The long tunnel of trees along the driveway was barely green anymore, and the first stars were coming out, bright pricks of light twinkling in the restless air. An engine rumbled, and headlights shone around a bend in the road. Sorrow stepped farther from the asphalt as the car passed. Somebody was heading down from the mountains, probably hikers whose day had run long. The car was gone in moments, and the road was dark again. A mosquito nipped at her arm. She slapped it flat, wiped the smudge on her jeans.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know what her father was worried about. She knew exactly what he was worried about. She knew exactly why he and Sonia had been so stiff with each other lately. She knew why Andi hadn’t come back from California for the summer. She knew why all of their conversations now turned into awkward exchanges of questions and avoidance. She knew why her father had become more overbearing and Sonia more distant. For months Sorrow had been making herself smaller and smaller, trying to duck between them like she was dodging raindrops, and she knew exactly who was to blame.
She knew it was her fault.
It had started the day she had accidentally gone missing. It hadn’t been intentional, no matter what anybody believed. She hadn’t meant to make them worry.
They had been at Sonia’s parents’ house for a spring break party. Mima and Abu lived way out on the outskirts of Miami’s metro area, at the fringe where suburban sprawl gave way to the Everglades. They had moved out there after decades in Little Havana, when Mima finally convinced Abu that she would be happier in her retirement with a piece of land to tend and a pair of binoculars for bird-watching. The party had been a noisy, crowded affair: music blaring, coolers packed with ice and beer, food-laden tables sinking into the soft grass, adults barking out warnings every time the kids tumbled too close to Mima’s garden, and Andi, home from college for the week, basking at the center of it all like a queen on a throne.
Sorrow had wandered around with a Solo cup of Diet Coke gone flat, ignoring the cousins who tried to pull her into a soccer game, letting aunts and uncles and friends stop and ask her about school, ask her if she had a boyfriend or maybe a girlfriend, ask her if she was proud of Andi, if she was thinking of going to Stanford too, after she graduated, wouldn’t that be fun, both of them out in California? Smiles, nods, murmurs of agreement, but what Sorrow was thinking was that she had two more years of high school ahead of her, and even then she would never be Stanford material. She was an average student, never having quite recovered from a rocky start to her formal education. Thanks to Verity’s homeschooling, she had begun school in Florida capable enough in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but while she’d had an encyclopedic knowledge of the history, geology, and ecology of the Green Mountains, and the uncanny ability to name every one of her maternal ancestors stretching back to the middle of the eighteenth century, her awareness of other topics had been somewhat lacking. Even worse, she’d had no idea how to sit in a classroom when she would rather be outside, or how to take a test when she would rather be collecting beetles and flowers. She hadn’t even known she was supposed to come back inside after recess. She had learned how school worked, reluctantly, begrudgingly, and when she was older she found biology and environmental science classes she enjoyed, but she would never be a top student like Andi.
And that afternoon at the party, after her face started hurting from being prodded into stiff smiles for hours and there was no sign anything would be winding down, Sorrow had slipped away. She’d rolled a bike out of the garage—the one Abu was supposed to be using for exercise, doctor’s orders—and rode away down the tree-lined road to where the pavement ended and the dirt began and she couldn’t hear the music and laughter anymore. She hadn’t meant to go far or stay away long, but there was always a tantalizing glimmer of water through the cypress trees, and all she could hear was birds singing and insects humming. At the end of one dirt road she found the remains of an old orange grove—a small one on a few soggy, ill-chosen acres—and she leaned the bike against a tree to look around. The property was abandoned, the trees draped with Spanish moss. She didn’t see any Trespassers Will Be Shot on Sight signs warning her away, so she took her chances and spent some time exploring the old grove, breathing in the rich scents of greenery and decay.
Daylight faded, and the shadows around her grew deep and dark, but she didn’t leave, and into that breathing silence came a thought she hadn’t let herself think in years: Patience would have loved this.
The unfamiliar trees, the dark water, the chattering bugs, the flat ground unwrinkled by even the slightest hill, and seeping from it a sense of history both vivid and alien: it was like nothing Patience had ever known, nothing she had ever had a chance to see. She would be twenty-four now—no longer a girl but a young woman—and that had stopped Sorrow in her tracks. All the questions everybody had been asking her all afternoon, they were things Patience had never even been allowed to contemplate, every one of them a path she had never been able to follow. Sorrow was two months past her own sixteenth birthday and already venturing into territory Patience had never had a chance to explore. She had been doing it all along, ever since she left Vermont, but it had never taken her breath away as it did that evening, when she realized her own life now stretched longer than Patience’s ever would.
She didn’t know what Patience would be doing now, had she lived. She didn’t know what she would be like, what choices she would have made. If she would have stayed in the orchard in Vermont like their mother and grandmother, or if she would have fled for college, travel, adventures elsewhere in the world. If they would be friends as well as sisters, or if they would be such different people they would have no point of connection. She didn’t know. There were days when she could barely remember Patience, when her entire childhood in the orchard had the feel of a dream slipping away after waking, fading into a blur of unfamiliar colors. She feared someday her memories would be gone for good.