The Secret Life of Bees (23 page)

“I never would have done it, except T. Ray said the man who beat Rosaleen was the meanest hater of colored people anywhere, and it would be just like him to come back and kill her. I couldn't leave her in there.”

It was scary, my secrets spilled out across the room, like a garbage truck had backed up and dumped its sorry contents across the floor for her to sort through. But that wasn't what frightened me most. It was the way August leaned back in her chair and looked off toward the window with her gaze skimming the top of my head, looking at nothing but the sticky air, her thoughts a nerve-racking mystery.

A fever broke along my neck.

“I don't mean to be a bad person,” I said, and stared at my hands, how they were folded together like hands in prayer. “I can't seem to help it.”

You would think I was totally cried out, but tears beaded again along my lids. “I do all the wrong things. I tell lies, all the time. Not to you. Well, I have—but for good reasons. And I hate people. Not just T. Ray but lots of people. The girls at school, and they haven't done anything to me except ignore me. I hate Willifred Marchant, the poet of Tiburon, and I don't even know her. Sometimes I hate Rosaleen because she embarrasses me. And when I first came here, I hated June.”

A flood of silence now. It rose like water; I heard a roar in my head, rain in my ears.

Look at me. Put your hand back on mine. Say something.

By now my nose was running along with my eyes. I was sniffling, wiping my cheeks, unable to stop my mouth from spewing out every horrible thing I could drum up about myself, and once I was finished…well, if she could love me then, if she could say,
Lily, you are still a special flower planted on the earth,
then maybe I would be able to look in the mirrors in her parlor and see the river glistening in my eyes, flowing on despite the things that had died in it.

“But all of that, that's nothing,” I said. I was on my feet needing to go someplace, but there was no place to go. We were on an island. A floating blue island in a pink house where I spilled out my guts and then hoped I wasn't tossed out to sea to wait for my punishment.

“I—”

August was looking at me, waiting. I didn't know if I could say it.

“It was my fault she died. I—I killed her.” I sobbed and dropped straight down onto my knees on the rug. It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said,
You are unlovable, Lily Owens. Unlovable. Who could love you? Who in this world could ever love you?

I sank farther down, onto my heels, hardly aware of myself mumbling the words out loud. “I am unlovable.” When I looked up, I saw dust particles floating in the lamplight, August standing, looking down at me. I thought she might try to pull me to my feet, but instead she knelt beside me and brushed the hair back from my face.

“Oh, Lily,” she said. “Child.”

“I accidentally killed her,” I said, staring straight into her eyes.

“Listen to me now,” said August, tilting my chin to her face. “That's a terrible, terrible thing for you to live with. But you're
not
unlovable. Even if you did accidentally kill her, you are still the most dear, most lovable girl I know. Why, Rosaleen loves you. May loved you. It doesn't take a wizard to see Zach loves you. And every one of the Daughters loves you. And June, despite her ways, loves you, too. It just took her a while longer because she resented your mother so much.”

“She resented my mother? But why?” I said, realizing that June must have known who I was all along, too.

“Oh, it's complicated, just like June. She couldn't get over me working as a maid in your mother's house.” August gave her head a shake. “I know it wasn't fair, but she took it out on Deborah, and then on you. But even June came around to loving you, didn't she?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Mostly, though, I want you to know,
I
love you. Just like I loved your mother.”

August stood up, but I stayed where I was, holding her words inside me. “Give me your hand,” she said, reaching down. Getting to my feet, I felt dizzy around the edges, that feeling like you've stood up too fast.

All this love coming to me. I didn't know what to do with it.

I wanted to say,
I love you, too. I love you all.
The feeling rose up in me like a column of wind, but when it got to my mouth, it had no voice, no words. Just a lot of air and longing.

“We both need a little breather,” August said, and she plodded toward the kitchen.

 

August poured us glasses of ice water from the refrigerator. We took them to the back porch, where we sat in the porch swing, taking little gulps of coolness and listening to the chains creak. It's surprising how soothing that sound can be. We hadn't bothered to turn on the overhead light, and that was soothing, too—just sitting in the dark.

After a few minutes August said, “Here's what I can't figure out, Lily—how you knew to come here.”

I pulled the wooden picture of black Mary from my pocket and handed it to her. “It belonged to my mother,” I said. “I found it in the attic, the same time I found her photograph.”

“Oh, my Lord,” she said, her hand going up to the side of her mouth. “I gave this to your mother not long before she died.”

She set her water glass on the floor and walked across the porch. I didn't know whether to keep talking, so I waited for her to say something, and when she didn't, I went and stood beside her. She had her lips tight together and her eyes scanning the night. The picture was clutched in her hand, but her hand dangled by her side.

It took a full minute for her to pull it up so we could both stare at it.

“It has ‘Tiburon, S.C.' written on the back of it,” I said.

August turned it over. “Deborah must have written that.” Something close to a smile passed over her face. “That would've been just like her. She had an album full of pictures, and she'd write on the back of every single one of them the place it was taken, even if it was her own house.” She handed me the picture. I stared at it, letting my finger move across the word “Tiburon.”

“Who would've thought?” August said.

We went and sat in the swing, where we rocked back and forth, making little pushes on the floor with our feet. She stared straight ahead. Her slip strap had fallen down to her elbow, and she didn't even notice.

June always said that most people bit off more than they could chew, but August chewed more than she bit off. June loved to tease August about the way she pondered things, how one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say,
Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.

Thunder rumbled over the trees. I thought of my mother's tea parties, tiny sandwiches for a doll's mouth, and it washed me in sadness. Maybe because I would've loved so much to have attended something like that. Maybe because all the sandwiches would've been peanut butter, my mother's favorite, and I wasn't even that crazy about it. I wondered at the poem August had made her learn, whether it had stuck with her after she got married. Had she lain in her bed listening to T. Ray snore, reciting it while she fell asleep, wishing to God she could run away with Robert Frost?

I gave a sideways glance at August. I forced my mind back to that moment in her bedroom when I'd confessed the worst of human things. Upon hearing it, she'd said,
I love you. Just like I loved your mother.

“All right then,” said August, like we'd never stopped talking. “The picture explains how you came to Tiburon, but how in the world did you find
me
?”

“That was easy,” I said. “We hadn't been here any time before I spotted your Black Madonna Honey, and there was the same picture on it as my mother had. The Black Madonna of Breznichar of Bohemia.”

“You said that real nice,” August told me.

“I've been practicing.”

“Where did you see the honey?”

“I was in that Frogmore Stew General Store out on the edge of town. I asked this man in a bow tie where he got it. He's the one who told me where you lived.”

“That would be Mr. Grady.” She shook her head. “I swear, it makes me think you were
meant
to find us.”

I
was
meant to, I didn't have a doubt about it. I just wish I knew where I was meant to end up. I looked down at our laps, how both of us had our hands laying palm side up on top of our thighs, like we were both waiting for something to drop in.

“So why don't we talk some more about your mother?” she said.

I nodded. Every bone in my body was cracking with the need to talk about her.

“Anytime you need to stop and take another break, you just tell me.”

“All right,” I said. What was coming, I couldn't imagine. Something that required
breaks.
Breaks for what? So I could dance for joy? So she could revive me after I fainted dead away? Or was the idea of breaks so I could let the bad news sink all the way in?

A dog started barking way off in the distance. August waited for it to stop, then said, “I started working for Deborah's mother in 1931. Deborah was four years old. The cutest child, but always into something. I mean, a real handful. For one thing, she used to walk in her sleep. One night she walked outside and climbed a ladder the roofers had left leaning against the house. Her sleepwalking nearly drove her mother crazy.” She laughed.

“And your mother had an imaginary friend. You ever had one?” I shook my head. “She called hers Tica Tee. She would talk to her out loud like she was standing right there in front of us, and if I forgot to set a place for Tica Tee at the table, Deborah would throw a fit. Once in a while, though, I'd set a place and she'd say, ‘What are you doing? Tica Tee's not here. She's off starring in the movies.' Your mother loved Shirley Temple.”

“Tica Tee,” I said, wanting to feel that on my tongue.

“That Tica Tee was something,” August said. “Whatever Deborah struggled with, Tica Tee could do it perfectly. Tica Tee made hundreds on her school papers, got gold stars in Sunday school, made her bed, cleaned her plate. People told your grandmother—Sarah was her name—that she ought to take Deborah to this doctor in Richmond who specialized in children with problems. But I told her, ‘Don't worry about it. She's just working things out in her own way. She'll grow out of Tica Tee in time.' And she did.”

Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.

“It doesn't sound like me and my mother were anything alike,” I said.

“Oh, but you were. She had a streak in her like you do. Suddenly she would up and do something other girls wouldn't dream of.”

“Like what?”

August stared over my shoulder and smiled. “One time she ran away from home. I can't even remember what she was upset about. We looked for her long past dark. Found her curled up in a drainage ditch, sound asleep.”

The dog had started barking again, and August grew quiet. We listened like it was some kind of serenade, while I sat with my eyes closed, trying to picture my mother asleep in a ditch.

After a while I said, “How long did you work for—my grandmother?”

“A good long time. Over nine years. Until I got that teaching job I told you about. We still kept up after I left, though.”

“I bet they hated it when you moved down here to South Carolina.”

“Poor Deborah cried and cried. She was nineteen by then, but she cried like she was six.”

The swing had slowed to a stop, and neither one of us thought to rev it back up.

“How did my mother get down here?”

“I'd been here two years,” August said. “Had started my honey business and June was teaching school, when I got a long-distance phone call from her. She was crying her eyes out, saying her mother had died. ‘I don't have anybody left but you,' she kept saying.”

“What about her father? Where was he?”

“Oh, Mr. Fontanel died when she was a baby. I never even met him.”

“So she moved down here to be with you?”

“Deborah had a friend from high school who'd just moved to Sylvan. She was the one who convinced Deborah it was a good place to be. Told her there were jobs and men back from the war. So Deborah moved. I think it was a lot because of me, though. I think she wanted me nearby.”

The dots were all starting to connect. “My mother came to Sylvan,” I said, “met T. Ray, and got married.”

“That's right,” August said.

When we'd first come out onto the porch, the sky had been clotted with stars, the Milky Way shining like an actual road you could walk down and find your mother standing at the end of with her hands on her hips. But now a damp fog rolled into the yard and settled over the porch. A minute later a light rain fell out of it.

I said, “The part I will never figure out is why she married
him.
”

“I don't think your father was always like he is now. Deborah told me about him. She loved the fact he was decorated in the war. He was so brave, she thought. Said he treated her like a princess.”

I could have laughed in her face. “This isn't the same Terrence Ray, I can tell you that right now.”