Sorrow lowered a spiral-bound notebook back into the box, but she didn’t turn around. She looked instead through the open door of the barn. She had been in Vermont for just over two weeks, although it felt like a span of time impossibly longer. Half of her planned vacation. She had been so busy worrying about everything that was happening she hadn’t given herself time to think about what she was going to do next.
The rain was coming down steadily now, a clean soaking shower, drumming on the apple trees, on Grandma’s garden, on puddles spreading over the lawn. They still hadn’t spoken to Ethan about the French drain, whatever that was. The kitchen window glowed with warm yellow light. It would smell of onions and garlic inside, chicken browning in the skillet, fresh-plucked herbs and ground pepper. There would be bread rising in a bowl on the counter. Sorrow didn’t know if Verity had eaten anything today. Surely Dr. Parker would have made sure she did before they left the hospital, or on the drive down. She didn’t know if she could sit at the table for dinner and not count the bites Verity took. She didn’t know if she could spend another two weeks enduring whispers and glares, the rumors and questions, the way every conversation in town would turn back to Cassie, to Patience, to the Lovegoods and the Abramses and the tragedies they shared. She wanted to go home, to her family and her friends, to the ordinary life she had set aside. She wanted to let the knotted ache of grief and regret and guilt fade with distance and time, to stop feeling in every waking moment like sadness was a hole inside of her that would never go away.
But if she stayed in the orchard, to the end of her planned time or longer, the weight of its history would seep into her, and it would perhaps start to feel like her natural landscape again. She could read her grandmother’s journals and meet all of the women who had come before, immerse herself in the memories until they stopped itching like skin that didn’t fit right. Before she had come back, she had not considered the possibility of staying longer. One month and no more. Close the gaps in her memory, fill in the spaces where Patience was supposed to be, and leave again, mission accomplished.
It wasn’t so simple, to walk away from a land that held parts of herself in its bones of wood and stone. But neither could she stand in one place and let roots anchored in centuries past push their way into her veins until she could not take a single step for fear of ripping them away.
“I don’t know,” she said. She could barely stand the look on Verity’s face, scared and hopeful all at once, with no sign of the careful, carved mask she so often wore. “It’s not really fair, is it? That I’ll start to forget again if I leave.”
“If you want fair, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong family,” Verity said. Her smile was fleeting, knowing.
Sorrow looked out through the barn door. The little farmhouse was obscured by mist and rain, and rivulets were snaking across the lawn to the edges of the garden. “I don’t want to be one or the other,” she said. “A different person here or there. I can’t do that anymore.”
The rain on the roof was so loud she thought she heard her mother say something, the beginnings of a word lost in the racket, but when she turned, Verity was looking at her, just looking, and the only answer she gave was a brief nod.
39
SORROW WOKE EARLY the next morning. Nobody else was up yet, so she left a note on the kitchen table—went for a walk, back for breakfast—and headed out into the orchard.
The sun was just peeking over the mountains. Another brief rainstorm had come and gone during the night. The orchard was damp, glistening with droplets still falling from the trees. The morning light was golden, the air cooler. Everything smelled fresh and clean. The ground was just muddy enough to squish beneath her shoes, but not so muddy that it stuck. Midsummer flowers were blooming under the apple trees, clustered together in splashes of color, sprinkled shyly through the shade: feathery and colorful false goat’s beard, tall snapdragons in orange and pink, purple tufts of phlox, deep blue stalks of larkspur. There were mushrooms in the shadows, and Sorrow tested herself on remembering how dangerous they were and she didn’t mind too much that she had forgotten most of it. She could learn it again.
She avoided the muddy road and cut through the apple trees, wandering around the base of the hill with no particular destination in mind. She stopped to examine unfamiliar shrubs and flowers, paused to listen to birdsong, breathed deeply as the light changed and the air warmed. In one spot where an apple tree had been cut down, a wild raspberry bush had taken its place, its first red fruit just beginning to swell. A few rows farther along she found a lump of rock protruding from the ground: angular Green Mountain granite softened by lichen and moss. She didn’t recall having seen it before, but when she scrambled up one side and stood at the top, a memory returned, and with it a faint thrum of sadness, soft, mellowed from being held so long in a stone older than remembrance. She had climbed that boulder on a crisp, clear fall day, declared herself queen of the rock, and giggled uncontrollably as Patience tried, not very hard, to knock her from her pinnacle and tackle her into a pile of crunching golden leaves.
She balanced on the boulder’s weathered edge until the ache passed and left in its wake an impression that wasn’t quite pain, wasn’t quite joy, but a braid of both, together bitter and sweet, like the first bite of autumn’s earliest fruit.
She jumped to the ground and kept walking, meandering her way down the slope.
Dad and Sonia were flying into Burlington that afternoon. They were going to rent a car and drive themselves to Abrams Valley; they had reservations at one of the quaint historic bed-and-breakfasts in town. Verity had invited them over for supper and asked what they liked to eat. Grandma was going to give Sonia a quilt she had just finished. Gestures and overtures, rituals and manners, retreating into the familiar when there were so many things they didn’t quite know how to talk about.
Sorrow had promised to sit down with them and talk, a proper talk, about what had happened and why she hadn’t told them, about the questions and fears that had driven her to Vermont and the secrets she hadn’t even known she had been keeping. She was going to keep her promise, but still the prospect of that conversation gave her a nervous flutter in her stomach. She had always tried so hard to keep her family in Florida separate from her family in Vermont, two worlds divided by lines in time, in geography, in sisters, in parents, past and present, forgotten and remembered. She didn’t know yet how to stitch the two halves of herself together, but she knew now that those lines meant no more than wire stretched across wild mountain land: easily ducked, or clipped, or crushed by a fallen tree.