The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  It wasn’t normal, to approach every conversation like that. That wasn’t how families were supposed to talk to each other. It was another thing Sorrow hadn’t understood until she moved away, until her father put her into therapy, until she met and spent time with Sonia’s family, who shouted out their concerns rather than burying them, who talked over everybody’s problems and faults and decisions ad nauseam. It had terrified her at first, the way Sonia would march over to her sister Lu’s house after Lu lost a job or had a bad breakup, demand she get up and get dressed and go out, growing louder and louder and refusing to back down, throwing open the curtains rather than drawing them, forcing out laughter rather than smothering Lu in whispers.

  Sorrow knew it wasn’t at all the same thing; a bad day wasn’t comparable to a chronic illness. But as a scared, grieving child in a strange place, all she had understood were raised voices where there should have been quiet, recklessness where there should have been caution, a noisy, stubborn defiance of every rule she had lived by in her mother’s house.

  The careful way she and Verity stepped around each other wasn’t how mothers and daughters were supposed to communicate. It certainly wasn’t how Andi spoke to Sonia; Andi always felt free to say whatever she wanted, even if she knew it would make Sonia angry or it wasn’t anything Sonia wanted to hear. There had been times when Sorrow had been frozen with anxiety about telling their parents about something—a bad grade on a test, a fight with friends, even a desire to stay home rather than go to the beach—and Andi would laugh at her, and then her laughter would pass and she would turn thoughtful, and finally she would help Sorrow figure out what to say.

  But Andi wasn’t here, and Sorrow wasn’t even sure she would help. She didn’t know how they were with each other now, after their phone call the other day. She didn’t know if she had ever told Andi enough about Verity for her to understand.

  She reached the corner of the house, but before walking around to the back she stopped, and she leaned against the wall beside the spigot and coiled-up hose, and for a moment she let the homesickness wash over her. She imagined turning around. Walking back to the end of the driveway. Calling Andi or Dad or Sonia and blubbering out that it had all been a mistake, that she shouldn’t have come back to Vermont, where nothing was like she had expected, where everybody knew her family but didn’t know a thing about her except her crazy mom and dead sister. Admitting that the only reason she had come back was because there was something wrong with her mind. Revealing the black spots in her memories where the past had rotted away. Telling them, through her tears, how desperately she had hoped that patching old wounds with stories and rumors would settle the jittery fear she had been carrying in her chest since that day in the Everglades, when she had realized she’d grown into the kind of person who couldn’t even remember important things about her own sister.

  Sorrow sighed and pushed away from the wall. She wasn’t going to leave, and she didn’t need to add her own blows to the embarrassment Cassie had already heaped on her today.

  She walked around to the back of the house. The light in the kitchen was on, casting squares of warm yellow through the window and screen door. Verity sat in one of the rocking chairs with a bundle of knitting on her lap.

  “There you are,” she said.

  Sorrow’s steps faltered. She had been hoping to offer a quick hello, did you have a nice day? and good night before escaping up to her room, but Verity sounded as though she had been waiting for Sorrow, and worrying, even though it wasn’t yet eight o’clock. She hadn’t asked Sorrow to be home by any particular time. She hadn’t asked her to call. Sorrow hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Here I am.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No, I had some stuff,” Sorrow said.

  “How was the festival?” Verity asked.

  Sorrow paused with her foot on the porch step. In the light from the house Verity’s face was half illuminated, half shadowed. Sorrow couldn’t tell if she was upset. She didn’t know how she was supposed to answer.

  “It was fine,” she said. “Kind of ridiculous, but also kind of funny. I guess it’s always like that.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Verity said.

  Sorrow crossed the porch, reached for the door, changed her mind. She settled into the other rocker instead. It was a warm, clear night with crickets singing all around and stars emerging from a velvet sky.

  She asked, “Grandma already go to bed?”

  “I think she’s reading.” Verity passed the bottle of hard cider to Sorrow.

  “You know I’m only sixteen, right? Which means I’m technically not supposed to be drinking this.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t,” Verity said. Then, after a pause, “It was hot today. It wears her out more than she likes to admit.”

  “Yeah,” Sorrow said.

  But immediately she wondered if she ought to have denied it, claimed she hadn’t noticed any signs of Grandma’s advanced age. She had been seeing, but not thinking much about, the way Grandma was slower to rise when she knelt in the garden, her longer breaks and earlier bedtimes, the way she sometimes ate so little at dinner it might have been a child’s portion. She was still steady on her feet, clear-eyed and active, but Sorrow, when she paid attention, could see the years bearing down on her, an invisible burden carried softly, quietly, her silence hiding any complaints or fears she might have. Sorrow didn’t know if Grandma would voice them even if she could. Grandma used her pen and notebook to answer questions, make suggestions, make lists, and give instructions, but not once since she’d been back had Sorrow seen her put a single line into one of her private journals. If she had any place to share her worries, her mind and her heart, Sorrow didn’t know about it.

  “Why did we never—” she began, but she paused, her courage faltering. She took a breath and tried again. “Why did we never go to the festival when we were kids?”

  “There never seemed to be much point,” Verity said. “I don’t care to hear what they think of our family history.”

  “They didn’t make our ancestor the bad guy,” Sorrow pointed out. “Pretty much the opposite, really.”

  “It may have seemed that way to you,” Verity said.

  Sorrow frowned at the dismissive note in Verity’s voice. She didn’t even want to talk about the festival. It was just such a stupid thing, so pointless, to have been built up so huge in Verity’s mind as an attack on their family, when it was clear nobody else took it seriously anymore.

  She took a swig of cider, slouched down in the chair, pressed her toes to the porch to set it rocking. The night was still hot, the heat of the day slow to fade. Sorrow’s mind rattled with things she could say—wanted to say, didn’t want to say—and there was a low nervous itch building in her chest as the light failed and the darkness deepened. She shifted in her chair, jeans sliding over a seat polished smooth by decades of use.

  She was so tired of swallowing the things she wanted to say because Verity didn’t want to hear them. She was so tired of feeling like her only option was to sew her mouth shut and slink away. She had come back to the orchard because she wanted answers, but all she had found were more questions, and if she kept waiting for the right moment to ask them she would never say anything at all.

  “Did you used to be friends with Mrs. Abrams?”

  Verity stopped knitting; her eyes remained fixed on the needles. “Where did you hear that?”

  Her voice was flat, and her hands were still in her lap, knitting needles crossed and unmoving. Sorrow’s skin prickled with discomfort. It wasn’t the firecracker response she’d expected, but still her instinct was to change the subject. Retreat, backtrack. Apologize for asking. She was only asking. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. But she knew that flat tone, the one that felt more like emptiness than sound. A chill traced down her spine.

  “Julie told me,” she said. Her mouth was dry, the words taking up too much space. “She said there’s a pictur
e of you two together.”

  “What were you doing talking to Julie?” Verity asked.

  “I was just talking to her. That’s not the point. Did you used to—”

  “You know you’re not supposed to spend time with those girls.”

  “It’s not those girls, it’s only Julie, and come on. I’m not a little kid anymore.” Sorrow tried to make it sound like no big deal, but her voice was unsteady, her hands shaking. She had known how Verity would react, and now it was too late to take it back. She didn’t want to take it back. She wanted an answer. “I can talk to whoever I want and—”

  “Not the Abrams girls,” Verity said tightly.

  “Why not? What does it even matter?”

  “You know why,” Verity said. “Their family has only ever tried to hurt ours.”

  “I’m not talking about history. I’m talking about now,” Sorrow said, frustrated. “I’m talking about you and Mrs. Abrams. Is it true?”

  “We aren’t friends with the Abramses,” Verity said.

  “Patience was.”

  If Verity had been still before, she was now carved from stone.

  “She was friends with Julie,” Sorrow went on, and now that the words were escaping she couldn’t stop them. “They kept it secret because they knew you and Julie’s parents would freak out. That’s why I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to—she knew Patience, and you won’t talk about her, and I just wanted to, I want to—” There was a hot sting in Sorrow’s eyes, a catch in her throat, and she was breathless, her heart racing. “I just wanted to talk to somebody who remembered her. Who wanted to remember her.”

  For a long, long moment Verity said nothing. She sat unmoving with her knitting bundled on her lap, half of her face in shadow. Sorrow watched her, growing more and more tense as the silence stretched. She turned her gaze away. Looked back. Verity wasn’t looking at her. A moth tapped frantically against the window above her head, trying to reach the light inside.

  When Verity finally moved, it was such a surprise Sorrow flinched. She snapped the knitting needles together—a soft metal clink—and wrapped the loose yarn around them. She stood so quickly the rocking chair tapped against the wall.

  “She was my daughter,” Verity said. Her voice was low, but in that moment it was the loudest sound in the world, drowning out the insects and the wind and the whole of the night. “I remember.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You’ve never wanted to talk about her before,” Verity went on. She reached for the screen door and pulled it open. She didn’t look at Sorrow. “There were times when I wasn’t even sure you remembered her, the way you were on the phone. It was like you became a completely different girl when you moved away, and that one didn’t remember the things I remembered, didn’t want to—you never wanted to—it was like you didn’t even know what I was talking about, like you—”

  Verity’s voice caught. Her lips worked a moment, words unspoken. Sorrow watched, frozen, unable to speak, her gut churning with guilt and anxiety and a white-hot flush of shame.

  “I remember everything about her,” Verity said. “I could never forget.”

  She stepped inside and let the door fall shut behind her.

  Sorrow jumped to her feet to follow. “I was eight years old,” she said, wrenching the door open. “I had no idea what was going on because you never told me anything. If I never talked about her it was because I didn’t know I was allowed to!”

  “I have never forbidden you from talking about your sister,” Verity said.

  “You didn’t have to,” Sorrow spat back. “By the time Patience was gone I was already so well trained you didn’t have to say a word, did you? Our whole fucking lives were about making sure we never said the wrong thing because it would upset you, and that meant we couldn’t say anything because everything upset you.”

  “You are not being fair,” Verity said. “You don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “What the fuck is there to understand?” Sorrow was shouting now, her voice made louder by the close walls of the house. “It was my childhood! She was my sister! Did you even know she was friends with Julie? You didn’t know until this fucking second, did you?”

  Verity’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t use language like that when you’re speaking to me.”

  “I really don’t fucking care what you think of my language right now. You won’t even answer my questions and you never knew the first thing about Patience because you never wanted to hear about how much she wanted to go to school or, or travel, or visit Dad, or have friends. She never wanted to do anything awful or unusual! She just wanted to be normal! What kind of crazy fucked-up heartless mother doesn’t even let her daughters have friends?”

  The words fell between them like stones, and in the thunderous silence that followed, Verity was pale and sharp and unbending, older than Sorrow had ever seen. She wanted to take it back. She wanted to shout it again, even louder, loud enough to echo through the orchard and make every branch on every tree tremble with the same ache she felt inside.

  “I am not going to listen to you speak to me like this,” Verity said. She turned her back to Sorrow, and there was a moment’s hesitation, a glance toward the stairs, toward the back door.

  “So you’re just going to run away again, like you always do.”

  The words were out before Sorrow could stop herself. Verity ran up the stairs—how familiar that sound was, the flight-quick drumbeat of her shoes—and when she slammed her bedroom door Sorrow felt it vibrating through her skin, through her bones, felt it a hundredfold, the relentless echo of every single time she’d heard it before.

  There was a soft creak of floorboards; Grandma was standing in the kitchen doorway in her faded flower-print robe.

  “What?” Sorrow said. Her face was burning and she felt sick, but she still wanted to shout. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

  Grandma didn’t shake her head. She didn’t frown. She didn’t lift an eyebrow or tilt her head in disapproval. She didn’t do anything at all except look at Sorrow, and look, and look, the weight of her gaze so heavy and so silent, as though she was trying to see the stranger beneath her granddaughter’s skin.

  20

  AFTER A STIFF, nearly silent breakfast, Verity announced that she had errands to run and would be out for most of the day. She didn’t invite Sorrow to go with her.

  “Have fun,” Sorrow muttered.

  Verity set her mug and bowl in the sink, fetched her purse and keys, and she was gone with the snap of the screen door. The sound of the car engine thrummed briefly, then faded as tires crunched down the driveway.

  Their fight had sat between them like a tree toppled over a path, and they on opposite sides, neither wanting to find a way around. Grandma, silent as ever, had looked from one to the other, her eyes unreadable, her pen still and paper empty.

  Sorrow sighed and scraped her spoon over her bowl. “I guess it’s better than her locking herself in her room all day.”

  Grandma only raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s not like I was trying to pick a fight. I just had a question. Am I not even allowed to ask questions now?” Sorrow didn’t know how much Grandma had heard. She cringed to realize that her shouting had probably woken her, but she wasn’t going to apologize. Not to either of them. This time, at least, she was not going to be the one to smooth over the rough patch with careful words and platitudes.

  Still Grandma didn’t reach for her pen, but the tilt of her head was eloquently inquiring.

  Sorrow squirmed in her seat. “I heard that she and Mrs. Abrams used to be friends. I asked her about it.”

  When she glanced up again, her grandmother’s eyes were wide.

  “What?” Sorrow said. “You do know that in a normal town with normal families, just asking something like that wouldn’t be a big deal. I don’t even know why it is a big deal. And you can’t expect me to believe it’s because some great-great-great-second-cousin of theirs did
something to some great-great-great-aunt of ours. The tourists at the festival might believe that sh—stuff, but come on. I know when it’s more personal than that.”

  Grandma shook her head, but Sorrow couldn’t tell if it was disagreement or dismissal.

  “Do you mean they weren’t friends? Or that I shouldn’t have asked? I don’t know what you mean.”

  Grandma reached for her notebook and pen. She wrote a few words and turned the page for Sorrow to see.

  It’s not easy for her to talk about.

  “Yeah, I figured that out,” Sorrow said. “Still doesn’t answer my question. Were they friends?”

  Grandma held the pen unmoving above the paper for a moment, considered, before she wrote an answer.

  They were close, once.

  Sorrow hadn’t really believed Julie was lying, but the confirmation made the hair on her arms stand up. “What happened?”

  I’ll talk to her about it.

  “Okay,” Sorrow said slowly. “Wait, about what? You don’t know? Or you don’t know if you can tell me?”

  There are some things you should know, with her permission. Give her time.

  Another sting of annoyance—how much time was she supposed to offer, after eight years apart and only a few weeks before she went home?—but it was quickly replaced by a quiver of worry. “What kind of things? What do you mean?”

  Grandma shook her head, gave a small sort of half shrug with one shoulder.

  “Does it have anything to do with Patience?”

  That time Sorrow had no trouble reading Grandma’s expression: she had not expected that question. Grandma shook her head emphatically.

  Why would you think that?

  “I don’t, really. I was just wondering.”

  It’s not about that at all.