The Lovegood ashes were still healthy. Longer-lived than they had any right to be, sturdy and tall, and thriving. Sorrow pressed an open palm to the nearest, the one Rejoice Lovegood’s husband had planted for her, at her request, after her death.
Sorrow and her family used to come out to the graveyard for night picnics sometimes, all four of them. They would spread blankets on the ground and gaze up at the stars, talking about this or that or nothing in particular. One such night in early fall, when the evenings were cool enough for sweaters and the mountains were washed in red and gold, Verity told them about a friendly argument the cider brewers had been having that day in town. One of them claimed it was the land, like the Abrams family had always believed, that made the Lovegood’s crop of Abrams Valley apples so perfectly bitter for brewing cider. The other had insisted it was the trees and their great age that made the flavor so strong. Verity had laughed as she told this story, a dry-leaf-rustle laugh, and said that it didn’t seem to have occurred to either of them that it was both the land and the trees together, sturdy roots sunk deep in soil, anchored to the earth and reaching for the sky, forever entwined. Grandma had moved her hand, a fluttering silhouette to encompass them, three generations lounging on a picnic blanket, and Verity had laughed again, more quietly, and she’d said, Yes, the family, we’re anchored here too.
Sorrow had imagined them all as trees, their feet firmly planted and their arms spread wide, and she had kicked off her shoes to press her toes into the ground, giggling when the grass tickled her feet.
She had not noticed if there was an edge of unease in Verity’s laugh, and she didn’t remember how Patience had reacted at all. It wouldn’t have meant anything to her, when she was a child, if there had ever been hints that her mother and sister chafed against the confines of their orchard and its history.
Alone in the cemetery, Sorrow pulled weeds and collected trash, chopped at the plants crowding the headstones, kicked and tugged the fence posts upright. She started in the oldest corner of the grove and worked her way along the graves, creeping forward in time with her trimmers and her garbage bag. Her world shrank down to the closed rectangle of the cemetery. Grasshoppers leapt around her and mosquitoes settled on her skin, took flight when she brushed them away.
The knot of anxiety high in her chest was still there, a living thing in her rib cage. She tried to focus on the dirt beneath her knees, the ragged tear of grass, the prickle of thorny leaves on her bare arms, but in her mind she kept replaying the fight with Verity. She imagined a hundred times what she could have said that would have been smarter, less cruel, more convincing, exactly the right thing she had needed to get Verity to talk to her, to have a conversation, share a piece of her past, open up rather than shut down. But no matter what she came up with, the replayed fight in her mind ended the same way.
Her, saying things she wasn’t sure she meant.
And Verity, fleeing to her room, closing the door.
She was chopping clumps of grass from around Anne Lovegood’s headstone when something small and blue caught her eye. Sorrow tugged off her leather glove and parted the grass with her fingers. It was a glass bead on a leather string.
Sorrow pulled it free of the grass, brushed away specks of dirt. Her heart was in her throat.
She’d had one just like this when she was little, only that bead had been red, not blue. She had found it in Grandma’s garden one spring day. She must have been about five—young enough that she had been more use playing in the dirt than gardening. She remembered how excited she had been when the dark earth revealed the shiny red bead, the first favor of the year, and how she had whooped and run to show her grandmother. Sorrow had worn the red bead on its leather thong around her wrist the whole day. It barely fit, it was made for somebody even smaller than she was, so when it was time for bed she had taken it off and added it to her collection.
She turned the blue bead over in her hands, watching the sun catch and sparkle in the glass. It wasn’t one of the favors she had lost, but it was a favor, and holding it made something jitter hopefully inside of her, an expectant feeling she had almost forgotten.
She hadn’t imagined them. They were real. Lost, perhaps, the things she had cherished as a child, but real. She wanted to run to Grandma like she had before. She wanted to drop it into the grass and pretend she had never seen it—but as soon as she thought that, she felt guilty, absurdly, as though she would be betraying the orchard.
Sorrow tucked the blue bead into her pocket. From Anne’s gravestone she moved to the next grave, the one belonging to a woman named Mary Covington. As a child Sorrow hadn’t questioned her mother’s explanation that Mary was Anne’s dearest friend. She knew better now, and she felt an amused sort of embarrassment at her childish na?veté—and a twinge of annoyance too, that Verity hadn’t tried to explain that Mary had been Anne’s partner. Sorrow would have understood, even as a child. Only family was buried in the Lovegood cemetery. After a lifetime together, Mary had outlived Anne by only a few months.
Their daughters were next in the row: Righteous had died as a young woman, only twenty-three, but her twin, Justice, had outlived her by sixty years. Sorrow traced Justice’s name on the moss-greened stone. They had grown up to be young women together, but no farther. A child never looks into the future and sees the seasons rolling past with a part of herself missing, a hole where a sister ought to be, a space so vast and so deep it is as though a piece of the landscape has been scooped away.
When she looked up she found the second favor.
Perched in the roots of Justice’s ash tree was a small wooden tiger.
It was her tiger. Her tiger, the same one she had found as a child. She knew before she crawled a few feet on her knees to reach for it. She knew before she held its familiar shape in her hand, before she pressed her thumb to the space between its little ears, the way she always used to do when she was lonely and wanted comfort. It was exactly as she remembered, a terrific stalking beast made small and still, the ridges on its side an echo of the knife that had carved it. She must have looked past it a dozen times as she was hacking away at the weeds.