Sorrow said, “Okay,” and she tried to sound like she meant it.
After Mom was gone, Sorrow shut off the light on her bedside table. She wanted to turn it on again right away, but she kept her hands fisted at her sides. She wasn’t a baby. She wasn’t scared of the dark.
Her lighter was tucked away in her underwear drawer. She had never kept a favor secret before, but she wanted to keep this one to herself more than she wanted to show it off. She had examined it in the light before hiding it away: it was a tarnished silver color, etched with musical notes on both sides and the words To My Joy, With Love and Music, Rosie. She had struck it one more time, here in her room, and her heart had raced when the little flame whipped and danced.
Hard snow skittered over the window, and the wind groaned and wailed. Sorrow closed her eyes, but as soon as she did she was back in the cider house, and the darkness was pressing all around her, and the hole in the floor was gaping, waiting.
Your whole family is crazy, Cassie had said, and the memory of the words made Sorrow’s face burn. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t heard before, from kids in town snickering as she and Patience passed—Patience with her head held high, Sorrow scurrying like a rabbit hoping to go unnoticed by a fox. Because Grandma was mute, because Mom went days and days without leaving the house, because they all wore patched clothes and lived without phones and computers and TVs like it was a hundred years ago, because Mom didn’t let Patience and Sorrow go to school or make friends in town, for all those reasons and more, they never, ever left the Lovegoods alone.
Sorrow rolled onto her side. She didn’t care what Cassie said. Cassie was an Abrams. She didn’t know anything. Sorrow rolled over again.
Everybody knows you’re just as crazy as your mom. Cassie’s voice echoed like she was right there in the room with Sorrow. Cassie had probably marched back to her big warm house on the hill and hung her fancy coat in a fancy closet and laughed to herself about Sorrow freezing to death in the cider house.
She shouldn’t get away with it.
The thought crept into Sorrow’s mind softly, like summer fog.
Cassie shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
Sorrow sat up. Her heart was thumping.
Sorrow’s favorite part of Rejoice Lovegood’s story came after she had escaped from her jail cell. Rejoice had returned to the orchard to find that Clement Abrams and his sons had piled up logs to build a cabin on her land. That had been their plan all along, to chase her and her husband away so they could take the Lovegood farm, where the water was sweeter, the soil richer, the trees sturdier than any others in the valley. But Rejoice had escaped, and she didn’t need help from anybody at all, not even her husband, to stop Clement Abrams from taking her orchard. She made a great raging bonfire of those logs the Abramses had chopped and hewn, a fire big enough to turn the night sky orange. The Abrams family never tried to build on Lovegood land again.
Sorrow slipped out of bed and dressed without turning on the light. She pulled open the drawer, hands shaking, and found the lighter. She listened before creeping out of her room, listened again as she sneaked down the steps. She took a flashlight from a kitchen drawer and held her breath to listen one more time.
There was nobody awake. Nobody to stop her.
The night was dark and blustery and so very cold. The snow had stopped. The clouds were breaking up, racing across the sky, allowing brief glimpses of the stars. The apple trees groaned in the wind. Sorrow kept to the shadows all the way to the property line, over the wire fence and on the other side too. It was longer than cutting through the meadow, but this way nobody would see her or her footprints.
There was a light on by the front door of the Abrams house, but none inside, and the barn was completely dark. Sorrow ran to the barn door and slid it open. It rattled so loudly she jumped, but she didn’t hesitate before ducking through the gap.
She pulled the flashlight from her pocket and switched it on.
The Abramses didn’t have any animals. All they had in their barn was a riding lawn mower, some bicycles, skis in a rack on the wall, and a workbench with tools arranged neatly on a pegboard. Sorrow cast the flashlight around until she spotted the ladder in the far corner. She bit off her mittens for better grip and climbed to the hayloft.
There, tucked away in a corner, she found Cassie’s playhouse.
Two flowery sheets hung from strings like curtains, enclosing a scrap of pink carpet and piles of pillows. A stuffed purple horse with a rainbow mane was tucked into a soft blanket nest. Against one wall wooden crates were turned on their sides as shelves; they held a stack of drawing paper, a box of colored pencils, a chipped teacup and saucer, a few thin books with ratty covers and cracked spines. Above the shelves there were drawings taped to the wall—mostly horses—and a collection of postcards. Sorrow stepped closer to look at them; her boots left clumps of mud and ice on the pink carpet. The Abramses went on vacation a lot, mostly to faraway places that existed for Sorrow only as spots on maps: Paris, New York, Hawaii.
One of the cards showed a white beach and a line of palm trees. A faint roar gathered in Sorrow’s ears. The print in the corner said Florida. That was where Dad lived. The closest Sorrow had ever been to Florida was finding it on a map at the library and poring over encyclopedia pictures of alligators and endless blue ocean. When the librarian asked if her father was going to take her to Disney World someday, Sorrow had fled without answering.
Sometimes Dad suggested Sorrow and Patience might come visit him, and Mom always said she would think about it, but after Dad left she would say something different. She would say they didn’t need to go anywhere at all. They had everything they needed right here in the orchard.
Sorrow tugged the Florida postcard from the wall. She tucked her flashlight into her pocket and grabbed Paris, London, California, Hawaii, pulling the cards down one by one and crumpling the stiff paper into balls. She took Cassie’s horse drawings too, tearing the pages from the taped-up corners, but it didn’t help. It didn’t help. She could still hear Cassie saying how much better her playhouse was than the gross old cider house, and she could still hear the door slamming shut, and there were icicles of cold deep inside her where her bones ought to be, a cold that felt like it would never thaw.