The doctors try to soften the blow. He was already on his way out, they tell us. His heart wouldn’t have made it another month, another week, they tell us. We’ll try to make him as comfortable as possible; you take all the time you want to say good-bye.
It’s remarkable he’s held on this long, they tell Dad, when they think I’m sleeping. His organs look like they’ve seen five lifetimes, not just one. And through my grief, I smile.
Mom sets Lu on my bed. He tests it for bounciness and claps for himself. I laugh and cry at the same time, thinking of the day he found the rattler under the porch, how close we came to losing him, too.
Death is around every corner at the ranch. But now, so is life. Isn’t one always part of the other? An old tree dies; a new one is born.
A doctor pokes her head in the doorway. “How are we doing in here?”
I give her a thumbs-up, and she comes to check the clipboard at the foot of my bed.
“Drinking lots of water?” she asks.
I hold up my drained cup and nod.
“Good. Keep it up.” She smiles as she surveys my sunburn. “Your swelling’s gone down. Good. You must have been sitting in the lucky chair.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Lucky chair?”
She gestures to the antique-looking rocking chair where Alta sits. My sister jumps up. “Did someone die in this chair or something?”
“No, nothing like that,” the doctor says. “It’s made of special wood. Very old.” She touches the smooth black chair. “We call it the lucky chair because everyone who sits in it winds up feeling a little bit better.”
Black bark, wood grains swirling.
Dad shuffles in and is so choked up, he can only speak one word at a time. “He’s … almost … there …”
Alta pushes my wheelchair into Grandpa’s room. She’s cracking her knuckles, over and over, nervously wrenching them from their sockets, her eyes wide and fearful. My cool, composed older sister, an over-cried, overwhelmed mess.
“It’s like when Grandma Rosa died all over again,” she says.
I remember what she said in Grandma Rosa’s closet that day. Saying good-bye before you’re finished saying hello. I pull her hand into mine, not caring if it’s lame or babyish. “I’m scared.”
“Me, too,” she admits, and squeezes my fingers.
Sisters.
We crowd around Grandpa’s bed, all except Dad, who paces near the window, his hair standing straight up from him running his hands through it over and over.
My grandpa’s covered in tubes and lines that dig into his skin and round white electrodes that look like the tentacles of a monster. Brave, strong, dragonlike Mom goes first. She leans over Grandpa and kisses his leathery cheek.
“Te queremos, Serge,” she says.
Grandpa’s eyes flutter open. “Beautiful … Patricia …” His words come out in tiny bunches. “If your daughters … grow up to have … even half your strength …”
Mom quietly says good-bye, lets Lu babble to his grandfather, and then leaves the room to cry in private.
Dad is staring out the window, looking lost.
I guess it’s our turn.
I climb out of my wheelchair, still holding hands with Alta. Together, we walk over to the bed.
“Ah,” my grandpa says, and somehow rustles up enough life to beam at us. “The two brightest blossoms … on the tree.” He lifts his fingers to stroke Alta’s face. “I wish … your grandmother … could see you … Her beautiful granddaughters. She would be so proud.”
“My … my grandmother?” Alta repeats.
“Your grandma Rosa,” Grandpa says. “Surely you know … you’re our granddaughter … whether our blood courses through your veins or not.” Each phrase uses a whole lungful of his breath. He reaches into the nightstand beside him and pulls out his whittling knife and a scrap of wood.
“Grandpa, I don’t think now’s a good time —” I say.
But he lays his whittling knife on the bed and puts something in Alta’s hands. “For you, Alta,” he says. “Caro-leeen-a has one. Now you’ll have one, too.”
Alta’s already crying. I strain my neck to peek at what he gave her. It’s a bracelet, made with sandy-colored wood. It looks just like mine — a long piece of bark, strung onto a leather strap. Only Alta’s bracelet is intricately decorated with flowers, leaves, curlicues, and bees.
“This is what you were working on, all those months,” I whisper.
“You made this for me?” my sister says. I lift up her hand to tie the leather straps for her, then admire our wrists together with the matching bracelets. One light, one dark. One new wood, one old wood.
“Chicas, you must never spit on your roots,” Grandpa replies.
Alta kisses Grandpa’s forehead, her tears dripping onto his pillow like rain. “Thank you,” she says, and leaves to find Mom.
My turn.
I’m not ready. Not yet.
I look at Grandpa, at his papery-thin eyelids, his yellowness. His body is too weak to even sit up. But for the first time, he’s teeming with life. Life in his blue eyes, serious, electric. Rings of a tree trunk.
I bend down, until our faces are near. “Are you scared?” I whisper.
“What’s scarier than death?” he asks, and once again I feel he’s testing me. But this time I know the answer.
“Not living,” I say. “Not living, being frightened of life, is much worse than dying.”
“Squeeze the juice out of every day, Caro-leeen-a,” Grandpa says. “Do not be afraid to live … and you will not be afraid to die.”
Then he reaches for my dad. “Raúl,” he croaks.
“No,” Dad says, and backs into the wall, nearly knocking down a shelf. “You can’t go. Not yet. I have … I have too many things I have to say …”
Grandpa blinks. “First … I want you to listen to me. I want you to hear … the ending.”
“The ending?” Dad says. “I know how it ended.”
“No,” Grandpa says. “I want you to hear … the real ending.”
“Save your breath, Papá,” Dad pleads.
“Even if it takes all day,” Serge says. One word at a time. “Once upon a time …”
Once upon a time, there was a tree stump. A scabby stump where a beautiful tree once stood. There was a splintered porch railing, a house made of old beams, a wood barn on a sheep ranch rotten with mildew.
Once upon a time, an ancient woman sat on the scabby tree stump. When the coral sunset light cut across her face, she smiled with rose-petal lips. She inhaled, long and low, like she was trying to breathe in the light.
She held a bracelet in her age-gnarled hands and turned it over, thumbs rubbing the bark.
Sergio stood on the porch. He counted to one hundred, then counted again. Why was he so nervous? Why wouldn’t his feet move? Walk to the tree stump?
They both knew a good-bye was coming. Measuring time had never felt so wrong. That day she collapsed in the driveway had been ten years ago, but Sergio still felt the fear like it was yesterday. And a decade of cancer divided by three hundred and sixty-five days a year … All those mornings, wondering if she’d wake up, even after all the tests and treatments — they weren’t a guarantee, doctors said. All those meals, spoonfed, choking, sputtering. Nights with no rest, sleep with no dreams. When a loved one is sick, the days are long, but the years are short.
He could measure time with their almost-daily conversation:
“Rosa, let me take you.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“But if you don’t get to a hospital, you’ll …”
He could measure time with how many unspoken dies should have ended this sentence. The word stacked up on his tongue like firewood.
“If we don’t get you to a hospital, you’ll …”
“Stay with me,” she’d say, and pull him closer, as close as two people can hold each other before they melt and mold and become one being.
Tomorrow, he’d think to h
imself. I’ll take her tomorrow. But no one had ever been able to tell Rosa what to do.
Perhaps it was selfish of him, but he wished he had one more year, even though they’d had more than their fair share together. Yes, he would give anything for even one more sunrise.
Rosa watched her husband cross the pasture, felt him nestle next to her on the stump. She clutched his shaking hands, flesh she knew as well as her own.
“Raúl called,” she said. “They had the baby — a healthy baby girl. They named her Carolina. For my sister.” She smiled, her lips still red and full despite her lined face. “Life goes on.”
Sergio’s face was stormy. “We never should have cut down the tree.”
Rosa raised her eyebrows. “That is your great regret?”
He looked at her. “You’re dying. Do you still think we were right to cut down the tree? Are you still glad you left the village?”
Rosa laughed. “I can’t believe I didn’t leave earlier. There’re so many places I never got to see.”
Sergio stared. “You went to two hundred countries,” he said. “You saw countless rivers. A thousand forests.”
“But not every forest. There’s always more to see.”
The time Sergio had had with this woman, if it could be stretched out like string, would have wrapped around the earth over and over. And yet, she still surprised him.
“There are places I wish I had seen,” he admitted. “I wish I’d seen the ocean.”
“You speak as though you’re the one dying,” Rosa said. “Go now, and see it all. There’s still time.”
But what was the point of time, if there was no Rosa to share it with? “There are things I never knew about you,” he said. “Things I never understood.”
Rosa squeezed his hand. “Maybe in the next lifetime.”
“I wish for a hundred more lifetimes with you.”
“But we only get one, don’t we?” She closed her eyes. “We did pretty well with the one we had.”
Sergio leaned his head into her lap, and she held him there while death chewed away the last of her lungs and guts. When her breathing lagged, he sat up, horrified.
“Rosa,” he said, panic rising up in his throat, tasting of bile. “Get in the car.”
She shook her head.
“Then I’m calling the ambulance.”
She smiled. “All these years, I begged you to come with me, and now that I want to stay, you’re finally ready to leave.”
Sergio’s hands trembled in her hands. “I pushed him away.” He shook the words out. “I pushed him away like I pushed you away.”
“You didn’t push, you held on tight,” Rosa said.
“How do I get him to come back?” he asked.
“You don’t,” she said. “You wait. He’ll come back. I always came back.”
She used her final breaths to creak to a standing position on the tree stump, toes over the edge, her hands pressed together, as though in prayer. “I’m on the tree branch,” she whispered, “and I’ll jump first.” She smiled a wild Rosa smile. “As usual.”
“Rosa,” Sergio whispered back. “Stay with me.”
“Only you, Sergio. Only you could have made me a life worth staying for.”
And then she exhaled, and her hands became white blossoms, and her body became white blossoms, and finally her face became white blossoms, milky-white petals, honey-vanilla scent reaching Sergio while she burst into bloom.
Full of life, even as she died.
A hot wind blew over the roof of the ranch house, blew across the pasture, tickling the fleecy backs of the sheep, and picked up the blossoms, carrying them over the ridge.
Amid the white blossoms, almost too small to notice, was a tiny black seed. Sergio mistook it for a bug at first but clapped his hands around the seed and saved it from flying away.
The gift lives on, he thought, and put the seed in his pocket.
Sergio stayed at the tree stump, watching the blossoms fly like white butterflies until the flat desert swallowed them up. The last of the blossoms. The last of life, gone.
Except for the seed. The seed was life.
Once upon a time, there was a tree, and they chopped it down, so they could live — and die.
Once upon a time, there was a seed.
The room is quiet, still, a sanitized, all-white tomb. My heart is my whole body, taking up space so my lungs can’t expand, my limbs can’t move, my brain can’t think.
“I wanted … to take her in, mijo,” Grandpa says. “I wanted … her to live. I wanted … her to live … forever.”
Dad takes a minute before leaving the window. His entire world, shattered. Twelve years of a feud with his father, unzipped in one story. “Papá,” he says, “I’m so sorry —”
“No,” Grandpa says.
“Please, let me say it,” Dad insists, his fists balled. “Let me say it now —”
Grandpa won’t let it fly. “No, Raúl,” he says. “You want to apologize … now that I’m dying. But death … is not a reason … to do anything. Life, mi cielo. Life … is the reason … to do everything.”
“The seed,” I say, nearly as out of breath as my grandpa.
His lips twist into a parched smile. “It fell … out of my pocket … I thought it was lost … forever … But you found it … Caro-leeen-a, didn’t you?”
“The ranch, Papá,” Dad blubbers. “I can’t — I called it off, okay? I’m not selling it.”
My jaw drops. “You saved it?”
“You’re keeping … the ranch?” Grandpa’s eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen them.
“That’s our ranch,” Dad says, knotting his hands together. “It belongs to us. I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s our land. It always has been, and we shouldn’t ever let it go.”
The three of us fall silent for a moment, the only sound in the room the faltering beep … beep of the monitors.
“All these years,” Grandpa says at last, “and now … I’m the one … leaving.”
Dad sobs, climbing into the bed next to his father, and puts his head on Grandpa’s shoulder. “Papí, stay with me. Don’t go — stay with me.”
One corner of Grandpa’s mouth turns up in a weak smile. “How many times … did I say that … to Rosa? And to you?”
“I should have stayed,” Dad says. “I should have come back.”
“You were … my tree,” Grandpa says. “My source of life.”
“Stay, please.” Dad’s shuddering speech is an arrow, straight through my middle. If I walk outside, people will see through the hole.
“Through you,” Grandpa says, “the gift lives on … Through you, Raúl, and your children … and the tree … Caro-leeen-a planted.”
“And we will never cut it down,” my dad whispers.
“Raúl?” Grandpa whispers, his eyes going cloudy, the blue washed away. “Would you make sure … Inés gets fed?”
Dad’s crying is long and loud, a coyote’s howl. He clings to Grandpa until I peel him off.
And then we wait, my father and I.
When Grandpa’s breathing slows, he closes his eyes. A machine kicks in — the sound of the end. It whirs and hums, a drone.
“The bees,” Grandpa whispers, so quiet it’s like a sigh. “The bees … are coming.”
I should look away, so my last image of him isn’t this struggle. But I can no more take my eyes off him than Sergio could take his eyes off Rosa. Grandpa and I, drawn to our loved ones like magnets, even in death.
Grandpa’s chest stops rising, and I know the exact moment when he releases his last breath. His eyes open wide, and he smiles at some invisible thing out the window. Then he freezes.
And then he’s gone.
I don’t know how long I’ll be alive. It could be another year, or another thousand years. But I do know this: It doesn’t matter how long I live. It matters what I do with the time I’m given.
Do not be afraid to die, and you will not be afraid to live, my grandpa told me.
I am not afraid to live.
Once upon a time, there was a tree.
It was a young tree, recently bloomed from a seed that had been lost in a closet for many years. The tree had sleek black bark, the color of night, and leaves that were spring green and contrasted with the dry brown desert. Its branches didn’t block out the sun, not yet. Its white blossoms were just tiny. But the tree would keep growing, forever, and the blossoms would get as fat and fluffy as the sheep munching the grass at its trunk.
The tree had strong roots.
A not-so-little girl, her baby brother, and her father drove to the tree in a pickup truck. When the girl ran to the trunk, she hugged it first, then picked up a rock and tried to skip it across the green-glass lake.
“Carol!” The dad set the baby, Luis, down on his chubby legs and swung onto a low-hanging branch. “Beat you to the top!”
The girl scurried up the tree, wincing when the bark scraped her almost-healed shoulder. The dad won, and it figured, since he had told her once that he spent his teenage years climbing every tree, fence, and telephone pole in the greater New Mexico area.
“No fair,” the girl panted. “You’re part monkey.”
“Then you’re a quarter monkey,” he shot back, grinning.
They sat on the highest branch, legs dangling above the water. Luis gathered rocks on the lake’s shore and piled them into castles.
“Pool table,” the dad said.
“My own fridge in my room,” the girl said.
“U2 posters, all over,” he said.
The girl scrunched up her nose. “Dad, that guy’s hair is so tacky!”
“No way! Bono is timeless.”
“Timeless means old.”
He mock-pushed her off the branch, and she giggled and shrieked, “Okay, U2 posters! U2 is officially cool!”
“What else should go in the new house?”
The two of them thought and looked at the land around them. The ranch house was gone. Termites had munched through most of the wood. Reluctantly, like he was giving orders to take a loved one off life support, the dad had demolished it, but he was going to build a new house.
A house for staying.
This was land for staying now. Next year, the girl would have to bus to school, a new school full of other farm kids who lived down south, but it was worth it. And she would hold on to her old friendships for as long as she could. She had already invited her friends down for a weeklong visit next summer. Manny practically burned up with jealousy when the girl showed her pictures of the ranch on her phone. “You’re so lucky you get to live there!” And the girl was lucky.
Hour of the Bees Page 20
