AFTER DINNER SORROW and Grandma went together to sit on the porch. The rain had stopped and the clouds had finally cleared. The sharp cold had subsided, leaving the evening pleasantly cool. Soft golden light filtered through the apple trees. Grandma had a ball of yarn and two wooden needles in her lap. Sorrow sat in the other chair, rocking idly from time to time, letting her inward restlessness show only in the occasional tap of her feet against the floorboards, the drum of her fingers on the arm of the chair.
All day she had considered and discarded things to say to her grandmother. She had reported that Verity seemed fine and might be coming home tomorrow, but she hadn’t been able to add: She told me about Henry Abrams. She had spent hours helping Grandma in the garden and around the orchard, but not once had she found a way to say: I know why you stopped talking. I know what hurt you so badly silence was the only way you could live through it. I know why you and Verity have wrapped yourselves in a protective cloak of loneliness and quiet here on the farm, surrounded by memories and dead ancestors. I know.
All the words Sorrow could not say beat a steady rhythm against her ribs. She couldn’t say something just to prove she knew, not when it might hurt Grandma to have the truth drawn unexpectedly into the open after she had locked it away so long ago.
The sun sank, the shadows lengthened, and the only sound between them was the creak of rocking chairs on the porch and the occasional slap of a hand brushing away a twilight mosquito. After a while, Grandma let out a quiet sigh, picked up her needles, and began to knit. The soft tap of wood on wood joined the chorus of crickets and evening songbirds.
The phone rang; the noise was so loud and so unexpected Sorrow jumped in her chair.
“I’ll just—get that.” Her heart was thudding as she stepped inside to answer. “Hello?”
“Uh, hi, Sorrow? It’s me. Ethan.”
A wash of relief: she had feared it would be Dr. Parker. “Oh. Hi.”
“Look, this is kind of—have you seen Cassie?”
“Cassie?” Sorrow’s relief turned to confusion. “Uh, no. I haven’t seen her since the festival. Why?”
“Nobody knows where she is.”
Sorrow felt an electric spark down her spine. “Since when?”
“Nobody’s seen her all afternoon,” Ethan said. “Aunt Hannah doesn’t know exactly when she went out. They thought she was in her room.”
“She’s not answering her phone?”
“Her parents have it. They’re calling her friends, but nobody’s seen her.”
“Right. Right, you said . . . yeah.” They had taken her phone away after Julie died; Sorrow remembered Ethan mentioning that. “Do you need help looking for her? I wouldn’t even know where to start, but I can help.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Ethan said. “They don’t know I’m calling you.”
Calling the Lovegoods for help with an Abrams family problem. Sorrow bumped her head softly against the wall and tasted, faintly, iron at the back of her throat, a drifting memory of that day she had run to the Abramses for help, so terrified she was doing the wrong thing.
“Right. Yeah. Have you . . .” Oh, she didn’t want to say it. She did not want to ask. “Has somebody looked in the cider house?”
“I did,” Ethan said, his voice quiet. “Just now. She’s not there. I don’t know if it’s . . . fuck, I don’t even know how freaked out we should be. But Aunt Hannah called me. She called me. She would never talk to me willingly unless she was really worried.”
“Yeah. Okay. What can I do?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know. If she shows up at your place and she’s . . . can you call me?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Thanks. Yeah. Thanks.”
“I hope you find her soon,” Sorrow said.
A pause, then Ethan said, “Yeah. Me too.”
Sorrow went back outside and dropped into her chair. “That was Ethan. Nobody can find Cassie. They don’t know where she is.”
Grandma’s eyes widened, and she lifted her hand in her usual go on gesture.
Sorrow shook her head. “That’s all he said. I don’t know if they think she’s . . . I don’t know. They wouldn’t even let Ethan talk to her a few days ago. I feel like I should do something.”
Grandma tilted her head to the side, and Sorrow made a face.
“I know. I’m the last person they want around. But I still feel like I should—”
The porch faced west. The sun was sinking before them, kissing the tops of the hills, just high enough to cast long bright rays through the apple trees, creating a striped pattern of light and dark over Grandma’s garden.
In one of those bars of sunlight, something glinted on the lawn.
It hadn’t been there before. She and Grandma had been sitting here for half an hour or more, watching the sun go down. She would have noticed that sparking bright reflection in the grass.
“Like I should do something,” she said absently. She stood; the chair rocked gently behind her. “I told Ethan I could help.”
She walked to the edge of the porch. Dropped down one step, another, stepped onto the hard-packed soil. Walked across the lawn until she stood above the glinting object.
It was a pair of old-fashioned wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
Sorrow’s heart beat quickly.
One of the round lenses was missing, the other broken down the middle in a lightning-shaped crack. She picked them up gingerly. The wire frame was warm to the touch.
She glanced back at the house. Grandma had risen from her chair.
A child could believe impossible things. A child with a home embraced by trees so old and roots so deep they were part of the mountains themselves, filled with small treasures, fading and growing with a cycle that sometimes had nothing to do with the seasons, she could rise every morning with the sun and work chores to tend the land, tame it just enough to make it nurturing, but not so much to make it docile. She could remember the stories her family had always told, passed down mother to daughter, woman to woman, words made breath through generations, and believe it was possible to pluck those stories from the soil with careful little-girl fingers. History never truly loosed its grip on the present. The past was never only memories.
Patience had placed the glasses on Sorrow’s face, her fingers warm from being tucked into her mittens. She had laughed at the find, delighted by proof that winter was ending. Sorrow had wanted to laugh. Oh, how she had tried, so achingly aware of the gap between the girl she was supposed to be and the one she was inside. Patience had believed the glasses were Sorrow’s first favor of the year, but Sorrow had been keeping a secret from her. In her pocket there had been a weight, so small nobody had noticed, so heavy it had threatened to press her into the earth.
She could feel it even now, a solid square against her ribs, right at the spot where her coat’s inside pocket had been.
She cupped the glasses in her hand and held them at her side. She glanced back at the house. Grandma was watching her, eyes shaded against the setting sun.
Julie in the cemetery grove, her golden hair in the sun, already prepared to die, she had handed the photograph to Sorrow and she had said: They don’t realize that what they’re hiding from isn’t as bad as what they’re doing to themselves by hiding.
Sorrow had assumed she’d been talking about Verity and Hannah. She had been tracing lines between their families since that day, weaving a spiderweb of gossamer-fine relationships. Verity and Hannah. Patience and Julie. Devotion and Perseverance. Mothers and daughters, sisters and friends, neighbors and enemies, women alone and women surviving. Julie and herself.
She had forgotten about Cassie. Cassie, who had accused Patience of setting the fires even when nobody else believed it. Cassie, who had confronted Sorrow not once but twice, flinging insults and challenges in her face, in public where anybody could hear.
Cassie, who had been alone since her sister’s suicide, and was now missing.
“I’m going to look for her,” Sorrow said.
Grandma nodded.
Sorrow walked past the chicken coop, down the hill, around the field below the house. She touched her grandfather’s pickup as she passed; the metal was warm, gritty, solid.
She stopped at the edge of the apple trees. Ahead the dirt road headed west into the shadows. A chorus of insects sang. The orchard in evening was breathtakingly beautiful: shades of green shivering to silver when the air stirred, golden light touching the highest treetops and the hills beyond, the velvet sky clear, cloudless, magnificent.
She rubbed at her arms. She looked back at the house. Grandma was still standing on the porch, her face alight. A small woman and a small house, old mountains and old trees, all of it so warm and familiar it made her heart ache. Sorrow pressed her fingers briefly to the skin at the base of her neck, tried to steady her breath, to calm her nerves. She didn’t know where to go. She didn’t know where Cassie would run to hide from her family and herself.
The apple trees were a wall of green and brown, a border between daylight and darkness, with roots that had been clinging for centuries and branches so entangled the canopy itself had forgotten where one tree ended and another began. There might be diseases lurking in the trunks and leaves, there might be blights and bacteria, fungus and rot, but hidden, gnawing from the inside, easily missed if you didn’t know how to look, and there were so many different ways to look. Sorrow had been turning and turning in her mind, grasping for memories unreachable through a thicket of snapping branches and rustling leaves, but her past had never been lost. Her memories had never been unreachable. They had been here all along, waiting for her to see not a barrier of shadows but a living thing, a breathing thing, a land that shuddered when her heart beat, that rose and fell with every breath, that gathered grief and pain and tears and held them close, intimate as secrets, and did not forget.
She stepped from the field into the orchard. The sun was sinking behind the mountains, the sky a searing blaze of gold. She took another step, and the deep green shadows surrounded her. A soft breeze pushed through the trees, and it was cold, a startling bite, raising goose bumps on her arms.
There, at the base of the first tree in the row, was a small bead on a leather string. She leaned to pick it up. It was as round and red as a white rabbit’s eye. She rolled it between her thumb and forefinger, then tucked it into her pocket.
Three rows into the orchard she found a filigree lady’s fan open against the base of a tree. She picked it up, eased it closed, coaxed it open again. She had never known who it belonged to; she had never thought to ask. When she was a child the favors were gifts from the orchard to her, nothing more and nothing less. She tapped the fan closed, slid it into her pocket, and kept walking.
Barely fifty feet along she found a pocket watch dangling from the low branch of an apple tree. To George, Love Forever, From Catherine. She had read those names a hundred times as a child, tracing the engraving, admiring her treasure. She wondered now how Catherine had mourned her husband when he disappeared. How long she had remained hopeful that he would one day return.
“Okay,” Sorrow said.
She reached up to untangle the chain; her hands were shaking. When she held the watch she felt cool water dribble onto her fingers. She opened the clasp and shook it slightly, heard the patter of droplets on the ground. The face was cracked, both of the hands pointing toward midnight. A dank, mossy smell rose.
The cider brewers of Abrams Valley liked to talk about the different qualities of apples grown in different parts of the valley—more sour from the northern end, more bitter from the Lovegood end—endless arguments around and around about the terroir of every orchard, that unique combination of soil and geology and human care that made even apples of the same variety noticeably different. Perhaps the same could be said of girls growing up in the same place at different times, if the landscape beneath their feet and the world around them was changing. A mother’s illness growing stronger. A family’s isolation drawing in on itself. Dreams of escape washing away. Patience had always been trying to get Sorrow to listen to the orchard, to hear the memories that vibrated in its stones and trees. Sorrow had never been able to hear those echoes. The orchard spoke to her in a different way.
“Okay,” Sorrow said again. Her heart was thudding in her throat. “You have my attention. Show me where to go.”
She was whispering, her words barely more than the faintest exhale of breath, but as she spoke, the trees around her stirred in a sudden lift of breeze. The leaves rustled and turned, the grass rasped and swayed, and a shiver crept over her skin.