Sorrow hadn’t realized anybody would miss her from her grandparents’ party until she heard the whelp of a police siren and saw blue and white lights flashing through the trees. Shouts echoed: her name, called over and over again. The party had broken up to search for her. Andi was furious, Sonia confused and annoyed, but Dad, he was the worst, because between hugging Sorrow and saying, “We were so worried,” and “Don’t you ever do that again,” he looked at Sorrow and saw the tears on her face and heard the stammer in her voice, and it was as though she had gone into the Everglades a daughter he knew and come out a stranger, and she had looked right back at him and seen a man as unfamiliar as he had been the day he took her away from Vermont.
No matter what she said after, however she reassured him, the damage was done. Her parents were looking at Sorrow but they were seeing Verity’s illness, with her bottle of pills and her hospital stays and a long, long family tree of twisted and diseased branches. Dad made therapy appointments for her and called every day when he was traveling. He began to check her homework, worried anew over her usual academic disinterest, and when Sorrow complained to Sonia, Sonia only said she wasn’t going to get between Sorrow and her father. Sorrow quickly learned that answering “Fine” when either of them asked how she was doing would only invite more questions, more digging, cautious looks and careful smiles, and it was all so overwhelming she caught herself thinking maybe Dad was right. Maybe there was something to find, if she cracked herself open and peered inside. Maybe there was a time bomb ticking away behind her heart, buried in that black hole of her memories, the ones edged with nightmares of fire. What kind of person couldn’t even remember her own sister’s death? Had to learn it instead like a lesson in school, a recitation of facts, because her own truth of it was gone?
Something crunched on the road’s gravel shoulder to the left, down the hill toward the Abrams farm. Sorrow’s heart skipped, and she turned, stared hard into the shadows. There was a shape in the distance, a few hundred feet away. Her breath caught. There had always been bears wandering through the orchard in the summer and autumn, chomping happily on fallen apples before waddling away. Patience had given them names: Sir Scruff, Lady Furrington. Plump lazy creatures who never bothered anybody. Nothing to be afraid of. Still, Sorrow’s heart was hammering.
Then the shape moved, and a pale light sliced through the dusk.
Not a bear, then, unless the bears had taken to carrying phones on their forest rambles. Sorrow pressed her fingers to her sternum, willing her heart to slow down.
From this distance, in the twilight, she couldn’t make out anything about the person on the roadside, but she saw when they turned. A stillness fell between them. Her skin crawled. She had been spotted.
Headlights appeared on the road, and Sorrow took a step back, but the car lurched to a stop before it reached her. In the sudden blinding glow Sorrow saw a short skirt and bare legs, a shimmery shirt nearly translucent in the light, a flash of blond hair. Abrams hair, the same crown for every head all the way down their line. A car door opened, music spilled out with bright catches of voices and laughter, and the girl climbed in. The sound of the door snapping shut echoed through the valley. The car pulled a sharp U-turn and headed back toward town. The red taillights faded.
Sorrow started back up the driveway. The maples were dense with leaves now. They had been barren the day she left.
Her steps slowed. A cool breeze snaked through the trees, turning leaves in the arched branches overhead. She rubbed her arms to chase away a sudden chill.
Not even a week ago, at their last appointment before she’d left, she had told Dr. Silva that she couldn’t even remember her sister’s funeral. What kind of person did that make her, she had asked, that she couldn’t remember putting her own sister in the ground? Dr. Silva had assured her there was no betrayal in not remembering, no failure on her part, but Sorrow had been unconvinced.
She was still unconvinced, and she grasped at this flicker of knowledge like a lifeline: the trees had been bare. It was only the vaguest shimmer of an image, more impression than thought, but the longer she held it, the more certain she became that she could feel the spring cold on her face, stinging and sharp, the sun too bright, offering too little warmth. Shoes that didn’t fit right. A dress that itched. The earth soggy beneath her feet where snow had melted away.
The air stirred again, and a single leaf fluttered down from the maples. Sorrow bent to pick it up. In the evening gloom it might have been blazing autumn red rather than rich summer green. She twisted the stem, watched it turn, wondered if it would be supple or crackling dry if she closed it in her hand.
The breeze died. The night was heavy and humid again, and the orchestra of crickets surged all around. Sorrow dropped the leaf and swiped her hand on her shirt, brushing away the sensation of it pinched between her fingers. She was tired. Her nerves were overloaded. She was going to be eaten alive by mosquitoes if she stayed out any longer. She marched up the driveway through the tunnel of trees. Ahead the farmhouse shone like a lighthouse glimpsed across the ocean at night.
6
EIGHT YEARS AGO
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.