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 in 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.