Mad Honey: A Novel (47 page)

Across the gallery, I see Ava Campanello waiting, her face pinched and drawn.

Judge Byers is pacing again. “Let the record reflect that the defendant and his attorney are present, along with the State represented by its attorney. I have been notified by the bailiff that the jury has sent a message that they have reached a verdict.” She nods at the bailiff. “Please bring the jury in.”

I think of what Jordan said, and as each member of the jury enters, I scrutinize their faces. Eleven of them sit down in the box, and stare straight ahead.

Fuck.

The twelfth juror looks directly at Asher.

“Madame Foreperson,” the judge asks, “has the jury reached a verdict?”

“We have, Your Honor.”

Judge Byers turns to Asher. “Mr. Fields,” she says. “Please rise.”

When Asher stands, dragged upright by Jordan, I grab Selena’s hand.

“To the charge of murder in the first degree, how does the jury find?”

The foreperson turns to the judge. “We find the defendant not guilty.”

The courtroom explodes, reporters racing outside to file their stories, Jordan folding his arms around a stunned Asher, Selena smothering me with a cry of delight. Dimly I’m aware of the judge banging her gavel, thanking the jury for their service, discharging them. She turns to Asher. “Mr. Fields, the jury has rendered a unanimous
verdict of not guilty and thus the charge of murder in the first degree is dismissed. You are free to go.” She smacks her gavel. “Court is adjourned.”

Jordan jumps over the wooden divider and sweeps me into his arms, lifting me off my feet and swinging me around. He gives Selena a smacking kiss of congratulations. It’s almost hard to breathe with the blanket of relief that has settled over us.

There are two people in the courtroom who aren’t celebrating.

Without Jordan to lean on, Asher has sunk back into his seat, like his legs have simply given out. He leans forward, his face buried in his hands, sobbing.

About ten feet away, as if she is reflected in a mirror, Ava Campanello is curled in the same snail shell of grief.

JORDAN PREENS FOR
the reporters, striking a balance between crowing over his own prowess and humbly remembering that a girl died, albeit not at the hands of Asher. But we do not linger at the courthouse, and after we arrive home, he and Selena pack up their suitcases, intent on getting home to Sam before his school day ends.

I help Jordan load everything into Selena’s car. While Selena is saying goodbye to Asher, I stand in front of my big brother. “Well,” I say. “Consider your debt clear.”

“Debt?”

“You may not have saved me from Braden,” I tell him. “But you saved me now.”

“I saved Asher,” he corrects. “You still get a freebie.” He folds me into his embrace, and I tuck my head under his chin and try not to cry.

“What happens now?” I whisper.

“Now you get to be a mom,” Jordan says. “He’s going to need you.”

I nod. “Thanks, Jordan.”

“I’d say
anytime,
but let’s not do this again, shall we?”

Then Selena hugs me, while Jordan claps Asher on the back.
“Here’s the thing,” I hear Jordan say. “When you’ve lost someone, being acquitted doesn’t make it hurt any less. So if you want to talk to someone—other than your mother—well, I wouldn’t be averse to breakfast at a Chili’s, say, once a month.”

Asher’s lips twitch. “Good to know.”

“But you’re paying,” Jordan says. “Since I took this case pro bono.” He grins as Selena ducks into the passenger seat of the car. “Remember, Asher,” he says. “You have a lot of people looking out for you.”

Asher nods, and Jordan turns to me one last time. “One more word to the wise,” he says, under his breath. “Use protection.”

“What?”

“My bedroom window looks over toward the hives,” Jordan says. “
I’m going to see if a skunk got into the bees,
my ass.”

A laugh breaks out of me, but it feels like a butterfly freed from a cocoon. I smack him across the shoulder. “You’ve officially overstayed your welcome,” I joke, but all the same, I stand on the porch and watch him drive away until I cannot see the car anymore.

I HAVEN’T TAKEN
a nap since I was in college, but once Jordan and Selena leave I am so exhausted that I fall asleep at the kitchen table, after putting my head down for a moment while sorting through the mail. When I wake up, it’s because there is a pounding in my head, or so I think until I sit up, wincing at the sound of hammering.

In the slanting light of late afternoon, it’s hard to see what’s going on at the edge of the woods near the hives, but I walk briskly along the strawberry fields until I find the source of the noise. The unmistakable rhythmic smack of metal striking wood is coming from inside the tree house.

I know Asher is responsible even before I climb the dangling rope ladder. My head crests through the little trapdoor in the floor of the structure. He is wearing a T-shirt that is damp the length of his spine. As I watch, he wipes his brow on his shoulder, then takes a nail from a row between his pressed lips and hammers it into a board that he’s using to close up one of the windows.

“Asher?” I say softly, so that I don’t surprise him.

He finishes pounding the nail in, and then turns to me, as if he’s expected me all along. “Oh,” he says. “Hi.”

I look around at the interior: all traces of occupation have been removed. The ship’s wheel and the hammock and the wooden box full of old games have been disposed of. The only hint that anyone was ever up here are the initials carved into the rafters, and the afghan, folded carefully.

“Do you need a hand?” I ask, not sure what I am volunteering for.

“I’m almost done.”

I watch for a moment as he finishes fastening the board, then I pick up a broom and sweep the dust into piles that I push out the trapdoor. I am careful not to touch the afghan, which feels special, somehow. Sacred.

Asher tucks the hammer into the belt of his jeans and hands me the box of nails. He opens the trapdoor and tosses out a few extra pieces of wood, then motions so I can climb down first. At the base of the rope ladder I wait for him, but he stops on the third rung, curling his arm into the winding twine like a circus performer so that he can anchor himself while he nails the trapdoor shut.

I open my mouth to tell him he’s left the afghan behind but then I realize that’s exactly what he intended.

When Asher gets down to ground level, he grabs a shovel I had not noticed, and stalks deeper into the woods. I hear the crunch of soil, and then, a few moments later, his footsteps. He holds the shovel in one hand, and in the other, the necks of several bright, wild daylilies, their roots trailing dirt. He sets them down gently at the base of the tree house, then digs a small hole, and plants a lily in it. As I watch him pat down the ground, I kneel beside him to help—but a low noise from the back of Asher’s throat makes me realize this is something
he
has to do.

I step back, and I bear witness.

When Asher is finished, he lets his hand gently trail over the exuberant orange petals, dusting his fingertips with pollen. His eyes are damp, and he’s breathing hard, like he’s just come off the ice. He
swallows, then looks up at the tree house—both an end, now, and a beginning. “Okay,” he says, his voice barely more than breath. “Okay.”

I loop my arm through his. I lean on him, or maybe he leans on me, as we walk toward the house, leaving his childhood sealed behind.

LILY
10

AUGUST 7, 2018

Four months before

We’ve been in the new house for less than twenty-four hours when I’m reminded that my mom, in spite of being the biggest badass I know, is also really fragile. I’m not the only person under this roof who has a few well-hidden broken places.

We’d done so well together on the long drive east. All the moments when you’d expect us to get on each other’s nerves turned out to be fun, even the obstacles and frustrations of the road emerging, in the end, as parts of the adventure.

We stayed at Motel 6s, Holiday Inns, college guesthouses. One night, somewhere in Wyoming, we were both so exhausted that Mom just pulled off the highway and we slept in a field in our sleeping bags, Boris curled up between us. Over our heads was a universe of stars.

I’ll never forget that, as long as I live.

When we finally pulled into the driveway of this house last night, Mom turned off the engine and we just sat for a moment listening to the silence, looking at the dark windows. Crickets chirped from a field.

“Well,” Mom announced. “We have arrived.”

The key was right where the landlords said it would be, hidden under a flowerpot on the front porch. But they’d said that the key was mostly a formality. People in Adams, we were told, didn’t go in much for locking doors.

The moving van wasn’t supposed to arrive until the morning, so
we just spread sleeping bags out on the floor of the living room and pretended we were camping. Mom got the last bottle of chardonnay from the cooler and we drank it out of plastic cups. We opened all the windows and listened to the sounds of New Hampshire at night fill the place, until we finally lay down and closed our eyes. The last thing I thought was
This is my new home. Here’s where I can start my life at last.

We woke up to the sound of the moving van pulling into the driveway. Mom and I got dressed and opened the door. There was the truck, full of everything we’d packed up two weeks before in California. A big guy stood there with a clipboard. He had his name, Hurley, stitched on his uniform. He looked me up and down.
Well, hello, sweetheart,
he said.

Now, late afternoon, we have the rugs down and the chairs and sofas more or less in the places where we expect they’ll stay. Mom has opened a big box of framed photos and art and is going through each one gasping with joy, like all these boxes are presents sent to her by someone who knew
exactly
what she always wanted.

Just shy of four o’clock, Mom goes into the kitchen to make herself a cup of chamomile tea. I can hear her rooting through the boxes until, with a cry of triumph, she locates the teapot.

I keep unpacking as I hear the water slowly coming to a boil. I pull an old photo album out of a box; it’s an album I don’t remember seeing before. I open the cover, and—just like that—my seven-year-old self stares back, wearing a little suit.

I flip the page to discover more photos. Our old house in Seattle. The ranger station in Olympic National Park. Me on the lawn of the Catholic church of our old hometown, holding an Easter basket. There’s even the one of me posing with a baseball bat at the Saturday morning T-ball league. I remember that one. It’s the picture of me Dad kept in his office at work, the one that was taken the very same morning I’d snuck into the bathroom and put on—and then rubbed off—my mother’s lipstick.

“I made you a cup,” says Mom, coming into the room. “Do you want—?” But now she sees what I’m looking at.

“What
is
all this?” I ask her, but I know what it is.

“Don’t be mad,” she says. “I just can’t bring myself to throw those photos away.” She sits down next to me on the couch. “It’s not that I want that life back. It’s just—”

And just like that, Mom’s eyes fill with tears.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and what surprises me is that it
is
okay. There was a time when a photo of me from pretransition would have filled me with shame and anger. Back then, it was as if my womanhood was something that could be taken away from me—by someone saying the wrong thing, by someone using the wrong pronoun, even by an old picture. But now, after this long journey, my womanhood is as solid and true as the earth. If Mom wants to keep her old photos, that’s okay.

“Is it?” says Mom. “Because I can throw it all away if you—”

“No,” I tell her. “I’m not the only one who went through transition. You did, too.”

She wipes her eyes. In the album before us is a picture of me with Puppy Boris. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t have any history,” she says. “I look in the mirror, and I see this middle-aged woman, and I wonder, who
is
this person? How did I get here?”

I give Mom a squeeze, and it’s weird. For a moment it’s like I’m the parent, looking out for her. I have a flash of me in the future, in my sixties, taking care of a very, very old version of Mom.

When I was little, on weekends, she let me be as feminine as I wanted. I never wore a dress to school, but I had some cute outfits I was allowed to wear at home. I had a set of hot rollers and some pink tights. I even had a princess costume, with a hanky hem and a pair of translucent wings that strapped over my shoulders.

One day, I swept into the living room with my wings and a wand with a sparkling star. My father, drinking a PBR, looked up and said, “What are you supposed to be?”

I told him the truth:
I’m queen of the fairies!

My father slapped his hand to his forehead and said,
Jesus fucking Christ.

I don’t know if that’s the day that Mom and Dad began fighting
about me; my guess is that it started long before that. They tried to hide it, but there were times I was all they talked about, my mother saying,
We have to let him be himself,
and my father saying,
We can’t let him get crushed by the world.

My father kept that photo of me holding the baseball bat in his office, year after year. He never changed it, even after I stopped looking anything like that boy.

By fall of 2011 my parents worked out what my father called
a compromise,
and Mom later told me was her
surrender
. “I thought if I agreed to this one thing,” she said, “that I could stay married.”

What she agreed to was sending me to a private school, Pacific Day, starting in sixth grade. It was over a hundred years old, had a campus of rolling fields, an old stone library. “They have a fencing team, Liam,” my father said, trying to make me feel good about it. “They have an orchestra!” I’d already been playing cello for three years by then.

None of that mattered to me, though, or quite frankly, to him, either. What mattered was that it was an
all-boys school
. We had to wear coats and ties. And call the teachers “sir.”

All summer long, I begged my parents,
Don’t make me go. Please don’t make me go.

My father:
I’m not saying it won’t be hard, Liam. But it’s going to be good for you. It’s going to teach you how to be a man.

I so wanted to say the words
That’s not what I want to learn.
But I didn’t want to disappoint them. Sometimes I thought of the words my father had spoken years before.
You can be anything you want to be, Liam.
And it occurred to me that maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could teach myself how to want to be a boy. That the sense of self I’d had from my earliest memory would somehow disappear, if only I worked harder at it.

By the time of my first morning at Pacific Day, I was determined to be a boy. I thought I could learn it, the way I’d studied the cello: with patience and practice.

But it was clear that at Pacific Day you were already supposed to know how to be a boy. At lunch the first day, I was jumped by a pair
of eighth graders. One tied my hands behind my back with a bungee cord, and the other paraded me through the school, shouting,
Hey, you see this faggot!
And everyone laughed, like this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

I tried
staying the course,
as my father put it, for a few more weeks, but every day there was another humiliation. I was beaten up a lot. I didn’t make any friends. I started doing badly on tests—flailing in class for the first time ever. And worst of all, even worse than the cruelty of the boys, were the teachers. They treated me like I was a joke, as though the way I was in the world was something I had deliberately chosen in order to attract attention.
You’d better get with the program,
said the headmaster, Mr. Parsons.

Mom was working at Olympic National Park that fall, spending four or five days each week on the coast at the ranger station. That meant that Dad and I were alone most nights. We ate takeout in silence, and then I retreated to my room, locked the door, and put on my wings.

Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if Mom had left Boris at the house while she was out in Olympic. But that fall, Boris went with her to the national park, where he spent hour after hour chasing after the sticks that tourists threw for him into the ocean, and bringing them back.

One day, Mr. Parsons called Dad at work and told him he had to pick me up and take me home. When he arrived at the headmaster’s office, Dad found me sitting in a chair. I had the beginnings of a black eye and a contusion on my right cheek from where I’d been dragged against the playground asphalt.

“Mr. O’Meara,” said Mr. Parsons. “I’m sorry you’ve had to be disturbed at work, but I think you’ll understand.”

Dad took a look at me. “I’m sorry,” he said to Mr. Parsons. “I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s not my business, of course,” said Mr. Parsons. “But I need to ask if everything is all right at home.”

“It’s
fine,
” said Dad, his jaw getting tense. “And you’re right, it’s none of your business.”

“I don’t mean to pry. It’s just that in situations like this, it’s often a quiet cry for help.”

I just sat there in shame. I
had
called for help, actually, and there had been nothing quiet about it. But no one had come, not until I’d already been hurt. Now, in Mr. Parsons’s office, I was learning the truth—that the boys who’d beaten me up weren’t the ones who were in trouble.

The night before, when I’d painted my nails salmon pink, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what was going to happen. But still I was amazed that Mr. Parsons was punishing me—suspending me, in fact, instead of the boys who’d pounded me against the blacktop.

I thought that salmon pink was a pretty conservative color, actually.

My father told me to get my things, and I did. “When can he come back?” he asked Mr. Parsons as we headed out into the hall.

“When he’s ready to rejoin the community,” said the headmaster. “When he’s ready to be a
man.
”

We started to drive home. “Well?” my father said. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I pulled my hair out of its ponytail and shook my head so that it all fell down around my shoulders. “I’m never going back there again,” I told him.

“No?” said Dad. “What are you going to do instead, Liam? Tell me that.”

I looked my father in the eye. “I’m going to be free.”

Dad laughed. “Maybe I should send you to the Porter School, see how you like that. Is that what you want?”

The Porter School was a fancy school on the coast. All girls.

“Could I?” I said, not realizing he was joking. “Could I really?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing’s the matter with me,” I said. “Except you.”

Dad didn’t say anything, but I could tell from the way his jaw was moving he wasn’t done.

Finally I said, “You told me I could be anything I wanted.”

“What?” said Dad. “When did I say that?”

“At the circus,” I said. “Five years ago.”

“What circus? I never took you to any circus.”

“There was a human cannonball, and a woman who rode on the back of a horse.”

“The only circus I’ve been to,” he said, “is the one in our goddamned house.”

When we got home, he told me to go into the bathroom and take the polish off. I hated to see it go. The smell of the acetone stung my sinuses. Each swipe of the cotton ball, dripping with nail polish remover, felt like I was erasing a piece of myself.

Finally my nails were blunt and clean, and I stood there, looking in the mirror.

What’s wrong with you? I asked myself.

Nothing’s the matter with me,
said the girl in the mirror.
Except you.

I can’t be you. It’s too hard.

Who else are you going to be
? said the girl.
Are you really going to spend your whole life pretending to be someone else?

All my mother’s makeup was lying right there on the counter. I dabbed a little concealer on my index finger and smoothed it over the blue bruise beneath my eye. Then I put some foundation on to make the rest of my face look normal. There was a compact, which helped it all set, and a little bronzer to put color back in my cheeks. I traced an eye pencil over my upper lid, and brushed my lashes with mascara. Then I put on one of her lipsticks—a MAC color called Crème in Your Coffee. I brushed out my hair. One of Mom’s bras was hanging from a towel rack, and I took off my shirt and put it on, filling each cup with a balled-up sock. Then I pulled on a blouse that was in the hamper, a stretchy scoop-neck print with three-quarter-length sleeves.