FOR THE THIRD day in a row, the dawn was overcast and gray and chillier than midsummer ought to be. Sorrow wrapped herself in a sweater and took her tea out to the back porch. She was the first one up. She had awoken slumped on her bedroom floor, stiff all over from sleeping curled up by the door. If she had dreamed, she didn’t remember it, and every time her mind turned toward what memories might still be hiding in the maze of her muddled brain, she felt so tired she wanted to give up thinking about it at all.
She had told herself, when she first began to remember, that it would be like piecing together a puzzle. Once she found enough pieces, once she fit together the corners and edges, the rest would fall into place, and for the first time she would have a complete picture of everything she had been missing.
She remembered the day before Patience had died. She remembered the night of the fire. She remembered how cold it had been. She remembered watching through her bedroom window as snowflakes whirled down in the blue and white lights of the sheriff’s car.
She remembered burying Patience in the ash grove.
Verity at the graveside with a doctor behind her.
Leaving with her father and not knowing if she would ever return.
She didn’t remember what had happened in between.
Your mother is sick. Your mother isn’t well. Your mother is going away for a while. That was what Sorrow remembered, but none of it came from her own memories, only from the explanations and excuses others had offered over the years. Verity had always been depressed, off and on, for as long as Sorrow could remember, and she was fairly certain there had never been any kind of treatment before Patience died. That had been the breaking point. During those few weeks between Patience’s death and Sorrow leaving for Florida, something had happened that had pushed Verity and Grandma and Dad to all agree that Sorrow could no longer live in the only home she had ever known.
She had asked, once, a few years ago. Dad had only said: Your mother had a breakdown.
What a useless word, breakdown, so big and so small all at once, meaning nothing and everything, no more than a way to avoid the truth. But at the time she had accepted it. It had all seemed so very far away, not her own life and her own memories anymore, but somebody else’s, the history of some poor little girl and her sad family tragedies.
She heard Grandma moving around in the kitchen. The light was changing, the orchard’s shades of gray sliding into dreary green, and the trees were emerging from the misty darkness as distinct shapes. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun was rising. Sorrow didn’t want the day to start yet. She wasn’t ready for more hours of worrying about whether Verity was coming downstairs, whether she should go fetch her, whether Grandma was paying enough attention, if it was even fair to expect Grandma to do more, if this was normal, if this was wrong, and why she didn’t know any of those things. How she could be sixteen years old and not have the slightest idea how to ask if her mother was okay.
Her tea had grown lukewarm when she heard a car coming up the driveway. She tensed, then relaxed. It was too early for the police, and she recognized the grumble of Ethan’s Jeep. He came around the corner of the house a minute or so later. He was dressed in his grass-stained work clothes, and his Red Sox hat was jammed into the back pocket of his jeans. He looked younger without it, his hair uncombed, his expression uncertain.
Sorrow slid a few inches to the left to make room on the step. “Hi,” she said.
“Hey.” Ethan sat down beside her.
She took a sip of her tea. “We meant to call you yesterday.”
Sorrow said we, but in truth she had considered it, then forgotten, and Verity had never mentioned it at all. It should have been Verity to suggest it in the first place. She was the one who liked Ethan so much she wished he were a Lovegood rather than an Abrams. Sorrow barely knew him; she wasn’t even sure if they were friends.
But his cousin had died, and she should have called.
“It’s fine,” Ethan said. “Things have been . . . I don’t even know. So messed up.”
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “I know I’m here early, but I had to get out of the house. Mom is all over the place because she can’t decide if she’s supposed to be helping or not, because she can’t stand talking to Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul anymore, but this is Julie, and Julie was never the problem, and . . . Two days of listening to her go around and around and I, uh, I told her you guys needed help today.”
“That’s okay,” Sorrow said. “You can use us as an excuse anytime.”
“I just can’t . . . Part of me keeps thinking, I can’t believe she did this, but part of me isn’t surprised at all. That’s an awful thing to think, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Sorrow said.
“She tried before,” Ethan said. “When she was in high school. At least once that I know of. She was away at boarding school, and she—I think she got drunk and climbed up on a school building or something. I was just a kid, nobody told me anything. But I remember how she came home in the middle of the school year and nobody would talk about why.”
The school counselors decided I needed a break. That was how Julie had described it that day in the café.
“But I thought they got her help,” Ethan said. “I thought, after that . . . I thought they got her help.”
“I don’t think it always works that way.”
“I don’t even know if there were other times after that.”
Other times, he said, like they could have been talking about anything. Julie had tried to commit suicide as a teenager, had succeeded eight years later, and the space between was filled with unknowns and euphemisms, careful avoidances and awkward silences, all the ways people had of talking around a thing they were too afraid to face.
“She mentioned that when I talked to her,” Sorrow said.
“She did?”
“Well, not really. She just said she was sent home from school. She didn’t say why. She and Patience became friends for a little while after that.” Sorrow turned her tea mug in her hands. “The sheriff asked me if I knew why Julie picked—why she went to the cider house.”
“I didn’t know they were friends,” Ethan said.
“I’d kinda forgotten about it, until recently. I don’t think anybody was supposed to know,” Sorrow said. “It was a secret. They weren’t even allowed to talk to each other. But you know it was . . .” Her voice caught, and she breathed for a moment to steady herself. “You know she was the one who saw the fire that night? From her window.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said softly. “I know.”