Mad Honey: A Novel (28 page)

“So you were both born,” I correct, quieting my voice, “
transgender.
”

“Lesson two. It’s not a curse word, you can speak up. And lesson three—you know what they say: if you’ve met one trans person, you’ve…” She smirks. “Met one trans person. What’s true for Lily might not be true for someone else.”

I nod, filing this away. “Did you get the—” I say. “Lily had—”

“The
operation
?” Elizabeth says.

I can tell from the expression on Elizabeth’s face that I have asked the wrong question.

“See, that,” she continues, “would be an example of something that’s none of your fucking business.”

“I’m sorry—” I say. “I didn’t mean—”

“What difference would it make to you, if I told you I’d had it—or I’d not had it? Some people don’t want the surgery. Other people can’t afford it.”

“Lesson four,” I accept, and nod.

“Jesus, I cannot believe it’s 2019 and I’m still talking about this bullshit,” she mutters. “We’re all different, and we all experience gender in different ways—even if we all fit under that umbrella of being trans. As opposed to
cis,
which is what you call someone who’s
not
transgender. So
trans
is to
cis
like
gay
is to
straight
. With me so far?”

Lesson five,
I think. “So you can be trans—and straight, too?”

“Being gay or straight,” says Elizabeth, “is about who you want to go to bed with. Being trans—or cis—is about who you want to go to bed
as
.” She lights up another cigarette. “If you got a bunch of transgender people together, you might hear them arguing about what it all means, or what the most important thing about it all is. There are
cross-dressers
—often straight men who dress as women as part of fantasy, or escape. There are
drag queens
and
kings,
who think of gender as a performance, an art form. There are
nonbinary
people, or
enbys,
who see gender as a spectrum—which it is—and want to express themselves anywhere along that spectrum as an act of freedom. Sometimes people call that
genderfucking
or
genderqueer
. If you hear someone say, ‘Reject the gender binary!’ you’re probably hanging around with a genderqueer person. Some of us
like
Caitlyn Jenner”—she smirks—“and some of us can’t stand her. Some folks are like me,
and have a deep sense of who they are, and want to do a medical transition. Some don’t. Sometimes people know it from when they’re children, like Lily. Other times, the light switches on a little later. I know transsexuals who’ve transitioned in their seventies.”

“Transsexuals?” I repeat.

She grimaces. “Well, someone my age uses that word. But it’s kind of going out of fashion, to tell you the truth. Because that word makes it sound like it’s all about sex—which it’s not. It’s about fitting into the body you live in.”

I wonder if it would be like being forced to wear size two clothes when you are a size twelve. You wouldn’t be able to move comfortably. You’d always be aware of the fact that something pinched. There would be wardrobe malfunctions and embarrassment when you thought people were looking at you oddly. You’d be thinking constantly about taking off the outfit just so you could
breathe.

But if you’re trans, that too-tight ensemble never comes off.

“When did you know?” I ask.

“I was ten. But I never came out until I was forty-five. Now I’m sixty-seven. It’d have been better, maybe, if I came out when I was young. Like Lily.” She finishes her smoke and crushes the cigarette beneath her shoe. “I’d probably have been a lot happier. Although, who knows?” She gives me a piercing look. “Maybe I’d have gotten killed. Like she did.”

“My son did
not
kill her,” I say, a reflex.

“You know this because…?”

“Because I know Asher.”

She glances at me. “Just like you knew Lily?”

There’s a truth to those words that makes me freeze. People tend to see the default that is presented, instead of the complexity of the truth: the gamine teenage girl, the charming cardiac surgeon.

The innocent son.

Elizabeth shrugs. “
Somebody
killed her,” she says, and the way she says this gives me chills. Because if it wasn’t Asher—then who? “Dozens of transgender women are killed every year. Especially trans women of color. And that’s only the ones we hear about. So many
others are killed and thrown away, like their lives meant nothing, like this wasn’t someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone’s lover.” She looks at me carefully, uncertain whether she should go on. “A lot of the time, it’s the people who are supposed to love these women who get violent.”

On the day I married Braden, if someone had told me that my prince would become a monster, I never would have believed it. I would have said no, that is not the direction in which the fairy tale goes. But there is a vast canyon between who we want people to be, and who they truly are.

We fall into silence as the sun disappears behind the ruined paper mill. For a moment it’s a lot darker, the park falling into shadow. Then the sun bursts through windows on the mill and lights everything up again with the colors of goldenrod and rust.

Elizabeth looks at her watch. “I can’t be away from the store much longer,” she says. Code for:
We’re done here.

“Can I ask one more thing?” I say. “Did you know Lily was trans?”

“That’s not the right question,” she replies. “The right question is, why would anyone care?”

“My
son
would care,” I say. “If he knew, I mean. You really think it doesn’t matter? If she kept such an important thing secret from him?”

“Maybe,” Elizabeth says, “you need to think about the difference between what is
secret
and what is
private
.”

I want to tell her that those are the same things, but maybe they’re not.

I think about my history with Braden. Is what happened between us a secret, in the way that the nuclear codes are secret? Or is it private, in the way that—painful as the facts are—this is history that belongs to me, and is mine to reveal?

Elizabeth leans forward on the railing, balanced on her elbows. “Ms. McAfee, do you know what made me come out here to talk to you?”

“To…help me understand?”

“No,” she says. “Because I have a son, too.”

I blink, surprised. “Does he go to school here, in Adams?”

“He’d be in his late twenties by now,” Elizabeth says, looking toward the distant bank. “But I haven’t been allowed to talk to him for over fifteen years. His mother told him I was dead.”

“But—” I falter. “You’re not dead.”

“Depends on who you ask.” Her gaze falls upon the slowly flowing river. “To be trans in this world means being at risk,” she says. “That’s true whether you’re out, or not. Everybody in this town knows my story, and people are mostly nice. Not everybody, but mostly. Because they know me. But when I leave town, when my trio plays at somebody’s wedding or something, people take one look at me and figure it out. I mean—I’m six foot four, I weigh nearly three hundred pounds, my voice—” She looks a little sad. “Well, I’m not exactly a soprano. You should see the looks people give me when I walk into a restaurant. It doesn’t take more than five, ten minutes before everybody’s whispering, elbowing each other in the ribs,
Hey, check out the freak show.
”

If I were in a bar and Elizabeth walked in, I’d probably look up at her. I’d probably draw all kinds of conclusions about her that had little to do with the truth.

“So why
wouldn’t
Lily keep her business to herself?” asks Elizabeth. “She was exactly what she always wanted to be: a pretty young girl. She didn’t go through the whole transition in order to have an asterisk next to her name, a footnote: pretty young girl
but
…She wanted to be herself. Is that really so hard to understand?”

Wife,
I think.
*Battered.

“If you choose to carry that asterisk,” Elizabeth says, “you get it coming and going. There’s all the shit you catch for being trans. And then there’s the shit you catch for being female. Sometimes, when I’m walking home by myself at night and I hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind me—when I’m driving a car alone, getting tailgated by some asshole…I don’t really remember what it was like to not feel vulnerable in the world.”

I have a sudden flash of my bee suit hanging from the hook in the mudroom. I like it because it’s part of the job of caring for the hives, because it says
beekeeper
in the same way that a turned-around collar
says
priest
. But I also like it because, while I’m wearing it, I feel invincible, like no harm can possibly come to me.

It’s not a feeling a woman gets very often, whether she’s trans or cis, or anything else.

From down the sidewalk, we hear a pair of voices approaching. Two teenage girls from the sound of them—but then I think:
What does it mean to
sound
like a girl? Is it pitch? Is it resonance? Is it the words themselves? Is the whole idea of sounding like this or that something we all just came up with at random, in order to separate people from each other?

The girls pass us now, talking to each other, and whispering. They’re about Lily’s age. Or they’re the age Lily was. Before she died.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“For?”

“Ambushing you?” I offer. “Not bothering to know all of this, before today? Take your pick.” I shake my head. “I just wanted to understand Lily better.”

“You just have to open your heart,” says Elizabeth.

“I think my heart’s pretty open,” I say defensively, but even as I say it, I wonder:
Is this true?

“Ms. McAfee,” says Elizabeth. “Maybe you could…open it
more
?”

At this moment, the girls—now receding down the walkway along the river—burst into laughter.

“Did you
see
that?” says one girl.

“Oh my
God,
” says the other.

How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?

We don’t say anything as we ascend the path back to Temple Street. A few pedestrians pass us by. This time I am aware of the looks Elizabeth gets from strangers. Some of them look at me, to see if I am like her.

Something in me wants to tell these people, I
am
like Elizabeth. I
am
like Lily. I am like a lot of women in the world who choose to conceal something; who live in fear of what might happen, if the exact wrong person ever found out.

LILY
6

OCTOBER 20–27, 2018

Six weeks before

I’m looking in the mirror when I hear the screams. All the hairs on my arms stand up because whatever this is, it is
bad shit.
“Mom?” I rush out of the bathroom and fly down the stairs. There’s a scary moment where I’m afraid that I’m about to tumble down the steps and kill myself.

“Mom?” I shout. I know she’s in trouble. “
Mom!!!
”

And there at her desk she sits: holding a mug of coffee, wearing a huge grin. The screaming grows more intense. “Come here,” she says, delighted. “You have to see this!”

On her computer there’s a video of two wildcats standing in a forest clearing, face-to-face, yowling.

“Watch,” says Mom. One lynx climbs atop the other, its claws sinking deep into the dark blond fur of the other.
Rrraaroooww! Rrraaroooww! Rrraaroooww!

It’s the lynx equivalent of
Stop! Don’t stop!

Mom pauses the video, then pushes her chair back from her desk contentedly. “I shot this yesterday on Bald Mountain,” she says proudly. “Isn’t it
awesome
! You never get to see this,
never
!”

“Why do they make that—sound?” I ask. “I thought somebody was dying.”

“It’s pent-up
kitten energy,
” says Mom happily. “They were having a dispute. Finally, they—you know.
Reached an understanding.
” She looks at me. “You look nice,” she says.

“Asher’s picking me up,” I tell her, and even as I say this, I can hear his Jeep pulling into the drive.

“Again?” Mom says pointedly.

Yes,
I think.
Isn’t it amazing?
But I head out the door without answering her. She has already started the video again. From the living room comes the sound of wildcats screaming.

Asher gets out of the car to open my door of the Jeep.
He was raised well,
my mother would say.

He’s been like that for two weeks now—so attentive that he seems to know when I am cold, hungry, or tired before I even realize it myself. He has been charming, funny, self-deprecating—the perfect boyfriend. And he’s touched me like I’m made of glass. I know he is still intent on proving to me that his outburst at the fencing meet was an anomaly, but I already know that. Whatever it was that made Asher so possessive there hasn’t resurfaced. If he’s trying to convince anyone now, it’s himself.

We are supposed to be going to brunch, but I realize, as he starts driving, that something is off. He’s drumming his free hand against the gearshift, and he seems lost in his own head. “I was thinking maybe we could go somewhere…else.”

“Sure,” I say. I don’t care what we do, as long as I’m with him.

But my answer doesn’t seem to put him at ease. “Is everything…okay?”

“There’s something about me that you don’t know,” says Asher.

“Okay,” I say slowly.

I cannot imagine that whatever’s making him nervous is something that would affect how I feel about him. Because, of course, there are things about me I haven’t revealed, either.

I want him to tell me, because I want to know everything about him. I want to know what makes him tick. But whatever age of honesty this ushers into our relationship, it won’t be
I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.

Because I love Asher, but not enough to risk everything.

I am just falling, falling deep into the Sea of Asher, and I want to
see everything, even the murk on the ocean floor. But it’s not going to go both ways.

“You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“I promise.” I wait for him to spill the beans, but he doesn’t say anything. Then he drives past the town line. “Where are we going?”

“To Massachusetts,” he says. “We’re going to see my dad.”

“Your dad?” I know that Olivia is a single mom, like mine. I know his parents are divorced. But in all the time Asher and I have been together, he has never spoken about his dad.

“That’s the secret,” he says. “That I see him once a month. At the Chili’s in Leominster.” He lets this sink in. “My mom doesn’t know.”

“Why not?”

We drive in silence for a little bit. “You could say they parted on—bad terms. It was pretty ugly.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“I didn’t see him for a long time,” says Asher. “But just about a year ago, I stalked him on Facebook. I sent him a message, and he answered. We went back and forth, eventually decided to meet. I hadn’t seen him since I was six. I guess I— Well, it’s not like I forgave him for everything. But I was curious. It was like there’d always been this hole in me, and I wanted to know what it would be like if I ever filled it up.”

“What’s he like?”

“You’ll see,” says Asher.

“That sounds ominous.”

“No, no,” says Asher. “He’s excited to meet you.”

“He knows I’m coming?”

“Oh yeah,” says Asher. “I told him all about you.”

That makes me glow inside. “What did you tell him?”

“Fishing for compliments?” Asher jokes. “That you play the cello. That you know the names of all the state capitals. That you can recite
The Princess Bride
from memory.”

“Yeah?” I say with a smile. “What else did you tell him?”

“I told him I love you,” he says. “And that you’re the most important thing in the world to me right now.”

And just like that, I’m completely slain. I want to kiss him until neither of us can breathe anymore and we die like that, asphyxiated by joy. But my throat closes up and I’ve lost my ability to talk, so instead I unbuckle my seatbelt and I lean my head on his shoulder and curl my arm across his chest.

Outside, the trees are orange and yellow and red and everything is on fire, as if we are the only two people in the world and the whole universe is blazing around us.

“I’m glad you found your dad,” I say finally.

“You said,” Asher asks carefully, “that your father died, when you were little?”

I pull back from Asher, refasten my seatbelt. It makes a sharp
click
.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

ASHER’S FATHER IS
handsome, charming, funny, and larger than life, but there’s something so practiced about it that I feel like it’s a show. He puts down a ten-dollar tip on our thirty-dollar breakfast. From the way he puts down the bill you can tell he wants to make sure Asher and I have noticed, but also that he wants us to be sure that we didn’t think he
wanted
us to notice.

“Dad, that’s thirty percent,” says Asher.

Our waitress, a curvaceous young woman named Tiffany, comes to pick up the check. “Well, she’s worth it,” says Mr. Fields—or Braden, as he insists I call him. He winks at her, and she blushes.

“Thank you,
Doctor,
” says Tiffany, and I can tell from this that Tiffany’s waited on Braden before.

Braden watches her walk away, then turns to Asher, his eyes twinkling. “And thank
you,
Tiffany.” It’s the kind of code traded between men—a semaphore for
She’s hot, amirite?
I remember, a long time ago, when boys used to say that kind of thing in my presence, back when they thought that I spoke their secret language, too.

He looks at the receding Tiffany again, and for a moment his eyes narrow, like he’s a lion zeroing in on a wildebeest. Then he smiles.
“Summer between high school and college,” he says, “I had a job waiting tables. I never forgot how much it meant to me, somebody giving me a good tip.”

“You waited tables?” says Asher. “I’ve never heard this story before.” My heart breaks for Asher a little. He is so, so thirsty for stories about his father, especially ones that took place when Braden was the same age Asher is now.

“Lenny’s Clam Shack, Newport News, Virginia. The only place in town that was open past eleven at night. It’d be quiet as the grave and then suddenly the place was packed. At dawn we’d all go out on the beach and watch the sun rise.”

“Did you ever take Mom there?” Asher asks.

There’s the shortest pause as Asher’s mom gets mentioned. “No,” he says. “We didn’t meet until I was a resident.” Braden looks at me, smoothly changing the subject. “Asher says you’re a musician? You’re hoping to go to a conservatory?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I say. “But I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’d be better if I went to some liberal arts college, and just majored in music. If I go to Oberlin, or Peabody, or Berklee, I’m afraid all I’ll do is practice and I won’t have time to do anything else.”

“I get that, Lily,” he says, looking thoughtful. “I was so focused on premed in college I never got to do a semester abroad, or play club sports, or act in a play. I wish I had, sometimes. I was the lead in my high school musical.”

“Seriously?” says Asher, surprised again. “What was the show?”

“
Oliver!
” says Braden. “I was Fagin.”

“
I’m reviewing,
” I sing to him
,
“
the situation…
”

“
Can a fellow be a villain all his life?
” he sings back to me, and laughs.

“All right, you two,” says Asher. “Break it up.”

“That’s such a great show,” I say. “You know what’s weird, Lionel Bart wrote that one perfect musical, and that was it.”

Braden shrugs. “There’s a lot of people who just have one great work in them, though, aren’t there? The guy who wrote
The Music Man
—”

“Meredith Willson,” I say.

Braden narrows his eyes at me. Is he pissed I keep one-upping him? “Sounds like you know a lot about musical theater, Lily.”

“She knows a lot about
everything,
” Asher says, squeezing my hand. Braden gets out his pager, stares at it for a second like he’s worried, then he gets out his phone, and stares at
that
. After about ten seconds, he puts them both away.

“Well,” he says, and that’s how we know it is time to leave. “I’m going to hit the men’s room before I go back.”

Asher and I wait in the booth. From speakers in the ceiling I can hear the sound of Miles Davis playing “Straight, No Chaser.” It’s the classic sextet, with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones.

Asher looks at me wryly. “What do you think of him?”

“Smooth,” I say. “He’s
real
smooth.”

“Surprised?” says Asher, and I detect what sounds like pride in his voice, although I didn’t mean it as a compliment.

I look down at my hands, braced around a cup of coffee. I’m wearing a shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves, and a gray cuff bracelet to hide the scars on my right wrist. I saw Braden eyeing it earlier, and I wonder if he suspected. He is a doctor, after all.

From my vantage point in the booth, I can see Braden come out of the bathroom. Instead of returning to the table, though, he crosses to the cash register and starts talking to our waitress. There’s a strange intimacy between them that I can detect all the way across the room. He takes one of her hands, and gives it a squeeze. His eyes are fixed on her, like a lighthouse illuminating a ship at sea. Then he slips a card into her hand. He glances over and sees me and for a moment his expression looks weird again, like I’ve clearly witnessed something he didn’t want anyone to see.

Braden strolls over to us.

“Ready to head out?” he says.

We get up from the table and follow him into the crisp October light. The Chili’s borders a small park, and as we stand there an acorn pings off the windshield of Asher’s Jeep and rolls toward Braden
Fields’s feet. He picks it up and puts it in my palm, like the heavens have presented him with a gift, and in his generosity he’s decided to pass it on to me. “Here you go, Lily,” he says. “Take this home and plant it. Someday you’ll have an oak tree.”

“Thank you,” I tell him.

“Did you ever hear the story about the man who asked his gardener to plant a tree? And the gardener complained that the tree was slow growing, and wouldn’t mature for a hundred years. And the man replied—”

“
There’s no time to lose then, plant it this afternoon,
” I say.

For a moment Braden gives me that look again, like he’s annoyed with me. Then he smiles. “Right,” he says.

Braden grasps his son’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze. “See you next month,” he says to Asher. He leans forward and kisses me on the left cheek, and then on the right one, European style.

A few moments later, Asher and I are headed north again, through the screaming colors of fall. We don’t say anything for a while. I guess I’m waiting for him to start, and he’s waiting for me. Finally, Asher says, “So?”

I say, “So.”

“What do you think of him?”

I turn to him and blurt out, “Did he cheat on your mom?”

“What?” Asher asks, surprised. “Why?”

I don’t want to tell him what I saw, but I don’t
not
want to tell him, either. I shrug. “I didn’t get the greatest vibe from him.”

To my surprise Asher doesn’t answer right away. Is this because he doesn’t think his father is sketchy? Or because he does, and he was hoping I wouldn’t pick up on it?

“When I told you things were bad between my parents before the divorce,” says Asher, slowly. “What I didn’t say was…how.”