Mad Honey: A Novel (13 page)

Asher and I do not talk about my life with Braden. We have never specifically discussed the reason I left. Once, I asked him what he remembered about his father—trying to figure out what he had absorbed from his vantage point in a high chair: the window shattering after a book was hurled; the deadly quiet of disappointment; the sound of a slap. If Asher did recall any of that, he lied and said he didn’t. Either way, really, it was a blessing.

But this. This admission, that he had tried to broker a relationship between Lily and her estranged father…was it because he didn’t
have one with his own? Was it some twisted transitive property of loss—that Asher felt this part of his life was missing, so he tried to fill the empty space for Lily?

“What do you mean she was angry?” Jordan asks.

“She stopped talking to me. For five days. Maya told me she was sick; I didn’t even know.”

Jordan’s eyes dart toward the door of the conference room, where the correctional officer is again peering through, and I quickly remove my hand from where it rests on Asher’s for emotional support. “So you went to Lily’s at what time?”

“Around three-thirty? Three forty-five? It was after school.”

“Did she answer the door?”

Asher raises his brows. “Is that supposed to be a trick question? Obviously she didn’t. The door was open a little bit, so I went inside and called her name. I turned the corner and she was…” His eyes fill with tears, and he swipes a hand across them. “She wasn’t moving.”

“What did you do?” Jordan asks.

“I think I shook her,” Asher says, his voice a hush. “I tried to wake her up. I carried her to the couch, and that’s when I saw the blood under her head.” He’s given up wiping away his tears; they stream down his cheeks, meeting at the point of his chin. “I loved her. I loved her, and now she’s gone, and everyone thinks it’s my fault and they’re not even bothering to figure out what the fuck happened to her—”

Jordan puts his hand on Asher’s forearm. “Calm down, Asher,” he says. “I’m going to make sure the jury understands all of that.”

Asher nods. He turns his face toward his shoulder and wipes it on the orange jumpsuit, leaving a wet streak. “I get to tell them, right?”

“Tell who?”

“The jury.”

Jordan closes his notebook. “We’re going to have a lot of time to talk about strategy while I’m building your case.” He slips his pen into his pocket. “Now. Do you have any questions for
me
?”

Asher sniffs once more and lifts his face, swollen and battered, to Jordan’s. “Yeah. When do I get to go home?”

Smoothly, Jordan replies before I have to confess my own shortcomings. “Your mom’s figuring that out,” he says, and Asher fades a little bit, like a photograph left out in the sun. “But you
will
be safe in here. I swear to you.”

Jordan stands up, and so do Asher and I. This time, Asher reaches for me. I barely touch his shoulder, and he does not smell the way he usually does. The soap is sharper, the shampoo foreign. His face is buried in my hair. “Mom,” he chokes out. “Don’t go.”

When Asher went to nursery school, he cried and clung to me at the door. His teachers promised me this was not extraordinary, and that the worst thing I could do was stay. What they did not know was that I felt just as vulnerable as Asher did. He was, in a way, my lucky charm; although it wasn’t foolproof, Braden was less likely to fly off the handle when our son was in the room. But Asher would be at nursery school four mornings a week. My shield was missing.

Now,
he
is the one holding
me
. I pull Asher closer, and repeat what I said fourteen years ago.
Let’s both be brave,
I whisper.

THE VERY LAST
time it happened was a Sunday. Asher was six, playing in his room with a Brio train set we had scored at a garage sale. Braden sat on the couch, trying to find the Michigan football game on cable. “Why the hell would ESPN show East Carolina over that?”

He had just finished a long shift and was drinking a Sam Adams, the neck of the bottle noosed between his thumb and forefinger. His nine-hour surgery had ended with the patient dying on the table; he’d had to deliver the news to the widow. I was as sensitive to his temperament as a mood ring: I had managed to keep Asher quiet while he took a nap; when he woke, it was to pancakes fresh from the griddle. “Well,” Braden said, tossing the television remote to the far end of the couch. “So much for this afternoon.”

“We could take a drive,” I suggested. “Maybe visit Jordan and Selena.” They had just had baby Sam and moved into a new home in Portsmouth.

“I get one day off every two weeks,” Braden said. “I don’t really want to spend it with your brother.”

“I could take Asher,” I told him. “So you can relax.”

“Wow,” he said, shaking his head. “You really want to get away from me that badly?”

I leaned over the couch from behind and kissed him upside down. “Never,” I said, but Braden had already dug himself a pit and was settling there.

“The first free day I have I want to spend with my wife,” he muttered, “and she picks her brother over me.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“You’re being a bitch.”

By now, I knew better than to engage. I took a deep breath and turned away, intending to find Asher.

It happened so fast. Braden’s hand snaked out and grabbed my ponytail, pulling so hard at the roots of my hair that my eyes teared. I cried out as he twisted his fist.

You should always wear your hair like this,
Braden had said to me once, when we were flushed and tangled in bed, my ponytail dancing over his chest like a paintbrush on canvas.
You look so damn beautiful.

So I always did.

I steeled myself for what came next, trying to make myself small as Braden loomed over me. But then something soft barreled into my leg. I looked down to find Asher launching himself against Braden.
Stop, Daddy,
he said, beating his fists against his father’s belly, trying to save me by doing to Braden what Braden was doing to me.

ON THE WAY
out of the jail, Jordan stops at the office of the superintendent. He walks right past the secretary, headed to the inner sanctum. “You can’t go in there,” the secretary says.

“Ask me if I give a fuck,” Jordan tosses back. He opens the closed office door. From where I’m hovering, near the secretary’s desk, I watch the superintendent look up with surprise.

“Who the hell are you?” he asks.

“Jordan McAfee. I’m representing one of your inmates. I assume you’re aware that Asher Fields was assaulted.”

The man shrugs. “That happens in here, sometimes, to murderers.”

“
Alleged
murderers,” Jordan corrects.

The superintendent comes around his desk. He’s as tall as Jordan, and they stand toe-to-toe. A pissing contest. “Surely you realize, Counselor,” he says, “that there’s a pecking order in the correctional system.”

Jordan doesn’t blink. “If it happens again, and I speak theoretically, I would assume it’s not about the pecking order but about negligence on the part of your correctional officers. Which, as you know, is quite a liability.”

The superintendent stares at Jordan for a long, charged moment. Then he turns to his secretary. “Move Fields to a different cell,” he says.

Jordan nods, turns, and walks out of the superintendent’s office. I follow him out of the jail, holding my shit together until we are outside, in an afternoon that feels heavy with the threat of snow. Then I start sobbing so hard that I can’t breathe.

I find myself braced by Jordan’s arm. “Easy, Liv.”

“That…is…my
son
in there,” I gasp.

“I know.”

“What they did to him—”

“Won’t happen again.”

I round on him. “
You don’t know that
.”

Asher is not the killer that the prosecutor and the media and,
Christ,
everyone seems to think he is. But if he has to stay in that jail—if he has to adapt to protect himself—whoever he is when he comes out will not be who he was when he went in.

For eight years I had stayed with Braden. It wasn’t until the day I saw Asher hit his father that I understood I had to leave. I had dismissed what Braden did to me, but I could not dismiss what he might do to Asher. Who Asher might become.

“I have to get him out,” I say.

A muscle ticks in Jordan’s jaw. “You know how.”

With the exception of wired child support and alimony payments, Braden and I have no interaction; he is legally forbidden from contacting me. But that does not prohibit
me
from contacting
him
.

Braden now lives south of Boston with his new family, far enough away that a northern New Hampshire boy being arraigned for murder might not have made his local news. If I ask him for bail money, he will give it to me. But he will also insist on being involved in Asher’s case, in Asher’s life.

“Anything but that,” I say to Jordan.

He sighs. “Let’s get you home.”

ON THAT SUNDAY,
twelve years ago, Braden had been so surprised by Asher’s tiny, focused fury that it diluted the charge of the moment. Braden turned sweet and solicitous, suggesting we watch a Disney movie as a family; stroking my hair and whispering an apology; making love to me that night as if I were a sculpture he was shaping with his own reverent hands. The next morning, when Braden left for the hospital, I kept Asher home from school. I told him we were playing a game: we had to find our favorite things—clothes and shoes and books and toys—and see how many we could fit into a trash bag. Then we drove to Jordan’s, seeking refuge, and he found me the best divorce lawyer in the state.

I don’t know what would have happened if I had not left my marriage. I may not have been here today to even wonder about it. I do know that Asher saved me then. And that I will save him now.

It’s only been two days, I tell myself. I will figure something out. I will not let Asher be damaged enough to become a man whose anger calibrates him. I moved heaven and earth once to make sure that didn’t happen; I can do it again.

But in the furthest crease of my mind is a whisper:
What if I’m already too late?

LILY
3

NOVEMBER 12–16, 2018

Three weeks before

I think there is a reason they call it
falling in love
. It’s the moment, at the top of the roller coaster, when your heart hangs in your throat. It’s the time between when you jump from the cliff and when you hit the ocean. It’s the realization that there’s no ground beneath your feet when you miss a step on the ladder, when the branch of the tree breaks, when you roll over and run out of mattress.

Here’s what they do not tell you about falling in love: there’s not always a soft landing beneath you.

It’s called falling, because it’s bound to break you.

TEN DAYS AFTER
I tell Asher, he still hasn’t spoken to me. No texts, no calls. He is careful to always pass by me in school in the company of someone else, so that we do not have to be alone. So that he can focus his attention on someone, anyone, else.

Ten days since he stared at me, as if the words coming out of my mouth were knives meant to hurt him, when in fact they’d cut me to ribbons when I spoke them.

Ten days since I made the biggest mistake of my life.

It’s not like I haven’t experienced what happens when you pull back the curtain and let someone see the ugly cranks and gears that make you
you;
the part that you’re still ashamed of; the part you wish you could erase from existence.

It’s not like I haven’t been here before.

I just thought, maybe, Asher was different. I thought in the equation of our relationship, who I was before we met might count less than who I am now.

In other words, I am an idiot.

Every time I see him at school, it’s like there’s this invisible force field between us now. When he
does
catch my eye, he looks wary, as if he can’t trust me. Why should he, when I didn’t trust him from the start?

But.

As far as I know, he hasn’t told anyone else what I told him, either. And I
would
know. This kind of juicy bullshit runs through a school faster than a virus; I’d have noticed the side glances by now, and Maya would
one hundred percent
have demanded details. Asher may not have liked me keeping secrets from him, but he’s keeping mine for me.

On the days when Asher doesn’t have hockey practice after school (because he’s had it at some ungodly predawn hour) we usually would hang out together. I’m trying to be respectful of his space, but there is an Asher-size hole in the fabric of my day and I think it’s only a matter of time before everything else unravels, too.

I tell Maya I’m going to the library to study after school and suffer her doe-eyed glance of pity. Since our conversation at the fire tower, she knows something is wrong between Asher and me. “Do you think he’s breaking up with you?” she had asked breathlessly, when I told her that Asher was still apparently thinking about things.

No,
I’d said, and that was the truth. Asher may have said a lot…and there may have been a lot more he
hadn’t
said yet…but so far I had not heard
It’s over.

And even though I knew better than to hope, it felt like a pilot light inside me.

Maya instantly positioned herself as an expert on Asher, ready to dissect every word and syllable and expression to tell me what it really meant. But somehow, I wanted to keep that all to myself, even
if it was terrible to remember. I didn’t want to share it, because what if that was all I had left of him?

Instead of going to the library like I’d told her, I pass right by the building and walk all the way to Asher’s house.

I knock on the door, but no one answers, so I let myself in.

Asher’s told me they never lock the door. His mom isn’t even sure they still have an actual key.

It’s an old farmhouse, which means that the floorboards creak under my weight and there are weird nooks and crannies that hold things like an antique icebox and a grandfather clock and a milk door where bottles used to get delivered. The interior smells of pine, beeswax, and faintly, of Asher. “Hello?” I call up the stairs, wondering if he can hear me.

“Down here!”

It’s Olivia’s voice. I find the door to the cellar and walk down the narrow steps. The first time Asher had taken me down here—ostensibly to play Ping-Pong, actually to make out—I told him it was the perfect place to commit a murder.
You could hack me into pieces and put me in the freezer,
I told him.

That,
he said,
would be a waste of resources
.

I hear a hammer tapping lightly. It’s ten degrees colder down here, and that’s saying something. Asher’s mom has covered the green acreage of the Ping-Pong table with stacks of pressed wax, two little jars of nails, and what looks like an Ikea nightmare of wooden slats.

“Oh, Lily, hi,” she says, smiling. “If you’re looking for Asher, he’s not here.”

I try to read her face, to see what Asher might have told her. From the easy smile and the way she naturally assumed that it was normal for me to show up searching for her son, I am guessing that he’s mentioned very little. Olivia might not even know that we haven’t been speaking.

“Right,” I answer, trying to figure out what to do next. Not that I had a game plan, really, for what I would do if Asher
were
here. Talk
at
him…again? Force him to talk to me?

“He’s still at practice,” Olivia says. She is wrestling four of the slats into a rectangular wooden frame, tapping nails into the corners to form right angles. She glances up at me. “But you know that.”

“Yes,” I admit, because on some level of consciousness, I did. “I came to talk to you.” I realize as I say it that this, actually, is true.

I really, really like Olivia. She’s funny and smart and amazingly badass, when you see her hauling thirty-pound supers of honey all over the place or dipping her bare hands into a buzzing hive. I’ve never seen her wear a stitch of makeup, and she always manages to look natural and fresh, even when she’s sweating inside her bee suit. But I think what I envy the most about her is how easy Asher is in her company.

“Well, okay,” she says. “What’s up?”

I open my mouth and nothing comes out.

Olivia stops hammering and looks at me. “I could use a hand,” she says. She passes me one of the rectangular frames and picks one up herself. “I’m making frames for next year’s hives.”

She lifts a sheet of wax from a stack—paper thin, with wires vertically embedded in it every few inches. Then she hands me one, too. “Slip the foundation into the groove at the bottom.”

Maybe I’ll find the words if I’m busy doing something with my hands. I try to settle the entire wax sheet into the thin groove, but it’s bendy and harder than it looks. “See these two little holes?” Olivia asks, pointing to the side of her own frame. She picks something out of the second jar—it looks like the world’s tiniest tuning fork—and pushes it through one puncture in the side of the rectangle, its tines falling on either side of the wax sheet. She does this on the opposite side, too. “Go on,” she urges.

I pick up the little fastener and thread it through the hole in the wood. The wax is so soft that one of the tines catches in it and rips it. “Oh, crap,” I say.

“The bees’ll fix it. Technically, we could give them an empty rectangle and they’d fill it with honeycomb.” Olivia grins. “I just want to make life a little easier for them.”

We settle into a factory line—Olivia building the rectangles and
anchoring the wax foundation into place; me inserting the pins to hold it steady. A stack of finished frames grows on the far end of the Ping-Pong table. “Did you know playing Ping-Pong activates your brain more than any other sport?” I say. “The American Museum of Natural History researched it.”

Olivia doesn’t look up from her work. “Did you come here to talk about Ping-Pong, Lily?”

I shake my head.

“I’m guessing you didn’t come here with a burning desire to make frames for beehives, either,” Olivia adds.

“No, that was just an unexpected perk,” I joke. “It’s about Asher.” I hesitate, trying to figure out how much to tell her. “We’re sort of not speaking to each other.”

I stare down at my hands, but I can feel her gaze climbing over me. “Did you have a fight?”

“Not really,” I say. I pick up another empty frame, so that I don’t have to meet her eyes. “He said he needed some time, and I’m trying to be really patient.” Finally, I look up at her. “I think that’s why I’m here.”

Olivia raises an eyebrow. “I don’t know if I’m the best person to give relationship advice,” she says.

“But is this something he does a lot? I mean, if he needs to shut me out, I get it. But I also need to know it won’t be permanent. Not before I have a chance to convince him not to, anyway.”

My cheeks flush, and Olivia’s eyes are narrowed, bridging the gaps between what I’ve been willing to tell her and what I wouldn’t say over my dead body. I pick up the tool I’ve been using and pinch a tiny nail between my fingers. I push it through the wedge.

“When Asher’s upset,” Olivia says slowly, “he does that sometimes. Pulls away.”

“I know,” I reply. “I mean, I’ve seen him after he loses a game. It’s like he’s trapped in his own head, reliving it.”

“Yes, but I mean for the bigger things, too. I’m not sure what Asher’s told you,” Olivia says delicately, “but his father and I didn’t have an amicable divorce.”

Asher has told me more, I’m sure, than Olivia realizes. I know her marriage was abusive.

“When Asher was around fifteen, he wanted to get in touch with his father. I understood on some level—he wanted a male figure in his life, and he probably had this golden idea in his head of playing catch or pond hockey, and Braden telling him that his biggest regret was not having Asher around. But I know Braden—far better than Asher ever did. That fairy tale wasn’t ever going to happen. Asher was just going to get hurt.” She seems to taste and discard words before she chooses her next ones. “I thought…Braden had exceeded his quota for that.”

I realize in that instant why I like Olivia so much. Because she, too, has so much to hide
.
But out of solidarity I play dumb.

“I told Asher flat-out that I would not let him see his father, and that he was still young enough for it to be my decision, and not his.” Olivia lets out a long breath. “He stopped speaking to me for two weeks. And two weeks is a long time, when you’re the only people in a household.”

I know that, too. I pick up the tool and thread it with a nail.

“Here’s the important part, though. Asher got over it.” Olivia shrugs. “One day, he just started talking to me again, like he’d never stopped. Even though he never reconnected with Braden.”

I think about the time Asher brought me to meet his father, the way his eyes danced back and forth between us, letting me in on his secret. I push harder on the tool, not trusting myself to look at her.

Olivia reaches across the table and places a cool hand on my arm. “Lily?” she says. “I think he’ll come around.”

As she says this, the tool slips and the nail shoots through the double layer of wood, piercing my finger. A bead of blood wells at the top of it. For a second, I cannot tear my eyes away.

“Oh my God,” Olivia says, springing into action. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you!” She scrambles, looking for something to stanch the blood, which is now dripping off my palm. She finds a clean cotton rag and presses it against my finger.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, although it is not, and likely won’t be. Asher
didn’t come around about his father. He didn’t realize the wisdom of his mother’s point of view. He sees his goddamned father every month, and Olivia is completely unaware.

So what does that mean for me?

“I’m sorry. I’ve got to…” I back away from the Ping-Pong table. “Thank you, for, you know, talking to…”

I have to get out of here. This was obviously a mistake.

I fly up the stairs with Olivia calling after me, and run through the house and out the front door. My finger bleeds the whole way home.

HERE ARE SOME
unlikely things that have fallen:

1. Blood, from the sky in La Sierra, Colombia, in 2008. Their local priest said it was a sign of sin.
   

2. A cow, which crushed a fishing boat in Japan in 1997. No one believed the crew who reported it. Then it turned out the Russian Air Force confessed that the crew on one of its cargo planes had kidnapped a cow, hoping to have fresh beef for dinner. The cow, however, wanted none of that, and when it got unruly it was tossed out of the hold at thirty thousand feet.
   

3. Hundreds of dead starlings in Somerset, England, blanketed a lady’s garden in March 2010. No one knows why, or where they came from.
   

4. Me. Dizzyingly, irrevocably, head over heels. For him.
   

THERE ARE TIMES
when I think I’ve been playing a role forever. When I was little, I learned quickly what adults expected of me, even when it felt like I was wearing shoes three sizes too small. When I was bullied, I pasted a smile on my face and told my parents I loved school. When I was sad, I rarely let my mother see me cry. If there was an award given out for acting your way through life, I’d win, hands down. So when I get home from Asher’s house and collapse on the floor next to Boris, it takes me a hot second to realize I’ve broken character.