The Wedding Bees

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  They looked at her.

  “The guy gives me two hundred bucks to inflate you this little love letter and all you want to do is eat pie?” Lola asked. “That’s harsh.”

  “It’s not a love letter,” said Sugar. “Although I do commend you on the inflation, Lola. It’s very . . . pert. And good for you for the money too. But I’m not sure I really get it. Maybe it’s missing an exclamation point?”

  “I don’t even know how you would do an exclamation point with a balloon,” said Lola.

  “You could attach a little round balloon by an invisible string to a big long one,” suggested Ruby.

  “Yeah, whatever, there isn’t any such thing and he didn’t ask for one in the first place and I’m off.” Lola tied her “1 CAN” to the back of a chair. “The Crankles are looking after Ethan while I go to a movie with this dude I met online. And yes, I know it’s ‘rude’ to call them the Crankles but that is what they are and yes, I know his name. It’s Johnny. Or Jimmy. See ya!”

  “So about this pie,” Sugar said.

  “I should get going too,” said Ruby, although she didn’t want to, she just didn’t want the pie.

  “Yes, please, I’ll have some,” Nate said quickly, feeling bad for Sugar. He didn’t want her to think everyone was abandoning her.

  “You can let your balloons go if you want to,” Sugar said, going in to get the pie. “She opened her store for Theo? I’m surprised, I must say.”

  “I think it’s nice that he would do that for her,” Ruby said, wistfully, to Nate as they tied their balloons to their chairs.

  “Me too,” he answered, going crimson. He was starting to get more of a feel for his type and thought Ruby might be kind of close. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay a bit longer?”

  Ruby went a lighter shade of beetroot herself. “OK,” she said.

  Sugar heard this small but significant exchange from where she was standing in the kitchen gripping the counter with whitened knuckles and wishing she had never laid eyes on Theo Fitzgerald.

  Theo would never heart bees. She was never going to let him.

  The moment her neighbors left, she got out her sharpest knife and popped every last balloon, very gently, so as not to alarm the bees. But the ruined colored carcasses hanging from their strings ripped a hole in her she couldn’t quite explain.

  She had thought it would feel good, but it didn’t. It felt terrible.

  29TH

  The following Monday Ruby was back leaning against the jamb when Sugar opened the door, her scrapbook pages bejeweled with Post-it notes.

  The layers of sweaters sagged between the younger woman’s shoulders and Sugar thought she could see every tiny bone and vein in her neck, the pulse beating too quickly at the base of it beneath the ghostly white skin. She had black rings under her eyes and her lips were the same color as her face.

  “Welcome, honey, come sit on the terrace with me. It’s such a beautiful morning.”

  Outside Ruby sank into a chair and her eyelids drifted closed. For a moment Sugar thought she’d gone to sleep and she was more frightened for her friend than ever before, but then her eyes opened and she managed a little smile.

  “I thought I heard bagpipes,” she said. “Can you hear bagpipes?”

  “No, honey,” Sugar said as a forager bee flew past her and over to the hive entrance, where the usual collection of bees was hovering, before going inside. They looked as though they were talking to each other, like washerwomen at a well, putting off the moment when they had to leave the socializing behind and get to work.

  Sugar also had something she could no longer put off.

  “Ruby, you have become a very dear friend to me, you know that?”

  Ruby nodded. “And the bees,” she said, looking over at the hive, with the shadow of that same sad smile. “I’m a friend to the bees too. I already heart them.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Sugar said, “about the thing we never talk about.”

  Ruby kept watching the bees. One was doing the waggle dance by the entrance to the hive. She wished with all her heart she was a bee, that she could just fly off to where the nectar was and bring home food for the queen, simple as that. Eating was so uncomplicated for a bee. She did it without even thinking. Ruby could barely remember what it was like to eat like that, to just put something in your mouth because it was there. That seemed like a pleasure from a distant past that did not belong to her, although she knew that once upon a time she’d been just like everyone else in that regard.

  Now, every mouthful she chewed had probably been pondered over for at least an hour and there were many more hours spent pondering mouthfuls she didn’t end up eating. No wonder she was tired. And she was tired. “I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “And it probably seems to you like it’s an easy thing to fix but it’s not. I try. In my mind I try but then I just can’t. When it comes down to it, I can’t.”

  “So what do you think is going to happen?”

  “Someone will put me in the hospital,” she said. “Then my mom will have every shrink in New York talk to me and she will get mad and it will be the same mess it was last time and the time before that until she ends up hating me more than she already does.”

  “Your mom doesn’t hate you, Ruby.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “I know mothers don’t hate their daughters,” Sugar said. “They just don’t understand them is all.”

  “It feels like hate,” said Ruby. “Trust me, if she gets involved, everything will just get worse.”

  “Ruby, it can’t get much worse. I’m not sure what the right thing is to say here so I’m just going to plow right on in because I can’t sit still any longer. You have so much love in that body of yours. Why I bet it’s having trouble keeping hold of all that love. And you have a wonderful, amazing future waiting for you but we need to figure out a way for you to get to it. You are just at the beginning of your life. Don’t you see that, Ruby? Don’t you want to live it?”

  Ruby’s eyes rolled slowly to hers. “Not always,” she said.

  “Oh, honey.” Sugar fought back tears. She reached for Ruby’s small, cold hand. “The world needs gentle souls like yours. Don’t you know that? You can’t leave us here on our own. You just can’t. There’s enough of us. We need more of you.”

  “I wish I was a bee,” Ruby said. “I wish I could just come and go and not think about anything.”

  “Bees think,” Sugar said. “Bees think a lot. A bee can count to five—did you know that? And a bee has to think about her queen, all the time. She has to think about living. Every creature in the universe has to concentrate on staying alive, honey. It doesn’t come natural to anyone.”

  “Don’t cry, Sugar,” Ruby said. “Please don’t cry.”

  “Well, of course I’m going to cry. You’re breaking my heart.”

  “But your heart’s already broken,” she whispered.

  Sugar let go of Ruby’s hand to dab at her eyes. She was the only person Ruby had ever met who always had a clean handkerchief.

  “Well, even if that was true, which it isn’t, you shouldn’t go worrying about me,” Sugar said. “Because my body is strong and I’m going to be OK. But your body is not strong. It’s not going to pull you through unless you help it. This is serious, Ruby. And you can’t expect the people who love you to just sit and watch you fade away, so we’re going to have to work out what to do.”

  “I’m watching you too,” Ruby said, with more than a glimmer of steel. “And Theo.”

  “Oh hush, sweetie. It’s not the same thing.”

  “I’m not doing something you want me to do and you’re not doing something I want you to do. It is the same thing.”

  “But you could die, Ruby. That’s the difference.”

  “Being dead isn’t the worst thing.”

  “Please don’t speak like that, Ruby. You can’t imagine how it upsets me.”

  Sugar stood up but Ruby reached for her arm
, her grip strong despite her frailty. “We had to talk about my thing,” she said. “So it’s only fair we talk about your thing.”

  Sugar sat down again.

  “It’s like Gwen Currie and John Doogan before they got married last year in Vegas,” Ruby said, holding up the scrapbook. “She thought he loved baseball more than her and he thought her friends were snooty so they broke up but then they met again at the opera and realized nothing else mattered.”

  “I see.”

  “Or Jason Lee and Wendy Yang,” Ruby said. “They split up because his job took him to Seattle and hers took her to Orlando and neither of them wanted to give up work but after a year they missed each other so bad they met up in Denver and both decided to stay there.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “It’s normal. Stuff happens and things get all messed up but it’s like what happened with Mary-Jane Stewart and Reuben Johns before their wedding last fall. Mary-Jane said that everyone could tell from the moment she and Reuben first met each other that they should be together forever and ever but they were the last ones to see it.”

  “That’s real cute, but I really don’t see—”

  “That’s the point! You don’t see! Because the other night when Theo found you in the rain and he kissed you in the kitchen and we were all here, we saw it. Everyone saw it. Everyone saw that you two should be together. Everyone except you.”

  “You saw the kiss?”

  “Mrs. Keschl saw it and she told us but we could tell anyway. We could all tell.”

  “Am I the only one who remembers that he ran off like a scalded cat?”

  “He was scared, Sugar. Don’t you know what it’s like to be scared?”

  “I think that’s enough, Ruby. Theo’s nothing in the great scheme of things.”

  “He is totally not nothing,” Ruby said, looking at her scrapbook. “Nobody is nothing. Love is totally not nothing.”

  Sugar wanted to tell her that if she would just get help in battling whatever demons were making her starve herself half to death if not completely, she would find love herself and could stop finding it for other people. “I’m going to fix us a drink,” she said instead. “You sit right there.”

  “Dinah Phillips and Greg Steiner met through the personal ads and eloped to Hawaii,” Ruby told her, not to be put off.

  “Well, I hope she’s going to keep her own name,” Sugar called from the kitchen. “Otherwise she’ll be Dinah Steiner.”

  “They were married by a Hawaiian woman who danced the hula and blew into a conch shell,” Ruby continued. “And her mom was pissed that she wasn’t invited.” She put the scrapbook down. “Would you invite your mom to your wedding, Sugar?”

  “I’m not going to have a wedding,” she answered. “But if I did, I think it’s fair to say that my mother would be unlikely to attend.”

  “But would you invite her?”

  “Of course. She’s my mother.”

  “I’m not going to have a wedding either,” said Ruby. “But I would not invite my mom anyway.”

  “Ruby, honey, you are twenty-one years old,” Sugar said when she came back with the drinks. “The Mr. Steiner of your dreams is out there looking for you somewhere and if you would just get strong enough to find him, you could have all the weddings you want. You could get married by a hula dancer in Hawaii or a Masai elder in Tanzania or a rabbi at the New York Public Library.”

  Ruby shot her a mischievous look and bit her pale bottom lip.

  “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “I read that,” Ruby said slyly, “about the Masai elders in Tanzania.”

  “Well, that must be how I know about it.”

  But Ruby had read it at home, on her own, which meant Sugar was reading the Times’s wedding pages without her.

  Elizabeth the Sixth, as always, was cheered by the presence of Ruby, the love sponge, up on Sugar’s rooftop but she was feeling pretty positive anyway. A swell had been building in the hive all day and was about to reach critical mass.

  That sometimes happened with the approach of big news. It might start, for instance, with one trio of bees flying back with a piece of crucial information, which they imparted at the entrance to the hive with a waggle this way and a waggle that way. Another trio or two or ten foragers might then fly off to the spot that first trio was talking about, and on their return tell another dozen or so. In this way, the queen herself would eventually get to hear about what her bees had discovered.

  And as Ruby sat on Sugar’s rooftop talking about the Steiners and their Hawaiian elopement, so Elizabeth the Sixth became aware of the crucial key to solving her big problem. Sugar was closer to happiness than the queen could possibly ever have imagined.

  30TH

  Early the next morning, Sugar stepped out onto the roof terrace with her cup of mint tea. The sun was rising over the neighboring rooftops, the vanilla scent of her heliotropes hung heavy in the air, and the hard, sharp edges of the rooftop jungle around her softened in the morning light.

  Mrs. Keschl ribbed her for always “mooning” over the city’s modern towers and turrets but Sugar never tired of her view. Everywhere she looked she was reminded that there she was, on top of it all, in New York City.

  She would take her blessings where she could find them and her home was a blessing.

  George’s leg was almost completely healed, that was another, and Nate was doing less midnight gardening, plus Lola was happier now Ethan was quieter; she’d seen the baby out walking with Mr. McNally and Mrs. Keschl—together and laughing—and if that wasn’t a blessing, she didn’t know what was.

  Ruby, on the other hand. She was so worried about Ruby. And Theo?

  “I do not even want to think about Theo,” she said, clasping her favorite cup in both hands. She’d brought it from her grandfather’s cabin, one of the few mementos that she had from her old life, and it was as smooth and comforting against her fingers as it had been the morning before and the morning before that and all the mornings since she left South Carolina.

  But despite her blessings, and the beautiful morning, the day did not hint at better things to come. Something in the air was a little off-kilter.

  She absently swatted away a bee that was hovering just out of eye line, then another. When the third and fourth bees started buzzing around her, she looked over at the hive where—to her amazement—the busy contingent of bees that usually lingered in front of it had thickened and was thickening more and more as she watched.

  The bees streamed out of the tiny entrance and gathered in a growing fat black ball, then in front of her very eyes, they started to stretch out and move upward in a steady column.

  “What in heaven’s name?” Sugar asked, as the column grew denser and denser with more bees pouring out and joining it, rising in the air, upward and upward, and then they stretched out, like a fat garden hose, toward her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, as the bees re-formed into a perfectly round dark cloud above her, then stretched horizontally like a bubble blown into a wobbly oblong, before lazily circling her head half a dozen times . . . at which point Sugar realized that Queen Elizabeth the Sixth was in the lead.

  The queen?

  A queen typically left her hive just once, not long after her birth, for the sole purpose of mating. It was no fun for her and even less for the drones who sperminated her and died immediately afterward as a result.

  But this was definitely Elizabeth the Sixth, her unmistakably elegant body flying slower than the workers normally would, them keeping a respectable distance behind as she led them in a graceful swirl around the terrace, over to Nate’s window boxes, back to the hive, once more around Sugar’s head then over the railing, across the gap where some building had long ago disappeared, across the street and then directly onto the vast empty rooftop with the fat naked sculpture.

  There the bees landed, covering the nude’s elbow—at least she hoped it was the elbow—like a suede patch on an old tweed
blazer.

  Sugar’s precious cup dropped from her hands and shattered on the tiled terrace, bringing Nate to his window, bleary eyed, to see what was happening.

  She could only point, and, when his eyes followed her finger, he still didn’t understand.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Elizabeth,” Sugar said. “She’s gone!”

  Nate squinted as the elbow pad on the sculpture changed shape and then changed shape again. His jaw dropped. “That’s your bees? They ran away from home?”

  Sugar looked at him, bewildered, then went to the hive and lifted off the lid. She’d only checked the queen the day before so knew that there was plenty of honey, plenty of space, and plenty of brood. The hive was in perfect condition.

  But it was empty.

  Not one single bee had stayed behind.

  There was no reason for Elizabeth the Sixth to swarm. None at all. And in the morning, right in front of her eyes. Bees just didn’t do that.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “I’m coming over,” said Nate and moments later he was there, peering in at the brood box.

  “Have they done this before?”

  “I’ve seen other bees swarm,” Sugar said. “But usually it’s because they’re too cramped or the weather’s too hot or too cold or because the queen is weak. But then there’s usually a new one left behind and there isn’t. You can see a new queen clear as anything. The workers build special breeding cells for them. That’s how you know what they’re up to. The queen just doesn’t leave the hive.”

  Well, not usually.

  “Do you think it’s been too hot?” Nate asked.

  “No. And the bees are very good at keeping everything the right temperature. They’ve been so happy here. She was off-color a couple of weeks ago but everything has been going just fine since. She’s been laying her rear off. Look at all that honey! She’s taken every last bee, Nate.”