Bee Season (33 page)

It is dark underneath Aaron’s door. Saul knocks softly.

“Aaron?”

He very much wants Aaron to be awake. Night often provides Saul a clarity day seems to obscure. In the darkened hallway outside his son’s door Saul is filled with things he wants to say to his son. He will start by apologizing for his inattention, assuring Aaron that the change is purely circumstantial and in no way reflects a lessening of his love. Standing outside Aaron’s door, Saul’s heart is so full of love that he can feel his eyes fill with it, can feel love dripping down his cheeks.

“Son?” he whispers, but the house is completely silent. What he wants to say will have to wait for morning.

Saul knows not even to try to sleep. Instead, he spends the morning’s earliest hours examining Miriam’s belongings. He rummages through drawers he had always prided himself on not opening. He investigates Miriam’s closet and bedside table drawers, searching for a sign of the woman from the warehouse and finding not a hint of anyone. Only while sorting his wife item by item does he realize the overwhelming generality of her existence: a closet of sensible clothes in practical colors; four pairs of shoes ranging from casual to dressy in either black or brown; no knickknacks; no pictures; her only jewelry that which he gave her early on, before realizing she never wore any. It is enough, in retrospect, to lead him to suspect her of living life elsewhere.

Then, under Miriam’s side of the bed, Saul finds a Buster Brown shoe box. It is faded from age, the boy and his dog having long been replaced in consumer consciousness by Nike and Tretorn. Inside, resting on several layers of padding, Saul finds a rubber ball, palm-sized and bubblegum pink. Saul puts the ball to his nose, inhales a scent from his childhood. He drops the ball to the floor. For a moment it appears that it may return to Saul’s waiting hand despite the laws of physics. Saul is ready to believe that this can happen, sits absolutely still, his hand outspread, waiting for the ball to come back to him. When it doesn’t, Saul picks it up and tries again. It’s a matter of effort and will, he decides, and he for one is willing to keep at it until the ball lands where it should have landed to begin with. He knows, if he tries hard enough, that he can make things right.

When Saul goes downstairs to start breakfast, he notices the blinking light of the answering machine.

“Hi, Dad, it’s Aaron.” Saul cannot tell if Aaron’s voice sounds far away because of the connection or the recording. “Um, I’m staying over at Charlie’s house tonight. I’ll call back later and explain when you get home.” The message is followed by two clicks, which Saul presumes to be Aaron hanging up on two successive attempts. Saul dials the operator, who agrees to connect him to the last person to call the house.

“Hare Kṛṣṇa, Vraja Dasa speaking. How may I help you?”

“I’m sorry,” Saul replies. “I must have the wrong number.”

Confused, Saul climbs the stairs. He knocks on Aaron’s door, then enters. The room is empty.

“Eliza?” Saul says as Elly exits her room for the bathroom. “Did Aaron come home last night?”

Eliza is still asleep enough that last night’s events remain at a safe remove. “I guess so,” but now she is remembering the phone call during dinner, her father’s departure, and shutting herself in her room with Abulafia to keep the world at bay. If Aaron had come home while she was transmuting, she wouldn’t have heard him, but it seems strange that he wouldn’t have sought her out. Perhaps he tried to come home last night but forgot his keys, was locked out, and she was too caught up in a permutation to hear him knocking. Where she felt pride the night before, she now feels hollow, her new progress merely a further sign of her own selfishness.

“Did you hear the phone ring or the answering machine pick up?”

Eliza darts into Aaron’s empty bedroom. Perhaps he knows something she doesn’t. “Is Aaron with Mom? Can I go too? Are they okay?” She doesn’t realize she has started to cry until she tastes the tears on her lips, isn’t sure if they are for her mother, her brother, or herself.

“Shh,” Saul says. “Everything’s going to be fine. Your brother stayed with a friend last night,” he says, trying to sound as if he hadn’t found this out minutes before. “And your mother isn’t in jail, she’s in a hospital,” which while not true yet probably will be soon. “The police found her last night when she was very sick and confused and they called us.”

“Can I see her?” Eliza has never looked more like her mother. There is a hopeful quality to her eyes that Saul never associated with Miriam until seeing it reflected in his daughter’s face.

“I don’t know,” Saul replies. “Eventually you can.”

He doesn’t mention that he hasn’t seen Miriam yet either, that last night his wife would only talk to her lawyer, that he will be attending her arraignment this morning, unsure whether she will speak to him or not.

“Some hospitals have rules about children. I’m going to visit the hospital today while you’re at school. By the time you get home, I’ll be able to tell you more.”

“Is she going to be better soon?” Eliza asks with her mother’s eyes.

“I hope so.”

Saul escorts Eliza downstairs and feeds her cereal, hoping he can get her out the door in time to get himself to the courthouse without it seeming like this is anything but a normal day.

The arraignment is mercifully brief. Miriam’s attorney meets Saul at the courthouse door and looks puzzled when Saul asks if he and Miriam work together. They do not have long to wait before Miriam’s name is called, after which the lawyer does all the talking. The power of his words and the quality of his suit ensure that everything goes according to plan. Miriam Naumann, wife and mother of two, with no priors, Your Honor, and clear evidence of mental instability is committed to the Holliswood Center for psychiatric observation. Throughout the entire proceeding, Miriam barely moves, barely acknowledges her name. Some essential internal switch, whose existence Saul never suspected, has been turned off. In the brief period Saul is allowed contact before Miriam is taken away, he places his hand on her shoulder. It is like touching wood.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” he says for the second time that morning, feeling like a poorly trained parrot. Miriam looks at him, then through him, then is escorted out. Saul is thankful to have somewhere else he needs to go. He proceeds directly to Abington High.

Saul has an urge, upon entering Aaron’s school, to wander. Strolling hallways bounded by the muffled sounds of class in session feels like playing hooky, reignites the adolescent joy of bending rules when rules were easier to bend. The hallways are redolent with the sights and smells of secondary education. The tang of grape bubblegum mixes with the musk of drugstore aftershave. A thin trail of precipitate left behind by the custodian’s push broom winds through the corridors like a breadcrumb trail. Saul resists the desire to continue his sentimental journey. Aaron has waited long enough.

Saul enters the front office with the air of someone deserving immediate attention, an air cultivated on the
bima.
He uses the words “family emergency” and looks the secretary in the eye. The truth of these words, of his manner, doesn’t reduce the feeling that he is playing a part, that he and this officious secretary, who is obviously pleased with her cameo role, have been rehearsing singly and together for this moment’s drama. Saul cannot overcome his sense of removal, the events of the past twenty-four hours so much easier to stomach as someone else’s story.

Saul realizes he doesn’t know his son’s homeroom. The secretary, disappointed, perceptibly cools as she accesses the senior class list. She makes Saul repeat the name. As she makes her way down the page, she begins to read aloud — Nassen, Nastor, Nattandi, Nauger. Saul ponders the surnames. Any of their fathers could just as easily be here. Saul turns toward the door, half expecting Messrs. Nassen, Nastor, Nattandi, and Nauger. He will exchange complicit smiles with these men. They will assure each other they are not alone.

“He’s listed as absent for today.” The secretary’s voice dispels Saul’s vision. He could have sworn he just heard the woman say that his son was not here.

“Absent? But that’s impossible. Aaron stayed with a friend last night. My wife was unexpectedly ill and he stayed with a friend. I was gone until late — at the hospital — ” Saying the words out loud makes them seem true. “He stayed with Charlie and then the two of them went to school together.”

The secretary pictures a bed sandwiched by an IV pole and one of those beeping heart things, the name of which she doesn’t know but which are always featured on “General Hospital.” Last week the doctor informed Laura that the clear liquid dripping out of Luke’s unconscious nose wasn’t snot but spinal fluid. She really likes Luke. “I’m so sorry about your wife. What’s Charlie’s last name? I’ll see if he’s accounted for.”

Saul realizes that he doesn’t know Charlie’s anything.

“Perhaps it’s my mistake. Charlie’s parents may have already taken Aaron to see her. It was crazy this morning, I might have forgotten.”

Saul pretends to rack his brain for events that never happened. His own guilt quenches any small flames of annoyance at Aaron’s unexpected disappearance, for doing to Saul what Saul has done to him.

“Yes, yes, now I remember. They said they’d take him to the hospital. I’m so sorry to take your time like this. I had completely forgotten,” and Saul beats a hasty exit to sympathetic secretarial assurances.

Walking to his car, Saul assures himself that Aaron is fine, that he is probably home already, that he is hiding out with his mysterious friend until school ends, that he is a teenager reacting in teenage fashion to Saul’s failure to handle this crisis. Saul will go home. He will tell Eliza to study on her own. And when Aaron arrives, he will take his son into his arms.

If her mother were really sick, the police would have taken her to the hospital and not the police station. Eliza knows this much. But her mother is a lawyer. Lawyers don’t commit crimes.

Then it comes to her. Her parents are getting divorced. She knows that getting divorced involves going to court, so it makes sense that getting divorced would also involve the police. Her father didn’t want to tell her about sleeping in his study, so he also probably didn’t want to tell her about the divorce. Which is why he told her that her mother was found by the police instead of admitting that she went to the police on her own. Eliza decides that if her father wants to use the word “sick” instead of “divorced,” she’s old enough to play along.

Eliza knows most kids of divorced parents have to choose who to live with, but she thinks her situation will be different. Her father, after all, is already sleeping in a different room and her mother isn’t home much anyway. If her mother moved out, she wouldn’t have anyone to cook for her and she would never have time to see Eliza or Aaron. Eliza decides, with relief, that it will be easier for everyone if everything stays just as it is.

At lunch, she spends the first ten minutes wandering around the cafeteria looking for Sinna’s table before remembering that Sinna is in middle school now.

The lawyer assures Saul that Holliswood represents the absolute best in private psychiatric care, but Saul still entertains gothic expectations of barbed wire fences, rough-hewn stone, and barred windows. Instead it looks like any other medical facility. There is a well-manicured lawn. Curved sidewalks feature an occasional nurse pushing an occasional wheelchair. A centerpiece of ornamental shrubbery and perennial flowers fronts the door. The lobby is sunlit, with comfy chairs, dog-eared magazines, and a television burbling at low volume. The woman attending the front desk smiles at Saul as he enters. Saul almost accedes to the urge to check the sign outside to confirm he has come to the right place. He approaches the front desk, face downcast, even as he tells himself to look her in the eyes. There is no reason to be ashamed.

“May I help you?”

It is the same question he is asked everywhere: a department store, a library, the produce section. It makes no difference that it is now being asked by a mental health professional, doesn’t matter that the answer now involves his wife.

“Um, yes. I, ah …” Saul prides himself on the directness of his speech. “My name is Mr. Naumann. Saul. I’ve come to see my wife, Mrs., I mean, Miriam Naumann. I believe she was brought here this morning.”

The nurse consults a list, confirms that Mrs. Naumann has indeed been admitted, asks if Saul called ahead to clear his visit.

“Cleared it? Are there set visiting hours? I can come back later if you’d like.”

The nurse’s voice is as melodious as a Disney character’s about whose shoulders fly tweeting birds.

“Oh no, Mr. Naumann, the time of your arrival is not the issue. It’s just that Mrs. Naumann or her doctors may have determined that she isn’t ready for visitors. I’ll call over to her wing and find out. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself comfortable?” which Saul realizes is actually a command and not a question. He does his best to look as if he is following orders by sitting in a nearby chair, even though he knows that comfort, in this context, is impossible.

The waiting room is deserted except for an older woman in purple leg warmers intently watching television. Her wig is crooked. Saul wonders if she is an inmate slipped out to pretend at being sane. But then an old man appears in the hallway wheeled by a nurse. The woman leaps up from the chair to kiss the man’s slack cheek. The man is attired in purple silk pajamas neatly pressed, his hair perfectly combed, his face showing no sign that he has been approached or kissed by this slightly askew woman, who takes the wheelchair from the nurse to head for the door and the early afternoon. Saul is alone. He watches the sun slanting through the front windows. He cannot help but compare it to the light slanting through a certain tower of wineglasses.

“Mr. Naumann?” Saul turns toward the Technicolor voice. He is expecting to see Miriam, is ready to join the lady in leg warmers and her oblivious purple husband for a stroll of the grounds, but there is only the front desk woman.