A MEMORY WAS a thing with no shape, no mass, but indescribable weight. Words spoken in cold winter air, secrets shared, a sprint, a chase, a smile, a favor, these things had their own gravity, distorting everything around them like the heaviest star, shaping time and space even when the heart remained hidden.
Sorrow and Patience had walked through the orchard together a hundred times, a thousand, in every season, in drizzling rain and blazing sun, howling wind and whipping snow. Every one of those walks was compressed to a single pinpoint of a single day: the last day of Patience’s life.
But all Sorrow felt now, standing at the edge of the meadow, was a nervous tremble in her chest. She should have come down here sooner, to this quiet place where Patience had died.
The cider house was a black ruin cupped in a meadow of vibrant green. Eight years of wind and rain and snow had washed the stench of smoke away, stamped the ashes into dirt, polished the blackened boards to a sheen. Wildflowers bloomed in the rich tangle of grass around it, and a thicket of trees huddled at its back. It was about half the size of the barn, with one story above the ground and a cellar below. The fire had brought down one of the long walls and half of the roof, but the rest of the building remained, a crooked, leaning skeleton of blackened boards and beams. There was grass growing inside, reaching for sunlight through the tumbling walls. A few yellow and pink flowers stood out against the charred wood.
Verity hadn’t had the building torn down, but the forest was slowly reclaiming it anyway.
There was a hole in the wooden floor; it had been there before the fire. At some point in the past the boards had rotted and the cider press had smashed through to the cellar. Sorrow and Patience had been forbidden from playing inside ever since Patience, a courageous thirteen years old, had decided to build a balance beam across that hole in the floor. She couldn’t find one board long enough, so she had tried to nail two together and ended up sticking her hand on a protruding nail. It punched right through her palm, and Verity had had to take her to the urgent care clinic for stitches and a tetanus shot.
It would have been fine—Patience thought it was cool, having a hole in her hand; she kept shoving the bandage in Sorrow’s face to show off—but Mrs. Roche had seen them going into the clinic, and she had mentioned it to their neighbors the Johnsons, and the Johnsons, who were newcomers to town, had carelessly told Mr. and Mrs. Abrams. After a visit from child services, questions from the social worker, and a tearful apology from Patience, Verity had put a padlock on the door and forbidden them from playing in the old ruin again.
The sheriff said Patience had fallen into the cellar.
Sorrow was never supposed to hear that. She had crept out of bed to listen from the stairs when the sheriff was talking to Verity and Grandma in the kitchen.
Patience must have fallen into the cellar through that gaping hole in the floor. She was knocked unconscious, and the roof collapsed. Julie Abrams had seen the fire from her bedroom window and woken her parents to call 911, but by the time the firemen arrived it was too late.
Sorrow had never questioned it, that story she’d overheard as a child, but she knew now the sheriff had probably made up the unconscious part to be kind. Patience would have been trapped in the cellar whether she was awake or not, whether she was injured or not. She could have been screaming for help. Nobody would have heard. The Abrams house was too far away, the road even farther. The cellar was at least ten feet deep. She wouldn’t have been able to escape.
Sorrow looked up at the remains of the cider house roof, where rafters and beams were broken at burned, spiky ends. She brushed her fingertips over the wood, almost expecting—it was stupid—almost expecting to feel cold winter wind breathing through the gaps. She closed her fingers into a fist, squeezed her eyes shut to chase the sensation away.
Sorrow lifted a hand to scratch the side of her neck—brush a hair away, or a spiderweb—and she stilled, suddenly tense, nerves sparking. She turned. The meadow was empty. Grass rippled on both sides of the wire fence like the pelt of a slumbering creature, a gentle breeze caressing shades of green from light to dark to light again. Up the hill the Abrams house gleamed in the sun; its redbrick chimney was an artery on the side.
It was too hot to be wandering around out here in the orchard, collecting ticks and a sunburn in exchange for nothing but more questions, waiting for the kaleidoscope contents of her memories to shake into some kind of sense. There was nothing of Patience left in the cider house. Sorrow could stare into that patchwork of darkness and light for hours and it wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. It was only a ruin.
She strode away from the cider house, aiming for the shade of the apple trees, but just as she dipped from sunlight to shadow, something caught her eye. She stopped again, turned, cast her gaze over the meadow.
There was something on the well. A small object perched right on the rim.
She looked around, her skin prickling into goose bumps. She was alone in the meadow. She had been all along.
She kicked her way through the high grass, her shoes squelching in hidden pockets of mud. The well was about waist-high, and it had been boarded up for as long as Sorrow could remember, a double layer of solid hardwood planks bolted securely into the masonry and stone. She had never known before why it was covered. She didn’t like knowing now. It had always seemed such a harmless thing, squatting there in a meadow of rich green, part of the landscape.
Perched on the edge of the cover was a single white rock.
Sorrow reached for it, but she stopped a few inches shy, curled her hand into a fist to steady it. It was one of the stones from Silence Lovegood’s grave. There were no chalky white stones like that anywhere else in the orchard.
She remembered watching Patience’s hands, thin and winter-pale, gloves stripped away in spite of the cold, her long fingers moving with nervous energy as she passed the stone back and forth between her hands, back and forth, back and forth, constant motion while the rest of her was so still, and her voice tight and unwelcoming—
There had been somebody else in the orchard that day.