The Secret Life of Bees

  Where had I been that I didn’t know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.

  “It doesn’t sound like me and my mother were anything alike,” I said.

  “Oh, but you were. She had a streak in her like you do. Suddenly she would up and do something other girls wouldn’t dream of.”

  “Like what?”

  August stared over my shoulder and smiled. “One time she ran away from home. I can’t even remember what she was upset about. We looked for her long past dark. Found her curled up in a drainage ditch, sound asleep.”

  The dog had started barking again, and August grew quiet. We listened like it was some kind of serenade, while I sat with my eyes closed, trying to picture my mother asleep in a ditch.

  After a while I said, “How long did you work for—my grandmother?”

  “A good long time. Over nine years. Until I got that teaching job I told you about. We still kept up after I left, though.”

  “I bet they hated it when you moved down here to South Carolina.”

  “Poor Deborah cried and cried. She was nineteen by then, but she cried like she was six.”

  The swing had slowed to a stop, and neither one of us thought to rev it back up.

  “How did my mother get down here?”

  “I’d been here two years,” August said. “Had started my honey business and June was teaching school, when I got a long-distance phone call from her. She was crying her eyes out, saying her mother had died. ‘I don’t have anybody left but you,’ she kept saying.”

  “What about her father? Where was he?”

  “Oh, Mr. Fontanel died when she was a baby. I never even met him.”

  “So she moved down here to be with you?”

  “Deborah had a friend from high school who’d just moved to Sylvan. She was the one who convinced Deborah it was a good place to be. Told her there were jobs and men back from the war. So Deborah moved. I think it was a lot because of me, though. I think she wanted me nearby.”

  The dots were all starting to connect. “My mother came to Sylvan,” I said, “met T. Ray, and got married.”

  “That’s right,” August said.

  When we’d first come out onto the porch, the sky had been clotted with stars, the Milky Way shining like an actual road you could walk down and find your mother standing at the end of with her hands on her hips. But now a damp fog rolled into the yard and settled over the porch. A minute later a light rain fell out of it.

  I said, “The part I will never figure out is why she married him.”

  “I don’t think your father was always like he is now. Deborah told me about him. She loved the fact he was decorated in the war. He was so brave, she thought. Said he treated her like a princess.”

  I could have laughed in her face. “This isn’t the same Terrence Ray, I can tell you that right now.”

  “You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different. I don’t doubt he started off loving your mother. In fact, I think he worshiped her. And your mother soaked it up. Like a lot of young women, she could get carried away with romance. But after six months or so it started wearing off. One of her letters talked about Terrence Ray having dirt under his fingernails, I remember that. Next thing I knew she was writing me how she didn’t know if she could live way out on a farm, that kind of thing. When he proposed, she said no.”

  “But she married him,” I said, genuinely confused.

  “Later on she changed her mind and said yes.”

  “Why?” I said. “If the love had worn off, why did she marry him?”

  August cupped her hand on the back of my head and smoothed my hair with her fingers. “I’ve thought hard about whether I should tell you, but maybe it’ll help you understand everything that happened a lot better. Honey, Deborah was pregnant, that’s why.”

  The instant before she said it, I knew what was coming, but still her words fell like a hammer.

  “She was pregnant with me?” My voice sounded tired saying the words. My mother’s life was too heavy for me.

  “That’s right, pregnant with you. She and Terrence Ray got married around Christmastime. She called long distance to tell me.”

  Unwanted, I thought. I was an unwanted baby.

  Not only that, my mother had gotten stuck with T. Ray because of me. I was glad it was dark, so August couldn’t see my face, how bent in it was. You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

  I listened to the hiss of rain. The spray floated over and misted my cheeks while I counted on my fingers. “I was born seven months after they got married.”

  “She called me right after you were born. She said you were so pretty it hurt her eyes to look at you.”

  Something about this caused my own eyes to sting like sand had flown into them. Maybe my mother had cooed over me after all. Made embarrassing baby talk. Twirled my newborn hair like the top of an ice cream cone. Done it up with pink bows. Just because she didn’t plan on having me didn’t mean she hadn’t loved me.

  August went on talking while I leaned back into the familiar story I’d always told myself, the one about my mother loving me beyond reason. I’d lived inside it the way a goldfish lives in its bowl, as if that was the only world there was. Leaving it would be the death of me.

  I sat there with my shoulders slumped, staring at the floor. I would not think the word “unwanted.”

  “Are you all right?” August said. “You want to go to bed now and sleep on all this, talk about the rest in the morning?”

  “No” burst out of my lips. I took a breath. “I’m fine, really,” I said, trying to sound unruffled. “I just need some more water.”

  She took my empty glass and went to the kitchen, looking back twice at me. When she returned with the water, she had a red umbrella hooked over her wrist. “In a little while I’ll walk you over to the honey house,” she said.

  As I drank, the glass shook in my hand and the water would hardly go down. The sound of swallowing in my throat grew so loud it blotted out the rain for several seconds.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to bed now?” August asked.

  “I’m sure. I need to know—”

  “You need to know what, Lily?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  August settled herself beside me on the swing, resigned. “All right then,” she said. “All right.”

  “I know she only married him because of me, but do you think she was just a little bit happy?” I asked.

  “I think for a while she was. She tried, I know that. I got a dozen or so letters and at least that many phone calls from her, spread out over the first couple of years, and I could see she was making an effort. Mostly she wrote about you, how you were sitting up, taking your first steps, playing patty-cake. But then her letters came less and less often, and when they did come, I could tell she was unhappy. One day she called me up. It was the end of August or first of September—I remember because we’d had Mary Day not long before that.

  “She said she was leaving T. Ray, that she had to leave home. She wanted to know if she could stay with us here for a few months till she figured out where to go. Of course, I said, that would be fine. When I picked her up at the bus station, she didn’t even look like herself. She had gotten so thin and had these dark circles under her eyes.”

  My stomach did a slow roll. I knew we’d come to the place in the story I feared the most. I began to breathe very fast. “I was with her when you picked her up at the bus station. She brought me along, didn’t she?”

  August leaned over and whispered against my hair. “No, honey, she came by herself.”

  I realized I’d bitten the skin inside my cheek. The taste of blood made me want to
spit, but I swallowed it instead. “Why?” I said. “Why didn’t she bring me?”

  “All I know, Lily, is that she was depressed, kind of falling apart. The day she left home, nothing unusual happened. She just woke up and decided she couldn’t be there anymore. She called a lady from the next farm to baby-sit, and she drove Terrence Ray’s truck to the bus station. Up until she got here, I thought she’d be bringing you with her.”

  The swing groaned while we sat there smelling warm rain, wet wood, rotted grass. My mother had left me.

  “I hate her,” I said. I meant to shout it, but it came out unnaturally calm, low and raspy like the sound of cars crunching slowly over gravel.

  “Now, hold on, Lily.”

  “I do, I hate her. She wasn’t anything like I thought she was.”

  I’d spent my life imagining all the ways she’d loved me, what a perfect specimen of a mother she was. And all of it was lies. I had completely made her up.

  “It was easy for her to leave me, because she never wanted me in the first place,” I said.

  August reached for me, but I got to my feet and pushed open the screen door leading to the porch steps. I let it slam behind me, then sat on the rain-sopped steps, hunched up under the eave.

  I heard August move across the porch, felt the air thicken as she stood behind me on the other side of the screen. “I’m not going to make excuses for her, Lily,” she said. “Your mother did what she did.”

  “Some mother,” I said. I felt hard inside. Hard and angry.

  “Will you listen to me for a minute? When your mother got here to Tiburon, she was practically skin and bone. May couldn’t get her to eat a thing. All she did was cry for a week. Later on we called it a nervous breakdown, but while it was happening we didn’t know what to call it. I took her to the doctor here, and he gave her some cod liver oil and asked where her white family was. He said maybe she needed to spend some time on Bull Street. So I didn’t take her back to him again.”

  “Bull Street. The mental institution?” The story was getting worse by the minute. “But that’s for crazy people,” I said.

  “I guess he didn’t know what else to do for her, but she wasn’t crazy. She was depressed, but not crazy.”

  “You should’ve let him put her in there. I wish she’d rotted in there.”

  “Lily!”

  I’d shocked her, and I was glad.

  My mother had been looking for love, and instead she’d found T. Ray and the farm, and then me, and I had not been enough for her. She’d left me with T. Ray Owens.

  The sky was split by a zigzagged path of lightning, but even then I didn’t move. My hair blew like smoke in every direction. I felt my eyes harden, grow flat and narrow as pennies. I stared at a dollop of bird shit on the bottom step, the way the rain was smearing it into the crevices of the wood.

  “Are you listening now?” August said. Her voice sifted through the screen, little barbed-wire tips on every word. “Are you?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Depressed people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

  “Like what?” I said. “Abandon their children?” I couldn’t stop. The rain spattered my sandals, dripped between my toes.

  Letting out a loud breath, August walked back to the swing and sat down. It seemed like maybe I’d hurt her, disappointed her, and something about that punched a hole in me. Some of my pridefulness drained out.

  I eased off the steps and went back inside, onto the screened porch. As I sat down beside her on the swing, she laid her hand on mine, and the heat flowed out from her palm into my skin. I shuddered.

  “Come here,” she said, pulling me over to her. It was like being swept under a bird’s wing, and that’s how we stayed for a while, rocking back and forth with me tucked under there.

  “What made her so depressed like that?” I said.

  “I don’t know the whole answer, but part of it was her being out on the farm, isolated from things, married to a man she really didn’t want to be married to.”

  The rain picked up, coming down in large, silver-black sheets. I tried, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of my heart. One minute I hated my mother, the next I felt sorry for her.

  “Okay, she was having a nervous breakdown, but how could she leave me behind like that?” I said.

  “After she’d been here three months and was feeling a little better, she started talking about how much she missed you. Finally she went back to Sylvan to get you.”

  I sat up and looked at August, hearing the quick suck of air through my lips. “She came back to get me?”

  “She planned to bring you here to Tiburon to live. She even talked to Clayton about filing divorce papers. The last time I saw her, she was on a bus waving at me through the window.”

  I leaned my head on August’s shoulder and knew exactly what had happened next. I closed my eyes, and there it was. The long-gone day that would never leave—the suitcase on the floor, how she’d tossed clothes into it without folding them. Hurry, she’d kept saying.

  T. Ray had told me she came back for her things. But she’d come back for me, too. She’d wanted to bring me here, to Tiburon, to August’s.

  If only we’d made it. I remembered the sound of T. Ray’s boots on the stairs. I wanted to pound my fists against something, to scream at my mother for getting caught, for not packing faster, for not coming sooner.

  At last I looked up at August. When I spoke, my mouth tasted bitter. “I remember it. I remember her coming back for me.”

  “I wondered about that,” she said.

  “T. Ray found her packing. They were yelling and fighting. She—” I stopped, hearing their voices in my head.

  “Go on,” August said.

  I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. “She grabbed a gun from inside the closet, but he took it away from her. It happened so fast it gets mixed up in my brain. I saw the gun on the floor, and I picked it up. I don’t know why I did that. I—I wanted to help. To give it back to her. Why did I do that? Why did I pick it up?”

  August slid out to the edge of the swing and turned to face me. Her eyes were determined-looking. “Do you remember what happened next, after you picked it up?”

  I shook my head. “Only the noise. The explosion. So loud.”

  The chains on the swing twitched. I looked over and saw August frowning.

  “How did you find out about—my mother dying?” I said.

  “When Deborah didn’t come back like she said…well, I had to know what happened, so I called your house. A woman answered, said she was a neighbor.”

  “A neighbor of ours told you?” I asked.

  “She said Deborah had been killed in an accident with a gun. That’s all she would say.”

  I turned and looked out at the night, at dripping tree limbs, at shadows moving on the half-lit porch. “You didn’t know that I was the one who—who did it?”

  “No, I never imagined such a thing,” she said. “I’m not sure I can imagine it now.” She laced her fingers together, then laid them in her lap. “I tried to find out more. I called back again, and Terrence Ray answered, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He kept wanting to know who I was. I even called the police station in Sylvan, but they wouldn’t give out any information either, just said it was an accidental death. So I’ve had to live with not knowing. All these years.”

  We sat in the stillness. The rain had nearly stopped, leaving us with all this quiet and a sky with no moon.

  “Come on,” August said. “Let’s get you in bed.”

  We walked into the night, into the blurring song of katydids, the thud-splat of raindrops on the umbrella, all those terrible rhythms that take up inside when you let your guard down. Left you, they drummed. Left you. Left you.

  Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because o
nce you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

  In the honey house, August waited till I crawled under the sheets, then bent over and kissed my forehead.

  “Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We’re all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.”

  “Good night,” I said, and rolled onto my side.

  “There is nothing perfect,” August said from the doorway. “There is only life.”

  A worker [bee] is just over a centimeter long and weighs only about sixty milligrams; nevertheless, she can fly with a load heavier than herself.

  —The Honey Bee

  Chapter Thirteen

  Heat collected in the creases of my elbows, in the soft places behind my knees. Lying on top of the sheets, I touched my eyelids. I’d cried so much they were puffed out and half shut. If it hadn’t been for my eyelids, I might not have believed any of the things that had passed between me and August.

  I hadn’t moved since August left, only lay there staring at the flat surface of the wall, at the array of night bugs that wander out and crawl around for fun after they think you’re asleep. When I grew tired of watching them, I placed my arm across my eyes and told myself, Sleep, Lily. Please, just go to sleep. But of course, I couldn’t.

  I sat up, feeling like my body weighed two hundred pounds. Like somebody had backed the cement truck up to the honey house, swung the pipe over to my chest, and started pouring. I hated feeling like a concrete block in the middle of the night.

  More than once, while staring at the wall, I’d thought of Our Lady. I wanted to talk to her, to say, Where do I go from here? But when I’d seen her earlier, when August and I had first come in, she didn’t look like she could be of service to anybody, bound up with all that chain around her. You want the one you’re praying to at least to look capable.