Hour of the Bees (6 page)

“So?” Alta’s glued to her phone.

“I just can’t picture him here.”

“This place is awful,” Alta says. “No wonder Raúl waited until Serge was on his deathbed before dragging us out here.”

I sit up. “You think Serge is on his deathbed?”

She shrugs. “Serge makes me hope I die before I’m forty. Just so I don’t ever have to be that old.”

“It’s not his fault,” I say. “Everyone has to get old.”

“He’s like the Crypt Keeper.”

My blood warms. “Alta. He’s not
that
old.”

“His skin’s falling off his bones and his teeth can’t even chew,” she says.

I glare at my sister, but earlier on the porch, when I saw Serge for the first time, the same things paraded through my mind: old, decaying, one foot in the grave. The living dead.

“What about his eyes?” I say.

Alta’s unimpressed. “Old-man eyes.”

“Yeah, but . . .”
But there’s something alive behind them. Like he has X-ray vision to your thoughts
.

Bzzz
. It isn’t Alta’s phone this time.
Bzzz
.

“Ew, get it.” Alta points at the window, where a winged insect hurls itself against the glass, trying to escape. It’s too big to be a mosquito. A fly, maybe? Some kind of evil winged ant?

I grab my sandal and crawl on the bed, ready to swat it into a stupor. It’s not an ant or a fly — it’s a bee; of course it’s a bee. Perfectly striped in black and golden yellow, buzzing along the windowpane. My throat goes dry. A bee, again.

“Kill it,” Alta commands.

“Hold on, I’m trying to let it out.” But before I can budge the window open, Alta crunches the bee with her rolled-up magazine.

“Alta!” I cry. “I was letting it out.”

“Flies will crawl in your mouth while you sleep,” she says.

“Gross, don’t say that.” The window finally opens, the dead-bee grit blowing out into the night. “And it wasn’t a fly,” I say, but Alta’s head is on her pillow, eyes closed, headphones in. Conversation, done.

I lie wide-eyed in the dark, my mind a pot of hot water about to boil over.

Alta snores, a delicate, feminine sound, like a chipmunk breathing on autumn leaves. The rest of the house is quiet.

My dreams are full of bees.

There’s a thunderstorm outside.

I wake in a cold sweat. For the record, cold sweat is way worse than hot sweat.

I crawl to the window, heart thumping against my ribs. Thunder means rain. Rain, after a hundred years of drought, I can’t believe it! Serge was right — the bees brought the rain!

But it’s not a thunderstorm, just Dad’s truck engine growling outside. I rub my eyes and reel at how ridiculous I am — did I really think it was rain? And that somehow the
bees
had brought it?

Going back to sleep seems as impossible as seeing a bee in a drought. I stand up and catch a glimpse of Alta, relaxed in dreamland, her face like a statue of an angel. When she’s sleeping, she looks almost nice.

My phone says it’s close to midnight. I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and walk to the porch. Serge snoozes here, in the openness of night, sitting upright in his wicker chair, a quilt tucked over his knees. Asleep, he seems frailer than ever. His skin is papery-thin, and his eyeballs move under the spiderwebs of veins on his purple eyelids.

“Carol?” Dad tinkers beneath the truck’s open hood. “Did I wake you? Sorry.”

The dirt is chilly under my bare feet. How can the desert be so scorching hot during the day, then freeze at night? “What are you even doing?” I ask Dad.

He climbs into the truck. “The pasture gate didn’t get shut. One of the sheep got out.”

I must have a glow of neediness, because Dad smiles a tired smile and waves for me to join him. “Come on, I could use another set of eyes. Mine are down to their last wattage.”

“Ever heard of sleep?” I get in the truck next to him.

He laughs. “No rest for the wicked.”

I finger-comb my rat’s-nest hair as we drive through the pasture. “So Serge really does sleep on the porch.”

“Whenever
Mamá
is gone, he sleeps outside.”

“But she’s been gone for twelve years,” I say, tightening the blanket around me. Twelve years of sleeping in a stiff wicker chair with the moonlight, and the jackrabbits, and the desert bats. . . .

“It doesn’t feel like twelve years,” Dad says. “When we pulled up to the house today, I half expected
Mamá
to come bounding down the porch steps, like she always did.” He smiles. “The ranch was different when she was here. Brighter. Bluer skies, and more air. She loved to travel, and whenever she was gone, and it was just
Papá
and me . . .” He goes quiet.

“I can’t believe he won’t go in his own bedroom,” I say.

“Grief does funny things to people.” Dad’s jaw keeps clenching and unclenching.

“And dementia,” I suggest. Behind us, the ranch house is illuminated by the moon, the wood warped, the windows dingy. “Dad?” I say. “Does he have to go to the Seville?”

“Where else would he go?”

My reply is tiny. “With us?”

“Live with us?” Dad nearly pops a lung with his laugh. “In our house? No. No. No.” He shivers, his whole body shaking. “Believe me, I hate that we have to move him. But it’s better that he goes to a home. For all of us.”

This is an off-limits topic, but it’s after midnight; it feels like the rules can be bent until they snap. “Dad? What happened to Grandma Rosa?”

“What do you mean?” Dad says.

“All I really know about her is that she died on my birthday,” I say. I was born at noon, and she died right before dinner.

“I’ll never forget that day,” he says. “Full of hellos and good-byes. Happiest and saddest day of my life.”

“I don’t even know how she died,” I say.

He coughs. “Cancer.”

“Cancer,” I repeat. What an ugly, scary word.

“She fought it. Fought hard. It kept leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back. In the end . . . Well, it took
Mamá
a long time to finally go. She sure was stubborn.”

“What else was she like?”

For a moment, I panic that I’ve gone too far. We’re in uncharted territory, talking about Grandma Rosa. Dad tightens his grip on the steering wheel. “She had lots of fire. Never let anything go unsaid. She was adventurous — definitely adventurous.”

“Fiery and adventurous,” I repeat. What was she doing married to Serge?

“
Papá
couldn’t ever get her to stay put. No one could.” Dad’s voice hardens. “She hated the ranch as much as I did.”

He parks the truck on the edge of the ridge, where the pasture ends and the desert begins. “All this openness,” he says, “and still, I always felt trapped here. There’s only one thing I love about the desert.” He switches off the headlights and points outside. “The sky,
niña
. Just look at the sky.”

I get out of the truck and gasp.

Golden-white stars freckle the black sky. A wisp of midnight cloud uncurls itself into hazy purple smoke, then disappears. The moon is round and bright and the color of harvested corn. All of this stretches above the miles and miles of sparse desert — a heavenly ceiling.

“Say what you want about the ranch,” Dad says, “but you sure don’t get skies like this in the city.”

“This belongs in a movie,” I whisper.

Dad squeezes my shoulder. “I’m glad you’re still young enough to gawk at the stars with your old man.”

“I’m not that young.” I lean against his truck, lost in the sea of stars. “Dad? What are those bumps on Serge’s face?”

“Believe it or not,” he says, “they’re bee stings, from years ago. They never fully healed.”

“Wow.” I wasn’t expecting that. “No wonder he’s obsessed with bees.”

“Like I said, grief can do funny things.” He pats my back.

“Dad?” One more question. “What happened between you and Serge?”

He looks down at me, and I watch something harden behind his eyes, like a puddle drying into crackled dirt. “You don’t need to know that,” he says, and grabs a rifle from the truck bed.

It’s dark, so he doesn’t see my scowl.

He hands me a flashlight. “Don’t go on top of the ridge,” he warns. “Stay in sight of the truck. Just shine that around the edge of the pasture, and if you see the sheep, holler.”

Dad vanishes, and I’m left with the stars, the moon, and a flashlight.

Something howls. A coyote, I think. That’s probably why Dad took his rifle.

I don’t have a rifle.

I walk into the night, picturing ghosts of dead bees and long-gone grandmothers swirling around me. Invisible eyes follow me from every crack in the ridge.

The ridge is a buildup of multicolored sand, stuck together in a giant wall about a mile from the back porch. When moonlight hits the ridge, it glitters like a Christmas ornament. The bottom is inky purple, from a million years ago when the universe banged itself together. Star dust. Above the purple, the sand turns rusty red, the color of caveman blood. Then a stripe of orange, and a bright yellow stripe at the top. It’s a prehistoric Popsicle. The Painted Desert, they call New Mexico. Like some god reached down from the clouds and dragged his palette along the mesas.

Beyond the ridge, the land dips into a basin. The grass becomes rose-colored, ragged, and the scrub recedes like a balding hairline. There’s just desert on and on until you hit Mexico. It’s easy to get lost in the vastness of the night and the land, even in your head.

At home, the city has a vastness to it, too — a vastness of cars, of people, of pavement, of never-ending lights. Little patches of perfectly manicured grass — fake Mother Nature — are inserted into the metropolis.

But I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the ridge.

The ridge isn’t safe to play on, as pretty as it is. On the drive up, Dad gave me the rundown of its many dangers. Coyotes prowl there, and scorpions, and fire ants make their hills on the ridge’s peaks. There are rattlers, always, hidden among the stones, so camouflaged you don’t see them until it’s too late.

I need snake-stomping boots.

An owl hoots. I spot it, a silhouette against the dime-round moon; it soars past me and lands on a lone cactus, ruffled-feather breast, unblinking eyes.

I scan the flashlight around me. No sheep.

Something tickles my neck. A trio of bees hovers around my head like it’s their hive.

“Go away!” I cry, running in a wide circle to lose them, my blanket fanning out behind me like a cape. “Quit following me!”

But when I stop, the bees swarm back around me, too close.

“Rain’s been gone for a hundred years,” I whisper. “You don’t belong here anymore.”

Bzzz
, they drone.
Bzzz
, around and around me, until I’m dizzy.

“You stop teasing my grandpa,” I say, and flick my hands until the bees go.

Then it’s me, and the sky, alone in the great, loud silence of desert.

Living in Albuquerque means I’m used to sharing close quarters. There’s always been at least thirty kids in my class. At home there’s limited closet space and not enough room in the yard to set up a trampoline. Some nights, I open my bedroom window just to breathe new air.

But there’s such a thing as too open. Too wide. Here in the dark, I’m nothing. I’m less than a smudge on the pages of the world’s history, tiny on the number line of forever. The lost sheep, Alta, Serge’s dementia, even junior high — everything seems laughably small. What’s one missing sheep to eternity?

Chilly night air creeps into my blanket. I think I’ll wait for Dad in the truck, with the heat on.

In the truck, maybe I’ll feel less small.

I turn around, and a scream bursts out of me before I process what I’m seeing: the missing sheep, lying mangled in an unnatural position — legs bent back, spine arched, wool tangled. The head is missing, and a cloud of flies pick at the corpse. Ribs, real ribs, jut from the body. They look fake. I never knew real bones were so clean, so yellow-white.

Where’s the head? I’m too nauseated to search with the light. Blood makes me sick, makes my stomach churn and my head spin.

“Carol!” Dad runs to me, rifle in hands. I point, trying not to breathe in any of the flies. When I finally take a desperate gulp of air, I inhale the stink of rotting flesh and dry heave.

“Coyotes,” Dad diagnoses.

“They, uh, didn’t take much.” I speak with my hand over my nose to filter the death stench.

“Drought makes the sheep spindly.” Dad waves his flashlight around the perimeter, and we spot it at the same time: the head of the chewed-up sheep, dragged about two feet from its body. The sheep’s lifeless eyes are round black mirrors, reflecting the flashlight’s gleam.

I’m still shaky with nausea, but Dad doesn’t seem bothered.

“How are you not grossed out by this?” I ask, my hand still firmly covering my nose.

“Coyotes used to get into the chicken coop all the time,” Dad says, waxing nostalgic. “We used to wake up to feathers and blood all over the pasture.”

“I get the picture,” I say, trying not to imagine this carnage of poultry.

Dad gets a shovel and a tarp from the truck bed and scoops up the remains, wrapping them up like leftover dinner. “So the meat doesn’t attract buzzards,” he explains, “and so the coyotes don’t take it as an open invitation to help themselves.” The sheep corpse goes into the bed of the pickup.