She tugged at the handle of the car’s hatchback, then remembered it was locked and clicked it open. She shoved the bags into the back; Sorrow darted forward to catch a jar of olives before it crashed to the ground.
“What?” Verity snapped. Sorrow flinched, but it wasn’t directed at her. Verity was glaring at Hannah Abrams, who hadn’t moved her cart out of the way. “What do you want? Are you going to make a list of what I’m buying? Do you want me to prove I’m feeding my child?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hannah said.
“Then what do you want?” Verity’s voice rose to a shout, and an elderly couple pushing a cart nearby turned to stare. “What do you want? Why can’t you just leave us alone?”
Hannah looked at Verity, her lips parting with the beginning of a word, but she changed her mind and turned to Sorrow instead. “I hope you enjoy your visit,” she said shortly. “You’ve been gone a long time. A lot has changed.”
Sorrow darted a nervous glance toward her mother and did not answer.
Verity slammed the hatchback. “Get in the car, Sorrow. We’re leaving.”
Sorrow twisted in her seat as Verity pulled the car out of the lot. Hannah Abrams was still standing beside her red shopping cart, watching them drive away.
4
SORROW DEBATED FOR a full minute whether to say anything, but she couldn’t keep quiet.
“What was that all about?”
Verity adjusted her grip on the steering wheel, twisting both hands over the vinyl with a soft creak. “It’s none of her business what you’re doing here.”
“She was only saying hi. It was no big deal.”
“Why are you defending her?”
“What? I’m not—I’m not defending anybody.”
Sorrow pressed her hands to the seat beneath her legs to keep them from shaking. She hadn’t even been back in Vermont for a couple of hours, and already she’d said something that had pushed Verity’s mood from warm and cheerful to prickly and dark. She didn’t know what she had said that was so wrong, and not knowing gave her a sickly, despairing knot in her stomach. She needed to know. She couldn’t let herself fall into this cycle again. She used to know how to navigate her mother’s mercurial moods, the pitfalls and traps of life with a woman who could tumble into a black spiral of despair at the merest push, but she didn’t know anymore. She had always followed Patience’s lead, but Patience was eight years gone and Sorrow was alone now, grasping desperately for reminders of everything she had once known about keeping the peace.
“I wasn’t even talking to her,” she said slowly. Cautiously. Calm voice, no anger. She could do this. “I was just—should I have ignored her? Not even said hi?”
A long pause, then Verity said, “You’ve been gone a long time.”
It was exactly what Hannah Abrams had said not five minutes ago.
“You don’t remember.” Verity’s voice was suddenly quiet, a drop that felt like the earth opening up beneath them. “You don’t remember the kind of trouble they used to make for us. For our family.”
The words felt like a barbed accusation. Sorrow wanted to deny it, refute it, spit out a defense. She did remember. She remembered police coming to the farm sometimes. A social worker as well, a round woman with an unflattering pageboy haircut, and she recalled clearly how thin-lipped and pale Patience would be when the woman left, how Verity would vanish to her bedroom and close the door, and how Grandma, forever silent, would sit in the kitchen by the woodstove for long hours through the night. She remembered whispers following her and Patience around town, and Patience tugging her away before she could hear what was being said—she remembered that so clearly she felt the phantom sensation of Patience’s fingers grasping hers, warmth and pressure and comfort, the aching deep certainty lodged somewhere beneath her heart that her sister would keep her safe.
“I guess there’s a lot I didn’t understand,” she said slowly. It felt like half trembling confession, half desperate apology, but it was as far as she was willing to go.
“You were a child,” Verity said. She took a breath, let it out slowly. “I never wanted you to worry. There were times I was so afraid they would . . . The right person would listen to them, to the things they said. I was so afraid of losing you.”
Sorrow looked away, a flush creeping over her skin. It wasn’t the Abramses who had taken her away in the end.
“They can’t do anything now,” she said.
“It’s not that simple, Sorrow.”
They fell into silence as they left the town behind. Houses on the outskirts gave way to run-down trailers and weathered barns, unwelcoming wooden fences and pickup trucks with political bumper stickers, road signs marred by bullet holes. Those things had always been there; there was unhappiness and hardship everywhere. But as a child Sorrow had rarely paid attention to life outside the orchard, and until she left she had never traveled anywhere beyond Abrams Valley. Her world had been so small, her understanding of it even smaller.
They passed the turn to the property that used to be the Roche farm; there was a new mailbox with no name on it. The sight of it brought back a memory, sudden and clear: Mrs. Roche, in their kitchen, scolding Verity about how irresponsible it was to let her daughters run wild. She should send them to the public school in town and buy them nice clothes and shoes. She should let them make friends. It wasn’t right, said Mrs. Roche, to dwell too much in the past. Verity had barely said a word, but Mrs. Roche hadn’t noticed. Patience and Sorrow eavesdropped from the stairs, their shoulders pressed together, and when Mrs. Roche was gone, Patience had fanned herself and swanned around the house mimicking Mrs. Roche’s Southern accent until Sorrow was doubling over with laughter and Verity’s stony silence cracked into a watery smile.
After the Roche property was the Abrams farm. The long driveway was paved and lined with flowering shrubs and short lampposts. The house looked the same—huge, rebuilt and remodeled so many times the original farmhouse was barely visible—but the detached garage hadn’t been there before.
What Sorrow remembered standing in its place was an old barn, deep red and looming, the door into its hayloft gaping like a Cyclops’s watchful dark eye.
“They used to have a barn, right?” she asked.
“They tore it down,” Verity said. “The fire, remember? The first fire.”
There it was again, the prickly flush of embarrassment, almost shame. She hadn’t forgotten. Not that. Not that. She might not remember the weeks before her move to Florida, the days surrounding her sister’s death, but she knew the recitation of facts her father and therapist had given to her, and what she knew was this: There had been two fires that March eight years ago, one in the Abrams barn, the other in the abandoned Lovegood cider house. The first fire had damaged the barn but had not harmed any people or animals.