Mad Honey: A Novel (33 page)

I think about Asher revealing Lily’s suicide attempt to Jordan
and me. How, at the time, he felt privileged to be the one she’d confided in.

“What happened next?” the prosecutor asks.

“I pursued surgery options for Lily.”

“Did your husband know?”

“Yes.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He was furious. He acted as if this was something being done to
him
. Eventually I had to get legal permission for Lily to have surgery without him signing off on it.”

“Was Lily aware of this? How did it make her feel?”

“She felt rejected. She felt like he hated her.”

I stare at Asher’s profile, again. Two of a kind, him and Lily. With mothers who protected them from their fathers, giving enough love to spackle over the hate.

“Ms. Campanello, is there a reason you didn’t tell the State that Lily was transgender?”

She shifts, straightening almost imperceptibly. “Is there a reason I
had
to?” Ava asks. “Lily was a girl. A girl who fell in love,” she adds, “with the wrong boy.”

THIS IS HOW
I told Braden we were having a baby: I had fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and I didn’t respond to the daily AIM message he sent from the hospital, just checking in to see how my day was going. He came home midshift, wild-eyed, slamming the front door against the wall as he burst through it, yelling my name. I jerked up off the couch, too surprised to do anything but stand like a willow in the face of his storm.
Do you have any idea how worried I was? I thought you’d been in an accident. Why didn’t you answer my message?

When I told Braden I had been asleep, he grabbed my wrists hard.
You’re lying to me,
he accused.

I’m pregnant,
I blurted out. I had taken an over-the-counter test the day before, and I was waiting for a blood test to be sure.

Braden’s mood changed like the wind. He let go of my wrists, his hands sliding up my shoulders with a feather-light touch.
A baby?
he said.
Yours, mine?
A smile broke over his face, and he kissed me as if I were made of air and light.

He called the hospital and said he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the afternoon. We talked about names—he liked Violet and Daisy and I teased him about having a whole bouquet of babies. He made love to me as if he was claiming an uncharted territory. Later, I sprawled across Braden with my ear pressed to the drum of his heart.
You know what this means,
he said.
As long as that baby exists, you and I are inseparable. We’re literally fused together in its genetic code
.

I woke up to Braden tucking the duvet around me and kissing me on the forehead as he slipped out of bed to get ready for work. But I pretended to be asleep, so I didn’t break the spell.

IT’S TRUE THAT
for years, I hid the fact that Braden abused me. Part of it was because I bought into the gaslighting, the constant barrage of abuse. Part of it was because I was bewildered and embarrassed that I had reached this point—as if I could no longer mark the spot where I stopped being an intelligent, confident woman. And part of it was because, in spite of everything, I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone else—and I thought that meant that I might be able to change him.

What made me finally willing to reveal the violent underbelly of my marriage was fear—not for me, but for Asher. I would have killed myself to keep him safe, but I also knew that if I was dead, I couldn’t protect him. So I left, and I told my parents and Jordan the truth. I got a restraining order, I got counseling, I got a divorce. I started over.

If I had never had Asher, though, I might still be married to Braden.

There are some secrets that I think we are willing to take to the grave for the people we love. It’s why, I think, Ava Campanello did not tell anyone in Adams that Lily was trans.

The prosecutor has shifted her line of questioning. “When did you first meet the defendant?” she asks.

“Lily invited him to dinner when they started going out. It was September,” Ava replies.

“What were your impressions of him, at first?”

She turns to look directly at Asher. “I liked him,” Ava says flatly, her words at odds with her expression. “He was polite to me and he looked at Lily like she was the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

“Do you know if Lily and Asher were intimate?” Gina asks.

A flush steals across Asher’s cheekbones.

“I don’t know,” Ava admits, her eyes filling with tears again. “I assume they were.”

“Why did you assume that?” Gina gently presses.

“Because she was so happy.” Ava breaks down. “I had never seen her so happy.”

I open up my Moleskine notebook. I can feel the eyes of the strangers on either side of me, and I curl my hand so that they cannot see what I’m writing.

Gin. Lemon juice. Honey.

I close my eyes. I imagine every cocktail you can make with honey, boiling it down into a simple syrup. I imagine sitting on the porch on a hot Sunday afternoon, with nothing better to do than drink one and listen to the hum of the bees collecting nectar. I imagine Asher coming up the porch steps, sweaty after a run, grinning at me.

Got extra?

I will when you’re twenty-one.

Lily Campanello will never be twenty-one.

I close the notebook.

“Ms. Campanello, I’d like to walk you through the day of Lily’s murder. We’ve heard that she was sick. What were her symptoms?”

“She had a fever, and felt weak. She stayed home from school.”

“Did you stay with her?”

“Yes, I called in to work and told them I needed the day off. Her fever spiked, and we had no Advil in the house, so I ran to the pharmacy to get some.”

Gina nods. “What time was that?”

“A little after three o’clock.”

“When you left, who was in the house?” the prosecutor asks.

“Just Lily. And Boris, our dog.”

“How long were you gone?”

“An hour or so.”

“When you returned,” Gina says, “what’s the first thing you noticed?”

“Asher’s car was outside. And the front door was open,” Ava responds.

“What happened next?”

“I went inside,” Ava says. “Asher was on the living room couch, holding Lily. She was bleeding. And…she…she wasn’t moving.” Her voice fades away until it’s only a hush that hangs over the room, like the air after a thunderstorm.

“I only have one more question, Mrs. Campanello,” Gina says. “Did you and Lily ever have a conversation about whether she should tell Asher that she was transgender?”

“Yes,” Ava admits. “I encouraged her to tell him…but she didn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because she said he would hate her for it, like her father did.” Ava swallows hard. “She said that if that happened…” She looks directly at Asher. “If that happened, her life would be over.”

The prosecutor lets that settle. “Nothing further,” she says.

DURING THE FIFTEEN-MINUTE
recess that the judge calls, Jordan spirits Asher and me into the conference room we used yesterday. He doesn’t sit down, instead just paces and hovers like a coach during halftime. “Okay,” he says, as if he needs to convince himself. “She gets the sympathy vote, period. We accept that, and then we dismantle it as best we can when it’s time for the defense to put up our case.”

Asher is even more quiet than usual. “I liked Lily’s mom,” he says.
“The first time I met her, we talked about how there are signs on New Hampshire mountains that say the summits have the worst weather in America. We joked about whose job it was to verify that, and what they’d done to get demoted.” He rubs his hand down his face. “She told me that once, Lily put herself in time-out because she didn’t want to clean her room and she assumed she would have wound up there anyway. And that when Lily was really little, she had an imaginary friend—a striped spider named David.” Asher shakes his head. “Who makes up an imaginary spider and names it David?”

Being in court this morning has already taught me that Ava Campanello is a better mother than I am. She had a child turn out to be someone she didn’t expect, and for all intents and purposes, she not only supported her but had her back against the judgment of the rest of the world.

On the other hand, I now have a child who may turn out to be someone I didn’t expect him to be, and all I want to do is reverse the clock to the moment before I doubted him.

JORDAN HAS AN
older son, Thomas, from his first marriage, but I was still pretty young when he was born, so it wasn’t until Sam arrived that I saw my brother play the role of a parent. I remember watching him coo to his baby when Sam was colicky and Selena had given up in exhaustion. I had seen Jordan argue and tease and fight and brood and even fall in love, but I had never seen him gentle all his rough edges before. Sam usually fell asleep in less than five minutes when Jordan soothed him; he never stood a chance against my brother’s soft voice and even softer touch.

It’s the same way, now, that he approaches Ava on the witness stand. “Ms. Campanello,” he says gently, “I am very sorry that you have to be here today. I have only a handful of questions to ask you.” She nods, a quick jerk of the chin. “Back in September, you knew Lily and Asher were dating?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew they were getting very close?”

“Yes.”

“Back then, you felt like Asher was good for Lily, didn’t you?”

Ava eyes him warily. “Yes.”

“In fact, only a few short months ago, didn’t you think Asher showed great concern and consideration for your daughter?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Isn’t that why,” Jordan says, “you suggested that Lily confide in Asher that she was transgender?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve stated that Lily resisted telling Asher, right?”

“That’s correct.”

Jordan slips his hands into his trouser pockets. “Most parents aren’t around for most conversations between two dating teenagers. Assuming that you weren’t present for every conversation between Asher and Lily, you really have no idea whether or not Lily ever
did
confide in Asher that she was transgender…do you?”

“No,” she says.

“Thank you, Ms. Cam—”

“But my daughter is dead,” Ava interrupts. “So I can make a pretty damn good assumption.”

Jordan steps backward. “Nothing further,” he murmurs.

THE NEXT MORNING,
when I walk by Asher’s bedroom door and knock to make sure he is awake and getting ready to leave in time for court at nine, he doesn’t answer. I knock again, and when there’s only silence, I open the door. His sheets are tangled, as if he’s recently been buried beneath them, but he is nowhere in the room.

He is not downstairs in the kitchen, or in the living room, or sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee. He isn’t in the basement or the barn. By the time I get back to the house, I nearly collide with Jordan in the hallway. “Whoa,” he says, grabbing my shoulders. “Where’s the fire?”

“Asher’s missing,” I say bluntly, and Jordan hesitates in the act of tightening his tie.

“Missing,” he repeats. “What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?” I ask, my voice rising in pitch and volume.

“He can’t leave,” Jordan says. “It’s a bail violation. Is his car here?”

“Yes, but I have no idea when he left. He could have walked all the way to town by now.”

“Well, we have to find him before the cops do, or he could get locked in jail for the rest of the trial. Where would he go?”

To Lily’s,
I think immediately, and realize at the same time that is exactly where he
isn’t
.

“Maybe he just went for a walk to clear his head,” Jordan says charitably, but at the same time, he grabs the keys to the truck from the bowl near the front door. “I’ll drive around and look for him. You stay here. Whoever finds him first, texts.”

I cannot say out loud what I am thinking, so I wait for Jordan to leave the driveway before I run downstairs to the basement and with shaking hands open the gun safe that holds the old .22.

The gun is still inside, propped as it’s been since it was last used, five or six years ago.

I am so relieved that my knees give out, and I wind up sitting in front of the open safe with my heart racing. It was only a couple of weeks ago that Asher tried to kill himself and failed.

But just because the gun is here doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about suicide.

I close up the safe, scramble the combination, and hurry back upstairs. The house is still, silent. Outside, a light rain has started to fall.

I run through the litany of terrible possibilities in my mind as I wonder where he might have gone. The apple orchard, with its thick branches? I grab my phone in case Jordan texts, and run along the fields, calling Asher’s name as I head to the woods that separate my property from the orchard. I step into the soft sponge of pine needles, looking for broken branches or footprints or any kind of evidence that Asher was here.

Suddenly a bird bursts out of the brush, a grouse startled by my
arrival. To be fair, I’m just as scared as it is, and I cower as it flaps away in a blur of feathers. But when I’m crouched like that, my face is turned up, which is how and why I notice the tree house.

My father built it for Jordan when he was a boy, and I inherited it when Jordan got too old to bother with it. Eventually, it was passed down to Asher when we moved back to Adams. He played there with Maya in elementary school. Now, it is camouflaged, its wood the same streaked gray of the tree trunks surrounding it.

“Asher?” I call, my hands on the rope ladder.

It’s faint, but audible. “Up here.”

With a relief that floods me from heart to fingertips, I scramble up and poke my head into the tree house. I am assailed by a wave of nostalgia—my initials and Jordan’s on the beams, and Braden’s (something he did when I showed him the hideaway, which completely pissed me off, because this was
my
place, not
ours
), the ship’s wheel I added for Asher, the smooth knot in the wooden beam that I used to pretend was a button that could transport me to Bangladesh, to the moon, to the future—to anywhere but Adams, New Hampshire.