by Mobi Warren
And then, as if to welcome Melissa and her father in larger than life style, their solar van came to a sudden halt to allow a migration of tens of thousands of tarantulas to cross the road. Each furry arachnid was as large as her fist. Melissa’s mouth dropped open and the origami bee she’d been folding fell from her hands.
“We’re still some hours from Benefit,” her father said. “You’ll be surprised how much greener the Hill Country is.”
CHAPTER SIX
BEAU
Hermes sniffed the fence line that separated the neighbor’s goat farm from the Bùi family’s new yard. Melissa sat on a weathered cypress bench placed beneath the wide branches of a live oak tree. Morning sunlight, hot on her cheeks, filtered through gnarled and twisting branches. She rubbed her palms, beaded with sweat, on her shorts. The basket at her side was a third of the way filled with origami bees.
She’d promised to call Noi, her grandmother, once they were settled in Benefit and now seemed as good a time as any. They’d been in the college town for a week and because they had few belongings and the cottage was already half-furnished with simple furniture, it hadn’t taken long to arrange things. The little house felt comfortable, even homey, although Melissa was not ready to accept it as home.
“Noi?” she tapped her holographic wristband and in seconds an image of her smiling grandmother rose into the air.
“I’m glad to see you!” her grandmother said in a chirpy voice, her black eyes sparkling. Her hair was pulled back in a bun secured with a red lacquered chopstick and Melissa could see her grandmother was sitting at her kitchen table with her cat. The slender Siamese was licking the last specks of rice porridge from a bowl the same blue as his eyes.
Mechtild Tran was a quilt artist who lived in San Francisco. She was holding a piece of cloth and a threaded needle. Her smile faded as she scrutinized her granddaughter’s face.
“Something bothering you, little bee?”
Melissa hesitated, and then said, “I had a couple seizures right before the move.”
Noi pursed her lips in a small frown. “Hmmm. Bad ones?”
“No, just a little different.”
“How so?” Noi leaned slightly forward as if Melissa were about to share a secret.
Melissa lifted a finger to the bridge of her nose and rubbed it. “Well, I thought I heard music that no one else did.”
“Hmm. But nothing else? No tremors?”
“No.”
“What did your father say?”
“He said it was probably a pre-seizure aura and we’d keep an eye on it.”
“That’s sensible. You know, Melissa, I sometimes hear unusual sounds prior to seizures.”
“I know, but I never have before.”
“Well, I like to think of them as the voices of apsara.” Noi giggled. Apsara, Melissa knew, were celestial nymphs in Buddhist fairy tales. Only Noi could think of seizures so poetically.
Her grandmother’s voice lowered and in a more serious tone, she asked, “But these recent episodes of yours, you’ve just blanked out? No convulsions? Nothing else?”
“No.”
An odd look that seemed a mixture of both relief and disappointment crossed Noi’s face. Then she smiled and held her quilting needle up with its tail of silver thread. “So tell me about Benefit. Better yet, quilt me a square that shows it to me.”
Melissa lifted her basket to show her grandmother. “Actually, I’m working on an origami project right now.”
“Ah. Are those bees?”
Melissa explained her plan to fold one thousand honeybees and Noi clucked approval.
“A wonderful idea! Good to dedicate your efforts to bring the bees back.”
Melissa shrugged doubtfully. “It’s not like folding a bunch of paper bees will bring any real ones back, but I want to show Ba I support his efforts.” She sifted a hand through the basket of bees.
“Never underestimate what imagination and mindful hands can accomplish.” Noi made a few even stitches, small as sesame seeds, then pulled her needle through the cloth in her hand.
Noi was an artist through and through. Melissa wished she had Noi’s faith that the world of honeybees could be restored. The truth was, Melissa wasn’t at all sure that any of her own actions could make a difference in the wrecked world she’d been born into. So many species gone, so many layers of life faded.
“Don’t tell Ba, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”
Noi nodded and looked up from her quilting, startling Melissa with a sharp, probing look. “I will be as silent as a stone. Fold each bee with faith, nhé!” Noi’s last word, Vietnamese for something akin to ‘okay?’ reminded Melissa of the sound of a small bell.
“I will, Noi. I miss you!”
“I miss you, too. It’s a good thing we have our holograms. Call me if you have another seizure.” Mechtild Tran was no stranger to seizures because she herself was epileptic.
“Okay, Noi. Talk to you soon.”
Melissa hesitated before picking up another piece of origami paper. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell anyone, not even Noi, about her seizures. She wasn’t supposed to have them anymore. The doctor said most kids grew out of them. She hated being defective, hated the way kids giggled or pointed at her when she came out of a seizure in the middle of class. And the way some kids called her “statue girl.” Maybe Noi had made peace with being an epileptic, but Melissa couldn’t.
I want a life that is whole, she thought, not one with holes cut out of it. She tried to shift her focus. Noi wanted her to quilt a square of the Texas Hill Country. How would that look? Patches of dull olive for live oak trees. Chalk color for limestone canyons. Pale gray for cypress that grew along the Sabinal. The sluggish river, of course, would be a patch of brown and green. Threads of mauve and purple for the lavender field where the Yolo bees now lived, where her father and his team were trying to keep the last of North America’s honeybees alive. In her mind, Melissa rehearsed embroidery stitches, but the thing was, she didn’t really want to stitch her new landscape. The place she didn’t want to be.
She wiped her sweaty palms on her shorts and completed the base folds for another bee. It was so muggy, it was hard to get the damp paper to hold a sharp crease. She bent over to get a tricky crimp fold right and swatted unsuccessfully at a mosquito that landed on her hand.
Her father told her that Benefit had once been a lush center of lavender production with meadows stretching in all directions. There were fewer lavender fields now. Fewer trees. Thousands of majestic oaks had toppled during long years of thirst, as had centuries-old cypress trees whose roots depended on the river. The past couple of years had seen somewhat better rainfall and the Sabinal, though sluggish and shallow, was flowing again. But who knew how long that would last?
Melissa tugged at two corners of her origami bee to pull the wings into position, and once again, wondered, why Texas, why here? Mom is so much luckier, she thought, living on an island in the crystal blue waters of the Aegean Sea.
She placed the finished bee in the basket and couldn’t help feeling a small swell of pride. She was good with her hands. An ability, Noi had assured her, passed down through a long line of Vietnamese grandmothers. Her lips turned up in a half smile as she remembered how Noi had scooped her hands into her own when Melissa was only four years old and closely examined the fingerprint whorls on each of Melissa’s finger pads. She had clucked in approval.
“Eight complete whorls. That means you have talent for fine work. For careful detail.” Noi had proceeded, on the spot, to teach Melissa how to sew a straight line on a piece of muslin.
Melissa was glad to have inherited skillful hands from her grandmother. Unfortunately, she had also inherited the blank-out form of epilepsy. Noi had been known to go blank for several minutes at a time, several times a day. How can she stand it, Melissa wondered, because her grandm
other always seemed so solid and cheerful?
Melissa stood up from the bench and stretched her arms over her head. She ambled back into the house and poured herself a tall glass of ice water, then sat on the porch swing, swaying slowly back and forth. At least Ba wasn’t making her start school right away. She had managed to take her final exams back in California early, and after several arguments, her father had finally agreed to wait until the fall to enroll her at Benefit Middle School. She was not looking forward to it. Teachers would have to be informed about her seizures. Kids would find her blank-outs weird.
Well, at least for now, she could stay at home, fold her origami, and look up holo-vids. Some days her father didn’t return until well past dark. That night, alone in the house, she lay beneath the whir of a ceiling fan in her room and listened to the distant yips of a coyote. Hermes curled his body against hers. As she drifted off to sleep, the faint lilt of a flute mingled with the coyote’s ghostly cries.
The next morning, Melissa sat at her same spot on the cypress bench and began another round of origami. Hermes again explored scents along the fence line as she folded her gold and black squares of paper into bees. Goats foraged in the meadow on the other side of the fence. Melissa had not yet met the neighbors and had forgotten about the thirteen-year-old boy who lived there.
She was working on a complex wing fold when she heard the flute, muted at first but soon clear and insistent. Her arms tingled and she felt a rush of fear. She jerked upright in an unsuccessful attempt to ward off the seizure, but the meadow with its goats dissolved. Everything vanished save for the haunted trills of the flute. Then there was a flash of light and she was looking at a different meadow. She saw a teenage girl, the one she had seen before, place a pair of flutes on a rock where a young boy with curly brown hair and pale eyes sat. There was something odd about the boy. His right foot ended in a knob that looked almost like a hoof and two horn-like bumps protruded from his brow. A slender hound lay beside him and he held a small goat, a kid, in his lap. He clapped his hands as the girl took her place behind a line scratched in the dirt. She crouched down, lifted her hips, and then burst into a sprint to the other side of the meadow. With a joyous whoop, the boy threw his arms into the air. The startled kid leapt from his lap and butted its head against him in protest.
Then something pushed against Melissa’s own back and she twirled around to see a small goat with curly strands of chocolate colored fleece. She was back on the cypress bench, her basket of bees beside her, a completed bee in her hand. She glanced from goat to bee and back to goat. What had just happened, another hallucination?
The goat’s narrow face and dainty hooves were black, but its eyes were a startling sapphire blue. Hermes trotted back to Melissa’s side protectively and deciding the goat was not a threat, turned his head to ignore it.
Half-dazed, Melissa reached towards the goat and ran her fingers through its soft fleece to convince herself it was real. The goat nuzzled its head against her thigh. It was real all right, but Melissa felt strangely drained as if part of her was still in that other meadow. Her arms felt light as air as if she’d somehow lost substance. She’d had another hallucination, seen the girl and boy again. And in her hand rested a perfect origami bee. She hadn’t folded those wings yet, had she? She felt a sudden wave of nausea.
At that moment a boy about her age ran into the yard and stopped just short of the bench. He was tall and slight with olive skin and wavy chestnut hair, dressed in a pair of cut-offs and t-shirt. The look on his face was a mixture of relief and exasperation.
“Found you, Amaltheia!” He held a collar attached to a leash, which he placed around the goat’s neck as if she were a dog. He turned to Melissa. “Sorry. Amaltheia picks locks on goat-proof gates. I guess she wanted to check out our new neighbors.”
Melissa just stared at him. Barely recovered from her hallucination, the boy’s sudden appearance felt like an invasion.
“Amaltheia, she’s harmless. You’re not afraid of goats, are you?”
What a ridiculous question. Melissa shook her head. “Of course not.”
The boy looked hard at her then at the origami bee in her hands.
“Are you okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
Just go away, she wanted to say, but she managed a curt, “I’m fine.”
He reached out a finger and touched the origami bee.
“Did you fold that?”
“No, my dog did.”
“Talented dog. Maybe he could teach my goat.” The boy laughed.
Melissa dropped the bee into the basket and shoved the basket under the bench. She felt embarrassed. What if the boy had seen her in her blank-out state? She wished he’d take the goat and leave.
Without warning, the blue-eyed goat thrust its head under the bench and grabbed a large mouthful of bees. Chomp.
“Hey, that’s not food!” scolded Melissa as she snatched the basket.
“Dang!” The boy jerked the goat back and pulled a bee from its mouth. He wiped it on his cutoffs and handed it back to Melissa. “Still intact, just a little chewed.”
Melissa made a face, took the bee and dropped it back in the basket.
“Look, I’m double sorry. Amaltheia will taste just about anything to see if it’s worth eating.”
The goat spit out a few bees, chewed beyond repair, then gave a little bleat. She was cute Melissa had to admit. Those startling blue eyes, the strands of curly chocolate fleece. But she’d probably devoured a half-day’s worth of folding.
“Her name is Amaltheia?” Despite wanting the boy to disappear, Melissa was curious about the goat’s name. Thanks to her mother, she knew her Greek mythology.
“Yeah, named after the goat that suckled Zeus.” He gave her another hard look. “You sure you’re okay? You look kind of queasy.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“So how come you’re folding all those bees?”
The boy was nosy. “Just something I’m working on.”
“How come I haven’t seen you in school?”
Impossibly nosy. “My dad said I could wait to enroll in the fall.”
“Wow, you’re lucky.”
“How come you’re not in school? Isn’t today a school day?”
“Suspended for the day. And tomorrow, too. Sometimes, I have to make my own luck.” He smiled, obviously pleased with himself.
Nosy and bad news. Melissa really wanted him to leave.
“You’re wondering who the hell I am, right?”
Melissa didn’t answer.
“My name is Beau, I live next door.” He extended a hand that Melissa now noticed was covered in a layer of cracked, red clay.
He wiped his hand on his cut-offs. “It’s just clay.”
She reluctantly shook his hand. “I’m Melissa.”
“Yeah, I know. Well, I need to take Amaltheia back. See you around.”
Hopefully not anytime soon, thought Melissa, as she watched Beau lead Amaltheia out the gate. She picked up her basket of bees and went inside the house to wash the clay off her hand and then lay down. She still felt queasy. The boy hadn’t said anything about seeing her blanked out, but had he? Should she call Noi and tell her about the seizure? Should she tell her father? She didn’t want to admit something strange was happening to her. She didn’t want to go back on meds and she knew that would be her father’s first and only response.
At sunset, Melissa sat on the porch swing swaying back and forth, still debating whether or not to tell her father about her seizure. She had decided against calling Noi. What could her grandmother, two thousand miles away, do anyway? Finally, she got up and went to the kitchen to boil rice noodles for dinner. She stir-fried some tofu and chopped a handful of fresh herbs. Their peppery, lemony scent helped ease the nausea she’d felt all day. She and her father had traveled from California with potted herbs th
at were now lined up along the porch. No meal, her father insisted, was complete without a generous sprinkling of fresh herbs like violet basil, coriander leaf or what everyone called cilantro in Texas, and mint. Some herbs could be hand-pollinated in the absence of bees, a tricky and time-consuming task, but worth it to break the bland monotony of vegetable and fruit deprived meals. Fruity and Veggie Pills, in their bright and chewable shapes, were no substitute for the real thing. Of course, in many cases, Melissa didn’t even know what the real thing tasted like.
The sky, drained of the day’s fierce light, darkened at the kitchen window. Melissa turned on a small lamp and waited for the water to boil. The cooked noodles sat in a colander, clumped and cold, before she heard the sound of her father’s bike glide over the driveway gravel. He entered the kitchen with a long face. He nodded at Melissa and sat at the table she had set with bowls and chopsticks. He didn’t even say hello.
“Ready for dinner, Ba?”
“I’m not that hungry.” He stood up to wash his hands at the kitchen sink and sat back down. The lamplight cast shadows across his face and darkened the circles under his eyes.
They held their palms together, like lotus buds Noi would say, and softly intoned a Buddhist prayer, “Countless beings have cooperated to bring us this meal. May we use this nourishment for the good of all beings.”
Her father picked up his pair of chopsticks and halfheartedly lifted a mouthful of noodles.
“You okay, Ba?”
“Bees went missing today.”
“Missing?”
“Our Yolo bees, the ones we stole.”
“You mean rescued?” Melissa wished her father would look up at her but he just stared into his noodles.