Sorrow had hugged him good-bye, told him she would be fine, and fled into the security line.
The pilot advised the flight attendants to prepare for landing. A few rows up a toddler shrieked excitedly. Trees gave way to open fields, open fields to an expanse of asphalt. The plane landed with a jolt and a rumble. When it rolled to a stop and the clatter of seat belts filled the cabin, Sorrow pulled out her phone, texted a single word to her father—landed—because he would call if she didn’t. After a moment, she texted the same to her stepmother, Sonia; she couldn’t be sure anymore that what she told one of them would reach the other.
She scrolled through messages from her stepsister, Andi, from her friends, from her cousins, but she didn’t want to go through a dozen have a safe trip! and don’t get eaten by a moose! texts right now, not from the same people who had reacted to her trip with varying degrees of skepticism and doubt, peppering her with invasive questions: “But your mother, is she okay now? Is she seeing a doctor? Is she medicated?”
Sorrow’s Florida family had always treated her family in Vermont as an artifact of ancient history, a distant, troubled past to be occasionally puzzled over, mostly ignored. They thought it charming that Sorrow could name her ancestors back twelve generations—but only the women, rarely the men—and didn’t that tell you what you needed to know about her mother’s side of the family? They knew her parents had never been married, hadn’t even lived together for more than a few months around the birth of each daughter, but they didn’t like to judge, that wasn’t what they were saying, sometimes these things happened. None of it was important anyway. It was all so long ago. There was nothing there worth going back to.
They had never known Patience.
To them, she was a concept veiled in tragedy more than a person, a sad story to be shared when Sorrow was out of the room. Heads shaking, voices low: She had an older sister once, you know, up in Vermont, but the poor girl died. Sixteen years old. There was a fire.
The airport was small, so it was only a few minutes before Sorrow was standing beside the baggage claim, tapping her fingers against her leg, waiting for the belt to move.
She looked around the room, the milling people, the families and reunion hugs.
She didn’t see her mother. She looked again.
The flight was on time, even a few minutes early. Maybe Verity hadn’t gotten to the airport yet. The baggage belt chugged to life, and the passengers crowded closer. Maybe she was parking. Maybe Sorrow was supposed to meet her outside. Verity had only said she would pick her up; they hadn’t decided on a meeting place. Maybe it was a longer drive than Sorrow remembered—she wasn’t even sure what she remembered. Narrow roads, green mountains, blue sky, an ache in her throat that had taken weeks to fade, but no sense of time, no sense of distance.
She spotted her bag, bright blue, and wrestled it off the belt.
“Sorrow.”
She turned, and there was Verity.
In Sorrow’s memories of her childhood in Vermont, she could not recall her mother ever wearing anything other than a skirt or a dress. Even when she was working in the orchard or garden, Verity had worn long skirts, usually handmade, often patched so many times they looked like one of Grandma Perseverance’s quilts. She had never even owned a pair of jeans, as far as Sorrow knew. None of them had. It was one of the things that had earned Sorrow and Patience relentless mockery from kids in town. The adults hadn’t been much better, wondering aloud if the Lovegoods were Amish or Mennonite or their own particular brand of backwoods weird, and what was their mother thinking, dressing them like that? If their father was around she wouldn’t get away with that, but the Lovegood women, they didn’t have much use for men, did they? Sorrow had never known how to respond. The women in their family did things their own way. That was all she had known when she was a child.
But now, eight years later, Verity was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was shorter, a stylish cut that wouldn’t have been out of place at Sonia’s investment banking job, with threads of gray lightening the dark brown. Sorrow had looked past her twice while searching the room. She hadn’t recognized her own mother.
“Hi,” Sorrow said.
She didn’t let go of her suitcase or step forward. She tried a smile, wasn’t sure it worked. Her face was warm, her heart beating too fast. She thought about saying hi again. She thought about saying Mom, but her mind stuttered over the word. She hadn’t called Verity Mom in years, since the first time they spoke on the phone after Sorrow left Vermont. That first conversation had been painfully brief. Sorrow had barely been able to choke out a single word, and Verity had sounded like a stranger, eerily calm in a way that Sorrow now knew was an effect of the medication she had been on at the time. Later conversations had been smoother, easier, as Verity got better and Sorrow adjusted to her new life in Florida, but at some point, without Sorrow even noticing, the word Mom had withered to dust.
“It’s good to see you,” Verity said. She started forward, paused when a man with a toddler on his shoulders pushed between them. Her lips twitched. “It’s really good to see you.”
She held out her arms, and Sorrow hesitated only a second before stepping into the hug. It didn’t feel right; she was taller than her mother now. Sorrow had shot up to five foot eleven in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, giving her one wretched year of being the tallest person in her class. She had never realized it would translate into gaining inches over her mother too.
“How was your flight?” Verity asked after she stepped back.
“It was good. It was fine. Long, but okay.” Sorrow didn’t know what else to say. She couldn’t carve any thoughts from the nerves muddling her mind. She pulled out the handle on her suitcase. “This is all my stuff.”
“All right, then.” That twitch of the lips again, not quite lifting into a smile. “Let’s go.”
They walked side by side out of the airport. Verity stopped next to a green car, a Subaru station wagon. Sorrow’s memories of her childhood were foggy, often more vague than specific, but she remembered a car much like this one, older, dirtier.
New car, new clothes, new hair. A lot could change in eight years.
“Grandma is really excited to see you,” Verity said. “I hope you’re ready to let her feed you. She’s been baking all week. I tried to tell her that you’re just one girl and one girl doesn’t need five pies, but you know how she is.”
Sorrow dug into her backpack for her sunglasses, mostly to have something to look at, something to do with her hands. It was easier to gaze out the window at the landscape than to stop herself from staring at Verity’s profile, at once familiar and strange.