THE DAY THEY buried Patience was cool, the sky a brilliant, aching blue. The apple trees in the Lovegood orchard still had not bloomed, and the ash trees in the cemetery grove remained leafless and brown. Nothing had been right since Patience had died. It was supposed to be spring, but there was no sign of it in the orchard.
Patience’s grave was at the end of a row next to their great-grandmother Devotion Lovegood, a woman she had never known. That spot at the end of the row should have been Grandma’s. Sorrow had always imagined it would be Grandma’s.
There were only a few people at the funeral. There was no preacher. The gravedigger and his assistant stood a respectable distance away; the tires of their yellow backhoe had pressed muddy tracks into the earth. The men were quiet now, but before, as the small family had been gathering, Sorrow had heard the young man whisper to the older that the witch weather seemed to be breaking, and the older man had hushed him with an elbow to the side and a wary glance at the barren trees. It would have delighted Sorrow before, to hear men from town murmuring nervously about her orchard’s strange weather, but now it only made her sick to her stomach. A man from the nursery had brought an ash sapling in a cloth sack. Dad and Grandma would plant it later, after Patience was in the ground.
Sorrow stood between Dad and Grandma. Nobody spoke. The Lovegood women did not bury their family members with empty words and meaningless prayers. Their only ceremony was giving the dead back to the earth and planting a new life to mark its passage. That was what Mom had said one day in town, when they saw a long funeral procession on the road. Sorrow had marveled at how a dead person could have known so many people, enough to fill all those cars.
Mom was there too, at Patience’s graveside. She wore a plain gray dress Sorrow had never seen before. At her back was a man in white and a woman in a dark skirt. The woman was a doctor. Sorrow had overheard Dad saying to Grandma that Mom was only allowed to come to the funeral if she was supervised, and she would go back to the hospital after.
Later, when the funeral was over, Mom would say good-bye to Sorrow. Sorrow would reach for her, wanting a hug, but Mom would flinch away. Her voice would be flat and dull and tired. When she was gone Sorrow’s stomach would cramp and her head would hurt and Dad would try to take her hand, but Sorrow would pull out of reach. She would walk back to the house behind Grandma, and she would notice how Grandma looked into the orchard, her eyes sad but her chin lifted in hope, as though she expected winter’s grip to finally break now that their tears were shed and Patience was gone.
In the morning, Dad would put a suitcase full of Sorrow’s things into the trunk of his rental car. Grandma would hug Sorrow, kiss her forehead, give her a quilt folded into a neat square, and only then would Sorrow understand that she was leaving. She didn’t want to go. She couldn’t leave Grandma alone. The garden wasn’t sprouting. The orchard wasn’t blossoming. She couldn’t leave. She would shout and fight and kick, clawing at her father when he tried to wrestle her into the car, slapping her grandmother away when she tried to help. She would hurt both of them, and herself, when she fell to the ground and scraped her knees and wailed. Only when she had tired herself out with fighting and crying would Dad lift her into the car.
Grandma would stand by the driveway and watch as they drove away.
“Your mother is very sick,” Dad would say as they left Abrams Valley.
It was what everybody had been saying for days. Doctors and police officers and the social worker in her pink suit as she sipped tea in the kitchen. They asked Sorrow if she was hungry, asked her if she had clean clothes, asked her how much her mother slept, how much she ate, how often she got out of bed. She didn’t know what to tell them. Patience had always warned her not to talk to strangers, but Patience was gone and Sorrow didn’t know what to do. It was easier not to say anything.
As they left Abrams Valley, Dad would say it again: “Your mother is very sick.”
And he would say, “Your grandmother thinks it’s best if you come stay with me for a while. Just until she gets better.”
And Sorrow would feel cold and small and hollowed out inside. Grandma was sending her away.
Tomorrow Sorrow would stare out the car window and she would remember pictures of palm trees and alligators in a library book, Patience tracing her finger all the way down to where Dad lived, and she would be too afraid to speak. Lovegoods didn’t leave the orchard. In all of Mom’s stories, every tale she had shared of their family when they cuddled together by the fire on cold winter nights, nobody ever left. Sorrow hadn’t even known they could. Mom had never said. Sorrow had never been to the airport before. She had never left Vermont, never ventured beyond the bounds of Abrams Valley. The orchard and the farm and the town were the only world she had ever known. She would remember Patience in the cemetery grove, not a shape in a white sheet but a living girl, her cheeks pink with cold beneath the spring green of her knit hat, and she would understand what she hadn’t understood before, and it would feel like a tangle of branches and vines wrapped around her heart, growing through her veins and squeezing her lungs. With every mile the distance tore at the underside of her skin like soft grass roots ripped away, until there was nothing left in her father’s rental car but a hollow shell of a girl, rigid with guilt and fear and a future looming over an unknown horizon, all of her warm, messy, pulsing, breathing insides left behind in the orchard.
Her father wouldn’t look at her. He would be holding the steering wheel so tight his knuckles were white, and he would say, “If she gets better.”
But that was tomorrow.
Now, in the Lovegood cemetery, Patience was wrapped up in a white sheet, and she was in the ground, and Dad was whispering that it was okay to cry, it was okay, but all Sorrow could feel was the sour ache at the back of her throat where a scream was gathering, growing like a summer storm, but instead of letting it loose she swallowed it down, down into the pit of her stomach, and locked it away beneath the fear and the suffocating sadness, buried it beneath the rich tumbling dirt, down with the roots and the worms and the darkness and the quiet.