Devotion clomped toward the barn in her heavy rubber boots.
Pride didn’t go inside as she had been told. She was still the older sister, after all, no matter what sort of stern old woman Baby Devy had grown up to be. She climbed the steps of the porch, one hand on the rail for balance, and tugged a chair a few inches around so she might have a view of the orchard. She picked up her mother’s lighter before she sat down. The naphtha inside should have long since evaporated away, but she gave it a flick, just for the hell of it. A small flame flickered, danced, vanished.
30
SORROW’S EYES WERE gritty with exhaustion when she pulled into the hospital parking lot. It was fifteen minutes before nine o’clock and the start of visiting hours, so she rolled down the window, leaned her head against the seat, and closed her eyes. Morning sounds drifted in: traffic around the hospital campus, the high beep of a locking car, a couple of women talking about their weekend plans in a mix of Spanish and English.
She opened her eyes to watch them pass. They weren’t Cuban, but that brief catch of voices sent a wave of homesickness through her.
At five minutes to nine she went inside. She hadn’t been in a hospital since Sonia’s brother Hector had had a heart attack a few years ago. This one was newer, brighter, less crowded than the one in Miami, but the long corridors and antiseptic smell were the same. She found the elevator and followed the signs to the right nurses’ station. The woman behind the desk had her sign in, asked what was in her pockets, confirmed that Dr. Parker had cleared the visit. The room she directed Sorrow to was square and bright, enclosed by windows on two sides: one bank facing the hallway and the nurses’ station, the other overlooking the parking lot. Ugly chairs and dull landscape paintings lined the walls. There was a male orderly in white dragging a mop over the floor, an old woman putting together a puzzle on a coffee table, but otherwise the room was empty.
Sorrow walked over to the window. Her shoes squeaked on the linoleum. Everything beyond the glass was the wrong color, gray-tinted and dull. The trees edging the parking lot were too far away. She chose a chair and sat down. Not even a minute passed before a reflection in the window moved. She looked up, and Verity was there.
“Sorrow.”
“Hi,” Sorrow said.
Verity looked at the chair beside her, looked at the one across from her, chose the latter. She wore a long flowery skirt, a soft sweater—they were the clothes of the old Verity, the one Sorrow had left behind. Barely forty-eight hours had passed since they had last seen each other, but Sorrow was more nervous now than she had been in the airport.
“You didn’t have to drive all the way up here,” Verity said.
“Dr. Parker said I could visit.”
“I’m glad to see you, but it wasn’t necessary. I’ll probably be home tomorrow.”
“Probably?”
“Miranda and I are going to talk about it today,” Verity said. “We’ll decide then.”
Just like that? It’s that easy? Sorrow didn’t say it. She couldn’t ask that. She pressed her lips together and swallowed. There were no bruises she could see. Verity’s fall down the stairs hadn’t hurt her, at least not in any way that left visible marks.
“Did you . . .” Verity took a breath. “Did you want to talk about something?”
Every single thing Sorrow could think to say was the wrong thing. She could ask how Verity was feeling. If she was eating now. Why she had stopped in the first place. Why she had come here. If she had been thinking about swallowing a handful of sleeping pills again. It was all wrong. There was a drumbeat of fear deep inside her chest, so persistent she couldn’t remember what it felt like not to have that anxious terror of making a mistake every time she opened her mouth. She was so tired of feeling like she had to make herself small and quiet to avoid upsetting Verity at all costs. It had never worked anyway.
“We used to have this system,” Sorrow said.
Verity’s lips were parted; she had been about to say something.
“Me and Patience.”
There it was, on hearing Patience’s name: a faint crack in Verity’s calm mask. Sorrow stamped down the rise of guilt, held it with her breath until it faded. She was allowed to say her sister’s name.
“It was this way of warning each other, I guess. When we were doing or saying something that was going to upset you. If I was being obnoxious Patience would go like this”—Sorrow held out her hand, sliced it side to side: Cut it out—“and I would know I had to stop. Calm down. Shut up. Stop whining. Stop bothering you.”
“You didn’t—”
“And the days when you would shut yourself in your room,” Sorrow went on, not raising her voice but not faltering either, “we would sit on the stairs and try to figure out what to do to make it better. We never knew what was going to help and what was going to make it worse. But we tried. We had this whole—” Sorrow’s voice caught. She inhaled slowly. “It was this whole system. Patience had figured it all out. I don’t know what she would be telling me to do right now.”
Sorrow had always believed it came naturally to Patience, a chore as obvious as turning the soil in the spring or harvesting fruit in the fall, caretaking their mother as they did their land. But she had been wrong. Patience had had to figure it out on her own, without help, and it had been guesswork and desperation from the start.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Verity said.
“You said you remember everything,” Sorrow said. “But I don’t. There’s a lot I don’t remember about—”
“You were very young,” Verity began.
“There’s a lot I don’t remember about what happened when Patience died,” Sorrow said firmly. “Before I came back here, I couldn’t remember anything. It was just this . . . this black hole. This empty space. Dr. Silva thinks I’ve blocked it all out because it was traumatic. She didn’t think me coming back here would help, but she said it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
“That’s why you wanted to visit?” Verity said, her voice small, hurt.
“And it’s why I went looking for Julie, even though I knew it would piss you off that I was talking to her. Did you really not know they were friends?”
“I had no idea.” Verity exhaled slowly. “I never even suspected.”
“What would you have done if you did know?”
Verity plucked at the fabric of her skirt and did not answer.
“They weren’t friends for very long. They didn’t have a chance to be, did they?” Sorrow leaned to the side to reach the back pocket of her jeans. “She came looking for me the other day. She gave me this.”
She held out the photograph. Verity’s hand trembled as she accepted it.
“I thought she was just being, like, friendly,” Sorrow said. “She seemed kinda lonely. But she was giving it away. They say people do that before they commit suicide, right? Give things away.”
Verity sat back in her chair and studied the photo. Sorrow waited.