Mom said if you let an Abrams push you an inch, they would take a mile. She said it when they were painting the No Trespassing signs to nail to fence posts, fresh lettering every spring to mark the property boundary. She said it when they were walking through town and the Abramses were too and Mom refused to cross the street to avoid them. They were Lovegoods, and they belonged in this valley, and no Abrams had any right to try to intimidate them or frighten them away.
Sorrow dropped Cassie’s postcards and drawings into a heap. Her hand was shaking as she took the lighter from her pocket, shaking as she flipped it open and tried once, twice, again, to raise a flame. Rejoice Lovegood wouldn’t have been frightened when she set fire to the logs Clement Abrams had piled on her land. He and his family had accused her of being a witch, they had tried to steal her land, but she had never let them win.
The lighter sparked and caught. Sorrow touched the flame to the corner of the crumpled-up Florida postcard. The paper curled and smoked and flared, filling the little playhouse with dancing warm light. Sorrow bit her lip in concentration and lit a horse drawing and another postcard. She watched them burn and wither.
The rising smoke took on a bitter, acrid scent. Sorrow scrunched up her face in disgust: the scrap of pink carpet was melting.
She jumped to her feet and stomped on the burning paper, but there was too much of it, and the fire was spreading too fast. She accidentally kicked one of the postcards away from the pile; it tumbled to a stop against the flowery sheet. Sorrow kicked at it again, but the sheet had already caught, and flames were licking up the fabric. The playhouse corner was as bright as daylight now, filled with flickering yellow light, and Sorrow’s shadow was a looming shape on the wall.
The smoke was thick and foul, filling her nose and mouth. She had to do something. The fire was spreading so fast, climbing up the sheet to the ceiling, but her ears were roaring and her mind was blank with panic.
It was getting so hot. She tugged desperately at the sheet, but it wasn’t just hanging over the string, it was sewn in, and she couldn’t pull it down. Flames whipped close to her face, snatched at her hands and the sleeves of her jacket. She jerked away and stumbled out of the playhouse corner. The fire was spreading from the postcards to the pillows, from the sheets to the blankets. She didn’t have any water. She didn’t know what to do.
She ran for the ladder and climbed down as fast as she could, slipping twice as her feet missed the rungs. She dropped to the floor and ran. The barn door swung and rattled as she shoved past, and the cold outside was a shock after the heat of the fire. Sorrow stood absolutely still for a moment, her throat aching with every inhale.
There was a light on upstairs in the Abrams house.
Sorrow sprinted for the trees, skidding precariously on the snow. When she glanced back another light came on in the house, this one downstairs. Somebody was awake. She couldn’t be caught. Mr. and Mrs. Abrams would tell the police and the police would tell the social worker and the social worker would visit again and Mom—Sorrow didn’t even want to think about what that would do to Mom, a visit from the police and child services all at once, so many outsiders crowding into the kitchen with accusing eyes and pointing fingers, and all of it her fault.
Her breath was wheezing and rasping before she even reached the property line, and she tasted the metallic tinge of blood at the back of her throat as she slipped through the wire fence. She looked back only once to see the Abrams house alight, and then she was running again, and she didn’t stop until she was in the fallow field below her own farmhouse. The house was dark, an inkblot on the night.
Sorrow doubled over at the edge of the apple trees, sucking in air like she had never breathed before. Only when she didn’t feel like her heart was going to burst from her chest did she climb the rest of the way to the house. She sneaked inside as quietly as she had left. Everybody was asleep. For the second time that day nobody had even noticed she was gone.
In her room she shut the door and leaned against it. Her heartbeat slowed and the pounding in her ears softened, and she became aware of another sound, something high and muffled. She leaned over her bed to open the window. Sirens. The high, distant wail grew louder. The Abramses had called the fire department.
As she lowered the casement, a breath of wind twisted through the gap. It felt different from the snow-chasing gusts that had buffeted the house all day. Warmer, gentler. The bite was gone.
The weather was turning. Spring was on its way.
36
THE SUN HAD set, taking with it the last golden light. The orchard had sunk into a hush of green and gray. The last frost melted away, and the warmth returned.
Sorrow reached for the lighter on the fence post. Stopped with her fingers inches away. It was a small silver square, such a tiny thing; the musical notes etched on the side were barely visible in the vanishing light. She could still feel the rasp of the ridged wheel beneath her thumb. The grit and grime of the cider house floorboards. The cold, oh, the aching, bitter cold, sinking into her limbs, sapping the heat from her core, and leaving in its place a bone-deep certainty that she would, very soon, freeze to death.
When she inhaled, she remembered the smell of smoke and the fast-building crackle of heat. She picked up the lighter, and she left in its place on the fence rail the glasses, the watch, the fan, the bead, her collection laid out in a row.
She stepped over the fence, moving slowly through the cemetery rows, past the plain white headstones and towering ash trees. Ahead there was a pale smudge in the twilight: a blue T-shirt, blond hair. Cassie.
She was sitting on the ground at the foot of Patience’s grave. Her legs were bent, her arms hooked around her knees. With one hand she gripped the fabric of her jeans, holding herself so tight it was as though she feared she would fly apart.
In the other hand she held a gun.
Sorrow stopped. Her throat was raw when she swallowed. Cassie didn’t look up; she hadn’t heard Sorrow approach. She barely seemed to be breathing. She might have been part of the orchard, as rooted and unmovable as the trees, if it weren’t for the golden glimmer of her short hair, and softly, softly, the sound of her weeping.
“Cassie,” Sorrow said.
Cassie’s head snapped up. Her face was pale, her eyes red. Without makeup she looked years younger, and Sorrow could see the little girl she had once been, the one whose mother dressed her up in dresses and ribbons, pretty as a doll.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Cassie’s voice was hoarse; she swiped her free hand over her nose and sniffled.
“Looking for you,” Sorrow said.
“Get the fuck away from me.”
Sorrow took a step forward. Grass crackled under her shoe. Another. “Your family’s worried about you. Everybody’s looking for you.”