The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace

  Sorrow went to bed early, still exhausted from the night before. She lay on her bed, curled onto her side beneath an extra blanket, and squeezed her eyes shut. She kept thinking about Julie in the cemetery grove, the sunlight shining on her hair, secrets and questions stretched between them delicate as spider silk, and her smile, always her smile, soft and sad and so very alive.

  And thinking about that led, every time, to Julie in the cider house.

  Sobs pressed at the back of Sorrow’s throat and hot tears streaked her face. Her heart was racing for no reason she could identify. She pressed her fingers to her wrist to feel her pulse and tried to count the beats, tried to draw in slow, even breaths, but nothing helped.

  She was still lying there, choking on sobs she couldn’t stop and rubbing tears from her cheeks, when Verity came upstairs.

  Please come in, she thought, staring at the closed door. Please come in.

  She wanted Verity to knock softly and open the door when Sorrow answered. She wanted Verity to ask if she was all right. Sit on the edge of the bed. Put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She wanted to not be alone.

  But Verity didn’t tap on the door. She walked down the hallway to the end, paused, returned, and did it again. She paced back and forth, back and forth, her soft steady footsteps lulling Sorrow halfway to sleep.

  The sound of her steps changed: she was going downstairs.

  Sorrow held her breath. Waited, waited—and there it was. The back door opening, the screen snapping shut.

  She exhaled and rolled onto her back. She fell asleep still waiting for Verity to return.

  25

  THE NEXT DAY dawned cool and gray, with a layer of clouds hanging stubbornly over the valley. Grandma was making bread when Sorrow went downstairs. She looked up from her kneading to offer a quick smile, which Sorrow couldn’t quite manage to return. She sat at the table and watched for a minute or two. Grandma’s arms were dusted with flour up to her elbows, and there was a stray speck on her nose. The door was open, and beyond the screen the orchard was muted under the cloudy sky, all the uncountable shades of green murky and dark where before they had practically glowed in the sunlight.

  Sorrow had barely slept. She had tossed and turned restlessly for hours until finally drifting off to dream about racing through the orchard on a cold winter night, surrounded by smoky shadows and chased by raging fire, and every time she looked back to see how close the flames were, the trees rustled and shuffled and bent to block her view. She had awoken disoriented and nauseated, and even after shoving her window open and gulping in the chilly night air, she hadn’t been able to settle her stomach or her nerves.

  And as soon as the shifting dream images faded, she was thinking about Julie again, and the way the firelight had glowed on her skin, how it had made her look warm and alive. Sorrow had showered twice since the cider house but still every breath smelled of smoke, and even when she was nested in her bed beneath two quilts she felt chilled all over.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Sorrow said.

  Grandma’s hands stilled. She turned to Sorrow.

  Sorrow hadn’t meant to say anything. She looked down at the table, tears filling her eyes, and she swallowed. “I keep thinking about her,” she said, her voice small. “I can’t stop seeing her.”

  A hysterical burble of laughter rose in her throat, and she pushed it down, covered her mouth with her hand to keep any sound from escaping. It wasn’t funny. There was not a single thing funny about it, but all she had been doing since she arrived was trying to remember something terrible, thinking about Patience and how she had died, and now all she wanted was for her mind to stop. She didn’t want any of it in her thoughts now. She didn’t want to think about anything.

  Grandma pulled out a chair beside Sorrow and reached for her hand. Sorrow let her take it, squeezed her fingers, and held on.

  “I remember a lot of casseroles,” she said.

  Grandma tilted her head in question.

  Sorrow sighed and rubbed her free hand over her face. “I keep thinking I don’t know what to do, and trying to remember what other people did, and that’s what I remember after Patience died. A lot of casseroles.”

  She couldn’t imagine how Hannah Abrams would react to a counter full of foil-wrapped baking dishes. She remembered Hannah that afternoon in the grocery store parking lot, so perfectly put together, so aloof, and how that aloofness had turned cold when Verity came out of the store. It was impossible to picture her breaking down in grief, or comforting Cassie, or standing beside her husband while the funeral director told them about different styles of coffins.

  “I wonder how Cassie’s doing,” she said. “I mean—that was a stupid thing to say. This must be awful for her. Maybe—oh, god, I wonder how Ethan’s doing. We should have called him yesterday. I should have called, right? Is that the right thing to do?”

  Grandma let go of Sorrow’s hand to pick up her notebook. We can ask Jody if the family needs anything.

  “Right. Yeah.” Sorrow had never spoken to Ethan’s mother, but Grandma was right. This was the kind of thing mothers were supposed to deal with. “Okay, so that’s—oh, shoot. I think I’m scheduled to work today.”

  For a moment the prospect was an appealing one, however shaky she was feeling. To escape a repeat of yesterday’s long, heavy silence, to break through the imaginary wall around the orchard and remind herself she wasn’t eight years old and stuck here dreading the sound of a police car on the driveway. The store could be a refuge, if only for an afternoon, with Kavita’s endless chatter and tourists wandering in to ask questions about tents and bears and blisters.

  But it wouldn’t only be Kavita, and it wouldn’t only be tourists. At some point the bell over the door would jangle, and it would be Mrs. Roche or somebody like her, locals Sorrow knew by sight if not by name, and even if she weathered the unsubtle staring she would hear the whispers: Isn’t that the girl who found . . . ? Oh, yes, she’s the one. She’s the Lovegood girl. Everybody in town would be talking about Julie, and that it had been Sorrow who found her. An Abrams tragedy on Lovegood land. That was too juicy too resist.

  “I guess I can call them and see what they say,” Sorrow said.

  Grandma didn’t offer an opinion either way. She patted Sorrow’s hand one more time and stood to go back to her dough. Sorrow stared at her shoulders, willing her to shrug, to nod, to do something to indicate whether Sorrow was doing the right thing. For the first time since she had come back to Vermont—perhaps the first time in her life—she felt a spike of genuine anger at her grandmother’s silence.

  But Grandma only kept kneading.

  Sorrow sighed. “I’ll call them,” she said.

  It was Helen Ghosh who answered, and she told Sorrow at once she didn’t need to come in.

  “I can if you really need me to,” Sorrow offered. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or dismayed. “And tomorrow is fine.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Helen said. “We’ll be fine. We’ll just make Kavita work extra.” There was a muffled “Hey!” in the background, and Helen said, “Speak of the devil; she wants to talk to you. Take care of yourself, Sorrow. Let us know if you need anything.”

  A rustle as the phone changed hands, and Kavita said, “You should consider yourself forewarned that if you take Mom up on her offer, it will be food, and food will probably be a pot of masoor dal big enough to drown in.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a bad thing,” Sorrow said, “but we’re fine. Nothing happened to us. It’s just, you know.”

  “It’s fucked up, is what it is,” Kavita said. “I can’t believe she did that. I mean, everybody knew she had problems, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see she had an eating disorder of some kind, but . . . I thought her family was the kind that would get her into therapy if she needed it.”

  Sorrow thought about what Sheriff Reyes had said about Julie being troubled for a very long time. There was an ache in her throat, a knot of chok
ed-back tears; she rubbed at her chest right below the hollow of her neck. “Maybe they did. Maybe it wasn’t enough.”

  “Yeah. Have you talked to Ethan?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Me neither. He’s been doing the one-word text answer thing. Mahesh is going over there later.” A brief pause, then Kavita said, her voice serious, “But, really, are you okay? That has to be—I mean. It is so fucked up.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Sorrow said.

  A lie, such a lie, but she couldn’t give voice to the quivery feeling in her chest, the way her mind turned in every unwary moment to her walk through the silvery cold moonlight, the glow of firelight below, and Julie’s hair falling over her face in a sleek curtain. She squeezed her eyes shut and she held her breath, terrified for a moment that Kavita was going to ask her, what was it like, what did you see—all the things Sorrow couldn’t bear to talk about again.

  But Kavita didn’t ask, only told Sorrow she’d see her later and said good-bye.

  Sorrow turned to Grandma. “Is Verity already outside? What’s she working on?”

  Grandma wrinkled her brow.

  “You don’t know?”

  A shake of her head, and Grandma glanced upward.

  “Or you mean—she hasn’t come down yet? But it’s—”

  Sorrow looked at the clock on the range. Almost ten. Hours past the time Verity normally woke. “What do you mean? Did she come down or not?”

  Grandma only shook her head again, and her expression was uncertain. Sorrow stood up—her chair scraped loudly on the floor—and she ran for the stairs.

  Verity’s door was closed. Sorrow should have noticed. Verity’s door was always open when Sorrow emerged in the morning because Verity was always awake first, but today it was closed. She had walked right by. She hadn’t seen. She reached for the knob. Her heart was pounding and her breath was short and she felt the same wild, irrational fear she had felt the other night, when she’d woken in the cold and known something was wrong. She didn’t even know where it was coming from, this anxious fear of what lay beyond that door. She was probably overreacting. Verity had been up late last night. She could have slept in. She was allowed to do that.

  Sorrow let go of the knob and knocked softly. “Verity? Are you awake?”

  The stairs creaked behind her: Grandma was following.

  “We just want to see if you’re up,” Sorrow said.

  Still no answer. Sorrow looked at her grandmother for help, but Grandma looked as lost as she felt.

  She turned the knob. It would be dark beyond the door. A darkness deep and growing, shadows reaching from every corner of the room, and the air would be stuffy, close, sickly. She didn’t want to open the door. She didn’t want to see what was on the other side. A shape in the bed, unmoving.

  She pushed the door open. “Hey, we’re wondering where you—”

  The window and curtain were open, filling the room with soft light and fresh air. Verity was sitting on the edge of her bed. Her hair hung in messy strands around her face. She was wearing her cotton sleep shirt over a pair of jeans, as though she had started to get dressed but had run out of energy before she could finish.

  “Hey,” Sorrow said, and she stopped.

  She looked around the room, gaze darting into every corner. There was a glass of water on the table, mostly full. A book beside it. A lamp, off. A pair of shoes on the floor. A knitted afghan draped over a chair. She didn’t know what she was looking for. The curtains drifted in the breeze, billowing gently. It looked normal. Everything was as it should be except Verity, half dressed at ten in the morning, staring at Sorrow in confusion.

  “Sorrow? What do you need?”

  “We were only . . .”

  Sorrow glanced at Grandma in the doorway. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. She didn’t know what to say. She needed somebody to tell her how to deal with this.

  “We were only wondering,” Sorrow said, “if you were feeling okay.”

  “You barged in here to ask me that? Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “But you—you never sleep this late.”

  Verity rolled her eyes—actually rolled her eyes, like she was the teenager and Sorrow the mother—and said, “I’m not sleeping. I’m wide awake.”

  “Yeah, okay, but . . .”

  “I’ll be right down.” Verity swept her hair back from her face and stood. “Are you going to stand there and watch me get dressed?”

  Verity wasn’t crying. She hadn’t locked the door. She wasn’t curled insensible beneath her blankets. She was awake. Standing. Getting dressed. She was talking to Sorrow, even annoyed with her. She had never been annoyed on her bad days. On those days, the very worst, no matter how many times Patience and Sorrow had tried to plead and pester her out of bed, she would only roll over and say she was too tired. This wasn’t like that. This wasn’t like that.

  But Sorrow couldn’t move. She couldn’t turn around and walk out of the room. She couldn’t let Verity close the door again. Every one of her oldest instincts was telling her to take Verity’s hand and tug her outside, pull her stumbling and blinking into the sun. She just needs a bit of fresh air—Sorrow couldn’t remember who used to say that to her. It was a lie then and a lie now, but still the words fluttered moth-frantic in her mind: she needed sun, she needed air, she needed Sorrow to do the right thing, say the right thing, and when she did what her mother needed, that sinking lethargy would snap away, and with it the fear clawing at Sorrow’s insides like brambles. She couldn’t move. If she left, anything that happened would be her fault.

  “Sorrow.” Verity walked to her wardrobe, opened the door, began searching through the clothes inside. “I’ll be right down. Five minutes. Not even five. Two.”

  Grandma touched Sorrow’s elbow. Sorrow looked at her, and Grandma gestured toward the door. Still Sorrow hesitated.

  “Sorrow,” Verity said. “Earth to Sorrow. I’ll be right down.”

  Her gaze slid to the side, and she fussed with the clothes in the wardrobe, straightening shirts on hangers, and that was when Sorrow saw the pink in her cheeks, on the tips of her ears, saw the wry twist to her mouth, and she understood: Verity was embarrassed. She was embarrassed to have been caught half dressed and momentarily overwhelmed. She was embarrassed that Sorrow had charged up here to find her.

  Sorrow turned, her face growing warm, and pretended not to see Grandma’s approving nod. “Okay. I’ll just—there’s breakfast. When you’re ready.”

  She hurried downstairs, followed by Grandma. She sat at the table for an interminable few minutes until she heard Verity’s footsteps on the stairs. She jumped to her feet and grabbed the kettle.

  “I can make tea,” she said.

  “No point,” Verity said. Her voice was bright, unusually high. She breezed past Sorrow to the back door. “Half the morning’s gone. I’ve got work to do.”

  “I can help,” Sorrow said quickly. “What’ve you got planned?”

  Verity was already stepping onto the porch. “Nothing interesting. I’ll just be clearing up some of the winter deadfall around the fence on the south side. You help Grandma.”

  The screen door clacked shut. Sorrow watched through the window as she crossed the lawn and disappeared into the barn, and when she looked away she saw that Grandma was watching too, a worried wrinkle creasing her brow.

  Verity didn’t return to the house until it was nearly dinnertime, and then all she did was pick at a few bites before shoving her chair back and declaring, “I’m disgusting. I need to shower.” And her voice was so airy, so dismissive, so unlike how she normally sounded that it put Sorrow immediately on edge. “Go ahead and put this away. I’ll heat up something later.”

  She vanished upstairs and didn’t return for the rest of the night.

  After the kitchen was cleaned up, after Grandma had gone to bed, when Sorrow was alone in her own room, she turned off her light and lay down. As soon as her head hit the pillow her heart was racing again
with the same panic she had felt the night before. She sat up and crossed her legs, hugged her pillow to her chest, and sucked in painful, gasping breaths. It didn’t help. Tears sprang into her eyes and she scrubbed them away, and her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her neck and in her fingertips. The room was too small. She had to get out. She scrambled off the bed and to the door.

  And she stopped again, hand on the knob. Leaned her forehead against the solid wood and closed her eyes. What was she going to do? Bust into Verity’s room when she was trying to sleep? Verity had been up today. She had been outside working. Outside in the sun, in the fresh air, and that was what everybody said she was supposed to do. That was good. That was fine. It was fine. Sorrow was freaking out for no reason. She didn’t know what was wrong. She kept picturing herself opening the door to Verity’s room over and over again, and finding not bright morning light, but darkness at midday, the air stuffy and stale, a too-still body in the bed, the soft crunch of something under her shoe, and she didn’t know why that was all she could see. She couldn’t remember. She tried and tried and tried, but every time she stepped into that room in her mind, every time that small person she used to be walked toward the bed, toward the shadowed shape she knew to be her mother, her mind shuddered and twisted and shied away, and there was a hedge of brambles around her, high enough to reach the sky, thick enough to block the light, and she still couldn’t remember. She could creep and peer and sneak through the labyrinth of her own memories, pressing like a bruise around the edges of what she couldn’t remember, but those bending, rustling branches were always there, blocking her path, turning her away.

  She slid to the floor and pulled her knees up to her chest.

  No matter what she remembered or didn’t, no matter what she found or left buried, no matter what was going on with Verity, Julie was still dead. Sorrow could still see her. The shine of her hair, the tilt of her neck. She could still smell the smoke.

  Sometime later, Sorrow heard her mother’s door open. Verity began pacing up and down the hall, from the top of the stairs to Patience’s bedroom at the other end, a constant slow rhythm, socked feet on floorboards the only sound in the tired old house.