Sometimes Sorrow woke to hear Mom pacing up and down in the hall, from the top of the stairs to the closed door of Patience’s room. She walked back and forth, over and over, the slow rhythm of her steps lulling Sorrow to sleep.
The worst of it was that some days when Sorrow woke, first thing in the morning or in the middle of the night, there was a moment when she forgot. She forgot Patience was dead. Before she opened her eyes, before she felt the sun through the window or heard the rooster crowing to accompany dawn birdsong, there was a moment where her traitorous mind listened for the sound of voices downstairs, the familiar morning chatter of Mom and Patience making breakfast. For Patience’s steps quick on the stairs, for the turn of her bedroom doorknob, for a cheerful voice calling Wake up, sleepyhead, wake up—
Then she would remember, and everything would crash over her like an avalanche.
Sorrow pulled on her bulky green sweater and heavy boots and went out into the orchard. She searched the apple trees for opening buds, but after she checked ten trees in a row and found none, she had to admit nothing had changed since yesterday. Not a single apple tree was sprouting its leaves. The orchard was as grim and gray as it had been in the middle of winter.
Witch weather. That was what Mrs. Roche had called it when she’d stopped by with a casserole the other day. She had sipped the tea Grandma made for her and nodded knowingly toward the kitchen window and she’d said, “This witch weather will break soon, Perseverance. It will break.”
Sorrow stopped looking for spring leaves and began looking for favors instead. In the pocket of her skirt, she was carrying the eyeglasses she had found in the cemetery, as she had carried them every day since Patience had died. Sometimes she took them from her pocket and put them on—carefully, as Patience had shown her—and squinted at a world that was half clear, half fractured, blurred almost beyond recognition.
She didn’t like that they were the last favor she would ever find while walking through the orchard with Patience. It gave her a cold, squirmy feeling in her stomach to remember how she had told Patience she didn’t like them. She could never take that back now.
There should have been more favors by now. Even if the weather wasn’t warming like it should, even if the trees weren’t budding, there should have been something. If she found a pretty seashell or polished stone, something bright and colorful, she could bring it to Mom and cheer her up. But the orchard didn’t offer so much as a single Indian Head penny.
What she found instead, nestled at the base of an apple tree, were the corpses of two little birds.
Sorrow stared down at them for a long time, a curious hollow ache growing inside her.
They were tiny, no more than a few days hatched. Scattered around them were the remains of frail blue eggshells.
She lived on a farm, in the woods; she had seen dead things before. Last winter during a bad snowstorm a buck with broad antlers had been caught on the fence between the orchard and the nature preserve. Mom hadn’t found it until it was already dead and the meat spoiling. For weeks every eastward turn of the wind had carried a foul, septic stench. Birds had picked at the corpse until it had shrunk down to a saggy sack of fur and bones.
No predator or accident had killed these chicks, only the cold. They had hatched expecting springtime warmth, found bitter clinging winter instead, and died before they had a chance to live.
A burst of song drew Sorrow’s attention upward. There was a nest huddled in the tree, and hopping along the branch beside it was the mother bluebird. She jumped back and forth, back and forth, her wings fluttering anxiously, chirping out a question to anybody who could hear. Each time she reached her nest she looked into it again, as though she might find it not empty that time.
Sorrow shoved a pile of leaf debris over the chicks and hoped the mother bird wouldn’t find them.
She walked north, toward the cider house, an uncomfortable tickle of guilt making her glance over her shoulder every few steps. She wasn’t allowed to go near the ruined building, but she didn’t want to get too close anyway. She only wanted to see, even though she hated the way it looked, so burned and broken. She stopped halfway down the hill. Slid to the ground with her back to an apple tree and hugged her knees to her chest.
The cider house was a smudge of black through the naked trees, a hole where light and color ought to be. Half the roof was caved in, but the building hadn’t collapsed. The meadow was brown and yellow, free of snow but still winter-dormant, and the grass all around had been churned up by fire trucks and police cars. The ambulance had taken Patience away after the firemen put the fire out.
They had known it was her at first by the dress she wore and the barrettes in her hair, later by tests they did in a laboratory.
Sheriff Moskowitz had explained that to Mom and Grandma when Sorrow wasn’t supposed to be listening. He asked if Patience had a boyfriend. He asked if they had seen Patience talking to strangers. He asked if she had ever sneaked out or lied about where she was going. He asked if they had any idea what she would have been doing out in the orchard that night. To every question, Grandma shook her head silently and Mom said, “No, nothing, no,” repeating herself until the words became meaningless sounds.
Nobody asked Sorrow anything. She expected it every day, for the sheriff to return to the house and demand to speak with her, for him to sit her down and look at her with his sad eyes and say that he knew she was lying, he knew everything, and it was time for her to tell him. And when he did, the secrets Sorrow had been holding inside would crack open like a hornet’s nest.
But a week passed, then another, and the sheriff did not ask. He said hello to her when he came to the house, ruffled her hair fondly, but he never looked her in the eye and said he knew she was hiding something.