Rust & Starlight
Chapter 19 : Wren Screams at the Sky
April came to Kansas like a liar.
The month had started warm — unseasonably so, with temperatures in the seventies that coaxed the orchard into premature bloom. The peach trees that Luke had planted in the year before he deployed, the ones Wren had tended alone for three springs, exploded with pink and white blossoms. The apple trees followed, then the plums, then the cherry tree by the well that had never quite thrived but kept trying anyway.
Mason had never seen anything like it.
He stood in the orchard on the first day of April, his breath catching at the beauty of it. Rows and rows of trees, each one a cloud of petals, the ground beneath them carpeted in fallen blooms. The air smelled sweet, almost intoxicating, and the bees had arrived in a buzzing, golden swarm, drunk on nectar.
“Wren,” he called. “You have to see this.”
She walked up behind him, wiping her hands on her apron. She’d been in the kitchen, canning the last of the winter preserves, and flour dusted her cheek like powdered sugar.
“I’ve seen it every spring for fifteen years,” she said. But she was smiling.
“Does it ever get old?”
“Never.” She slipped her hand into his. “Luke used to say that the orchard was his gift to the future. Something that would outlast him.” Her voice caught. “He was right.”
Mason squeezed her hand. “Then we take care of it. For him.”
She nodded, and they stood together in the blooming orchard, the petals falling around them like snow.
The liar came three days later.
Mason woke to cold. Not the usual morning chill, but a deep, penetrating cold that seeped through the walls and settled in his bones. The window in his bedroom was frosted over — frost, in April, when the trees were in full bloom.
He dressed quickly and ran downstairs.
Wren was already at the kitchen window, her face pale. The thermometer outside read twenty-eight degrees. Twenty-eight degrees, when the delicate blossoms needed at least thirty-five to survive.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
Mason looked past her, through the window. The orchard was still beautiful — but the petals that had been soft and pink yesterday were now stiff, translucent, rimed with ice. The bees were gone. The air was silent.
“Wren—”
“We have to save them.” She was already moving, pulling on her boots, her coat, her gloves. “We have to cover them. Sheets, tarps, anything. If we work fast, we can—”
“Mason caught her arm. “It’s twenty-eight degrees. The damage is already done.”
“You don’t know that.” She yanked her arm free, her eyes wild. “I’m not losing the orchard, Mason. I’m not losing the only thing he left me.”
She ran outside.
Mason followed.
The next four hours were a blur of desperation.
Wren worked like a woman possessed, dragging old sheets and tarps from the barn, throwing them over the trees, anchoring them with rocks and bricks and anything else she could find. Mason worked beside her, his hands numb with cold, his breath fogging in the air. They didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.
By noon, they had covered every tree in the orchard.
Wren stood in the middle of it all, her hands bleeding from the cold, her face streaked with tears and dirt. The sheets and tarps flapped in the wind, making the orchard look like a field of ghosts.
“Maybe it worked,” Mason said, though he didn’t believe it.
Wren didn’t answer. She walked to the nearest tree — the cherry tree by the well — and lifted the sheet.
The blossoms were brown.
Not white, not pink. Brown. Dead. Frozen solid, then thawed, then frozen again. They crumbled at her touch, falling to the ground like ash.
Wren stared at her hand, covered in the remains of the blossoms. Then she walked to the next tree. Brown. The next. Brown. The next. Brown.
She walked through the entire orchard, lifting sheet after sheet, finding death beneath every one.
When she reached the last tree — a young peach tree, the one Luke had planted the week before he deployed — she didn’t bother lifting the sheet. She just stood there, staring at it, her shoulders shaking.
“The frost came too early,” Mason said quietly. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have covered them sooner. When I saw the forecast—”
“The forecast said forty degrees. This wasn’t your fault.”
She turned to face him. Her eyes were red, her lips cracked from the cold, her whole face a mask of grief.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. I’m so tired of hearing that. Luke’s death wasn’t my fault. The frost isn’t my fault. Nothing is ever my fault, apparently. But I’m the one standing here in the ruins. I’m the one who has to clean it up. I’m the one who has to live with it.”
She walked past him, out of the orchard, toward the open field beyond.
Mason followed.
The field was empty — just grass and sky and the distant line of cottonwoods. Wren walked to the center of it, stopped, and looked up at the sky.
The sky was pale blue, indifferent, the same color it had been on the day she’d buried Luke. The same color it had been on the day her father had told her the bank was calling in the loan. The same color it had been on a thousand other hard days, offering no comfort, no explanation, no mercy.
Wren screamed.
Not a shout or a cry — a scream. Raw and primal and terrible, the sound of a woman who had been holding everything together for too long. She screamed at the sky, at God, at the frost, at Luke for dying, at herself for surviving, at the whole cruel, indifferent universe that kept taking and taking and taking.
She screamed until her voice broke, until her throat was raw, until she collapsed to her knees in the cold grass, sobbing.
Mason didn’t try to stop her. He didn’t tell her it would be okay. He just walked to her, knelt beside her, and pulled her into his arms.
She fought him at first — pushing, hitting, her fists weak against his chest. But he didn’t let go. He held her, his arms wrapped around her shaking body, his face pressed into her hair.
“I hate this,” she gasped. “I hate everything. I hate the farm and the frost and the stupid, beautiful orchard that’s never going to bloom again. I hate Luke for leaving me. I hate myself for not saving him. I hate you for being here, for making me feel things I don’t want to feel.”
“I know,” Mason said.
“You should leave. You should go back to Nashville and write your songs and forget you ever met me.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re worth staying for.”
She lifted her head, her face swollen and tear-streaked. “I’m a disaster.”
“You’re a woman who just lost something she loved. That’s not a disaster. That’s being human.”
She stared at him. The wind blew across the field, cold and sharp, but she didn’t shiver.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to keep losing things and keep going.”
Mason cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs wiping away her tears.
“You keep going because you have to. Because the sheep still need feeding and the fence still needs mending and the sun is going to come up tomorrow whether you want it to or not.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “And you keep going because you’re not alone anymore. You have me. For as long as you want me.”
“I don’t deserve you.”
“That’s not your decision to make.”
She laughed — a wet, broken sound — and leaned into him. He held her as the afternoon light faded, as the wind died, as the first stars appeared in the cold April sky.
They stayed in the field until dark, and when they finally walked back to the house, hand in hand, the orchard stood silent behind them — a graveyard of blossoms, a promise broken, a grief that would take time to heal.
But they would heal it together.