DAWN CREPT OVER the mountains, and the land breathed. She felt it beneath her, a living thing, as she climbed the hill away from the cabin. The newest saplings, one year old, were knee-high now on the cusp of summer. The hills were mottled brown and green, shapes indistinguishable in the murky half-light before sunrise, but the sky was an extravagant smear of pink and orange and gold, such glorious colors they felt like fire in her eyes, embers beneath her skin.
At the summit of the hill waited the gnarled old oak. It was a magnificent tree, so broad and so towering she had thought it might have a story, a history, some weighty reverence due to its great age and imposing height, but the villagers had laughed when she asked. It was only a tree, they said. A tree in a sea of trees, a world of trees, but even so, she had not the heart to cut it down. It would stay here. She would clear the hill around it, bring her apple trees up the south-facing slope in clean curving rows, over the top and down the northern side. By the end of this summer she would have this hill ready for her rootstock. The land was stubborn, the roots hard as iron and the stones plentiful, but her stubbornness, she had learned, was greater.
Last year’s planting had the look of spindly sticks, offering a shy spattering of leaves as they broke from their winter dormancy. Those from the year before, no longer saplings but still skinny as colt legs, were branching into proper little trees. The oldest, the first she had planted, they were three years old, and their branches were innumerable, their early-summer leaves lush and supple, and their blossoms as shy and pink as a smile.
Four years now she had toiled alone in these dark woods. That first winter, after she had cleared the land and planted her precious roots, but before she had known if even a single apple tree would take, she had huddled in her cabin as the wind snaked through chinks in the mud. She had been barely more than a girl when she crossed the sea, spring-fresh and unformed, not yet twenty years of age, and though she felt ancient in her heart as the cold closed around her, old as the mountains in her bones, she had wept like a child when the storms wailed. Wept for the girl she had been and the misty green hills she had left behind, wept for the family across the sea that would never again speak her name except in shame and, someday, perhaps, regret. She had wept until she was scraped raw inside, empty but for the leaden weight of every memory of the life she had left, the grasping thorns of every choice that had brought her to this bleak and howling place. When darkness fell she poured rivers of tears into the wood and soil and stone beneath her, a well of loneliness that felt as though it would never run dry.
But slowly, slowly, winter had broken its hold on the mountains. Gray skies cracked apart to reveal searing blue, and the call of songbirds and drone of insects chased away the mourning wind. Spring came with a crush of green, a blush of pink, and she did not have time to weep anymore. She had work to do. The tears she spilled had nourished the land, softened it for her ax and spade, flowed through the earth, feeding her trees both wild and tame. Her sweat sank to join it, her blood as well, so much through that first year, so often, the land might have been an extension of her own body, flesh and stone, water and blood.
The wind turned, a gentle breeze tugging at wisps of unbound hair. The work never stopped, but she allowed herself this small luxury of watching the sun rise. Today the dawn was joined by a hint of smoke in the air. It had become a familiar scent these past few days, and she wasn’t yet sure how to feel about neighbors planting themselves so close. She had met them yesterday. A man and his family, grim stern-faced folk lately of a plantation in Massachusetts. The boys were strapping and strong, the wife unsmiling and silent; one of the sons, a child of about ten, had spat on the ground and glowered, mumbling witch to the earth before his mother herded him away. The man had asked to speak to her husband, her father, her brother, each question lifting his voice and brow with increasing disbelief that he had come so far into the mountains to find a woman alone on a piece of land she had cultivated with her own hands, and no man to rule her.
She had told him she was a widow—handily dispatching the imaginary husband she had invented to secure the land—and she had watched the calculating spark appear in his eyes. Her land was rich, the soil good, and most of all it was already cleared. Her apple trees were young but thriving. His own land promised years of toil to come.
She patted the trunk of the magnificent oak and felt its warmth beneath her fingers, its welcoming strength. She had acres to tend, and the sun was rising. The smoke of the neighbors’ fire was as delicate as spider silk against the brilliant dawn. The man would be waking with avarice in his heart and deception in his eyes. As the summer bloomed he would try to clear her along with the shrubs and stones and snags, as though a woman were no more than another obstacle on the landscape.
But she had shed tears and blood to make this land a part of herself. She was not so easily frightened away.
3
SORROW RESTED HER forehead against the window as the plane descended. Lake Champlain glittered in the sun, deep blue dotted with small boats like scattered toys. Burlington at its shore barely looked like a city. No skyscrapers, no lanes of highway glinting with traffic, no suburban sprawl stretching to the horizon. She had looked it up: the entire state of Vermont had roughly one-quarter the population of Miami-Dade County.
Everything was small and strange and unfamiliar. She hadn’t been sitting by the window when she flew away eight years ago. All she remembered of the day she left were tree-lined roads blurred through tears, her father a stiff and quiet stranger beside her, a hollow ache in her chest that felt like something had been torn away, and not understanding, not really, that she wouldn’t be coming back for a very long time.
Her eyes were hot, her head heavy, but her insides were an electric tangle of nerves. For three months she’d been pushing and planning for this trip. Telling Dad and Sonia that letting her go was the only way they could help. Enlisting Dr. Silva to argue on her behalf. Reassuring herself, over and over again, in every way she knew how, that it was what she needed to do, that when she was standing on the ground in Abrams Valley, breathing the summer mountain air beneath a clear blue sky, the gaps in her childhood memories, all those empty spaces edged with thorns, would collapse on themselves, and she would remember. She scarcely dared think about what she would do if it didn’t work, if her month in Vermont passed and nothing changed.
She had left Miami in the muggy darkness before dawn, after managing barely an hour of restless sleep. Right up until she passed through security she had been expecting Dad to change his mind. All through the days leading up to her leaving, through the drive to the airport in the morning darkness, the walk through the terminal, there had been words perched on the tip of his tongue, a single breath from being spoken, but in the end he’d only said, “You don’t have to stay if it’s not what you expect.”