THE NEXT AFTERNOON Sorrow took her phone down to the end of the driveway. It was half past noon in California, which meant Andi would likely be in the middle of her lunch hour, and that meant the conversation would have a natural time limit.
She sat on the top rail of the fence and scrolled down to Andi’s number. Then she stared at her phone until the screen went dark. She wished she had a way of knowing before she called what the problem was, and what Andi’s mood would be, so she could prepare herself.
She and Andi had always gotten along well enough, once Sorrow had gotten used to the loud, chatty, know-it-all older girl who had crashed into her life after she moved to Florida. Dad and Sonia had only been dating when Sorrow first went to live with him, but somehow their fledgling relationship had survived the unexpected arrival of a grief-stricken little girl, and before long Sonia’s family had welcomed Sorrow as one of their own. When she was feeling generous, she was grateful for that, how easily they had accepted a weird, quiet girl who was prone to disappearing into the backyard to hide under shrubs for hours on end.
When she wasn’t feeling quite so generous, she wondered if it had been so easy for them because her arrival had been barely a blip in their lives, if the worst thing that had ever happened to her—something so huge and so terrible it had cracked her world right down the middle, opening a chasm she still didn’t know how to bridge—had been nothing more than a minor adjustment for them.
She wasn’t feeling particularly generous today. There was too much wriggling around in her mind already. Cassie’s accusation and Verity’s story and, most of all, her memories of Patience, those small rough gems offering proof that she had been right, that coming back here was the best way to remember, but she couldn’t make sense of them yet. She needed more. She needed to hoard and polish and study every new memory, turn them over in her mind until the shape of what was missing made more sense. Talking to Andi wasn’t going to help her do that. But she made the call anyway.
Andi answered right away. “Hey.”
“Hey. I got your texts.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, do I know you? This number belongs to somebody I used to know, but I haven’t heard from her in a million years.”
Sorrow was regretting the call already. “Very funny.”
“Yeah, no, not really,” Andi said. “I was beginning to think you’d been eaten by a bear.”
“I was at work last night,” Sorrow said.
“How can you have work? You’re only there for a month.” There was noise in the background on Andi’s side of the call—a busy street, chattering voices—but Sorrow couldn’t picture what kind of restaurant she might be in or what street she was walking down.
“I’m helping some neighbors at their store. Just a couple of shifts a week.”
“So you’re not actually that busy,” Andi said.
Sorrow bristled. “This is a farm. I’m busy all the time.”
“What, are they making you do manual labor?”
“Nobody’s making me do anything.” Sorrow closed her eyes. She was not going to let Andi under her skin. “What did you want?”
“Wow. Okay. So we’re gonna be like that.”
“No, I—” Sorrow let out a huff of breath. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—it sounded urgent?”
“But not urgent enough for you to answer right away.”
Sorrow had been assuming that Andi was just being Andi, overly dramatic and self-centered. A year ago Sorrow would have known, but it was different now. Andi lived across the country, Dad and Sonia were barely tolerating each other, and everybody was expecting Sorrow to have some kind of breakdown before their eyes. Now, for the first time, she felt a genuine nudge of worry. “Did something happen?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Andi answered. “That’s what I want to ask you! What’s going on at home?”
Sorrow’s worry vanished like a burst bubble. “You want me to tell you what’s going on at home.”
“Well, Mom isn’t telling me anything. She just keeps saying everything is fine, like she always does, but we know that’s bullshit.”
“You want me to tell you what’s going on at home,” Sorrow said again. “You mean the home that’s like two thousand miles away from me.”
“Yeah, but you were there last—”
“The home that you’re so worried about you decided not to come back even for a visit this summer.”
“I have work,” Andi snapped. “It’s important. I didn’t just decide to go off and play in the woods for the summer.”
“I’m with my family,” Sorrow answered. “I know that’s not important to you, but you could at least pretend it matters.”
She didn’t remember sliding down from the fence, but she was standing in the grass now, and her hands were trembling. She hadn’t wanted to bring any of this with her to Vermont. She already felt like she was being split in half across miles and years, tugged both ways by families that would never understand each other. But Andi didn’t care about any of that. She had never even asked why Sorrow was coming back to Vermont.
“You’re not being fair,” Andi said. She was always first to break the silence.
“I’m not being fair?”
“You were supposed to keep an eye on them.”
“They’re adults,” Sorrow said. “What the hell could I do? They don’t need a babysitter.”
“Well, that’s good, since you’re not doing it anyway.”
“You’re just as far away.”
“You can’t expect me to drop everything in my entire life.”
“But it’s okay to expect me to do that.”
“I expected you to at least make an effort,” Andi said, exasperated.
“Right. I have to do it. Because what you’re doing is important, but all I’m doing is playing in the woods.”
“Yes! No! I don’t know! I thought maybe you would try, since you’re the whole reason they’re—”
Andi broke off suddenly. Sorrow felt numb all over, numb and empty and too light, as though she would float away if she let herself.
“I’m the reason they’re fighting,” Sorrow said. “You can go ahead and say it.”
“I don’t mean—”
“Yes, you do. But it doesn’t matter. They don’t tell me anything. Not even when it’s all my fault.”
“Have you even asked?” Andi demanded. “Or did you just decide to fuck off to Vermont for the summer with no explanation and who cares what the rest of us think?”
“I’m not—”
“I don’t care,” Andi said. “I don’t care! I don’t know if you did something or your dad did something or you’re just both being selfish assholes, but I don’t care about your stupid reasons. I just hope you fucking fix it when you get around to it. I’ve got work to do.”
Andi hung up.
“What the fuck.” Sorrow glared at the phone, but Andi didn’t call back.
Andi’s accusation—suspicion, whatever it was—wasn’t anything Sorrow hadn’t been carrying for months already. It had been there at the back of her mind since that day in March when they had all surrounded her after the party, worried and angry and rightfully unsatisfied by her explanations. It had been there every time her father looked at her like he was afraid of what she would do next, and every time Sonia looked at her like she no longer recognized her. It had been there when she had told them both, ignoring the hurt and fear in their eyes, that the only way they could help was to let her leave.
Hands shaking, eyes stinging, Sorrow slipped her phone into her back pocket and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, willing the tears not to fall. She couldn’t stand here on the side of the road all day, but if she went back to the house now, with red eyes and a red face, she would look like she had been crying, and Verity would know something was wrong. Sorrow didn’t talk about her Florida family with her mother, not about fights and problems. It was simpler to keep her two families as separate as she could—or it had been, when there had been little reason for their jagged, ill-fitting edges to meet.
She kicked through the grass along the fence, making her way back to the driveway, but instead of heading to the house, she left the packed dirt and stepped into the trees.
This was the oldest part of the orchard. These few acres between the house and the road were where Rejoice Lovegood had planted her first trees and nurtured them through hot summers and frozen winters. She had been alone then, before she met her husband and bore their daughter, Fearful, before Clement Abrams or any of the other white neighbors had arrived. There had been an Abenaki village down at the far end of the valley, Rejoice alone at this end, and nothing but forest in between.
According to the old stories born in the feverish depths of puritanical imagination, Rejoice had fed these oldest apple trees her own blood when it looked like they might not survive, and that was why they had endured so long.
Sorrow breathed in the scents of soil and moss, mud and grass, and the ever-present memory of apples. She tried to let the orchard soothe her as she walked, tried to let the sunlight and the canopy of green draw out the ache in her chest like poison from a snakebite. Two squirrels chased each other up a tree in a chattering burst. It was a beautiful afternoon, hot enough to make the shadows welcoming.
The day couldn’t be more different from the last time she and Patience had walked together in the orchard.
Sorrow’s steps faltered, and she exhaled softly, let the memory settle like snowfall over her thoughts. That cold day at the clawing, blustery end of winter. She had been bundled up in boots and gloves, skidding on soggy patches of snow as she chased after Patience with no hope of catching her. That girl she had been, not once suspecting how little time she had left with her sister, she had wanted to see the witch’s grave.
Sorrow turned to the north, took a breath, and climbed the hill.
By the time she reached the summit, her heart was racing and her calves were burning. She stopped in the shade at the edge of the clearing.
The oak that grew atop the hill was a massive black-barked monster, towering over the whole of the orchard. Its leaves were as big as dinner plates, its branches as fat around as whole trees. Bulbous knots protruded from its lumpy, deformed trunk. It was ugly, misshapen, and had been struck by lightning more times than anybody could count. Verity had once told Sorrow the black oak looked as it did because it absorbed all the blights and diseases that threatened the orchard, gobbled them up like a ravenous beast and swallowed them down into the soil where they could do no harm, and Sorrow, wide-eyed and credulous, had believed it. It was the biggest tree in the orchard, the biggest in all of Abrams Valley. Nobody knew how old it was; it had been towering and ancient already when Rejoice Lovegood first came to the valley.
The oak was surrounded by a barren patch where no grass or shrubs ever grew, and in a curve around one side of the clearing were six ash trees. They were very old and very tall, all the exact same age: one for each of the children Silence Lovegood had slain. Their father’s family had insisted the children be buried in town, far from their mother and the stain of her wickedness. Silence’s daughter Grace, the only survivor, had planted the ash trees for her siblings years later.
Silence herself was buried at the base of the oak beneath an uneven rectangle of white stones. She had neither a headstone nor an ash tree. She had only the roots of the black oak wrapped around her in a tangled cage.
They had come up here together the day before Patience died. Sorrow remembered the dull, cold dread she had felt about going back to the house and how important it had been to convince Patience to walk a bit longer. She remembered leaving the cemetery and hurrying around the hill, both wanting and not wanting a glimpse across the meadow to the burned Abrams barn in the distance.
Sorrow walked the perimeter of the oak’s clearing to the northern side. The apple trees were too tall, the orchard too lush for a view from this spot, so she picked her way down the slope until she met the orchard road. From there she could look along a wide gap between rows of apple trees and see the Abrams house on its hill: tall, white, a blinding spark on the landscape. The new garage stood beside it, the one that had replaced the old barn—it was whole, of course it was whole, but for the briefest flicker of a moment Sorrow saw a black wound in the corner where fire had eaten it away.
There, below, was the meadow on the property boundary between Lovegood and Abrams land, and there was the fence that separated them. From this distance the double strands of wire were no more than the merest pencil sketches. The Abrams side was mowed in long sweeping lines; on the Lovegood side the meadow was choked with grass and wildflowers so thick the leaning fence posts were half-hidden.
At the western end of the meadow was the old stone well where George Abrams might have died, and might still remain, rotted away to a skeleton. It was small and round and innocuous, its weathered lid a circle of silver wood.
And there was the cider house.