The headstone at the base of the tree looked like all the others. Patience Lovegood. A name and a pair of dates.
Sorrow did the subtraction in her head, just in case—what? They wouldn’t have gotten the numbers wrong. Patience had been sixteen when she died. That was all anybody would learn of her from her headstone. Five years from now, ten, a hundred or more, that was all any stranger walking through this grove of cemetery trees would see, pausing on their way to search for invasive beetles or an overgrown trail or a minute of peace and quiet. That was all they would ever know. They wouldn’t know how Patience had smiled, how she had been so polite to people’s faces but so mocking behind their backs, how she had made her little sister laugh with her impressions and her jokes. How she had been fine one day, dead the next. How pink her nose would turn in the cold, that one fierce spot of color in a snow-pale face and a scattering of freckles. How she loved to race Sorrow through the orchard and never, ever let her win.
There was a pressure growing in Sorrow’s chest, a lump sitting at the top of her lungs. The insect chorus around her rose and rose and blended and hummed. She carried Patience in her thoughts, memories of washed-out color, fading echoes, but it had always been from far away, surrounded by people who hadn’t known her, a landscape she had never walked. She remembered asking, long before Patience died, what happened to the dead when they were buried, and the softness in her mother’s voice when she described the dismantling of a body, the natural cycle of decay, particles that had once been flesh and blood turning into roots and leaves, and no way of knowing if the things that made a body a person were transformed as well. Thoughts into flowing sap. Love into bark as impenetrable as armor. She remembered how her mother had found it comforting, the inevitable end, the joining of one to all who had passed before.
Patience hadn’t found the promise of a quiet end in the orchard comforting.
The thought shivered over the surface of Sorrow’s mind like a breath of winter wind.
They had come out here that day.
She remembered now, so clearly she didn’t know how she could have forgotten.
She and Patience had walked through the orchard on the day before Patience died. It had been cold, the muddy gray end of winter in Vermont, and in her mind that gray took on a shimmering quality, as though she were glimpsing it reflected in a pond. The cold hadn’t stopped them. It never did, not when they wanted to escape the oppressive silence their mother knit around the house on her bad days.
Sorrow remembered standing in this very spot, which had then been empty, a blank space beside a grave, and asking Patience if this was where their grandmother would be buried when she died.
She looked back. Verity was still waiting by the fence, and Sorrow felt a fleeting panic, that Patience wasn’t here to tell her what to say, what to do with their mother’s distance and her silence. They had once shared an elaborate sign language of expressions and gestures, a system for navigating the minefield of their mother’s moods, but Sorrow had lived eight years without Patience’s guidance, eight years in unfamiliar terrain, and she had never felt as lost as she did in that moment, looking across the neglected cemetery to Verity, with absolutely no idea what to do.
She leaned over to set the bouquet beside Patience’s headstone. The flowers were already wilting in the heat.
As she straightened up, a spot of yellow in the green caught her eye. Somebody had left a ring of small yellow flowers draped over the corner of the headstone, a crown made from a braid of soft green stems. The name came back to her: hop clover. It grew along roadsides, at the edge of the woods. It was the kind of small, insignificant flower anybody could pluck while wandering around. She glanced to where Verity was lingering outside the fence—but she knew it hadn’t been her mother, and Grandma would have left flowers from her own garden.
She reached for the ring of flowers, tugged at it with two fingers. It snagged in the grass. She let it go. Patience’s life had been small, occupied by only a few people, but there was somebody outside their little family who remembered Patience, and missed her, and brought her flowers.
Sorrow closed her eyes until the sting faded. She had no idea who it could be, and she felt the presence of that unknown visitor as a shadow behind her, faceless, soundless, a hole in the morning light.
She left the braided clover on Patience’s grave, and she walked back through the cemetery grove to where Verity was waiting. She pressed her palm to the trunks of the ash trees as she passed. They were solid and rough and strong.
10
GREEN MOUNTAIN GEAR was located on Main Street between a boutique clothing store and a real estate office with pictures of log cabins and ski resort condos plastered in the front window. Directly across the street was the Abrams Valley Post Office—which, in keeping with the regulations of the federal government, was supposed to close every weekday at 5:00 p.m. The curtains were drawn, the door closed, the flag lowered from its pole.
Sorrow was halfway through her first week in Vermont. It was Wednesday and, according to her phone, exactly 4:47 p.m.
“Drama,” said Kavita, leaning on the counter to stare through the store’s front window. “So much drama. It never ends.”
Kavita’s mothers, Helen and Jana Ghosh, owned the store. This was the second shift Sorrow had worked for them, after Verity had volunteered her labor to fill in for an employee who was backpacking through Nepal. Sorrow wondered, a little guiltily, if Verity was trying to shuffle Sorrow into town and away from the farm during her visit. She didn’t think it was deliberate—didn’t want to think it was deliberate—but that only meant it was something she couldn’t even imagine asking about. She also didn’t know the first thing about hiking or camping, but then neither did most of the people who came into the store. Kavita’s older brother, Mahesh, was technically working too, but he had retreated to the back room to text his girlfriend, which was, as far as Sorrow could tell, how he spent 99 percent of his time.
Sorrow had a book open on the counter before her, a field guide to wildflowers of New England. She had been trying to remember all the plant names she used to know by heart—regional common names only, never any Latin designations—but she let the book fall closed to watch the scene across the street.
The postmaster was arguing with two women. He was the same man who had held the position eight years ago; Sorrow recognized his short stature and elfin ears but didn’t think she had ever known his name. The women were stooped and sweaty, with bulging packs on their backs and bandannas over their hair. One of them was shaking a hiking pole. The postmaster crossed his arms resolutely. The hiking pole shook some more. A family of tourists in shorts and T-shirts scurried around the argument.