Linda sprang up. “We were playing a silly game.”
Marion held a pink apple in her hand. She held it up. “There’s a gorgeous little orchard out there. You can see the moon all big in the sky. Apples everywhere!” She took a crunchy bite, then spit it out onto the floor. “Ugh, that’s rotten.” She blushed, searching the room. “Is there a napkin somewhere? Sorry. It surprised me. It didn’t seem rotten.”
Linda looked down at the chewed remains of Linda’s bite; tiny red seeds had fallen with it, more like a pomegranate than an apple. Linda bent to inspect them. They weren’t like pomegranate seeds at all. She squished one between her fingers. It felt like caviar.
“Why are you digging around in my trash?” Marion said. Sabrina produced a tissue from a fancy gold box on a side table. Marion let it flutter to the floor, where it covered the apple bits. Linda picked it up for her.
“Linda, why don’t we go for a walk?” Tristan said uneasily. He probably thought she was weird for inspecting it, but why did no one else notice how bizarre—how wrong—the fruit was? She’d heard that apples were different in the northwest—wild varieties were unlike the store-bought ones—but she’d yet to see anything as odd as this one.
“I’d love to see this orchard,” Linda said, more curious about the weird fruit. “It sounds lovely.”
“Get your own special place,” Marion muttered.
“I’d love to take you there.” He looped his arm with Linda’s.
Outside the manor doors, Linda dropped the apple guts onto the ground. Tristan watched as they tumbled out of the napkin.
“You ever seen an apple like that?” Linda said as the cameras closed in on her face.
“Nah,” Tristan said. “But once, when I was little, my mom took me to this new grocery store, and you wouldn’t believe the fruit they had! Spiny little things. Things that looked like weird red tongues.”
Leaves crunched underfoot, though Linda realized with a start that they were still nowhere near either the orchard or the woods. “How’d you get here?” she said to the leaves.
“I got here because I’m looking for love,” Tristan said. He moved to hold her hand. It felt nice to hold someone’s hand. “I’m ready to settle down. Have a family.” He stopped at the edge of a paved path. “This is the path that leads to the orchard, by the way. If you squint, you can maybe make it out, where that big archway is.”
They made their way down the pathway made of little stones.
“Speaking of which, if you make it through this week, and I hope you do, who will I meet when I come home with you next week?” When he smiled, the moonlight glinted in his perfect teeth. “What’s your family like?”
Linda tried to shove her hand into her pocket, then realized she didn’t have any pockets in her dress. Damn women’s fashion.
“My cat,” she said. “His name’s Salmon.”
“Salmon, nice,” he said. “I like cats. Who else?”
“My sister won’t be around. She moved away when she turned eighteen and never called, never wrote. I’ve tried to look her up online, but she must be off-the-grid or something.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s awful.” Tristan paused and grabbed both her hands as though to lead her in a sudden dance. “How did that affect your parents?”
“My dad died when I was in middle school,” Linda said. She swallowed hard and felt her chest try to close. “My mother—well, she’s locked up.” She pulled Tristan along the path.
“In prison?”
“An institution.” Linda pinched her lips. They reached the archway, and the moon shone on a circle of what looked, at first, like apple trees. The loop had a break down its center, a pathway through the trees. “She broke after my dad died. There’s no talking to her anymore.” Linda dragged her lip between her teeth. “What I’m saying is, you won’t be meeting any of my family. You’ll be visiting a broken home, with a broken woman. The only one around me who has it all together is Salmon.”
Tristan squeezed her hand again. “I can’t wait to meet Salmon.”
Linda forced herself to smile.
“Let’s walk,” he said, and Tatum leaned over and flipped a switch. The orchard lit up as the ornamental lights that the producers had installed popped to life. Tristan and Linda took two steps forward, and Linda got her first good look at the trees.
The trees in the orchard had similar bark to the trees in the forest, waxen and thick with a rubbery look, but they were different, too. Their leaves were like great big ears, complete with curves and folds. Linda held a leaf between two fingers. It was squishy to the touch. Linda pressed her hand against the tree trunk; it felt like skin stretched over muscle, but harder, more like the rough areas on Sabrina’s hands from where she picked herself raw, half-healed. The trees bore the fruit that Marion had brought inside the house. The fruit was fuzzy on the outside, like a peach. Linda shivered to be in the presence of its wrongness. The previous owners of the manor must have been horticulturists with wild vision.
All she could think to say was, “Wow.”
“Wow indeed,” Tristan said. He beamed out at the courtyard.
“Don’t these trees eek you out?” she said.
“Nature does freaky things.”
“This is man-made,” she said. “Someone bred these.”
“This doesn’t frighten me. It’s when things that aren’t supposed to be alive, come alive—that’s what gets to me.”
“Like a haunted bone?”
“Like a haunted house.”
Linda pulled away from the tree. She wanted nothing more to do with it.
“Thanks for being so understanding about my family,” she said, and she pulled at Tristan’s hand, tugging him closer to her.
“Everyone has their demons,” he said. He bent to her, and their lips met for an instant. Linda felt no spark.
The lights cut off all at once.
Linda jumped, then felt Tristan’s hand closing over her upper arm. He grabbed her too firmly, but she attributed it to fear. Still, it made her even uneasier.
