Bee Season (30 page)

She is about to turn off the water, but if she does she fears he will stay. She soaps up again even though the water is turning cold.

When they practice that day, the first after her covert book-borrowing, Eliza’s eye keeps straying to a particular volume on her father’s bookshelf. She imagines having accidentally replaced
Light of the Intellect
upside down or spine first, keeps looking anxiously at Saul for a sign that he has detected her ruse. Yet her continuing desire for the book is as omnipresent as her fear. Every moment in the study is a struggle not to make for the book, father or no father, and return to work, to attempt one more step toward Abulafia’s terrifying, miraculous promise.

Because Eliza has given the discovery of her parents’ secret a lot of thought since breakfast. She can picture only two potential causes. Either her mother has banished Saul from the bedroom for his spelling preoccupation or he has decided to live out of his study in devotion to their work. Both implicate Eliza as chief instigator. Both leave her determined not to let her father down.

Miriam had expected her bumps and bruises to defer her next venture. Instead, they are a constant provocation. Too many missing pieces are relying on her to make the world whole. She must prove she won’t be so easily deterred.

Miriam walks downstairs. She is going to the store for typewriter paper and ink ribbon, no need for alarm, nothing out of the ordinary, but faced with the closed study door, her pretensions are unnecessary. She is unsure of her destination, knows only that she won’t be returning to the site of her recent defeat. Anything waiting inside that house is dead to her now, its call silenced. It won’t happen again.

Miriam rejects the highway in favor of a back road generally invisible to anyone not looking for it, a one-lane strip of eroding asphalt bounded by trees, interrupted by an occasional house. Though some of the houses are well maintained, even those betray a level of poverty Miriam has neither witnessed nor considered. Broken windows are patched with wood or cardboard. Roofs are topped with plastic tarps. Undrivable cars decay on rough gravel driveways. In the fading light of the afternoon Miriam sees a child playing in the dirt with a plastic spoon.

The house that selects her lacks neighbors, is the last before the road dissolves into a sparse trail of sun-bleached litter. Her view is impeded by long-neglected grass and shrubbery. Even as Miriam imagines a similarly unkempt man waiting in the shadows of his living room with a hunting rifle, she knows she must go inside. Fear stiffens her limbs and makes movement difficult. She feels a tightness in her stomach and the burn of sour bile in her throat. In the quiet of the late afternoon she can hear the distant rumble of the highway and, closer, the calls of small birds. Then, after a lifetime of struggle, the demands of Perfectimundo take charge. Miriam feels her arms and legs loosen, her stomach unclench as she hands off responsibility to the thing grown larger than herself, relieved to finally relinquish control.

Miriam can make out nothing of the house’s interior through the few windows not boarded shut. From the porch even the highway is mute, the air cobwebbed with silence. Miriam wonders how long the house has been abandoned, wonders what could possibly be left inside to draw her to it.

The front door, half off its hinges, detaches completely when Miriam pushes it aside. It hits the half-rotten floor with a thunk that causes her to suck in her breath as if slapped unexpectedly. The front room is littered with fast food cartons, broken bottles, and old newspaper. A scorched chair is interred upon a charred portion of flooring studded with soot-blackened cans. The air reeks of mold and dust and the rankness of a still pond.

The back room is darker and mustier. A tree grows through its broken window. A hardware store calendar is pinned to the wall, October 1974 too sun-faded to betray its original color. A warped wooden bureau leans into a corner, its one open drawer choked with Chesterfield coupons. Miriam pulls at the others, but they won’t budge, the wood bloated with time and neglect. What at first looks like an abandoned stuffed animal is actually a desiccated dog, white bones peeking through strips of lifeless fur. Miriam feels her stomach lurch and her bowels constrict, but doesn’t retch. With a perverse sense of pride, she realizes how far she has come.

In a small side room she initially overlooked, Miriam finds a wooden chest bordered by shoe boxes of rotting photographs. She is about to heft open the chest when she spots a photo on the floor. It is a yellowed and water-distorted Polaroid of a small, dark-haired girl with serious eyes that have already learned not to expect too much. She is standing in what might have been the same room an unknowable number of years before. Miriam is momentarily transfixed by a deep sense of recognition. Even after the image resolves into its proper arrangement of unfamiliar features, Miriam’s sense of connection to the photo remains. She reverently peels the photograph from the floor, careful only to handle its edges, and carries it back to the car.

As soon as she places the photo on the seat beside her, something inside Miriam shifts. The sights and smells, muted in the house’s presence, hit her full force. Miriam barely reopens her door before they are spilling out her mouth — the mold, the rotten wood, the dog corpse. She hasn’t quite finished when the need to be as far away as quickly as possible causes her to start the engine. She pulls away before properly reshutting her door. Her departure barely scrapes the silence of the place she leaves behind.

Aaron’s return home feels like awakening from a sleep of Rip Van Winkle proportions. Everything is familiar but removed. His own memories seem like secondhand stories. Even his image, reflected in the front windows, stares strangely back, the boy in
karmi
clothes at best a distant relation. Aaron’s legs, having known the freedom of robes, balk at the seams of his blue jeans, yearning to dance.

At the door, Saul wraps Aaron in a hug that catches him by surprise.

“Welcome back, camper. How was your trek in the wilderness?” Saul’s voice seems too large, his smile too broad. Aaron sees Eliza hovering in the hallway behind their father, her face strained.

“Is everything okay?” Aaron asks, realizing as Saul answers that it is a question for his sister.

“Everything is fine, just fine. We’re happy you’re back, that’s all. I’m cooking a special dinner, a family dinner for the four of us. Your mother is really looking forward to it.” At which point Aaron knows that something is amiss. He looks at Eliza again.

“Where
is
Mom?” Aaron asks.

“Oh, she’s out,” Saul replies. “But she knows all about dinner and has promised to be on time.”

Something in the kitchen buzzes and Saul grins, returning to the kitchen.

Aaron and Eliza stare at each other for a few moments before Eliza asks, “Do you want to go outside?” and Aaron knows exactly where they are going.

The tree still lies at the same angle on the same stretch of ground, having been felled by a lightning bolt prior to either Aaron’s or Eliza’s memory. Since they last visited it together almost six years before, one end has grown soft with decay. Even taking the decay into account, the log seems smaller, the reality of it suffering the usual comparisons with memory and the fact that both Eliza and Aaron have grown significantly since their last visit.

The mix of earth, dogwood, and crabapple activates an image previously unaccessed from Eliza’s mnemonic cold storage. It is a visceral freeze-frame, a snapshot of multisensual memory powerful enough to temporarily reconfigure her surroundings. She is unsure of her age, but she is young enough that her feet, when straddling the log, do not touch ground. Her field of vision is taken up by Aaron’s shirt, which is striped blue and orange. Her hands clasp her brother’s waist. In addition to the evocative mix of earth, dogwood, and crabapple that fills her nose, she can smell her brother’s skin, a combination of sun, grass, and sweat. For a brief moment, within the grip of this memory, Eliza can actually feel the original surge of excitement that coursed through her then, a sense of exhilaration spurred entirely by the imaginary trip they are taking. Even more fleeting, but equally identifiable, is the sense of security underlying the thrill of the journey. At that moment in time, Eliza’s hands are clasped around the most solid thing she knows.

At first brother and sister circle the tree as if it is a museum piece, both afraid to break through the glass. With a shrug, Aaron then breaches the circle traced by their footsteps. Eliza quickly follows. Rather than straddle the tree they sit beside one another facing the house, just far enough away that their hips and legs don’t touch.

They can see Saul at the stove through the kitchen window. He is cooking more frenetically than usual, seems to be continually looking to add something to the pot.

“How long has he been in there?” Aaron asks.

“Awhile,” Eliza says. “Ever since we came out to the kitchen for a snack and he realized Mom had gone out. She’s been gone all day.” She picks at the tree, focuses on a scale of bark she manages to peel away with her fingers. “I don’t think she and Dad are sleeping in the same bed anymore.”

A motorcycle revs its engine a few blocks away. Above them from a tree in the yard, a bird chirrs the same repeating pattern. Three chirps, then stop. Three chirps, then stop. Aaron grabs a twig from the ground and traces a circle in the dirt.

“Elly, if I tell you something will you promise to keep it to yourself?”

The question is out before Aaron realizes he is asking it, but it is accompanied by intense relief, a loosening of internal strictures in place so long Aaron had taken their discomfort for granted.

Eliza nods, afraid that if she speaks he’ll change his mind.

“I didn’t really go camping.”

When Aaron blushes, he is not sure if it is from the shame of revealing his lie or for having betrayed his secret.

Eliza deliberately looks away until she thinks her brother’s blush has faded. “I kind of wondered about that,” she says quietly. Then she adds, “Where did you really go?”

Aaron focuses his eyes on the back of their father’s neck through the window. He wonders if Saul will turn if he stares hard enough. “I went to a certain place,” he says. Saul continues to face the stove, oblivious to Aaron’s gaze.

“What kind of place?” Elly asks, braver now.

“A religious place. For people who want to get closer to God.”

He looks over at Eliza then, to gauge her reaction, but Eliza’s face is completely open, bears the same trusting expression it used to wear when he would pilot them through space and time.

“What do you do there?”

“Lots of stuff. You pray. You take classes. There’s a special chant. You can’t gamble. You can’t eat meat. You can’t — you know — touch yourself.” He blushes again, but this time recovers quickly. “There’s dancing and music. There’s even kids your age.”

“Is it better than Beth Amicha?”

Aaron nods. “Way better than Beth Amicha. You won’t tell, right?”

Eliza shakes her head solemnly. “I won’t. Not even Dad,” she says. She has learned for herself that there are things Saul shouldn’t be told.

When Miriam finally arrives home, Aaron’s first thought is that his mother has been replaced by a disheveled twin. Aaron has never known his mother to look anything but freshly washed, pressed, and ironed. The woman who sits down to dinner has a stained shirt, a smudged face, and tangled hair. More disturbing is the odor. Miriam’s nose is acutely sensitive to twice-worn shirts and unwashed hair, too fine-tuned for anything but unscented soaps. Yet she smells like she’s been sorting through week-old garbage.

“Miriam?” Saul asks in a cautious voice. “Honey, are you all right?”

Miriam smiles and pulls her chair closer to the table. “I’m sorry I’m a little late. I hope I didn’t worry you.”

Dinner is, by now, a foregone conclusion, but Miriam eats oblivious to the cold food and startled faces.

“Miriam, did something happen? Was there an accident?”

Miriam looks at Saul as if he is an endearing but somewhat slow child. “I’m
fine.
Did something happen to you? You seem … strange.”

“Miriam, come to the mirror.” Saul reaches for her hands. She pulls them away until she remembers that Eliza and Aaron are watching.

Saul guides his wife to the mirror in the bathroom and turns on the light. For a moment there is complete silence. No one breathes. Miriam stares at the stranger looking back. It never even occurred to her to check her appearance after leaving the house.

“Oh, my God.”

The voice is not quite Miriam’s. It is a scared animal version of her voice. The sound of it is too much for Eliza, who begins to cry quietly, beyond Saul’s hearing, but loud enough to spur Aaron to put his arm around her shoulders.

“Miriam, honey, come upstairs,” but Miriam is already out the bathroom door. Saul races after her, knowing if she beats him to the bedroom he will not be allowed inside.

“Aaron,” Eliza says very quietly, “what’s happening?”

Aaron pats Eliza’s shoulder and stares after the receding footsteps, the sound that was almost his mother’s voice replaying in his head.

When Saul doesn’t return to the kitchen, Eliza and Aaron start to clean. They fall wordlessly into a rhythm, their regained sibling unity expressed in the perfect timing of relayed dishes, in mutual anticipation of towel or sponge. At the slightest sound from the hall, real or imagined, both freeze and look toward the doorway, anticipating their father and parental reassurance. There is a moment of disappointment each time neither of these manifests, after which their cleaning resumes.

They take their time. Eliza inches the sponge over the kitchen table, rubbing at spots that aren’t there. Aaron ignores the dishwasher and scrubs each plate by hand. The two dry together, making sure the very idea of moisture has been removed from a dish before carefully replacing it in their mother’s immaculately ordered cabinets. By the time dinner is cleaned up and put away, Saul still hasn’t appeared.

Aaron opens the cabinet beneath the sink for the cleansers as Eliza reaches for rubber gloves. Miriam always keeps a second pair as a backup. Eliza starts on surfaces while Aaron works sink and stove. They know from years of observation which cleanser is used where and with what implement. They relax into the sound of scrubbing and the smell of ammonia unsuccessfully masked by lemon. Lulled by such familiarity, they stop looking toward the hallway, giving themselves over to the shine of Formica and the glimmer of stainless steel.