Mad Honey: A Novel (20 page)

It strikes me that I have never seen my brother in his natural element. He speaks so fluidly that it’s mesmerizing. It’s like seeing a tiger—already impressive even seen at a zoo—transform into a wild predator when it is released into the jungle.

“The State’s theory of the case,” he continues, “is that this was a volatile relationship, there was a physical altercation, and the victim is now dead. They are suggesting my client caused that death. Part of what they’ll attempt to prove is that my client was enraged by the victim’s breaking off the relationship, as evidenced by the text typed on her phone. But this text was never received by my client, and thus has no value whatsoever as evidence of his alleged rage…or any other emotion. You can’t get upset about something you have never seen or heard about. In fact, for all we know, it might not even be relevant to the
victim’s
state of mind. She never sent it…and we don’t even really have proof that she herself
typed
it.”

Jordan sits down beside Asher, and the judge turns to the prosecutor. “Ms. Jewett?”

“Your Honor, this may indeed be the only time I agree with Mr. McAfee, but he is spot-on in our theory of the case. Statements made by the victim, whether in person or by text or over the phone, influenced the defendant’s state of mind and his actions and also reflected the victim’s fear and her desire to distance herself from the defendant. Therefore
all
of the texts—just like all the actions and communications in a relationship—need to be admitted. In particular, Your Honor, the final text response to this string of texts sent on the day of Lily’s death is a crucial one. The defendant sent a message, all caps, saying
THIS ENDS NOW, I’M COMING OVER
. Lily’s typed response was
Don’t bother, it’s over.
The text was typed midargument with the defendant; there is no evidence of anyone else being present; it is on the victim’s phone. In order to weigh the importance of certain facts, the jury needs all the circumstances surrounding the
argument before, during, and after. This text is the very meat of the evidence that occurred
during
that fight.” She looks at Asher coolly. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

The judge gets up from the bench and starts walking. Not far—just behind her desk—pacing back and forth. I am pretty sure she’s taken off her shoes.

Jordan leans toward the prosecutor. “What’s she doing?” he whispers.

“She’s a former courtroom attorney. Says she thinks better on her feet,” Gina Jewett says under her breath. “Just go with it.”

“Ms. Jewett,” the judge says, pausing with a hand on the back of her plush black chair. “Does the State have evidence that the text in question was sent from the victim’s phone?”

“We know it was typed on her phone, Your Honor. We do not know if it was sent.”

“The police and the prosecutor’s office have Mr. Fields’s phone, isn’t that correct?” Judge Byers asks.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Is there any evidence that on Mr. Fields’s phone the text
Don’t bother, it’s over
was received?”

The prosecutor clears her throat. “Not as of yet, Your Honor.”

“Not in four months?” the judge clarifies.

Jordan huffs a laugh. “Cellphone service here is bad,” he says, “but it’s not
that
bad.”

Judge Byers cuts a glance in his direction and he stops chuckling.

She slips back into her chair and looks down at the motion in front of her. “Fiske,” she says, and the bailiff blinks at her.

“Your Honor?”

“Why didn’t you bring me a maple creamee?” she asks.

The bailiff frowns, baffled. “Ma’am?” he says.

“I have been deeply craving a maple creamee from Tuckerman’s Dairy Barn all morning. I woke up thinking of that maple creamee; I ate my egg whites wishing they were a maple creamee; one might even go so far as to say that visions of maple creamees will dance
behind my closed lids when I go to sleep tonight. So, Fiske, I ask again, why didn’t you bring me a maple creamee?”

“I…didn’t know you wanted one?” he says, unsure. “I can get you one now…?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Judge Byers says. She turns to Gina Jewett. “I may deeply covet a maple creamee at this moment. I might even be willing to trade my firstborn for one. But as long as this communication remains in my head, uncommunicated, there is no logical punitive measure I can take for Fiske not having acted upon an unexpressed wish, unless he is gifted with ESP, and if he were, he would have had the good sense to call in sick today. This court is being asked to rule on admissibility of one final text found on the victim’s phone. But there is no evidence who typed it into the phone, no evidence that it was ever sent from the victim’s phone…and there
is
evidence that it was never received by the defendant’s phone. Thus even in consideration of the prosecution’s theory of the case, there is no reason to think that this particular text sheds any light on the circumstances surrounding the relationship of these parties, or what happened to the victim. The court finds that it would be more prejudicial than it would be probative of any issues of the case.” She tips her head, acknowledging Jordan. “The motion to suppress is granted.”

The surge of winning, of something finally going
right,
floods through my limbs. I find myself on my feet, hugging Jordan from behind. As the hearing is adjourned, he untangles my arms from his neck, and I see he isn’t nearly as jubilant as I am. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Isn’t this good news?”

“Liv,” Jordan says, “we just got through the gate, but we still have the marathon to run.” He offers a tiny, grudging smile. “Pace yourself.”

WHEN I WAKE
up in the middle of the night, I slip out of bed and cross the hall to peek in on Asher. It’s not that I am expecting him to have nightmares, but I also cannot get over the simple ease with
which I can check. It’s why, as Jordan and I drove him home from the superior court, I kept glancing in the rearview mirror to spy on Asher in the backseat. It’s why, when he sequestered himself in his bedroom, I found multiple reasons to knock on his door and ask him a needless question:
Have you seen my phone charger? I’m doing laundry, do you need anything washed? What are you reading?

Without his phone or his laptop, there is little for Asher to do—so mostly, he’s stayed in bed with a book. He can’t even borrow my computer, because it’s against the rules of his release from jail. I don’t think this is a bad thing, actually. I’d rather he not read what has been said about him online.

The hall light is on again. I tiptoe, so that I don’t disturb Asher’s sleep, and peer around the edge of his open door. His bed is empty.

The bathroom is unoccupied, and I find myself flying down the stairs with my heart pounding, wondering where he could be. I think about his bandaged wrist, the pond in the apple orchard, the shotgun we keep in a safe downstairs in case we need to scare off bears or fisher cats.

I tear the front door open so hard it explodes against its hinges, smacking into the outer wall of the house, and I see him.

A pale white T-shirt that glows beneath the moon, like he’s already a ghost.

He’s sitting on the porch, looking toward the strawberry fields, his back to me.

“Mom,” he says, without turning. “Sorry I woke you.”

I walk toward him, shivering in the cool night air. “How did you know it was me?”

“You smell like honey,” Asher says. “You always have. Once, in jail, we got packets of really shitty honey with our toast for breakfast, and I almost jumped out of my skin because I was so sure you were there.”

I sit down cross-legged beside him. “Bad dream?” I ask.

Asher’s mouth twists. “I don’t dream anymore,” he says.

“Then what woke you up?”

“The quiet,” he says ruefully. “In jail, someone is always yelling. There’s instructions being called over the loudspeaker. And it’s either
way too hot or freezing cold, and you don’t get to adjust it.” He shrugs. “I don’t know why I came out here. I guess because I
could
.”

I look up at the night sky. “Do you remember how you used to think that you could make stars? You’d come out here with a flashlight and turn it on and off and tell me you couldn’t go to bed until more of them floated into the sky.”

“Yeah,” Asher says. “Then again, I also thought that after the dinosaurs died out, grass grew over them to make hills.” He stares out at the hives we can’t see in the dark. “The fields are so much bigger than I remember. It’s weird, what happens to memories, when they’re all you have.”

I hold my breath, hoping he’ll say more.

“When I first got to jail, I’d wake up and think I was having a nightmare,” Asher confesses. “But it was real, and I’d get so fucking sad. Now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m home in my own bed…but I’m still so sad I can’t breathe.”

His bandage gleams in the dark. “Why, Asher?” I whisper. “You’re back.”

For the first time since I’ve come outside, he looks at me. “For how long?” he says.

LILY
4

NOVEMBER 9, 2018

Four weeks before

“Lily?” says Maya. “Are we going to do this or not?”

We’re in the basketball court at Adams High, which is where the fencing team practices. Everyone else is already back in the locker room except us, and to be honest I’d be happier if this day was over.

It has been a week since Asher walked out on me, a week since we’ve communicated, a week since the trapdoor opened up beneath me and I fell into the void.

But I agreed to stay late because Maya wants to know how to do a flèche attack. So here we are, with me giving fencing pointers, when what I’d really rather be doing is lying in my bed at home eating a whole sleeve of Oreos and crying.

“Sure,” I say. “
En garde.
”

She points her sword at me, and I point mine at her, and I raise my other hand in the air. “Okay, step one,” I say. “You extend your sword arm forward. That’s the easy part. But don’t square your shoulders.” I pounce in slow motion toward her, and let her sword hit my shoulder. “See?” I take a few steps back, and then drop my left shoulder back. “If you do it like this, you’re coming at your opponent obliquely, right? So there’s less of you to hit.”

I can’t see Maya’s face behind her mask, but she nods.

“Step two, keep your body low. The whole point of the flèche is
the sudden surprise of it—I mean, it’s meant to scare people. It’s like you’re charging against all these assholes, and you just want to stab them. You’re suddenly changing the rules, like, all at once everybody who thought you were someone they could just ignore, now they have to take notice, cause you’re showing them you
matter
.”

“Um. Lily?” says Maya, the point of her sword slowly dropping toward the floor.

“And as you make the flèche, you yell at them like a
banshee
.” I pull my shoulder back, lean forward on my right knee, and then charge toward my friend with my sword drawn.

“AAAAAUUUUGHHHHHH!”

I crash into Maya and she falls backward, and I fall down on top of her. I’m still screaming.

“Jesus,” says Maya. “Hey.” She pulls her mask off. I pull mine off. I cover my face with my hands. Tears seep into my white gloves. I just sit there going to pieces while Maya sits with me.

“Lily,” she says. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Nothing,” I say, but it’s clear that whatever is going on is the opposite of nothing.

IF YOU ASKED
ME,
I’d tell you I’m a fundamentally happy person, someone whose heart is capable of big leaps in the air. Which is a weird thing to say, actually, considering how much of my life I’ve spent depressed.

It’s not just that so many shitty things have happened to me, it’s that for the longest time I didn’t know how to make my life better.

Finally, as if I were someone discovering a secret door in a secret garden, the future revealed itself to me. But now that I’m here, I still feel the weight of the past. Sometimes it’s like my legs have been bound with anchor chains, and I’ve been thrown off a ship into the cruel ocean, and all I can do is sink.

I guess there are different kinds of depression. There’s the kind that just crushes you for no reason, what Mom calls the
clinical
kind.

But this isn’t that. This is the other kind, the kind that comes because the things that have happened to you are actually just unbelievably, heartbreakingly sad.

WE’RE STILL LYING
on the floor of the gym. “I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t even want to think about what I look like right now. This is an ugly cry, with snot coming out of my nose and my face red and wet. “What am I going to do?”

“I’m guessing we aren’t talking about fencing anymore.” Maya looks at me carefully. “You can tell me, you know. If you want.”

I nod my head yes. But I can’t. Because really, I’m going to go through this twice?

There’s a strange calm about Maya. She’s what my mother would call an
old soul.
I wonder if growing up as an Asian girl, the daughter of two mothers, in this very white, very straight world of Adams is what’s given her a kind of resilience, a kind of wisdom.

“First off, this is about Asher?”

She looks up at the scoreboard over on the wall behind the bleachers.
PRESIDENTS 0 VISITORS 0
.

Nobody’s winning.

“Did you break up?” Maya asks.

“I don’t know,” I admit, and it comes out in a rush. “We haven’t talked for a week! He told me he—needed some time. Things got really—intense.”

“Intense,” says Maya. “You didn’t—? Did you tell him—you
love
him?”

“I told him that weeks ago,” I said.

“Really?” says Maya. “And he didn’t freak out then?” I shake my head. “Because that’s usually been it for Asher. Whenever anyone’s told him they love him in the past, he breaks up with them, because he just—”

“Because why?”

Maya looks thoughtful. “I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with his father? Like, he saw what happened to his parents, and
he’s afraid that something that seems perfect at first is going to turn into some kind of shitshow—?”

I wipe my eyes again. “I told him I loved him back in October. And he said he loved me. He’s said it lots of times. It sounded like he meant it.”

Maya’s eyes grow wide. “He—said that?”

I nod.

“So—” Maya says. “What’s going on?”

“He got weird,” I say. “After we slept together.”

I assumed Maya knew Asher and I had sex, even if I hadn’t expressly told her. “This was back in October,” she says, not asking me, but stating a fact. “That time you called me to come get you, and you were so upset.”

“Yeah. In the tree house. In the woods behind his house.”

“You said you didn’t want to talk about it,” Maya says. “So I didn’t press you. But I was worried about you. I’m
still
worried about you.”

I wipe my eyes again. “I’m sorry I haven’t told you everything. But some of the stuff with Asher has been so private—I didn’t want to share it. Even with you.”

“It’s okay,” says Maya. “I get it.” She looks thoughtful. “Only now—things are different?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Maybe it’s my fault. I mean, I wanted to sleep with him. It was great at the time. But afterwards—” I shrug. “I wondered if it had all gone too fast. And when I told him I wasn’t sure about it—well, Asher didn’t take it very well.”

“No,” Maya says. “He wouldn’t.”

I feel tears burning in my eyes, but I am determined not to let them fall. “We were so close,” I tell her. “But now we might as well be on different planets.”

Maya just nods, like she understands.

“Maybe I should just be grateful we had what we had,” I say. “I mean, it wasn’t like we were going to get married.” But even as I say it, as stupid as this is, I have to admit I’d already thought about it, spending the rest of my life with Asher. All at once it had become impossible to imagine any world where we weren’t together.

But now that’s the world I’m living in.

“Do you think it’s possible that the thing I said is true?” Maya asks me. “That it has something to do with his father?”

“Maybe,” I say. “But it’s more likely it has something to do with me.”

“What?” says Maya. “What about you?”

It’s insane that I don’t have the words for it, that with all the things I know, I still can’t explain myself.

She looks at me patiently, waiting for me to go on. What I
want
to do, actually, is pull up the cuff of my fencing jacket and show her the scars. It hurts so much not to be able to tell her the whole truth, the whole long story. But I’m not going there with Maya, not after what happened with Asher. So I just say, “Sometimes I get so sad, it’s like, I can’t even see. It’s like I’m alone, in the dark.”

“Lily,” Maya says, and she puts her hand down on my wrist. She doesn’t know it, but underneath my cuff, right where she’s touching me, is the proof. “You’re not the only person to be sad. Sometimes I think, if you’re not really sad in this world, you’re just not paying attention.”

She means this nicely, but it’s pissing me off, because she really has no idea what it was like. I remember that day. Mom was at work. I didn’t write a note.

“Sometimes,” I say, “I think Asher likes the bright side of me, you know, the part that knows the names of all the vice presidents and how to make jambalaya. But there are things about me that scare him.”

The gym is getting quieter now, as people head for the buses, or out to cars to drive themselves back home.

“Oh, come on,” Maya scoffs. “What about you could be scary?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I can’t lose the both of them, not Maya
and
Asher. Which now I know is exactly what will happen if I say one more word.

People always talk about how their love for you is unconditional. Then you reveal your most private self to them, and you find out how many conditions there are in unconditional love.

“I—I—” But the tears just pour down.

“All right, that’s it,” says Maya. She stands up. “Come with me.”

“What?” I say. I stand up, too. “Where are we going?”

“Trust me,” she says. “There’s something I need to show you.”

A HALF HOUR
LATER,
we are driving through the Sandwich Range Wilderness in her mother’s beat-up Range Rover. We are grinding up an access road along a rushing river called Birch Creek. This is not much of a road, more like a pair of tire tracks leading into the dark wilderness.

“So your mom’s a park ranger?” says Maya.

I don’t really feel like talking about it. “Forest ranger,” I say.

“What’s the difference?”

The Range Rover does a major bounce over a pothole in the trail. Maya downshifts. We keep ascending.

“Park rangers work for the Interior Department, in national parks. Forest rangers work for the Department of Agriculture, in national forests.”

“It’s the same job, though, right? Hold on—” We do another lurch as the car plows over a small boulder.

I sigh. “Park rangers are about conservation. Forest rangers are about resource management.”

“Resource management. So, like, logging and stuff.”

“Logging,” I say. “Water quality. Wildlife.”

“Wildlife? Like, mountain lions and bears and stuff?”

“Yup,” I say. Why are we talking about this? Why does it matter?

Why does
anything
matter?

Maya brings us to a stop. She pulls back the emergency brake. “Okay, we’re here.”

I look around us. I see deep woods: white pines and birch, a few maples now almost completely bare. Red leaves fading to brown lie on the ground. A path leads up a small hummock.

“Where’s here?”

“You’ll see,” says Maya, and she jumps out of the Rover. I follow
her, although without much enthusiasm. Maya can see I’m dragging my feet. “Come on,” she says.

We climb the path, which rises sharply up an incline. I want to tell Maya that I just can’t bother, I don’t have the energy. But I keep climbing.

At the top of the hill is hurricane fencing, and a sign,
DO NOT ENTER: PRIVATE PROPERTY. US FOREST SERVICE
and next to this an emblem similar to the one I’ve seen so many times on the badge of my mother’s uniform, the pine tree between the letters
U
and
S
. But at the bottom of this one is a banner containing capital letters: ENFORCEMENT.

Next to the sign is a hole in the fencing, which Maya pops through. She looks back at me. “In we go,” she says.

“Maya—” I hesitate. If we get busted for trespassing here, my mother and I are both going to be in serious trouble.

“There’s nobody for miles.” She reaches forward to help me through the hole in the fence. I know I’m doing the wrong thing here, but I do it anyway.

The path leads up to a clear, rocky space, and all around us are the peaks of the White Mountains, the Sandwich Range. We can see lakes and forest, the setting sun sinking over the peaks in the distance.

And right before us is an old fire tower, looking like something out of a horror movie. It has a square lookout up at the top, accessible by a series of metal staircases. There’s a heavy metal chain across the bottom of the staircase, and another Forest Service sign:
CLOSED. DANGER
.

Maya steps over the chain, goes up half a dozen stairs and turns to make sure I’m following her. Which I’m not.

“It says
closed,
” I say. “It says
danger
.”

“It’s fine,” says Maya. “I’ve been here a hundred times. Trust me. It’s worth it.”

I’m pretty sure no scenic vista is going to be worth the risk of falling through these rusted stairs. But I’m too numb to object to
anything. I feel like I’m a piece of driftwood, just floating along on the tide.

Maya goes up the metal steps. She’s holding on to the handrail. So am I. I can feel my heart pounding as we go higher and higher. But then, finally, we arrive, and there it is: the great horizon and the vast wilderness and it is all more stunning than it has any right to be. The White Mountains are an ocean of blues and purples surrounding us. Golden sunlight shines down on the lakes and in the valleys between the peaks. There’s a huge bird circling in the sky, and as I look closer, I see that it is a bald eagle. I’ve never seen one in the wild before.