“When you get to the farm,” Ethan said. “If anything’s broken, you tell me.” “Okay.” Sophie looked at him for a moment. Then she went back to her fries. “Okay,” she said. Victoria was watching all of this from across the booth, saying nothing. And when Ethan glanced at her, she looked away out at the window at the parking lot and the road and the darkening October sky.
They arrived at Ridgeline Orchard at dusk. The farm looked different through the eyes of someone who’d never seen it before. Ethan was aware of this, aware of the tilting barn and the equipment parked at odd angles and the general sense of a place that was held together by habit and stubbornness rather than system. The farmhouse itself was presentable mostly, though the porch light had been out for 2 weeks, and the vegetable beds near the house looked like an archaeological site.
Sophie got out of the car and stood in the driveway and looked at it all. Then she looked up at the sky, which out here, away from town lights, was starting to show stars in a way that wasn’t possible in Eugene or Portland or wherever she’d been living. “There are a lot of stars,” she said. Yeah, Ethan said, “Too far from town for light pollution.
” She looked at the sky a moment longer. Then she looked at the orchard, the rows of bare trees visible against the darkening blue. “Those are your trees?” she said. “My trees?” he confirmed. She nodded slowly, processing this. “Okay,” she said for the second time that day. And she walked up the porch steps and waited for him to open the door.
That night, after Sophie had been shown the room that Ethan had hurriedly cleared and outfitted with clean sheets and a lamp and not much else, after she’d brushed her teeth with a toothbrush they’d bought at a gas station because he hadn’t thought to have one ready. Another failure, noted. After she’d settled in with the gray animal on the pillow beside her, and said nothing when Ethan stood in the doorway and said good night, he went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. Victoria
appeared in the kitchen. She’d taken the spare room, the one his father used to use, without making it a discussion. She was carrying a coffee mug that she must have found in the cabinet and made herself without asking, which he found strangely deeply reasonable. She sat down across from him.
“She’s going to be hard to reach,” she said. “I know. She’s not going to forgive you just because you show up.” A pause. She might not forgive you at all for a while. I know. He lifted his head. I’m not looking for forgiveness. I’m looking for, I don’t know, a chance. Victoria looked at him steadily. You have one, she said.
Don’t waste it. He nodded. Outside, the night settled over the farm. The apple trees stood in their rows in the dark. Somewhere in the house, a 7-year-old girl lay awake in an unfamiliar room with a gray stuffed animal and a broken zippered pencil case, listening to the new sounds of a new place she hadn’t asked for and didn’t yet trust.
And Ethan Brooks sat at the kitchen table with a woman he barely knew and a daughter he’d just met, and the specific crushing weight of understanding that this was not the beginning of something easy. It was only the beginning. The second morning was harder than the first. Ethan had set his internal alarm for 5:14, the way he always did, but he was already awake at 4:50, lying in the dark, listening to the house.
He’d never paid attention to the sounds of this house before, the way the pipes knocked in the walls when the temperature dropped, the particular creek of the third stair from the top, the wind finding the gap under the back door that he’d been meaning to seal for two winters. He’d lived with these sounds so long they’d become silence to him.
Now he lay there cataloging each one, wondering which of them was Sophie. She wasn’t any of them. When he finally got up and went downstairs, the house was still, and Sophie’s door, which he’d left open a crack the night before, the way he’d seen parents do in movies without really knowing if that was right, was still open the same crack, unmoved.
He stood in the hallway for a moment listening and heard the slow, even breathing of a child who had finally, in the very early morning hours, managed to sleep. He went down and made coffee. Victoria appeared at 6:30, which was considerably later than he expected. She came downstairs already dressed, which told him she was one of those people who committed to the day before leaving their room.
Her hair was pulled back and she had her phone in one hand and the expression of someone who had been awake for a while but had chosen to stay in her room, which he appreciated more than he could easily say. She poured herself coffee without asking where anything was. She’d apparently mapped the kitchen the night before, and sat at the table with her phone and didn’t try to have a conversation. He liked that about her.
He didn’t say so. Sophie came downstairs at 7:52. She appeared at the kitchen doorway in the green hoodie and yesterday’s jeans, the gray animal tucked under one arm, and stood there looking at the kitchen like she was studying a map of somewhere she’d never been. Her hair was messy from sleep, and she had a crease on her left cheek from the pillow.
And she looked younger than seven in the way that kids only look when they’ve just woken up before they put on whatever version of themselves they show the world. “Morning,” Ethan said. She looked at him. I couldn’t find the bathroom, she said. There are two doors and one of them is a closet. Sorry, should have shown you. He stood. I’ll show you now. I found it, she said.
