Hour of the Bees (12 page)
Authors: Lindsay Eagar
One Saturday, as Mom’s on her way home from a shift, Dad realizes he forgot to thaw one of the frozen meals she made for nights like this.
“Aw, shoot,” he says when he pulls the casserole dish of enchiladas from the freezer and it’s a solid brick of pulled pork, tortillas, and red sauce.
My mouth waters. “How long will it take to cook?”
He pokes it with a finger. Hard as a wall. “Hours,” he says. His stomach gurgles. He’s been doing ranch repairs all afternoon. He’s as hungry as I am.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll find us something else.” He opens the cupboards and frowns. There’s only Serge’s strange field-grown, dried-out, unrecognizable vegetables and Mom’s ingredients for made-from-scratch dinners.
“Hmmm,” Dad says, clearly flummoxed by the lack of ramen noodles.
“Sun cakes?” I suggest. Dad can really only cook this one thing. Luckily, they’re delicious.
“Good thinking.” Dad ties Mom’s apron around his middle and turns a burner on the stove to medium.
Sun cakes are really just Mexican pancakes with cinnamon and brown butter, but when I was younger, to get me to eat, Dad told me these round things on my plate covered in syrup had a special ingredient in them: sunshine.
I fell for it every time. They were exactly how I imagined sunlight would taste: soft on my tongue, melting, with a hint of spice and a whole lot of sweet. Plus they were round and golden, like the sun.
It was easy to believe in impossible things as a little kid.
Within fifteen minutes, Dad’s whipped up a stack of pancakes taller than the carton of orange juice and is already working on a second batch.
I serve Lu, cutting his pancakes into bits. I get a plate ready for Serge, cutting his pancakes into even smaller bits. I don’t even bother asking Alta to help. She’s sitting at the table, making a big show of enjoying Dad’s sun cakes, probably laying the groundwork in case he finds out what she was up to all day: fiddling with her phone and avoiding chores.
“Sun cakes?” Serge says when he comes in from the porch. “I haven’t had sun cakes since you were a boy, Raúl.”
Dad shovels an entire pancake into his mouth, but he still purses his lips as he chews. Three weeks here, and Dad still can’t stand it when Serge talks.
“You know about sun cakes?” I say.
Serge puffs his chest out. “Where do you think your dad learned how to make them?” I look at Dad, but he’s pretending to read the back of the syrup bottle.
So Dad’s most famous meal is actually a Serge recipe.
Mom comes through the door with a giant cardboard box in her arms and a stack of envelopes in her hand.
“Mama!” Lu cheers, tossing a confetti of sun-cake crumbs in celebration.
“Oh, man, what a long drive,” she says. “I’m beat.”
“Hungry?” Dad gestures to the tower of sun cakes.
“I had Chinese on the way. Here’s the mail.” Mom hands the bundle of envelopes to Dad, who flips through them, frowns once or twice, then tosses them on the table.
“Something for you, Carol.” She gives me a letter, which I tear open. It’s the registration for junior high. A whole mountain of paperwork, including a map of the school, instructions for accessing the website for checking grades and attendance, a how-to guide for opening my locker, and, most important, my schedule.
Wow, that’s a lot of classes. Teachers. Homework. My future school year spreads across an entire grid. I scan it once, and a sentence jumps out at me.
Your locker partner is: SINGLE
.
Single?
“What does this mean?” I show Alta.
“It means you don’t have to share a locker with anyone,” she says. “Cool.”
“I don’t get a locker partner?” I say.
Alta notices my face. “This means you get it all to yourself,” she says. “You should feel lucky.”
Mom nods. “No one else’s stinky gym socks to deal with.”
I try to feel lucky, but I mostly feel left out. I bet Sofie and Gabby both have locker partners. Now I can’t even gossip with them about that.
“And look what came, girls.” Mom points at the label on the cardboard box.
ForeverTeen
.
School clothes! I temporarily forget my locker-partner woes and tear into the box.
Mom has us buy our school clothes online at the beginning of summer, when stores have sales to make room for new stock. I chose my outfits with a critical eye this year, only picking items that I thought seventh-grade Carol would wear. Finally, I’ll get a glimpse of her.
“Can I try them on?” I ask. “Can I? Can I? Can I?”
“If you’re done with dinner,” Mom says, and I clear my plate as a response.
“I want to see them on you before you take off any tags,” Mom warns, and goes to get changed out of her dirty work scrubs.
Alta dumps the box on the bed and makes two piles: Alta clothes and Carol clothes. I pull out my phone and text my friends.
ME: My school clothes came from ForeverTeen! You guys want to see?
SOFIE: Model them for us!
GABBY: Yessssss please! Send pictures!
Hmm, what to try on first . . . There’s a sleeveless white eyelet blouse, a lavender chiffon cap-sleeved top, a navy-blue matching skirt-and-shirt combo that screams first day of school . . .
Alta’s already slipped into jeans and a black tee, and looks effortlessly, irrevocably chic.
“Put something on,” she says, “and we’ll walk the catwalk together.”
Nice Alta is here.
“Which one?”
Alta selects the sleeveless white blouse and a pair of shorts, and turns her back while I change.
“Well?” I say, smoothing the new clothes with my open palms.
“Cute!” Alta nods her approval, which means it no longer matters what I look like. I’m sold.
“I want to send a picture to my friends,” I say. “Will you take one?”
She takes my phone. “Strike a pose,” she says.
When I get my phone back and flip through the photos, my breath is knocked out of me.
Who is this girl?
There are plenty of mirrors at the ranch, but I must rush past them on my way to help with chores. They’ve never shown me this girl, staring at me in the photo.
My hair, notoriously frizzy but usually tamed by a straightening iron, is a ball of tangled black yarn.
My skin is leathery with tan, a buzzard’s complexion, after only three weeks at the ranch — what will it look like by the end of summer? My eyes, sunken into my face with exhaustion, are dull and black. I have dirt smeared around my mouth, dirt from running after Lu in the pasture today. I’m feral, wild.
The clothes fit okay. But this is not what I pictured seventh-grade Carol looking like.
“Come on, let’s show Mom,” Alta says.
“No,” I say. “You go ahead. I’m going to change.”
“Mom wants to see everything, even the stuff you don’t like.” My sister inspects her rear end in a window’s reflection.
“No,”
I say louder, and heat zooms up my neck and cheeks. “I don’t like this shirt. Or these shorts.”
“They look fine,” Alta says, and I almost laugh. As if Alta would use “fine” as a standard for anything in her life.
“No they don’t,” I argue.
“Well, try on something else, then,” Alta suggests, and so I do. I try on everything I picked out from the
ForeverTeen
website, six weeks ago, when I selected each piece like I was choosing my future.
I hate it all. Every shirt, every bottom, every photo Alta snaps of me.
ME: Nothing fits :(
SOFIE: What??? Oh no!
GABBY: Show us!
But I can’t show them. It’s not as simple as that — Alta was right, the clothes fit fine. I just don’t fit the clothes. I delete the pictures from my phone.
ME: I’ll show you when we exchange them for the right sizes
.
ME: Hey, did you guys find out who your locker partners are?
SOFIE: Gabby and I signed up together, remember? You were going to ask Bree Anderson, but then she moved
.
I vaguely remember a conversation of this nature happening in the last month of sixth grade, but there were lots of papers I had to fill out.
My own locker. It could be okay.
Mom, to her credit, is sympathetic when I come back in the kitchen in my pajamas. “Not a single thing?” She shakes her head as if
ForeverTeen
personally ruined her daughter’s life with their ill-fitting clothes.
“We’ll go on a special shopping trip, just you and I,” she promises.
When?
I want to ask, but she retreats to her bedroom to recover from her shift, and I’m left alone.
Alta’s taken over our bedroom, talking to Marco, so I head to the porch to find quiet.
Instead, I find Serge. He’s in his chair, whittling. The porch light casts an overhead shadow, making a thick black line of his oxygen tube.
“Did you used to tell Dad that sun cakes were made of sun?”
“Sí,”
he says. “Sometimes little boys are too busy to eat. I’d tell him it was made of sun, and he’d finally stop running around long enough to sit down and eat five in a row.”
I smile, but somewhere in me, there’s a sadness. I wish Dad had told me sun cakes were from his childhood. I wish Dad had told me they were from Serge.
Twelve years old and only barely learning about my roots.
“Rosa left,” I say. “In the story, she left. Does Sergio ever leave the lake? Or is he too afraid?”
Serge stares into me. “Would you be afraid to leave, Caro-leeen-a?”
I think. “I’d be scared of the newness of it, I guess. Change can be scary.”
Serge nods. “Some people are afraid of the future. Your father is terrified of the past,” he says, and I can’t argue there. That pale fear that was on Dad’s face when he wrangled the rattlesnake into the pillowcase . . . that’s the same fear that I saw on his face when Serge talked about sun cakes.
Whenever Serge talks at all, actually.
“So does he ever leave the lake?” I ask again.
“I will tell you,
chiquita
. Once upon a time,” Serge says, “there was a tree . . .”
O
nce upon a time, there was a tree. A village gathered in its shade, shade as big as the moon itself
.
At sunset, on a calm night that belonged to no season in particular, a woman with rose-petal lips waited under the tree. She smelled of foreign wind, snow, and pines, of the sand of other deserts. She smoothed the front of her dress: an expensive-looking, exotic silk number, unlike any clothing ever seen in the village. Her hands trembled with excitement
.
Sergio was next to his wife. “Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t tell them.”
But she did tell them. She told the villagers about how she wore the tree’s bark around her wrist during her many years of travel. She told them about the rock slide, how she lay crushed under two tons of crumbled canyon wall, breathing and waiting. When people uncovered her, they had planned to bury what was left of her corpse, but instead she picked herself up like a rag doll that had fallen off a girl’s bed
.
Sergio clenched his teeth as she spoke, whittling a stick to a dagger-sharp point
.
“Do you understand what this means?” she cried. She held her bracelet up for them to see, to make it real for them. “We don’t have to stay here at the lake. We can go anywhere!”
“Why would we want to leave?” Father Alejandro said. “We have everything we need here.”
Sergio nodded. His thoughts exactly
.
Rosa laughed, a swan’s cluck. She reached into her luggage, still packed from her journey. “Because of this,” she said, and held up a leering cougar totem carved into white wood. “From the ruins of Cuzco, in Peru. And this.” She held up a hexagonal jewelry box embroidered with golden dragons. “From the Far East. And this, and this. And these.” She tipped the trunk over, and the villagers’ curiosity couldn’t be contained. They lunged forward. They touched the clunking wooden shoes from the land of the windmills, touched the lump of gritty peat from a cranberry bog on the Emerald Isle, touched jars of seashells from three different oceans
.
Carolina held a strand of raw, unpolished freshwater pearls and sighed. Rosa came around behind her and fastened the pearls around her sister’s neck
.
“Keep them,” Rosa said
.
“Or I’ll get my own,” Carolina said, smiling up at her
.
“Exactly!” Rosa cried. It was happening, really happening. She had worried about resistance, resistance to adventure, to change. Resistance to new
.
But the more they touched the things, the more it seemed something had brushed onto their skin, something contagious, something foreign. Something other. Their desire to stay safely near the tree melted away, replaced by a new desire: to go. Their faces lit up, and they whispered monosyllabic explanations of joy: “Ahhh.” “Ohhh.” “Yes.”
Only one face grew harder and darker. Sergio refused to look at a single souvenir; his eyes stayed on Rosa while she flitted among the crowd like a hummingbird, darting into every conversation
. She’s doing exactly what Rosa always does, riling everyone up, stoking their flames,
he thought. He wished she would sit down and be silent
.
“The tree is a gift!” Father Alejandro said. Everyone quieted, and Sergio prepared to call out his agreement. At last, a voice of reason among the madness
.
“And Rosa has shown us that the gift has no limits,” the Father continued. “Let us take the gift to the four corners of the earth and witness the many wonders of His creation.”
“But . . .” Heads turned to Sergio, fumbling his whittling knife awkwardly in his hands. “Father, you always said there is nothing else in the world that compares with the tree.”
Father Alejandro stroked his chin, his weathered face crinkling. “When we first came to the oasis, my men and I, after years of fruitless searches for gold, we knew it would be an insult to God to leave this tree, and so we stayed. This is what I have taught — that we must be grateful and always stay here to delight in God’s gift. But the Lord has spoken.” He pointed at Rosa. “He has spoken through this daughter of God! To have her leave and return in safety is God’s way of telling us to go forth and see all of His creation!”
The villagers erupted in passionate, overlapping conversations. The Father’s eyes turned hazy and dreamy. “To sail again,” he said softly. “To once again feel the cold sea breeze . . .”
Sergio’s heart plummeted into his stomach. “It isn’t right,” he said. “To harm the tree. To strip its bark.”
“But Sergio,” Rosa said, “you’re the one who cut the bracelet in the first place.”
The villagers all looked at him, unable to believe it
.
Sergio let out a long breath
. Was I the one who started all this madness?
“You’re right,” he said, and the villagers twittered among themselves like hens. “But I never meant for all
this
to happen.”
“Our tree survived when you took the bark for me,” Rosa said. “Why shouldn’t every villager partake of the gift?”
“We could take turns,” Sergio said. “One bracelet is enough, isn’t it?”
“But we have this whole tree,” Rosa countered. “There’s more than enough for everyone to have their own.”
“God wants us to leave the lake,” Father Alejandro said. “We must carry this gift across the whole of earth’s paradise, for to know God’s creation is to know God.”
Rosa grinned. The approval of the Father meant the approval of the village
.
“Let’s take a vote,” Sergio said, desperate. “Each of us must decide. Do we stay and bask in the full protection of the tree? Never bleed? Never choke, never hurt, never die?”
“Or do we leave, and live?” Rosa said. “See new things, breathe new air?” Bees flew around her head, gleaming in the last gasps of sunset light
.
The people cheered. Sergio threw a stone in the lake
.
Every villager, the old and the older, cast their votes
.
It was almost unanimous. Nearly everyone voted to cut into the tree, take slivers of its wood, and see the world
.
Only one person voted to leave the tree alone
.
There were odd dreams that night. Dreams of cold square houses with black windows. Giants in multicolored clothing with blank faces. Animals that could only exist in the mind: fishes with coyote heads, rabbits with eagle wings. The strangest dreams that night were the ones full of nothing — blank spaces that would be filled in with all the things they would see when they left the lake
.
Once upon a time, there was a tree, living on the shores of a green-glass lake, breathing in hot desert air. Its black branches grew green leaves and snowy flowers, and bees lived in the blossoms. The tree was a gift, protecting the people in the village from injury, aging, disease. Death
.
Once upon a time, there was a tree, and they were only supposed to use its bark. But they cut it down
.
