The Music of Bees Read online

It would have been no big deal, except they were standing on the second-story roof over the patio. Jake fell, his body twisting in the air, and landed with a sickening thud on the low wall separating Mrs. Pomeroy’s rose garden from the driveway. He looked up and saw Megan and Pomeroy peering over the edge of the roof. He wanted to laugh up at them that he was okay, but he was not. And things would never be the same again.

  Unlucky, the doctors told him later. That was what they called his incomplete spinal cord injury to T11 and T12 in his lower back.

  Jake felt sick remembering. He took a deep breath and wheeled himself down the hall to his room. The loop had started in his head.

  He would never walk again, the surgeon said, but at least he had good control of his upper body since the injury was only partial. “You can be grateful for that.”

  Jake had stared at the guy. Grateful? Gratitude was far, far from his mind then.

  He pulled on his favorite gray Dickies shirt, buttoned it up, grabbed his backpack, and slung it over his chair.

  He was lucky to have the use of his hands and arms, the redheaded nurse had told him, despite the asymmetry of strength on one side.

  He slid his sunglasses into his shirt pocket.

  He was young and otherwise healthy, his PT said over and over again. He could have a really great life.

  Jake lifted one leg onto the foot rail with both hands and then the other. He pulled on his Doc Martens, laced them up, and wheeled through the house, out the door, and down the ramp.

  “A successful career,” his therapist said.

  He put on his sunglasses and stuck in his earbuds. He turned up the volume on his iPhone, and the familiar rasp of ska-punk filled his head.

  “Computer programming, maybe,” his mom suggested, nodding at the social worker and then at Jake. “You like those games so much, don’t you?”

  He maneuvered his chair down the gravel driveway and out into the bike lane that snaked along Belmont. His wheels kicked up dust and bits of gravel. He smiled at his speed. The chair was pretty fly. His classmates had taken up a collection for it. Otherwise he’d have the crap-assed one his dad’s insurance would have covered. They had announced it at graduation, Noah told him. He was glad he hadn’t been there to have to thank them, which would have been so humiliating, though he was grateful for it. He would spend the afternoon, as he had been lately, now that the spring rains were tapering off, out near the orchards where he knew he wouldn’t run into any of his friends. Those who weren’t at college—like Noah, who was working to save money to travel—would be at work or hanging out at the skate park.

  The air smelled green and fresh. It pricked something in his heart. This season—when unexpected rain showers swept across the valley floor and the wind turned the orchards into waves of blossoms—had always filled him with hope. The chorus frogs sang in the irrigation ditches, and the days lengthened imperceptibly. Hawks perched along the fence line of county roads, and tiny finches darted through the air. Flickers keened in the shadows of the forest. He never told anyone he noticed these things. But spring always brought him a secret joy, the promise of something new. Now he felt his heart try to rise toward it and fall back defeated.

  He turned up the music. It was Spring Heeled Jack’s Connecticut Ska, which launched the band into the U.S. punk scene in the early nineties, just before Jake had been born. Jake would focus on Pat Gingras’s trumpet and parse how the band’s sound was changing before Gingras was replaced by Tyler Jones. He would make up arguments in his head, today taking the position that Jones’s style maintained the band’s classic ska-punk sound, but who believed that, really? If you had any ear at all, you could hear Spring Heeled Jack working toward the mainstream sound of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which would eventually swallow some of its members. Other days he would conjecture that Gingras’s sound was authentic and true to the real mission of the music, which was what he really believed. So did every other genuine ska fan. It didn’t matter. It was like his Tomb Raider games. Just killing time in the jail that was his life. This life had replaced the life he was supposed to have—one of music and promise, the other life that now felt like something he had imagined.

  Jake’s musical ability, which had been obvious from an early age, was a mystery to his parents, who were not musical people. Luckily his teachers noticed and had suggested he join the school band. He’d been playing trumpet since middle school. He couldn’t remember life without music. He didn’t have words to explain it, this vivid thing that lived in him.

  In the fall of his senior year, Jake had been offered a three-quarter scholarship to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, mostly based on his musical ability and letters of recommendation. If his grades had been better, it might have been a full ride, but 75 percent was enough. He was going to study music theory, history, and performance with trumpet as his primary instrument. He kept the acceptance letter in his trumpet case for months and pulled it out to reread when he was alone even though he pretty much had it memorized.

  “Dear Mr. Stevenson, It is with great pleasure that we welcome you into the Cornish College of the Arts community . . .” The words made him giddy. But then, when it came time to send the school a down payment on the balance, his father had refused to lend him the money. Ed wouldn’t listen to his wife’s pleading and barely took his eyes off the TV to respond.

  “Music school? Please,” he scoffed. “I was working full time at his age.”

  Case closed. Jake didn’t want to think about it, that crushing loss. But under the wail of Gingras’s trumpet, his mind was invaded by questions with no answers that played in an unending loop: What if his father had lent him the money? What if he’d earned more than a 2.3 GPA and gotten the full ride? What if he’d worked a weekend job and saved some money of his own? How pathetic to have this thing he’d so wanted slip away because he hadn’t tried harder a little earlier.

  The questions unraveled from there like always, becoming more and more impossible. What if he hadn’t been at Pomeroy’s that day, but had cleaned up the yard for his mom, like she’d asked? Instead he stepped around the rake and leaf bags, promising himself he’d go to the party for an hour and finish the yard before she got home. What if he hadn’t been showing off for Megan Shine? What if he could do it all over again?

  Jake turned up the music to drown his thoughts. He hit the bottom of the hill by the Indian Creek Golf Course and threw himself into the climb. The clouds had lifted, and the sky was turning from orange to yellow over the ridgeline. The apple and pear trees had unfurled into an embarrassment of beauty, their blossoms rippling along the valley floor to the foot of snowcapped Mount Hood. The temperature dropped, and Jake inhaled the wet green scent of the irrigated orchards. He could taste the faint, acrid tang of whatever they sprayed on the trees in the back of his throat. He told himself the pesticides were making his eyes sting.

  He sailed down the next hill, ignoring the old dude who had stopped his golf cart to gawk at the boy with the mohawk in the wheelchair flying toward the four-way intersection. Don’t worry about me, old man, he thought. The worst has already happened.

  Was that true? Maybe the worst thing was that nothing else was going to happen in his miserable life. A month from now, Hood River Valley High School would host another graduation. Class of 2014. Hip, hip hooray! Two hundred young people would move forward in their lives to college or work or at least someplace other than this hick town. He’d been thinking about it all week. It was right there in his face, the anniversary of the day his life stopped. Nice job, Jake. You fucked up. Just like your old man has been saying your whole life. Nice job, fuckup.

  The afternoon deepened into dusk, and Jake sped past the old Oak Grove Schoolhouse, which cast long shadows into the apple orchards. Out in the trees he watched lights coming on in the fruit workers’ shacks. He could see figures up on ladders, their shadows lengthening between the rows of trees. He rolled s
outh toward the shape of Mount Hood, which was kissed with alpenglow against the green-yellow horizon.

  “Give you a knife and fork and send you on your goddamn, merry way.”

  The words echoed in his head, and he turned the music up as loud as it would go. He could smell his sweat, which was different now than it had been before. He smelled like an old man, like someone sick, like a stranger to himself. He tried to focus on the white line of the road, which wasn’t a bike lane this far outside of town in the orchards, just a skinny shoulder.

  He fought a flood of images: Megan Shine’s smile and the sun bright on her bikini top. His fingers flying along the valves as he blasted a trumpet solo with his heart in his throat at the state jazz band competition. Watching Noah rip the half-pipe at the skate park. Passing around a can of chew in the back of the band bus. Running after his brindled dog on the sandbar. All of it gone. Those things were part of the life he used to have, the one that was lost to him. His heart ached, and he hated himself for it. He hated the tears that were coursing down his cheeks, which he could no longer pretend were sweat. He hated what he had done to his stupid life and that he had no one else to blame. In that moment he felt broken in a way that could not be undone.

  Jake was turned so far inward that he didn’t hear the sound of the pickup truck coming up behind him. He was facing away and wouldn’t have seen one wheel riding inside the white line of the shoulder. A truck whose driver didn’t see the boy in the dusk until the headlights hit the back of his chair. Then Jake heard the squeal of brakes over the sound of the music and everything stopped.

  2

  Twelve Queens

  The queen bee is the only perfect female in the hive, and all the eggs are laid by her.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  Alice Holtzman would have rated her mood below average even before she hit the wall of traffic creeping down Interstate 84 back to Hood River. She blamed the young imbeciles at Sunnyvale Bee Company in Portland who had mixed up her order, which had delayed her departure and landed her in this late-afternoon sea of cars and trucks. To be more precise, they had lost her order, which was frustrating because Alice was a regular customer at Sunnyvale and also because, as a point of personal pride, she tried hard to be conscientious.

  Things were always crazy on Bee Day, an annual event in April, and she acknowledged that. After all, the Sunnyvale Bee Company saw hundreds of millions of bees move through their yard on that single day. When Alice arrived, she saw hundreds of bee packages awaiting pickup. Each small, screened crate held ten thousand bees, all buzzing with confusion at their recent sorting in the bee yards of southern Oregon from whence they came. The precious cargo, trucked in before dawn, had to be picked up, transported, and hived within twenty-four hours. Hundreds of beekeepers would descend on Sunnyvale to claim their bees on an average Bee Day, so things could get hectic.

  The car in front of her crept forward and slammed on its brakes. Alice exhaled through her nose with impatience. She looked at her watch and sighed. Yes, Alice knew Bee Day would be crazy. That was why she had taken the day off. It was a Thursday. You could never count on the bees arriving on a weekend. They came, like babies, unpredictably and often inconveniently. Alice and other expectant beekeepers had to wait until those southern hives grew strong with populations of young bees and the early-spring showers tapered off. Pickups were rescheduled all the time. A betting man wouldn’t put money on Bee Day, as intransigent as it was. Alice knew that. That was why she had called two days before, like she always did, to reconfirm her order with Tim, the cheerful shop manager who’d been there, she knew, for more than twenty years. It was impossible to tell how old Tim was. He was one of those men who’d looked old at twenty, probably, losing his hair right after high school, and now seemed ageless. Unflappable Tim. Alice didn’t even know his last name, but for the past several years, Tim had been a regular part of her life. Not a friend, exactly. More like a friendly milepost, a happy marker that said it was spring, Oregon’s winter was finally over, and it was time for fresh life in the apiary. For all its inconvenience, Alice usually loved Bee Day.

  But this year Tim hadn’t answered the phone when she called. Instead a young woman picked up and identified herself as Joyful.

  “How can I help make your day amazing?” she’d asked.

  Alice gave her name and order number while wondering if Joyful could possibly be her real name. Joyful had assured her that all orders would be filled as usual and that they would be thrilled to see her in two days. She hadn’t actually refused to look up Alice’s order, but she hadn’t looked it up either.

  “Be well!” she’d said, and hung up before Alice could say anything else.

  So as Alice stood watching Joyful with her blond dreadlocks hanging in her face as she pawed through the stack of orders and failed to find Alice’s, she had wanted to say, I told you so. She had wanted to say other things—things that would have disappointed her mother. Alice folded her arms over her chest, took a deep breath, and leaned on the counter.

  “Miss, I called you two days ago. My name is Holtzman. Alice Holtzman. Hood River. I ordered twelve Russian nucs. Twelve nucleus hives.”

  She tried to sound calm and shifted back slightly when she noticed she was tapping a blunt finger on the counter.

  “No extra queens and no packages. Tim usually sets my stuff aside in the overflow yard.” Alice pointed to a gated area on the left. For years now, Tim had separated the orders of experienced beekeepers, like her, from those of the beginners who were more inclined to linger with questions, thereby creating their own buzzing confusion on Bee Day.

  “Why don’t you just let me have a look over there? I’m sure I can find them myself.”

  But Joyful, with her brows in a crease and her dreads in her face and who was not having an amazing day, would not be moved. She looked up from the mess of papers and fixed Alice with a stern gaze.

  “Ma’am, I hear you saying that you are a longtime customer, and I do respect that. But we have a system in place here, and you are just going to have to wait your turn like everyone else.”

  Alice flushed with embarrassment and drew back, pressing her lips together and feeling like a chastised child. She felt her breath catch and thought about Dr. Zimmerman, who asked her to note such moments. Alice hitched up her overalls and joined the clutch of other beekeepers milling around and chatting as they waited for their orders. Alice did not chat.

  The spring sun grew warm on her head. She took off her sunhat and pulled her hair off her neck, which was damp with sweat. She glanced at her hands, her nails chewed to the quick, and shoved them in her back pockets. She shifted her weight from one foot to another, her feet swelling in her work boots. She glanced up and saw herself on the security monitor and looked away, tugging on the straps of her overalls. Being motionless made her nuts. Half an hour later, her order was discovered on the floor under Joyful’s Birkenstocked feet.

  “Alice Holtzman, Hood River. 12 Russian nucs. No extra queens. Side yard. ***VIP!!!” was scrawled in red across the page.

  Joyful looked miffed but didn’t apologize. She handed Alice the crumpled paper and pointed toward the overflow area.

  This situation was nothing new to Alice. She was a Holtzman, after all. German-American, rational, she always planned ahead and thought things through like her parents had taught her. She tried to anticipate what might go awry and work in advance to avoid hiccups. She knew most other people were not as conscientious. She often found herself waiting for others to catch up with her thinking, having fallen short before they even started. So how did she account for this feeling now, this impatience, the childish urge to reach across the counter and yank Joyful’s dreadlocks? She took the paper and walked to the side yard.

  A couple of regular staff, Nick and Steve, helped Alice duct-tape the tops of the cardboard boxes and carefully load each one into the back of her pickup. She tighten
ed a tie-down strap around the bases of the boxes to keep them from sliding around.

  “Sorry, Alice,” Nick said, rolling his eyes toward Joyful. He was a nice guy about her age with a handlebar mustache.

  “New management while Tim’s in Arizona. Family stuff, I guess.”

  Alice shrugged, tried to smile, and failed. She shut the gate of the truck harder than she needed to. It wasn’t Nick’s fault that she’d wasted more than an hour on what was meant to be a fifteen-minute stop, but she wasn’t going to stand around making small talk.

  “Thanks, Nick,” she said. “Tell Tim to give me a holler about that honey extractor when he gets back.”

  Now on the clogged highway, Alice huffed with annoyance. She reached across the seat and grabbed the bag of mini Chips Ahoy! cookies she knew she shouldn’t have bought at Costco earlier that day. She pulled out a handful of cookies and tossed them into her mouth.

  She hated to admit it, but she’d been running late long before she got to Sunnyvale. She stopped at Tillicum Lumberyard and then at Costco, that great behemoth of retail they didn’t have in little Hood River. People shoved past her, and one harassed-looking mother of two banged her cart into Alice’s heels and didn’t even apologize. Alice waited forever in the checkout line, which made her stressed. Then she’d lost an hour waiting for her bees and was now smack in the middle of the afternoon traffic she’d tried so hard to avoid. It was why she’d called ahead two days ago. It was why she’d taken the day off and gotten up early. She tried so hard to have everything organized. It was other people who fouled things up. She felt a bloom of anxiety then. The line of traffic inched along, and her chest felt tight. She cracked the window, but the hot smell of asphalt stung her nostrils, so she shut it again. She looked at the cars on either side of her. Nobody else seemed to mind sitting here. They were all looking at their phones. She gripped the steering wheel, feeling the tightness creep up into her throat. Then she heard Dr. Zimmerman’s calm voice in her head: “Do you know where that feeling comes from, Alice? Can you follow the thread?”