The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  But Mr. and Mrs. Abrams had known exactly what they were doing when they’d covered up Cassie’s role in Patience’s death. There would be consequences for them, although nobody seemed to know yet what they would be. Sorrow knew the whole town would already be talking about it—the tragic Abrams Valley girls, those who were lost and those who remained—but for once the prospect didn’t anger her. She only felt tired and sad, and a pang of something almost like sympathy, that this little mountain town had to figure out, once again, how to deal with such terrible things happening to its girls.

  “I hope it does,” she said. Verity was looking at her across the car. “Rain,” Sorrow clarified. “I hope it rains.”

  “Let’s go home,” Verity said.

  Sorrow leaned her head against the seat as Verity drove them out of town. She closed her eyes, lulled by the quiet rumble of the car. When she opened her eyes again, they were passing the Abrams house. Sorrow wondered if she should say something, if she had to be the first to break the silence. Then they were passing the cider house, passing the hill, and before she could decide what to say her phone rang.

  She was expecting Dad, but the name on the screen was Sonia.

  “Oh. I should . . . Oh. Can you let me off at the bottom of the driveway?”

  Verity was already slowing to make the turn. She let Sorrow out by the mailbox and headed up to the house, and Sorrow answered the call. “Hello?”

  There was a pause, then Sonia’s voice, surprised: “Sorrow! Hello. I thought you—”

  Sorrow felt a tired pang of guilt. Sonia had thought she wouldn’t answer, and Sorrow couldn’t even blame her. “We just got home,” she said. “From the police station.”

  “Oh, Sorrow. That must have been hard. How are you doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Sorrow said. “I’m tired. I don’t know what else to . . . I don’t know.”

  “Your mother is home with you?” Sonia asked, and she sounded so hesitant, so unsure, like she didn’t even have the right to ask that question. Sorrow hated hearing that uncertainty in her voice. She hated knowing she was responsible for putting it there.

  “Yeah. She’s home now.”

  “That’s good,” Sonia said.

  They fell into an awkward silence. A few cool drops of rain tapped Sorrow’s face. She brushed them away. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She was too worn down, too wrung out. But she didn’t want to hang up either. She leaned against the wooden fence and held out her hand to catch the raindrops.

  “Sorrow.” Sonia’s voice was soft, almost pleading. “Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you tell us what was happening? You didn’t have to deal with all of that by yourself.”

  Sorrow’s eyes stung; she squeezed them shut. “I wasn’t by myself. Grandma’s here.”

  “I know. I know she’s taking care of you, but—why didn’t you call?”

  It was no use. The tears were going to fall no matter what she did. She was so tired of holding them in like a stone in the center of her chest. “I don’t know. It just didn’t seem . . . I don’t know.”

  “Your father told me about the conversation you had yesterday.”

  Only yesterday she had sat in the hospital parking lot with her father on the phone, frustrated and alone and so very angry. It seemed ages ago now, but the hurt was still raw inside of her, piled up on top of everything else.

  “I don’t think I want to apologize to him,” she said.

  “I’m not asking you to,” Sonia said. “I think you have a lot of reasons to be angry. I think it’s good for you to be angry.”

  “You do?”

  There was a brief pause; then Sonia went on: “You always try so hard not to be, Sorrow. You’re always trying to be calm and avoid upsetting anybody and that’s . . . Sometimes you’re trying so hard it hurts to see.”

  Sorrow’s face grew warm. She had never known anybody noticed. She had always hoped it looked like being relaxed, unruffled. She had never known that Sonia or anybody else might look at her and see how desperately she was trying not to fall apart.

  “I didn’t know a lot about your childhood until recently,” Sonia said. “When I met your father, it was still so fresh and painful for you, he decided it was best to let Dr. Silva deal with it, so I tried to stay out of it. I didn’t want to make things worse for you. And that’s what I was thinking this year, when you were so upset after spring break. I was so used to thinking it was something that had nothing to do with me that I thought—no, I convinced myself I would only make it worse by sticking my nose in. You know I have a tendency to do that, and it’s not always helpful.”

  Sorrow didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t know if Sonia’s interfering nature would have helped or hurt when she was trying to remember Patience, trying to decide if coming back to Vermont was the right idea, trying to find a way forward when the tangled tragedies of her past kept tugging her back. She did think she would have liked Sonia to try, but she didn’t know how to say that either.

  “And I was . . .” Sonia sighed. “I was reeling a little bit. I was angry at Michael. It’s something of a shock to learn that you’ve been married for seven years to the kind of man who would have stayed away for weeks when one of his daughters had just died and the other one was all alone in such a terrible and scary situation.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Sorrow said weakly.

  “Yes, Sorrow, it was, and you’re allowed to be angry about that. You were eight years old. You never should have felt even for a second like you were responsible for your mother’s well-being. And I know you love your mother and your grandmother. I know they did the best they could for you. But your father didn’t. He should have been there. When he first started telling me about it back in the spring, when you were so lost and we didn’t know what to do, it was—I had to figure out how to deal with it.” Sonia took a breath, released it, shuddering and slow. “But I didn’t want to make it harder for you, what you’ve been going through now. I didn’t want to get between you and your father, not when you needed him. I don’t think I made the right call, letting you sort it out on your own.”

  Sorrow couldn’t help it: she let out a startled little laugh.

  “What?” Sonia said. “Is that funny?”

  “No. Yes. No. It’s really not.” But she was still laughing, trying to catch it and bottle it down, not quite succeeding. “It’s just that on the scale of parents making really bad decisions I’ve dealt with just in the last twenty-four hours . . . that doesn’t even rate. That’s, like, farm-team-level parenting mistakes. You’re nowhere near the big leagues.”

  She tried to laugh again, but it turned into a sob, and Sonia let her cry. When she felt steady enough to speak again, she said, “It’s kinda starting to rain. I should get inside.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk when we get there. Michael sent you our flight itinerary, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We are going to talk. All three of us. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Sorrow said.

  It was what she was supposed to say, in spite of the weak nervous feeling she had inside. There had been nothing but talking around her all day. The police, Verity, the lawyers, all the murmured voices at the sheriff’s department behind coffee mugs and closed doors, a constant patter of questions, and what she wanted now was quiet. But Sonia was talking about tomorrow, the next day, a promise of what was to come, and Sorrow was tired of crying, tired of shouting, tired of treating her entire life like an obstacle course riddled with traps and mistakes.

  “Yeah,” she said again. “Okay.”

  “We’ll see you when we get in tomorrow afternoon,” Sonia said. “I love you, Sorrow.”

  “Love you too.”

  Sorrow walked up the driveway slowly. Rain pattered on the maple trees, and the temperature was dropping, but there was no bite in it, no ominous unseasonal threat. It felt nice on her skin, soothing when she lifted her face to the sky. Soft gray curtains were drifting over the moun
tains, nudging the downpour closer. Everything was green and lush and summer-alive.

  She went around the back of the house and into the kitchen. Grandma was chopping up vegetables and dumping them into a big pot on the stove.

  “Rainy day soup?” Sorrow said, and Grandma nodded. “That’ll be good. Where’s Verity?”

  She didn’t mean to glance up at the ceiling as she asked, but she couldn’t quite stop herself. Verity had been perfectly calm and controlled all day, reasonable and rational and even a bit stern when she’d met Sorrow at the sheriff’s department. She had sat by Sorrow’s side through the entire ordeal without once wavering.

  Grandma pointed her needle toward the barn.

  “What’s she doing out there?”

  Grandma shrugged. Sorrow went back outside and jogged across the lawn. She ducked into the barn as the rain began to fall.

  At the threshold she paused to let her eyes adjust. The air was stuffy with the scents of rust and fertilizer and a faint, lingering hint of hay. Verity was sitting on the workbench with her feet propped up on the engine block of the tractor. She had cleared a space on the cluttered bench for herself and the white file box beside her; the lid was tipped off and she had a stack of papers on her legs.

  “What are you doing out here?” Sorrow asked. “You’ve been home like five minutes.”

  “I was looking for some old insurance paperwork, but I got distracted.” Verity fanned her face with the stack of papers. “We’ve been shoving stuff in here for so long I don’t even know what’s in half these boxes. But I’d like to get it cleared out and get rid of this thing.” She kicked the tractor. “I want to park the car in here this winter. I’ve spent enough of my life scraping ice off the windshield.”

  “So you’re going to start now?” Sorrow asked.

  Verity glanced down at the papers, and when she looked up she was wearing a self-conscious smile. “Well, it’s raining, and I don’t want to be stuck in the house. I might start remodeling again just to have something to do.”

  Sorrow looked down uncomfortably, scraped her toe over the floor. She didn’t know how to answer, not when her first impulse was to say something awful: Why did you wait until everything was ruined to start remodeling rather than sleeping all day? That wouldn’t help. That wasn’t the right thing to say.

  But maybe there was no right thing to say. There were no magic words they could pass between them, no confessions or reassurances that would heal the wounds. Patience had figured that out too, right before the end. She had gathered her courage to push and demand, to look beyond the orchard and imagine another life for herself. For so long Sorrow had believed she’d been following Patience’s lead in doing everything she could to avoid causing even the slightest ripples, but she knew now she had learned the wrong lesson. Patience would never have wanted her to make herself quiet and small. Patience would have challenged her to a race just to see how far they could go.

  Sorrow’s eyes were stinging again. She blinked twice, cleared her throat. “You want help?”

  Verity gave her a considering look. “You don’t have to. You look exhausted.”

  “If I nap now, I won’t be able to sleep later. I can help.”

  “Okay. Grab a box. There’s a trash bag over here, and I’m putting stuff to donate in the wheelbarrow.”

  Sorrow stepped over a length of dented gutter and a pile of garden stakes. There was already a pile in the wheelbarrow: mismatched tools, a painted birdhouse, an elbow of plastic piping, a pair of leather work boots. She reached for an age-softened cardboard box just inside the door, where the cool damp air stirred around her. She turned the box, and a fluttery feeling settled high in her chest, something light and a little painful. Patience, in Grandma’s handwriting on the side. She was tired; she hadn’t been paying attention. She withdrew her hand.

  “You can go through those, if you want,” Verity said.

  Sorrow looked over her shoulder.

  “But you don’t have to.”

  There was a scattering of leaves and a fine layer of dust over the gray sweater at the top of the box. Below the sweater, a white dress with tiny blue flowers. A long skirt patched together from two of Verity’s old dresses—Patience had made that one herself. Beneath the skirt was a sky-blue wool scarf—Grandma had knit it because Patience had fallen in love with the yarn at the store, had kept returning to brush her fingers gently over the skeins even after she had sighed at the price tag.

  Sorrow tugged the scarf out, drawing it gently between her fingers. It was still as soft as a kitten; Patience had liked it too much to wear it often.

  “You should take it,” Verity said. “It’s too nice to give away.”

  Sorrow didn’t have any use for a thick wool scarf in Florida, but she folded it into a square and set it aside.

  Under the scarf were more folded clothes, skirts and shirts with no particular sentimental meaning, and at the bottom of the box she found a journal bound in leather and tied closed with a green ribbon. It was familiar, but Sorrow couldn’t recall ever seeing Patience use it. She slid the ribbon off and opened to a page in the middle.

  It wasn’t Patience’s handwriting that filled the pages, but Grandma’s.

  Sorrow flipped through the book, frowning. She remembered how Grandma used to write in her journals, early in the morning before anybody else was awake, or late at night by a crackling fire, the scratch-scratch of her pen on paper a constant and reassuring sound, but Sorrow hadn’t seen her do it once this summer.

  She set the leather journal aside and lowered the box to the floor. She opened the next, dug through layers of sweaters and summer dresses until her fingers brushed over something solid. She pulled out two more of Grandma’s old journals. She paged through them, one after another, her curiosity growing. She had been expecting diary entries, notes about the seasons and the orchard, thoughts and reflections. But that wasn’t what Grandma had been writing at all.

  “What have you got there?” Verity asked.

  Sorrow slid the journals into a stack and carried them over to her. “Look.”

  Verity’s eyes widened in recognition. “Those are Mom’s.”

  “I know. They were in with Patience’s things.”

  “I haven’t seen these in years.” Verity took the top journal, the one with the leather cover, and opened it. “I didn’t even know she still had them.”

  “Have you ever read them? It’s not a diary, not like in the normal way,” Sorrow said. “They’re stories. Stories about our family.”

  “She started writing in them when she stopped talking,” Verity said quietly. “But I never knew what she was writing. I never . . . I didn’t like to ask a lot from her then. Oh, I remember this story. My grandmother told this to me when I was just a little girl.”

  Verity paused at a page near the center of the book. At the top of the page was a name written in black ink: Grace Lovegood. Below, a pair of dates. 1811–1873. Birth and death. Sorrow recognized the years from her gravestone. Silence Lovegood’s one surviving daughter.

  “What happened to her?” Sorrow asked. “I’ve always kinda wondered about that. She must’ve gone to live with somebody, right? After her mother was executed?”

  “She did. Her father’s family here in Vermont refused to have anything to do with her, so she went to stay with an aunt in Baltimore. Anne Derry. She was the only one who would take Grace in. But it turned out to be a good thing.”

  “It did?”

  Verity’s lips curved into the beginning of a smile. She turned a few pages, scanning quickly. “Anne Derry was this eccentric spinster type—not very old, maybe only thirty at the time, but a woman didn’t have to be old to be considered a spinster in those days. She saw to it that Grace got a good education, learned everything a girl was supposed to learn, and all the things boys were supposed to learn too. They traveled all over together. They went to Paris, to London, eventually to India. By the time Grace was twenty she had seen half the world. She’d stu
died all kinds of things—math and science and law and history. She was a brilliant woman.”

  Sorrow had only ever known the bookends of Grace Lovegood’s life: the tragic childhood, the eventual death, with the orchard always at the center.

  “Why did she come back?” she asked.

  “You know, I don’t know,” Verity said. “The way my grandmother told it, it always sounded like an inevitability, like there wasn’t anything else she could have done. Something about needing to claim the land back for the family. But I was only a kid when I heard that story, and my grandmother wouldn’t have bothered to explain the details to me. I do know Grace didn’t come back until she had a daughter of her own. Anne, named for her aunt.” Verity turned a few more pages. Her touch was gentle now, almost reverent. “There’s a lot more here than I remember.”

  “You never knew this was what Grandma was writing down?”

  “I had no idea. She must have heard a lot of this from Devotion.” Verity ran her forefinger over a crease in one page. “My grandmother was a terrible person, but she had a mind like a steel trap. She remembered everything.”

  “She never left, did she?” Sorrow said. “She never lived anywhere else. She had no choice but to remember.”

  “No,” Verity said. “She didn’t. I don’t think she ever traveled more than ten miles from this spot. She used to say—usually when she was angry about something—she used to say the land was a part of her and she was a part of the land, and anybody who wanted to separate them would have to rip up every tree in the orchard to find every piece of her.”

  Devotion had never ventured beyond the sloping shoulders of Abrams Valley. Every one of her days had been spent pruning Lovegood trees and tilling Lovegood land, working every season of every year until the soil was ground into the creases of her hands, until her sweat and blood flowed through the veins of the trees, and she would have remembered everything. The orchard was as much a part of their family as the mud-brown hair and hazel eyes, and it held their grief and their memories as firmly as the mountains held the roots of their apple trees.