by Kali Wallace
“I thought she was just . . . well, my grandmother. I thought she was just odd,” Verity said. “Until I went to college.”
Sorrow studied her face for a moment, looking for signs that her question would not be welcome. “Did you start to forget?”
“It didn’t feel like forgetting,” Verity said. “I wasn’t even gone a full year, but it felt like . . . like everything was fading. Like things that had happened to me were things I had read in a book. I began to understand why so many women in our family were so obsessive about remembering our history—including my grandmother, for all her faults.”
Sorrow flipped through one of the journals, but glancing over pages of Grandma’s sloping, spiky script, she felt a wormlike wriggle of discomfort. It might be their shared history on the page, but these were Grandma’s words, and she had always kept them to herself. Sorrow closed the journal and smoothed her hand over the cover. It wasn’t up to her to decide what Grandma ought to do with the voice she had found when she stopped speaking.
“We’ll ask her what she wants to do with them,” she said.
Verity looked the leather journal over one more time before handing it to Sorrow. “At the very least we should bring them inside so nothing gets into them out here. Check if there are more.”
“Yeah. I’ll look.” Sorrow set the journals beside the blue scarf and hefted another box to the top of the stack. This one was full of Patience’s old schoolbooks and paperbacks; she spent a couple of minutes flipping through each notebook to see whose handwriting covered the pages.
When Verity spoke again, her voice was quiet, almost hesitant. “Are you going to go back to Florida with your father after he gets here?”
Sorrow lowered a spiral-bound notebook back into the box, but she didn’t turn around. She looked instead through the open door of the barn. She had been in Vermont for just over two weeks, although it felt like a span of time impossibly longer. Half of her planned vacation. She had been so busy worrying about everything that was happening she hadn’t given herself time to think about what she was going to do next.
The rain was coming down steadily now, a clean soaking shower, drumming on the apple trees, on Grandma’s garden, on puddles spreading over the lawn. They still hadn’t spoken to Ethan about the French drain, whatever that was. The kitchen window glowed with warm yellow light. It would smell of onions and garlic inside, chicken browning in the skillet, fresh-plucked herbs and ground pepper. There would be bread rising in a bowl on the counter. Sorrow didn’t know if Verity had eaten anything today. Surely Dr. Parker would have made sure she did before they left the hospital, or on the drive down. She didn’t know if she could sit at the table for dinner and not count the bites Verity took. She didn’t know if she could spend another two weeks enduring whispers and glares, the rumors and questions, the way every conversation in town would turn back to Cassie, to Patience, to the Lovegoods and the Abramses and the tragedies they shared. She wanted to go home, to her family and her friends, to the ordinary life she had set aside. She wanted to let the knotted ache of grief and regret and guilt fade with distance and time, to stop feeling in every waking moment like sadness was a hole inside of her that would never go away.
But if she stayed in the orchard, to the end of her planned time or longer, the weight of its history would seep into her, and it would perhaps start to feel like her natural landscape again. She could read her grandmother’s journals and meet all of the women who had come before, immerse herself in the memories until they stopped itching like skin that didn’t fit right. Before she had come back, she had not considered the possibility of staying longer. One month and no more. Close the gaps in her memory, fill in the spaces where Patience was supposed to be, and leave again, mission accomplished.
It wasn’t so simple, to walk away from a land that held parts of herself in its bones of wood and stone. But neither could she stand in one place and let roots anchored in centuries past push their way into her veins until she could not take a single step for fear of ripping them away.
“I don’t know,” she said. She could barely stand the look on Verity’s face, scared and hopeful all at once, with no sign of the careful, carved mask she so often wore. “It’s not really fair, is it? That I’ll start to forget again if I leave.”
“If you want fair, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong family,” Verity said. Her smile was fleeting, knowing.
Sorrow looked out through the barn door. The little farmhouse was obscured by mist and rain, and rivulets were snaking across the lawn to the edges of the garden. “I don’t want to be one or the other,” she said. “A different person here or there. I can’t do that anymore.”
The rain on the roof was so loud she thought she heard her mother say something, the beginnings of a word lost in the racket, but when she turned, Verity was looking at her, just looking, and the only answer she gave was a brief nod.
39
SORROW WOKE EARLY the next morning. Nobody else was up yet, so she left a note on the kitchen table—went for a walk, back for breakfast—and headed out into the orchard.
The sun was just peeking over the mountains. Another brief rainstorm had come and gone during the night. The orchard was damp, glistening with droplets still falling from the trees. The morning light was golden, the air cooler. Everything smelled fresh and clean. The ground was just muddy enough to squish beneath her shoes, but not so muddy that it stuck. Midsummer flowers were blooming under the apple trees, clustered together in splashes of color, sprinkled shyly through the shade: feathery and colorful false goat’s beard, tall snapdragons in orange and pink, purple tufts of phlox, deep blue stalks of larkspur. There were mushrooms in the shadows, and Sorrow tested herself on remembering how dangerous they were and she didn’t mind too much that she had forgotten most of it. She could learn it again.
She avoided the muddy road and cut through the apple trees, wandering around the base of the hill with no particular destination in mind. She stopped to examine unfamiliar shrubs and flowers, paused to listen to birdsong, breathed deeply as the light changed and the air warmed. In one spot where an apple tree had been cut down, a wild raspberry bush had taken its place, its first red fruit just beginning to swell. A few rows farther along she found a lump of rock protruding from the ground: angular Green Mountain granite softened by lichen and moss. She didn’t recall having seen it before, but when she scrambled up one side and stood at the top, a memory returned, and with it a faint thrum of sadness, soft, mellowed from being held so long in a stone older than remembrance. She had climbed that boulder on a crisp, clear fall day, declared herself queen of the rock, and giggled uncontrollably as Patience tried, not very hard, to knock her from her pinnacle and tackle her into a pile of crunching golden leaves.
She balanced on the boulder’s weathered edge until the ache passed and left in its wake an impression that wasn’t quite pain, wasn’t quite joy, but a braid of both, together bitter and sweet, like the first bite of autumn’s earliest fruit.
She jumped to the ground and kept walking, meandering her way down the slope.
Dad and Sonia were flying into Burlington that afternoon. They were going to rent a car and drive themselves to Abrams Valley; they had reservations at one of the quaint historic bed-and-breakfasts in town. Verity had invited them over for supper and asked what they liked to eat. Grandma was going to give Sonia a quilt she had just finished. Gestures and overtures, rituals and manners, retreating into the familiar when there were so many things they didn’t quite know how to talk about.
Sorrow had promised to sit down with them and talk, a proper talk, about what had happened and why she hadn’t told them, about the questions and fears that had driven her to Vermont and the secrets she hadn’t even known she had been keeping. She was going to keep her promise, but still the prospect of that conversation gave her a nervous flutter in her stomach. She had always tried so hard to keep her family in Florida separate from her family in Vermont, two worlds divided by lines i
n time, in geography, in sisters, in parents, past and present, forgotten and remembered. She didn’t know yet how to stitch the two halves of herself together, but she knew now that those lines meant no more than wire stretched across wild mountain land: easily ducked, or clipped, or crushed by a fallen tree.
At the base of the hill she crossed from the shade to sunlight, into the meadow between the Lovegood and Abrams farms. The yellow crime scene tape was still up over the collapsed wall of the cider house, but one end had come loose to flutter lazily in the morning air. Verity had already started making arrangements to have the building torn down. Sorrow kept her distance and paced the area around the squat stone well.
When she found a flat spot, she dragged her heel through the dirt to make an X. Julie would be buried in the graveyard in town, her name carved into stone and set alongside her ancestors stretching all the way back to Clement Abrams, but she deserved to be remembered here as well. Ashes were forgiving trees, not particularly finicky about how well drained their plot of earth might be; they would grow in the damp meadow soil as well as they grew in the cemetery. The Lovegood land was the richest in Abrams Valley, with all the tragedy it had endured, giving and taking in equal measure.
Sorrow glanced at the well and, after a moment’s thought, added two more marks. George Abrams would have hated it, a Lovegood daughter planting trees for him and his son, but George had died on Lovegood land, and Henry had loved a Lovegood woman. They belonged to the orchard now.
With a glance at the yellow tape and the burned ruin, Sorrow left the meadow and climbed the hill to the black oak. She walked around the perimeter of the clearing, pressing her palm to each of the children’s ash trees in greeting, then circled the oak at its base until she found the protruding knot that gave her the best foot up. She climbed to a height of about twenty feet to settle on the branch Patience had always claimed was Silence Lovegood’s hanging branch.
She sat on the branch with her back against the trunk, one leg drawn up and the other dangling. She wondered if she might learn to hear what Patience had heard echoing through the wood. A mother’s desperation, a town’s rabid terror. The chafe of a rope on bark. That could have been the end of their family, but Grace had returned to remake a home from the ruins, and they were still here.
The rising sun cast dappled patterns over Sorrow’s bare arms. She felt an insect tickle her skin and brushed it away without looking. The trunk at her back was rough, almost painful, but if she didn’t move, didn’t shift around and fidget, she barely felt it. Here there was no decision to be made. There was no home and no away, no families split by difference and distance, no past and no present. There were no gaps in her memory anymore—the missing pieces had been here all along, cradled in the mountains and waiting—and in their absence the seams between the lonely lost child she had been and the person she was now were that much harder to find.
Nearby two birds were starting the day with an argument, and high above, a faint breeze turned the leaves of the oak. The rows of apple trees sloped into the valley, into fields and forests, hills and hollows wild and tamed, over the sharp line where the orchard ended and the preserve began, all stitched together like blocks of her grandmother’s quilts in countless shades of green. In the cool morning dew everything smelled of old, old apples.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my editor, Alexandra Arnold, without whom this book would never have evolved into anything worth reading. Thank you for your endless patience through endless revisions, and for pushing me to make the story so much more than I ever thought it could be.
And thank you to my agent, Adriann Ranta, who has yet to flinch at any of the random genre changes and wild ideas I throw her way.
A million thanks and cookies and fancy cocktails to Audrey Coulthurst, Adriana Mather, and Paula Garner. I never would have made it through the year I spent working on this novel without your friendship. (My liver, on the other hand, most adamantly does not thank you.)
And thank you to the members of my San Diego writing group (and our Oregon annex): Valerie Polichar, Jessica Hilt, Morgen Jahnke, James Seddon, Gary Gould, and Alex Gorman. Your beautiful stories, helpful insight, and good company were always a welcome diversion during a most difficult year.
Endless gratitude and thanks to the members of the Sweet Sixteens debut group. Through all the ups and downs of being a debut author, there is no comfort like knowing you’re not alone on this wild ride. I am looking forward to cheering for every single one of you as you bring more amazing books into the world.
And thank you, as always, to my family, for your unwavering love and support.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit Jessica Hilt
KALI WALLACE is the author of Shallow Graves. For most of her life, she was going to be a scientist when she grew up. She studied geology in college, partly because she could get course credit for hiking and camping, and eventually earned a PhD in geophysics researching earthquakes in India and the Himalayas. Only after she had her shiny new doctorate in hand did she admit that she loved inventing imaginary worlds as much as she liked exploring the real one. She’s from Colorado but now lives in Southern California. You can find her at www.kaliwallace.com and on Twitter @kaliphyte.
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BOOKS BY KALI WALLACE
Shallow Graves
The Memory Trees
City of Islands
CREDITS
Cover art by Connie Gabbert
Cover design by Heather Daugherty
COPYRIGHT
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE MEMORY TREES. Copyright © 2017 by Kali Wallace. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932868
ISBN 978-0-06-236623-8
EPub Edition © September 2017 ISBN 9780062366252
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FIRST EDITION
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e, The Memory Trees