The Secret Life of Bees (22 page)

When the kiss was over, he looked at me with burning in his face. “Nobody will believe how hard I'm gonna study this year. That jail cell is gonna make me earn grades higher than I ever got. And when this year is over, nothing can keep me from leaving here and going to college.”

“I know you'll do it,” I said. “You will.” And it wasn't just words. I'm good at sizing up people, and I knew for a fact he would make himself into a lawyer. Changes were coming, even to South Carolina—you could practically smell them in the air—and Zach would help bring them. He would be one of those drum majors for freedom that Martin Luther King talked about. That's how I liked to think of Zach now. A drum major.

He faced me, and shifting around on his feet, he said, “I want you to know that I—” He stopped and looked up into the treetops.

I stepped nearer to him. “You want me to know what?”

“That I—I care about you. I think about you all the time.”

It crossed my mind to say there were things he didn't know about me, that he might not care so much if he knew them, but I smiled and said, “I care about you, too.”

“We can't be together now, Lily, but one day, after I've gone away and become somebody, I'm gonna find you, and we'll be together then.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.” He lifted the chain with his dogtag from around his neck and lowered it over my head. “So you won't forget, okay?”

The silver rectangle dropped down under my shirt, where it dangled cold and certain between my breasts. Zachary Lincoln Taylor, resting there, along my heart.

Wading in up to my neck.

I
waited for August in her room. Waiting was a thing I'd had tons of experience doing. Waiting for the girls at school to invite me somewhere. For T. Ray to change his ways. For the police to show up and drag us off to the Everglades prison. For my mother to send a sign of love.

Zach and I had hung around outside till the Daughters of Mary finished in the honey house. We'd helped them clean up the mess in the yard, me stacking plates and cups and Zach folding up card tables. Queenie had smiled and said, “How come you two left before we finished?”

“It got too long,” said Zach.

“So that's what it was,” she teased, and Cressie giggled.

When Zach left, I slipped back into the honey house and retrieved my mother's photograph and her black Mary picture from underneath my pillow. Clutching them in my hands, I glided past the Daughters as they finished up the dishes in the kitchen. They called to me, “Where're you going, Lily?”

I hated to be rude, but I found I couldn't answer, couldn't speak a word of idle talk. I wanted to know about my mother. I didn't care about anything else.

I marched straight into August's room, a room filled with the smell of beeswax. I switched on a lamp and sat on the cedar chest at the end of her bed, where I folded and unfolded my hands eight or ten times. They were cool, damp, with a mind of their own. All they wanted to do was fidget and pop knuckles. I stuck them under my thighs.

The only other time I'd been in August's room was the time I'd fainted during the Daughters of Mary meeting and wakened in her bed. I must have been too muddled then to see it, because it all seemed new to me. You could've wandered around in this room for hours and had a field day looking at her stuff.

For starters, everything was blue. Bedspread, curtains, rug, chair cushion, lamps. Don't get the idea it was boring, though. She had ten different shades of it. Sky blue, lake blue, sailor blue, aqua blue—you name a blue. I had the feeling of scuba diving through the ocean.

On her dressing table, where less interesting people would've put a jewelry box or a picture frame, August had a fish aquarium turned upside down with a giant piece of honeycomb inside it. Honey had oozed out and formed puddles on the tray underneath.

On her bedside tables were beeswax candles, melted down into brass holders. I wondered if they could be the ones I'd personally created. It gave me a little thrill to think so, how I had helped to light August's room when it was dark.

I walked over and inspected the books arranged neatly on her bookshelf.
The Advanced Language of Beekeeping, Apiary Science, Bee Pollination, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, The Myths of Greece, The Cultivation of Honey, Bee Legends Around the World, Mary Through the Ages.
I pulled the last one off the shelf and opened it across my lap, thumbing through the pictures. Sometimes Mary was brunette and brown-eyed, other times blond and blue-eyed, but gorgeous every time. She looked like a Miss America contestant. A Miss Mississippi. You can usually count on the girls from Mississippi to win. I couldn't help wishing to see Mary in a swimsuit and heels—before her pregnancy, of course.

The big shock, though, was all the pictures of Mary being presented with a
lily
by the angel Gabriel. In every one, where he showed up to tell her she was going to have the baby of babies, even though she wasn't married yet, he had a big white lily for her. As if this was the consolation prize for the gossip she was in for. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf.

A breeze moved through the room from the open window. I walked to it and stared out at the dark fringe of trees by the edge of the woods, a half moon wedged like a gold coin into a slot, about to drop through the sky with a clink. Voices filtered through the screen. Women voices. They rose in chirps and melted away. The Daughters were leaving. I twisted my hair with my fingers, walked around the throw rug in circles, the way a dog will do before it settles onto the floor.

I thought about prison movies in which they're about to electrocute some prisoner—wrongly convicted, of course—the camera going back and forth between the poor man sweating in his cell block and the clock creeping toward twelve.

I sat down on the cedar chest again.

Footsteps landed on the floorboards in the hallway, precise, unhurried steps. August steps. I sat up straighter, taller, my heart starting to beat so I could hear it in my ears. When she stepped into the room, she said, “I thought I might find you here.”

I had a desire to bolt past her through the door, dive out the window.
You don't have to do this,
I told myself, but the wanting rose up. I had to know.

“Remember when…” I said. My voice came out barely a whisper. I cleared my throat. “Remember when you said we should have a talk?”

She closed the door. A sound so final.
No turning back,
it said.
This is it,
it said.

“I remember it very well.”

I laid out the photograph of my mother on the cedar chest.

August walked over and picked up the picture. “You are the spitting image of her.”

She turned her eyes on me, her big, flickering eyes with the copper fire inside them. I wished I could look out at the world through them just one time.

“It's my mother,” I said.

“I know, honey. Your mother was Deborah Fontanel Owens.”

I looked at her and blinked. She stepped toward me, and the yellow lamplight glazed her glasses so I could no longer make out her eyes. I shifted my position so I could see them better.

She dragged the chair from her dressing table over to the cedar chest and sat down facing me. “I'm so glad we're finally going to talk this out.”

I could feel her knee barely touching mine. A full minute passed without either of us saying a word. She held the picture, and I knew she was waiting for me to break the silence.

“You knew she was my mother all along,” I said, uncertain whether I felt anger, or betrayal, or just plain surprise.

She placed her hand on mine and brushed her thumb back and forth across my skin. “The first day you showed up, I took one look at you and all I could see was Deborah when she was your age. I knew Deborah had a daughter, but I thought no, you couldn't be; it was too much to believe that Deborah's daughter would turn up in my parlor. Then you said your name was Lily, and right that minute I knew who you were.”

Probably I should have expected this. I felt tears gather in the back of my throat, and I didn't even know why. “But—but—you never said a word. How come you didn't tell me?”

“Because you weren't ready to know about her. I didn't want to risk you running away again. I wanted you to have a chance to get yourself on solid ground, get your heart bolstered up first. There's a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course. That's what I've been trying to do.”

It grew so quiet. How could I be mad at her? I had done the same thing. Held back what I knew, and my reasons were not the least bit noble like hers.

“May told me,” I said.

“May told you what?”

“I saw her making a trail of graham crackers and marshmallows for the roaches to follow. My father told me once that my mother used to do the same thing. I figured she'd learned it from May. So I asked her, ‘Did you ever know a Deborah Fontanel?' and she said yes she did, that Deborah had stayed in the honey house.”

August shook her head. “Goodness, there's so much to tell. You remember how I told you I worked as a housekeeper back in Richmond, before I got my teaching job? Well, that was in your mother's house.”

My mother's house.
It seemed odd to think of her with a roof over her head. A person who lay on a bed, ate food at a table, took baths in a tub.

“You knew her when she was little?”

“I used to take care of her,” August said. “I ironed her dresses and packed her school lunch in a paper bag. She loved peanut butter. That's all she wanted. Peanut butter Monday through Friday.”

I let out my breath, realizing I'd been holding it. “What else did she love?”

“She loved her dolls. She would hold little tea parties for them in the garden, and I would make these teeny-tiny sandwiches for their plates.” She paused, like she was remembering. “What she didn't like was schoolwork. I had to stay after her all the time about it. Chase her around calling out spelling words. One time she climbed a tree, hiding up there so she wouldn't have to memorize a poem by Robert Frost. I found her and climbed up there with the book and wouldn't let her come down till she could say the whole thing by heart.”

Closing my eyes, I saw my mother perched beside August on a tree limb going through each line of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which I myself had had to learn for English. I let my head drop, closed my eyes.

“Lily, before we talk any more about your mother, I want you to tell me how you came to be here. All right?”

I opened my eyes and nodded.

“You said your father was dead.”

I glanced down at her hand still on mine, afraid she might move it. “I made that up,” I said. “He's not really dead.”
He just deserves to be dead.

“Terrence Ray,” she said.

“You know my father, too?”

“No, I never met him, only heard about him from Deborah.”

“I call him T. Ray.”

“Not Daddy?”

“He's not the Daddy type.”

“What do you mean?”

“He yells all the time.”

“At you?”

“At everything in the world. But that's not the reason I left.”

“Then what was it, Lily?”

“T. Ray…he told me my mother…” The tears rushed up, and my words came out in high-pitched sounds I didn't recognize. “He said she left me, that she left both of us and ran away.” A wall of glass broke in my chest, a wall I didn't even know was there.

August slid up to the edge of her chair and opened her arms, the way she'd opened them to June that day they'd found May's suicide letter. I leaned into them, felt them close around me. One thing is beautiful beyond my words to say it: August holding you.

I was pressed so close to her I felt her heart like a small throbbing pressure against my chest. Her hands rubbed my back. She didn't say,
Come on now, stop your crying, everything's going to be okay,
which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, “It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.”

So I did. With my mouth pressed against her dress, it seemed like I drew up my whole lifeload of pain and hurled it into her breast, heaved it with the force of my mouth, and she didn't flinch.

She was wet with my crying. Up around her collar the cotton of her dress was plastered to her skin. I could see her darkness shining through the wet places. She was like a sponge, absorbing what I couldn't hold anymore.

Her hands felt warm on my back, and every time I paused to sniff and gasp for a little air, I heard her breathing. Steady and even. In and out. As my crying wound down, I let myself be rocked in her breathing.

Finally I pulled back and looked at her, dazed by the force of what had erupted. She ran her finger along the slope of my nose and smiled a sad kind of smile.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Don't be sorry,” she said.

She went to her dresser and pulled a white handkerchief from the top drawer. It was folded, ironed, with “A.B.” monogrammed on the front in silvery threads. She dabbed softly at my face.

“I want you to know,” I said, “I didn't believe T. Ray when he told me that. I know she never would've left me like that. I wanted to find out about her and prove how wrong he was.”

I watched her move her hand up under her glasses and pinch the place between her eyes. “And that's what made you leave?”

I nodded. “Plus, Rosaleen and I got in trouble downtown, and I knew if I didn't leave, T. Ray was gonna half kill me, and I was tired of being half killed.”

“What sort of trouble?”

I wished I didn't have to go on. I looked at the floor.

“Are you talking about how Rosaleen got the bruises and the cut on her head?”

“All she wanted to do was register her name to vote.”

August squinted like she was trying to understand. “All right, now, you start at the beginning. Okay? Just take your time and tell me what happened.”

The best I could, I told her the miserable details, careful not to leave anything out: Rosaleen practicing writing her name, the three men taunting her, how she poured snuff juice on their shoes.

“A policeman took us to jail,” I said, and I heard how strange the words sounded to my ears. I could only imagine how they sounded to August.

“Jail?” she said. Her bones seemed to soften a little in her body. “They put you in
jail
? What was the charge?”

“The policeman said Rosaleen assaulted the men, but I was there, and she was only protecting herself. That's all.”

August's jaw tightened, and her back went ramrod straight. “How long were you in there?”

“Me, I didn't stay long. T. Ray came and got me out, but they wouldn't let Rosaleen go, and then those men came back and beat her up.”

“Mother of God,” said August. The words hovered over us. I thought of Mary's spirit, hidden everywhere. Her heart a red cup of fierceness tucked among ordinary things. Isn't that what August had said? Here, everywhere, but hidden.

“Well, how did she finally get out?”

Some things you have to take a deep breath and just say. “I went to the hospital where they'd taken her to get stitches, and I—I sneaked her past the policeman.”

“Mother of God,” she said for the second time. She stood up and walked one loop around the room.