Mad Honey: A Novel (15 page)

He shrugs dismissively.

“Ash,” I whisper. “Talk to me. Please.”

He shakes his head. He will not look at me.

“When you won’t tell me what you’re thinking…it
kills
me.”

He makes a small sound in the back of his throat. “Tell me about it, Lily.”

Then he stands up. I close my eyes, still shaking with the cold, anticipating the sound of him leaving me. Instead, I feel him draping his coat around me. “You’ll freeze,” I say, looking up at him.

“I’ll live.” He pulls his keys out of his pocket, and heads toward his old Jeep.

Do not listen to anyone who tells you a broken heart is a metaphor. You can feel the cracks and the fissures. It’s like ice splintering under your feet; like the cliff crumbling beneath your weight.

“Wait,” I call out, standing.

Asher doesn’t turn, but he stops walking.

My voice is an eggshell. “Do you hate me?”

Finally,
finally,
Asher looks at me. His eyes soften. “I don’t hate you,” he says. “I hate that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.”

I open my mouth to argue, but I can’t. He’s right. I didn’t trust Asher. And it has everything to do with the way I’ve been treated before, but not by him.

He gets into his Jeep and drives away.

Maybe it’s ten minutes later, maybe it’s an hour, I don’t know. But I’m still on the curb crying when Maya finds me. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she says. “Lily, I’m sorry. I should have told you I invited him.”

I wipe my eyes with Asher’s sleeve. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you hate me?” Maya asks, and a shudder runs through me—the same words I asked Asher.

“No,” I exhale, and she sits down beside me and wraps an arm around my shoulders.

“Then come back inside.”

I shake my head. “I think I’m going to go home,” I tell her.

“You
are
pissed at me…”

“No, it’s just—” I do not want to tell her about Asher; I do not want to relive what he said. So instead I seize on the first excuse to pop into my head. “It’s my period.”

She laughs. “Oh my God. A self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I shrug. “I’m not really in the mood for a party now.”

“Cramps?” she says, sympathetic. “I hate when it feels like I’m being turned inside out.”

Exactly,
I think.

TWO WEEKS AFTER
Asher stops speaking to me, I wake up to the sound of rain striking the windows of my bedroom. Except it isn’t constant. It isn’t even raining.

I pick up my phone: 1:33
a.m
. I hold my breath, waiting, and hear it again. Not rain.

I pad to the window and peer into the dark and see the moon of Asher’s face.

Scrabbling to open the window, I feel the night spill onto my bare feet. Asher’s crouched on the slope of the roof, peering up at me. “Jesus,” I whisper. “What are you doing?”

His lips twitch. “Trying not to fall.” He cuts his glance toward the tree he must have climbed. “Can I…can I come in?”

I nod, reaching out for his hand until he gets a good solid grasp on the windowsill and pulls himself into my bedroom. He is wearing dark jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, which he yanks away from his face. I swallow, folding my arms across my thin T-shirt and cotton shorts.

Instead of telling me why he’s here, though, Asher prowls like a jungle cat through my room. He trails his fingertips over the top of my dresser and picks up my hairbrush. He takes a ring and slips it onto the tip of his pinkie before he sets it back down in a little ceramic dish that was a gift from my mom, which reads:
Daughters are somebodies, not somebody’s
.

My heart is like a series of sonic booms. Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “Did you come here to break up with me?”

Asher turns, surprise scrawled all over his features. “Do you really think that?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I haven’t exactly been privy to your inner thoughts lately.”

He sinks down on the edge of my mattress. “I told you I needed a little time.” He looks at his hands, clasped between his legs. “It wasn’t what you said. It was that you were afraid to say it to me.”

I sit down next to him. I wonder if I should turn the light on. “I didn’t know you well enough.”

Asher just raises his brows at that, and I feel my cheeks burn.

“I need to know something,” he says, and I nod, steeling myself. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

The thought of my father skitters across my mind, but I shove it away. He is dead to me, and that is a truth in itself. “No,” I swear.

“You’re sure?” Asher presses, his mouth curling at the corner. “You don’t have a secret baby being raised by an aunt in Iowa? You’re not, like, a Russian spy?”

“
Nyet,
” I say.

“Nothing but the truth?”

“Nothing but the truth.”

He brushes my hair back from my face, tucking it behind my ear. “I love you, Lily,” Asher whispers. “I don’t care about your past. It doesn’t make a difference to me.”

“But if anyone found out,” I say slowly, “it
would
make a difference to
me
.”

He knows what I am asking: for a promise.

He holds my hands in his and lifts my wrists, pressing his lips to each of them in turn, even the scars I have kept from everyone but him. “Found out what?” he murmurs, and then he kisses me.

Asher has kissed me before, of course, but it’s never felt like this—like there is no seam between us; like I am transparent to him. I surge closer, trying to slip under his skin. His hands thread through my hair and his breath feeds me.

When we finally break apart, fighting for oxygen, Asher kisses my forehead. “Now what?” I whisper into his neck.

His smile is a brand. “It’s a goddamned long way down.”

I’m smiling, too. I feel like I’m smiling at the cellular level. “It would be incredibly rude then, for me to ask you to leave.”

Asher kicks off his sneakers. “You’re not one to be impolite.”

“Never.” I yank off his sweatshirt.

“Manners are the framework that society is built on,” Asher says, shimmying my T-shirt up over my ribs.

“Did you make that up?” I ask. “Or is that an actual saying?”

“Do you really care?” Asher asks, and then we fall back in a tangle into my sheets.

My body has never been anything to be proud of. There have been times, obviously, when it only caused me pain. But as Asher peels off my shorts and flattens his hand on my belly, as his mouth coasts from my collarbone to my sternum and lower, I am thinking of none of that. If the last time—my
first
time—was when Asher created a map of me, then this is the trip where he revisits the highlights: Remember when we…? Remember how this…?

When I feel his breath fall between my legs, my thighs press together. Instinct, maybe. Embarrassment. But when Asher lifts his face, the whole world is in his eyes. “Don’t hide from me,” he begs, and I open like a rose.

I’m so, so tired of hiding.

Then Asher inches up, poised in the cradle of my hips. He slips on a condom and slowly pushes into me. The whole time, he keeps his gaze on mine. He’s seeing me, all of me, and there is not an iota of disappointment or disgust. He stares at my face, at my body, like it’s perfect. Like I’m a one-of-a-kind wonder meant just for him.

I tear my eyes away. I look down at myself and, for the first time in my life, I am able to see what Asher sees.
Yes,
I think,
a miracle. That’s what I am.

OLIVIA
4

JANUARY TO APRIL 2019

A few months after

It is amazing how quickly the abnormal becomes normal. It is like how, after my father’s death, life closed up around the loss like a puncture wound, and how I became accustomed to driving five hours each week to take care of his hives. How my knight removed his shining armor to reveal a monster, and I pretended not to see. And now, how patterning my weeks around the days and times I get to see Asher in jail is the way I now organize my calendar.

Sometimes I go with Jordan, who has set up a makeshift office on my kitchen table. He spends most of the week with me, building Asher’s case. Selena mostly stays in Portsmouth during the week to take care of their son, but sometimes brings Sam up for the weekend, so Jordan can see him, or leaves him with her mother when she has to be up here doing investigative work. When Jordan and I visit Asher together, I get to see him in a private client-attorney room; I get to touch his hand or hug him, even if I have to do so out of the near-continuous glance of the correctional officer posted outside the door. When I visit Asher alone, I am just another mother with a sad story and an incarcerated child. He sits in a round room with a panel of phones; I am on the outside of the Plexiglas, holding a receiver to my ear, trying not to listen to the conversations or tears of the women beside me.

When I visit the jail with Jordan, we talk about Asher’s case. But when I visit alone, we talk about anything but that. I memorize the
sports page of the paper:
The Bruins beat the Trojans, eighty-eight to seventy-four,
I say, and Asher laughs.
A for effort, Mom, but one, that’s basketball. Two, it’s college, not pro. And three, no hockey score is remotely close to that high
. He asks how his own team is doing, if they beat Berlin. He talks about the things he misses: mint-chip ice cream, snow, sleeping in total darkness, even (surprisingly) his English class. He shows me sketches that he has done, pencil on sheets of white paper, of a doe with a fawn, a dragon, the view from his room at home. There is one of Lily, too, which I take home with me and put in a frame beside Asher’s bed.

When I can’t visit Asher, I write letters to him. And he writes back to me.

In every letter and at every visit, Asher asks me when he is going to get out of jail, and I think my heart can’t possibly hurt any more than it already does.

Until the day he stops asking.

ON SATURDAYS,
I have a table at the North Adams Farmers’ Market. In the summer and fall, it’s a glorious outdoor space, filled with music and shrieking children and vendors selling cheese, grass-fed beef and lamb, lush organic produce, chocolate milk as thick as cream. In the winter, though, we strip to the essentials and cram into the VFW hall. I sell honey I bottled in the fall, and beeswax candles, and body butter. There are times I don’t sell a single jar, so I just carry a milk crate with a smattering of products in from the parking lot, leaving the reserves in the back of my truck.

Today, I am feeling hopeful. There’s a January thaw and those who haven’t wanted to make the trip outside for a nonessential item like a candle or homegrown tea are in the mood to wander a little. I sit at my booth, smiling pleasantly as people walk past. But unlike other years, no one approaches me.

I tell myself that I’m being overly sensitive. But when I ask the vendor beside me to watch my table while I duck into the bathroom,
she hesitates before she nods. As if she doesn’t want to be seen doing me a favor.

I’m in the stall when two girls come in, and I hear only snippets of their conversation:

—heard that he’s in there for, like, ever—

—they took his MVP trophy out of the case—

—yeah the honey lady—

—he’s got to be guilty, or he wouldn’t still be in there, would he?—

I open the stall door and find them at the row of sinks, applying mascara. “Ladies,” I say tightly. “Just for the record, the way our legal system works, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. And that doesn’t happen until the trial, which doesn’t happen until months after you’re arrested. Maybe you’d know that if you spent more time in civics class and less time making yourselves look like baby prostitutes.” I feel a sharp blade of shame for picking on adolescents. But I’m overripe with rage, a plum that’s split its skin. I wash my shaking hands and dry them. “Instead of
honey lady,
I’d rather be called
Asher Fields’s mother
. Have a great day.”

I sail out of the bathroom.

What a bitch,
one of them says.

For the rest of the market, I watch other vendors get swarmed, while I am ignored. One husband pauses, reminding his wife she said she needed honey. “Not
that
honey,” the woman murmurs, and she drags him away, as if misfortune is contagious.

When the market closes at 1:00
p.m.
, I pack up my crate of unsold wares and carry it to my truck. The sun is deceptive, a false taste of spring. It even smells sweeter outside, or so I think until I open the gate of my truck and see the remainder of my stock—dozens of glass bottles of honey, every last one smashed.

THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN
me and Detective Mike Newcomb is noticeably strained when he comes to take my statement about the vandalism. In addition to the honey, my tires have been slashed. I text Jordan and ask him for a lift, but Selena is the one who steps out of the car.

“That your ride?” Mike asks.

“My sister-in-law.”

He runs his hand through his hair. “I would have driven you home.”

“Isn’t that consorting with the enemy?”

He has the grace to look embarrassed. “You’re not my enemy. Neither is your son, for the record.” Mike shakes his head. “It’s my job, Liv.”

I look at the ruined mess in the back of my truck. “And that was mine.”

He nods. “I’ll find the girls.”

I can’t prove it’s them, but they are the most likely suspects, given our conversation.

“And then what?”

Mike frowns. “You can press charges, if you want.”

I shake my head. “I don’t. I just…put the fear of God into them, or something.”

He stares at me for a long moment, as if I’m a puzzle that is missing a critical piece.

“We done here?” Selena interrupts.

Mike nods. “I’m sorry about this, Olivia.” He gets into his unmarked car and drives away.

Selena squints after him. “Why do I know that dude?”

“He went to school with me. Now he’s a detective,” I say. “The one who arrested Asher.”

“Riiiiight,” she replies. “He was at that celebration we came to when I was pregnant with Sam. The one where white people throw themselves a party because it took two weeks for them to hear the Revolution was over.”

“Yeah. Adams Day.”

Selena shakes her head. “You all ever heard of Juneteenth?”

I get into the car and tell her what happened as we drive to the farmhouse. We arrive just as Jordan pulls up. He grabs Selena and kisses her deeply.

“What was that for?” Selena asks.

“I’m having a shitty day,” Jordan says. “It needed balancing.”

“What happened?”

“I had a meeting scheduled with Maya Banerjee,” he says, and I turn, surprised. I wonder why he hadn’t told me this before. “I guess Maya wanted to talk to me because Asher’s one of her best friends.”

“That’s true,” I say.

“Well, her
other
best friend is dead,” Jordan finishes. “Every time I asked her a question, she started to cry. One of her moms ended the interview before I ever got started.”

“I could try to talk to her,” I suggest.

“That’s called tampering with a witness,” Selena says. “So, no.”

Jordan yanks at his tie, loosening it so it hangs off to one side. “Is it too early to start drinking?” he asks, starting toward the house.

“Not for a Saturday,” Selena offers cheerfully.

I fall into place behind them, thinking of Maya, of things that are over before they begin.

Just before we enter the house, Jordan turns. “Liv,” he asks, “what happened to your truck?”

SOMETIMES, DURING THE
attorney-client meetings, I stop listening to Jordan’s endless run of questions and concentrate instead on how Asher is changing. It’s not just the physical—his skin is pasty and pale, his body whipcord thin instead of muscular. It’s the way his gaze darts around the room, like he is looking for the exit. How he always takes the seat where he can face the door. It’s the curtain that drops behind his eyes when I ask him anything about being in jail.

I know he has been moved to a new cell; I know that he hasn’t been beaten up again—at least not in the places I can see. I think that he has new scars, but they are deeper. And unlike the bruises
that were on his face a month ago, I am not sure they will ever fade.

“Do you know Abby Jeter and Tanya Halliwell?” Jordan asks.

That grabs my attention. “Jordan,” I warn.

He ignores me, staring at Asher. “They’re a year behind me in school,” Asher says. “I know them, but I don’t
know
them. Why?”

“They were questioned about some vandalism involving your mother,” Jordan says.

Asher turns to me, and I can tell that this has shocked him. “
What?
What happened?”

“It was nothing,” I assure him, as Jordan says, “They smashed up a few bottles of honey.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry, Mom. You shouldn’t be…” Asher shakes his head. “I didn’t think about all that,” he says softly.

“Technically, Abby and Tanya didn’t do the dirty work,” Jordan adds. “It was a kid named Danny Barbello?”

“Yeah, Abby’s boyfriend,” Asher says. “People used to bet on how long it would take for him to wind up in juvie.” As soon as the words fall from his mouth, he reddens. “Go figure.”

Jordan leans back in his chair. “Your friend Maya is worried about you.”

“She always is.”

“Not enough to talk to me, though. Her mom pulled the plug on our interview when she started to cry.”

“Her parents are superprotective,” Asher says. “Back in eighth grade when we did a school trip to Washington, DC, they flew down and stayed in a hotel a half block away just in case.”

Jordan taps his pencil on his notepad. “Well, if we can’t get Maya to talk to me, then we can’t depend on her as a character witness for you. Is there anyone else you can think of from school who might testify about you and make you sound like you’re the Second Coming?”

“Dirk?”

“Um, no,” I interject.

“How come you don’t like him?” Asher asks.

“How come you
do
?”

Jordan watches this volley. “Anyone else?”

“Coach Lacroix,” Asher says immediately. “He’s my hockey coach, and I’m captain for the second year. In the summers, I teach little kids at his hockey camps.”

“You’ve played since you were, like, five?”

“Yes, but I’ve been on varsity since I was a sophomore, except for the month last winter when I got benched.”

“How come?”

“There was this thing that happened at midterms,” Asher says.

I think back to the phone call I got from the principal. The moment I came to find Asher outside the main office, his head bowed, his elbows resting on his knees. How, when he looked up at me, it wasn’t remorse in his eyes but a burning anger.

“Some jocks broke into the math department and stole a trig exam and paid a bunch of brainiacs to create an answer key,” Asher explains. “Then they sold it.”

“You were involved in this?” Jordan asks, stunned.

“I was blamed by association,” Asher says tightly. “Because I was on the hockey team.”

“So what happened?”

“I got suspended for a month.”

Jordan turns to me. “You didn’t fight it?”

Asher meets my gaze, and in that one look, we have an entire conversation.

I have to tell him, Asher.

But it wasn’t fair.

Life rarely is.

Do you think I don’t
know
that?

“Hello,” Jordan interrupts. “What the hell is going on?” He looks at me. “This isn’t a drill, Olivia. If Asher was complicit in something like this, it’s bound to be dragged up by the prosecution. You need to tell me
everything
.”

“When Asher was questioned by the principal, he said he wasn’t involved in stealing the exam. Dirk—the friend he mentioned
earlier?—was the one who did that. But some of the other guys on the team said that Asher was the one who came up with the idea.”

“
What?
”

“It’s not what you think, Uncle Jordan,” Asher says quickly. “I wasn’t, like, trying to mastermind anything. It was a joke. We were in the locker room talking about how our math teacher refused to grade on a curve and made the tests impossible and everyone’s GPA was tanking because of it. I said applying to college would be a hell of a lot easier if we could fix that, and the other guys ran with it. I never meant for them to actually
do
it.”

“The end result is that you got suspended,” Jordan points out, “which is not great.”

“I don’t understand why a school suspension I was railroaded into a year ago has anything to do with
this,
” Asher says.