Mad Honey: A Novel (17 page)

“About a week. I was freaking out.”

“Because you thought she would break things off?” Jordan asks.

“Because she tried to kill herself once,” Asher says flatly.

What?

I imagine all the times I saw Lily and Asher tangled together, being silly and giddy and stupid…
How lucky they are,
I would muse,
to not be weighed down by the world
. But Lily wasn’t carefree; she just wanted to be seen that way. I had not known Lily was suicidal; she clearly wanted to keep that private.

“Do you know when she attempted suicide?” Jordan asks.

Asher hesitates. “Sometime before she moved here. I don’t know the details; she didn’t like to talk about it. I was the only person she actually told.”

“Do you know…how?”

Asher shakes his head. “But she had scars on her wrist.”

I think back to Lily’s clothing. Most recently she’d worn long sleeves when she was at our house—but it was winter. I try to remember her harvesting honey—what was she wearing that sweltering September afternoon? A T-shirt, I think, but she had bright friendship bracelets ringed on both wrists. She always sported a scrunchie there, too. To pull back her hair? Or to hide scars?

“So you kept having sex with Lily,” Jordan says. “In the bedroom you told the cops you hadn’t been in.”

Asher glares at Jordan, tamping down his frustration. “I didn’t tell them that…I said I wasn’t in her bedroom
that night
and I wasn’t. Why is this even—”

“Because it
is,
Asher,” Jordan interrupts. “Because these are the kinds of things the prosecution will do. This is why I can’t put you on the stand. You lied to the cops, and you lied to me.”

“I told them the truth! The detective didn’t ask me if I’d
ever
been in her bedroom. He didn’t ask me if I’d slept with her.” His voice climbs a ladder of frustration. “You’re supposed to be the
one
person who’s on my side. Why are you being such a dick?”

“Asher!” I cry.

Jordan flattens his hands on the table and leans toward Asher. “Because if I’m a dick to you now, then you won’t come across as one in court.”

“Why don’t you just leave?” Asher bites. “
I
would, but my lawyer hasn’t managed to get me out of here yet.”

Jordan slams his notebook shut. “You know what? You’re right. We both need to cool off. We’ll pick up again next week.”

Jordan is up and banging on the door to be let out before I rise from the chair. The CO holds the door open, waiting for me to follow. “Asher,” I say quietly.

“Just go, Mom,” he murmurs, so tired that the words can barely carry the distance between us.

I know better than to engage Jordan until we are settled in the car, driving away from the jail. “Did you know Asher was having sex with Lily?” he asks.

“I assumed…but we didn’t really talk about it.”

Suddenly I remember the week that Asher got moody and distant, snapping at me no matter what I said or did. Was that early November? I heard the crash, and found Asher in his room cradling his fist, the sheetrock smashed, looking just as stunned as I was by the violence he had wreaked.

You think you know someone,
Asher said to me (by way of apology? explanation?) when I found him with plaster dust snowing over his feet.
But you really don’t know them at all.

Until this moment, I hadn’t remembered Asher’s words. But now, I wonder if they referenced Lily. If they had anything to do with her suicide attempt; with sex.

My throat is suddenly dry as dust. I picture Asher’s knuckles, scraped. I think about the force a punch would have to have to break through a wall. “Jordan?” I ask quietly. “Do you think Asher could have…hurt Lily?”

I cannot bring myself to say the word
killed
.

Jordan’s eyes slide to mine before refocusing, hard, on the road before him. “If I ever hear you say that again,” he replies, “you’re never coming to another meeting.”

ONE OF THE
first dates I had with Braden was to see a zombie movie. He loved them—the good, the ridiculous, the big budget, and the ones that looked like they were shot by teenagers in basements. The Danny Boyle film
28 Days Later
was, in his opinion, the gateway to all things zombie. Although I told him that I had not slept for weeks after seeing
The Shining,
he promised me that this would be different, because I was seeing it with him.

We sat in a packed theater, fortified with Goobers and popcorn. As we watched humans infected with the virus attack others, Braden leaned closer to me. “I would kill you myself before I let them get you,” he whispered, and he kissed the spot on my neck that always made me shiver.

BEES SURVIVE WINTER
by forming a cluster around the queen, baseball-size in subzero months and beach-ball-size in the early spring, generating heat to about ninety-five degrees. When the snow melts in the spring, I remove the insulation from my hives, in preparation for them to start flying.

January has bled into February, which has seeped into March. I’ve measured time by my bees, because every day looks the same, now—endless trial preparation, punctuated by visits to the jail.

One day, when the weather starts to turn, I adjust my bee veil and start with Adele’s colony, blowing a little smoke at the entrance and beneath the cover. Ten frames are snugged together in the hive body, with bees crawling all over them.

I don’t see the queen, but that’s okay. You don’t actually have to see her to recognize evidence of her work. If Adele’s healthy and laying eggs, they will look like commas in their brood cells. A queen lays different sorts of eggs in different spots in the honeycomb. A larger drone cell will get an unfertilized egg, which will become a male bee. A regular-size cell gets a fertilized egg, which will become a worker bee ninety-nine percent of the time.

It takes twenty-one days for a worker bee to go from egg to adult. Twenty-four for a drone. A queen takes sixteen days, and then she will go on her maiden (and only) mating flight. She flies into the sky, releasing pheromones to let the drones know it’s their lucky day. The ones who fly fastest and highest get seven minutes in heaven, so to speak. A drone turns the tip of his abdomen inside out to expose his penis, and shoves it into the queen’s sting chamber. When he ejaculates, you can actually hear it.

Once his sperm is in the queen, his penis snaps off, staying inside her. He falls to his death as another drone hooks up with her. At the end of this orgy, when the queen goes back to the hive, she has enough fertilized eggs inside her to last a lifetime.

I have not been on a date in eight years.

After Braden, I couldn’t imagine being with another man. It took four years for me to agree to go out to dinner with the divorced son of one of my mother’s friends. He was smart and pleasant, but I kept
thinking he wasn’t very tall and that he didn’t seem to get my jokes and by the second course I realized I was comparing him to Braden.

I slept with him, though. Not because I was attracted to him, but because I wanted Braden to not be the last. The whole time, I was thinking about queen bees, and how a new drone will literally push his predecessor’s genitals out of the way to make room for himself.

If I was thinking about this during sex, obviously, it wasn’t particularly
good
sex.

That night I dreamed about making love with Braden. How he had once asked me what my favorite part of myself was, and how I had said,
The dip of my waist
. He’d placed me on the bed, turning me to my side, running his hand over that curve repeatedly, learning the way I loved myself.

The sad truth is that I am more like that queen bee than I’d like to think. I had one run at passion, and that’s probably all I’ll get for the rest of my life.

The sadder truth is that in spite of all the moments my marriage was a hellscape, there were other moments I was cherished.

The saddest truth is that even
while
Braden was hurting me, I forgave him.

I gently slide the frames back into place in Adele’s hive, using a spacer tool to make sure they’re evenly set, and cover the top. Her colony looks just like it is supposed to at this time of year.

Beyoncé’s colony, next to this, looks much the same, but this time I am lucky enough to see the queen surrounded by a coterie of attendants.

Then I open Celine’s hive, the one I repatriated after the bear attack in December. That was the day, I realize with a shock, that Lily died.

There is no hum from the hive when I open the top. The frames are cold and stiff. As in the scene of a massacre, every single bee is dead, heaped in the bottom of the box.

I expected this. I knew the colony that had absconded after the bear attack would never make it through the winter.

But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

AS SPRING UNFOLDS,
Jordan’s preparation of Asher’s case moves into high gear. Selena has found out which judge is assigned—Rhonda Byers, a fifty-something Black single mom who put herself through law school and who has a reputation for being no-nonsense. Jordan has gone back and forth on whom he will call as a witness for the defense. I will testify, of course, but in the end he also chooses Coach Lacroix. The coach didn’t know Lily and will be able to present Asher as a good student, a good person, an empathetic athlete who teaches kids during the summer—all pros. The con is that the prosecution knows about the cheating scandal and will bring it up on the cross-exam, and once that area of Asher’s character is revealed they are entitled to bring up anything that might show another, less flattering side of him.

He doesn’t have to say the real reason he added the coach: because a defendant who has only one witness—his own
mother—
is in pretty sad shape.

We have talked about alternative scenarios—from other visitors to the house (Asher has no idea) to alibis (Asher doesn’t have one, since he
was
at Lily’s house and, prior to that, was driving there) to accidents that might have befallen Lily—any red herring Jordan might be able to introduce as an alternative theory to stick in the jurors’ minds. Jordan has also gone back to the prosecution for another look at the discovery, returning with transcriptions of texts from Asher’s and Lily’s phones. For the past three hours, we’ve been in the conference room at the jail, painstakingly going through Asher’s conversations with Lily—and we’ve only now reached the day of her death.

“This was sent at eight
a.m
.,” Jordan says to Asher. “
Are you okay, I heard you’re sick
. You sent this to her, even though you two were arguing?”

Asher is sprawled in his chair, his head lolled back. He looks thinner than he did a week ago, and there are deep purple circles beneath his eyes. “
Especially
because of that. I wanted her to know I was still thinking about her.”

Jordan shuffles through the text printouts. “The second message was sent at ten-fifteen
a.m
….three question marks?”

Asher shrugs. “She still hadn’t written back.”

“
I’m really worried about you
. Eleven twenty-one
a.m
.,” Jordan reads. “One-fourteen
p.m
.
Please, just give me a chance to talk
. Three thirty-one
p.m
.:
THIS ENDS NOW, I’M COMING OVER
.” He whistles softly. “All caps.”

“That was the last text I sent,” Asher says.

“Pretty fucking ominous. At least that’s what the prosecution is going to say.”

“It wasn’t meant as a threat,” he counters. “I just wanted to be face-to-face with her. I knew I could explain everything, if she’d just see me. But she never wrote back.”

“Yes, she did.”

Asher shakes his head. “Well, if she wrote it…I never got it.”

Jordan frowns and starts shuffling through the printouts. “These messages were on your phone. Here’s a thread with your mother…here’s Maya. Dirk.” He flips a page. “Who’s Ben Flanders?”

Asher picks at the skin on his thumb. “Just a guy I play hockey with.” He grabs another stack of papers from the table. “Look. Here. These are the texts that Lily sent to
me
. The last one was seven days before she died.”

Jordan pulls a page free and places it beside the one Asher is still holding. “This is the printout from
her
phone—of her replies to
you
. There’s a message that looks like it was typed out underneath your last text to her…but never actually sent.”

Asher leans over, reading—for the first time—Lily’s final message to him. “
Don’t bother, it’s over
. It’s over…?” he repeats, his voice hollow. He turns, tears bright in his eyes. “Do you think…was she breaking up with me?”

I reach for him. “No, Asher…she didn’t send it. Maybe she was mad, or upset, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she changed her mind.”

Jordan starts pacing, thinking out loud. “If you had received that text from Lily and still came over, it looks like you were angry. Like
you went there in a rage because you didn’t accept that she was breaking up with you. I’m a hundred percent sure that’s what the prosecution plans for the jury to see—a guy who was thinking,
If I can’t have you, no one can.
But if you never
got
Lily’s text…”

“Then the prosecution can’t make that argument,” I finish.

“And they certainly can’t use it as a motive for murder.” Jordan grins. It is the first time I’ve seen him actually get excited since he’s started building Asher’s case. “I’m going to file a motion to exclude that evidence.”

“That’s good for us,” I say. “Right?”

“It is if we win the motion.”

I look at Asher, but he is picking at the cuticle on his thumb, lost in thought. I want to comfort him, to tell him I know how it feels when you think someone you love has betrayed you. But I also know that if anyone had said that to me, when I was married, I would have been mortified by their pity.

“There’s one more thing we have to talk about, Asher,” Jordan says, drawing his attention. “We have a plea offer from the prosecutor.”