God, the apples look good. It had been remarkable in the market, but the improved health of the trees, at least compared to what Will remembers, is incredibly stark. Whatever he might feel about Casey, it’s good to see the old grove looking so lush,like it’s growing for the joy of it instead battling against adverse conditions.
He stops, surprised and a little annoyed to find himself blinking back tears, in front of his favorite apple tree. It’s a Melrose tree, although of course Will hadn’t known that when it had become his favorite; it had been the one with the lowest bottom branch, and thus the easiest one for him to climb as a short, scrawny six-year-old. And there had been, in the heart of the tree, a perfectly forked little wooden seat, which, in a happy accident of branch growth, always seemed to fit him perfectly, even as he got older. Will could sit there amidst apple blossoms in spring, hidden through the summer by the dark, saw-edged green of the leaves, and always, from August through nearly to Thanksgiving, in reach of an easy snack. It wasn’t always a ripe snack, of course—the Melrose, like Will, was really a child of October—but even the tiny, half-finished apples were sweet and tart, quietly satisfying.
They’re ripe now, swollen nearly to the point of dropping everywhere he looks; someone on staff will probably be out in the next few days to clear them, he realizes, a little startled by it. It washes over him that while he knows exactly what will happen to these apples, who exactly will be doing it is a strange, yawning mystery. Every Melrose before him will be picked, then sorted and separated, the best sent to the market, the bakery, or into cold storage for later sale, and the rest divided by quality for cider production or to supplement the animal feed—but by whom? Once it would have been Clive and Denise, or Tara and Jed, or Samson and Kyle, or… Well. Will doesn’t remember them all, the rotating cast of farm staff who’d been hired and fired on Bill’s capricious whims. Still, he’d alwaysknown, while he was actuallyhere, who they were at any given moment. It’s oddly unmooring to realize he doesn’t; more than the changes to the farm, the town, the yellow market door, Mere’schildren, it drops on Will the weight of how long he’sbeen gone, on how much has carried on, come and gone, without him.
He can’t bring himself to climb it—it will hurt too much if the seat no longer fits—but, eyes stinging, Will pulls an apple off the tree and takes a bite. He remembers, as he chews and swallows, that it’s the state apple of Ohio, chosen sometime in the ’40s. As a young man, Old Bill had ripped out fifteen Baldwin trees to put these in against his own father’s advice, which Will only knows because the ensuing fight had entered family lore. Will thinks now that the Melrose is an appropriate representative choice: so sweet at the front of the bite that you can almost forget the note of sharp, puckering sour at the back.
It’s a good apple, though, and Will chomps quite happily through it as he makes his way out of the first orchard. To avoid the indignity of being caught having picked an apple after all by Noel the Easily Bribed Teen, Will decides to avoid going back through to the main gate. He cuts, instead, through the back of the first orchard, and into the little collection of sheds, silos, and other storage outbuildings that various Bills have had constructed here out of lack of interest in considering anywhere better to put them. Many times over the years, as Will grimly drove one of roughly seventeen loads of feed grain per season clear across the farm on their wheezing, ancient tractor, he’d wondered why no one had, for example, consideredbuilding the feed silo next to the barn. But critical thinking was not encouraged, at least not from Will—it was the sort of idea that, if voiced, would, at best, result in his being told to watch his mouth.
He’s grimly pleased to see these are roughly as he saw them last. That they haven’t collapsed is honestly impressive; not a one of them was in solid condition even when Will was a kid. Some of them look like they’re one good storm or heavy snow away from becoming the Ruins Formerly Known as Bill’s “ToRepair” Shed, and Will considers peeking inside a few of them and decides better of it. Some doors are better left unopened.
He winds instead through the third orchard, planted in the ’80s, shortly after Will’s father took over operations. Bill had been ambitious, but not necessarily a genius—his big idea had been, more or less,more apples. It had worked out for him. Farm visitors, who had never managed to pick their way through even the first and second orchards, had not, as Bill had expected, spontaneously generated a new demand to meet the extra supply, but he’d found buyers in the end. The third orchard was closed to guests all through Will’s childhood, promised along with the overflow from the other groves to grocery stores in Columbus and Cleveland, as well as to a few local school districts. It was these sales, more often than not, that had kept the lights on, the water running, and the staff paid when Will was young, as market traffic had been variable at best.
As expected, it’s empty, and as Will approaches the farmhouse from the back, he has to stop and take a breath. Here’s something else that looks the same as he left it—after everything else that’s changed here in Glenriver, Will’s been bracing himself all day to see the old place painted over in a bright magenta, or covered with a complicated mural of bees.
But instead it’s the same. Just the same. The same blue paint, which was maybe a nice robin’s egg once, but has faded and peeled over the years into a dusty, pallid color, like the sky on a half-gray day. The same tattered red, white, and blue hangings draped over the whitewashed wooden railings of the wrap-around porch, which Bill had hung up over a Memorial Day weekend that must’ve been thirty years ago now and never bothered taking down. The same thin, yellowing lace curtains visible through the same dirty windows.
But no, Will realizes, squinting. Thatisdifferent: The windows aren’t dirty at all. Not one of them is streaked with dust, or fingerprints, or long dribbles of dried birdpoop, or a cheeky message along the lines ofWash me!left by a member of staff who didn’t realize Will would end up catching the blame. Someone has cleaned them, and recently. It certainly wasn’t Bill, since he’d avoided the task successfully and actively even when he wasn’t in his eighties and approaching his extremely timely death. Casey might have done it—certainly rumor, vibe, and Noel’s immediate suggestion of getting him suggests he is the one behind most of the improvements—but Will can’t imagine why he would have. He puzzles over it as he climbs the steps up onto the porch, moving unconsciously towards the back door, which his whole family had always used as though it was the front.
The windows might be clean, but the porch furniture is the same, Old Bill’s rocking chair dust-coated and clearly calcified in place after all these years, but obviously left alone, even now. Bill’s rocker, too, is coated in a thin layer of brownish dust, which gives Will a moment’s pause. The man hadn’t died that long ago, not long enough for a layer like that to form, and Will can’t imagine any version of his father not sitting in that accursed chair for at least an hour or two a day, rocking back and forth in a foul mood, chewing bitterly on his preferred tobacco.
He takes a breath; there’s no point thinking about that now. What’s past is past, and Will’s here to do…well, to do whatever it is he wants to do here, exactly. He’s still not sure even now, as he pulls his wallet out of his pocket and, his fingers trembling a little, reaches deep into the recesses of a rarely accessed flap.
He pulls out a small, standard metal key, of the type available in any hardware store. It’s unremarkable to look at, nothing about it that would suggest any real significance, but Will has transferred it from wallet to wallet for nearly twenty years, feeling small and silly about it each time. He’d just wanted… He’d wanted to remember where he came from, maybe. He’d wanted to feel, in whatever stupid, insignificant way, that there was still some thread tying him to the place that had meant so much to him until, abruptly, it had meant so little.
He takes a deep breath, inserts the key in the lock, and turns.
It opens.
The tumblers give easily, in fact, none of the frustrating sticking and jiggling Will remembers from opening this door in his youth. And when he turns the knob and pushes the door open, his heart pounding frenetically in his chest, the hinges don’t whine or squeak at all. It’s the first time in his life he’s managed to step into this vestibule totally silently, not a single creak or groan to announce him, not one voice snapping, “Thereyou are,” or “You’re not supposed to be back yet!” or “Get those filthy shoes off your mother’s rug before I make you regret it.”
He stands for a moment in the stillness, letting his heart rate settle out, his breathing slow. Bill’s dead, and June’s dead, and Old Bill’s dead—they’ve gone, and their opinions and expectations and standards for Will have gone with them, buried under dirt and past and withering away, even now, to nothing. There’s no one in the house but Will, save the ghosts, and those walk with him, anyway, and did even when his parents were alive. There’s nothing left here for him to be scared of, and he might as well, after all these years, give himself the closure of walking these halls as an adult.
Feeling bold and brave and, if he’s honest, a bit like he might throw up, Will sets about exploring. He’s surprised, and then puzzled, and then downright mystified by what he finds.
The living room, first of all. The furniture is the same—the blue chintz sofa June had insisted on keeping under a plastic cover even though it had been out-of-date fifteen years before Will was even alive is still there, as is the brown leather armchair Bill had loved to doze in while whatever Cleveland sports team was playing that night competed and lost. But the ancient box television is gone, replaced by a sleek modern one.If it was that alone, Will could understand; after all, at a certain point even the ugly behemoth of a television he’d grown up with would have been bound to kick the bucket, having been in regular use since roughly 1982.
But there’s agaming systemhooked up to the television. Will stares at it, and the collection of games stacked next to it, with the bewilderment of a man who has just discovered a pile of loose shrimp in his medicine cabinet: What are thesedoinghere? How did theygethere?Why?Will knows that peoplecanchange, although they rarely do, but he simply can’t imagine anything that could have happened to his father that would have caused him to turn, in his old age, to the sweet embrace of digital adventure. Will had, more than once, seen the man brought to apoplectic frustration by the shop’s basic digital credit card machine; he didn’t seem the type to playElden Ring.
The bookshelf in the living room, too, is unsettling. The various nonfiction books about wars, farming, and maritime disasters, Bill’s three primary interests, are still there, but among them—God help him, there arefictionbooks on this shelf. This would be strange enough on its own, since Bill had never held with fiction and encouraged Will not to, either, but some of them are books Will himself counts amongst his favorites. Some of them arequeerbooks.
Will is capable of a lot of things. He can read and understand a complicated genome sequence; he can make a passable French omelette and a pretty solid lasagna; he can assess a pile of graduate student exams in less time than it takes him to finish a cup of coffee. But he can’t, to any degree, picture his father reading even one of these books. The very thought is almost bloodcurdling in its essential wrongness.
He sets the books aside as beyond his rational understanding and prowls through the rest of the first floor. The kitchen, at least, is more or less unchanged, the old microwave still clearly the only element in regular use, the freezer full offrozen dinners and the fridge full of beer and hard cider. The dining room, too, is the same, dust thick over the large, rarely used dinner table. That had been a wedding gift, Will knows, from Old Bill and Jillian, Will’s grandmother. Maybe that’s why Bill had never liked using it, and they’d eaten nearly all their meals at the cramped, wobbling breakfast table in the kitchen. It is, Will realizes now with a bit of a pang, quite a beautiful dining set—black walnut, if Will doesn’t miss his guess, and with intricate carving work along the sideboards and thick table legs, in the detailing of the chairs. Old Bill would have gathered the lumber himself, probably, after a storm took down one of the big, behemoth trees near the farmhouse, which were always dropping those huge, ground-staining fruit pods in the weeks leading up to Will’s birthday. He glances out the nearest window and smirks, satisfied, to see a number of them on the ground even now.
He drums his fingers on the tabletop, thinking about how Old Bill, ever the whittler, must have carved it himself. Even when he’d forgotten essentially everything else near the end, he’d whittled simple figurines and spoons, still scattered on windowsills around the house. There was love in that, wasn’t there, of a sort? And yet Will had never heard the old manexpresslove, not to his father or his grandmother, and certainly not to him. It just…wasn’t the sort of thing the Robertson men got up to.
Looking down at the table, Will wonders if maybe it didn’t all have to gosomewhere. If maybe Old Bill had put it all into his woodworking, all the affection he couldn’t show, all the things he couldn’t bring himself to say. By all accounts, the original Bill had been that way about the farm—even when Will was a kid, generations later a town legend was still making the rounds about the night Old Bill was born. The original Bill had, indeed, famously been up all night, but not at the hospital with his wife: He’d been out in the apple grove, trying to protectsome young saplings from being nibbled to nothing by area wildlife.
Will wonders, knowing it’s too late to ask the answer, where his own father had put it all.
Sighing, he steps away, turns towards the stairs, and finds as he climbs them that his tension is mounting with each one. He’s not sure what he’s expecting to find, or afraid that he’ll find, at the top; it’s hard to know which would feel worse. If he finds his old bedroom changed, turned into an office or a sewing room or whatever, he thinks that might not be…amazing, as an emotional experience. But the thought of it as a mausoleum, preserved forever as though Will died in a tragic prank-gone-wrong like that Gramlich kid did when Will was in middle school—that’s awful, too, in an equally disquieting way.
His was the first door at the top of the stairs growing up, and so it’s the first one he has to face. It’s closed, and Will takes a deep breath before gripping the knob, bracing himself for it to be locked. It turns, though, and on an exhale, Will pushes the door open…
Willpushesthe dooropen…
Will struggles, in vain, to push the door open, getting it about half an inch off the frame before it’s caught against some heavy obstacle. Annoyed, Will huffs, repositions, leans his shoulder against the door, andshoves, really putting his weight into it. Something moves, and the door gives way; Will stumbles at the sudden shift and only barely doesn’t face-plant, jumping to straighten himself even though no one is here to see him.
