by Kali Wallace
“I used to pretend I was a Lovegood. A secret Lovegood, like, your long-lost sister or cousin, and my parents had stolen me away for some reason, and someday it would all come out and I would get to go back to the right family and . . . It’s so fucking stupid.”
“It’s not,” Sorrow said again.
“That’s what I used to pretend when I went up to my playhouse,” Cassie went on. “I wanted, like, a real playhouse, or a tree house, but my dad kept promising to build one and never doing it, so I just had that stupid corner of the hayloft. And that day after the fire my parents were all, Were you playing with matches? Did you leave a candle burning? You can tell us, you can tell us, and . . . they didn’t believe me. I was telling the truth, but they just looked at me like they were looking at—like they were looking at some stranger, like I was this problem they had to solve. But I wasn’t lying.”
“I know,” Sorrow said, the words barely louder than a whisper.
Cassie looked up. Her eyes burned in the growing twilight. “You said it wasn’t your sister.”
“It wasn’t,” Sorrow said. “It was me.”
There was a long silence, as though the entire orchard was holding its breath. Cassie didn’t move. She didn’t sniffle. She didn’t wipe her tears. In her stillness she sank into the shadows.
Then she let out a ragged breath, half laugh and half sob. She lifted her hand—the hand with the gun—to wipe at her eyes with her wrist. “Of course you did. Jesus fucking Christ. Of course it was you.” She pressed the curve of her wrist against her eyes, shaking her head with her face hidden. “I should have known. You must have hated me so much.”
Lovegoods hated Abramses. Abramses hated Lovegoods. That was how it had been since Clement Abrams had first come to this valley to find that a woman had already claimed the fertile land he wanted for himself. That was how it had been since Rejoice Lovegood had spilled her own blood and sweat and tears to bind these acres to herself and herself to the land, sharing her burden with the mountains and hollows when there was no one else to help her carry it. Seasons turned, apple blossoms blushed and withered, fruit swelled and dropped, snow fell and melted, and children grew to bear children of their own, to make mistakes of their own, to love and hate and fear on their own, to die by hunger, by violence, by the lure of the wider world. Promises were made, hearts were broken, and people twisted themselves around and around and around, the soft green tendrils of their dreams hardening into woody vines that could not bend but would someday break. Mounds of lush green grass erupted where bodies lay buried. Children spilled blood in a creek. A man drowned in a well. A fire burned out of control.
The lighter was warm. Sorrow’s fingers ached from holding it so tight.
There might be a spark, if she struck it. It might catch still.
Sorrow opened her hand, each finger releasing like vines unwinding, and she looked at the lighter on her open palm.
You must hate me, and I you.
All she had been, in the end, was a thoughtless child with a grudge and a stupid idea.
She didn’t know if this was the right way to help. She wanted to ask. She wanted to accuse. She didn’t know if there was a right way. She was not going to lie.
“I don’t think I hated you,” Sorrow said. Carefully, so carefully, taking small steps in her mind. “I didn’t even know you. I was angry and jealous and I didn’t know how to put a fire out once I got it started.”
Cassie’s smile was a terrible, crumbling thing. She gestured with the gun—a shape in the darkness, a void—and Sorrow curled her fingers into the soft earth. But Cassie wasn’t pointing the gun at her. Her finger wasn’t on the trigger; she didn’t even seem to remember she was holding it. She was motioning toward Patience’s headstone.
“Did you know they were friends?” Cassie said.
“Not until right at the end.”
“I knew all along. I used to follow Julie—” She choked on her sister’s name, held her breath a moment before going on. “I used to follow her. After she came home from school that year, our parents were so pissed at her, but it was the kind of pissed that meant they obsessed over everything she did. Everything was about Julie. Get Julie a therapist, get Julie a tutor, get Julie into a summer program. Everything was about fixing Julie. And around them she acted all . . . contrite, you know, she was so sorry, she wouldn’t mess up again, they could totally trust her. But she was still sneaking out and I thought—I thought she had a boyfriend or, like, a drug dealer. I didn’t think it was just . . . a friend. How fucked up is that? Of all the stupid, pointless secrets to keep. She just had a friend.”
It wasn’t anything Sorrow hadn’t thought to herself before, but hearing it spoken aloud in Cassie’s bitter voice made the weight of those secrets press anew on her shoulders and spine. What would it have mattered, if their parents had discovered Patience and Julie were friends? Centuries of animosity and feuding, of fighting with words and violence, of glaring and scheming across a wire fence that bound their families together more than it separated them, and what were they left with? Two dead girls and eight years of secrets. A girl in a graveyard with a gun.
“I thought . . .” Cassie sniffled. “I thought maybe Julie and Patience were the ones who had—I thought they’d been in my playhouse. Maybe they’d been smoking or something. Left a candle burning. Whatever my parents thought I’d been doing. I don’t even know why. I just thought, it wasn’t fair, everything was all about Julie, and that one thing that was supposed to be mine, I didn’t even have that anymore. So I followed her that night when she went out to meet your sister. They had this—secret meeting code, I don’t know, it was stupid. I guess they had to make something up because you guys never had phones. Your sister would shine her flashlight from the meadow so Julie would know she was there.”
You know how to find me, Julie had said, that day in the orchard. It had meant more to Patience than it had to Sorrow. An invitation to reconcile. Sorrow felt the nip of a mosquito on her arm, brushed it away. Somewhere in the darkness an owl hooted. Grass rustled as a field mouse scurried for its burrow.
“I didn’t mean to hurt them,” Cassie said. Every word sounded as though it were being torn from her throat. “I didn’t mean that. I just thought—I wanted to scare them. I wanted to make Julie mad. Everybody was looking at her all the time and I just wanted, I just wanted—to ruin her secret place like, like I thought she’d ruined mine. I never meant to hurt them.”
She dropped the gun and crumpled in on herself, covering her face with both hands. Her shoulders shook as the pained sobs escaped through her fingers.
Sorrow pressed her fingers into the ground, curling her fingers into the soil again, holding herself still. She wanted to grab Cassie and shake her and demand a better explanation. She wanted to jump to her feet and run, run, run, flee into the orchard and the darkness until her breath was a rasp and the sound of Cassie’s agonized sobs was swallowed by the song of crickets and the stir of breeze-turned leaves. She wanted to grab Cassie’s hair and pull her head back to see her face, to look at her, eye to eye, and command her to say it again.
There was distant thunder at the back of her mind, like a storm crawling over the ocean. She had wanted to know. She had come back to Vermont for this very moment. She had risked breaking her family apart. She had hurt her mother and grandmother. She had scraped carelessly through the scattered debris of her own memories to find this one truth, and now all she wanted was to scream and kick and wail and make Cassie take it back. She wanted to have never heard it. She wanted the soil beneath her, the trees around her, the whole of the embracing orchard to leach away that terrible knowledge, to draw it out through her grasping fingertips to take it away as it had done before, to spread the awful bleak ache she felt in her chest over acres and hollows, hills and fields, spread it as thin and fragile as the last feeble frost before winter’s end.
“Why . . .” Sorrow had to stop, steady herself, swallow the bile at the back of her throat. “
Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Cassie rubbed her hands over her face. “What?”
“If you didn’t mean—why didn’t you run for help?”
“I—but I did. We did. Julie came running out first, and Patience was right behind her but she—she tripped and she fell, we heard her fall. She screamed. That hole in the floor.” Cassie’s breath was short, shuddering. “Julie tried, she tried to get back inside—it was so fast. The roof came down so fast, but she still tried to go back in. It was so hot and so loud and—and she was shouting and screaming and—I ran up to the house. I got our parents.”
The hair on Sorrow’s neck prickled. “You told your parents?”
“I woke them up,” Cassie said. “I was screaming my head off.”
“Your parents know,” Sorrow said.
“They’ve always known.”
They had always known.
Eight years ago Paul and Hannah Abrams had not once challenged the police theory that a homeless drifter had been responsible for both fires. They had never pointed a finger, not at the Lovegoods or anybody else. The whole town had been in an uproar over Patience’s shocking death, but the Abramses had never demanded a more thorough investigation into the fire on their own land. A few weeks later they had taken their daughters out of town and let the matter wither away unsolved. If the police had asked Sorrow about the barn, she would have cracked like an eggshell, and the rest of the story might have come out. She had been a child, scared and guilty and angry all at the same time. She would have confessed in a heartbeat, if anybody had asked. They could have put it together. Nobody ever did.
“They said we couldn’t tell,” Cassie said. “They made us promise we would never tell. Over and over again. We kept having to say it. It was a stranger. It was a homeless person. That’s all we know. We had to—” Cassie’s voice broke, small and wretched. “We had to promise.”
Sorrow felt something splinter inside of her, with a pain like a mountain cleaving open. She wiped tears from her face, but more were falling. The darkening orchard was a blur around them.
“You were a little kid,” she said. “You wouldn’t have been—you said it was an accident. They shouldn’t have made you do that.”
Cassie was a shuddering shape in the night, pale shirt and pale hair, hunched over herself. Her breath hitched with painful cries, and a couple of times she made a terrible keening noise, so soft it was barely audible.
She inhaled tightly, let out her breath through her fingers. She said, “Julie left a note. My mom found it before the police looked.”
Sorrow was afraid to ask. “You read it?”
“She said she was . . . she was sorry but she was so tired. She didn’t want to keep lying. But she didn’t even say it was me. I think she wanted people to think it was her. I think she knew that I was trying to . . . I don’t know. That shit I said to you, about your sister, it was bullshit. I just wanted people to notice. She knew that. Julie always understood. But she never did anything wrong. It was never her fault. I don’t want anybody to think it was her fault.”
A breathless pause, the orchard around them quietly waiting.
Sorrow said, “We can tell them.”
Cassie sniffed roughly and lifted her head. “What?”
“We can tell the truth,” Sorrow said. There was an ache at the back of her throat. She felt like she had been screaming. “Both of us.”
Cassie shook her head, but she said nothing.
“I’ll tell them about the barn fire,” Sorrow said, “and you tell them what happened after. It was an accident. You were only a little kid. Tell them about Julie’s note. Can I—” Her voice caught. She breathed a moment, cleared her throat. “Can I tell you what she said to me? The day before she died? She came over here to talk to me, and she said—she said that sometimes people don’t realize that the hurt they’re causing themselves by keeping a secret can be worse than the secret itself. I thought she was talking about something else, but she was—I think she was talking about you. She knew how much it was hurting you.”
“Nobody will believe me that it was an accident. My parents didn’t even believe me.”
Sorrow’s heart broke again. “Your parents aren’t thinking clearly. They weren’t then and they aren’t now. They should never have made you lie.”
“What will happen to them?”
“I don’t know.”
“And me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you even care? You must hate me. How can you not hate me?”
“I don’t know,” Sorrow said. “Maybe I do. I don’t know what else to do.”
Cassie didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for a long time, but Sorrow didn’t push. Grandma would be worried. Ethan might have called again. The people looking for Cassie might now be looking for Sorrow too. They would just have to worry a little longer. She wasn’t leaving Cassie in the orchard alone.
Finally, finally, Cassie unfolded her legs. She left the gun on the ground.
“You’ll come with me?” she said, her voice so small, so scared.
Sorrow stood up, felt the burn in her legs as she moved. She held out her hand.
When they left Patience’s graveside they would walk together through the orchard until they heard people calling their names. They would see flashlights flicking behind trees and silhouettes moving in the distance. They wouldn’t answer until they were close enough to be recognized, and when they did it would be Sorrow who spoke, who lifted her voice over the questions and demands, the exclamations and scolds, to say they needed to speak to the sheriff. They needed their parents. They needed help. They had a story to tell, and they would tell it even if nobody wanted to hear. They would tell it together. There would be whispers—the Lovegood girl, the Abrams girl, did you hear? How terrible—but they would say what needed to be said, and unearth the long-buried secrets, and weather what followed.
When they left the graveside, the world would crash around them again, but for a moment, this last moment, they were only two girls who might have been friends, had never wanted to be enemies, and a grove of ash trees bending protectively around them. Cassie took Sorrow’s hand and held on tight.
37
PERSEVERANCE LOVEGOOD
1947–
IT WAS ONLY a single shoot, thin as yarn, but it was green.
The ground was soft and muddy, sinking into soggy craters beneath her feet. It had rained steadily through the night, a cold stinging downpour that drummed on the roof and rattled through the naked trees. She had sat up listening to it, alone in the kitchen, letting cup after cup of tea cool by her elbow. When gray morning light crept through the window and the rain softened to a drizzle, she stood—knees cracking, joints creaking—to go outside.
The clouds had broken apart after dawn, and in a fleeting patch of sunlight she found a green stem emerging from the ground. She knelt beside it; her knees pressed into the earth. With a trembling hand she cleared a tangle of rotted leaves and winter debris. The little shoot looked like a single green matchstick separated from its bundle, but she recognized it as the beginnings of a crocus, the first flower of spring. Two months late and so fragile a misplaced step would crush it.
And she thought, for one wild moment: she would hurry back to the house with the news. Spring had come after all, finally, finally there was life in the orchard, and the girls would whoop and laugh with joy and—
They were gone.
Her girls were gone. The house was empty. There was nobody waiting for her return, nobody to celebrate this one bold flower-to-be. A thousand flowers could have bloomed overnight and she would remain the only one to see them. Even the little Abrams boy, the one who looked so much like Henry—like the child they might have had, if everything had been different—he was nowhere to be seen. She was rather afraid she had scared him away for good, when they had surprised each other a few days ago. She had been without her notebook and unable to tell him he was allowed to stay, she wasn’t a w
icked witch who gobbled up little boys for supper, she wasn’t going to hurt him like whoever had given him that bruise on his wrist.
She could show him the crocus if he appeared again. Enlist his small hands to search for other shoots, to clear the dead leaves and let them breathe. There was too much quiet now that she was alone. A child could be trusted with a flower.
Her knees ached. Her eyes remained fixed on the crocus shoot, but her thoughts turned and stretched, traveled through the muddy gray orchard and over the brown fields, up to the house now echoing and empty, and she imagined herself walking back slowly, grass and flowers springing from the earth with every footstep like she was a crone from a fairy tale, not a selfish hag but a generous queen. Overhead the apple trees would blossom pink and white, a blush spreading over every leafless branch, and by the time she reached the house, spring would have come, and as flowers bloomed in a riot of color and the garden grew heavy with bounty, Verity would return from the hospital, Sorrow from her father’s home, and together in the orchard, in the embrace of their living mountains, they would be a family again, and begin to heal their broken hearts.
It was only a single shoot, one shy crocus not yet formed, but it was green.
38
HEAVY GRAY CLOUDS were gathering over Abrams Valley again. The air was humid and warm, but there was a breeze kicking up. This was the promise of a summer storm, not an aberration. Those few tourists still wandering around town were eyeing the sky warily.
Verity held the door of the sheriff’s department open for Sorrow, and they walked down the sidewalk toward the car parked half a block away.
“It’ll rain soon,” Verity said.
Sorrow looked up, and with the motion a wave of dizziness passed over her. Her eyes were hot with exhaustion, her blood buzzing with too much caffeine. It felt as though the hours since she’d found Cassie in the cemetery grove had passed in the bewildering whirl of a dream. She had called Dr. Parker to get through to Verity. She had called her father. She had gone to the police station as soon as Verity came home in the morning. She had given her statement, she had told the truth, she had answered all of the sheriff’s questions. Her part in it was supposed to be over now. She had been eight and Cassie nine; under Vermont law neither of them was criminally liable for the fires they had set.