The Secret Life of Bees (24 page)

“You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different. I don't doubt he started off loving your mother. In fact, I think he worshiped her. And your mother soaked it up. Like a lot of young women, she could get carried away with romance. But after six months or so it started wearing off. One of her letters talked about Terrence Ray having dirt under his fingernails, I remember that. Next thing I knew she was writing me how she didn't know if she could live way out on a farm, that kind of thing. When he proposed, she said no.”

“But she married him,” I said, genuinely confused.

“Later on she changed her mind and said yes.”

“Why?” I said. “If the love had worn off, why did she marry him?”

August cupped her hand on the back of my head and smoothed my hair with her fingers. “I've thought hard about whether I should tell you, but maybe it'll help you understand everything that happened a lot better. Honey, Deborah was pregnant, that's why.”

The instant before she said it, I knew what was coming, but still her words fell like a hammer.

“She was pregnant with
me
?” My voice sounded tired saying the words. My mother's life was too heavy for me.

“That's right, pregnant with you. She and Terrence Ray got married around Christmastime. She called long distance to tell me.”

Unwanted,
I thought.
I was an unwanted baby.

Not only that, my mother had gotten stuck with T. Ray because of
me
. I was glad it was dark, so August couldn't see my face, how bent in it was. You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say,
Amnesiac.

I listened to the hiss of rain. The spray floated over and misted my cheeks while I counted on my fingers. “I was born seven months after they got married.”

“She called me right after you were born. She said you were so pretty it hurt her eyes to look at you.”

Something about this caused my own eyes to sting like sand had flown into them. Maybe my mother had cooed over me after all. Made embarrassing baby talk. Twirled my newborn hair like the top of an ice cream cone. Done it up with pink bows. Just because she didn't plan on having me didn't mean she hadn't loved me.

August went on talking while I leaned back into the familiar story I'd always told myself, the one about my mother loving me beyond reason. I'd lived inside it the way a goldfish lives in its bowl, as if that was the only world there was. Leaving it would be the death of me.

I sat there with my shoulders slumped, staring at the floor. I would not think the word “unwanted.”

“Are you all right?” August said. “You want to go to bed now and sleep on all this, talk about the rest in the morning?”

“No” burst out of my lips. I took a breath. “I'm fine, really,” I said, trying to sound unruffled. “I just need some more water.”

She took my empty glass and went to the kitchen, looking back twice at me. When she returned with the water, she had a red umbrella hooked over her wrist. “In a little while I'll walk you over to the honey house,” she said.

As I drank, the glass shook in my hand and the water would hardly go down. The sound of swallowing in my throat grew so loud it blotted out the rain for several seconds.

“Are you sure you don't want to go to bed now?” August asked.

“I'm sure. I need to know—”

“You need to know what, Lily?”

“Everything,” I said.

August settled herself beside me on the swing, resigned. “All right then,” she said. “All right.”

“I know she only married him because of me, but do you think she was just a little bit happy?” I asked.

“I think for a while she was. She tried, I know that. I got a dozen or so letters and at least that many phone calls from her, spread out over the first couple of years, and I could see she was making an effort. Mostly she wrote about you, how you were sitting up, taking your first steps, playing patty-cake. But then her letters came less and less often, and when they did come, I could tell she was unhappy. One day she called me up. It was the end of August or first of September—I remember because we'd had Mary Day not long before that.

“She said she was leaving T. Ray, that she had to leave home. She wanted to know if she could stay with us here for a few months till she figured out where to go. Of course, I said, that would be fine. When I picked her up at the bus station, she didn't even look like herself. She had gotten so thin and had these dark circles under her eyes.”

My stomach did a slow roll. I knew we'd come to the place in the story I feared the most. I began to breathe very fast. “I was with her when you picked her up at the bus station. She brought me along, didn't she?”

August leaned over and whispered against my hair. “No, honey, she came by herself.”

I realized I'd bitten the skin inside my cheek. The taste of blood made me want to spit, but I swallowed it instead. “Why?” I said. “Why didn't she bring me?”

“All I know, Lily, is that she was depressed, kind of falling apart. The day she left home, nothing unusual happened. She just woke up and decided she couldn't be there anymore. She called a lady from the next farm to baby-sit, and she drove Terrence Ray's truck to the bus station. Up until she got here, I thought she'd be bringing you with her.”

The swing groaned while we sat there smelling warm rain, wet wood, rotted grass.
My mother had left me.

“I hate her,” I said. I meant to shout it, but it came out unnaturally calm, low and raspy like the sound of cars crunching slowly over gravel.

“Now, hold on, Lily.”

“I do, I hate her. She wasn't anything like I thought she was.”

I'd spent my life imagining all the ways she'd loved me, what a perfect specimen of a mother she was. And all of it was lies. I had completely made her up.

“It was easy for her to leave me, because she never wanted me in the first place,” I said.

August reached for me, but I got to my feet and pushed open the screen door leading to the porch steps. I let it slam behind me, then sat on the rain-sopped steps, hunched up under the eave.

I heard August move across the porch, felt the air thicken as she stood behind me on the other side of the screen. “I'm not going to make excuses for her, Lily,” she said. “Your mother did what she did.”

“Some mother,” I said. I felt hard inside. Hard and angry.

“Will you listen to me for a minute? When your mother got here to Tiburon, she was practically skin and bone. May couldn't get her to eat a thing. All she did was cry for a week. Later on we called it a nervous breakdown, but while it was happening we didn't know what to call it. I took her to the doctor here, and he gave her some cod liver oil and asked where her white family was. He said maybe she needed to spend some time on Bull Street. So I didn't take her back to him again.”

“Bull Street. The mental institution?” The story was getting worse by the minute. “But that's for crazy people,” I said.

“I guess he didn't know what else to do for her, but she wasn't crazy. She was depressed, but not crazy.”

“You should've let him put her in there. I wish she'd rotted in there.”

“Lily!”

I'd shocked her, and I was glad.

My mother had been looking for love, and instead she'd found T. Ray and the farm, and then me, and I had not been enough for her. She'd left me with T. Ray Owens.

The sky was split by a zigzagged path of lightning, but even then I didn't move. My hair blew like smoke in every direction. I felt my eyes harden, grow flat and narrow as pennies. I stared at a dollop of bird shit on the bottom step, the way the rain was smearing it into the crevices of the wood.

“Are you listening now?” August said. Her voice sifted through the screen, little barbed-wire tips on every word. “Are you?”

“I hear you.”

“Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.”

“Like what?” I said. “Abandon their children?” I couldn't stop. The rain spattered my sandals, dripped between my toes.

Letting out a loud breath, August walked back to the swing and sat down. It seemed like maybe I'd hurt her, disappointed her, and something about that punched a hole in me. Some of my pridefulness drained out.

I eased off the steps and went back inside, onto the screened porch. As I sat down beside her on the swing, she laid her hand on mine, and the heat flowed out from her palm into my skin. I shuddered.

“Come here,” she said, pulling me over to her. It was like being swept under a bird's wing, and that's how we stayed for a while, rocking back and forth with me tucked under there.

“What made her so depressed like that?” I said.

“I don't know the whole answer, but part of it was her being out on the farm, isolated from things, married to a man she really didn't want to be married to.”

The rain picked up, coming down in large, silver-black sheets. I tried, but I couldn't make heads or tails of my heart. One minute I hated my mother, the next I felt sorry for her.

“Okay, she was having a nervous breakdown, but how could she leave me behind like that?” I said.

“After she'd been here three months and was feeling a little better, she started talking about how much she missed you. Finally she went back to Sylvan to get you.”

I sat up and looked at August, hearing the quick suck of air through my lips. “She came back to get me?”

“She planned to bring you here to Tiburon to live. She even talked to Clayton about filing divorce papers. The last time I saw her, she was on a bus waving at me through the window.”

I leaned my head on August's shoulder and knew exactly what had happened next. I closed my eyes, and there it was. The long-gone day that would never leave—the suitcase on the floor, how she'd tossed clothes into it without folding them.
Hurry,
she'd kept saying.

T. Ray had told me she came back for her things. But she'd come back for me, too. She'd wanted to bring me here, to Tiburon, to August's.

If only we'd made it. I remembered the sound of T. Ray's boots on the stairs. I wanted to pound my fists against something, to scream at my mother for getting caught, for not packing faster, for not coming sooner.

At last I looked up at August. When I spoke, my mouth tasted bitter. “I remember it. I remember her coming back for me.”

“I wondered about that,” she said.

“T. Ray found her packing. They were yelling and fighting. She—” I stopped, hearing their voices in my head.

“Go on,” August said.

I looked down at my hands. They were trembling. “She grabbed a gun from inside the closet, but he took it away from her. It happened so fast it gets mixed up in my brain. I saw the gun on the floor, and I picked it up. I don't know why I did that. I—I wanted to help. To give it back to her. Why did I do that? Why did I pick it up?”

August slid out to the edge of the swing and turned to face me. Her eyes were determined-looking. “Do you remember what happened next, after you picked it up?”

I shook my head. “Only the noise. The explosion. So loud.”

The chains on the swing twitched. I looked over and saw August frowning.

“How did you find out about—my mother dying?” I said.

“When Deborah didn't come back like she said…well, I had to know what happened, so I called your house. A woman answered, said she was a neighbor.”

“A neighbor of ours told you?” I asked.

“She said Deborah had been killed in an accident with a gun. That's all she would say.”

I turned and looked out at the night, at dripping tree limbs, at shadows moving on the half-lit porch. “You didn't know that I was the one who—who did it?”

“No, I never imagined such a thing,” she said. “I'm not sure I can imagine it now.” She laced her fingers together, then laid them in her lap. “I tried to find out more. I called back again, and Terrence Ray answered, but he wouldn't talk about it. He kept wanting to know who I was. I even called the police station in Sylvan, but they wouldn't give out any information either, just said it was an accidental death. So I've had to live with not knowing. All these years.”

We sat in the stillness. The rain had nearly stopped, leaving us with all this quiet and a sky with no moon.

“Come on,” August said. “Let's get you in bed.”

We walked into the night, into the blurring song of katydids, the thud-splat of raindrops on the umbrella, all those terrible rhythms that take up inside when you let your guard down.
Left you,
they drummed.
Left you. Left you.

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

In the honey house, August waited till I crawled under the sheets, then bent over and kissed my forehead.

“Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.”

“Good night,” I said, and rolled onto my side.

“There is nothing perfect,” August said from the doorway. “There is only life.”

H
eat collected in the creases of my elbows, in the soft places behind my knees. Lying on top of the sheets, I touched my eyelids. I'd cried so much they were puffed out and half shut. If it hadn't been for my eyelids, I might not have believed any of the things that had passed between me and August.

I hadn't moved since August left, only lay there staring at the flat surface of the wall, at the array of night bugs that wander out and crawl around for fun after they think you're asleep. When I grew tired of watching them, I placed my arm across my eyes and told myself,
Sleep, Lily. Please, just go to sleep.
But of course, I couldn't.

I sat up, feeling like my body weighed two hundred pounds. Like somebody had backed the cement truck up to the honey house, swung the pipe over to my chest, and started pouring. I hated feeling like a concrete block in the middle of the night.

More than once, while staring at the wall, I'd thought of Our Lady. I wanted to talk to her, to say,
Where do I go from here?
But when I'd seen her earlier, when August and I had first come in, she didn't look like she could be of service to anybody, bound up with all that chain around her. You want the one you're praying to at least to
look
capable.

I dragged myself out of bed and went to see her anyway. I decided that even Mary did not need to be one hundred percent capable all the time. The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say,
You poor thing, I know how you feel.
Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that's just me.

Right off I smelled the chain, its thick, rusty odor. I had the urge to unwrap her, but of course that would have ruined the whole reenactment August and the Daughters had going.

The red candle flickered at Mary's feet. I plopped onto the floor and sat cross-legged in front of her. Outside, I heard wind high in the trees, a singsong voice that carried me back to long-ago times when I would wake in the night to the same sound and, muddled with sleep and wanting, would imagine it was my mother out there among the trees, singing her bottomless love. Once I flew into T. Ray's room, yelling she was outside my window. He said three words: “Holy crap, Lily.”

I hated when he was right. There had never been any voice in the wind. No mother out there singing. No bottomless love.

The terrible thing, the really terrible thing, was the anger in me. It had started on the back porch when the story of my mother had collapsed, like the ground under my feet giving way. I didn't want to be angry. I told myself,
You're not angry. You don't have any right to be angry. What you did to your mother is a lot worse than what she did to you.
But you can't talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you're not.

The room was hot and still. In another minute I would not be able to breathe for the anger filling me up. My lungs went out only so far before they struck against it and closed back in.

I got to my feet and paced in the darkness. Behind me on the worktable a half dozen jars of Black Madonna Honey waited for Zach to deliver them somewhere in town—to Clayton's maybe, to the Frogmore Stew General Store, the Amen Dollar, or Divine Do's, the colored beauty parlor.

How dare she? How dare she leave me? I was her child.

I looked toward the window, wanting to smash the panes out of it. I wanted to throw something all the way to heaven and knock God clean off his throne. I picked up one of the honey jars and hurled it as hard as I could. It missed black Mary's head by inches and smashed against the back wall. I picked up another one and threw it, too. It crashed on the floor beside a stack of supers. I threw every last jar on the table, until honey was spattered everywhere, flung like cake batter from electric beaters. I stood in a gooey room full of broken glass, and I didn't care. My mother had left me. Who cared about honey on the walls?

I grabbed a tin bucket next and, letting out a grunt, threw it with so much force it left a dent in the wall. My throwing arm was nearly worn out, but I picked up a tray of candle molds and flung that, too.

Then I stood still, watching the honey slide along the wall toward the floor. A trickle of bright blood wound down my left arm. I had no idea how it'd gotten there. My heart beat wildly. I felt like I'd unzipped my skin and momentarily stepped out of it, leaving a crazy person in charge.

The room turned like a carousel, with my stomach gliding up and down. I felt a need to touch the wall with both hands to make it still again. I walked back toward the table where the honey jars had been and braced my hands against it. I couldn't think what to do. I felt a powerful sadness, not because of what I'd done, as bad as that was, but because everything seemed emptied out—the feelings I'd had for her, the things I'd believed, all those stories about her I'd lived off of like they were food and water and air. Because I was the girl she'd left behind. That's what it came down to.

Looking around at the wreck I'd made, I wondered if someone in the pink house might have heard the honey jars hit the wall. I went to the window and stared across the gloom in the yard. The panes in August's bedroom window were dark. I felt my heart in my chest. It hurt so badly. Like it had been stepped on.

“How come you left me?” I whispered, watching my breath make a circle of fog on the glass.

I stayed pressed against the window for a while, then went and cleared off a few pieces of glass from the floor in front of Our Lady. I lay down on my side, drawing my knees toward my chin. Above me, black Mary was flecked with honey and seemed not at all surprised. I lay in the emptiness, in the tiredness, with everything—even the hating—drained out. There was nothing left to do. No place to go. Just right here, right now, where the truth was.

I told myself not to get up in the night and walk across the floor unless I wanted to cut my feet to smithereens. Then I closed my eyes and began to piece together the dream I wanted myself to have. How a little door in the black Mary statue would open up, just over her abdomen, and I would crawl inside to a hidden room. This was not all my imagination, as I had glimpsed an actual picture of this in August's book—a statue of Mary with a wide-open door and, inside, all these people tucked away in the secret world of consolation.

 

I woke to Rosaleen's big hands shaking me and opened my eyes to a terrible brightness. Her face was bent over mine, the scent of coffee and grape jelly coming from her mouth. “Lily!” she yelled. “What in the Sam Hill happened in here?”

I'd forgotten there would be dried blood caked across my arm. I looked at it, at a piece of glass, small as a stub of diamond, burrowed in a puckered setting of skin. Around me, jagged pieces of jars and puddles of honey. Blood dotted the floor.

Rosaleen stared at me, waiting, bewildered-looking. I stared back, trying to make her face come into focus. Sunlight slanted across Our Lady and fell down around us.

“Answer me,” Rosaleen said.

I squinted in the light. My mouth couldn't seem to open up and speak.

“Look at you. You've been bleeding.”

My head nodded, bobbed around on my neck. I looked at the wrecked room. I felt embarrassed, ridiculous, stupid.

“I—I threw some jars of honey.”

“
You
made this mess?” she said, like she couldn't quite believe it, like what she'd expected me to say was that a roving band of house wreckers had come through during the night. She blew a puff of air over her face, so forceful it lifted her hair, which was not easy to do considering the amount of lacquer she kept smeared on it. “Lord God in heaven,” she said.

I got to my feet, waiting for her to bawl me out, but she took her thick fingers and struggled to pluck the piece of glass from my arm. “You need some Mercurochrome on this before you get infected,” she told me. “Come on.” She sounded exasperated, like she wanted to take me by the shoulders and shake me till my teeth fell out.

 

I sat on the side of the tub while Rosaleen dabbed my arm with a stinging icy swab. She plastered a Band-Aid across it and said, “There, you won't die from blood poisoning at least.”

She closed the medicine cabinet over the sink, then shut the bathroom door. I watched her take a seat on the commode, how her belly dropped down between her legs. When Rosaleen sat on a toilet, the whole thing disappeared under her. I perched on the side of the tub and thought how glad I was August and June were still in their rooms.

“All right,” she said, “why did you throw all that honey?”

I looked at the row of seashells on the window ledge, knowing how truly they belonged here even though we were a hundred miles from the ocean. August had said everybody needed a seashell in her bathroom to remind her the ocean was her home. Seashells, she'd said, are Our Lady's favorite items, next to the moon.

I went over and picked up one of the shells, a pretty white one, flat with yellow around the edges.

Rosaleen sat there watching me. “Any time now,” she said.

“T. Ray was right about my mother,” I said, hearing myself say the words, feeling sickened by them. “She left me. It was just like he said it was. She left me.” For a second the anger I'd felt the night before flared up, and it crossed my mind to slam the shell against the tub, but I took a breath instead. Throwing fits wasn't that satisfying, I'd found out.

Rosaleen shifted her weight, and the toilet lid squeaked and slid around on top of the seat. She raked her fingers over the top of her head. I looked away, at the pipe under the sink, at a smudge of rust on the linoleum.

“So your mother did leave after all,” she said. “Lord, I was afraid of that.”

I lifted my head. I remembered that first night after we ran away, down by the creek, when I'd told Rosaleen what T. Ray had said. I'd wanted her to laugh at the very idea of my mother leaving me, but she'd hesitated.

“You knew already, didn't you?” I said.

“I didn't know for sure,” she said. “I just heard things.”

“What things?”

She let out a sigh, really something more than a sigh. “After your mama died,” she said, “I heard T. Ray on the phone talking to that neighbor lady, Mrs. Watson. He was telling her he didn't need her to watch after you, that he'd gotten one of the pickers out of the orchard. He was talking about me, so I listened.” Outside the window a crow flew past, filling the bathroom with a frantic
caw-caw,
and Rosaleen stopped, waiting for it to die down.

I knew Mrs. Watson from church, from all the times she stopped to buy peaches from me. She was kind as she could be, but she'd always looked at me like there was something indescribably sad written across my forehead, like she wanted to come over and scrub it off.

I clutched the side of the tub as Rosaleen went on, not sure I wanted her to. “I heard your daddy tell Mrs. Watson, ‘Janie, you've done more than your share, looking after Lily these past months. I don't know what we would've done without you.'” Rosaleen looked at me and shook her head. “I always wondered what he meant by that. When you told me what T. Ray said about your mother leaving you, I guess I knew then.”

“I can't believe you didn't tell me,” I said and folded my arms across my chest.

“So how did you find out?” Rosaleen asked.

“August told me,” I said. I thought of all that crying I'd done in her bedroom. Holding fistfuls of her dress in my hand. The monogram on her handkerchief, scratchy against my cheek.

“August?” Rosaleen repeated. You don't see Rosaleen looking dumbfounded that often, but that's the look she had now.

“She knew my mother back when she was a little girl in Virginia,” I explained. “August helped raise her.”

I waited a few seconds, letting it soak it.

“This is where my mother came when she left. When…Mrs. Watson took care of me,” I said. “She came right here to this house.”

Rosaleen's eyes grew even narrower, if such a thing was possible. “Your mother—” she said, then stopped. I could see that her brain was struggling to fit it all together. My mother leaving. Mrs. Watson watching me. My mother returning, only to get killed.

“My mother stayed here three months before she went back to Sylvan,” I said. “I guess one day it finally dawned on her:
Oh, yeah, that's right, I've got a little girl at home. Gee, maybe I'll go back and get her now.”

I heard the bitter tone in my voice, and it came to me how I could lock that tone into my voice forever. From now on, every time I thought of my mother, I could, so easy, slip off into a cold place where meanness took over. I squeezed the shell and felt it dig into the pad of skin on my palm.

Rosaleen got to her feet. I looked at her, how large she was in the little bathroom. I stood up, too, and for a second we were sandwiched together between the tub and the toilet, staring at each other.

“I wish you'd told me what you knew about my mother,” I said. “How come you didn't?”

“Oh, Lily,” she said, and there was gentleness in her words, like they'd been rocked in a little hammock of tenderness down in her throat. “Why would I go and hurt you with something like that?”

 

Rosaleen walked beside me to the honey house with a mop flung over her shoulder and a spatula in her hand. I carried a bucket of rags and the Spic and Span. We used the spatula to scrape honey off places you wouldn't believe. Some of it had gotten all the way over onto August's adding machine.

We wiped off the floors and the walls, then went to work on Our Lady. We picked the place up and turned it back the way it was, and the entire time we didn't speak a word.

I worked with heaviness inside, with my spirit emptied out. There was my breath curling in hard puffs from my nostrils. There was Rosaleen's heart so full toward me it broke through into her sweating face. There was Our Lady talking with her eyes, saying things I could not make out. And there was nothing else.