by Kali Wallace
Anything was better than standing in the kitchen, arguing with herself. She set the kettle to boil, then collected the clothes she’d been wearing last night into a pile with the rest of her laundry. After she had shoved it into the machine and set the cycle running, she returned to the kitchen to find Grandma had come inside.
“I really wish you guys drank coffee,” Sorrow said. “I don’t think tea is going to be enough this morning.”
Grandma’s smile was small, and Sorrow cringed.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to be—you know—flippant.”
Grandma opened her arms, and Sorrow stepped gratefully into the hug. Grandma smelled earthy and green, and her shoulder where Sorrow rested her cheek was cool with clinging morning mist.
“Is the garden okay?” she asked.
Grandma released Sorrow from the embrace and, after a moment’s thought, nodded.
“I was worried, with how cold it was last night. It was really cold. Did it frost? I thought for sure it was frost, I mean, it felt like it, but I’m not used to the cold anymore, so I was probably over-reacting. I’m glad it didn’t.” She was babbling to fill the silence and didn’t know how to stop. She was relieved when the kettle began to hiss—it never really managed a full whistle—and she could occupy herself making oatmeal and tea. “Where’s Verity?”
Grandma pointed outside.
“I guess it’s kind of late. Is she getting started in the barn? I know she wanted to start cleaning it out.”
Grandma was shaking her head.
“Then where is she?”
Grandma pointed again, this time to the north.
A knot tightened in Sorrow’s stomach. “She went out there? Why?”
Grandma’s only answer was a shake of her head.
“I don’t think she should—” Be out there. Be alone. Invite the memories in. Sorrow’s breath was short, her chest tight. “I’m going to get her.”
She left her tea steeping on the counter and marched into the orchard. It still looked like an ordinary overcast summer day, all the grass thick and full, all the trees heavy with green leaves, but the cold deepened when she stepped into the shade of the orchard, the more she found that was wrong. There were no leaping grasshoppers or lazy bobbing bees, no chasing squirrels or chattering birds. There was a hush over the orchard as oppressive as the gray clouds, and every flower she spotted in the grass beneath the trees was wilted.
She was wearing a flannel shirt, but the fabric felt too thin in the deepest orchard shadows, and she found herself shivering every time she stepped from sunlight to shade. One night. It had taken only one night of cold to brown and shrivel the blossoms, to silence the birds, to chase away the bees. The only sound was the gentle, sporadic patter of drops falling from the leaves. After so many days of persistent shimmering heat, it felt as though the volume had been turned down on the morning.
Sorrow slowed as she reached the point where the dirt road dropped down to the property boundary. She had expected to see a police car outside the Abrams house, or people milling around the cider house, but there was neither. Both places looked deserted.
She found Verity about halfway down the hill. She was sitting at the base of an apple tree with her knees crooked up, and in profile, from several feet away, she looked so much like Patience that Sorrow’s breath caught. The illusion faded quickly. Patience had never worn jeans, never cut her hair short, never worn an expression of such careful blankness she might have been carved from stone.
Sorrow picked her way along the hillside and sat beside her.
She thought about asking, What are you doing out here?
She thought, What are you thinking about?
And, Did you go down there?
And, I know you’re thinking about Patience.
The police had come to the house last night. The sheriff was a woman named Reyes, and she had told them Julie’s death did appear to be suicide, but there would be an investigation to determine the cause of death. She wanted to know why Sorrow had been out in the orchard in the middle of the night. Sorrow had told her about the cold, going outside to check for frost, smelling smoke.
She told the sheriff, too, about both times she had spoken to Julie.
“She didn’t seem depressed,” Sorrow had said, painfully aware of Verity sitting beside her at the table. She could not meet her mother’s eyes, so she had looked at her hands, at the sheriff’s pen and notebook, at the mist on the window, at the clock on the stove ticking through the early hours of the morning. “It didn’t seem like there was anything wrong.”
Sheriff Reyes had taken her leave sometime around 2:00 a.m., with a promise to provide more information when she had it.
Sitting beside her mother on the hillside, Sorrow drew her legs up, mimicking Verity’s posture, and she said, “Doesn’t look like anybody’s over there.”
“They left a little while ago,” Verity said.
There was a sour taste at the back of Sorrow’s throat, a sting in her eyes, and she was suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. She shouldn’t have come out here. She didn’t want to hear that flat tone in Verity’s voice. She didn’t want to talk about the Abramses and the daughter they had lost. She didn’t want to feel the damp earth beneath her, the dripping dew pattering on her arms like rain, the cold breathing from the shadows. She didn’t want to feel the well of Verity’s silence beside her.
And she didn’t want to have to talk about Julie. She didn’t even want to think about Julie, and how she had been alive and warm in the ash grove, silent and hanging in the cider house, one and the other, both at the same time, a cycle and a blur, and it was no use. There was nothing she could do to turn her thoughts away from the awful certainty she had felt leaning into that firelit cellar. She felt the shock of seeing Julie’s face over and over, every time she tried to think about the weather or the orchard or her mother’s waiting silence, like a wound that would never stop tearing open.
She blinked rapidly and turned away, rubbed at her nose to quiet a sniffle.
“Are you coming back to the house?” she asked. “Grandma’s in the garden.”
“Does she want to scold me for not doing my chores?” Verity said.
There was a spark of annoyance in her voice, a ripple in the awful flatness, but it didn’t make Sorrow feel any better. She didn’t know what she could say that would draw Verity to her feet, turn her away from staring at the cider house, and bring her back to the house—and even if she found the right words, she didn’t know if it would matter. The cider house would still be marring the orchard in a tumble of charred wood. Julie would still be dead. Patience would still be eight years gone and everywhere all at once, filling every space between them with thistle barbs and thorns.
Verity said, “They keep telling me I should tear it down.”
Sorrow didn’t need to ask, but she couldn’t leave those words dangling and unanswered. “Yeah?”
“Some kids got into it a few years ago,” Verity went on. “They were using it as a sort of hangout. Smoking pot and drinking and—well, you would know better than I do what teenagers do these days. They were coming over for weeks before anybody noticed. I don’t know what they”—a flick of her wrist toward the Abrams house—“were doing that they didn’t notice a party practically in their yard—no, that’s right. They were in Europe that summer.”
The pause that followed was where any other morning Verity would make a wry comment about how tough it must be to spend the summer in Europe, how wrong it was that the Abrams family cared so little for their land they could abandon it for months at the height of summer. Any other morning she would have laughed, not in envy but in mockery, before going on.
Verity cleared her throat. “One of the kids fell and broke his wrist. His parents threatened to sue—with Paul egging them on, obviously. He was the only reason they were talking about it.”
“Did they go through with it?” Sorrow asked.
“They realized pretty quickl
y that a lawsuit would mean having a public record of their son’s illegal activities, and college admissions might not like that. They dropped it.”
“You never told me any of that.”
“You were twelve,” Verity replied. “It didn’t amount to anything.”
“You didn’t tear it down,” Sorrow said.
She could guess why: if the entire town had been telling Verity and Grandma to tear down the cider house, they would have dug in their heels and done the exact opposite. Lovegoods did not allow the people of Abrams Valley to push them around—not even if it was only common sense, that a dangerous old ruin and eyesore should be removed. It was such an ugly thing, a black blight on the green land.
“It’s not the first cider house to stand where it is now,” Verity said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“The first one wasn’t torn down, not really. It was—”
“A terrible winter.” Sorrow rubbed her hands together; she couldn’t tell if the morning was getting warmer. She wished Verity hadn’t chosen a spot in the shade. “I know.”
When the winter of 1919 had come too soon and lasted too long for Abrams Valley—witch weather, Sorrow thought, the words minnowing through her mind—Justice and her granddaughter, Joyful, had taken the cider house apart piece by piece, board by board, preferring to strip the entire building to the ground for firewood than sacrifice a single apple tree. Making a game of that winter had been one of Sorrow’s favorite snowy day activities as a child: melting snow in a pot on the woodstove, piling blankets into a corner to nest, bringing log after log in from the woodpile, turning misery from another century into an afternoon of make-believe.
“What does that have to do with anything?” she asked. “You should have torn it down.”
Verity wasn’t looking at Sorrow. She wasn’t looking at the cider house. Her gaze was turned higher, lost in the sky. “They had nobody to help them that winter. They’d lost so much and they were alone—”
Sorrow stood, and Verity stopped.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t listen to Verity tell an old family story as though it were any other morning. She couldn’t sit here on the hillside looking down on the cider house and see anything other than the same reminder Julie had seen every day of her life, every time she looked out her bedroom window, all because Verity clung so desperately, so stubbornly to a past that was likely half-fictional anyway. Every time Sorrow closed her eyes she saw the orchard cast into stark moonlight shades of silver and black. She felt the sting of smoke, the rising heat. She saw the smooth fall of Julie’s golden hair and the unnatural angle of her neck. She couldn’t have all of that crowding her thoughts and Verity’s meandering storytelling too. She needed somebody who would sit beside her when Sheriff Reyes returned, who would reassure her it wasn’t her fault she hadn’t found Julie sooner, who would lie to her and tell her everything would be okay. She needed a mother to comfort her in the present, not a wraith lost in the past.
“I don’t care,” Sorrow said. “I don’t want—god. Why are you even talking about this now? Julie is dead, and it has nothing to do with—with anything that happened a hundred years ago. She’s dead. And all you give a fuck about is where our stupid ancestors got their firewood.”
Sorrow walked away without looking back. She hadn’t come out here to start another argument with Verity. She had planned to be calm, reassuring, to make sure her mother was okay and bring her back to the house, where they could all go through the pitiful motions of pretending it was a normal day. That was what she had intended.
But all of the mechanisms she had for being the calm one, for being the person who absorbed other people’s emotional ups and downs without wavering, without reacting, always cowering in the quiet center no matter what storm raged around her, none of it was working now. All of the things she normally thought and kept to herself, they were flying from her tongue every time she was near Verity, and she didn’t know how to stop.
And every time she blinked she saw Julie’s face, warm with firelight.
Verity still hadn’t come back from the orchard an hour later, when Sheriff Reyes returned.
“Is Ms. Lovegood here?” the sheriff asked. She was a tall woman with brown skin and short-cropped black hair, and she spoke with a big Boston accent that filled the small kitchen. “I have some information.”
“She’s out in the orchard,” Sorrow said. She thought about adding she’s working, decided against it. She wasn’t interested in lying for Verity today.
There was a pause while Sheriff Reyes waited for an explanation; then she asked, “Will she be back?”
“No idea,” Sorrow said. “She didn’t tell me anything. Why? Do you need her for something?”
“No, nothing like that,” the sheriff said. “I only want to fill her in.”
“You can tell me.”
“I would prefer to have this conversation with your mother present.”
“She’s not even my legal guardian or anything,” Sorrow said. Through the kitchen window she could see Grandma in the garden, but Sheriff Reyes didn’t mention her. Sorrow wondered if she was one of those people who dismissed Grandma out of hand, assuming that because she didn’t talk she couldn’t hear either and wouldn’t be any use in a conversation. “Can’t you just tell me? I want to know if . . . I want to know.”
Sorrow didn’t like the assessing look in her brown eyes, but Sheriff Reyes nodded slightly and said, “The coroner is going to designate Julie’s death a suicide. That’s what all the evidence indicates.”
At once Sorrow regretted asking. She didn’t want to know about the evidence. She didn’t want details. They were too many in her mind already. The warmth of the fire on her skin, and the lingering scent of smoke. The thinness of Julie’s hands, and how they had played with her headphones in the café. The way the sun had shone on her hair in the ash grove.
She only wanted to know how they were sure. “Did she leave a note?”
“Not that we’ve found. But that’s not unusual. Most people don’t.” A grimace passed over the sheriff’s face, like a cloud crossing the sun. “This has already gotten out, thanks to a blabbermouth in the office, so I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you. There were recent searches on her phone.”
Sorrow’s stomach clenched. “What kind of searches?”
“Information on how to make a noose.”
“Oh.” She shouldn’t have asked. She didn’t want to know that.
“There is one thing I want to ask you about,” the sheriff said.
Sorrow looked up to meet her eyes, looked down at the table again. The sheriff must have heard about what Cassie had said at the festival. “What is it?”
“I’m wondering if you know why she chose that old building,” the sheriff said. “Most people seem to think she picked it to spite your family, but nothing else I’ve heard about Julie makes her sound spiteful. Her parents insist—pretty strongly, I might add—it was more about convenience than making a statement. That it has nothing to do with your family. I’m inclined to agree with them.” Sheriff Reyes paused, and when Sorrow didn’t answer she went on, “But, as everybody keeps reminding me, I’m a newcomer around here. I’ve only lived here for five years, which might as well be five days in this town. What do you think?”
Sorrow traced her fingertips along the woodgrain of the table. That didn’t sound like Mr. and Mrs. Abrams, vehemently absolving the Lovegoods of having any part in their personal tragedy. Ethan had been right when he’d said that if they had any way to blame the Lovegoods for something, they would do so loudly and repeatedly.
But they didn’t know what Sorrow knew about Julie and Patience and their brief winter friendship. That secret had felt so huge and terrible when she was a child, but now it seemed no more than a small hot ember, pressing on the inside of her chest.
“You know that’s where my sister died,” Sorrow said. She looked up at the sheriff to be sure she was listening.
“I do know
about that,” Sheriff Reyes said.
“They were friends. Not for very long, I don’t think. Just a few months. They weren’t supposed to be. Our families . . .” Sorrow shrugged. “It was a secret. I mean, they kept it a secret from our parents, because they would get in trouble.”
“That’s why you sought out Julie when you came back to town?”
“I just wanted to talk to her. I didn’t think—I didn’t mean to upset her. I wasn’t trying to do that. I just wanted to see if she remembered Patience. I didn’t—oh, god.” Sorrow put her hand over her mouth and choked back a sob. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it would hurt her just to ask.”
“Sorrow.” Sheriff Reyes moved her hand like she was going to reach out, changed her mind and rested it on the table. “I didn’t know Julie, but I do know that something like this doesn’t happen because of just one conversation. Her family and friends tell me she’s been troubled for years.”
Sorrow nodded, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She didn’t know Julie either. She never had. They’d spoken twice, and all of the enthusiasm for those conversations, every feeling of connection shared between them, every possible future meeting where they might talk again, those had all been in Sorrow’s head.
After the sheriff left, the day passed quietly. Verity returned to the house after Sorrow and Grandma had finished lunch, and she stayed only long enough to claim she wasn’t hungry before vanishing into the barn. Grandma did what she could for the cold-nipped garden, then came in to sew in the living room, and Sorrow sat in the kitchen with her summer reading books. She tried to let the steady chug of the sewing machine soothe her, but every glimpse of motion outside the kitchen window, every change in the light, made her look up, half hoping and half dreading it would be Verity on her way inside. The clouds showed no signs of breaking.