Feeding a log in, her arm touched hot cast iron—the quick hiss of heat against flesh blooming red, blistering her skin. Eamon’s old T-shirts made up the rag drawer. She tore one into strips and wrapped her wound. This wet world where she’d once belonged. This world that left her aching for Nick, for everything she’d thought could be hers.
She thought of Juniper and Tiko disappearing into the smoke, Sage lying still in her stall, and clutched her chest, choking back sobs. All she’d thought could be, all she’d held belief in.
She walked the wet trail to the beach, tangles of blackberry vines snagging her skin, the beach strewn with tracks—raccoon and gulls, the wide-splayed V-print of an island deer. Delicate clumps of blooming tufted saxifrage and Siberian miner’s lettuce graced the hollow between forest and beach, shells studding the sand, Eamon’s ashes joined with them.
A Swainson’s thrush sang its night song, a sound like rain. She’d thought that whenever she finally went back to visit the island, Nick would be with her. Had pictured showing him all the island’s secret places, teaching him everything she knew. Now that she was back and alone, she couldn’t imagine Nick anywhere other than the canyon, her anywhere but with him.
The moon rose, nearly full, the air cold and damp. She took off her clothes, left them on the beach as she stepped into the water, this place that had defined her. She was surprised at the water’s cold bite against her calves and thighs, the way it needled her stomach as she waded in deeper, her feet sinking in the silt of the rocky bottom, kelp waving its long leaves around her.
She stood hip-deep, looking out at the water’s undulating expanse, the pull of the tide washing up against her body, rocking against her. Something small floated along the surface, and she waited until it reached her—a perfectly formed wreath bobbing gently on the swells, kelp and seagrass tangled together, adorned with tiny pale flowers like an aquatic bridal crown, except in the wreath’s open, watery center, a tiny silver fish floated on its side, motionless. A funeral wreath delivered like an offering from the sea. But when she cupped her hand underneath it, the fish suddenly came to life, diving away so quickly she thought she must have imagined it.
The water pulled her in deeper, rising up her belly to her chest, until finally she let it fully take her, laying back and sucking in her breath as it swallowed her, prickling her scalp, washing over her closed eyes, her body sinking into its dark embrace. No matter how hard she tried to push it away, she felt the same familiar sureness she had before: everything she touched would crumble to nothingness. She’d never been meant to stay in this world.
The tide pulled her out as she sank lower and lower into the depths, her skin a muted white in the darkness, her hair floating around her face like a shroud—long tendrils waving outward with the seaweed, catching on the swell of her chest, her body turned sluggish and heavy, her lungs convulsing as they had in the smoke, the moon receding like a distant, wavering light showing through fathoms of years, finally claiming her as its own.
There was no going back. She was tired of fighting.
The moon disappeared as she descended into the darkness, sinking down until she could hold her breath no longer, her lungs feeling as if they would burst. Then, against her will, she flailed, convulsing in the black depths, sucking water in her mouth and nose to her lungs, her arms and legs churning as she choked, liquid coursing through her airways as she surged toward the surface.
Heaving and coughing, she splashed to shore, where she collapsed onto the beach, salt water running from her gasping mouth, from her nose and ears and eyes, streaming from her as it had from the woman onto the Snake’s sunbaked rocks. She curled into a fetal position on the sand and rocks, digging her fingers in as she coughed and sobbed, trying to hold on to something, her hands like malformed appendages, as damaged and misshapen as the rest of her.
She remembered a small silver fish nosing bone in silt, the white ash spread of it like shock drawn long, a calcium-rich cloud shadow, a sea offering, what was left of Eamon settling below her submerged feet, shiny-edged bits glinting like teeth. Bones baked so hot they shimmered underwater like mica under glass: there were his hips and spine, the blades of his shoulders, his hands and skull. The bones of his face. A sea otter swimming and snuffing close by, trying to understand this new shape, this offering of grief, this marking of her passage: blood and bone, rivers and sea, hackberry and honeybees. The shores she’d stood on, casting her white stones.
Her body cold and quaking, the smell of raw woodsmoke drifting down from the fire she’d built, she wondered how she could survive the quiet burden of trees and tide, all the losses that had formed her life. A memory of land. A memory of water. The surviving silence of stone.
EPILOGUE
SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
Isabelle set up her easel on the island’s crescent beach cut out of the Salish Sea, the shoreline the same shape as the moon still pinned on the fog-hazed morning sky. On the beach’s far end, the red-roofed lighthouse stood ready with its beacon of fenestrated light. The comfort of that scene: gulls and terns chattering and bobbing offshore, the morning foghorns sounding across the water’s silvered surface with its reflection of sky. Endless, tranquil. The movement of her heart.
Nick and Silva walked hand in hand along the minus-tide’s ridged sand and teeming tidal pools, the dog, Juniper, effulgent—wind sprinting ahead of them, then circling back in a run-by juke-out as they laughed and reached out, grazing his tail, his legs stretched in a speeding Superman pose, his feet flinging wet sand, his mouth wide in a toothy husky smile, his tattered ears folded back with the immense joy of it all.
Behind them, wild bluffs rose perpendicular to the beach, banks studded with manzanita and wild rose grown into alder and birch brush, and finally topped out in cedar, fir, and stately Sitka spruces in all their sparse, wind-blown beauty—bonsais grown into maturity. Intertwined in the evergreens was the bright auburn uprights of the madrones’ trunks. The color of Silva’s hair. The color Isabelle’s hair used to be, too. Something febrile and alive, something that forced you to face the world on your own terms.
Isabelle set the angle of her easel, filled her jar of water, arranged her tubes of paint, selected her favorite brush, readied her palette and blotter, and stood there behind the cold-press paper making the first strokes of color against its blank, stippled whiteness.
Within a few quick flicks of her wrist, pigments began filling the unelaborated expanse of crevices, two figures emerging. She felt a trembling rising from her feet to her hands. Eamon.
This day—their anniversary. What he would have thought had he been there, witnessing this with her. Nick and Silva. The dog, too. Like something from a dream. Her own granddaughter. A grown woman. A woman who’d already become more than Isabelle could ever be.
The three of them—Nick, Silva, and Juniper—walked down to the lighthouse and nearly disappeared in the reflection of shore and water, the dog running through the tidal froth, his distant barking carrying on the air back to Isabelle, lighting her painting, lighting her face.
The trees on the bluffs blew sideways in the wind, their branches waving. Razor clams, hiding their phallic indecency, shot water spigots into the air while orange crabs scuttled along a water’s edge piled with kelp grown pearlescent in its glaze of salt, sun, and cloud. The beginnings of an ephemeral but eternal archetypal scene—as if Isabelle were recording with her paints the first moments of humankind rising out of the muck, turning from fish into man and woman. Edenic.
She couldn’t help but feel Eamon there with her. They had found their way back to each other after all. His spirit rose from the water, from the shore, from the trees, each one of them holding something of him. A reflection of love. A coming home. The scene Isabelle had been waiting to paint her whole life.
When Silva had told Isabelle that Eamon was gone, Isabelle had sunk to her knees on the shore in front of the cabin—the place Silva had put him to rest, his ashes spread there beneath the water, where h
e’d always be. Isabelle had held the pebbled sand in her hands and wept until she couldn’t weep anymore. After her own early abandonment, after these twenty-some years apart, after her own eventual homecoming, Eamon was really, truly gone.
She’d had to force herself up. But then she’d carried on the way Eamon would have wanted her to, blotting her face, steadying her hands, going back to the cabin’s warmth, the golden light of an early fall night illuminated through each windowpane. Back to Silva. Their granddaughter. Back to where she’d always been meant to be. Blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. Chains of double-helixed DNA tracing them together through all these years, through all this time and space.
She painted fast, but with a sense of calm. This was her world. The world she’d always been coming to. The world she’d always been searching for. Delivered back unto her.
Nick and Silva and Juniper disappeared as distant specks hidden in beach grass, and then reemerged, walking back toward her. Out in the water, a spotted harbor seal lifted its dark, wet dog-face and regarded Isabelle for a long moment before slipping again below the surface. The wind kicked up, and with it the smell of woodsmoke and damp earth. Sand fleas burrowed and hopped around her bare feet, the cold seeping up from tide-wet sand. A new season coming in. An anniversary of change. A beginning. An ending. A starting over. A circling back.
On the ferry to Trawler, after the surprise of discovering their mutual destination, Nick had offered to give Isabelle a ride along with him and the dog. They had driven through town to Eamon’s cabin in Nick’s old jalopy of a truck, Juniper balanced on the front seat between them, panting the wet salt air, the bonsai and honeybees boxed behind in the pickup’s bed. Driving down the winding, tree-lined driveway to the cabin, Isabelle had known: this was something new, something with meaning beyond what she’d always been trying to find, to define, to understand.
Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal. A child she hadn’t known existed. A child, though, who she’d always felt in her heart, in her body, in her spirit. A child who was hers, who had been hers all along, waiting there on the island for her just as Eamon had before, arms wide open.
Silva had been standing there, outside the cabin, when Nick, Isabelle, and Juniper had driven up. As if she’d been expecting them, as if she’d known they were on their way, breaking a new path to her. And as soon as Isabelle had seen Silva, she had understood what she’d never been able to understand before: This was what she’d always wanted. This was what she’d always felt. This was what she’d always known to be true. This was the family she’d seen in her dreams.
She had stood back waiting, watching as Nick and Juniper and Silva reunited, Nick and Silva weeping as they embraced, Juniper yipping and whining as he jumped on Silva, licking her hands and face. Isabelle had stood there with her beating heart held in her hands. A wild, pulsing, wet thing. A thing with branching arteries, with muscles palpitating and contracting.
When she had finally walked to Silva, Isabelle knew that she was walking into a reflection: of herself, of what her life might have been, of her future. Their future. One story after another after another, intertwined, interwoven, interspersed—Silva. Nick. Eamon. Isabelle. A story made complete. A story made whole. A story with no start. A story with no end.
She painted as they walked back to her and kept painting as they drew near, Juniper running up to her in joyful greeting, his muzzle wet and sandy as he gave her hand a quick nuzzle before running back to Silva and leaping for a stick she threw out into the water, launching himself into the rolling swells and swimming with shoulder-lifting power.
Nick and Silva walked down to the waterline as Juniper swam back to the beach. Nick picked up a stone and brushed off the sand, gave Silva a challenging look before setting up his skipping throw, which ended in three quick hops. Silva’s laugh was musical on the water as she selected her own stone and winged it, leaving widening dimples across a swath of the Sound long enough that its skips disappeared in the distance before it was overcome. Nick shrugged in defeat as Juniper bounced wetly around their feet, waving his sandy stick. Silva wrapped her arm in Nick’s, reached up and touched his face. A caress that said everything anyone would ever need to know.
Isabelle rinsed her brushes, cleaned the paint from her hands, and walked down to join them. A fractured family of castoffs formed from the severed pieces that made up the sum of their existence. A fractured family fit back together. A fractured family made whole.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere gratitude to Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media Group, and Katie McGuire and Claiborne Hancock at Pegasus. You have all made dreams into reality, and for that magic, I am so thankful. For mentorship, friendship, and inspiration, a deep, heartfelt thank-you to the incomparable Kim Barnes—my Headquarters woods sister forever. To all the writerly women who have been there with their friendship and support from the beginning: Sayantani Dasgupta, Bethany Maile, Kelly Blikre, Jamaica Ritcher, Brittney Carman—thank you. Alexandra Teague, thank you for all the writing walks and talks. And a huge debt of gratitude to all those who read drafts along the way, including Kristine Searcy, Vicki Lynn Raine, and Donnie Eastman: you will never know how much I appreciated the gift of your consideration. To the Washington State University Honors College faculty, staff, and students: I cannot imagine working with a better group at a better place, with special thanks to Grant Norton, who has been nothing but generous, thoughtful, and kind. And finally, my eternal thankfulness to my family. To my mother, Cathleen Eastman, and father, Don Eastman, for encouraging me and loving me and always believing in the power and magic of words and stories. To my trio of talented sisters: Michelle Giesey, Deborah Wood, and Vicki Lynn Raine, thank you for your love and belief and for always cheering me on, and likewise, Nina Wooldridge. To my three beautiful sons, Phin, Ben, and Saiah—thank you for your gift of time and love as you grew from boys into men during this story’s progression. And finally, to you, Stephen Dean, my beloved. You have always been both my launchpad and my landing pad. Without you, this wouldn’t be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNIE LAMPMAN has a Master of Fine Arts in fiction and is an Associate Professor of Honors Creative Writing at the Washington State University Honors College. Her short fiction, poetry, and memoir essays have been published or are forthcoming in sixty-some literary journals and anthologies, and her letterpress-printed, limited-edition poetry chapbook Burning Time is available from Limberlost Press. She has been awarded the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, a Best American Essays Notable, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, a 2020 Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and a Bureau of Land Management national artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness. She lives in Moscow, Idaho, on the rolling hills of the Palouse Prairie where she has a pollinator garden full of honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies, and songbirds. For decades, she and her family have backpacked into the depths of Hells Canyon. Visit her at annielampman.com.
SINS OF THE BEES
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
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Copyright © 2020 by Annie Lampman
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition September 2020
“Ode to the Beekeeper” from Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay, © 2011. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Pegasus Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-64313-53
3-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-64313-534-2
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Sins of the Bees Page 31