Hour of the Bees (14 page)

Alta’s stopped packing and instead has her arms full of things that have called to her: everything, apparently.

Then I find something.

A bracelet. Black bark strung onto a leather strip. It jumps out from all the sparkly, bedazzled jewelry because it’s so simple. Like the ranch. I pick it up.

It’s like the bracelet from the story.

Alta sets her things down and looks at the bracelet in my open palm. She uses her coral fingernail to prod the bracelet’s bark. “Pretty,” she coos.

“I know,” I say. The bark swirls, grains trickling into formation, a cellular wooden waterfall frozen in time. It feels like staring at eternity, looking at this bracelet.

It calls to me.

“It’s really pretty,” Alta says again. A flame flickers in my chest. I know what she’s doing. She’s going to try to con me into giving it to her.

She’ll wear it for a month, then toss it out instead of passing it down to me. She hates giving me her old things — she wants to be the only owner of things forever.

“This would go perfectly with a dress I saw at the mall,” Alta says.

I’m not backing down. “Dad said I could pick something,” I say, “and I’m picking this.”

Alta glares. “It doesn’t match anything you have.”

Exactly
, I think. This bracelet matches nothing in my wardrobe, matches nothing in Albuquerque. Nothing in my life. The bracelet isn’t anything like who I am; it’s a bracelet for who I want to be.

“I saw it first,” I say, hating how like a little kid I sound.

“Hey, what’d you find?” Dad comes back from stacking boxes in the minivan. I hold out the bracelet, and he takes in a sharp breath.

“
Mamá’
s bracelet. She wore it everywhere.” Dad ties it around my wrist. I try hard not to smirk at Alta. “It’s kind of perfect that you found it,” he says, “since you look so much like her these days.”

“I do?” I ask, and I realize that I don’t actually know what Grandma Rosa looked like.

“See for yourself.” He pulls a sepia-toned photo down from a shelf.

Rosa looks like an old-fashioned movie star. She’s tall and curvy as a cello, with pouty lips and black wavy hair hanging past her hips.

At first, nothing in her face is familiar. She’s beautiful and glamorous, and I’m, well, I’m like my dad. But then I realize her eyes are just like our eyes, too — squinty, with stubby eyelashes and no color in the irises, just dull black. Looking at Rosa, I see how I can tilt my chin up, glance at the world from beneath my eyelids like they’re heavy drapes, and add sparkle to my dark eyes by thinking mischievous thoughts. I practice it while Alta and Dad pack another box. It feels like a grown-up way to see the world.

“Here’s
Mamá
in Chile.” Dad puts another photo in my hands, patting Lu on the head as he walks by him. “That’s one of her scarves, see?” My grandmother’s neck is draped in a knitted scarf that looks softer than clouds. “And here she is at the Olympics.” Rosa aims an arrow at the camera, tongue sticking out the side of her mouth in concentration.

“Grandma was in the Olympics?” I say, surprised — no one in our family is athletic.

“No, no,” Dad says. “She was at the Olympics selling her scarves and made friends with the Spanish archery team. Everyone loved those scarves. People paid a lot of money for them.”

“Was there anything Grandma couldn’t do?” I say, entranced by the photos. “She was so . . .”

I pause, overwhelmed by the words that could end this sentence: So adventurous? So talented? So wild and free?

So unlike Serge?

Dad has to clear his throat a few times before he can speak. “She was something, all right.” He gives us instructions to finish packing. “I’ll haul it out to the minivan later, when the old man isn’t looking.” Then he leaves, taking Lu with him, and Alta and I are alone.

I flex my wrist, examining the bracelet. Old wood, young skin. This is how I hoped to feel in my school clothes from ForeverTeen: ready to mount a horse and ride to the other side of the world. Like in Serge’s story.

So much of his story is stolen from real life. There’s a girl named Rosa who travels the world. There’s a sheep ranch in the desert. The world’s most persistent bees. A bundle of souvenirs from every country that’s ever existed. And now this black-bark bracelet . . . There’s even a scabby tree stump beyond the pasture, I realize, that kind of matches up. I wonder if Serge was always such a clever storyteller, weaving reality with fiction as masterfully as Grandma Rosa knit her famous scarves. Or is this another side effect of dementia? Does Grandpa Serge actually believe the stories he’s telling me?

Bzzz, bzzz
. . . Alta’s phone rings in her robe pocket and brings me back to the here and now. “You can just pack all this up.” She gestures to the pile of Rosa treasures she plucked up so greedily moments ago.

“You don’t want any of it?” I hold up the brocade bag from New Orleans that Alta gushed over. “Not even this?”

Her eyes shift cold: Moody Alta. “It’s all just a bunch of junk. She wasn’t even my real grandma, anyway.”

My chest deflates. Didn’t we just talk about Grandma Rosa, how amazing she was, and now Alta won’t even claim her? “But you’re my sister,” I say, “and she was my grandma. So that’s basically like saying she was your grandma, too.”

“Well, if you want to be technical, you’re really only my
half
sister . . .” she says, and I swear, something burns the outside of my wrist. The bracelet presses against my skin, its heat radiating up my body, exploding out of my mouth like I’m breathing fire:

“You’re just mad about the bracelet. Well, it’s mine. For once, something is mine. Your daddy can’t buy it for you, and you can’t bat your eyelashes and make me hand it over. It’s mine.” I love the way that word tastes, so I say it again. “Mine.”

Her glare penetrates me — there might be scorch marks on the wall behind me. “You’re right,” she says. “Your bracelet. Your grandma Rosa, your grandpa Serge, so it’s
your
closet to finish packing.”

She glides out of the room, a rattlesnake retreating, and my face glows red, like I’ve just been slapped.

I don’t know how long I stand there, waiting to cool down, but when I venture into the back of the closet to finish the packing by myself, it doesn’t surprise me to hear a faint buzz. Whenever I’m by myself at the ranch, the bees turn up their volume. This time I’m glad for their company. They make me feel less alone.

I snap my fingers, just to see how fast a second is. Things change that quickly.

Just minutes ago Alta and I were equals, playing dress-up in the closet. If only I could have bottled that moment up and saved it for when I needed it — but moments can’t be stored or repeated. They are lived once, then gone.

I measure time with changes.

The bracelet is heavy now, scratching my wrist. It’s the prize for winning against Alta, a bittersweet victory.
Not my real grandma
, she had said.
Not real sisters
.

I finish the closet joylessly, folding, draping, and packing in robotic movements. When the closet is empty, I shoo a few rogue bees out the bedroom window, and that’s when I spot something on the floor, back in the dark corner. . . . Something small and round. . . .

A seed.

A seed, black as a scorpion, the size of a penny. I examine it in my palm. A seed, in Grandma Rosa’s closet. A seed that grows into what? I guess we’ll never know; it would probably just fizzle and die if buried in the ranch’s gritty, sandy dirt.

While I’m puzzling over this, a bee lands on the seed and scurries along its surface. It inspects it, almost sniffing (do bees have noses?), then flies away.

The front door opens and shuts. “Carol?” Mom calls from the kitchen.

“Coming,” I say, and gently pocket the seed. The bee disappears out the window.

Mom kisses my cheek when I come into the kitchen. “Thank you,” she says. “Did Alta help?” She inspects my face as she asks this.

“Yeah, big help,” I say. Mom raises her eyebrows, but I don’t feel like going into it, so I change the subject. “What happened at the doctor’s?”

She swallows, then swallows again — Mom’s procrastinating saying the truth out loud, which is how I know it’s not good news. “He’s getting worse. His brain is deteriorating faster than they can track it.”

My heart lurches. “They don’t have a pill that can stop it?” I say. “There’s no cure? No machine that can slow it down, or a surgery . . .”

Mom’s eyes flood. “Brain deterioration is irreversible. Once the Christmas lights are off, they’re off.”

I guess I had hoped Serge would stay only comically forgetful, in the shallows of dementia — misplacing his boots, barking at the people on TV like they can hear him, asking if Inés has been fed, over and over. I can live with a Serge like that. But instead Serge is going to drift further out to open sea, lost inside his own broken brain. Mom spots my bottom lip quivering and hugs me.

“Oh, hon,” she whispers.

The dam of tears threatens to break, but I hold it in, hold it in, hold it in . . .

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“Where else?” Mom says. “On the porch.” I take a deep breath and head out there.

Serge is in his chair, whittling. He doesn’t look different than he did this morning, doesn’t seem any deeper down the dark, drippy well of dementia.

“Caro-leeen-a,” he says, “what is that around your wrist?”

My entire body freezes solid. “A bracelet,” I answer truthfully. “A very old bracelet.”

“It suits you,” he says. “You look so much like her.” He breathes in deeply, his oxygen tube sighing. “
Chiquita
, does Inés have food?”

“Yes.”

“And water?”

Sigh. “Yes.”

He nods. “She’s a good dog.”

I sit on the top step. “Can you tell me the rest of the story? Do they really chop down the tree?”

He stares at the ridge, eyes in story-land already.

“Yes, they chopped down the tree. Left a scab on the land.” Serge’s knife moves like a blur. “Once upon a time . . .”

I mouth along with him, blinking back tears,
there was a tree
.