The Music of Bees Read online

  Also by Eileen Garvin

  HOW TO BE A SISTER

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Eileen Garvin

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Garvin, Eileen, author.

  Title: The music of bees: a novel / Eileen Garvin.

  Description: New York: Dutton, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020043236 (print) | LCCN 2020043237 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593183922 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593183946 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bee culture—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Farm life—Fiction. | Grief—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.A782894 M87 2021 (print) | LCC PS3607.A782894 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043236

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043237

  Interior art: Bees and flowers © AVA Bitter/Shutterstock

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design and illustration by Vi-An Nguyen

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  For all the wild creatures and everyone who loves them

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Eileen Garvin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Orientation Flight

  Chapter 2: Twelve Queens

  Chapter 3: Foraging

  Chapter 4: Callow Bee

  Chapter 5: Scent Fanning

  Chapter 6: Hive Siting

  Chapter 7: Bumbling

  Chapter 8: Bee Space

  Chapter 9: Worker Bee

  Chapter 10: Hive Maintenance

  Chapter 11: Scouting

  Chapter 12: Disruption

  Chapter 13: Overtones

  Chapter 14: Drone Life

  Chapter 15: Queen Right

  Chapter 16: Colony Collapse

  Chapter 17: Glory Bee

  Chapter 18: Congregating

  Chapter 19: Into the Hive

  Chapter 20: Bee Dance

  Chapter 21: Requeening

  Chapter 22: Swarm Warning

  Chapter 23: Guarding

  Chapter 24: Hive Splitting

  Chapter 25: Robbing

  Chapter 26: Bee Day

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Orientation Flight

  Those who suppose that the new colony consists wholly of young bees, forced to emigrate by the older ones, if they closely examine a new swarm, will find that while some have the ragged wings of age, others are so young as to be barely able to fly.

  —A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON THE HIVE AND HONEY-BEE, L. L. LANGSTROTH, 1878

  Jacob Stevenson had the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School. Even before it was listed as an official yearbook record, he was pretty sure about it. In his senior photo, it was a blue-black masterpiece that flared up to a height of sixteen and a half inches. Well, almost. It was more like sixteen and three-eighths, but close enough to silence any quibblers. Jacob had put six months into growing the spiky mass, which he sculpted into four sections, and it had reached its optimal height right before spring finals last year.

  On this morning, he surveyed the masterpiece of his hair in the mirror and felt no little satisfaction that he’d managed to maintain it for more than a year now, despite unforeseen challenges. The undeniable truth of a mohawk was that you were always fighting gravity, and at a certain point, you lost. You had to be realistic. The idea was to aim for maximum volume that would hold over an entire day. A fallen mohawk would be a terrible embarrassment, especially for a boy of eighteen. Jacob had experimented with various products to maintain the loft. He’d tried egg whites, mustache wax, hair spray, and even some adhesive from wood shop—an unfortunate episode. All that experimenting revealed that a mixture of extra-firm sculpting wax and professional-grade hair spray was the best choice to sustain that sixteen-and-nearly-one-half-inch height of achievement.

  Noah Katz had taken the official measurement the night of the spring jazz band concert. Both of them had been dressed in the traditional black tuxedos that members of the Hood River Valley High School jazz band had been wearing for the past twenty years. Jacob thought then that his hair contrasted nicely with the powder-blue cummerbund and bow tie. He posed with his trumpet as Noah snapped a photo, cackling, the phone dwarfed in his big paw. His cheeks shook as he laughed.

  “Sick, Stevenson!”

  Katz was a good-natured lumberjack of a guy. The two had become friends at May Street Elementary in fifth-grade band—Jacob on trumpet and Noah on trombone. Noah did not have a mohawk. Noah’s hair was crazy curly, and he referred to it as “The Situation.” Unlike Jacob, he did not need any product to make his hair resist gravity. He grew his curls up and out, chiefly to irritate his mother.

  “Look out, ladies!” he crowed, tugging on his curls with one hand so that he resembled a human dandelion in fluff stage. He snapped a selfie. Then they hustled into Noah’s truck and sped across town to the high school. They had been late, as usual, and Mr. Schaffer was mad, but their band teacher seemed always to be looking for a reason to yell at the two boys, so it was no big deal.

  Remembering that night made Jacob smile. He turned his head from right to left. On either side of the mast of hair he could see bits of stubble on his otherwise cleanly shaven skull. He turned on the faucet and dampened a washcloth under the tepid stream to wet his head. He squirted a soft puff of shaving cream into his hand and patted it on the stubble. The lemony white foam smelled institutional, like the hospital, and made him feel slightly nauseated. He breathed through his mouth and picked up his razor.

  A mohawk took discipline. He had to wash or at least wet his hair, then comb it out, apply wax to the wet mop, part it into sections, and dry it with the high-power blow-dryer before spraying it into place and then shaving the stubble. The process made him sweat on warm days like this one. It was a big investment of time, really. But that was cool. These days he had nothing but time. Two hours to do his hair was no problem at all.

  The reality of that hit him like a punch in the throat, as it often did when he sat in front of the bathroom mirror in the morning. The dark little hairs on his scalp poked through the white lather, standing up unwaveringly while Jacob Stevenson—or Jake, as everyone but his parents called him—could not. Jake swallowed hard. It seemed so stupid—the mohawk itself and the mohawk record, considering that in addition to having the tallest mohawk in the history of Hood River Valley High School, he was probably also the only kid there who’d ever had one in this farm town, which was short on punk and big on rodeo. It was also stupid because he no longer went to school there, having sort of graduated last spring. But mostly it seemed stupid because it was pretty much all he had to do
on a given day, fix his fucking hair, now that the doctor’s appointments had tapered off and his physical therapy was down to once a month and he had all the time in the world to face the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

  Jake pushed back from the mirror and looked at his body—lean and muscled in his torso and arms. His legs didn’t look terribly different than they had before. But sometimes he almost felt like they belonged to someone else.

  The wheelchair was why he had “sort of” graduated. The school administration had mailed his diploma to his parents’ house while Jake lay in the hospital sixty miles away in Portland. His teachers had all passed him even though that was a stretch for a couple of classes, like PE, since he was in the habit of skipping to go to Noah’s house after second period to get high before lunch. He hadn’t darkened the gym door since before Christmas break. But even Mr. McKenna wasn’t enough of a dick to fail a PE student who was going to spend the rest of his life as a paraplegic. Irony, yo.

  Jake’s mother had told him he’d be graduating when he was still doped up during those first days at the hospital. She sat next to his bed, her eyes puffy behind her pink-framed glasses. She tried not to cry in front of him, though she barely left the chair next to his bed. She sat for hours, holding his hand and murmuring that God was watching over him. She’d run through the list of people who had called and emailed to send their thoughts and prayers—his teachers, the neighbors, the mailman, people from church. People he’d never heard of, but he didn’t say that because it would have hurt her feelings. She brightened when she got to the part about the graduation ceremony, which, at that point, was still weeks away.

  “We’re so proud of you, honey,” she said. “Your name will be in the program. They asked Noah to receive the diploma on your behalf, since you won’t be able to . . .”

  Her voice faltered, and she stopped.

  Jake winced, his smile a grimace. “Since I won’t be able to walk, you mean?”

  His laughter came out in short barks, and then he couldn’t stop. He blamed the drugs, but there was more to it. He laughed and laughed at the word “walk,” which had taken on such a different meaning now that he had lost the use of his legs, his young, strong boy legs, legs that had skateboarded and run and climbed, legs he had completely taken for granted every single day of his stupid life until the day he couldn’t use them anymore. He couldn’t stop laughing even when his mom put her face into her hands and wept. He was such an asshole, he thought now, sitting in front of the mirror. He rolled forward and peered at himself, noticing how much thinner he was than he had been last spring.

  He had laughed because the word “walk” had made him think of his father, Ed Stevenson, and his fleshy, angry face.

  “The least goddamn thing you can do is walk your lazy ass down the aisle at graduation,” Ed had said. “You turn eighteen, we’re gonna give you a knife and fork and send you on your goddamn, merry way.”

  That had been winter break of his senior year, when Jake realized his grades didn’t matter, now that he’d lost his music school scholarship, and it seemed like he might actually flunk out.

  “Don’t worry about me, Ed,” Jake replied.

  He’d begun calling his father by his first name when he started high school, knowing it bugged him.

  “I’ll be out of here so fast you won’t even see me go.”

  Jake had decided to move to Portland after the dream of music school faded to impossibility last year. He figured he’d work in a music store or a coffee shop someplace near the eastside clubs. He hadn’t worked out the details, but how hard could it be to get a job in a city that big?

  However, since Jake had injured his spinal cord, his lazy ass was firmly stuck at his parents’ house. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and there was nothing Ed or anyone else could do about it.

  He touched up the right side of his head, toweled it off, and started on the left, dragging the razor along the curve of his skull. The scraping sound was half-thrilling, half-sickening.

  His father was part of a six-man building crew for Klare Construction. That meant he worked long hours on weekdays like this one, and those hours, even when they yawned wide and empty, were a relief to Jake. Weekends were harder, when Ed parked himself in front of the TV with a half rack of PBR and a bag of peanuts. Then Jake stayed in his room, listening to music or surfing the web. His earbuds muffled the sound of his father’s rattling cough, the ping of peanut shells into the bowl, the white noise of screaming fans, which always sounded the same whatever the sport or season.

  Jake looked around the bathroom at the lowered sink and mirror, the shower chair, grab rails, the widened doorway. An experienced carpenter, his father could have easily made these renovations in a couple of days to prepare for his only son’s return from the rehab center, where Jake had gone after the hospital. But Ed hadn’t lifted a finger. His mother’s church group had done it, all eager to help Tansy Stevenson, their pastor’s administrative assistant, during this difficult time with her son. They took up a collection to pay for it and assembled a volunteer work crew before Jake returned home.

  His mom told him this when she came to visit him. She sat next to the therapy table in a flowered dress and sensible shoes, an outfit usually reserved for church or holidays. He could tell she hadn’t wanted to make too much of the renovation to save his pride. But Jake knew his mom read it as a sign of God’s love that all those people had come out to their crummy double-wide to help Tansy Stevenson by helping her son. Jake lay on the table and his PT showed his mother the exercises she’d need to help him do to prevent contractures—permanent shortenings of the muscles that would make him even more of a freak. He watched his foot move toward and away from his face in the PT’s hands. He didn’t ask if Ed had sat in front of the TV sipping tall boys while the earnest members of the congregation remodeled the bathroom. He didn’t have to ask because he knew Ed wouldn’t even have had the decency to leave the house while they were doing the work he should have done. That must have been hard on his mother too. Anyway, he was grateful he could use the damn bathroom by himself.

  Jake cracked the window and heard a car rattle past, its radio blaring Mumford & Sons’ “I Will Wait.” That song. His stomach dropped. He swiveled the chair and reached for the hair spray. He surveyed his bare chest and shoulders in the mirror, flexed his biceps, and smiled grimly. His upper body was stronger than it had ever been, as he’d started lifting weights to fill the long days.

  When he’d returned from the rehab center last fall, his mother tried to get him to keep going to his support group in Portland. She nagged him to call the local mentor he’d been assigned—a Paralympic skier who lived nearby in Mosier. She stood in the doorway of his room, her purse over her arm, as she got ready to leave for church.

  “You should get out of the house, Jacob,” she said. “You need to see people and start getting on with things.”

  Getting on with things. His body flushed with anger, but he didn’t say anything. He just stuck his earbuds in and turned back to his computer. He was playing Tomb Raider and winning—a hollow victory since he was playing against himself. At least he didn’t say something horrible to her. She was sweet, his Jesus-loving mom. It wasn’t her fault that her only son, who was kind of a screw-up to begin with, had fucked himself up so badly.

  They hadn’t been drunk, not even a little buzzed, on that weirdly warm April day last year. Someone had set up a Slip ’N Slide in the yard at Tom Pomeroy’s house, and they had taken turns belly-flopping down the slick yellow plastic. There were about twenty people, all juniors and seniors. The guys whooped and the girls screeched as they careened down the lawn. When Jake threw himself into the wet tongue of the slide, he felt a streak of joy. He let himself forget about the pressure of life after graduation and the stress of finals that he was pretty sure he would fail. He pulled his thoughts away from the lost scholarship to music school, which had hur
t so much at first and finally settled into a dull ache that he could ignore from time to time. As he walked among his friends in the warm sunshine, he felt like a kid again. He went up onto the porch as someone cranked the stereo. Mumford. That song. It was just a few moments, an ordinary collection of seconds that had an extraordinary impact on his life.

  Jake grabbed a beer out of the cooler and bummed an American Spirit. He didn’t smoke, but it was a party, so why not? He climbed the stairs to the second floor behind Megan Shine, who was telling some story about her spring break trip to Mazatlán, where her rich parents had taken her and her sisters. Megan was super nice even though she didn’t need to be because she was also gorgeous. Cheerleader hot. Blond and all that. Not his type, but still. She laughed at something he said and took his beer away from him, tipping her head back to drink, and he snuck a look at her beautiful breasts. Surely she wouldn’t mind even if she noticed his eyes diving down into her bikini top, her lovely flat stomach, her short pink shorts. Someone grabbed him from behind. Pomeroy squeezed Jake with one arm and gave him a playful smack on the side of his shaved head.

  Pomeroy was a good guy, if kind of an ape. He was one of those dudes who always had to be doing something physical—a push-up contest or jumping off the train trestle into the river or skateboarding through the Mosier tunnels in the dark—and rallying everyone else to do the same. Nothing fazed him. The guy was always doing shit that should have gotten him hurt, but he was like a cat, always landing on his feet.

  He was bigger and stronger than Jake. Pomeroy played football, so Jake would usually have dodged this kind of wrestling match. But for some reason, he dropped his cigarette and spun around to grab Pomeroy’s meaty torso. Maybe because Megan was watching and laughing. Jake threw himself at the bigger boy, wrapping his arms around Pomeroy’s waist. His friend staggered under his weight.

  “Christ, Stevenson!” he yelled as he slipped.