Black River Orchard

by Chuck Wendig

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Supernatural suspense; Horror

Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A small town is transformed when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples in this masterpiece of horror from the author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.

“Chuck Wendig is one of my very favorite storytellers. Black River Orchard is a deep, dark, luscious tale that creeps up on you and doesn’t let go.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there.

Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.

Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.

This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples . . . and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?

Even if something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.

But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Del Rey

Print pages: 640

Sample

PROLOGUE THE FIRST

THE ORCHARD-KEEPER’S TALE

Calla Paxson, age twelve, lurched upright in her bed, her heart pounding as if the nightmare she’d been having was still chasing her. She tried to chase the nightmare down in turn—but the ill dream fled from her, leaving only the raw, skinless feeling of its passing.

As the dream darted into darkness, a new certainty arose:

Someone is in the house.

It was just a feeling—an intrusion, as if the air had been disrupted, stirred about. It’s just the bad dream, she thought. Dreams seemed to stay with you, the way the smell of her friend Esther’s cigarettes hung in their hair, their clothes. (Technically, they were Esther’s mother’s cigarettes. Esther was thirteen and assured Calla, “I’m a teenager, and teenagers are allowed to smoke,” adding hastily, “but don’t tell my mom, because she’ll fucking assassinate me.”)

Calla rubbed her eyes, looked at the digital clock next to her bed: 3:13 a.m.

Her heart was pounding now and she failed to calm it. She grumbled and flopped back onto the pillow, knowing now that falling back asleep would be hard.

But then, downstairs—

A faint whump.

She sat up again. Heart spurred to a new beat.

No longer just a feeling, now it was a reality:

Someone was in the house.

They didn’t have a dog.

Her father would be asleep.

So, what was that noise, then?

The fridge icemaker made a racket sometimes. Or the heater. The pipes in the radiators knocked and banged—it was March, after all, the days warming, the nights still cold. Still. She knew the icemaker, the heater, the sounds of the old farmhouse settling.

This wasn’t that.

Get Dad.

Barefoot, in loose flannel pants and a pink Alessia Cara Band-Aid shirt, Calla darted to the door of her bedroom and eased it open a crack. Another bump-and-thump from downstairs. A door closing? Her throat tightened with fear.

She hurried down the hall to her father’s bedroom—she opened the door to his room quick, the old hinges complaining (shut up shut up shut up),

, and ran to the bed and shook her father—

“Dad,” she hissed. “Dad!”

But her hand collapsed to the bed. He wasn’t there. Just his wadded-up comforter tangled around a pillow.

Another sound downstairs. This time, she was sure it was the front door opening and closing. Calla hurried down the hallway on the balls of her feet, looking down the staircase—

And there stood her father, the front door closed behind him. Cold air rushed the steps, raising gooseflesh on the girl’s bare arms. He was wearing his barn jacket; he’d been outside. His hair was a tousle. Sweat slicked his brow despite the cold. In his long arms, he held a bundle, swaddled in an old set of bedsheets. Something dark and crooked poked out the one end. Calla released her breath in an exasperated sigh.

“Dad,” she said, irritated. “You scared the crap out of me.”

He startled a little upon seeing her. His arms full, he leaned his head toward his body, using his shoulder to push his eyeglasses farther up the bridge of his bookish nose. “Calla, hey. Gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. You can go back to bed, sweetie, everything’s fine.”

But Calla was nothing if not curious (read: nosy). Her feet carried her down the steps, buoyed by a child’s salacious desire to poke into her parent’s private business.

“What are you doing?” she asked, eyebrows up, mouth down.

Her father—Dan—looked left and right, the furtive glance of someone who was afraid he was about to get caught, but then grinned a big goofball grin. “What am I doing? Securing our future, Calla Lily. That’s what I’m doing.” He licked the corners of his mouth and hurried past her, toward the kitchen. He put the bundle on their secondhand country nook table, a table already piled with stuff like bills (past-due), a rusted toolbox, some kitchen implements, a can of dirt (if only Calla could one day find a boyfriend who loved her as much as Dad loved dirt). Every flat surface in their house became a shelf, he always said with some exasperation, as if it wasn’t him that was making it that way.

“Our future,” Calla said, bleary. She looked at the bedsheets. “It’s just a bundle of sticks.” And it was. Sticks like the fireblack fingers of a charred skeleton.

“Not sticks,” he said. “Branches. From a tree.” He sniffed, still half panting with excitement. “You know what, I need a drink. A celebration drink. Preemptive,” he muttered mostly to himself, “but I think deserved.”

From the cabinet he

pulled a bottle of something brown. Whiskey. (Calla admitted to having tried a sip about six months ago. It tasted like someone poured campfire ash down her throat. Why did adults drink that stuff? Did they hate themselves? She assumed that they did and she promised herself she’d never hate herself, not now, not ever.) As he uncorked the bottle and splashed it into a coffee mug, Calla sidled over toward the bundle of sticks. She peeled back the sheets, revealing dozens of black sticks bound together with strips of yellow cloth. (The cloth dotted with, what, red mud?)

Dad watched her from the other side of the counter. “It’s scionwood. For grafting.” As if she understood what that meant. These were just sticks. Why collect sticks? Sticks were, like, nature’s garbage. It was one of her chores here at the new (old) house: to go around the yard, picking up sticks. Then Dad burned them. (And, she assumed, made that nasty whiskey from the remnants, ugh.)

“Okayyyyy,” she said, because, whatever. Dad had gone out at three in the morning to get…sticks? Was he having a break with reality? A stroke? She peeled back the other side of the bedsheet, and something tumbled out—a little something, soft and bloodless pink, and it bounced off her foot and—

She cried out.

It was a finger.

A severed human finger.

She backpedaled away, still feeling the way it felt—moist, cold, mushy but also somehow stiff—on the top of her bare foot—

Dad was already scooping it up, laughing nervously.

“Your finger,” she said, alarmed, looking at his hand. But he had all his fingers. Which meant—

That finger belonged to someone else.

“What about my fingers, sweetie?” he asked.

“You—you’re not missing—that was a finger—” Her gaze crawled around his hands, looking for the finger he’d snatched off the ground.

But instead, he turned his hand toward her and opened it up.

She winced, not wanting to see.

“Calla, look. It’s not—it’s not a finger.” He laughed, almost dismissively. Like, What a stupid little kid. “You must be tired.”

Peeking through squinted lids, she saw that he was right. It wasn’t a finger at all. It was a thin apple core from an eaten apple. Black seeds exposed like fat carpenter ants. Skin so red it was almost black.

“That’s—that’s an apple.”

“Sure is,” he said, fire dancing in his eyes. “That’s the point of all of this.”

“Uh, okay. I still don’t get it, Dad.” She still felt like she was reeling. She was sure she’d seen a finger. But maybe her mind was just playing tricks on her. That bad dream again, poisoning her thoughts like a dead

animal in a well.

“I’m saying this scionwood, it’s going to help us make an orchard. Like your grandfather wanted to do so long ago. But couldn’t. It all starts here. The future is this.” He held up the apple core, turning it around in his fingers. “Everything starts with this apple.” 

PROLOGUE THE SECOND

THE GOLDEN MAN’S TALE

1901, The Goldenrod Estate, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Henry Hart Golden—anthropologist, archaeologist, student of law, craftsman, collector, chef, explorer, and folklorist—stood in front of a wall of his own tilework design. These red clay tiles were glazed with wild colors, each emblazoned with unique and strange iconography, and it was in this place he stood, arms spread wide, in front of those who had gathered there in their handcrafted masks, to speak of the country they called home:

“Friends of the Goldenrod Society, you know that I have been all around the world. I have explored the cenotes of the Yucatán. I’ve found the cloth-swaddled dead in mountain caves. I’ve been to Egypt and Nepal, I’ve dug earth with Chinamen—and had some of those same Chinamen try to bury me with what we found there.” At that, they laughed. “But it is here at home where I find my interest sharpened. And it is to our great nation that I turn my attention to ask: What is it that makes us so special? Now, my friends, I know what you’re thinking: Henry, the story of America is the story of its people—or, Henry, the story of America is in what we make and what we made, what we produce, what we craft and construct and conjure. Or, some would say, no, no, America is about the work. America is in the toil. It is in the very act of building rather than in what we build or who builds it. But I am here to tell you, no, the story of America is in our tools.”

Henry whipped off the cloth to reveal tools—not modern tools, no, but not ancient tools, either. Tools from fifty years past, a hundred, at most two centuries. Each numbered like an archaeological artifact. Whale oil lamps, astragal planes, flax hatchels, tin funnels, and the like. And in the center: a wrought-iron apple peeler with a wood base.

Those gathered gasped behind their masks—masks that were themselves amalgams of ceramic, cork, tin, and leather. He enjoyed their stupefaction, though to be fair they always gasped when Golden acted with flourish. They would eat dung out of his cupped hands if he asked them to—and grin as they did it.

With their attention fully seized, he continued:

“The tool is an expression of the maker—the choice of tool is the hallmark of a civilization. And the tools of America are humble, simple things. They are not the electric motor, the soot-belching machine. They are these tools you see before you: tools of iron and wood

and tin. It is the hand, yes, but also the tool the hand holds, that shows who we are. Individually, oh, we are represented by our craft, by our art, by the meals we cook and the clothes we make. But as a society? As a nation? Our soul is expressed in the choice of our tools. And our tools must continue to be plain and unpretentious—but beautiful, too. Resilient and resistant to obsolescence. And they must do as we command.”

They, of course, applauded. He went on a bit longer after that, showing off some of the tools and their craftsmanship—but soon, his desires rose up in him like a dragon (as they always did) and that dragon would not be denied its gold (as it never was). He wound down his speech and went out among them, his people. They wanted to touch him—a passing brush of their knuckles upon his cheek, a hand softly pressing into the small of his back, a quick breath in his ear. He had collected these people as easily as he had collected the tools on the table behind him. They were his society in the truest sense of the word: They, in their masks, surrendered so much of their time to him. And in return, they joined together, made themselves better, made themselves richer.

It was of course someone else he had his eye on, someone he spied in the crowd during his speech: a new girl, likely one brought here by a society friend. She did not belong, though perhaps her family did, for she was likely the scion of some powerful local bloodline. (Many of those present were.)

Her mask was a humble one, hastily made: a papier-mâché rabbit face, its ears bent forward, likely an error in the making but one that gave the prey’s countenance a sense of active, alarmed listening.

Henry could feel his desire tighten within him like a hangman’s rope, so he went right to her and asked the young woman if she’d like to see his private collection. She blushed and giggled and said yes, yes, of course, yes. A thousand times yes. Maybe too eager, but that was good.

Eager was ideal.

---

—

The two of them went to his chamber in the Goldenrod—high upstairs in the tower,

though to him the chamber also felt subterranean. No windows to see in. Tile floors of his own design with grooves between them, gently sloping to the center. A dumbwaiter, too, that went all the way down to the kitchens below. His house had no staff. Henry would cook a meal with tools he brought with him from long ago, and then he’d draw it up the dumbwaiter to his room.

Now, though, the dumbwaiter was open and on the pewter tray within waited a single apple.

It was the perfect specimen. Red-black, gleaming, beautiful. Ready to be skinned and eaten. The seeds bitten and spit. The young woman, whatever her name was, went to it first, captivated by it, as was expected. It was rather hypnotizing. She reached for it but did not touch it, likely unsure she even should be touching it. He felt the frisson of excitement and fear climb through her; he could almost hear her wondering if she was simply too crass a creature, too foul a thing, to touch that apple. As if her own grotesque fingers, covered as they were in the filth of the world, might bring swift and inescapable rot to that perfect void of appleskin.

Appleskin, he thought. Yes. It was time. He eased toward her at an angle, passing by an old marble-top bureau with a small garden of plants upon it—he kept this room hot, good for the violets, the slipper orchids, the mother-in-law tongue—and as he ran his hands along their leaves, his fingers danced onto something just past the pots: a mask of his own making. He pulled it taut over his head and face. He smelled the esters of rose and elderflower. The tart tang of the fruit. His breath hissed through the mouth slit.

Henry pressed himself up against the young woman from behind, urgent and needy, smelling her hair, though through the appleskin mask, all he could truly detect was the scent of the fruit itself. Which suited him fine.

He whispered in her ear, “Do you like what you see?”

And she gasped, because here she was, trapped between two beautiful things. Caught between the Scylla of Golden, the Charybdis of the apple, his whisper still crawling around in her ear. And when she nodded, still transfixed by the fruit, he reached for something nearby, sitting on the corner of a wooden ice chest: an orchard pruning hook. Good for getting apples off their branches. Among other things. 

THE APPLE

This is the apple in your hand.

Some would say it is so red that it looks black, but that’s not quite right. It’s the color of wine and offal, of liver soaked in Pinot Noir. Bruise-dark and blood-bright.

The skin shows little russeting, if any. But it is home to a peppering of lenticels—the little white dots you sometimes see on appleskin. These lenticels feel somehow deeper than the skin itself. As if you are staring into a thing that is nothing as much as it is something: an object of depth, of breadth, like a hole in the universe. In this way the lenticels are like the stars of a moonless evening.

The skin is smooth and cold, always cold. It is a round apple, not oblong, not tall, but also not squat. The Platonic ideal of an apple shape, perhaps: roughly symmetrical, broad in the shoulders, narrow toward the calyx. The apple is heavy, too. Dense-feeling. Heavy enough to crack a window. Or break a nose.

Even before you bite it, a scent rises to meet you. It’s the smell of roses—not unusual, because apples are related to the rose. Same family, in fact: Rosaceae.

What is unusual is the moment, a moment so fast you will disregard it, when the smell makes you feel something in the space between your heart and your stomach: a feeling of giddiness and loss in equal measure. In that feeling is the dying of summer, the rise of fall, the coming of winter, and threaded throughout, a season of funerals and flowers left on a grave. But again, that moment is so fast, you cannot hold on to it. It is gone, like a dream upon waking.

Of course, what matters most is the eating.

In the first bite, the skin pops under your teeth—the same pop you’d feel biting into a tightly skinned sausage. The flesh has a hard texture, and if you were to cut a slice you’d find it would not bend, but rather, it would break like a chip of slate snapping in half. That snap is a satisfying sensation: a tiny tectonic reverberation felt all the way to the elbow.

In the chew, the apple is crisp, resistant to its destruction, with a crunch so pleasurable it lights up some long-hidden atavistic artifact in your brain, a part that eons ago took great joy from crushing small bones between your teeth. The flesh is juicy; it floods the mouth, refusing to be dammed by teeth or lips, inevitably dripping from your chin. But for all its juiciness, too, the

tannins are high—and the apple feels like it’s wicking the moisture out of your mouth, as if it’s taking something from you even as you take from it.

The taste itself is a near-perfect balance of tartness and sweetness—that sour, tongue-scrubbing feel of a pineapple, but one that has first been run through a trench of warm honey. The skin, on the other hand, is quite bitter, but there’s something to that, too. The way it competes with the tart and the sweet. The way the most popular perfumes are ones that contain unpleasant, foul odors secreted away: aromatics of rot, bile, rancid fat, bestial musk, an ancient, compelling foulness from the faraway time when crunching those little bones made us so very happy. And so very powerful.

The bitterness of the skin is a necessary acrimony: a reminder that nothing good can last, that things die, that the light we make leaves us all eventually. That the light leaves the world. A hole in the universe. So we must shine as brightly as we can, while we can.

It speaks to you, this bitterness, this foulness.

It speaks to some part of you that likes it.

Because part of you does like it.

Doesn’t it?

 

SEPTEMBER

What makes apples so interesting is that like human beings, they are individuals, and their history has paralleled our history.

—Helen Humphreys, The Ghost Orchard

 

NOMENCLATURE

Calla Paxson, now age seventeen, stood in the middle of their gravel driveway, nose down in her phone, trying very, very hard not to be distracted by her father, Dan, as he hurried back and forth from the shed to the pickup to the house and back again. Every time he went past, he had a new question for her—

“Is Marco coming?”

“Yes, Dad, Marco is coming, Jesus.”

Back and forth.

“What time is it again?”

“It’s nine a.m., Dad,” and as he went past, she added loudly, “aka entirely too early, okay?”

Back and forth.

“Did Marco say he’d be here at nine?”

“Yes? No? I dunno, I’m not his boss, you are.”

Back and forth.

“You know, you could help me? Carry these—oof—boxes?”

“That’s not really—like, not my thing.”

He eased the wooden crate of apples into the back of the pickup, but Calla wasn’t paying attention. She held her phone up, blocking the view of him. With the camera reversed, she checked herself in the screen—saw a thousand tiny flaws but steeled herself against caring about them. (Eyebrows too thin, ugh, mouth too wide, ugh, left eye with that odd golden fleck hiding in the green, a green that wasn’t a pretty emerald but a muddy hazel the color of algal muck, uggggh.) She chided herself for feeling that way. Be better, say something nice about yourself, and she told herself today was a damn good hair day thanks to the humid September weather. She was all golden locks with the center part, framing her face with long layers, but the negative thoughts kept nagging her from the back of her mind. Calla shook the bad thoughts out of her head and (since Insta was over) checked her follower count on Faddish, then (since TikTok was almost over) checked her followers on Appy, then on Nextra, and of course also on Insta and TikTok because obviously. The classics were the classics for a reason. Her follower counts hadn’t budged since this morning. Or since last night. Or the night before.

Gently, a hand reached out and eased the phone aside.

The same hand, her father’s hand, lifted her chin.

Her father stood there in front of her.

“It’s not your thing,” he repeated.

“What?”

“That’s what you just

 said. ‘That’s not really, like, my thing.’ ”

“Oh god you’re about to give me a lecture, aren’t you?” She sighed. “I just mean I don’t know that I can move those boxes. They’re heavy. I already tried to clean myself up this morning and I don’t want to look like some farm girl—”

“No lecture. I promise, Calla Lily. You’re right. This is your thing.” He did a faux-game-show gesture toward her phone.

“I feel like you’re being sarcastic right now.”

“No sarcasm! I’m saying you wanna be a—what’s it called? An affluent—”

“Influencer. Jesus, Dad.”

“An influencer.” He smiled. He was fucking with her, wasn’t he? Was he fucking with her or was he just this goofy? “Right. So I need your influence.”

She winced. “What?”

He did this awkward moonwalk toward the truck, and then did an even-cringier spin, snatching up one of the apples from the crate resting on the pickup truck’s open gate. Dance-walking his way back, he thrust the apple at her.

“I told you I’m not eating one, apples are gross,” she said.

Dan Paxson put his hand over his chest and feigned injury. “You hurt me. You know that, right? My own daughter still won’t try my apple. My pride and joy insults my other pride and joy. It’s like my children are fighting. Sibling rivalry.”

“So dramatic.”

“I don’t need you to try the apple, but the apple needs your…influence. You know what I mean?”

She confessed: “I don’t.”

Her father sighed.

“Look, this is our first day at market. It’s not just tables and produce anymore. You’re right, it’s not enough to be the farmer anymore. People go there to sell their…fancy puddings and their honeycombs, it’s all pasture-raised beef and duck eggs. It’s produce you’ve never heard of like mizuna and kabocha and micro-cilantro. And though I know this apple is beautiful with a taste that’s—” The words seemed to catch in his mouth. Was he getting emotional? He probably was, the big dork. (She loved her father’s profound dorkiness. He was such a nerd because he cared so much about this stuff. She wouldn’t admit any of this, not for a million followers on social. Maybe for two million.) “I need help selling it.”

“That’s not what I do.” Or what I want to do.

“But you do. I see how much you put into your videos. You want people to…love the things that you love, and I love that about you. Maybe you could sprinkle a little of that pizzazz on this apple? Though I think there’s an actual apple named Pazazz, come to think of it.” He

shrugged. “I’m just saying, you’re my little branding genius, you have these explosive, firecracker thoughts, and I think this apple is really something special. Like you. But nobody will know if they don’t try it. I need your magic, Calla Lily. I need your sparkle.”

She rolled her eyes (trying to hide that, ugh, it felt nice when he said nice things about her). “Fine, I’ll give a glow up to your dire little fruit.” And it was dire. Pretty, maybe. Gothy, definitely. In the sun, it was a rich, black-blooded red.

But she couldn’t say any of that. Gothy, black, red. It wasn’t a Hot Topic apple. It did need something. “Does it have a name already?”

He hesitated. Acting a little cagey.

“I gave it a name. It—” He flinched. “Didn’t have one before.”

“Okay, fine, what did you name it?”

Her father shrugged, like, Oh, no big deal, don’t mind me. “I’m calling it the Paxson apple. After us. Our family. Our home.”

“Really. The Paxson.”

“Yeah. Why? Apples are—you know, the heirlooms, anyway, they’re named after the people who grew them. Baldwin, Ortley, or, uhh, Esopus Spitzenburg.”

Calla made a face like she’d just licked a moth. “No. You can’t—you can’t use those as your comps. Those sound like Old People apples. Esopus? We’re not Amish, Dad, god. No, you, like, go to the grocery store and the apples there have fun names, right? Honeycrisp, Pink Ladies, ummm—”

“SweeTango! Oh, Cosmic Crisp, too.”

“Yeah, okay, yeah. Whatever. So, you can’t call it the Paxson. You just can’t.” She made a disappointed face. “Promise me you won’t. It’s mid. It hurts me on the inside. Please promise. Please.”

“Our name matters, Calla,” he said, stiffening. She’d hurt him. But then his face softened and he leaned forward to take a big, sharp bite of the apple. His eyes closed and he breathed through his nose as he chewed. For a moment he seemed lost. He moaned around it. (Gross.) Finally he said: “You’re right. It’s too good for a boring name. So you’re up, Little Miss Influencer. Influence me. Name this apple.”

Calla scrunched up her nose, plowing little furrows in her brow as she grabbed his wrist and moved it this way and that, pivoting the apple in her view. (She wasn’t going to touch the apple because it was drooling juice from its bite wound.) “Dark, red, pretty. Like I’m staring into something deep—” It almost pulled her gaze to it, even into it. As if she were staring into the hall-of-mirrors aspect of a gemstone’s facets. That’s it. “It’s like a ruby. You wanted to name it after us?” At the end of the gravel drive, she

saw the old sign that hung there, a wooden sign with their name carved into it. A name signaling their house. Their home. That’s it, she thought. “There’s no place like home.”

“What?” he asked.

“Ruby Slipper.” She paused. “There’s no place like home. Ruby Slipper. It’s like from that movie. The one with the scarecrow.”

Aaaaand her father hated it. She could tell immediately. He seemed struck by it, like the name was a bad taste wiping away the flavor of the apple in his mouth, like her suggestion had ruined the entire experience for him. She instantly felt humiliated for screwing up—he could run hot and cold sometimes when she displeased him. Like she was embarrassing him somehow.

She stammered, “I mean, whatever, I don’t care, use the name or don’t, that’s what I came up with.” And she put up her phone again, placing the screen between her face and him, a shield, a wall, a world away.

“It’s perfect,” he said, quietly.

She lowered the phone. “What?”

He had tears in his eyes. “It’s absolutely perfect, Calla Lily. My gosh. You really have a gift. Your mother would’ve been so proud of you.” Normally, she hated when he said that. Calla had barely met her mother. The woman died when she was five—an aggressive blood cancer took her from the world. So it always felt like a sour off-note to suggest somehow this woman that Calla didn’t really know would have some grand opinion of her. But suddenly, now, it hit different. She had to blink back her own tears.

“Cool,” she said, trying to pretend this wasn’t the best thing ever. But she gave a smile. For him, of course. Not for her. Not because she meant it or anything, she told herself.

“What’s cool?” came a voice from the end of the driveway.

“Hey, M&M,” she said, spinning on her heel to greet her boyfriend walking his bike down the driveway. M&M. Her nickname for him sometimes. Marco Meza. MM. He was long and lean, like a series of taut ropes rigging a boat, his joints like cinched knots. He could run like nobody’s business—it’s why he was the best of their track team. Sprinter. Destined for a scholarship.

(And he needed it. As did she. But Dad was sure this orchard was going to take off and help pay for school…)

“Mister Meza!” her father said, “Not right on time, but just in time.”

“Sorry, Mister P,” Marco said, dropping the bike’s kickstand. “Thought I was going to get the car today but my sister has to drive down toward Philly

to pick up the Inca Kolas and—”

Dad clapped his hands. “It’s all right, Mister Meza, I’m just messing with you. It’s something my father used to say about me. Not right on time, but just in time. I was always showing up right under the wire, you know?” Dad picked up another apple, turned it over in his hand. “How’s the family? The restaurant?”

“Good, good, Dad says hi.”

“Here, tell him to put this on the menu—”

And at that, Dad slapped the inside of his forearm to launch a fresh, red apple (a Ruby Slipper) toward Marco—who caught it handily out of the air with a downward swipe. He looked down at it with practiced awe. He’s so fucking hot, Calla thought. “Apples aren’t really a big thing in Peruvian cuisine, Mister P, but uhhh, is this—is it what I think it is? Is this the apple?”

Dad spread his arms wide. “Finally unveiling it.”

“Do I—? Can I—?”

“Have a bite? It’s time. You’re one of the first people to try this apple, Marco.” At that, Dad shot her a glance that was a caricature of guilt. “This one over here doesn’t like apples, but I know I can trust you to give me the real-deal review, right? Go on.”

Marco looked at her with a smile and she shrugged with a dismissive laugh. “Just be glad he likes you,” she said. Under her breath, Calla muttered, “I think he likes you more than he likes me.”

“All right, let’s give this a go,” Marco said, polishing the apple with his shirt, eyeballing

 it. Marco gave her one last cheeky look and then opened wide, taking a big, loud bite. Cronch. He chewed a few times—

That’s when he stopped.

The smile fell away. His face went almost blank, like he was staring past her father, past the driveway, into someplace beyond. Like a memory. Then his eyes went wide and he held the apple close, staring at it as he resumed chewing. Juice dripped from his chin and he didn’t even wipe it off.

“Well?” Dad asked.

Marco laughed around a mouthful of apple. This wasn’t a show. She could tell that much. “This is the best apple I’ve ever eaten,” he said. Then he greedily devoured the rest of it right there, without pause. Like he was starving.

“Okay, don’t eat the seeds, weirdo, god,” Calla said, walking over and snatching it out of his hand before he did exactly that.

Dad whooped with success. “I got a good feeling about today. A real good feeling.”

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

They had a dock now, and Emily Bergmann stood at the end of it, staring at the dark water of the Delaware River.

The river wanted to drown her.

All rivers did, but this one felt keenly hungry, to her.

Her heart raced.

Emily’s wife, Meg Price, must’ve sensed Emily’s agitation. She came up alongside Emily and watched her, curiously, carefully. Meg was Scandinavian in design and attitude. A true silver fox: sharp, silverware hair. All of her drawn with a confident, steady hand. Nothing ever out of place; even her chaos was meticulously arranged. Emily, Korean on her mother’s side, German on her father’s, was—well, depending on when you asked, either a complement to Meg, or her opposite. She wore dark clothes often (aka always): presently, a black Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirt and yoga pants the color of a coming thunderstorm. Her hair, black as her mother’s, but with errant curls—those, a gift from her father. Emily appeared nervous, ever-worried. Where Meg stood still, Emily fidgeted. Where Meg was clean lines, Emily was a messy scribble.

The river only made it all worse. She chewed a nail. She gnawed her lip.

(Scribble, scribble.)

Above and behind them stood their new house, a little hyper-modern two-bedroom cottage nestled in among the quaint, village-like homes of the county’s river towns. Up there, the movers unloaded their furniture. They stood down here, out of the way.

Though only the two of them stood there at the small riverside dock, they were not alone. They were never alone, not anymore. Between them stood the thing that was known but unspoken, detected but unacknowledged. A ghost, of sorts—a presence with no body and no face and a name that they trapped on their tongues but would not let slip, not now, maybe not ever again.

They did as they had been doing: They ignored it, they talked past it, they pretended like That Unspoken Thing was not a thing at all, had never been a thing.

“We have a river,” Emily said, plainly. Still staring at it.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Meg asked, taking it all in.

“Sure.”

Emily heard it in her own voice: the wary, weary eyedropper of sarcasm dispensing one sardonic drop, bloop. Just enough to perfume the word. Sure.

She didn’t mean it that way. (Or so she always told herself.) But there it was, just the same. Put down for Meg to pick it up, and of course Meg picked it up.

“You don’t like it.”

“It’s not—I mean, I like it, it’s beautiful, you’re right. It’s just—” I’m afraid of water. Emily was hydrophobic. Not so bad she couldn’t stand here, but enough that she felt the river’s hungry waters easing past like a starving crocodile with black, dead eyes. Christ, she couldn’t even take a shower without having to grab a towel every five minutes to dry her eyes. But she didn’t want to say any of this. Meg knew it already. It wasn’t a secret that Emily feared water. “A river.”

Meg sighed through her nose. “Are you okay with this?”

“Totally. Very.”

“Moving out of the city was a big deal, I know.”

“Right, but now—now you’re home.”

“We’re home.”

“Right, yeah, I just mean, you grew up here. This is your home. Your parents are ten minutes away. You have a new job at your father’s old law firm. It’s good. This will be good.”

“It will be good. Thanks for making this work.”

“Obviously, yeah.” Because it’s on me to make this work, she knew. Meg knew it, too. Not that she’d say it. You don’t speak the unspoken. Speak of the Devil and the Devil shall appear.

“It’s early yet. Mimosa?”

Emily offered a dramatic, almost-whole-body nod. “Mimosa.”

---

—

They had gotten married five years ago, when Emily was thirty, and Meg was forty. Emily wanted a small wedding, maybe in another country. Costa Rica, maybe. Meg said no. She wanted the pomp, the circumstance, the hundred guests and the rustic farm-to-table vibe with a cake from Factory Girl down in Coryell’s Ferry. They had the wedding not far from this spot where they stood now.

They lived in the city until Recent Events, and Emily loved Philly, loved its attitude, its vibrancy, its art and its big loud mouth. Meg wanted quiet, but stayed because she had a good job at a prestigious firm in Center City. They had an apartment just off Rittenhouse Square. They ate omelets at Parc, one of their shared loves. For most everything else they were out of sync, but Emily told herself that was a good thing, that you didn’t want to be with someone who was just like you, otherwise the seesaw plonked down at one end and you never had the fun of the weeble-wobble ride. Besides, Emily knew she was a ship adrift, a ship that needed ballast to give her stability, to keep her on course, and Meg was that. Once more she told herself that it was good they were two different people, that it was only proper they balanced each other out like this. Except this time, Emily feared it was a lie. But maybe that was okay, too. Maybe the lies you told yourself became true enough, eventually. Like a magic spell. An incantation of deception; an illusion made real.

---

—

Mimosas on the dock. By the hungry river. With the Unspoken Thing. The movers would be doing this all day. Inside the little modern bankside house—their new home up past a set of long, zigzagging steps—it was a high-traffic zone. They’d get trampled. So down here they remained. Trapped, Emily thought, but did not say. Meg sidled up next to her—no hand-holding or arm-linking, but her elbow touched Emily’s and that felt like a kind of offering. Whether as a peace treaty or a sacrifice or a promise, Emily didn’t yet know. Meg would know. Meg didn’t do things without knowing what they were, what they meant. And she didn’t care if everyone else was playing catch-up.

You’re being uncharitable, Emily said. Meaning, she felt like a judgy bitch. God, was she a judgy bitch? She was, wasn’t she? She knew she was, why was she even asking? Shit. Get out of your own head, idiot.

Meg said: “So, starting the week after Labor Day, I’ll be in the office all day, most days.”

“Yup.” Emily resisted snarking: Yeah, that’s how jobs tend to work, Meg.

“You’ll be home and can handle a lot of the unpacking and arrangement and such?” It was framed as a question, but Emily knew it was a statement.

“I dunno. You have the, the way you want things—I don’t know if I’m up for that task, Meg. I thought maybe I could look into some of the local community service NPOs, find some people I could help. There’s a local women’s shelter—”

“Emily, c’mon, no.”

“What?”

“I know that was your life in the city. And you’re good at it. So good at it. It’s what I love about you, how much you care, how much you want to fix things. But maybe we need to spend some time working on what we have here.” The Unspoken Thing, almost summoned, almost conjured. Meg continued: “Like the house. Like our stuff. I could use you here.”

“But people could use me out there. It’s hard out there right now, Meg. The local school board has screwed over LGBT kids, they’ve removed books.

by Black authors, homelessness is up—even out here, even in the rural burbs. I just think I could do some good. You know?”

“And you can and will. Eventually. Just not right now.” Meg rubbed her arm. “Look. This is a beautiful house. This county is gorgeous. Lots of history. It was the seat of the American Revolution. We’re ten miles from where Washington crossed this very river. And we’re almost on the cusp of autumn. It’ll be gorgeous here when the leaves change. Let’s sit with this for a little while. Okay?” At that, Meg offered her mimosa glass to the air. An invitation.

Emily was not one to resist an invitation.

Pinkies out, they tinged glasses. It felt nice. The Unspoken Thing was here, still. But it didn’t stand between them. Drown in the river, Unspoken Thing, Emily cursed it. Drown in the waters and let the river take you far, far away from us. ...