The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  She stopped outside a café called Cozy Coffee. There was a busy ice cream shop to her right, a store offering canoe rentals and fishing lessons to her left, and nobody was paying any attention to her except a golden retriever watching from a shady spot beneath a bench. There had probably been hip coffee shops and trendy food stores in town when she was a child, but she had certainly never gone into them. If she had, she would have been shooed out as soon as the shopkeepers saw her handmade clothes and muddy shoes. She could still hear the whispers: It’s the Lovegood girl, poor little thing. Why doesn’t her mother watch her properly?

  She wasn’t wearing a patched skirt and ill-fitting hand-me-down boots now. She had as much right to be here as anybody. When she had asked for the car keys and made up an excuse about wanting a Wi-Fi connection, Verity had only laughed and said, “I’m surprised it’s taken you this long. This has to be a different pace of life than what you’re used to.” She had handed over the keys without question, and all the way into town, guilt had gnawed at Sorrow’s insides. She hadn’t lied. But she hadn’t been entirely honest either.

  She pulled open the café door and stepped inside. It was a small place, decorated with bright patches of blue and yellow, and only about half of the dozen mismatched tables were occupied. There were a few people working on laptops, two women chatting while babies slumbered in strollers, an old man paging through a newspaper, and Julie Abrams.

  Julie sat alone at a small table by the window. The pink streaks were gone from her hair, and her face was more angular than Sorrow remembered, making her look years older than twenty-four. Her hands were resting on the keyboard of her laptop, but she was staring out the window rather than looking at the screen. What struck Sorrow most of all was how thin she was: arms like sticks, collarbone jutting like blades, the kind of thin that would have Sonia remarking how unhealthy she looked and Andi scolding her for being judgmental of somebody else’s body.

  Sorrow stepped up to the counter to order some iced tea. While it was being made, she kept glancing over her shoulder, afraid Julie would see her and slip away. Sorrow had found out—by asking Kavita, who had asked Mahesh, who had asked his girlfriend, who worked at the café—that most afternoons Julie could be found here with her computer. Filling out job applications, apparently, which seemed to Sorrow the kind of thing that shouldn’t have been anybody’s business, but this was Abrams Valley, and Julie was an Abrams. People had noticed that she wasn’t working. They definitely noticed when she fled her parents’ house every day.

  Tea in hand, Sorrow approached Julie’s corner table.

  “Julie?” she said.

  Julie started and looked up. Her eyes widened, and she slid her headphones off.

  “Um, hi,” Sorrow said. “I’m—”

  “You’re Sorrow.”

  “Yeah.” She had considered and practiced a dozen smooth introductions on her drive into town, but none of them felt right now that she was standing here. There was only one way to start. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I guess,” Julie said warily.

  “You were her friend, weren’t you?” Sorrow said. She put a hand on the back of the chair opposite Julie, gripped it nervously to steady herself. “You and Patience were friends.”

  Julie studied her, and as the silence stretched Sorrow grew certain she was going to deny it. She was going to scowl, say she had no idea what Sorrow was talking about, say she would never be friends with a Lovegood girl, demand that Sorrow leave her alone, and she would say it loudly enough that heads would turn throughout the little café, and Sorrow would slink away in embarrassment, and her memory of that gray day in the orchard would be only that, a memory, not a key, not a door, not an answer.

  Then Julie said, “Yeah. We were. For a little while.”

  It wasn’t an invitation, but Sorrow pulled out the chair and sat down. She jostled the table with her knee, grabbed the edge to keep it from rocking. “But you kept it secret, right? I didn’t know until that day. When we saw you in the orchard.”

  Julie didn’t ask what day she meant. “We didn’t hang out for very long. Just those few months when I wasn’t at school. Why?”

  “I was just wondering—”

  Sorrow’s voice cracked; she took a sip of tea. Her face was growing warm, and the longer Julie looked at her with those suspicious blue eyes, the worse she felt. She had been hoping that when she mentioned Patience, Julie would smile, she would open up to her, she would offer to talk, to remember. But Julie was leaning away from her and she was twisting the cord of her headphones in her fingers, and maybe Sorrow had gotten it all wrong. She had only that one memory, a cold day in the orchard, a single fraught conversation clipped from the end of a friendship she hadn’t even known existed before that moment.

  She set her cup down, caught a drop of condensation with her fingertip.

  “I just want to talk to somebody who remembers what happened.”

  There was a pause. Then Julie said, quietly, “Everybody remembers what happened to her.”

  “I mean, not—that’s not what I mean,” Sorrow said, but when she looked up, Julie’s expression was softer, more considering than suspicious. “I mean somebody who knew her. Who liked her. She didn’t have many friends.”

  Julie took a breath, let it out. “Yeah, she mostly kept to herself, didn’t she?”

  Not by choice, Sorrow thought, but she didn’t want to interrupt.

  “And it didn’t help that she was kinda weird—sorry.” A smile quirked Julie’s lips. “But you know she was.”

  “I know.” Sorrow’s heart was thudding. “It runs in the family.”

  “I liked that. I did like her. She was different. She was fun.” Julie picked up her cup, set it down again when she saw it was empty. “But yeah, we kept it secret. I was petrified my parents would find out.”

  Tell me about the night she died. The words were right there, hammering at the front of Sorrow’s thoughts. Tell me why your sister thinks Patience started the fire. She held them back. Ethan had denied it, had made a good case for why it wasn’t true, but Sorrow couldn’t get past the echo of Cassie’s words going around and around in her mind, compounded with every turn by the force of Cassie’s bitterness, the venom in her voice when she’d realized who Sorrow was. Nobody said something like that without a reason, and being a jerk out of the blue to somebody you didn’t even know wasn’t a reason.

  “Can I ask—how did you even become friends?” Sorrow asked. “With our families so . . . you know.”

  Julie didn’t answer right away, but her expression was thoughtful now, not guarded. “I guess the first time I actually talked to her, it was just random chance. I was home that winter—the school counselors decided I needed a break—but I hated being cooped up in the house all the time, so I spent a lot of time outside. Just walking around and stuff.” Julie turned toward the window, and the look in her eyes was unfocused, distant. “I was on the trail up to Lily Lake when I realized there was somebody behind me. It was the middle of winter, so there weren’t many hikers. . . . Do you mind hearing this? It doesn’t bother you?”

  “No, it’s fine,” Sorrow said quickly. “Really. I want to know.”

  Another shrug of those razor-thin shoulders. “She told me I looked sad,” Julie said.

  You do, Sorrow thought. She dropped her gaze to the table, where Julie was fidgeting with her headphones cable. Her fingers were childlike and small, her wrists bony, and Sorrow had the sudden urge to reach out and still her nervous motions.

  “About the last thing I wanted to do was talk to the creepy Lovegood girl who was following me in the woods, but . . .” Julie lifted a hand to tuck a strand of pale hair behind her ear. Sorrow watched the motion without thinking, looked away quickly when she met Julie’s eyes. “She just sort of walked beside me for a while, telling me about how she always came out to the woods when she was feeling sad, because she liked to think that the . . . she felt like the trees and the mountains and, I don’t kno
w, the rocks or whatever, they would listen to everything she said even if she didn’t say it out loud.”

  Listen, Patience had said, pressing her hands to the granite in the caves by Peddler’s Creek. Listen, and Sorrow had tried, oh, how she had tried, but all she’d heard was the moan of wind through the trees.

  “I knew it was just, you know.” Julie smiled. “Lovegood weirdness. But it made me feel better. I guess we became friends after that. But it was, I don’t know. We didn’t have much in common except wanting to get out of Abrams Valley.”

  Sorrow felt something pull inside her chest, a dense knot that was part jealousy, part yearning.

  Julie wasn’t looking at her. “All we ever talked about was how much fun it would be to, like, take a road trip across the country, to see the ocean, travel. Go to California or England or Japan or whatever. You know, the stupid things people dream about when they’re stuck in a town like this.”

  Sorrow had never known Patience wanted to travel. She had never known what Patience wanted at all beyond the small things that had defined their lives: warm weather and rich harvests, good days for their mother and smiles from their grandmother, the chance to go to town, the possibility of going to school. The girl Julie was describing might have been a stranger, and a stranger she would always remain. Even if every memory came back, Sorrow wouldn’t ever remember this Patience, sharing troubles and planning an escape and looking to the future. Sorrow had been eight years old, a tagalong little sister, and Patience had kept her dreams secret.

  “I’m glad she had a friend,” Sorrow said weakly. She didn’t know what else to say.

  “It’s not like we ever could have done any of it,” Julie said, but her voice was different now. Gone was the quiet warmth, the gentle sadness. She sounded, if anything, angry, and the change sent a chill through Sorrow. “Can you even imagine? Our moms would have flipped the fuck out. I don’t know what the hell happened between them way back when, but even when I was fifteen I wasn’t dumb enough to risk dredging that all up again.”

  Sorrow’s stomach dropped. “What do you mean, what happened between them?”

  “That’s what I don’t know,” Julie said. “Whatever it was, it was before I was born.”

  “No, I mean—” Sorrow shook her head, trying to settle her buzzing thoughts. “Are you talking about something besides the usual family stuff?”

  Julie tilted her head. “You know they used to be friends. Your mom and mine.”

  “What?” A man working at the nearest table looked up with a scowl. Sorrow lowered her voice. “No, they didn’t. That’s not—”

  Verity used to say, when she warned them away from the neighbors: friendship with the Abramses would only lead to heartache. More than trouble. More than police at the door, social workers in the kitchen, whispers around town. Heartache. It hadn’t meant anything to Sorrow as a child, that painfully intimate characterization of consequences. Their lives were a spiderweb of rules, guidelines they had cobbled together to avoid upsetting their mother, and Sorrow had never tried to tease out the reasons behind any particular tender spot. Don’t talk to the Abramses. Don’t make friends with the Abrams girls. Heartache.

  “Are you sure?” Sorrow asked. “I mean, I’m not saying you’re . . . I have never heard that before in my life.”

  “I don’t think most people know. I only found out because I found a picture of them together,” Julie said.

  Sorrow stared. “No way.”

  “Yeah. When I was a kid,” Julie said. “I was playing dress-up with my mom’s old things in the attic, and there were all these old boxes of pictures from my dad’s uncle. And there was your mom and mine. Like, forever ago. Back in the eighties or nineties.”

  Sorrow’s head was spinning. Julie wasn’t lying; she didn’t have any reason to lie. Sorrow took a sip of tea, took a breath, but she couldn’t seem to get enough air. Her voice was high and strained. “Did you ask her about it?”

  Julie rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, but she yelled at me and told me it was none of my business. So I asked Aunt Jody—Ethan’s mom—since she’s kind of an outsider and not stuck in the middle of the whole family thing, but I guess it was before she met Uncle Dean. She didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Did you—did Patience know?” Sorrow asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Julie said. She snapped her laptop closed and wound the cable around her headphones. “It was ancient history even then. We only ever talked about getting away from our families. Look, I’ve got to get going.”

  It stung, to hear again how much Patience had been looking outward, and how little Sorrow had noticed, but she couldn’t think about that now, and she couldn’t be distracted by Verity and Hannah. Julie was packing up her stuff to leave, and Sorrow hadn’t asked her what she had come to ask.

  “Can I ask you something else?” she said.

  Julie hauled her bag onto her lap to slide the computer in. “What is it?”

  “I, uh, talked to Cassie the other day.”

  Julie looked up. “You did? Why? What did she say?”

  It was much more of a reaction than Sorrow had been expecting: Julie spat the words so sharp and fast Sorrow leaned back, startled by her vehemence.

  “She, uh, she said . . .” Sorrow couldn’t remember how she had decided to ask. Everything she had practiced had vanished into a blank space in her mind. “She said it was Patience.”

  “What was?”

  “The fires,” Sorrow said. “She said Patience started the fires.”

  Julie stared, unblinking, for a long moment. “She didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, she—”

  “She wouldn’t say that.” Julie was a flurry of noise and motion, shoving her headphones into her bag, winding up her computer’s power cable. “You must have misunderstood her.”

  “I didn’t misunderstand. I didn’t—”

  “Why were you even talking to her about that? Why would you even ask?”

  “I didn’t ask!” Sorrow said, her voice rising with frustration. “I didn’t bring it up! She did. She said—”

  “Is that the whole reason you came to find me?” Julie asked. She stood up so quickly she jarred the table, and Sorrow’s iced tea sloshed from her cup. “Pretending to bond just so you could ask that?”

  Sorrow’s face burned with shame. She couldn’t meet Julie’s eyes, but she had to ask. She had to say the words before Julie stormed away.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “Is that what people think?”

  “No,” Julie said. “Nobody thinks that. Cassie doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Then why would she say it?”

  The café door opened and a group of men in cycling clothes came in, and the small space was filled with the sound of their voices, laughter, their bike shoes clicking noisily over the floor. Sorrow turned to watch them, then looked up at Julie.

  “What happened to Patience . . .” Julie sighed, and it was as though all the anger drained out of her. “It was an accident. A sad, awful accident. Why do you want to bring it all up now? It’s only going to hurt people.”

  Tears of embarrassment stung Sorrow’s eyes.

  “You should focus on remembering her when she was alive. Remember the good things.”

  There was a protest lodged in Sorrow’s throat, but she couldn’t find the courage to say I’m trying. That’s why I’m asking. I’m trying to remember. It didn’t do any good. Everything she remembered, everything she asked, only led to more questions, and it was getting harder and harder to know what the good things were, when so much of her childhood had been a minefield of words they did not say, questions they did not voice, secrets they did not share.

  “The rest of it doesn’t matter,” Julie said. “I have to go.”

  She left without looking back.

  18

  THE DAY OF the 253rd anniversary of the Battle of Ebenezer Smith’s Stockade was hot and bright and clear. The air smelled of sunscreen and fri
ed food, apple cider and cut grass, and the occasional whiff of a thru-hiker who had been too long without a shower. Along Main and Champlain Streets tourists and locals alike wandered among the farm stands and food tents, and everywhere there were kegs and bottles of Abrams Valley cider.

  “Okay,” Kavita said. “You’re going to have to explain the significance of this day in a way that makes sense to somebody who didn’t grow up in this weird little town.”

  Sorrow was standing near the edge of the park with Kavita, Mahesh, and Ethan. She hadn’t planned on coming into town for the festival, but when Kavita and Mahesh had shown up that morning to invite her, she hadn’t been able to think of a good reason to say no.

  “It’s not that weird,” Ethan said.

  “I hate to break it to you,” Kavita said, “but it is. This entire town is obsessed with the history of two families, to the point where I swear people are on the verge of asking me what side I’m on. It’s weird and creepy and kinda backward.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think it’s weird too,” Sorrow offered. “And if you’re expecting real historical significance, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  Eager parents were setting up folding chairs and spreading picnic blankets around the plywood stage while a couple of frazzled-looking women tried to wrangle excitable five-year-olds into formation. Sorrow kept looking around, casting uneasy glances over faces near and far, but she didn’t see Julie or Cassie Abrams anywhere. She didn’t even know what she would do if she did. Pretend she hadn’t? Look the other way? She didn’t particularly want to see Cassie again, but she didn’t like the way her conversation with Julie had ended the day before. She couldn’t stop thinking about what she could have said, how she could have been more honest, more open about wanting to know about the fire, yes, but also how desperately she just wanted to talk about Patience. To say her name and not flinch from it. To sit with somebody who had liked her. She could have said that. She thought Julie might have understood, if only Sorrow had tried.