Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  A tall, lean man got out of the jalopy truck and patted his leg. A dog jumped out behind him—a husky mix that looked like a wolf, a dark stripe down its nose and a mask over the top of its eyes, its ears tattered, its white tail wagging like a peace flag.

  The man walked with the dog to the front deck, the Salish Sea stretched out beyond them. They stood still, looking out as if it were their first time seeing so much water. She could remember that feeling—how awed she’d been by the sea, the island.

  The ferry’s engines kicked in, surging them forward and out, the wind picking up, blowing in her face as they gained momentum, leaving a trail of white frothing water behind. She looked down again, watching the man climb into the back of his truck and check the bee box, securing its ties. Then he opened one of the cardboard boxes next to it and carefully lifted out a small potted tree. Isabelle’s heart stopped. It was a bonsai, although not much of one—two bare trunks wired together, a sweep of twiggy branches. A bonsai in training. She’d seen Eamon form the same thing.

  The man lowered his head, and it looked for all the world as if he were in supplication—praying to the tree, praying to the bees. When he jumped out of the truck, he brushed off his hands on his jeans, then closed the dog in the truck cab, windows left down. She could barely hear him say, “Stay,” over the engine noise, the dog watching with concentrated concern as he left.

  She wondered what his story was—a man and his dog and honeybees. A man with a bonsai tree heading for the islands. She imagined him going to make a new start just as she and Eamon had. Find all the things you didn’t know were missing.

  She shook her head at herself—she was getting musing in her age.

  The wind blowing cold and wet, she went back into the cabin, walking past the vending machines and bathrooms, making her way to the other end so she might look at the map hung under Plexiglas on the far wall. She knew the way, had studied the ferry’s route before coming, but now that she was here, she wanted to look again, see the green blots of islands on blue water, the mainland receding into memory. Over twenty years, gone in a breath. As if it were her first time going to Trawler all over again. She and Eamon starting their life together. Nothing else in the way. Both of them optimistic, sure that the life rolling out ahead of them was all that they wanted, all that they had planned. A family coming. A beautiful life in the making.

  She could feel the thrum of the ferry’s engines vibrating through her legs as she traced the dashed line that marked their path then—the same path she was on now. She stopped on the smallest island, her finger pinning it. Trawler, it read in bold cursive, cartoonish drawings of the old hotel, the beach and dock, a few gulls and cormorants perched on pilings.

  “That’s where you’re going as well?” a voice asked from behind her.

  She turned. Of course it would be the young man with the honeybees and bonsai. Of course he would be going to Trawler. Hadn’t she known it as soon as he’d gotten out of his truck?

  “Have you been before?” he asked. There was a sorrow in his eyes she recognized. A life lived through tragedy.

  “Decades ago. Too long to really claim any kind of kinship,” she said. “Your first time?”

  Glancing at the map, he nodded. “I just wish I’d been able to come sooner,” he said, his voice layered with deep sadness, regret. Something she knew only too well.

  “Don’t we all,” she said. She held out her hand. “Isabelle Fullbrook.”

  He shook with a firm grip even though she could see his thoughts were held elsewhere, as captured as she had been, coming here the first time.

  “Nick Larkins,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  MARCH 2001

  Silva drove east, away from the coast, away from Trawler. This time, she wouldn’t stop until it was over—whatever that meant. Even if it meant things were exactly what she thought they were: irrevocably stripped away, severed, uprooted.

  She urged the Dodge into high speed, double-clutching the way her grandfather Eamon had taught her—that long throw, the smooth coolness of the oak knob under her hand, rounded and gleaming with varnish. Reassuring. The road atlas fluttered on the seat beside her, threatening to take wing out the open window, the route to her grandmother’s lover highlighted in yellow. Two Rivers, Idaho.

  Once as a child digging through Eamon’s old boxes, Silva had found a photo of Isabelle. An older version of herself, except, like Modigliani’s women, Isabelle’s gaze had held something tragic, a fated sorrow. Silva had studied herself in the mirror for days afterward, angling her face until everything was the same except their age and the depth of their mourning.

  She knew now that it had only been a matter of time.

  On the freeway, cars streamed past her, parting around Eamon’s 1970 Dodge Power Wagon like water around a rock. When a convertible cut in too close, Silva hit the brakes and flung her arm out as if the five bonsai packed on the pickup’s bench seat beside her were loose children she had to protect from being tossed. She remembered Eamon doing the same for her at five years old, the Dodge snarled in traffic during a trip into the city. She’d frowned at all the vehicles and asked Eamon why everyone didn’t just go home.

  The place she’d just willingly left behind.

  She rested her hand on her stomach, absorbing her own body heat. A tender bit of growth rising out of the ashes. Her, the fetus inside her, and now perhaps Isabelle, too. A fractured family of castoffs formed out of the severed pieces that made up the sum of their existence.

  Before Eamon, before Silva’s mother’s accident, home had been a commune with a giant garden lined with bowers of vining hops clustered with papery flowers and plate-size leaves that cast a patchwork of shade. The “New Community,” they called themselves, the women working the garden together, weeding, planting, tending with a kind of maternal tenderness Silva missed more than ever—a deep inner ache that matched the biology of change happening within her, cells dividing, copying a new iteration of her, of those who’d come before her. She could remember what it felt like to be part of a family, one unit functioning together, joined by purpose and belief, there to help one another—even if now it seemed naive to believe in such things.

  She’d lost her mother the day after the summer solstice party, a pig roasting in a pit, men stocking sauna wood and setting up teepees, and women weaving the children hops and field-daisy wreaths. Silva, five years old at the time, had run and played late into the night with her friends, crowned in their wreaths. They’d eaten shreds of roast pig rolled up in lettuce leaves and snuck sips of home brew. She could still remember the sharp bitterness, the cold wash of fizz. They’d watched steaming people stumble out of the sauna, women’s breasts and men’s penises loose with heat, and fallen asleep by the bonfire, blankets thrown around them like petals.

  The next morning, Silva’s mother had driven into town for more supplies and never come back. Fire pits drifting with ash, people coming and going. Silva had waited hours, days, feeling as if she were the one drowning, the air a wave that sucked her under and kept her. The same way she felt now.

  She climbed Snoqualmie Pass, sharp-toothed mountains cloaked in trees and snow, fog hanging, Vs of Canada geese pushing northward, leaving the security of their southern warmth behind, pulled forward by a season of breeding and rearing.

  When Silva had taken a job on the mainland a few months before, Eamon hadn’t wanted her to leave, wanted her to stay on the island and take over the arborist business he and Isabelle had made, stay near him. Silva had told him that she couldn’t stay forever, that she needed to find her own way. The work he’d taught her had become second nature by then—trimming, transplanting, aerating, grafting. She didn’t have to think, just had to follow her hands. She’d made forays into the suburbs of Seattle before—Woodinville, Mukilteo, Gig Harbor—but had mostly stayed close to home, close to Eamon. The way it’d been since he’d first picked her up and brought her to Trawler.

  Over the y
ears, Eamon had told Silva the story many times—how after Isabelle had left him, he’d gone back to the same places on the island over and over again, hoping to find her standing at her easel with her watercolors, returned to him. Said it’d always been her pattern, leaving everything behind scattered in her wake. Pieces torn asunder and flung about, left to the mercy of the wind. A kind of survival that felt more like death than living. But then the phone call had changed everything: the authorities reporting Isabelle’s twenty-two-year-old daughter dead in a car accident, run into the river, hair suspended around her, tires balanced on some underwater boulders as if she’d settled there by volition, as if she were enjoying the view. Her five-year-old child left behind. Isabelle’s granddaughter. Silva. A child neither of them had known existed.

  Eamon hadn’t known much about Isabelle’s early life—pregnant at fifteen from an abusive stepfather; the baby, Silva’s mother, given up—but in the end, none of it had mattered. The trail of crumbs had led to him—nobody else but the broken foster-care system available to take in Silva. Even though Silva wasn’t his blood, Eamon was the one to be her guardian. A five-year-old with no family left but him and a runaway grandmother who didn’t know she’d fostered a family line that was still going—if only barely.

  Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal. A small, quiet girl with an outsize name. Eamon later told Silva that when he’d picked her up, he hadn’t expected the uncanny resemblance—her pale skin, fern-green eyes, and copper hair making her an exact replica of Isabelle. Along with the sorrow she carried. He said that first day on the island, when Silva had refused to come inside—standing lithe and pale well into the evening’s gloaming, legs as long and thin as a heron’s, perched waiting on the shore like a shorebird herself—that she’d reminded him so much of Isabelle it’d taken his breath away.

  When Eamon had first come for Silva, he’d presented her with a juniper bonsai in a moss-covered tray. He’d had her repeat its style until she could pronounce it correctly: Sokan—twin-trunk. The smaller tree emerging from the larger, forever protected. The juniper’s pungent smell forever a part of that passage, the ferry, bells clanging, engines surging, the smell and stretch of salt water, the green mass of trees rising out of the Straight that Eamon had pointed to and called home.

  Silva had been awed by Eamon’s bonsai. They had formed the habit of his days and so formed the habit of hers. Every morning he’d scrutinized them, eyes owl-like under his magnifying glasses, Silva beside him. He’d told her he could read a tree’s future, could divine the way it would become something other than itself, the way it would anchor and transform. Like his muse—the hundred-year-old honeysuckle bonsai he’d inherited at sixteen from his mentor, who’d collected it in the wilds of Japan. Eamon had carved its shape into marriage earrings for Isabelle, and he had later modeled it as his business logo.

  The honeysuckle’s trunk was fissured into two shapes—a woman’s body wrapping into a man’s, her long legs tapering off into a heap of moss, her breast a small knot in the upper trunk, the lovers leaning over the edge of the pot, the woman bent into the man, their branches sweeping out behind him, as if blown for years, they had succumbed to the way of the wind.

  Eamon had been that wind. Each day he’d examined the tree, magnifying glasses on the end of his nose, trying to see the future of each nodule and root. He’d articulated the lean of the trunk by forcing the roots to grow away from the lee side, letting lead branches grow until they achieved the sweep he saw in his mind. But the lovers had been there from the beginning, their outlines alive in the trunk, the branches, alive as flesh to him, breathing and pulsing with existence. They had always been at the start of everything. Or at the end of everything—although he hadn’t known that yet.

  The honeysuckle had been the focus of Eamon and Isabelle’s final battle—Eamon silently tending the bonsai with fixed attention as Isabelle yelled and cried and stormed out of his life for good, accusing him of only caring about his “fucking trees,” even though all he’d ever really cared about was her. After she’d left, Eamon had driven, looking for Isabelle all over the island, his arms tensed on the steering wheel, his tools shifting and bouncing as the truck’s back end skittered and bucked over the potted blacktop. He’d finally stopped at the farthest point along the island’s wildest stretch—Isabelle’s favorite hidden spot—bramble overrunning the gravel on the shoulder and rooting into cracked pavement, subsuming the road. Made his way down the wet dirt trail to the long crescent lighthouse beach, seagulls bobbing on the water, and stood staring out. He’d thought he would find Isabelle standing at her easel as always, a paintbrush full of watery pigment in her hand, her body a collage of paint smears, oblivious to everything but the scene directly in front of her, trying to re-create the world as she saw it: fragments made into something newly whole, pieces of herself joined back together. Speaking riddles about purpose and clarity, forgiveness and recompense, relentless in her effort to define some undefinable thing, to make sense of what could never make sense. All that carried pain, all that heartbreak.

  After painting, she had always come home and thrown her still-damp canvases into the fire one by one until they burned to ash, no matter how much Eamon had begged her not to, no matter how much he’d begged her to let him keep them instead. There wasn’t even one remaining after she left. All those haunting self-portraits she’d created over and over again. Eamon had tried to secret one away once, a small landscape portrait titled Burial—a red-haired woman standing waist-deep in the Sound, her arms raised over her head, the tide swelling around her pregnant stomach, lapping at her breasts—but Isabelle had found it and burned it, too. In the end, the honeysuckle bonsai was the only thing Eamon had that still connected him to Isabelle—her body wrapped into his within the tree’s trunk, the two of them forever together.

  * * *

  Over Snoqualmie Pass, past the last line of trees and dropping into the eastern Washington lowlands, Silva rolled down her window, let in the dry air—the smell of land so parched that to look at it was like experiencing thirst for the first time. All the coastal trees and moisture replaced by a vast expanse of rolling desert, open road miraging into lakes of sagebrush, squat herds of tumbleweeds waiting to take flight. A land as foreign as moonscape. Places she’d never wanted to be, places she couldn’t think of living—no water, no sea, no gulls, no trees.

  Two months ago, when the mainland job hadn’t turned out to be what she wanted after all—swarms of people everywhere, everyone invested in the chaotic, cutthroat business of making maximum money in minimum time—she had decided to go back to the island, tell Eamon she’d finally made up her mind: she would settle there, on Trawler, keep the family business going. It was her only home and future, the only one that made any kind of sense.

  She’d gone back to the island happy, anticipating Eamon’s joy when she surprised him with the news he’d always wanted, but instead she’d found him lying on his bed, color drained from his skin, the honeysuckle uprooted next to him, its branches stripped, it trunk laid bare, as if in direct consequence of her abandonment, no one there to help him, no one there to help her.

  She’d dragged him out to the Dodge and driven too fast, bracing his keeling body as she skidded through the corners. At the docks they Life Flighted him out, the blink of the helicopter’s lights in the sky, the dock swaying under the lap of the tide, clunking gently against its moorings.

  By the time she’d caught the ferry and arrived at the mainland hospital, Eamon had been entombed in tubes, his skin putty-gray. Nurses brushed past, adjusting IVs, checking monitors, before the doctor came in and told Silva that Eamon’s heart was failing, that it looked as though it had been in trouble for some time. Even though it wasn’t what the doctor meant, Silva knew that both of their hearts had been compromised long ago.

  She’d sat next to Eamon all night, smoothing his blankets, watching the movement of his breath, begging him to stay, stroking his knobbed and crooked knuckles, as hard as tree knot
s, as though he were turning into a tree himself, but he lay silent and died in the dark of early morning, his last breath like the rustling of leaves.

  The nurses had come in officious and busy, handling Silva as if she were a task to be checked off, having her sign the cremation orders that forever consigned her to a family of ashes.

  On Trawler, people had left casseroles and condolence cards as Silva slept in Eamon’s bed—a dead dreamlessness that did nothing but make her more exhausted. She would wake and stare at the ceiling’s water stains, which bled out like amoebas on the white tiles, feeling as though she were the one bleeding out, her mourning a numbness creeping up each limb. Everyone gone to the water now. The beach shore below the cabin where Eamon’s ashes drifted, the white grit of them shifting beneath the water like a shadow presence left behind.

  Finally, Silva had forced herself up, took the ferry to a seedy place on the mainland where the men eyed her as if they knew her, knew all she might be willing to take, all she might be willing to give to escape her sorrow. And she accepted everything they offered, drinking and inhaling until her limbs loosened in the thick air, until the music undulated into waves of pixilated light, until in the night’s dark haze, someone took her to a mattress in a back room, the air saturated with the sickly ripeness of bare flesh, heads nimbused above her, her body suppurated beneath the metallic slap of strangers’ skin. She had pawed the air like a drowning swimmer fighting for the surface until she’d finally lifted, suspended above herself on dark currents that cast her loose and drifting, severed from the weight of earth’s gravity.