There were no big monuments in the Lovegood cemetery, no crosses, no stone angels on marble bases. The headstones were plain white rectangles: chips of marble, names and dates, nothing else. No words identified the interred as beloved mothers or fathers, cherished sisters or brothers. Verity used to say they didn’t need words carved in stone to remind them where their family had come from.
What they had instead were the ash trees.
When a member of the Lovegood family died, before the earth had settled into a solemn depression over their body, before the mourners had walked the path back to the house, an ash sapling was planted over their grave. There was one for every person buried in the cemetery. Their family was old, but most generations had only one or two daughters, few had any sons, and many had died young. But there were trees enough to form an impressive grove, and their branches wove together in an arched canopy, and sunlight through the gaps cast a dappled pattern on the ground.
The oldest and grandest ash belonged to Rejoice Lovegood, their ancestor who had first planted the orchard. She had died in 1790, but there was no birth date on her gravestone, because nobody knew when she had been born. She had come to Vermont alone, before it was Vermont, a young woman without a family. Nobody knew where she had come from or what her name had been before she chose Lovegood for herself. She had eventually met and married a French trapper, but the women in their family never took their husbands’ names.
Sorrow hadn’t known that was unusual until Mrs. Roche, their neighbor down the road, had told her most families used their father’s name, not their mother’s. Mrs. Roche hadn’t exactly said the Lovegoods were weird for doing it the wrong way around, but Sorrow had known she was thinking it. Mrs. Roche carried everything she was thinking in the climbing arches of her drawn-on eyebrows, and they climbed extra high, with more than the usual amount of arch, when she was disapproving of Sorrow’s family.
Beyond the gray lines of the split-rail fence, splashes of yellow in the green revealed themselves to be plastic strips tied around the trunks of the ashes, and in a few high branches, dangling from ropes, were bright purple squares.
“What’s all that stuff?” Sorrow asked.
“Some forestry students put them up,” Verity said.
“Are the trees sick?”
“Not yet,” Verity said. “They’re trying to keep this bug called the emerald ash borer from getting established in Vermont, so they’re teaching people how to recognize ash trees and look for the signs. I guess the bugs are attracted to purple, and the traps are supposed to catch them.”
“Have they?” Sorrow looked up and down the trunks of the ashes, searching for signs of disease, infestation, rot. The trees were strong and healthy, as far as she could tell; a leaf she plucked from a low branch was soft and supple. But she didn’t know what to look for, and so much of what could go wrong with trees wasn’t visible from the outside.
“The beetles aren’t here yet, if that’s what you mean. You look like you expect one to crawl down your neck any second now.”
Sorrow rolled her shoulders to relax. “I didn’t know that was a thing you had to worry about. In Florida they’ve got this little bug called the psyllid that causes citrus greening, and it’s killing orange trees all over. It’s not the bugs that kill the trees, actually. It’s a bacteria they carry. It does something to . . .” She trailed off. “It’s really bad. I wrote a paper about it for my environmental science class.”
Still Verity said nothing, and Sorrow’s questions about the ash trees faltered in the silence. Dad and Sonia had seized on Sorrow’s interest in biology and ecology with a fervor that embarrassed her, especially after she’d realized—with help from Dr. Silva—that they were only desperate for her to show some spark of academic inclination because that was the only way they knew how to relate to a teenage daughter. Thanks to Andi, with her valedictorian GPA and college applications and extracurriculars, the rubric their parents had for assessing how their daughters were doing was one on which Sorrow was never going to tick very many boxes.
She thought Verity might understand that, if she explained. Verity, who had never quite fit into what the world expected her to be, living according to the weather and seasons, measuring accomplishments in harvests and planting, she would be unimpressed by Dad and Sonia trying to fit Sorrow into a mold that hadn’t been made for her.
But Verity didn’t ask. She didn’t seem to have noticed that Sorrow had spoken at all.
When they reached the corner of the cemetery fence, Sorrow kicked at a fallen rail before stepping over.
“I’m surprised you haven’t taken this whole thing down.” The fence post wobbled ominously when she nudged it. As a child she had walked the entire length of the cemetery fence as a balance beam, but barely half of it was still standing. “I think if I sneezed on it the whole thing would fall over.”
She glanced back. Verity had stopped on the outside of the fence.
“Are you . . . ?” Sorrow gestured with the bouquet of flowers.
Verity looked at her, then looked into the orchard, away from the gravestones, away from the ash trees, and said nothing.
Sorrow waited, waited, stared and waited for an uncomfortably long time before she realized, in a crush of embarrassment, that Verity had no intention of crossing the fence.
Her face grew hot. Verity wasn’t even looking at her. “I, uh. Okay. I’ll just . . . Okay.”
Sorrow left Verity at the fence and walked alone through the cemetery. The grass was long and untrimmed, and tangles of weeds choked each headstone, dotted here and there with plastic bags and scraps of trash. Every piece of rubbish she spotted tightened a knot in her throat. It wasn’t supposed to look like this. It never had before. She used to play out here, climbing the trees and walking the fence. On summer nights they would come out as a family, all four of them, spread a blanket on the ground and look up at the stars. It wasn’t right that Verity had neglected the graveyard, not when she was putting so much effort into cleaning up the rest of the property.
Sorrow’s steps slowed as she reached the far corner.
She hadn’t known, before that moment, how fast an ash tree could grow. The ashes of the cemetery were tall and sturdy, towering so high she had to crane her head back to glimpse their crowns, but the youngest ash had been a sapling when she last saw it, a whip of soft wood in a burlap sack of dirt. In her mind that was the way it had remained. But Patience’s tree was well over ten feet tall now, tall enough that Sorrow had no proper scale for estimating its height. A single-story bungalow in a Miami suburb? A swaying palm in a postage-stamp yard? She looked up and up and she wondered—it hurt, to wonder, like a bee sting in her chest—if she would be taller than Patience now, as she was taller than Verity, herself sturdy and treelike where they had always been willowy and graceful.