She looked around the room, gaze darting into every corner. There was a glass of water on the table, mostly full. A book beside it. A lamp, off. A pair of shoes on the floor. A knitted afghan draped over a chair. She didn’t know what she was looking for. The curtains drifted in the breeze, billowing gently. It looked normal. Everything was as it should be except Verity, half dressed at ten in the morning, staring at Sorrow in confusion.
“Sorrow? What do you need?”
“We were only . . .”
Sorrow glanced at Grandma in the doorway. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. She didn’t know what to say. She needed somebody to tell her how to deal with this.
“We were only wondering,” Sorrow said, “if you were feeling okay.”
“You barged in here to ask me that? Why wouldn’t I be?”
“But you—you never sleep this late.”
Verity rolled her eyes—actually rolled her eyes, like she was the teenager and Sorrow the mother—and said, “I’m not sleeping. I’m wide awake.”
“Yeah, okay, but . . .”
“I’ll be right down.” Verity swept her hair back from her face and stood. “Are you going to stand there and watch me get dressed?”
Verity wasn’t crying. She hadn’t locked the door. She wasn’t curled insensible beneath her blankets. She was awake. Standing. Getting dressed. She was talking to Sorrow, even annoyed with her. She had never been annoyed on her bad days. On those days, the very worst, no matter how many times Patience and Sorrow had tried to plead and pester her out of bed, she would only roll over and say she was too tired. This wasn’t like that. This wasn’t like that.
But Sorrow couldn’t move. She couldn’t turn around and walk out of the room. She couldn’t let Verity close the door again. Every one of her oldest instincts was telling her to take Verity’s hand and tug her outside, pull her stumbling and blinking into the sun. She just needs a bit of fresh air—Sorrow couldn’t remember who used to say that to her. It was a lie then and a lie now, but still the words fluttered moth-frantic in her mind: she needed sun, she needed air, she needed Sorrow to do the right thing, say the right thing, and when she did what her mother needed, that sinking lethargy would snap away, and with it the fear clawing at Sorrow’s insides like brambles. She couldn’t move. If she left, anything that happened would be her fault.
“Sorrow.” Verity walked to her wardrobe, opened the door, began searching through the clothes inside. “I’ll be right down. Five minutes. Not even five. Two.”
Grandma touched Sorrow’s elbow. Sorrow looked at her, and Grandma gestured toward the door. Still Sorrow hesitated.
“Sorrow,” Verity said. “Earth to Sorrow. I’ll be right down.”
Her gaze slid to the side, and she fussed with the clothes in the wardrobe, straightening shirts on hangers, and that was when Sorrow saw the pink in her cheeks, on the tips of her ears, saw the wry twist to her mouth, and she understood: Verity was embarrassed. She was embarrassed to have been caught half dressed and momentarily overwhelmed. She was embarrassed that Sorrow had charged up here to find her.
Sorrow turned, her face growing warm, and pretended not to see Grandma’s approving nod. “Okay. I’ll just—there’s breakfast. When you’re ready.”
She hurried downstairs, followed by Grandma. She sat at the table for an interminable few minutes until she heard Verity’s footsteps on the stairs. She jumped to her feet and grabbed the kettle.
“I can make tea,” she said.
“No point,” Verity said. Her voice was bright, unusually high. She breezed past Sorrow to the back door. “Half the morning’s gone. I’ve got work to do.”
“I can help,” Sorrow said quickly. “What’ve you got planned?”
Verity was already stepping onto the porch. “Nothing interesting. I’ll just be clearing up some of the winter deadfall around the fence on the south side. You help Grandma.”
The screen door clacked shut. Sorrow watched through the window as she crossed the lawn and disappeared into the barn, and when she looked away she saw that Grandma was watching too, a worried wrinkle creasing her brow.
Verity didn’t return to the house until it was nearly dinnertime, and then all she did was pick at a few bites before shoving her chair back and declaring, “I’m disgusting. I need to shower.” And her voice was so airy, so dismissive, so unlike how she normally sounded that it put Sorrow immediately on edge. “Go ahead and put this away. I’ll heat up something later.”
She vanished upstairs and didn’t return for the rest of the night.
After the kitchen was cleaned up, after Grandma had gone to bed, when Sorrow was alone in her own room, she turned off her light and lay down. As soon as her head hit the pillow her heart was racing again with the same panic she had felt the night before. She sat up and crossed her legs, hugged her pillow to her chest, and sucked in painful, gasping breaths. It didn’t help. Tears sprang into her eyes and she scrubbed them away, and her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her neck and in her fingertips. The room was too small. She had to get out. She scrambled off the bed and to the door.
And she stopped again, hand on the knob. Leaned her forehead against the solid wood and closed her eyes. What was she going to do? Bust into Verity’s room when she was trying to sleep? Verity had been up today. She had been outside working. Outside in the sun, in the fresh air, and that was what everybody said she was supposed to do. That was good. That was fine. It was fine. Sorrow was freaking out for no reason. She didn’t know what was wrong. She kept picturing herself opening the door to Verity’s room over and over again, and finding not bright morning light, but darkness at midday, the air stuffy and stale, a too-still body in the bed, the soft crunch of something under her shoe, and she didn’t know why that was all she could see. She couldn’t remember. She tried and tried and tried, but every time she stepped into that room in her mind, every time that small person she used to be walked toward the bed, toward the shadowed shape she knew to be her mother, her mind shuddered and twisted and shied away, and there was a hedge of brambles around her, high enough to reach the sky, thick enough to block the light, and she still couldn’t remember. She could creep and peer and sneak through the labyrinth of her own memories, pressing like a bruise around the edges of what she couldn’t remember, but those bending, rustling branches were always there, blocking her path, turning her away.
She slid to the floor and pulled her knees up to her chest.
No matter what she remembered or didn’t, no matter what she found or left buried, no matter what was going on with Verity, Julie was still dead. Sorrow could still see her. The shine of her hair, the tilt of her neck. She could still smell the smoke.
Sometime later, Sorrow heard her mother’s door open. Verity began pacing up and down the hall, from the top of the stairs to Patience’s bedroom at the other end, a constant slow rhythm, socked feet on floorboards the only sound in the tired old house.
26