The Memory Trees by Kali Wallace

Author:Kali Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

21

VERITY RETURNED IN time to make dinner, and Sorrow made an effort to act normal at the table, but a day apart had not lessened the tension between them. Grandma kept looking at each of them with a pinched frown. It was a relief when the dishes were washed and Sorrow could escape to her room.

When Verity came up for bed a little while later, she tapped on Sorrow’s closed door and said, “Good night, sweetheart,” but by the time Sorrow decided to answer she was already gone.

The night was hot and Sorrow’s bedroom was stuffy. She kicked her quilt down to the foot of the bed, tugged the sheet up. Her window was open, but the air was humid and heavy, without the slightest hint of a breeze. There was a moth on the dormer ceiling above her, unmoving, a flat black triangle against the white paint. Somewhere outside, a bird chattered angrily, then faded, and the night was quiet.

After arguing with herself for a couple of minutes, Sorrow rolled out of bed and snapped on the light. The favors she’d found in the graveyard were sitting atop her dresser, right where her collection used to be. She touched her fingertip to the smooth spot between the tiger’s ears. She remembered clearly where she had found it the first time: in the branches of the black oak on the hill, ten or twelve feet above Silence Lovegood’s grave. Patience had been teaching her to climb the tree and trying to get her to guess which of the branches had held the rope where Silence was hanged. Sorrow had grown annoyed with her sister—the tree wasn’t telling her anything, it was only a tree—but her annoyance had changed to smugness when she’d found the tiger, and Patience had admired it with just a hint of jealousy in her expression, and she’d said, “Maybe it’s telling you something different.”

Sorrow dug Julie’s photograph out of the top drawer. She had stashed it there earlier, in the same spot where, with the laughable solemnity of a child, she had always hidden her most secret favors. She couldn’t remember now, what those secret favors had been. When she walked through her old collection in her mind—the tiger, the watch, the beads and coins and lady’s fan—she felt as though she was still grasping into dark places, reaching gingerly into corners and cracks, not even knowing what she was looking for. She felt a space where something ought to be—small and solid, tucked in her pocket—but like every other gap in her memories, every time she focused on it, it was as though a thicket of branches closed over the past.

It wasn’t growing any less frustrating, the longer she was in Vermont, to have her own mind be so unyielding, even when she was only trying to remember things that mattered as little as trinkets she had found in the orchard.

She dropped onto the bed and examined the picture in the lamplight. How strange it was, to be looking into a corner of her mother’s past she hadn’t even known existed before.

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