The Music of Bees

by Eileen Garvin

  The door clicked open, and she looked up, expecting to see Nancy saunter in with a whipped cream–topped smoothie in her hand. Instead, Rich Carlson stood in the doorway, batting a magazine against his leg and smiling aggressively. His close-together eyes and narrow teeth made Alice think of a ferret. His right front tooth was slightly yellowed, she noticed.

  “Alice. Glad I caught you! I’ve got a small item to discuss.”

  Rich grabbed a chair and propped his elbows on Alice’s desk. She leaned back abruptly.

  “I don’t think Bill will be back today,” Alice said, knowing he wasn’t there to see Bill.

  He gave her a tight smile and said it was Alice he wanted to talk to. She braced herself.

  “Look, Rich,” she said, “I was just walking by the waterfront and Stan said hello. You know how Pete is.”

  Even as the words came out of her mouth, she felt stupid. She sounded like a girl in trouble with the teacher.

  Rich feigned confusion.

  Alice pulled the newspaper out of the recycling bin and held it up.

  Rich leaned forward and squinted at it. “Ah! I hadn’t seen that. I just wanted to talk to you about your vesting plan.”

  “My vesting plan?”

  Rich nodded and rocked back in the chair with his hands behind his head, stretching his elbows and knees away from each other in a way Alice had always found slightly obscene. Why did men do that?

  “. . . Been at the county for almost twenty years,” Rich was saying. “Your pension disbursement would kick in two years from July 1, should you choose to retire.”

  Twenty years. She knew that, of course, but the stark reality of it struck her then. Almost twenty years ago she was an energetic young graduate student and the county job was a temporary thing until the orchard passed to her.

  Rich was saying something about annual review baselines and how the penalty clause affected the vesting date. A poor review could bump back the vesting period two to four years depending on what the committee decided. Multiple bad reviews could nullify the pension agreement altogether, he said.

  “Of course, that has never happened before,” he said. “Not during my tenure. It’s just the official county policy, you understand. And the committee has to get a formal complaint through Legal about employee noncompliance. Jim Murphy says there’s nothing too much to worry about right now.”

  He sat forward again, still smiling that non-smile, and pulled a pack of gum out of his jacket pocket. He popped a bright green stick into his mouth and chewed vigorously, snapping the gum in his teeth.

  “Let’s keep it that way, shall we, Alice?” He stood up and slapped the magazine against his palm. “Well! Please tell Bill I thought the meeting went great today. You have a good day, Alice.”

  He left the door open, and Alice could hear him whistling as he walked down the hall. She felt sick, and her ears rang as his words sunk in. He was threatening to mess with her pension over this photo of her with Stan, over nothing. She pushed her chair back and stood, looked at the air where Rich Carlson’s narrow face had hung. The air was sticky with electricity. Alice grabbed her bag and headed for the front of the building. Nancy stood next to the copier, teasing Casey and sipping on her smoothie. Her floral knit dress stretched tight across her rump, and she leaned toward the intern, laughing her big toothy laugh as he shrank away. She grinned at Alice.

  “Where’s the fire?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a meeting at the waterfront building site. Back after lunch,” Alice said, not slowing.

  “Yes, sir, Alice, sir. Important business to attend to.” Nancy laughed and looked at the intern, trying to draw him in.

  Alice stopped and turned. “I’m just trying to do my job, Nancy. What are you doing?”

  She pushed through the front door, leaving Nancy’s astonished face behind her, and walked quickly down the sidewalk. She didn’t know where she was going and found herself striding down Oak Street. Her clothes felt tight, and she tried to catch her breath. That empty feeling yawned inside her, and the hole in her center gaped wide open. Dammit. Damn Rich Carlson.

  She passed Bette’s Place, and it was all she could do not to push through the glass door and rush to the counter. She pictured herself demolishing an entire pie by herself, banana cream or strawberry rhubarb, in front of Bette and Grace, who had worked there for thirty years and had known Alice since she was born. Alice saw Bette through the window, her white hair above that silly pink apron, waiting on a full table. She waved. Alice waved back. She couldn’t do that. That was far too much drama for a weekday morning in downtown Hood River—a public display, taking her grief by the hand like a small, monstrous child and parading it for everyone to see.

  She turned toward the waterfront and struggled to control the anxiety, her heart racing and her breath accelerating.

  “Where did it begin, the feeling?” Dr. Zimmerman had asked her months ago, during what had been her third appointment.

  The therapist worked out of a mother-in-law apartment behind an elegant, two-story Craftsman that overlooked the river from a high bluff. Alice felt at ease there. It didn’t feel clinical, like the hospital would have. She also valued the privacy, which was hard to come by in a town this small. The fact that Dr. Zimmerman was somewhat new to Hood River helped too. Dr. Zimmerman hadn’t known her since she was a child. She’d never met Al or Marina. She wasn’t from an orchard background and didn’t understand the complex network of old alliances, grudges, and gossip that formed invisible fences around the people who lived there. It also made things harder to explain because Alice couldn’t fall back on the customary small-town shorthand.

  An October rain had lashed the windows and the skylights as Alice leaned back into the rose-colored love seat. She felt like she was playing hooky from school. She had left work for that appointment, telling Nancy only that she had a doctor’s visit. Nosy Nancy. Even there in the private office, Alice felt as if the residents of the little town were leaning in, craning an ear to listen to her talk about her very private thoughts.

  “Can you think about how it started? What were you thinking about when that anxiety was triggered the first time?”

  Alice described standing in the grocery store parking lot and noticing it was crowded. It was a Sunday morning, and Spanish-language mass had just ended at church. She thought about coming back later, but told herself she was being silly avoiding people and forced herself to walk through the door.

  Dr. Zimmerman nodded and made a note. Alice was distracted by the woman’s casual elegance—a slate-blue cashmere sweater and dark wool slacks. She wouldn’t know that the clothes she wore on a rainy Tuesday were more expensive than what some would spend on special-occasion clothing in this town. Not that it mattered. Dr. Zimmerman looked like she belonged wherever she chose to be—comfortable in her own skin.

  Alice crossed and uncrossed her legs. She dug her thumb into her waistband. She described how she had grabbed a blue plastic shopping basket, only meaning to get a few things, like milk, cereal, and Tylenol. She moved through the crowd—mostly Latino families all dressed-up from mass. In the checkout line, she saw a little girl in a flouncy pink dress, patent leather shoes, and white ankle socks. She had one hand in her mother’s and was looking up at the older woman, asking a question in Spanish. Her glance fell on Alice as she passed, and Alice recalled Luz Quinto from the Hood River County Fair when she and Buddy were on their first date. Luz and her lamb. Luz and her little face blooming with joy when Buddy gave it back to her.

  Alice felt her breath catch recounting the story to Dr. Zimmerman. Of course that hadn’t been Luz Quinto in the store. She would have been in high school by then. But the heart-shaped face, the soft brown eyes, and the bright smile brought it all back. Alice wheeled around and headed to the produce department to get away from the little girl and the memories that flooded her mind: Buddy at the fair. Buddy i
n the kitchen. Buddy leaving for work that last time.

  Dr. Zimmerman nodded. “So it was the little girl, and the memory of that day?”

  Alice shook her head and rubbed her hands across her face, trying to find the words. No, it wasn’t just the memories, she said. It was the realization that time had moved on. Alice was no longer a young woman with options. When she first met Bud, her life opened up in ways she’d never imagined. She’d expected to be alone in life, and she had been content with that. But then she gained this extraordinary life partner. She even thought they might have kids—something she’d never considered possible before. Her, Alice—somebody’s mom! Al and Marina could have been grandparents. Bud would help her run her parents’ orchard, and she could leave the county job to lean into the family farm. She could teach their children all that Al and Marina had taught her about the fruit business and how to behave in the world. She would leave something behind. But not now. All those possibilities were gone. Alice was a childless, middle-aged widow and the last of her family. The treasures she never even knew she’d wanted before had evaporated overnight. She felt—she searched the edges of the emotion for the right word—robbed. Her biggest dreams had disappeared just as she’d become aware of their existence.

  She felt safe talking about these things to Dr. Zimmerman in her cozy office. And the doctor had given her a strategy to help whenever she felt overwhelmed, when she lost her breath. Follow the thread. What was it that made her feel out of control? What stole her breath?

  Alice walked on toward the river. She thought of Rich Carlson’s pointy face and mean smile. She remembered the long-ago Christmas party, his face too close to hers. Usually that memory brought shame and discomfort, but now she felt a flash of indignation. How dare he touch her. And now, this threat to mess with her pension, that money she had worked so hard for. She, who never called in sick. Alice, who came in early and stayed late. Loyal Alice. Why would he do that? More to the point, why did it make her feel this rising panic? Everyone knew Alice was doing Bill’s job. If they fired her, nothing would get done. The waterfront project, the biggest development the county had undertaken in years, would be stalled for months as they cajoled the old man off the golf course. Even if they got him back to work, they would discover that Alice had been doing his job for so long that he truly didn’t know how things worked anymore. Or they could hire someone new to replace her. Either way, they couldn’t afford to lose the time.

  This wasn’t about her fear of getting fired, then. And she wasn’t embarrassed at being linked with Stan either. Like she’d told Nancy, she respected what Stan’s organization had done for the farmers and orchardists like her parents. It was something else. What was it?

  “You’re too nice, Alice.”

  Out of nowhere, out of the clear blue, she heard Buddy’s voice.

  “You know it, sweet pea.”

  The sudden realization was like a curtain pulled aside to reveal a hidden room, the interworkings of Alice’s heart, her motivations, misguided and hidden even from herself.

  How often had she stayed late on a Friday to finish something Nancy had dumped on her? Not that she had plans anyway.

  “You’re so good to me, Alice!” Nancy called as she left. “Thank you!”

  Too nice.

  Why had she been doing Bill’s job for him instead of demanding a promotion? Staying after the Labor Day picnic to clean up. Volunteering for the high school football team fund-raiser every year when she was the only employee without kids. Sitting there at the booth all day in the rain, and she hated football.

  Too nice. Too nice to say no.

  Her face flushed with shame. No, too afraid to say no. Afraid to stand up for herself and speak her mind. Afraid of being herself.

  She had never understood it so clearly before. But now it was all she could see. She had felt the shape of it that night she confronted Ed Stevenson. It was buried way down deep, that white heat, the anger that had seemed to come from nowhere. Alice was deeply angry at having pretended to be someone she wasn’t for so long. Why would she do that? Just to avoid making other people uncomfortable, like Rich Carlson? She saw his ferret face, his comb-over. Fury rose up in her like a wall of fire. How dare she fail her parents that way. How dare she fail herself.

  She kept walking past the waterfront beach. She climbed down the rocky bank and out onto the wide sandbar that spilled into the confluence of the Hood and Columbia Rivers. She hiked around the big logs and boulders that had tumbled down from Mount Hood in flood after flood. That powerful rushing water had pushed those obstacles down the mountain one mile at a time. The wind stung her face as a squall blew in from the west. When she reached the end of the sandbar, she stood in the spattering rain and let it all spill over—her anger, sorrow, loss, and despair. That was where the thread took her, Dr. Zimmerman.

  She named it all: Buddy, her parents, the orchard, the children she might have had, and the irrevocable passage of time. She let it all course through her, everything she had lost and could never retrieve. Her body throbbed with the understanding that she was alone in the world. She had been alone before Bud and now would be until she died. Alice Island, drawbridge up. Alice All Alone.

  But she hadn’t minded before, had she? That was essentially who she was in her core. Just Alice. So it would be okay. Yes, she thought, her breath slowing. She could be content with that, content with exactly who she was. She could be herself. She would belong wholly to herself. And like water from a turned-off faucet, the anxiety just stopped. She could feel the clean edges of her grief, but it was a contained, manageable thing. Alice stood at the river’s edge, not caring how she might look—a pudgy, middle-aged woman bawling her head off in the middle of a spring rain shower.

  The knot loosened in her chest and released its grip in her throat. She saw them all lined up in her mind’s eye—Buddy, Marina, and Al. They had all loved her. That still mattered. And they expected her to be herself. Then the last bit of fear flew away like a balloon cut from a string. She smiled, wiped her eyes, and laughed. She felt 100 percent Alice Holtzman—daughter of Al and Marina, wife of Buddy Ryan, and keeper of bees. She was very much herself, and she was deeply pissed off.

  She reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and dialed.

  “Hello, Stan,” she said. “It’s Alice Holtzman. Do you have time for coffee?”

  16

  Colony Collapse

  If the Apiarian keeps his stocks strong, they will usually be their own best protectors, and, unless they are guarded by thousands ready to die in their defence, they are ever liable to fall a prey to some of their many enemies.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  The guiding principle of the hive was order, Jake understood. And the first element to be ordered was food. A queen could lay upward of two thousand eggs a day, but if the harvesters didn’t locate enough nectar and pollen, those eggs simply wouldn’t survive. The second element of order was cooperation. The most experienced bees, the foragers, often visited several thousand flowers in a single day in the course of collecting resources for the colony. The house bees were responsible for delivering that food to the nurse bees, who fed the eggs, larvae, and callow bees. The queen’s retinue kept her fed and clean so she could keep doing the work she needed to do. It was a perfect system of interdependence, a high-functioning, interconnected household.

  Not unlike humans, Jake thought as he chopped kale for white bean chicken chili. In his family home, he had never felt a sense of cooperation. It almost felt like the three of them lived together separately. But at Alice’s, once he started cooking, he felt like he was making a contribution. They had eaten together every night at the dining room table since Jake had moved in. He liked sitting down with her at the end of the day and talking about the bees. He was also surprised to find that he had a knack for cooking. No matter that Noah was now calling him “la dueña de la casa.”

&
nbsp; “All you need is a flowered apron, man!” Noah teased when Jake offered him a dish of flan—one of Celia’s family recipes.

  Celia elbowed Noah, accepted her plate graciously, and handed Jake a small package wrapped in tissue paper. He opened it to find a retablo of St. Pasqual painted on hammered tin—the patron saint of kitchens, Celia explained.

  “From my mom,” she said, rolling her eyes. “‘Cada cocina lo necesita, mi’ja,’” she said, her voice rising to imitate her bossy little mother. “You’re supposed to hang it near the stove.”

  Under that there was a second retablo, this one from Celia—St. Deborah.

  “Patron saint of bees,” she said, smiling shyly.

  Noah, meanwhile, was wolfing down the flan.

  “Man, this is actually really good. No, I’m serious!” he said when Jake scoffed.

  Celia and Jake pored over the new cooking app he was using. It linked to a grocery list, which he texted to Noah and Celia so they could food shop for him. It pained him to ask for their help, but he knew he couldn’t handle that right now. The idea of rolling through Little Bit Grocery and Ranch Supply for the first time in over a year—well, he might as well do it naked, he thought. All those people staring at him and wanting to stop and talk to him. No way. Not yet. He’d made a troubled peace with the fact that depending on his friends allowed him to contribute to Alice’s household and gave him some value as a guest.