by Karen White
“Why did you do that?”
“Because I wanted to.”
I shook my head over and over, not really knowing why. “I think it’s time you went back to New York.”
Turning, I began to walk quickly down the dock toward the yard, eager to put distance between us.
“You’re not ordinary,” James called after me. “I don’t think you could be ordinary even if you tried.”
I didn’t stop until I reached Marlene’s house, watching as the moon’s shadows crept between the statuary, still tasting James’s kiss on my lips and wondering why I wanted to cry.
chapter 31
The queen bee is the only bee in the hive that does not have a barbed stinger. This means she can repeatedly sting, like a wasp.
—NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL
Birdie
I stayed in my nightgown all day, sitting up in the turret window of my bedroom and looking out across the bay. I was aware of Maisy coming in to check on me and to offer food, and of her soft sobs from her room. Of Georgia, lying down on the dock as sunset approached. Something had happened, then. I stared off into the horizon, expecting to see heavy storm clouds. But all I saw was Venus and the moon, and the brightly colored bees flitting around a soup cup. And George. I felt him near me again, his hand in mine. Saw us fleeing from the thin man on the dock, the man who’d asked me to remember.
I held the soup cup lightly in one hand while the fingers on my other hand traced the flight patterns of the bees around the rim. It was hard to determine where the line originated or where the bees were headed, a circle with no beginning or end.
Marry me, Birdie. I’ll help you forget. I turned my head, expecting to see George, to tell him now what I didn’t understand then. That some things can’t be forgotten. You can push them so far back inside your head that you think they’re not there anymore, but they are, shimmering around the periphery.
He said that you knew who’d stolen your daddy’s truck. And if they ever found it, they should ask you about it. I could smell the dog scent and her breath on my cheek as Marlene had said that. Marlene. I needed to go see her, to show her the soup cup. Maybe she could tell me what I was missing, what knowledge was still lodged in the forgetting part of my brain.
It had been a while since I’d been to Marlene’s, but my feet seemed to know where to go, even in the dark. I walked slowly, my eyes and ears focused inward to the year of the red tide again, of the beginning of George and me. Of him kissing me, hidden beneath the magnolia tree near the apiary, and seeing the thin man approach Daddy and embrace him as if they were old friends.
Mama was in her rose garden with her sprayer, murdering weeds, as she liked to call it. It was her own chemical concoction, toxic enough that weeds would brown and shrivel within hours. She’d let me watch sometimes, as long as I never got near enough to touch the clear, odorless liquid. It took only a little drop, she said, to kill a weed or a rose, and she had to be careful not to confuse the two.
George and I watched as she approached Daddy and the man. They talked for a few moments and Mama’s knees seemed to soften, and Daddy had to catch her before she fell. Daddy held her around the shoulders and led the three of them inside.
I looked at Mama’s face as they passed. She didn’t look like herself, but instead like a person who was thinking about a lot more things than what was right in front of her. She must have been distracted and forgotten that she carried the spray bottle, because she brought it into the kitchen.
The arguing began as soon as the door closed behind them. Not between the stranger and my parents, but between my mama and daddy. When the shouting grew louder, it was my mother’s voice that was raised. It seemed as if the stranger and my father had said all they could say and Mama could not let that be. I heard my name and cringed, unused to hearing it in a raised voice. And then there was just silence.
Curious, George and I went inside. The three adults sat at the kitchen table, the man with a book in front of him, something thin sticking out of the top. The man smiled at me and I felt George pulling on my arm in warning, as if I should be afraid. I wasn’t, even though Mama and Daddy were sitting as far away as possible from the stranger. I recognized the man, and not just from seeing him on George’s dock.
Daddy introduced the man as Mr. Mouton, a man he’d met while on his travels to France before the war, although Daddy didn’t explain why he was in Apalachicola. Mr. Mouton looked at me the whole time no matter who was talking, and I didn’t find it odd because I wanted to look at him, too, and figure out why he seemed familiar. He didn’t mention that he’d seen me the day before, or that he’d given me the soup cup. I didn’t say anything, either, figuring he had to have a reason.
As George and I sat down at the table, Mr. Mouton pulled from the book what looked like a postcard and slid it across the table toward my daddy. It was a photo of the bridge that crossed the bay on one side and a picture of a beach on the other and had big red lettering on the top corner: “Welcome to Florida.”
“You remember this, yes?” he asked my daddy. “You sent it to me after your visit. I keep for a long time, because we are friends. And then I give it to Yvette to keep it safe.”
“But that was so long ago,” Daddy said, using his arm to wipe his forehead. It wasn’t warm inside the kitchen, but patches of sweat darkened his shirt.
“Yes,” Mr. Mouton agreed. “It took me a long time to come back for it. They sent me to a camp—and I was there for two years.” He paused and coughed into his hand, a deep, rattling sound of dry bones knocking together. “I would have died except I remembered what I’d left behind. What I promised to come back for.” His eyes moistened and I felt mine tearing up, too, as if this stranger and I had shared more than just a few moments in each other’s company.
He looked away from me, directing his words to Daddy. “Yvette died, you know. After her son-in-law found you here because of the postcard and brought you something precious. It seemed to me that you must have known, all those years ago, that this postcard would bring us together again. That it would bring me back to something I lost.”
I’d never seen Daddy’s back so straight, or Mama’s lips so white.
“And now it’s time to give it back.” He smiled as he said it, but I could tell it wasn’t meant to be funny.
“It’s been ten years,” Daddy said, his words rasping like a razor on a shaving strop. “You could not be so desperate if it took you ten years.”
“Ned.” Mama put a hand on his arm, her eyes sliding in my direction. George held my hand under the table and I was glad. I no longer recognized anybody sitting at my own kitchen table.
“I was starved in the camps, no food. Took many beatings. My health when they set me free—not so good.”
He thumped his chest as if to prove his lack of health by the hollow sound, but he didn’t need to prove anything. His pale skin and protruding cheekbones were enough. I had the oddest feeling that I should crawl into his lap and put my arms around him in an attempt to comfort.
“I stay in American hospital in Germany for almost a year because I cannot walk. My heart not so good anymore.” He shrugged. “Two years later I’m strong enough and I go back home and find only burned buildings. My bees gone, the château open to the sky and home only to bats and mice. Another five years to find where Yvette and her family had gone, two years to earn money for passage to America. I promised to come back. And I did.” He looked at me, his eyes soft and like there was a young man locked inside an old body, and when he looked at me it was as if he believed I held the key.
I looked at my parents, hoping for reassurance, or at least an explanation of what was going on, but their expressions were closed to me, their eyes focused on the stranger as if to try to draw his attention away from me.
“It’s been ten years,” Mama repeated, her voice cracking as if she was close to te
ars. “You can’t just . . .” Her eyes slid to me. “We have a good family here, a good life. We are all very, very happy.” I was surprised to see tears slipping down her face. Daddy placed his hand over hers, then dipped his head. “She doesn’t remember any of it.” Mama almost hissed the words.
The man’s face became serious. “But children never truly forget.” He turned to me and took my hand, rolling it into a ball inside his own fist. “Souviens-toi toujours que mon coeur t’appartient et que tu seule peux le libérer.”
He smiled and I smiled back. I’d heard those words before, and even believed that I knew what they meant. He opened his fist and wiggled his fingers like petals on a sunflower. I remembered this part, remembered what I was supposed to do next. Watching my hand as if it didn’t belong to me, I saw it open slowly, my fingers dancing in a smaller imitation of his.
And then my voice repeated the words I knew in my heart but not in my head. “Souviens-toi toujours que mon coeur t’appartient et que tu seul peux le libérer.” I looked at my parents, their surprise mirrored in their faces. I knew those words, had heard them many times but couldn’t remember where. I knew I’d heard this man say them before, a long time ago. But it also seemed that I’d heard them in the soft tones of a woman’s voice, a woman with dark hair and soft skin.
“Adeline?” I said, the name suddenly familiar on my tongue. It was a name that brought back mixed memories—joy and sadness, homecoming and abandonment. Of a time that I always thought of as before. Before the darkness that fell inside my head.
Mr. Mouton looked confused for a moment and then his eyes widened in recognition and a smile traced his lips. “Yvette’s oldest daughter, yes? She took care of you like a mother when Yvette became ill. Her husband brought you here.”
A memory of me at the wooden table, filled with the beautiful china, and Adeline braiding my hair and singing to me. We were both crying and I couldn’t remember why. And then I saw the suitcase by the door and knew that it was time to say good-bye.
I looked at my parents in confusion, but they were staring hard at the thin man, as if he carried some horrible disease. “I don’t understand,” I said.
Nobody responded, but George placed his hand in mine and squeezed.
“She doesn’t remember,” Daddy repeated, but it sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.
Mama covered her head in her hands and began to sob. Daddy patted her back, the anger in his eyes slipping into sorrow. “We thought you were dead. For five long years we tried to find you. We sent letters to every government official we thought could help. We even sent one to the president. There was no record of your death, but there was no record of you surviving, either.” He was silent for a moment, the room still as a tomb, so that we heard the buzzing of a trapped bee, its body thumping against the glass window of the door.
I tried to stand, but George pulled me back into my chair. “Please,” I said, looking across the table at my parents, who wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Please tell me what’s going on. I don’t . . .”
Daddy held up his hand, silencing me. He leaned closer to Mr. Mouton. “I could not give my wife the children we wanted, but we had more than enough love to share.” He settled his gaze on me for a moment. “And when our daughter arrived, we had a family to give her, and all the love we’d been storing up for all our lives. You don’t have any of that—no wife or home. Bad health. It wouldn’t be right, taking her from everything she knows. From her family. From her friends.” He stared straight at George.
George shifted next to me, as if he was understanding something I couldn’t quite grasp because I was seeing a picture in my head of bees and fields of lavender, and I was running as fast as I could through it, feeling chased but too afraid to turn around and find out by whom.
But I’d always been that way, Mama said. Ever since I was a little girl, when things upset me or something happened that I didn’t understand, I’d disappear into my own imaginary world, where everything happened just as I wanted it to, and the real world would slip away like so much dust. I’d been doing that for so long that I didn’t remember when I’d started. I’d stopped trying to remember, because every time I thought about it my heart hurt as if it were being stung by a hundred bees.
The man’s face was still and serious as he listened to Daddy, but after waiting for a moment to make sure Daddy was finished speaking, he said, “The teapot. You still have it, yes? Adeline said she told you to keep it safe. She gave me a cup to show to my little girl, to see if she remembered, just in case there is no more teapot. That is her history. Of three generations of her family, and their position on a grand estate. That is all she needs. And a father who loves her. We will manage. It is in our blood. I have survived thus far, yes?”
“Then you won’t listen to reason?” Daddy’s voice was thick, as if a sock were stuck in his throat, preventing the words from coming out.
“What other reason is there besides a father who loves his daughter and has worked for ten years to keep a promise he made to her?”
I will come back for you; I promise. However long it takes. He’d said those words to me a long time ago. Or maybe I’d just made it up like so many of my stories.
Daddy’s jaw quivered. George slid back his chair and stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders. He was only thirteen but already over six feet, with wide shoulders and muscled arms. It almost seemed as if he were trying to be intimidating.
“Who are you, Mr. Mouton?” My voice sounded like a small child’s.
He leaned across the table and took my hands in his. “You know, don’t you? You remember.”
I stared into his brown eyes, seeing the lavender fields. Smelling sweet honey. The teapot. He’d said something about a teapot, and I knew it was something I should remember—could almost picture in my head. A pattern that matched the one on the cup he’d brought me. Something to do with bees and a suitcase. And me crying for someone not to leave me.
He must have heard my gasp of recognition, because he sat back with a satisfied smile. “She remembers. She knows who she is.”
His words brought me back to the kitchen, to a familiar place and the two faces I loved most in the world. “I’m Birdie Bloodworth,” I shouted, angry tears hitting my cheeks. “Who are you?”
George put his arm around me and pulled me to him, and I buried my face in his shoulder.
“Please,” Daddy said, in a tone of voice I’d never heard him use before. “I beg of you. For my wife’s sake. For our child’s sake. Please reconsider.”
“Reconsider what? What is right?” The man coughed, his breath wheezing through his nostrils. “All I am asking is for what is right.”
“But my wife . . .” He stopped to look at Mama, but she no longer seemed to be listening. She was staring at the stranded honeybee crawling across the table, looking for a way out.
“Her daughter is everything to her. All of her hopes and dreams are in this one child. My wife and I can take care of her needs, and love her. She will want for nothing.”
The man coughed again, then settled back in his chair. “And my daughter is all I have left in this world. All the love I have left. This is not easy for you or for me. But there is nothing but the truth.” He doubled over in a coughing fit, the smell of wet pennies filling the air.
Mama watched him cough, saw him draw away a filthy handkerchief spotted with fresh red blood. Her shoulders slumped, like they did when her favorite cat had died, and I saw lines around her mouth and eyes that I had never seen before. They remained on her face until the day she died.
I remembered all that now. I stopped walking and looked down, realizing I’d walked several blocks from the house carrying a soup cup and wearing my nightgown. Marlene. Yes, I needed to see Marlene. To tell her I did remember the stranger’s name. Mr. Mouton.
I blinked up at the moon, wondering whether there was more I was suppos
ed to remember. Yes, something George had told me later. This isn’t something a person ever gets over, Birdie. But it’s something we’ll always share. Our secret.
My hands trembled and I clutched the soup cup tighter, my mind threatening to spill one last secret, my heart just as determined to keep it safe.
The brief blare of a siren pulsed behind me and I turned. Lyle stepped out of his cruiser and came toward me. “Birdie? Are you all right? Maisy’s been worried sick.”
I hid the cup in the folds of my nightgown, not yet ready to share it with anybody. Words continued to evade me, so I began to hum a tune from long ago as I used to stare at the bees on the soup cup, the words of the song in a foreign language that I knew but didn’t. Marie, Lucille, Lisette, Jean.
Lyle settled me into the front seat next to him, then slowly drove me home. I was so tired, as if I’d walked for miles instead of just blocks, and when I closed my eyes all I saw were bright purple fields of lavender.
chapter 32
The Marquis de Sade said, “All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost—the most legitimate—passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.” But a good beekeeper never takes more honey than the bee can afford to give, and never calls it stealing. That way the beekeeper remains noble, while the bee feeds its hive, stingers ready if the beekeeper becomes greedy.
—NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL
Maisy
Georgia arrived at the house right before Lyle pulled up in his cruiser with Birdie. It reminded Maisy too much of the times their mother had been sent away, how she and Georgia would sit in the turret window of their mother’s bedroom each night, waiting for her to return. It made no sense, of course. Birdie wouldn’t have arrived by boat over the bay. Georgia had known it, but had made Maisy believe that Birdie was just over the horizon, trying to find her way back to them. It had taken years for Maisy to realize the lie, but back when she was small it had allowed her to go to sleep at night.
