Bee Season (31 page)

Refrigerator door and floors are next in the litany. Eliza scrubs moldings while Aaron mops with oil soap. It is unclear who starts the whistling. Aaron harmonizes to Eliza’s melodies, most of them silly television jingles or top 40 songs that neither likes. When both forget a song simultaneously, they realize the kitchen is finished, the house completely still.

“It looks good,” Aaron says, and Eliza nods, thinking how surprised their mother will be when she comes downstairs and sees what they have done, how much better it will make Miriam feel.

They have no choice now but to go upstairs. It is late, past both their bedtimes. At the base of the stairs they peer toward their parents’ bedroom, but the door is closed. Eliza tells herself this is a good sign; it means they are sleeping in the same bed again. She gives her brother a smile, but Aaron is staring too intently at the door to notice, as if he could see through it to the other side.

They brush their teeth together at the sink. Aaron says yes before Eliza even finishes asking if she can sleep in his bed, her traditional refuge from bad dreams. There is less room now that they are bigger, but their curled forms still fit on the twin mattress. Their backs touch mid-spine: two butterfly wings, one big, one small.

“Aaron,” the small one whispers, “do you like it better there than here?”

“Elly,” the bigger one whispers back, “be glad for me.”

Eliza feels the expansion of her brother’s lungs as he breathes, his back briefly pressed more closely against hers.

“Would you be happier if I stopped spelling?” Elly is crying a little, but she’s trying to act like she’s not, determined not to be the baby.

Aaron’s voice is gentle. “You’ve got a talent, Elly. You shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

“Does that mean no?” Her nose is now completely stuffed up even though she was barely crying at all.

“It’s not your fault,” Aaron says, his voice sleep-slurred. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Do you think Mom will feel better in the morning?” she whispers.

“Go to sleep,” he replies.

Eventually, she does.

Saul waits silently outside the bathroom door while Miriam showers, the water so hot he can feel the temperature in the bedroom rise. She emerges wrapped in flannel from neck to foot. They do not speak. Instead he holds her for hours as she lies very still, neither of them sleeping. He cannot remember the last time they did that, simple prolonged touch complete in itself. It makes him hopeful enough to swallow his mentally rehearsed suggestion that she seek help, because this, he reasons, is so much better a beginning.

Miriam dreams of the house. She sees the lattice of cracks running across its ceiling, the layered dust floating above its window sills. This time, after exploring the front room with its burnt floor and trash, she goes straight to the side room. She sees the trunk but the photo of the girl isn’t on the floor. Miriam rifles through the photos in the shoe boxes but they are all blank. Miriam knows her parents’ bodies are inside the trunk. She runs to the back room with its Chesterfield coupons. She yanks on the warped drawers of the bureau, certain one of them contains the photo of the girl, but she is distracted. There is a shape at the corner of her eye, the body of the dog. She turns her head, but it is not the dog. It’s much bigger, and there are two of them. It was a closed casket service, too much damage, the undertaker had said, but here they are terrifying in that they are perfectly intact. Their heads were crushed by the car yet their hair is in place; their skin unbroken. They are staring at her with perfect dead eyes and now there is a smell, the overpowering, sweet putrescence of decaying garbage. Miriam realizes that this is the house’s stench, a stench she couldn’t smell until she was taken to the mirror by her husband and shown her reflection.

Eliza awakens and returns to her own room, her sense of filial closeness now faded to an awkward blush with the coming dawn. Staring at the lightening sky through her bedroom window, she hears sounds through the wall and realizes that her brother is also awake. At first she thinks he might be calling to her, but there is no pause in the sounds that come fast and then slow, seeming to repeat. Eliza gets out of bed to hear better, creeps into the hallway, and places her ear to his door.

The only word she recognizes is “hairy,” followed by ones she can’t make out. She isn’t sure why such strange words seem so comforting until she realizes that it is the way her brother is saying them. In the smoothness of the sounds, the way they flow from her brother’s mouth, she finds echoes of her own chanting, this a secret she didn’t know they shared. Their familiarity lulls her until Aaron’s voice becomes the sound of water lapping at the hull of a boat. Eliza is crouched into a corner of the storage hold, trying to fall asleep in spite of her uncomfortable position. Her head knocks against the side of the boat with a thump. The water stops.

“Elly?”

She opens her eyes and she is back in the hallway, trying not to move, scared her brother will open the door and find her spying.

“Elly, go back to sleep,” says Aaron through the door. Elly keeps still, torn between asking to come in and sneaking away as though she was never there to begin with. When the chanting starts up again, she runs back to her room and places her ear to the wall, letting the sound of her brother carry her back into dreams.

When school begins, Eliza is placed in Ms. Paul’s sixth grade, this her first noncombination classroom since Ms. Lodowski. The desks are uncarved. The seats do not wobble. Baby animal posters have been replaced with posters of presidents. To pass the time, Eliza transforms each student into the letter they most resemble. Even when Ms. Paul moves Eliza to the first row, Eliza keeps her eye on the clock, waiting for the moment she will be set free.

She no longer needs pen or paper to bring the letters into her mouth and body. In class, the letters in her textbooks rearrange themselves at her least glance, eager to reveal their true natures. Eliza tries to explain that this is the reason she can no longer read aloud. Her explanation only gets her a note home and an appointment with the school psychologist to discuss her “difficulty separating reality from imagination.” Luckily, by the day of the appointment, Saul has explained enough for Eliza to keep her knowledge of the letters from Miss Osbourne, who has her draw a lot of pictures and gently asks if anything “bad” has happened, maybe something she’s been told to keep secret. Miss Osbourne is satisfied enough not to ask Eliza back. Elly works on stilling the words long enough to read them. There are no more notes, though Ms. Paul now looks at her the same way she looks at Glenn Guerdo, who stands up in the middle of class, drops his book, and says, “It’s called gravity,” whenever he forgets to take his medication.

Eliza doesn’t mind that she sits alone at lunch now or that she is laughed at for studying word lists at recess. As far as she’s concerned the day doesn’t really begin until she gets home. The only thing she likes better than studying with her father is spending time in the study without him.

Alone, Eliza grapples with the 200 combinations that compose
Light of the Intellect
’s dissection of
Adonai,
working to memorize Abu-lafia’s instructions. She will need to chant perfectly to gain her reward. Hebrew chants different than English, its letters carrying the weight of millennia. She likes the heaviness. The weight soothes her, reminds her she can take her time.

Each Friday night יהוה  leaps up from the pages of her
siddur.
Eliza finds it difficult not to move her head along with each vowel, discovers herself breathing according to Abulafia’s careful cadences. As she listens to the congregation sing, glossing over
Adonai
as though it is any other word, she can’t believe she used to be one of them, blind to
Adonai
’s potential. She is even more amazed that her father is able to feign ignorance as he leads the prayers, his lips betraying no sign of where the word can lead.

Fall slides into winter. Saul is pleased, if surprised, to find that Aaron has taken a sudden interest in school clubs. Debate team, science club, chess club, yearbook, and the Sierra Club take up alternate weekdays and weekends, often not bringing Aaron home until long after dinner, except on Fridays when Saul insists that Aaron be there in time for the blessing over the candles. If Saul notices a certain distraction on Aaron’s part at Shabbat services, he attributes it to Aaron’s newly busy schedule and the intense solipsism of the teen-aged. Aaron, Saul tells himself, is merely a late bloomer who has finally blossomed. The best thing he can do, as a father, is to provide room for his son to grow.

Since their night of tentative embracing, Saul and Miriam have reached a state of marital détente. While Miriam has implied that she would prefer Saul to remain downstairs for the time being, she has reverted to her 6 P.M. homecomings and tends to stay in on Saturdays. There have been no overt discussions of the evening Miriam came to dinner
not herself,
as Saul prefers to think of it, but when Saul now asks his wife how she is feeling it is with an air of tender diligence he feels accurately conveys his concern. Miriam, for her part, has shown no further sign of the stranger she briefly became. This helps to further everyone’s secret hope that the longer the strange interlude goes unmentioned, the less significant it will become.

If Eliza continues to worry that her covert book-borrowing will be discovered, she needn’t. In the face of the past months’ familial shifts, the movements of a particular book from a shelf in the study do not register on Saul’s internal Richter scale.

The day begins so normally. By the time Eliza comes down for breakfast Aaron is almost finished eating, Saul is in his study, and Miriam has left for work. Though she can’t remember his ever having done it before, Eliza tells herself that Aaron hugging both her and Saul before leaving for school is normal. They are, after all, a family. When Aaron tells Elly to take care of herself too low for Saul to overhear, Eliza nods as if this is a regular request. She follows him out the door soon enough to see him back out of the driveway and down the street. Though she knows he can’t see her, she waves.

After school lets out and Eliza returns home, she and Saul dive into her studies with their usual fervor, Saul breaking away only to put something on the stove. Eliza enjoys studying to the smell of her father’s cooking. It makes the words seem nutritive, reminding her that she is feeding her brain.

The call comes in the middle of dinner. Dinner calls are the most common, that being the time favored by the solicitors of magazine subscriptions and long-distance services. Eliza concentrates on her food, waiting for her father’s self-righteous, “You have interrupted dinner with my family,” even though it’s just the two of them. Instead, her father’s face grows still and serious. He says lots of small words like “Yes” and “Of course” in a correspondingly small voice. Elly cannot imagine who would make her father sound just like her or Aaron when they are caught doing something wrong.

“Your mother’s been arrested,” Saul says quietly to Eliza after hanging up. The words are completely alien, too unlikely to possibly mean what they say. Saul’s face remains expressionless, its features seemingly sprayed into place. “Why don’t you stay here and wait for your brother while I go to the station? I’ll call as soon as I know what has happened.”

Eliza tells herself this must be a family version of a school fire drill or a test of the emergency broadcast system, a just-in-case for an event that won’t ever happen. But then her father is fetching his coat, and then he is out the door, and if this is a test Saul isn’t showing any sign of calling it off.

Eliza hears the car door slam. The engine starts up and then fades in the distance until the loudest sound is the tick of the oven clock. It is the first time Eliza has ever been in the house alone. She turns on the television and begins clearing the table of dinner, deliberately knocking into cabinets and rattling plates in an attempt to fill the vast space she has suddenly found herself in. The sound of the television cushions the emptiness of the house as long as she has dishes to do, but once they are done the TV laughter bounces oddly off the walls. She needs something else.

When Eliza thinks of the
Light of the Intellect,
she doesn’t picture the Hebrew she has never been able to read or her father’s spidery translation, but the face she has attached to its author. Abulafia has become a man with kind dark eyes and curly dark hair whom Eliza has yet to recognize as an older, male version of herself. It is this face she imagines speaking to her after she closes herself inside her room, mentally reciting the instructions she has memorized. Abulafia’s imagined voice inside her head is just the company she needs to make her feel less alone.

Though Eliza has been patiently permuting   for some time now, her attempts have not yet yielded the desired effect. No image has appeared before her. There has been no special voice. Every time she has completed a permutation without seeing or hearing anything special, she has managed to find some small error in her execution to explain away their absence — a slip of the tongue, a misjudged breath. The very elusiveness of her goal has inflated it in her mind. Many nights she has fallen asleep to the divine visions she is certain await her. Having cycled through the more classical images, her imagination has set out in more subliminal directions. God has become a baobab with ladybugs for leaves, a million-story high-rise that sings through its doors and windows, an umbrella that turns raindrops into candy. The voice, however, is nonnegotiable. The voice she knows she will recognize. יהוה

So tonight to block out the fact that Aaron isn’t home yet, that her mother has been arrested, and that her father has left her alone to find out why, Eliza decides to try again. Sitting on her bedroom carpet, the door closed behind her, she cycles through the proper combinations of
yod, vav,
and
heh,
her voice and body perfectly attuned. Chant feeds seamlessly into movement as if these two things have always been integrally connected. There is no room left in her head to wonder where her brother is or what her mother has done. There are only the ancient letters and the sounds they make.