The Orchard House

by Heidi Chiavaroli

  “I go right by your house, but if you feel more comfortable, we can pay for a taxi. I don’t think you should walk home this time of night.”

  I swallowed down my nerves. I just wanted to get home, bury my head under the covers, and forget this entire mess had happened. No, scratch that. I wanted to tell Victoria what a loser her “friend of a friend” turned out to be.

  “I don’t want to be any trouble . . .”

  “Not at all.” He smiled for the first time since I saw him, and it softened his well-cut features in a way that made him look like Ben Affleck and put me at ease. “Just give me a couple minutes to finish up in the back, okay?”

  “Okay . . . thanks.” I sat on the patio, listened to the hum of the music within, the clatter of glasses and plates, the thrum of conversation. Was it wise to allow a stranger to take me home? Before tonight I would have said no, but I trusted something about this guy. Still, I’d never been the best judge of character. Why should I begin to trust my instincts now?

  “Ready?” He had keys in his hand and a Tufts University sweatshirt on.

  I stood and followed him to the alley.

  “I’m Will, by the way.”

  “Taylor.” We walked another minute. “Thanks again. I feel kind of lame. When I saw that sign on the back of the restroom door, I felt like there really was an angel watching over me.”

  He grinned, and I caught the flash of straight teeth beneath a streetlamp. “I like to hear that. One of the waitresses had a bad dating experience last year. We decided to come up with something that might help out girls in a tough situation.” He unlocked the driver’s side door of a beat-up Ford truck, reached in, and unlocked the passenger side.

  I climbed in. Or rather, tried to climb in.

  “Sorry for the mess. Wasn’t expecting company.” He pulled a pile of textbooks and folders toward the console.

  I sat down and buckled. “School?”

  “Engineering.” He backed the Ford out of the parking space.

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah, should beat working nights at this place, anyway. You in college?”

  I pulled my hair over my shoulder, glad he didn’t think I was in high school—I was often told that, despite my height, I looked younger than I actually was. “Yes. Emerson.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Journalism.” When it became apparent there was little I could do with an English degree besides teach, I decided to put my desire to write behind a more practical endeavor. I could write my fiction stories on the side, and if I was successful, maybe one day I could leave the news world altogether.

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “I hope so.” Victoria thought it would be, anyway. Sometimes I wondered if I didn’t just follow in her footsteps for the sake of not being alone. My journalism plan wasn’t really mine—it was Victoria’s. But I loved to write more than anything else, and despite our ups and downs, I loved my best friend and sister. Where would I be without her? It made sense that we would continue down the same path.

  “Are you doubting your major? You can always change, you know. I started off in computer science. Switched sophomore year. Best thing I ever did.”

  The beam of headlights shone into the truck and I squinted over at Will as discreetly as I could. “No, I love to write. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

  “Then . . .”

  “You’re a little pushy, you know that?”

  He laughed, a pleasant, deep sound that echoed in the darkened car. “I’ve been told that before.”

  I sighed. “Maybe . . . I guess I’m not crazy about chasing after news stories. It sounds exciting—Victoria, my sister, is nuts about it. But I’m kind of a stay-in-the-background girl, you know? And I don’t know if I have enough guts to push for the best stories.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Excuse me?” What did he know about me?

  “Well, you had enough guts to manage to shake off that dirtbag back there. Maybe you’re not giving yourself enough credit.”

  “If I had enough guts, I would have been able to handle him on my own.”

  “Hey, asking for help sometimes takes more guts than going it alone.”

  I let the conversation drop. I didn’t want to search for compliments, search for something that wasn’t there.

  But there was a new thought—asking for help took guts. I must be one gutsy girl then, because I basically lived the last quarter of my life on charity.

  I closed my eyes. I had to stop this. Rachel, my current therapist, said so, and I said so. I was not charity to the Bennetts. Maybe at first, but not anymore. I was family.

  I pointed to the next drive. “Right there. The big yellow one.”

  He pulled into the drive and I gathered my purse. “Thank you so much. For everything.” I opened the door and the interior light of the truck shone on us, making me feel more exposed than before.

  “My pleasure. I’m glad I could help. Maybe I’ll see you around again sometime?”

  I smiled, glad for the millionth time that Mom and Dad had invested in my teeth. “Yeah, I’d like that.” I closed the door and walked around the truck but turned at the sound of Will’s voice.

  “Hey, just thinking . . . I might not see you around sometime unless we plan a sometime. You think you want to plan a sometime?”

  My heart beat faster. Was this just some damsel-in-distress draw for him and some knight-in-shining-armor draw for me? More than likely, he would eventually be disappointed. Maybe I would, too. There was definitely something . . . different about him. He was kind, no doubt. But there was this confidence or control he had about him that unnerved me. Why, though? Because I didn’t possess it or because I felt it was there, hiding something unseen?

  I blew out a long breath. Anthony had rattled me, that was all. The ten minutes in the car had been innocent enough. And he was obviously a good guy—going out of his way to make women feel comfortable where he worked, a devoted student, and definitely not bad to look at. What was the harm?

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  I laughed. “Yeah.”

  He reached in the console, tore off a piece of notebook paper and searched for a pen. “What’s your number?”

  I gave it to him and thanked him again, watched as he drove off, an unexpected angel in a beat-up Ford.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I remember the dear little “Pickwick Portfolio” of twenty years ago, and the spirit of an editor stirs within me.

  ~ LMA

  Taylor

  I CLEARED MY THROAT as I entered Victoria’s room. My sister sat on the bed, her Dell laptop on her crossed legs, fingers flying over the keys. She didn’t look up. I swear, she could write in the middle of a hurricane with debris and livestock flying around her.

  I cleared my throat again.

  She blinked and glanced at me, her mind still tangled in the words on her screen. She came back to reality slowly—she always did. “Taylor . . . hey. How did it go?” She closed her laptop, scooted to the end of her flowered bedspread.

  “The date part? Horrible.”

  She groaned. “You didn’t like him?”

  I quickly recapped the events of the night, and by the end, she had fallen back on her bed, her long arms spread out behind her, a faraway look in her eyes. “Oh, you have all the luck!”

  I lowered myself to her bed. “Luck? I was scared. I think it could have turned ugly.”

  “But it didn’t. Someone was watching over you.”

  “I—I suppose. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  She scooped it up. “Oops, sorry. I meant to charge it earlier. Lost track of time.”

  For the hundredth time I tried not to envy her ability to turn off the real world and enter the world of a story.

  “You could have called the house, you know.”

  “I know. I just . . . I didn’t want Mom to know.” It didn’t matter how much my parents did for me, it seemed I
would forever be trying to ensure I wasn’t inconveniencing them in some way, making sure my debt didn’t go deeper. I didn’t want Mom and Dad to ever regret all they’d done for me.

  “So . . . is he cute? This Will guy?”

  “He’s—” I let a breath of air pass my lips and a smile crack my mouth—“really cute. He seems like a gentleman, too. Studying engineering at Tufts, a manager at Main Streets . . . I guess we’ll see if he calls.”

  “He’ll call.” Victoria grew pensive, staring into space. “I’m sorry about Anthony. If I’d realized . . .”

  I waved my hand through the air. “It all worked out.”

  “Yeah, but if anything happened to you . . .”

  We’d had some rough months the first couple of years I came to live with the Bennetts. There was no question in my mind that Victoria would always be my best friend, but I think it was sometimes still hard for her to fully share her parents with me. She’d been an only child. To gain a sister so suddenly wasn’t easy.

  But we’d made it through. Mostly because we didn’t have a choice. In many ways, like real sisters, we were stuck together whether we liked it or not.

  I never did tell her that I found her letter to Louisa, that I’d seen additional letters since at the Alcott burial ground but, although my curiosity tempted me, had never ventured to open more.

  “I’m glad it all turned out right. I never would have forgiven myself.”

  I didn’t like this fear, the wild look that came into her eyes. I knew her imagination was getting the better of her, as it always did.

  I placed my hand on her arm. “I’m fine. It’s all okay, right?”

  She sniffed, and her eyes cleared. “Yeah. Thank God.”

  I wiggled out of my sandals and tucked my legs under me. “Do you think there really is a God?” I couldn’t help but think about my bathroom prayer, the answer in the most unlikely of places—on the back of a restroom door, the angel it had brought forth.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “Why are you so sure?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know . . . I think it’s some sort of inherent knowing within me. Like God’s the One who gave me this creative desire to write, you know?”

  I nodded. I’d never thought of it that way.

  “I haven’t really thought about Him much deeper than that, though,” she said. “But I always remember how Louisa called Him a ‘friend’ in Little Women. That stuck with me.”

  We sat silent for a minute, and it wasn’t uncomfortable. After all these years, there was in fact no one I felt more comfortable to sit in silence with.

  She suddenly nudged me with her foot. “Impromptu Pickwick meeting?”

  I grinned. “Sure.” We hadn’t given up our regular Pickwick meetings since that day at Orchard House. We’d grown both in age and as writers, and so our meetings grew with us. They weren’t always tranquil, either. Constructive criticism—and sometimes not-so-constructive—wasn’t easy to take from your sister. But beneath one another’s encouragement and critique, we not only grew thick skin, we became better writers. I trusted Victoria with my words, and I knew she felt the same way with me.

  She handed over her laptop and a chill raced down my spine at the quote heading the first page.

  A time will come when you will find that in gaining a brief joy you have lost your peace forever.

  A Long Fatal Love Chase, Louisa May Alcott

  I scrolled to the next page, the start of her story. I savored the words, dark against the white screen. They breathed life into new characters, and I hadn’t even moved to the next page when I realized what Victoria had done with one of Alcott’s lesser-known stories. My friend’s writing was nothing short of brilliant, the characters she drew with words and sentences leaping off the page.

  When I finished the chapter, I stared at the screen. “It’s magnificent.”

  “You really think so?”

  “A modern retelling of Louisa’s most recently discovered story? Absolutely.” Alcott had written A Long Fatal Love Chase in 1866 after a trip to Europe, but it was considered too audacious for a nineteenth-century readership and wasn’t published until 1995, the very same year Victoria and I had attended Jo March Writing Camp. We’d gobbled up the story, even as we found it impossible that it was composed by the same woman who’d written of four sisters with their castles in the air and Pickwick meetings and boy next door.

  “The good?” she asked. This was our routine, right to the point. Encouragement. Critique. Encouragement.

  “Your modern-day Rosamond—Charlotte—she’s perfect. I love her already and understand why she’s drawn to Blaze.”

  “The bad?”

  “I think if you tied in a little more of her background, we’d feel even more for her. Other than that, wow.”

  I set down her laptop and she hugged me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  “I’m excited to read the rest.”

  “I find it hard to believe you’re not sick of my Alcott obsession yet. I don’t know why I can’t seem to let her go.”

  “She lived and breathed in this very town. She impacted so many young girls—still does today. I don’t think it’s weird that you’re drawn to her. That we’re drawn to her. Maybe there’s a reason.”

  What I didn’t say was that of course Victoria was drawn to her—she had created a sort of god in her mind with not only her obsession, but her letters and secrets spilled out to a woman who had been dead for more than one hundred years. I didn’t think it was healthy—and yet there was no way of admitting how I knew without revealing my own transgression at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery that long-ago day. And healthy . . . who was I to claim to know anything about mental health? My own tattered copy of Little Women still sat prominently on the top shelf of my nightstand, my one connection to the mother who didn’t want me. The mother I couldn’t seem to release despite Lorraine’s tangible care and love.

  “Thanks, Taylor. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  I winked at her. “Lucky for you you’ll never have to find out. If you didn’t notice, you’re kind of stuck with me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “How’s your story coming?”

  I scrunched my face. “I’ve been busy working . . .” I worked with the kids at the summer recreational program. It wasn’t my first choice for a job, but between that and my weekend work scooping ice cream at Bedford Farms, I had saved up a good amount of money. While I could never pay the Bennetts back for all they’d done for me, I could at least ensure that I got a good start once I was out of college. That the time and money and efforts and love they poured into me didn’t go to waste.

  “Come on, Taylor. I can’t do this without you. We said we’d both finish a book this summer. What’s your word count so far?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Does the title page count toward that?”

  “Taylor Lynn . . .”

  “Okay, okay. I haven’t written anything.”

  “Pickwick meeting tomorrow night. You’re supposed to have twenty-five hundred words for me.”

  “Do you ever think you might take this stuff too seriously?” My words were met with an expression of stone. “Guess not,” I breathed.

  She threw a pillow at me.

  “I’m waking up at 5 a.m. tomorrow. Getting it all done before my shift at Bedford. I’ll have those words for you—though I’m not promising they’ll be great.”

  I didn’t want her to expect too much. I didn’t want to expect too much. Her words had always been better, more prolific. And from the moment she won the Orchard House short story contest for youth at the age of fourteen, I’d always known that nothing I came up with would be half as brilliant as what she put on the page.

  “You better start praying for another angel,” she said as I headed down the hall to my own room.

  I grinned back at her, but her words lingered as I went into my room and closed the door. Thoughts of Anthony, then the sign on the back of the Mai
n Streets restroom door, then Will, fluttered in and out of my head.

  An angel.

  Could there be a story there?

  The next morning after I’d squeezed out a thousand words, I heard tension in Mom’s voice as I came down the stairs, so I huddled against the wall, not wanting to interrupt the conversation.

  It only took a minute of eavesdropping to know they argued over me.

  “You shouldn’t have set her up with him, then.” Mom’s matter-of-fact voice.

  “I didn’t know he was an idiot, Mom. Besides, Taylor’s a big girl. She took care of herself.” Victoria’s defensive one.

  “All I’m saying is it wouldn’t hurt you to think a little bit about your sister once in a while. She doesn’t make friends as—”

  “I cannot believe this.” Something slapped—almost as if Victoria had raised her hands up, then let them fall against her legs. “She’s nineteen. Why do you always treat her like she needs protecting? If I didn’t know better, I’d have a hard time guessing who your real daughter was.”

  She stomped out of the kitchen, practically ran into me. Rolled her eyes and let out a long breath, shook her head, and continued up the stairs.

  I stood at the threshold of the kitchen, staring at Lorraine. “I’m sorry,” I said, not even exactly sure what I was apologizing for. For existing, maybe?

  Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “You are both my real daughters. She didn’t mean that.”

  I pressed my lips together, nodded. I knew she didn’t. At least, I thought I knew.

  Lorraine came over to me, placed a kiss on my cheek. I realized then how I’d stopped flinching over her touch long ago, how I welcomed these moments, even. “Pancakes?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  Will did call. We went out and had a great time. Then he called again. And again. I skipped one Pickwick meeting, then another. I stopped writing.

  Something else happened, too: Lorraine started pulling away from me. It was so gradual, I thought at first I was imagining it—a subtle shift in the foundation of our relationship. It was little things—like a petering out of morning hugs, a coffee date with Victoria that I hadn’t been included in.