Sorrow’s stomach twisted. “I never—”
“It’s okay. I just wanted you to know—I didn’t think you were bothering me. Not like that. Cassie’s just . . . confused, and angry about a lot of things. But I didn’t mind. I don’t want you to think you upset me.”
“Oh.” Sorrow nodded uncertainly. “Okay. I mean, that’s good, that I wasn’t . . . yeah.”
“I just wanted you to know that,” Julie said, and she was walking away again, her blond hair gleaming in the sun.
Sorrow watched her until she disappeared into the trees. She looked down at the photograph in her hand, two faces familiar but so unlike the women she knew them to be, and tucked it carefully into her back pocket.
21
VERITY RETURNED IN time to make dinner, and Sorrow made an effort to act normal at the table, but a day apart had not lessened the tension between them. Grandma kept looking at each of them with a pinched frown. It was a relief when the dishes were washed and Sorrow could escape to her room.
When Verity came up for bed a little while later, she tapped on Sorrow’s closed door and said, “Good night, sweetheart,” but by the time Sorrow decided to answer she was already gone.
The night was hot and Sorrow’s bedroom was stuffy. She kicked her quilt down to the foot of the bed, tugged the sheet up. Her window was open, but the air was humid and heavy, without the slightest hint of a breeze. There was a moth on the dormer ceiling above her, unmoving, a flat black triangle against the white paint. Somewhere outside, a bird chattered angrily, then faded, and the night was quiet.
After arguing with herself for a couple of minutes, Sorrow rolled out of bed and snapped on the light. The favors she’d found in the graveyard were sitting atop her dresser, right where her collection used to be. She touched her fingertip to the smooth spot between the tiger’s ears. She remembered clearly where she had found it the first time: in the branches of the black oak on the hill, ten or twelve feet above Silence Lovegood’s grave. Patience had been teaching her to climb the tree and trying to get her to guess which of the branches had held the rope where Silence was hanged. Sorrow had grown annoyed with her sister—the tree wasn’t telling her anything, it was only a tree—but her annoyance had changed to smugness when she’d found the tiger, and Patience had admired it with just a hint of jealousy in her expression, and she’d said, “Maybe it’s telling you something different.”
Sorrow dug Julie’s photograph out of the top drawer. She had stashed it there earlier, in the same spot where, with the laughable solemnity of a child, she had always hidden her most secret favors. She couldn’t remember now, what those secret favors had been. When she walked through her old collection in her mind—the tiger, the watch, the beads and coins and lady’s fan—she felt as though she was still grasping into dark places, reaching gingerly into corners and cracks, not even knowing what she was looking for. She felt a space where something ought to be—small and solid, tucked in her pocket—but like every other gap in her memories, every time she focused on it, it was as though a thicket of branches closed over the past.
It wasn’t growing any less frustrating, the longer she was in Vermont, to have her own mind be so unyielding, even when she was only trying to remember things that mattered as little as trinkets she had found in the orchard.
She dropped onto the bed and examined the picture in the lamplight. How strange it was, to be looking into a corner of her mother’s past she hadn’t even known existed before. There were no lost memories here, no murky mental traps to find her way around, no flaw like the fog-filled canyon running through the center of her own mind. There were only secrets of the mundane variety. Two women who were once close enough to sit with their shoulders and knees touching, their heads thrown back in laughter, their hands drifting toward each other, no longer.
Sorrow set the photograph aside and turned off the light.
When she woke later she was shivering violently. It took a moment for her to register the cold, and in those few sleep-muddled seconds she saw blue lights flashing on the white dormer ceiling.
Her heart thumped in fear and she blinked rapidly, shook her head so fast her hair rasped against the pillow, and the glow was gone—a stray wisp of a memory. There was no light through the window but moonlight. Sorrow fumbled for the quilt at the foot of the bed, pulled it up to her chin and kicked her legs to generate heat. Only after a minute or two of groggy confusion did she realize she ought to close the window. She rolled up onto her knees to reach for it. Her breath was an opaque puff, and the orchard gleamed silver. The moon was sitting low over the trees, casting long, sharp shadows.
Sorrow’s hand stilled on the window frame.
She had left the window open every night since she’d arrived, because the upstairs of the house grew unbearably stuffy during the day. The nights were cool in the mountains, but never like this. It wasn’t supposed to be this cold. It was the end of June.
Sorrow slid the casement down and it dropped with a snap. She checked the time on her phone: half past midnight. The house was quiet. Completely, totally quiet. She sat in the center of her bed with her quilt wrapped around her, looking from the window to the door. She didn’t know what to do.
It wasn’t supposed to be this cold, and the bite on her skin, the ache in her ears, they sparked something in her memory. Blue lights through the window. She had forgotten before, what that looked like, how it felt to wake and see her bedroom cast in shifting colors all wrong, but she was remembering now, the cold and the light, those sensations long buried. There had been voices in the kitchen.
She pushed herself out of bed and winced over the cold floor. She opened her bedroom door, paused to listen. There were no voices. No visitors. She shook her head. She was not going to confuse past and present.
Down the hall Verity’s bedroom door was closed. Sorrow slid her feet along the floorboards and stopped in front of it. She remembered this too: standing here. Smaller, younger. Her nose cold and running from being outside. She was going to ask Mom for a story.
She had opened the door. Something small and white had crunched under her foot.
Sorrow reached for the doorknob, and the door wavered before her, like a pond in moonlight, disturbed. She stopped, fingers resting on the cool metal. Her chest hurt. She hadn’t noticed the panic rising, but there was a racing fear squeezing her lungs with every breath. She didn’t want to open the door. She had to. She didn’t want to. She turned the knob.
She squeezed her eyes shut. The cold didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything.
Witch weather.