The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  She was carrying it with her, the cold. She was holding on to that icy stone of grief. It had been there all along, sitting high in her chest, and with every step another fissure split through its middle—shivering over the orchard, frosting and melting, seasons flickering around her with the rhythm of her breaths, with the beat of her heart, she and the trees and the earth all part of the same creature. The ice she was carrying, the memory she had left buried in the orchard for so long, it cracked, and weakened, and woke, and by the time she reached the fence around the cemetery grove it was ready to shatter.

  There, balanced on a fence post, was an engraved silver lighter.

  35

  EIGHT YEARS AGO

  MOM AND PATIENCE both emerged from their rooms to make dinner. They ate together, the four of them. Nobody argued. Nobody stormed away. Nobody mentioned school.

  And nobody asked Sorrow how she had spent her day.

  It was there on the tip of her tongue, every time Mom and Patience fell silent. She nearly blurted it out half a dozen times, but each time the urge grew smaller, the words withering away, until finally she was determined to say nothing at all. Mom was out of her room and talking, Patience wasn’t picking fights or bringing up things she shouldn’t, and Sorrow wasn’t going to be the one to change all that. She wasn’t going to let Cassie Abrams ruin everything.

  When it was time for bed, Mom came to tuck Sorrow in. She smoothed Sorrow’s hair back from her forehead and said, “I know it’s not easy being stuck inside all day. Why don’t we do something fun tomorrow?”

  Let’s do something fun, Cassie had said. Sorrow shivered, tried to hide it, but Mom saw anyway.

  “Do you need another blanket?” she asked.

  “No,” Sorrow said. She hadn’t felt warm all evening, not even during dinner when she had been sitting right next to the woodstove, but she didn’t want Mom to worry. “I’m fine.”

  Mom kissed her forehead. “You’re always fine. It’s like having another little grandmother in the house.”

  Sorrow wrinkled up her nose, because that was what she was supposed to do, and she was rewarded with a smile from Mom.

  “How about we bake some cupcakes?” Mom said.

  “It’s nobody’s birthday,” Sorrow pointed out.

  “We’ll call them it’s-still-winter-and-we’re-sick-of-it cupcakes,” Mom said. “They’ll be better than birthday cupcakes.”

  Sorrow wanted to believe it. She wanted to trust the smile on Mom’s lips, the easy way she talked about baking without needing a reason to celebrate. But she kept hearing the sound of doors slamming in her mind. Mom’s, Patience’s, the cider house’s, one after another, each one adding to the nervous tremble in her chest. She wanted to ask Mom to promise, but she didn’t ask for promises anymore. Asking only made Mom cry.

  Sorrow said, “Okay,” and she tried to sound like she meant it.

  After Mom was gone, Sorrow shut off the light on her bedside table. She wanted to turn it on again right away, but she kept her hands fisted at her sides. She wasn’t a baby. She wasn’t scared of the dark.

  Her lighter was tucked away in her underwear drawer. She had never kept a favor secret before, but she wanted to keep this one to herself more than she wanted to show it off. She had examined it in the light before hiding it away: it was a tarnished silver color, etched with musical notes on both sides and the words To My Joy, With Love and Music, Rosie. She had struck it one more time, here in her room, and her heart had raced when the little flame whipped and danced.

  Hard snow skittered over the window, and the wind groaned and wailed. Sorrow closed her eyes, but as soon as she did she was back in the cider house, and the darkness was pressing all around her, and the hole in the floor was gaping, waiting.

  Your whole family is crazy, Cassie had said, and the memory of the words made Sorrow’s face burn. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before, from kids in town snickering as she and Patience passed—Patience with her head held high, Sorrow scurrying like a rabbit hoping to go unnoticed by a fox. Because Grandma was mute, because Mom went days and days without leaving the house, because they all wore patched clothes and lived without phones and computers and TVs like it was a hundred years ago, because Mom didn’t let Patience and Sorrow go to school or make friends in town, for all those reasons and more, they never, ever left the Lovegoods alone.

  Sorrow rolled onto her side. She didn’t care what Cassie said. Cassie was an Abrams. She didn’t know anything. Sorrow rolled over again.

  Everybody knows you’re just as crazy as your mom. Cassie’s voice echoed like she was right there in the room with Sorrow. Cassie had probably marched back to her big warm house on the hill and hung her fancy coat in a fancy closet and laughed to herself about Sorrow freezing to death in the cider house.

  She shouldn’t get away with it.

  The thought crept into Sorrow’s mind softly, like summer fog.

  Cassie shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

  Sorrow sat up. Her heart was thumping.

  Sorrow’s favorite part of Rejoice Lovegood’s story came after she had escaped from her jail cell. Rejoice had returned to the orchard to find that Clement Abrams and his sons had piled up logs to build a cabin on her land. That had been their plan all along, to chase her and her husband away so they could take the Lovegood farm, where the water was sweeter, the soil richer, the trees sturdier than any others in the valley. But Rejoice had escaped, and she didn’t need help from anybody at all, not even her husband, to stop Clement Abrams from taking her orchard. She made a great raging bonfire of those logs the Abramses had chopped and hewn, a fire big enough to turn the night sky orange. The Abrams family never tried to build on Lovegood land again.

  Sorrow slipped out of bed and dressed without turning on the light. She pulled open the drawer, hands shaking, and found the lighter. She listened before creeping out of her room, listened again as she sneaked down the steps. She took a flashlight from a kitchen drawer and held her breath to listen one more time.

  There was nobody awake. Nobody to stop her.

  The night was dark and blustery and so very cold. The snow had stopped. The clouds were breaking up, racing across the sky, allowing brief glimpses of the stars. The apple trees groaned in the wind. Sorrow kept to the shadows all the way to the property line, over the wire fence and on the other side too. It was longer than cutting through the meadow, but this way nobody would see her or her footprints.

  There was a light on by the front door of the Abrams house, but none inside, and the barn was completely dark. Sorrow ran to the barn door and slid it open. It rattled so loudly she jumped, but she didn’t hesitate before ducking through the gap.

  She pulled the flashlight from her pocket and switched it on.

  The Abramses didn’t have any animals. All they had in their barn was a riding lawn mower, some bicycles, skis in a rack on the wall, and a workbench with tools arranged neatly on a pegboard. Sorrow cast the flashlight around until she spotted the ladder in the far corner. She bit off her mittens for better grip and climbed to the hayloft.

  There, tucked away in a corner, she found Cassie’s playhouse.

  Two flowery sheets hung from strings like curtains, enclosing a scrap of pink carpet and piles of pillows. A stuffed purple horse with a rainbow mane was tucked into a soft blanket nest. Against one wall wooden crates were turned on their sides as shelves; they held a stack of drawing paper, a box of colored pencils, a chipped teacup and saucer, a few thin books with ratty covers and cracked spines. Above the shelves there were drawings taped to the wall—mostly horses—and a collection of postcards. Sorrow stepped closer to look at them; her boots left clumps of mud and ice on the pink carpet. The Abramses went on vacation a lot, mostly to faraway places that existed for Sorrow only as spots on maps: Paris, New York, Hawaii.

  One of the cards showed a white beach and a line of palm trees. A faint roar gathered in Sorrow’s ears. The print in the corner said Florida. That was w
here Dad lived. The closest Sorrow had ever been to Florida was finding it on a map at the library and poring over encyclopedia pictures of alligators and endless blue ocean. When the librarian asked if her father was going to take her to Disney World someday, Sorrow had fled without answering.

  Sometimes Dad suggested Sorrow and Patience might come visit him, and Mom always said she would think about it, but after Dad left she would say something different. She would say they didn’t need to go anywhere at all. They had everything they needed right here in the orchard.

  Sorrow tugged the Florida postcard from the wall. She tucked her flashlight into her pocket and grabbed Paris, London, California, Hawaii, pulling the cards down one by one and crumpling the stiff paper into balls. She took Cassie’s horse drawings too, tearing the pages from the taped-up corners, but it didn’t help. It didn’t help. She could still hear Cassie saying how much better her playhouse was than the gross old cider house, and she could still hear the door slamming shut, and there were icicles of cold deep inside her where her bones ought to be, a cold that felt like it would never thaw.

  Mom said if you let an Abrams push you an inch, they would take a mile. She said it when they were painting the No Trespassing signs to nail to fence posts, fresh lettering every spring to mark the property boundary. She said it when they were walking through town and the Abramses were too and Mom refused to cross the street to avoid them. They were Lovegoods, and they belonged in this valley, and no Abrams had any right to try to intimidate them or frighten them away.

  Sorrow dropped Cassie’s postcards and drawings into a heap. Her hand was shaking as she took the lighter from her pocket, shaking as she flipped it open and tried once, twice, again, to raise a flame. Rejoice Lovegood wouldn’t have been frightened when she set fire to the logs Clement Abrams had piled on her land. He and his family had accused her of being a witch, they had tried to steal her land, but she had never let them win.

  The lighter sparked and caught. Sorrow touched the flame to the corner of the crumpled-up Florida postcard. The paper curled and smoked and flared, filling the little playhouse with dancing warm light. Sorrow bit her lip in concentration and lit a horse drawing and another postcard. She watched them burn and wither.

  The rising smoke took on a bitter, acrid scent. Sorrow scrunched up her face in disgust: the scrap of pink carpet was melting.

  She jumped to her feet and stomped on the burning paper, but there was too much of it, and the fire was spreading too fast. She accidentally kicked one of the postcards away from the pile; it tumbled to a stop against the flowery sheet. Sorrow kicked at it again, but the sheet had already caught, and flames were licking up the fabric. The playhouse corner was as bright as daylight now, filled with flickering yellow light, and Sorrow’s shadow was a looming shape on the wall.

  The smoke was thick and foul, filling her nose and mouth. She had to do something. The fire was spreading so fast, climbing up the sheet to the ceiling, but her ears were roaring and her mind was blank with panic.

  It was getting so hot. She tugged desperately at the sheet, but it wasn’t just hanging over the string, it was sewn in, and she couldn’t pull it down. Flames whipped close to her face, snatched at her hands and the sleeves of her jacket. She jerked away and stumbled out of the playhouse corner. The fire was spreading from the postcards to the pillows, from the sheets to the blankets. She didn’t have any water. She didn’t know what to do.

  She ran for the ladder and climbed down as fast as she could, slipping twice as her feet missed the rungs. She dropped to the floor and ran. The barn door swung and rattled as she shoved past, and the cold outside was a shock after the heat of the fire. Sorrow stood absolutely still for a moment, her throat aching with every inhale.

  There was a light on upstairs in the Abrams house.

  Sorrow sprinted for the trees, skidding precariously on the snow. When she glanced back another light came on in the house, this one downstairs. Somebody was awake. She couldn’t be caught. Mr. and Mrs. Abrams would tell the police and the police would tell the social worker and the social worker would visit again and Mom—Sorrow didn’t even want to think about what that would do to Mom, a visit from the police and child services all at once, so many outsiders crowding into the kitchen with accusing eyes and pointing fingers, and all of it her fault.

  Her breath was wheezing and rasping before she even reached the property line, and she tasted the metallic tinge of blood at the back of her throat as she slipped through the wire fence. She looked back only once to see the Abrams house alight, and then she was running again, and she didn’t stop until she was in the fallow field below her own farmhouse. The house was dark, an inkblot on the night.

  Sorrow doubled over at the edge of the apple trees, sucking in air like she had never breathed before. Only when she didn’t feel like her heart was going to burst from her chest did she climb the rest of the way to the house. She sneaked inside as quietly as she had left. Everybody was asleep. For the second time that day nobody had even noticed she was gone.

  In her room she shut the door and leaned against it. Her heartbeat slowed and the pounding in her ears softened, and she became aware of another sound, something high and muffled. She leaned over her bed to open the window. Sirens. The high, distant wail grew louder. The Abramses had called the fire department.

  As she lowered the casement, a breath of wind twisted through the gap. It felt different from the snow-chasing gusts that had buffeted the house all day. Warmer, gentler. The bite was gone.

  The weather was turning. Spring was on its way.

  36

  THE SUN HAD set, taking with it the last golden light. The orchard had sunk into a hush of green and gray. The last frost melted away, and the warmth returned.

  Sorrow reached for the lighter on the fence post. Stopped with her fingers inches away. It was a small silver square, such a tiny thing; the musical notes etched on the side were barely visible in the vanishing light. She could still feel the rasp of the ridged wheel beneath her thumb. The grit and grime of the cider house floorboards. The cold, oh, the aching, bitter cold, sinking into her limbs, sapping the heat from her core, and leaving in its place a bone-deep certainty that she would, very soon, freeze to death.

  When she inhaled, she remembered the smell of smoke and the fast-building crackle of heat. She picked up the lighter, and she left in its place on the fence rail the glasses, the watch, the fan, the bead, her collection laid out in a row.

  She stepped over the fence, moving slowly through the cemetery rows, past the plain white headstones and towering ash trees. Ahead there was a pale smudge in the twilight: a blue T-shirt, blond hair. Cassie.

  She was sitting on the ground at the foot of Patience’s grave. Her legs were bent, her arms hooked around her knees. With one hand she gripped the fabric of her jeans, holding herself so tight it was as though she feared she would fly apart.

  In the other hand she held a gun.

  Sorrow stopped. Her throat was raw when she swallowed. Cassie didn’t look up; she hadn’t heard Sorrow approach. She barely seemed to be breathing. She might have been part of the orchard, as rooted and unmovable as the trees, if it weren’t for the golden glimmer of her short hair, and softly, softly, the sound of her weeping.

  “Cassie,” Sorrow said.

  Cassie’s head snapped up. Her face was pale, her eyes red. Without makeup she looked years younger, and Sorrow could see the little girl she had once been, the one whose mother dressed her up in dresses and ribbons, pretty as a doll.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Cassie’s voice was hoarse; she swiped her free hand over her nose and sniffled.

  “Looking for you,” Sorrow said.

  “Get the fuck away from me.”

  Sorrow took a step forward. Grass crackled under her shoe. Another. “Your family’s worried about you. Everybody’s looking for you.”

  Cassie snorted. “Yeah, right. They don’t care. All they care about is how embarrassing I am, th
at’s the only thing they—they’re doing it again, talking about how, oh, it’s so shocking, so much young life lost in such a small town. Calling them the tragic Abrams Valley girls. It’s on the fucking internet. People who don’t give a fuck about them and never did.”

  She swallowed back a sob and twisted her face into her shoulder, wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She wasn’t pointing the gun at anything—where had she even gotten a gun? Had her parents noticed it was missing?—but in her hand it was a terrible black shadow, more outline than shape, and Sorrow couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  She sank to the ground beside the grave, and they formed a triangle, the three of them, Cassie and Sorrow and Patience’s sturdy tall ash.

  “I’m not as brave as Julie was. I’m sitting here, trying to convince myself I can do it. But I’m a fucking coward.” Cassie scrubbed at her face again. “You know, I used to be so jealous of you.”

  Sorrow wasn’t expecting that. “Me? Why?”

  “You. Her. Both of you.” She gestured toward Patience’s headstone with the gun, and Sorrow flinched. “I thought you had the best life. You didn’t have to go to school. You didn’t have your parents freaking out over everything you did. Nobody telling you that your whole life was decided for you. It seemed so perfect. Your mom let you do anything and everybody loved your grandma and it was . . . everything we didn’t get to do. Everything. My mom was always like, Oh, those Lovegood girls, look at how dirty they are, they don’t even wear shoes, they’re like wild animals, and the whole time I was just thinking how much I wanted to be one of you. I was so jealous. I knew your mom was crazy—sorry, depressed—but still I used to pretend—this is so stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid,” Sorrow said softly. She had no idea if she was saying the right thing. She only knew that talking was better than letting Cassie’s confession fall into a horrible empty silence. “What did you pretend?”