The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  Sorrow glanced into the nest as they passed: empty.

  Verity said, “It turns out it’s more trouble than it’s worth to pay somebody to haul something like that away.”

  “It’s been here forever anyway,” Sorrow said. “It gives the meadow character.”

  “It was my father’s. He got it from his father when it was already a classic—did I ever tell you about them?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sorrow said. Verity’s father had died when she was only a child. He was buried in the family graveyard, but Sorrow didn’t know much more about him than his name, which had always stood out from the eccentric but thoroughly New England Lovegood names. “His name was . . . Anton? Where was he from again?”

  “Close,” Verity said, smiling. “Antanas. And he was born in upstate New York, but his family was Lithuanian. His parents came over after World War Two. That truck, it was the first real American thing they bought, their first big purchase, after they’d been working long enough to save up some money. My grandfather was absolutely meticulous about maintaining it. He gave it to my father for his eighteenth birthday, and it ran perfectly for another fifteen years until the day my grandfather died. According to my father, he was driving in from the orchard when the truck stopped and wouldn’t start again, and he knew right away what that meant.”

  Sorrow looked back at the truck, a ruddy fossil in a rich green field. “I didn’t know any of that.”

  “I wish I knew more about his family,” Verity admitted. “I was only six when he died. Pancreatic cancer. It happened so fast we barely knew he was sick before he was gone. But I remember how much he loved that truck. And I remember . . .” Verity laughed a little, shaking her head. “He used to sing these old songs. I couldn’t understand a word of them, but he had a lovely voice.”

  Verity’s father and his family had never featured in any of the stories she’d told when Sorrow was a child. Verity had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Lovegoods, so extensive and detailed it had always made Sorrow’s head spin to learn new pieces of it, but the more distant branches of their family tree had never gotten as much attention. She had always assumed it was because the Lovegoods were more important than everybody else. She hadn’t realized until she moved away how thoroughly her mother’s one-sided interest had skewed what she knew.

  Past the truck, around the field, to the edge of the orchard. Steps Sorrow had walked a thousand times, barefoot and in stomping winter boots, in sunshine and rain and snow, sometimes skipping, sometimes dawdling, often with no particular destination in mind. The orchard had never been a place that invited hurry. It moved at the pace of the seasons, the change of the weather, the slow orbit of the earth. Their apple trees were the oldest in all of Abrams Valley. They weren’t as bountiful as they had once been, but they still blossomed pink and white when the weather warmed, and in the fall Verity hired people from town for the harvest. The Abrams Valley variety was an old-fashioned apple: small and sour and hard, too bitter to eat, good only for cider.

  It should be called the Lovegood variety. That was what Verity used to say, and Sorrow had always bobbed her head in agreement. The Abrams family had the town and the whole valley, with an Abrams Street and an Abrams House, a plaque on a church about its founding minister, Clement Abrams, and another in the park commemorating the day the town name had been officially changed from Cold Hollow. The Abrams name was stamped all over everything, touching every part of the valley. There was no reason for them to claim the apples too. The Lovegoods had been first to the valley, first to plant an orchard. The apples were rightfully theirs.

  The scent of apples lingered even now. Sorrow tasted the air as they walked, their footsteps crunching softly on the dirt road, morning sun warm on their shoulders.

  Sorrow was quiet for a minute, then said, “I think I saw one of the Abrams girls outside last night.”

  “Here?” Verity looked around, as though she expected an Abrams to leap from the trees. “In the orchard?”

  “No, on the road, when I was calling Dad. I couldn’t tell who it was. Are both of them living at home now?”

  “They are. Cassie’s back for the summer from that prep school of hers, and Julie finally managed to finish college at UVM.”

  “Finally?”

  “She transferred out of a couple schools before she stuck with one.”

  “That sucks for her.”

  Verity raised her eyebrows. “Those girls have been given every opportunity, and more chances than most people get, and all they do is throw them away.”

  Sorrow slanted a glance toward her. “Didn’t you just tell Ethan to throw away those same opportunities and make his own way?”

  “That’s different,” Verity said. “He’s more like us than he is like them.”

  Sorrow started to reply, stopped herself. She didn’t like the judgmental tone in her mother’s voice, the us and them and lines between traced in the air with an electric crackle. Eight years in Miami had shown her there was a much bigger spectrum of rich to poor than existed in Abrams Valley, and probably in the whole of Vermont. There were a lot of people in the world with problems bigger than anything the Abrams and Lovegood families could imagine. Sonia’s parents hadn’t even been able to stay in their own country, much less own and farm the same valuable parcel of land for twelve generations.

  But she didn’t know if she was allowed to say that. For all that this road was familiar to her feet, these trees in summer as comforting to her as an old blanket, she couldn’t shake the feeling of being the stranger here, a visitor who hadn’t quite learned all of the rules.

  The Lovegood family cemetery was on the west side of the orchard, in a deep hollow at the bottom of a hill, far from the house and road. A little farther on was the property line, and beyond that a nature preserve popular with hikers and fishermen. The preserve had once been Lovegood land, long before Sorrow was born, but her great-grandmother Devotion had donated it to a public trust to keep the Abramses from getting their hands on it.

  There were no big monuments in the Lovegood cemetery, no crosses, no stone angels on marble bases. The headstones were plain white rectangles: chips of marble, names and dates, nothing else. No words identified the interred as beloved mothers or fathers, cherished sisters or brothers. Verity used to say they didn’t need words carved in stone to remind them where their family had come from.

  What they had instead were the ash trees.

  When a member of the Lovegood family died, before the earth had settled into a solemn depression over their body, before the mourners had walked the path back to the house, an ash sapling was planted over their grave. There was one for every person buried in the cemetery. Their family was old, but most generations had only one or two daughters, few had any sons, and many had died young. But there were trees enough to form an impressive grove, and their branches wove together in an arched canopy, and sunlight through the gaps cast a dappled pattern on the ground.

  The oldest and grandest ash belonged to Rejoice Lovegood, their ancestor who had first planted the orchard. She had died in 1790, but there was no birth date on her gravestone, because nobody knew when she had been born. She had come to Vermont alone, before it was Vermont, a young woman without a family. Nobody knew where she had come from or what her name had been before she chose Lovegood for herself. She had eventually met and married a French trapper, but the women in their family never took their husbands’ names.

  Sorrow hadn’t known that was unusual until Mrs. Roche, their neighbor down the road, had told her most families used their father’s name, not their mother’s. Mrs. Roche hadn’t exactly said the Lovegoods were weird for doing it the wrong way around, but Sorrow had known she was thinking it. Mrs. Roche carried everything she was thinking in the climbing arches of her drawn-on eyebrows, and they climbed extra high, with more than the usual amount of arch, when she was disapproving of Sorrow’s family.

  Beyond the gray lines of the split-rail fence, splashes of yellow in the
green revealed themselves to be plastic strips tied around the trunks of the ashes, and in a few high branches, dangling from ropes, were bright purple squares.

  “What’s all that stuff?” Sorrow asked.

  “Some forestry students put them up,” Verity said.

  “Are the trees sick?”

  “Not yet,” Verity said. “They’re trying to keep this bug called the emerald ash borer from getting established in Vermont, so they’re teaching people how to recognize ash trees and look for the signs. I guess the bugs are attracted to purple, and the traps are supposed to catch them.”

  “Have they?” Sorrow looked up and down the trunks of the ashes, searching for signs of disease, infestation, rot. The trees were strong and healthy, as far as she could tell; a leaf she plucked from a low branch was soft and supple. But she didn’t know what to look for, and so much of what could go wrong with trees wasn’t visible from the outside.

  “The beetles aren’t here yet, if that’s what you mean. You look like you expect one to crawl down your neck any second now.”

  Sorrow rolled her shoulders to relax. “I didn’t know that was a thing you had to worry about. In Florida they’ve got this little bug called the psyllid that causes citrus greening, and it’s killing orange trees all over. It’s not the bugs that kill the trees, actually. It’s a bacteria they carry. It does something to . . .” She trailed off. “It’s really bad. I wrote a paper about it for my environmental science class.”

  Still Verity said nothing, and Sorrow’s questions about the ash trees faltered in the silence. Dad and Sonia had seized on Sorrow’s interest in biology and ecology with a fervor that embarrassed her, especially after she’d realized—with help from Dr. Silva—that they were only desperate for her to show some spark of academic inclination because that was the only way they knew how to relate to a teenage daughter. Thanks to Andi, with her valedictorian GPA and college applications and extracurriculars, the rubric their parents had for assessing how their daughters were doing was one on which Sorrow was never going to tick very many boxes.

  She thought Verity might understand that, if she explained. Verity, who had never quite fit into what the world expected her to be, living according to the weather and seasons, measuring accomplishments in harvests and planting, she would be unimpressed by Dad and Sonia trying to fit Sorrow into a mold that hadn’t been made for her.

  But Verity didn’t ask. She didn’t seem to have noticed that Sorrow had spoken at all.

  When they reached the corner of the cemetery fence, Sorrow kicked at a fallen rail before stepping over.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t taken this whole thing down.” The fence post wobbled ominously when she nudged it. As a child she had walked the entire length of the cemetery fence as a balance beam, but barely half of it was still standing. “I think if I sneezed on it the whole thing would fall over.”

  She glanced back. Verity had stopped on the outside of the fence.

  “Are you . . . ?” Sorrow gestured with the bouquet of flowers.

  Verity looked at her, then looked into the orchard, away from the gravestones, away from the ash trees, and said nothing.

  Sorrow waited, waited, stared and waited for an uncomfortably long time before she realized, in a crush of embarrassment, that Verity had no intention of crossing the fence.

  Her face grew hot. Verity wasn’t even looking at her. “I, uh. Okay. I’ll just . . . Okay.”

  Sorrow left Verity at the fence and walked alone through the cemetery. The grass was long and untrimmed, and tangles of weeds choked each headstone, dotted here and there with plastic bags and scraps of trash. Every piece of rubbish she spotted tightened a knot in her throat. It wasn’t supposed to look like this. It never had before. She used to play out here, climbing the trees and walking the fence. On summer nights they would come out as a family, all four of them, spread a blanket on the ground and look up at the stars. It wasn’t right that Verity had neglected the graveyard, not when she was putting so much effort into cleaning up the rest of the property.

  Sorrow’s steps slowed as she reached the far corner.

  She hadn’t known, before that moment, how fast an ash tree could grow. The ashes of the cemetery were tall and sturdy, towering so high she had to crane her head back to glimpse their crowns, but the youngest ash had been a sapling when she last saw it, a whip of soft wood in a burlap sack of dirt. In her mind that was the way it had remained. But Patience’s tree was well over ten feet tall now, tall enough that Sorrow had no proper scale for estimating its height. A single-story bungalow in a Miami suburb? A swaying palm in a postage-stamp yard? She looked up and up and she wondered—it hurt, to wonder, like a bee sting in her chest—if she would be taller than Patience now, as she was taller than Verity, herself sturdy and treelike where they had always been willowy and graceful.

  The headstone at the base of the tree looked like all the others. Patience Lovegood. A name and a pair of dates.

  Sorrow did the subtraction in her head, just in case—what? They wouldn’t have gotten the numbers wrong. Patience had been sixteen when she died. That was all anybody would learn of her from her headstone. Five years from now, ten, a hundred or more, that was all any stranger walking through this grove of cemetery trees would see, pausing on their way to search for invasive beetles or an overgrown trail or a minute of peace and quiet. That was all they would ever know. They wouldn’t know how Patience had smiled, how she had been so polite to people’s faces but so mocking behind their backs, how she had made her little sister laugh with her impressions and her jokes. How she had been fine one day, dead the next. How pink her nose would turn in the cold, that one fierce spot of color in a snow-pale face and a scattering of freckles. How she loved to race Sorrow through the orchard and never, ever let her win.

  There was a pressure growing in Sorrow’s chest, a lump sitting at the top of her lungs. The insect chorus around her rose and rose and blended and hummed. She carried Patience in her thoughts, memories of washed-out color, fading echoes, but it had always been from far away, surrounded by people who hadn’t known her, a landscape she had never walked. She remembered asking, long before Patience died, what happened to the dead when they were buried, and the softness in her mother’s voice when she described the dismantling of a body, the natural cycle of decay, particles that had once been flesh and blood turning into roots and leaves, and no way of knowing if the things that made a body a person were transformed as well. Thoughts into flowing sap. Love into bark as impenetrable as armor. She remembered how her mother had found it comforting, the inevitable end, the joining of one to all who had passed before.

  Patience hadn’t found the promise of a quiet end in the orchard comforting.

  The thought shivered over the surface of Sorrow’s mind like a breath of winter wind.

  They had come out here that day.

  She remembered now, so clearly she didn’t know how she could have forgotten.

  She and Patience had walked through the orchard on the day before Patience died. It had been cold, the muddy gray end of winter in Vermont, and in her mind that gray took on a shimmering quality, as though she were glimpsing it reflected in a pond. The cold hadn’t stopped them. It never did, not when they wanted to escape the oppressive silence their mother knit around the house on her bad days.

  Sorrow remembered standing in this very spot, which had then been empty, a blank space beside a grave, and asking Patience if this was where their grandmother would be buried when she died.

  She looked back. Verity was still waiting by the fence, and Sorrow felt a fleeting panic, that Patience wasn’t here to tell her what to say, what to do with their mother’s distance and her silence. They had once shared an elaborate sign language of expressions and gestures, a system for navigating the minefield of their mother’s moods, but Sorrow had lived eight years without Patience’s guidance, eight years in unfamiliar terrain, and she had never felt as lost as she did in that moment, looking across the n
eglected cemetery to Verity, with absolutely no idea what to do.

  She leaned over to set the bouquet beside Patience’s headstone. The flowers were already wilting in the heat.

  As she straightened up, a spot of yellow in the green caught her eye. Somebody had left a ring of small yellow flowers draped over the corner of the headstone, a crown made from a braid of soft green stems. The name came back to her: hop clover. It grew along roadsides, at the edge of the woods. It was the kind of small, insignificant flower anybody could pluck while wandering around. She glanced to where Verity was lingering outside the fence—but she knew it hadn’t been her mother, and Grandma would have left flowers from her own garden.

  She reached for the ring of flowers, tugged at it with two fingers. It snagged in the grass. She let it go. Patience’s life had been small, occupied by only a few people, but there was somebody outside their little family who remembered Patience, and missed her, and brought her flowers.

  Sorrow closed her eyes until the sting faded. She had no idea who it could be, and she felt the presence of that unknown visitor as a shadow behind her, faceless, soundless, a hole in the morning light.

  She left the braided clover on Patience’s grave, and she walked back through the cemetery grove to where Verity was waiting. She pressed her palm to the trunks of the ash trees as she passed. They were solid and rough and strong.

  10

  GREEN MOUNTAIN GEAR was located on Main Street between a boutique clothing store and a real estate office with pictures of log cabins and ski resort condos plastered in the front window. Directly across the street was the Abrams Valley Post Office—which, in keeping with the regulations of the federal government, was supposed to close every weekday at 5:00 p.m. The curtains were drawn, the door closed, the flag lowered from its pole.