SORROW’S EYES WERE gritty with exhaustion when she pulled into the hospital parking lot. It was fifteen minutes before nine o’clock and the start of visiting hours, so she rolled down the window, leaned her head against the seat, and closed her eyes. Morning sounds drifted in: traffic around the hospital campus, the high beep of a locking car, a couple of women talking about their weekend plans in a mix of Spanish and English.
She opened her eyes to watch them pass. They weren’t Cuban, but that brief catch of voices sent a wave of homesickness through her.
At five minutes to nine she went inside. She hadn’t been in a hospital since Sonia’s brother Hector had had a heart attack a few years ago. This one was newer, brighter, less crowded than the one in Miami, but the long corridors and antiseptic smell were the same. She found the elevator and followed the signs to the right nurses’ station. The woman behind the desk had her sign in, asked what was in her pockets, confirmed that Dr. Parker had cleared the visit. The room she directed Sorrow to was square and bright, enclosed by windows on two sides: one bank facing the hallway and the nurses’ station, the other overlooking the parking lot. Ugly chairs and dull landscape paintings lined the walls. There was a male orderly in white dragging a mop over the floor, an old woman putting together a puzzle on a coffee table, but otherwise the room was empty.
Sorrow walked over to the window. Her shoes squeaked on the linoleum. Everything beyond the glass was the wrong color, gray-tinted and dull. The trees edging the parking lot were too far away. She chose a chair and sat down. Not even a minute passed before a reflection in the window moved. She looked up, and Verity was there.
“Sorrow.”
“Hi,” Sorrow said.
Verity looked at the chair beside her, looked at the one across from her, chose the latter. She wore a long flowery skirt, a soft sweater—they were the clothes of the old Verity, the one Sorrow had left behind. Barely forty-eight hours had passed since they had last seen each other, but Sorrow was more nervous now than she had been in the airport.
“You didn’t have to drive all the way up here,” Verity said.
“Dr. Parker said I could visit.”
“I’m glad to see you, but it wasn’t necessary. I’ll probably be home tomorrow.”
“Probably?”
“Miranda and I are going to talk about it today,” Verity said. “We’ll decide then.”
Just like that? It’s that easy? Sorrow didn’t say it. She couldn’t ask that. She pressed her lips together and swallowed. There were no bruises she could see. Verity’s fall down the stairs hadn’t hurt her, at least not in any way that left visible marks.
“Did you . . .” Verity took a breath. “Did you want to talk about something?”
Every single thing Sorrow could think to say was the wrong thing. She could ask how Verity was feeling. If she was eating now. Why she had stopped in the first place. Why she had come here. If she had been thinking about swallowing a handful of sleeping pills again. It was all wrong. There was a drumbeat of fear deep inside her chest, so persistent she couldn’t remember what it felt like not to have that anxious terror of making a mistake every time she opened her mouth. She was so tired of feeling like she had to make herself small and quiet to avoid upsetting Verity at all costs. It had never worked anyway.
“We used to have this system,” Sorrow said.
Verity’s lips were parted; she had been about to say something.
“Me and Patience.”
There it was, on hearing Patience’s name: a faint crack in Verity’s calm mask. Sorrow stamped down the rise of guilt, held it with her breath until it faded. She was allowed to say her sister’s name.
“It was this way of warning each other, I guess. When we were doing or saying something that was going to upset you. If I was being obnoxious Patience would go like this”—Sorrow held out her hand, sliced it side to side: Cut it out—“and I would know I had to stop. Calm down. Shut up. Stop whining. Stop bothering you.”
“You didn’t—”
“And the days when you would shut yourself in your room,” Sorrow went on, not raising her voice but not faltering either, “we would sit on the stairs and try to figure out what to do to make it better. We never knew what was going to help and what was going to make it worse. But we tried. We had this whole—” Sorrow’s voice caught. She inhaled slowly. “It was this whole system. Patience had figured it all out. I don’t know what she would be telling me to do right now.”
Sorrow had always believed it came naturally to Patience, a chore as obvious as turning the soil in the spring or harvesting fruit in the fall, caretaking their mother as they did their land. But she had been wrong. Patience had had to figure it out on her own, without help, and it had been guesswork and desperation from the start.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Verity said.
“You said you remember everything,” Sorrow said. “But I don’t. There’s a lot I don’t remember about—”
“You were very young,” Verity began.
“There’s a lot I don’t remember about what happened when Patience died,” Sorrow said firmly. “Before I came back here, I couldn’t remember anything. It was just this . . . this black hole. This empty space. Dr. Silva thinks I’ve blocked it all out because it was traumatic. She didn’t think me coming back here would help, but she said it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
“That’s why you wanted to visit?” Verity said, her voice small, hurt.
“And it’s why I went looking for Julie, even though I knew it would piss you off that I was talking to her. Did you really not know they were friends?”
“I had no idea.” Verity exhaled slowly. “I never even suspected.”
“What would you have done if you did know?”
Verity plucked at the fabric of her skirt and did not answer.
“They weren’t friends for very long. They didn’t have a chance to be, did they?” Sorrow leaned to the side to reach the back pocket of her jeans. “She came looking for me the other day. She gave me this.”
She held out the photograph. Verity’s hand trembled as she accepted it.
“I thought she was just being, like, friendly,” Sorrow said. “She seemed kinda lonely. But she was giving it away. They say people do that before they commit suicide, right? Give things away.”
Verity sat back in her chair and studied the photo. Sorrow waited.
“I assumed they would have gotten rid of all of Henry’s pictures,” Verity said.
A small, sour fear at the back of Sorrow’s throat subsided. That wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t a refusal to talk. It was, perhaps, an opening.
“Julie said they still have boxes of them in the attic,” she said. “I don’t even know who he was. I’ve never heard anything about him.”
“You remember Eli Abrams, right?”
“Their grandfather? Ethan and Julie and Cassie’s? Yeah. A little. Patience called him Mean Old Eli.”
“Henry was Eli’s younger brother.” Verity traced a fingertip over the photograph, the pressure so light it barely bent the paper. “They weren’t anything alike. Henry was this bohemian hippie type. He traveled a lot. He’d gotten arrested protesting Vietnam. That kind of thing. Eli considered him an embarrassment.”
Sorrow heard the fondness in her mother’s voice. “You liked him.”
A small, sad smiled played over Verity’s lips. “Your grandmother liked him. A lot. They were going to be married.”
“What?” Sorrow’s voice rose so loud the orderly across the room gave her a sharp look. “Are you serious?”
“I supposed it does seem hard to imagine,” Verity said. “But my father had been dead for more than a decade by the time Henry moved back to town, and my grandmother for a few years. Mom and Henry were both in their forties. They weren’t kids. They were doing what they wanted, never mind what anybody else said. Eli hated that they were together, of course, but they didn’t care. They were in love.”
Verity hadn’t once taken her eyes off the photograph.
“That doesn’t explain why you were all friendly with Hannah Abrams,” Sorrow pointed out.
“She wasn’t Hannah Abrams then,” Verity said. “She was still Hannah Lowell when I met her.”
“Where was that taken? I don’t recognize it.”
“Massachusetts. Amherst. We were at college together.”
“You went to college?” Sorrow managed not to shout that time, but she felt every bit as sideswiped as she had a moment ago. “You never told me that.”
“Hearing all of Henry’s stories about traveling around was what made me want to go,” Verity said. “He was the reason I even applied. He was always saying, there’s a big world out there, why not go see it? And I thought . . . it wouldn’t be so bad, to get away from Abrams Valley for a while. To get away from a town where just hearing my name was enough for people to see a whole long history of violence and tragedies they would never understand.”
Verity would have heard it too, all through growing up: You’re the Lovegood girl. There had always been more meaning behind the words than Sorrow knew how to translate.
“I never graduated,” Verity said. “I didn’t even finish my first year.”
“But you met her there? You were friends?”
A brief silence. Sorrow could hear the murmur of the TV from across the room, where the puzzle lady was watching a morning talk show, and the chatter of nurses in the hallway. One laughed, a discordantly bright sound. An elevator dinged. The hospital smelled like disinfectant and filtered air and, faintly, drifting from a break room somewhere, popcorn.
“Yes. We were close. She was a couple of years ahead of me,” Verity said. She still hadn’t looked up from the photograph. “She was from Boston. She was smart. She was beautiful. I’d certainly never met anybody like her. Certainly not in Abrams Valley—not anybody who would ever talk to the Lovegood girl, anyway.”
“And you were friends,” Sorrow said. Her voice was shaking and she felt an ache in her head, guilt twisting around and telling her she didn’t have to ask, she didn’t have any right to demand explanations of Verity just to satisfy her own curiosity. “Were you friends? What do you mean by close?”
Verity sighed and set the photograph on the cushion beside her. “It was more than twenty-five years ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
And that, Sorrow thought, wasn’t any kind of answer.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But why don’t you want to tell me?”
“We were different people then.”
“Different people who were really close? So close you never told anybody about it? Because you look really close in that picture.” Sorrow jabbed her finger at the photograph. “But Julie got yelled at for just asking about it, and now you’re refusing to answer.”
“Why does it matter, Sorrow?” Verity asked tiredly.
Sorrow sank back into her chair. “I don’t know. Maybe it matters because of all those times you told me and Patience how much we would ruin everything if we even talked to the Abramses, like the worst thing we could do was try to make friends like kids are supposed to. And nobody says anything that extreme about random friends from twenty years ago. Not even you. Maybe it matters because you were conveniently leaving out the fact that it wasn’t about our family history or the stupid feud or people being assholes a hundred years ago at all. It was all about you.”
Verity said nothing, and for a long, crushing moment Sorrow was certain she had gone too far. Verity didn’t look angry. She didn’t look disappointed. She only looked drained. The slump of her shoulders and lines around her eyes made Sorrow want to shrivel up, to back off and apologize for asking, to plead forgiveness for pushing and swear to never speak of it again.
But she didn’t. She was so fucking tired of being led around by that pathetic cringing instinct of hers. She was so tired of how assiduously it lied to her. It had always lied to her: If you are good, if you are calm, if you don’t upset your mother, if you don’t make her sad, everything will be okay. She had been so careful after Patience died. She had crept through the house like a ghost. She had filled the days with gentle little-girl chatter and cheer. She had made tea. She had done her chores. She had never caused her mother or grandmother a single moment of trouble, for the entire span of those two terrible weeks, and it hadn’t mattered. Verity had still swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Grandma had still sent her away. None of it had mattered. Her family would have fallen apart even if she had been having screaming tantrums rather than trying to vanish.
“Were you friends?” Sorrow asked. “Or were you . . . was she your girlfriend?”
Verity looked down at the photograph again, but she left it lying on the arm of the chair. “We didn’t call it that,” she said. “We didn’t call it anything.”
“But that’s what it was?”
“I suppose.”
Sorrow took that in for a moment, turned it over in her thoughts. It wasn’t surprise she felt, she decided. It was the uncomfortable sort of understanding that came with figuring out something she ought to have figured out years ago, if only she had been able to look at her mother and see more than her isolation and eccentricities.
“What happened?” she asked.
Verity looked up. “What happened?”
“You went to college. You got a fancy Boston girlfriend.” Verity raised an eyebrow, and Sorrow didn’t look away. “The Lovegoods and the Abramses were being all friendly with each other and hell didn’t freeze over. How did it get from that to the point where Patience and Julie had to creep around like criminals just to hang out? What happened?”
“Our families were never truly on good terms,” Verity began.
Sorrow rolled her eyes. “I know, I’m just—”
“I’m answering your question.” Verity’s voice was the crack of a whip. Sorrow shut up. “Mom and Henry were going to be married. They were planning an autumn wedding. I was so happy for her. She’d been lonely since my father died, even though she would never admit it. We Lovegood women don’t admit that sort of thing, do we?” A sharp little twist of a smile, gone in a flash. “I was only away for a few months, but it was long enough that I started to forget how bad things could be between our families. Isn’t it funny how all you have to do is step away for a bit, and things start to look different?”
“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” Sorrow said quietly.
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” Verity looked at her steadily for a moment before going on. “Mom called me a few weeks before the end of the school year. She was—I’d never heard her like that. She was hysterical, barely making any sense. All I could make out was that something had happened to Henry. It was too late for a bus and I didn’t know anybody with a car, so I hitchhiked. By the time I got to Abrams Valley, Henry was dead.”
“I heard it was a car accident?” Sorrow said.
Verity nodded. “They’d all been having dinner together, the Abrams family, and Henry brought Mom along. And Eli, well, he hated that. He started in on Mom right away. Asking her if she knew all the ways her mother had cheated his family over the years. Saying he knew she had helped Devotion kill his father and cover it up. Henry blew up at him, and they fought, and Henry stormed out of there.” Verity paused for a second; her voice had gone hoarse. “He’d been drinking—they’d all been drinking—and he only made it about two miles down the road before he missed a turn and smashed into a tree.”
“Oh no,” Sorrow whispered.
“It took him most of the night to die. They wouldn’t let Mom see him. Eli had his worthless sons pick her up and carry her out of the hospital, like she was a toddler having a tantrum, not a woman who only wanted to hold the hand of the man she loved before he died. And nobody said a word. Nobody helped her.”
Sorrowed cleared her throat, steadied her voice to ask, “Grandma told you about it? Afterward?”
“A little,” Verity said softly. “I heard the rest from other people. She was so distraught. I’d never seen her like that. I’ve never seen anybody like that. I didn’t know what to do. I came home to take care of her. She didn’t have anybody else. I thought . . . I thought after a few months it would go back to—not exactly normal, but it would get better. But she only kept fading. That’s when she stopped talking. Not all at once—I know that’s how people remember it, but it wasn’t sudden like that. It wasn’t like she woke up one day and decided not to speak. The words just dropped away. Every day she said a little less, and she spent more and more time writing in those books of hers.” Verity’s voice was quiet with old hurt. “By the end of the summer . . . it was an awful summer. We barely had any harvest at all. The trees were sickly, and the apples rotted on the branches, and we couldn’t do anything to stop it. By autumn I knew I couldn’t leave her to go back to school. I shouldn’t have left in the first place.”
Sorrow had wondered what was behind Grandma’s decades-long silence, but only in the same way she wondered why the sun rose in the east, why snow fell in winter. She had never known her grandmother any other way, and like all children she had assumed the world she knew was the world that had always been. She had never pictured Perseverance in love, or heartbroken, or humiliated, just as she had never imagined that Verity had once dreamed about life beyond the orchard, had even reached out to take it, only to be pulled back.
“Did Patience know any of that?” Sorrow asked.
“Patience?” Verity said, surprised. “No. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
She asked because even though the hospital walls around her were modern and white and bland, even though she was miles and mountains away from the orchard, she was still standing in the ash grove where their family was buried. She was still squirming with alarm to hear her sister, her idol, the person she trusted to lead in every situation, telling her in a voice raw with desperation how much she wanted to escape, how she dreamed of leaving, but even her dreams were shackled by the roots of the orchard. In that moment, that cold morning on the last day of her life, Patience had understood something Sorrow had been too young to grasp: the stories were never just stories, and history was never only in the past. If they echoed loudly enough, those long-dead spites and long-buried hatreds, they weren’t a legacy but a cage—and she had wanted out.
If only they had been a family who talked about what they wanted as much as they talked about where they had come from, Patience and Verity might have found that in common.
“I know you think I was unreasonable,” Verity said. “And you’re probably right. Sometimes I feel like my whole life I’ve done nothing but make one wrong decision after another. I was only ever trying to protect you. All of you. I didn’t want Mom to have to face that kind of pain again. I didn’t want you and your sister to ever know what that felt like. There were days when it seemed like all I could do to keep you safe was keep you close. I thought we would be safe in the orchard.”
“That’s not—” Sorrow stopped, and she didn’t say: That’s not rational. That doesn’t even make sense. That’s not how it works.
The protests were there on her tongue, but withered before she spoke them. Verity knew that already. The regret seeped through every word she spoke.
“How did . . .” Sorrow had to stop, take a breath. “How did Hannah end up married to an Abrams? After all that? How did she even end up in Abrams Valley?”
“At the end of that summer she came to try to persuade me to go back to school,” Verity said. “I didn’t even—I refused to see her. I didn’t want her seeing how much Mom and I were struggling. I suppose she and Paul met while she was staying in town. I don’t know. I never asked. The next time I saw her they were engaged, and everybody in town was talking about how Paul’s fiancée had dropped out of law school to marry him. That bothered me, actually. That she dropped out to get married. She’s smart. She could have had quite a career.”
“That’s what bothered you,” Sorrow said slowly. “That she quit law school.”
“What do you want me to say, Sorrow? Hannah was always going to marry a man her family approved of. Paul Abrams may have been barely one generation removed from farmers, but at least they could trace their roots back before the Revolution. And I was always going to go home to the orchard. I had already decided to have daughters by then. Our lives were on different paths. I met your father when he was hiking through one summer.”
Sorrow knew that part of the story: Dad was an Appalachian Trail hiker who never made it to Maine because he got distracted in southern Vermont. She had always imagined it as a summer fling that led to an unexpected pregnancy. She had assumed Patience was an accident, and her too, eight years later.
“Michael and I were never going to want the same things,” Verity said, as though she knew what Sorrow was thinking, “but we both wanted you and your sister. You were supposed to come along a bit earlier, but these things don’t always go according to plan. Whatever else you think about the choices I’ve made, don’t ever doubt that. We always wanted you and Patience.”
Sorrow’s face grew warm and she looked away quickly. She knew Verity wasn’t being entirely honest with her—there was heartbreak beneath her dismissal of Hannah’s callousness, hurt and embarrassment and regrets, the inevitable act of moving on. There was more to her history with Dad than their daughters and the eight years between them. But Sorrow could let her have these small lies. She didn’t have to tear the scar tissue away from every one of her mother’s old hurts. She had done enough of that already.
Sorrow leaned forward to take the photo back. Julie hadn’t known the story behind that picture; she hadn’t known anything about it. To her it was a curiosity, an artifact of a forgotten age hidden away in an attic. Sorrow didn’t know why Julie would have taken time out of her last day alive to find it for her. Sorrow wasn’t anybody to her except the little sister of her long-dead once-upon-a-time friend. It probably didn’t matter. Julie was still dead. The girls in the photograph had grown into women who could barely speak to each other. Their families were still torn apart by rifts that would never mend.
“You know,” said Verity, “I really hate this place.”
Sorrow looked up. Verity was staring out the window. The view was unremarkable: parking lot half-filled with cars gleaming in the sun, strips of grass and trees locked in concrete curbs, roads pulsing with weekday traffic. Nothing from outside filtered into the room. Not the sounds of the traffic, not the heat of the day, not the scents of gas and asphalt and cut grass.
“I hate this place,” Verity said again. “I hate the rooms. I hate the beds. I hate the food. I hate wearing this stupid thing on my wrist.” She plucked at the patient ID band. “I hate that the windows don’t open. I hate that the plants are plastic. I hate that nobody who’s here wants to be here. I don’t want to be here.”
Sorrow opened her mouth, but Verity lifted a hand to stop her.
“Let me finish. I hate this place so much I start thinking about leaving the second I get here. But as much as I hate being here, sometimes I need to be. I need . . .” Verity considered her words. “I need somebody else to make decisions for a while, when I can’t trust my own judgment. When I can’t trust that the way the world looks to me is the way it actually is. I know you think I’m selfish, but all I could think—I kept thinking about when Patience died. You were so worried all the time.”
Sorrow nodded.
“I hated that. I hated how scared you were. It wasn’t that I didn’t notice. I did. But everything was cold and gray. Everything I ate tasted like ashes. It was all dust. Nothing had any texture to it anymore. And sometimes—sometimes I start thinking like that again. Like nothing has changed. When it starts to feel like the world has gone flat and dull, it’s like my mind gets stuck on this wheel going around and around, and there’s no room for anything else. I can’t feel anything else. I don’t even want to. I didn’t mean to scare you. But I couldn’t . . .”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, both of them looking toward the windows, watching the day move beyond the glass. Sorrow knew what she was supposed to say. Her entire life had been rehearsing for this. She was supposed to reassure Verity she wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. She hadn’t been scared. It was okay, it was really okay that in those few days after Julie died, when she had wanted so very badly for somebody to see how shaken she was, she had instead faded away to nothing more than an afterthought at the edge of her mother’s awareness. But it was fine. She was fine, Grandma was fine, they would be fine. She was supposed to say all of that, and mean it. That was what she would do if she could be a good daughter and granddaughter, the kind of person who could offer forgiveness as easily as she hoarded hurt. It would only take a few small words. She wouldn’t even choke getting them out.
“I better get back,” she said. She stood up and didn’t wait for Verity to do the same. “I don’t want to leave Grandma alone too long.”