Hour of the Bees (15 page)

It’s always hot at the ranch, but tonight, our last night, the heat’s suffocating.

Lu’s been fussing for twenty minutes straight. I’ve tried everything: peekaboo, a puppet show, tossing “dog treats” (Cheerios) into his mouth like he’s a puppy. But Lu fusses in a steady stream until it’s background noise. I check one of the ancient fans we have propped in the windows around the ranch house. Yes, it’s cranked up to full blast, but the fans don’t cool anything off. They just push this hot air around in circles.

It’s driving me crazy.

“Mom.” I fuss a little myself. “Make him stop.”

“He’s got the big three going on,” Mom says. “Hot, hungry, and tired.”

“Aren’t we all,” I mutter, and drag him to Mom. She’s zombie-tired, too, her hair a black nest at her collarbone, but she cuddles Lu to her shoulder while hunting through the pantry for dinner inspiration. Most of the kitchen is packed at this point, which makes our meal options slight.

“Shh,” she tells Lu. “I know, I know, it’s the witching hour.”

That’s what Mom calls this time of day, right before dinner: the witching hour. It’s the perfect description. The border between real life and the impossible feels thin, hazy.

Also, we all turn into grouchy, pouting witches. If I knew a spell that could snap dinner onto the table and smiles on our faces, I’d do it.

Alta’s at the kitchen table, her huge fuchsia headphones covering half her head (sister code for “do not disturb under pain of death”).

Mom’s now opened the fridge for the third time, groaning when no new food magically appears. She forgot to hit the grocery store on her last drive back from Albuquerque.

“Can’t we just call in a pizza?” I say.

Mom shakes her head. “It’s too far to deliver.”

“It’s too hot!” I moan, and lie flat on the kitchen linoleum.

Mom steps over me to get to the sink. “Move, please? You’re in the road.”

I roll until I’m barely out of the way. “I can’t breathe,” I say.

“Carol,” Mom says, and I stop the whining. I hate when my own name is used as a weapon.

I roll one more time and reach in my pocket to rub the seed. I’ve carried it with me since that day I found it in the closet. In a house where death hides around every corner, it’s reassuring to touch something so alive. At least, I hope it’s alive.

The witching hour . . .

Even the sky is witchy tonight, halfway between light and dark, sun and sunless, blue and amber, starry and blank. My own fuse feels shorter than usual. I want Lu to be quiet, Mom to cook dinner, and me to be zoning out, watching the Disney Channel until bed.

Impossible. The TV is packed, anyway.

Tomorrow we’ll put the big-ticket items into the moving van Mom brought down instead of the minivan: tables, couches, beds. We’ll fit the rest of the boxes in, too, filling the gaps and holes in a 3-D version of Tetris. We’ll sweep the floors, turn out the lights, and head back to Albuquerque on that long, lonely highway.

I’ve been counting down the days all summer. I thought I’d be more excited to go home.

There’s a crash outside. The whole house rattles.

Alta rips off her headphones and points out the window. “Fire!”

“What?” Mom nearly drops Lu in her rush to the window.

I smudge my face against the glass. The evening has an orange glow. Yes, a fire — but where?

There’s yelling, too. One of the voices is definitely Serge, hollering from the porch in curse-laced Spanish. Dad responds with a few choice phrases of his own. He sounds underwater.

Serge practically bounces out of his chair with fury, sucking oxygen in gulps. “Put it out, put it out!” he cries.

Mom, Alta, and I beeline it to the porch. Across the pasture, the barn is ablaze, burping balls of fire into the evening air. Wooden beams snap, walls crumble. The whole thing will be gone in minutes.

“Should I call the fire department?” Alta holds up her phone.

“What fire department?” Mom says, bouncing Lu on her hip. “The closest one is fifty miles away.” I guess in the desert, when something’s on fire, you just let it burn.

“Barn’s on fire!” Serge yelps. Mom touches his shoulder, and he jerks away, looking pained. “Make it stop, make Raúl stop!”

“Raúl!” Mom grips the porch rail with white knuckles.

I’m paralyzed, staring at the fire. Flames look so different on TV, almost cartoonish; in real life, the fire’s as big as the sun.

“Burning, burning, too hot!” Serge cries.

“Alta, go get Serge some water,” Mom says. Alta, to her credit, doesn’t put up a fight — she rushes right away.

“Is dinner ready?” Dad calls from the pasture.

“The barn, Raúl!” Mom shrieks.

“I know. So do we have dinner ready or what?” Dad says. “I’m starving.” He’s burning the barn on purpose; why else would he so casually stroll into the front yard while the rest of us gawk at the fireball shining behind him like the world is ending? Even with the flames amplifying the desert heat to core-of-the-earth temperatures, I shiver; the image of my dad silhouetted against a fire is eerie.

“You started a fire in a drought? Are you nuts?” Mom shoves Lu into my arms, heavy as a sack of flour, and charges down the steps.

“It’s fine,” Dad snaps. “It’s contained.” He finds his beer on the porch railing and swigs it.

I gasp when the firelight illuminates his face — Dad’s eyes are bloodshot and watery, swollen from a summer’s worth of work on just slivers of sleep. Sweat glistens on his forehead and neck. He doesn’t look like he’ll even last until tomorrow.

Serge is mad enough to melt into a puddle of flabby skin. His sentences start in English, then run off a cliff and fall into angry, broken Spanish. “You burned my barn. You’re coming for me next. You’ll roast me alive with the sheep!”

“Calm down,
Papá
,” Dad says. “The barn had termites. Wood with termites has to be burned, you know that. No one’s coming for you.”

“You are.” Tears leak down Serge’s cheeks, bending like rivers around the bumps. “You put my things in boxes. You’re going to put me in a box. Then you’ll burn it all down.”

“
Papá
, none of that is happening.”

“Uh, Mom?” Alta comes outside with Serge’s water, forehead wrinkled in what appears to be genuine concern — a rare sight. She angles her whisper out of Serge’s earshot: “Something’s wrong with the dog.”

My throat tightens. Not Inés.

Mom passes Serge his water. “Raúl!” she calls. “Come quick!”

When Dad walks past his father’s chair, Serge cries once more, “You’re going to burn everything down!”

I don’t want to leave Serge alone, babbling and blubbering in his wicker chair, but Mom calls for me to join the family in the kitchen.

We gather near the counter, and my heart is shipwrecked at the sight: sweet, strong Inés lies cold on the linoleum, legs stiff.

“Is she breathing?” Mom asks.

Dad kneels beside the old dog, stroking her head, her neck, her face. “Barely,” he says, a tremor in his voice. Yes, if I watch around her collar, Inés’s neck rises and falls, but slowly, like each exhale hurts.

“Oh, Inés,” Dad says, and I can’t tell if he believes this is really Inés, pet of his childhood, or if he’s still just playing along. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

“How old would she be, again?” I ask.

Dad looks at us, his exhausted eyes brimming with a lifetime of memories. “Old Inés has always been around.” He rubs her floppy ears.

Lu fusses, then turns to Jell-O and slides out of Mom’s arms. He coos, patting Inés on the head, then looks mystified when she doesn’t respond.

“Say bye to the dog, Lu.” Dad can barely choke this out.

Then it happens. Inés takes her last breath, and when her chest falls, it doesn’t rise again. She’s gone.

No more early morning scratches at the front door. No more tail whacking against my knee at the dinner table. No more dog sighs punctuating the sweltering afternoons. I could have measured my summer with that dog.

How will Serge take this? He asks if Inés has been fed as often as I hear bees buzzing. My heart hurts so much, I ache down to my toes. I’ve never seen anything die. I put my hand in my pocket and hold on to the seed.

We wait, silent, until Dad dries his eyes and lifts Inés’s body, cradling her like a newborn.

“She lived a long, happy life,” Mom says.

“What does that matter now?” Alta says. “She’s dead.”

“It matters,” I say. “It’s all that matters in the end.” My sister puts her headphones back on and wanders off, but I stay.

“Don’t tell Serge,” Mom says to Dad.

He shifts the dog’s weight in his arms. “I have to. She’s been with him for years. He’ll notice she’s gone.”

“He goes to the Seville tomorrow, Raúl. Can’t you fib a little?” Mom says. “Tell him we took Inés to the vet? Buy him some time to process?”

“Rule number one,” I pipe in. Serge came unglued when Dad burned his barn down. What will it do to him to lose Inés?

“You’re right,” Dad says. “We won’t tell him.” He lifts the dog. “Carol, peek out at him, will you? I don’t want him to see me.” I look out the front door.

Serge stares at the flames as if he’s watching a movie. His back is to us.

“Go,” I tell Dad, and he carries Inés down the porch steps and around the opposite side of the house, off to find a proper place to bury her.

I wait until my tears dry up, then walk to Serge.

“First the barn, then the house,” he whispers. “Then they’ll pack me in a box and send me away.”

I touch his shoulder the way Mom did, and he doesn’t shove me away.

“I’ve never been anywhere else,
chiquita
,” Serge says. “Will my new home have a ridge? Mesas? Will it smell like the ranch smells? There won’t be sheep, but will there at least be stars?” His voice is laced with all his love for this place, this ranch that I try so hard to understand, but I always fall short.

I’ve never felt that way about anywhere. Not even home.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’ll be different. But think of the new things you’ll see, the new air you’ll breathe.” I use words from his own story, the same words Rosa told the villagers.

Dad climbs up the porch steps, dirt coating his jeans. Arms empty.

Serge growls through yellowed teeth. “You’re packing all my things in boxes, taking whatever you want, stealing my treasures . . .”

“No,” Dad says weakly.

“You want to put me away in a box! You’re burning me down!” Serge propels himself up and out of the chair, hands flying in slow motion, aiming to attack his son.

“I was just trying to kill the termites, you crazy old man!” Dad shouts, his cheeks chili red. He pushes Serge away, hard, and my grandpa lands back in his chair with a sickening crunch. His oxygen tube has fallen from one ear, making half his face look strangely bare.

I swallow away a bitter taste. Dad hovers over Serge with hands tensed in fists, a cobra coiled to strike.

“Raúl,” Mom gently calls from the doorway, and breaks Dad’s spell.

There’s a buzzing.
Not now, bees
, I think, and search the air. But it’s not bees, it’s Dad, sobbing. His fists fall open, then he falls to his knees, howling like a coyote pup.

“I’m sorry.” He grabs Serge’s snake-stomping boots and holds himself there. “
Papá
, please, I’m so sorry.”

Serge stands and extricates himself from Dad’s touch, pulling his loosened oxygen tube taut. “You won’t burn me down,” he says, his face blank of emotion, and disappears into the house, his metal oxygen tank clinking behind him.

“Guys,” Mom says to Dad and me, “I’m beat. Fend for yourselves for dinner, okay?” She goes in.

I’m not hungry. I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again.

Dad sips his beer, and when he locks his puffy eyes on mine, it’s not even debatable: he needs me more than Serge does right now. I sit next to him on the porch steps. Smoke billows above the pasture — the closest thing to fat gray clouds this ranch has seen in a century.

He wipes away sweat and tries to speak, but all his sentences start, stop, then start again, the way his truck freezes up in winter. “I’m sorry you had to see . . . Dementia does funny things . . . Sometimes Serge’s brain just . . .” He shakes his head, over and over and over. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him.”

“Dad,” I say, “why’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Why’d you burn down the barn?”

“You heard me,” he says. “Termites.”

“Termites,” I repeat. “You couldn’t have just used some bug spray?”

“We can’t afford commercial-grade pest repellent. Termites travel. It was either fire, or else they’d catch a ride on a sheep running downhill and munch all the wood in the house.”

I think about that morning, at the beginning of summer, when Serge and I dosed sheep in the barn, when he told me about measuring time, keeping track of his years by counting the sheep he sheared. When the sheep are gone, Serge will lose that time. Lose those years. In the Seville he’ll have to use a clock to measure time, just like everybody else.

The image infuriates me. I can’t let Dad off the hook that easily. “You really hurt him, Dad.” I’ll never forget the way Serge screeched while he watched the flames take his barn — like he was the one on fire.