by Karen White
Neither one looked up as she entered, but Birdie sat back in her chair, looking down at the saucer cupped in one hand, the other placed loosely on top as if to hide it from view.
“Hi, Grandpa,” Maisy said as she entered, then stood next to Birdie. “Is everything all right?” She found herself half expecting Birdie to look up and say something, the words Maisy imagined hearing floating somewhere right outside her grasp. Her heart beat with a panicked thrum. What if Becky wasn’t lying about Birdie talking?
Birdie stood and Maisy held her breath, waiting. But Birdie just leaned over and kissed her father’s forehead, then walked toward the door, pausing briefly before leaving the room. Maisy clenched her teeth, focusing on the sense of panic, trying to identify its source, then realizing with some surprise that it wasn’t the thought that Becky hadn’t been lying to her, but the fact that Birdie might have something to say.
“Do you need anything?” she asked her grandfather.
He slowly turned his eyes toward the water glass on the nightstand. Carefully she picked it up and helped him take a few sips before he turned his head away.
“Would you like me to turn on the television?”
He shook his head, his gaze focused past her shoulders toward the window.
“Would you like to go outside? I bet your bees miss you.”
He turned just his eyes toward her, the way a small child did when he knew he’d done something wrong. He grunted something that sounded like the word “no.”
She watched him for a moment. “I’ll take you for a walk down to the dock tomorrow morning when it’s a little cooler, all right?”
He didn’t respond, his gaze focused on the window again.
Maisy checked the chart to see whether he’d been given his nighttime medications, including the antidepressant his doctor had prescribed. She saw Georgia’s initials next to the checkmarks. She made a mental note to talk to his doctor about upping the dose.
He turned his head away from the window, an indication that he was ready to go to sleep.
She helped him move down in the bed, then fluffed the pillows behind his head before kissing his cheek.
“Good night, Grandpa,” she said as she stood, but his eyes were already closed. Maisy carefully took off his glasses and placed them on his bedside table, noticing his beekeeper’s journal flipped open and upside down, like a bird stalled in flight. It was the notebook he carried with him every day as he went into his apiary, and where he jotted his thoughts and observations. He’d never allowed her to read it, although from time to time he’d share a favorite quote or proverb he’d discovered.
She glanced at him to make sure he was sound asleep—his ability to fall asleep quickly a side effect of his mediation—and after a brief moment of hesitation picked it up, feeling like a child left unsupervised around a cookie jar. There were too many questions and not enough answers, and it wasn’t her nature to wait until problems resolved themselves. The cover of the journal was old and soft from age and use. He didn’t write in it every day, but he’d told her he’d been writing his observances in the same journal since he’d started beekeeping with his father in his late teens.
She opened it to the first entry, the pen strokes on the page faded to a pale blue. The date at the top read, April 10, 1954. She paused at the date, a thought jabbing at the back of her head. After a quick calculation, she looked down at the date again. In 1954 her grandfather would have been thirty-three. Glancing up at the full bookshelves against the wall that had remained despite the room’s conversion to a bedroom, she scanned the spines, looking for another journal, one that might have been started when he’d been a teenager.
Not seeing one, she returned to the journal and read the entry.
There are no secrets to bee behavior that cannot be explained by science. The jobs of each bee are preordained at birth: the worker, the drone, the queen. And yet some bees will find themselves far from the hive, wayward wanderers, almost as if their predestination had been to wander far from home and forget they were meant to be just a bee.
Maisy opened the journal to the last entry, noting that it had been written two days before his stroke. The bees have returned to their hives for the evening, where they will not sleep but continue in their duties for the good of the hive. Yet there’s a low hum, not restful or peaceful but agitated. It’s as if they, too, sense the ripples in the atmosphere around us. Can predict the approaching change that I’ve sensed in my old bones since I learned my granddaughter is returning home. I will observe them closely, hoping that they will tell me what I need to do now.
She read the last entry twice, then replaced the journal where she’d found it. She stood by the bed and watched her grandfather for a long moment, wondering what it was he needed to know.
After she arranged the bedclothes up around his shoulders, she left the room, pausing just for a moment in the foyer, the evasive words she’d imagined hearing suddenly as clear to her as if they’d been shouted. Tell me.
She turned around for a moment to stare at the closed door, those two words reverberating in her head. Surely she’d imagined it. The stress of the last weeks and her lack of sleep were affecting her.
She climbed the stairs slowly, dreading her empty bed and the quiet of her room because there was no one there to talk through the day with. She still slept on one side of the bed, being careful not to feel the cold absence, the missing indentation on his pillow. Her bedroom had become a mausoleum, a solemn memorial of a marriage that had passed.
Birdie’s bedroom door was closed, but there were soft voices coming from Becky’s room. As Maisy neared, she recognized Georgia’s voice. She sucked in her breath, suddenly angry. Becky was supposed to be doing her homework, and it was typical of Georgia to assume that she could come and interrupt Becky anytime she wanted.
Becky’s voice was low. “Mama won’t let Birdie do my hair. She says as long as it’s clean and cut nicely and I wear it out of my face, then I shouldn’t think twice about it.”
Maisy stopped outside the room and looked inside. Becky sat cross-legged on the bed, while Georgia sat on her knees behind her, French-braiding her hair, their backs to the door.
“Well, she’s right,” Georgia said.
Maisy’s anger jammed in her throat.
Georgia continued. “You’re too young to be worrying about your hair. You should use your brain cells for school and tennis.”
Becky groaned. “I figured you’d take her side.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re sisters. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
There was a long pause. “You’re right. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
“Why is Mama so mad at you?”
Georgia’s fingers stalled on the yellow strands. “It’s an involved and complicated story, sweetie. Maybe when you’re older we can have a long talk.”
Becky let out an exaggerated sigh. “That’s what Mama says, too. Can’t you at least give me a hint?”
Maisy pressed her lips together, holding back the hot words that threatened to spill out of her mouth.
“Let’s just say that your mama and I didn’t have the kind of childhood you have. We were raised mostly by Grandpa after Grandma died, and he loved us, but we were two little girls and he didn’t have too much experience with being a single dad. That just wasn’t something men of his generation ever expected to do.”
“What about Birdie? She’s your mama.”
“Theoretically. But I don’t think motherhood was anything she ever planned on. She married for love the first time and for security the second time, and us girls were just sort of collateral damage.”
“Did you ever want to be a mother?”
Maisy squeezed her eyes shut, picturing Georgia’s face at the hospital the day Becky had been born, the smell of blood and longing and retrib
ution forever linked in Maisy’s mind. She remembered, too, the way her heart expanded when she’d held Becky for the first time.
“Not really. At least when I was younger. Not sure how I feel about it now, either.”
Becky twisted her head to look at her aunt, the strands of hair slipping from Georgia’s fingers. “What does collateral damage mean?”
“It means that your mama and I had to stick together, because we were being brought up by two people who were raising us by default. Not like you, Becky. You have a mama and daddy who love you very much, and are doing their best to raise you right. If your mama is grumpy or telling you to do things, be grateful. That means she cares and that she loves you. It will make a big difference in your life when you get older.” Georgia’s elegant fingers threaded through Becky’s hair again, returning to where she’d left off.
“But she’s grumpy all the time, and she never wants to listen to what I have to s-say.”
It was the first time Becky had stuttered in the whole conversation with Georgia, and it made Maisy feel hollowed-out, knowing it had been the mention of her that had started it.
“Your mama has a lot going on in her life right now, so be kind to her. If I thought for one minute, or one second, that she wasn’t the best mother in the world, I would have moved back here years ago to keep an eye on you. From the first moment I saw her holding you, I knew that you could search the world over and never find someone who could love you more.”
Georgia’s voice cracked, and Maisy wondered whether Becky had heard it, too, had recognized the sound of a broken heart.
The quietly sung words from “Send in the Clowns” from behind Birdie’s closed door punctuated the silence. Becky’s voice sounded strained. “She’s singing it for me.”
“What do you mean?”
Becky shrugged. “She always sings it after one of her ‘episodes’—that’s what Mama calls them. It’s like she wants me to know she’s all right, that her thoughts are in the right place again.”
Maisy could almost hear Georgia’s thoughts running through her head, mirroring her own. “The right place?”
“Uh-huh. It’s like when you’re playing tag and you’re on base. She’s on base right now, where she’s pretending she’s in a play and nobody can catch her or take her away.”
“She told you this?” Georgia continued threading the blond strands in and out of the long braid, slowing slightly as she reached the bottom.
“Sort of.” There was a long pause, and Maisy imagined Georgia keeping silent on purpose, waiting until Becky was ready to tell her more. But Becky didn’t saying anything else.
Georgia sat back on her heels. “Did you know you’re missing a big chunk of your hair?” She held up a small quadrant of hair toward the back of Becky’s head. “Looks like it’s been cut clean.” Using a hair tie, Georgia quickly wrapped up the bottom of the braid, the shorter strands lying conspicuously untethered on the side of Becky’s face. “Did you cut it?”
Becky shook her head. “No.” She began gnawing on her thumbnail, obscuring her voice.
Georgia waited for a moment for Becky to elaborate. When she didn’t, she asked, “Then who did?”
Becky tilted her head down so she was staring at her crossed legs, her thumbnail lodged between her teeth. “P-promise you won’t be mad?”
“Not if you tell me the truth.”
“It was Madison Bennett. She sits behind me in math.”
Maisy drew in a breath. Why hadn’t Becky told her?
“Why would she do such a thing?”
Becky was silent.
“I won’t be mad, remember? Just tell me the truth.”
The singing stopped, as if even Birdie were waiting for an answer. “Your friend Bobby that we saw the other day? Madison is his niece. He said something not very nice about you, and she was telling people at school. So I told her to shut up.”
Maisy pressed herself against the wall so she wouldn’t be tempted to rush into the bedroom and give her daughter a high five. Not just because it wouldn’t be the right thing for a mother to encourage her child to tell another child to shut up, but because she wouldn’t want Georgia to see her praising Becky for sticking up for her aunt. Her second instinct was to call the school’s principal and ask for a meeting. It was too late, of course, but Maisy made a mental note to do it first thing in the morning, and that made her feel slightly better.
“Do you want to tell me what she said?”
Becky shook her head.
“That’s all right. Is Madison a friend of yours?”
“She’s one of the popular girls. They have a special table in the lunchroom, and you have to be invited to sit with them.”
“And you haven’t been?”
The French braid flopped as Becky shook her head again. “I don’t want to. I sit at the jockettes’ table.”
“Jockettes?”
“Those are the girls who play sports. But we let other people sit with us if they want.”
“That’s nice—to have a group of people you’re comfortable with, and still welcome others. It’s a good way to be.”
“Did you have a group you hung out with when you were in school?”
The boys, Maisy thought. Always the boys.
“Not really. I wasn’t into music and ran on the track team—much to Birdie’s disappointment. But I loved art, so I hung out with a bunch of the other kids who were into art. I especially liked to paint, although I was terrible at it. That’s probably what got me interested in antiques and old china. Well, that and my grandmother’s love of collecting it.”
“Did you have a best friend?”
Maisy listened as the bedsprings creaked, and when she stole a glance into the bedroom, Georgia stood next to the bed, her profile outlined by the beside lamp, looking somehow small and lost and alone. “Not really. I didn’t need one.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a sister. And that’s all I needed.”
Maisy turned from the doorway and tiptoed down the hallway to her own bedroom, carefully closing it without a sound. She stood with her back pressed against the door for a long time, watching the light fade from the sky as a night crier began its endless calling from its perch in a tall cypress, searching for something in the vast darkness it couldn’t seem to find no matter how long it cried.
chapter 22
“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”
Victor Hugo
—NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL
Georgia
James and I sat in the shade of the giant magnolia tree near the apiary, he with his laptop and I with the thick folder filled with photocopies from the Beaulieu estate ledger. The handwriting was tiny, old-fashioned, and, to make it even more difficult for me, in French. Happily, I needed to know only the words Limoges and Emile Duval. Not that I expected a nineteenth-century estate manager to make it convenient for an American in the twenty-first century to decipher his work, but I’d hoped that the tedium of the last weeks had bought me at least one convenience. But life, I’d learned, rarely made sense, was fair, or cared about what was convenient or easy.
James closed his laptop with an annoyed expression, then put it on the ground. “I just lost the Wi-Fi connection again—I guess I’m too far from the router. I wish I’d brought my personal Wi-Fi hotspot, but I wasn’t really thinking ahead when I decided to take the trip down south.”
I shook the pages in my hands. “See? Modern technology is vastly overrated. I’m not having a problem accessing my data.”
He snorted. “But by the way you’re squinting, I’m guessing you’re having trouble reading it. If it were online you could make the font bigger. And let’s not forget that the only reason you’re looking at it here in your backyard in Apalachicola, Florida, is because somebody in France decided to make it ava
ilable online.”
Feeling a lot like Becky, I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a Luddite—really. I think a lot of modern technology is great, especially for research. I just don’t think there’s a need to be in touch twenty-four/seven. When do people have time to think if they’re being constantly barraged by bings and texts and alerts? I’ve just opted out of all that.”
James leaned back, crossing his legs at the ankles. He was barefoot—that was a first—and I tried very hard not to stare. It was really unfair that a man should have such nicely formed legs and feet. I wondered whether his sisters were built the same way, or if they resented his good fortune.
His eyes narrowed, a darker blue in the shade. “So it has nothing to do with cutting yourself off from a past you want nothing to do with?”
I wasn’t angry at him because he’d spoken the truth. I was angry at myself for being so transparent to him. “I already told you why I choose not to have a cell phone.”
“Yes, but I’m assuming your reasons don’t really apply anymore.”
His phone buzzed three times, then stopped, and then after only a brief pause it began again.
“Case in point,” I said, pretending he hadn’t spoken. “You’re obviously annoyed that somebody is trying to reach you, but you’re too addicted to your phone to turn it off or just leave it at your hotel. So you end up torturing not only yourself, but those nearby.”
He reached into his pocket and held out his phone. “I didn’t answer because I knew it was my oldest sister calling yet again. I’ve spoken to her several times since I’ve been here and have exchanged numerous texts and see no need to beat a dead horse. I’m hoping she’ll come to realize that and stop—although it’s not in her nature to leave things alone where I’m concerned.”
For some reason I felt the need to leap to the defense of a woman I’d never met. “She’s just being an older sister. She obviously cares about you.”
He leaned forward, his eyes probing. “And Maisy always did what you wanted her to do because she appreciated your caring?”
