer forgiveness as easily as she hoarded hurt. It would only take a few small words. She wouldn’t even choke getting them out.

  “I better get back,” she said. She stood up and didn’t wait for Verity to do the same. “I don’t want
to leave Grandma alone too long.”

  31

  SORROW’S PHONE RANG as the elevator reached the ground floor. She silenced it and glanced at the screen.

  Dad.

  They hadn’t spoken since her first night on the farm. They’d exchanged a few text messages—brief, unimportant—but that was all. She hadn’t told him that Julie had died; she’d wanted to think of a way to tell him that wouldn’t have him freaking out and demanding she come home instantly. But then he’d texted that he was off to Hong Kong for a business trip, and Sorrow had felt a guilty relief for not having to make the decision.

  Her phone beeped as it sent the call to voice mail. Somebody bumped into her from behind. She muttered an apology and shuffled out of the way. She didn’t listen to the message until she was back in the car with the key in the ignition and the phone on her lap.

  “Hey, sweetie, just checking in to see how you’re doing.” Dad’s voice was cheerful and fast, the way he always sounded first thing in the morning. “I’m back stateside—stuck in LA traffic as we speak. I hope you’re having fun. Give me a call when you get a chance.”

  He sounded so normal, so warm, so very far away. Dad had no idea she’d been having anything other than an ordinary summer vacation. He certainly didn’t know she had just walked out of the hospital. Sonia always liked to joke that he had the best-worst timing of anybody she knew.

  Sorrow deleted the message. It was early in Los Angeles. He was probably on his way to a meeting. He might not have time to talk. But he would notice if she didn’t respond at all.

  She took a breath and called him back.

  Dad answered right away. “Hey! Guess what. Still stuck in traffic.”

  “It’s only been like two minutes,” Sorrow said. She made herself smile, hoped it carried through in her voice. “You’re not driving and talking, are you?”

  “No. The company sent a car.”

  “Ooh, corporate big shot.”

  “I think it’s more that they’re afraid I would go Mad Max on my way to the meeting. There are twelve lanes of traffic and none of them are moving. So how have you been? How’s Vermont?”

  “Oh, it’s . . .”

  Tell him, Sorrow thought. Tell him. Say it.

  But if she said it, if she started with the night Julie died and let the rest spill out, they would be right back to where they had ended their last conversation, and this time Dad would be right. Nothing was okay. Everything was broken and wrong and terrifying, exactly as he had feared and Sorrow had insisted would never happen. Sorrow knew her father. He would be so worried for her he wouldn’t even manage an I told you so before he was making arrangements for her to go home. A plane ticket and a plan. That was all he could do. He was too far away to do anything else. He had always been too far away.

  “Does that significant silence mean things are really good or really bad?” Dad asked.

  “Can I ask you something?” Sorrow said.

  “Sure,” Dad said. “What is it?”

  Sorrow gripped the steering wheel with her free hand, so tight her knuckles were white beneath her summer tan.

  “Sorrow? Is something wrong?”

  “Why didn’t you come to Vermont after Patience died? Before Verity went into the hospital, I mean. Why didn’t you come back?”

  “Oh,” said her father, a breathy exhale of a word.

  And there was a long, long silence.

  “I didn’t know you . . .” Dad trailed off, started again. “You’ve never asked about that before.”

  “It was, what, two weeks? What could you have been doing for two weeks that you couldn’t even—that you didn’t even—” Sorrow’s voice caught. She pressed her knuckles to her lips, held her breath for a few seconds.

  Two weeks of unnatural cold. Two weeks of crushing quiet. Two weeks of crying herself to sleep, stifling her sobs in her pillow so her mother wouldn’t hear, and waking every day wishing for spring to come, wishing her mom would get better, wishing her sister would return.

  “I wanted to come back,” Dad said. “But Verity told me to wait.”

  Sorrow let go of the steering wheel. That pinch she felt in the center of her chest, it wasn’t surprise. You couldn’t be surprised by something you had suspected before you asked.

  “She told me it would only make it harder for you. That I shouldn’t force you to deal with somebody who was essentially a stranger when you were grieving your sister. She told me to give you time. All of you. And I . . . I didn’t argue.” Dad made a frustrated sound. “I wanted to see you, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. I was a stranger to you. We barely knew each other when Patience died, and we didn’t for a long time after, did we?”

  They had never spoken of it before, those agonizing first months in Florida, after Sorrow had been plucked from the only life she knew, how long it had taken for the nightmares to fade, the tears to dry up, the knowledge that she wasn’t going home again to sink in. By then she had been so tired of rebuilding the walls around her heart she had given up in exhaustion. It had taken the two of them months to begin acting, in fits and starts, neither of them knowing how, like father and daughter rather than a lost child and a bewildered man who had been thrown together by an accident of fate.

  “That’s not a good enough reason,” Sorrow said. Her voice sounded like a stranger’s to her own ears, hoarse and wet and faint. “I get what you’re saying. I get that—but it’s not, it’s not good enough.”

  “I know,” Dad said quietly. “Has something happened, Sorrow? What’s this about?”

  “Do you give Verity and Grandma money?”

  That caught him off guard. “I—uh, well, yes. I’ve helped them out from time to time.”

  “Does Sonia know?”

  A brief pause. “She does now, yes.”

  “And she doesn’t care?”

  “Honey, what’s going on? Is there something wrong?”

  Sorrow scrubbed the tears from her cheeks. “Why does something have to be wrong? Do I need a reason to ask questions about my own family?”

  “You can ask whatever you want. But you sound so upset and this isn’t—this isn’t like you.”

  “Being upset isn’t like me?” Sorrow said, laughing bitterly. “Well, isn’t that convenient for everybody else. We’ve always got to have one person in the family who doesn’t get upset so everybody else can lose their fucking minds, right?”

  “Sorrow—”

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Sorrow, wait—”

  “Talk to you later. Bye.”

  Sorrow hung up and threw her phone onto the passenger seat. She reached for the key in the ignition, changed her mind before she turned it. Her phone rang. She ignored it. The voice mail beep sounded. A text, then another. She ignored those too. The only sound inside the car was her own breathing, rough and fast; she put a hand over her mouth to trap the sobs, swallow them down, bury them away somewhere deep inside. It didn’t help. Her shoulders were shaking, her throat raw. Her phone rang again, and still she didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and leaned forward to rest her head on the steering wheel.

  She had come back to Vermont because she had realized, that day in the Everglades, the day she had imagined Patience walking beside her and understood she was older than her sister would ever be, that she didn’t know how to move forward into terrain Patience had not explored first. She had been following Patience’s example for so long, for so many years even after Patience was dead and buried, she hadn’t known she was still doing it until she tried to look forward and couldn’t see anything at all except the shadows and gaps and echoing empty spaces behind her.

  But none of it had worked like she’d planned. All she had wanted to do was remember the last days of her sister’s life, to have a complete picture of the person Patience had been, to know what she had wanted to be. But now Patience’s only friend was dead, Verity was back in the hospital, and Sorrow felt more mired in the past than she ever had before.

&
nbsp; It was a long time before she felt steady enough to drive away.

  32

  AFTER DINNER SORROW and Grandma went together to sit on the porch. The rain had stopped and the clouds had finally cleared. The sharp cold had subsided, leaving the evening pleasantly cool. Soft golden light filtered through the apple trees. Grandma had a ball of yarn and two wooden needles in her lap. Sorrow sat in the other chair, rocking idly from time to time, letting her inward restlessness show only in the occasional tap of her feet against the floorboards, the drum of her fingers on the arm of the chair.

  All day she had considered and discarded things to say to her grandmother. She had reported that Verity seemed fine and might be coming home tomorrow, but she hadn’t been able to add: She told me about Henry Abrams. She had spent hours helping Grandma in the garden and around the orchard, but not once had she found a way to say: I know why you stopped talking. I know what hurt you so badly silence was the only way you could live through it. I know why you and Verity have wrapped yourselves in a protective cloak of loneliness and quiet here on the farm, surrounded by memories and dead ancestors. I know.

  All the words Sorrow could not say beat a steady rhythm against her ribs. She couldn’t say something just to prove she knew, not when it might hurt Grandma to have the truth drawn unexpectedly into the open after she had locked it away so long ago.

  The sun sank, the shadows lengthened, and the only sound between them was the creak of rocking chairs on the porch and the occasional slap of a hand brushing away a twilight mosquito. After a while, Grandma let out a quiet sigh, picked up her needles, and began to knit. The soft tap of wood on wood joined the chorus of crickets and evening songbirds.

  The phone rang; the noise was so loud and so unexpected Sorrow jumped in her chair.

  “I’ll just—get that.” Her heart was thudding as she stepped inside to answer. “Hello?”

  “Uh, hi, Sorrow? It’s me. Ethan.”

  A wash of relief: she had feared it would be Dr. Parker. “Oh. Hi.”