“Silvia, what the . . . Calm down, please, stop it.” Cynthia’s voice is rising as Silvia lunges again, this time towards the child, trying to tear Cynthia’s arms apart. Cynthia nearly loses her balance and drops the baby, and the bedroom key that had been in her hand clatters to the ground. Silvia had been locked in.
The door to her room is now open, and Silvia looks out to the window in the corridor, the window where she tried to save the bee; this glass too is black with bees, all trying to break though.
“They’re here,” she says quietly to herself, her eyes glazing over.
“Who’s here?” Cynthia spins around to see what Silvia is talking about, but there is nothing.
Silvia had thought the apocalypse would be a religious thing, but at this moment God is nowhere. “I won’t let you do this to her,” she says, rage distorting her vocal cords; she speaks like another person. She can see so clearly what she needs to do, but she cannot coordinate her body and mind to make it happen.
Then—it must be because of the bees—the baby starts to cry, a piercing shriek so sharp it could tear a hole through the stratosphere. Silvia’s chest becomes wet, she doesn’t know whether from tears or milk, and all she wants is to stop the baby crying. She reaches out for her child, but then something happens and she’s on the floor.
“Ibrahim!” Cynthia calls out. “Ibrahim!”
Did she fall? She doesn’t think she fell. She doesn’t feel hurt, but she can’t get up. Was she pushed? Did Cynthia push her? Or did she faint?
The baby’s screams are getting louder but still do not surpass the sound of the bees.
“You did this on purpose,” Silvia says weakly, her body limp and shaking like a fish freshly tossed out of the water. “This is what you wanted all along.”
Footsteps. Ibrahim appears. Silvia sees his expression of fear and concern, and then her eyes close and the world becomes sound alone. She trusts that now he is there, he will be able to do the right thing; perhaps it’s this relief that allows her to surrender. Her heartbeat is loud in her ears and then it fades out, the whump and whoosh replaced by the steady, monotonous buzzing of bees.
XXXV
WHEN IBRAHIM GETS to the top of the stairs, the image frozen before him at the end of the corridor looks like a Renaissance Biblical painting, something he’d love to mimic, a classical composition of Virgin, child, and Mary Magdalene, but as movement catches up with his vision the scene quickly coalesces into reality. Cynthia is clutching his baby girl, who is screaming like it’s the end of the world, and Silvia is slumped lifelessly against the wall, her back to the bedroom, facing the dark window in the hallway. Cynthia turns to face him, dazed and grateful. It must have been she who called his name—funny, he’s able to think even in the moment: he’d been certain it was Silvia’s voice.
He runs towards them, towards the light.
“What’s going on?” he asks, breathless, looking between Cynthia, whose face is puckered with concern; his baby, red-faced and wailing; and Silvia, who seems to be part of a different world. Nothing makes sense; it doesn’t add up to anything.
He squats to meet Silvia at eye level. “Silvia, what’s happening?” He goes to her first—she is his woman, his love; he trusts her despite everything; without his even really registering the process, she has become his whole world. The baby, after all, came from her.
She doesn’t answer. He looks over his shoulder at Cynthia, who is looking down at him. “She has totally lost control, Ibrahim,” Cynthia says. “She tried to attack the baby.”
“What?” The air comes out of his lungs like a balloon that’s been deflated. “Silvia?” He takes her shoulders and shakes her, wanting her to deny this, or at least to mitigate it with an explanation, but her head, with a fresh red mark on the cheek, lolls on her rubbery neck and her eyes are unseeing, looking right through him. Their murky colour he so loved painting has morphed into a practically translucent black: a hollow well, an abyss with no bottom.
“I told you, she needs help.” Cynthia speaks with resolve.
He can see now that this is true, that Cynthia is right, but he wants to be the one to help Silvia. He used to be able to, and he doesn’t know what’s happened since. He takes his hands off Silvia’s shoulders and puts them on either side of her face, her soft, perfect face, slightly hollowed in the last months despite the flush of health that pregnancy had first bestowed upon her. She looks as though she’s lost some essential part of herself and the rest of her can’t properly operate without this missing thing. He feels his heart as though someone is squeezing it beneath his ribs, gripping it in a tight fist.
“Silvia,” he says again, “what do you want?” He’s desperate to bring her back, and part of him still believes that if he acts normal, she might too.
Throughout all this the baby hasn’t stopped screaming, and Silvia’s face and neck are getting increasingly wet, though she doesn’t seem to be crying, and Cynthia is losing patience behind him, he can hear it in the way she’s breathing, and he wants to tell everyone to just take it easy for a second and be quiet so he can think. The truth is, he can’t appease everyone; he knows he’ll have to pick a side, but he can’t entertain, let alone predict, all the repercussive effects of whatever ultimate decision he’ll be forced into making.
He’s on the point of breaking when Hartford appears at the top of the stairs and walks down the dark corridor towards them. Ibrahim feels an impossibly huge sense of relief.
“Hartford!” he cries over the baby’s screams.
“Hartford,” Cynthia repeats, with a pleading edge to her voice.
Suddenly the baby stops crying. The world empties of sound and the air clarifies, becomes smooth and open like a sun-warmed lake. Ibrahim can now hear his own breathing, raspy as wind trapped in a seashell, and his heartbeat, so loud it seems to be outside himself. He looks at Silvia, his face so close to hers that he can feel her shallow breath on his neck, and then her eyes catch the motion of his and for a second they are looking at each other. Hope fills his chest, he’s exhilarated but fearful, and then she speaks, but her voice is so quiet she’s practically just mouthing the words, and only he can hear them. “Don’t let her go,” Silvia says.
“What?” His eyes widen, his voice sharp. “What did you say?” he asks, though he knows he heard her perfectly well. But who is “her”? Cynthia? The baby? Go where? These questions happen in half-seconds, and he knows he can’t say anything out loud. He doesn’t know whether her words were a flash of lucidity or of lunacy.
“She didn’t say anything,” Cynthia says, her feet planted slightly apart as she rocks gently from the knees and gazes at the silent baby, exhausted from its crying fit.
“You should take Silvia,” Hartford says, pulling Ibrahim aside. “If you leave now, you’ll be in Timmins by the time the hospital opens.” He gives Ibrahim the car keys.
“Timmins?” Ibrahim asks, but what he means is How am I meant to do this, what’s going to happen after that, how long will it be until everything is normal?
“They can examine her and give her medication if required,” Hartford says, looking at Cynthia and the baby, “but hopefully she’ll feel much better as soon as she’s got some distance from all this.”
Ibrahim again looks desperately at Silvia, who still is not moving. She’s in a sort of trance, staring at the window. Then he looks up at Cynthia, who is staring at him.
“What will we do with the baby?” Ibrahim asks, turning back to Hartford.
“Cynthia and I will look after her until you get back.”
Ibrahim swallows, thinking of Silvia’s words. Did she know this was going to happen? Is this what she meant?
“The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be able to return,” Hartford continues, staring unblinkingly at Cynthia.
“Are you sure?” Ibrahim looks at his baby, now cherubic in sleep. He loves this living thing that he’s made; the only thing that he wants in the whole world is for her to be safe, to be allowed to
thrive. Something about this—everything about this—doesn’t seem right, but when you have no control, you just have to have faith.
“Okay,” he says, almost deferentially. “I’ll get some things packed up.” He looks at his baby and feels the fist around his heart again. He has momentarily lost his words.
He bends down and picks Silvia up, slings her arms over his shoulders like a yoke, and carries her slowly downstairs, placing both feet on each step to balance as they descend.
“We’re going to go,” he says to her.
“Really?” she says, hope having the same out-of-body quality as delusion. “Thank you,” she says, “thank you.”
XXXVI
SHE’S DESCENDING THE STAIRS, the stairs she’s gone up and down seven thousand times by now, and yet their whiteness seems newly astounding. So white it’s alive. She wants to reach out and touch the plain white walls and feel the light within them, wants to transmit the light to her own body and illuminate the darkness there, but her body doesn’t listen. Her arm doesn’t move. A voice comes into her head: What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?
They cross the foyer and enter the library, and her certainty that the baby is coming with them overrides her awareness that the baby is not there. Silvia sees the painting of Cynthia on the wall right next to her. She stiffens, holding Ibrahim back.
“What is it?” he asks, his tone different this time.
She looks at this painting, then turns to look at the wall opposite, where her own portrait hangs. The two still face one another. The oak-leaf wings, the disproportionate eyes, the twisted magenta cord.
“Why did you call it that?”
“What?”
“The Other Woman.”
“The painting? It was just the first thing that came to mind.”
“What’s her name? The baby.” She feels certain that the baby has a name and she’s forgotten it.
“We haven’t named her yet, Silvia.”
“Oh.” Silvia stares at the painting. She feels as though there are answers in the paint and that she needs to find them.
“Come on,” Ibrahim says, leaning forward with her.
“What if we name her after a colour? Like the pink there, the colour of the beloved? We can’t call her Pink, though. What else is pink? Like . . . Magenta? Or . . . Rose?”
“Rose is nice.” Rose madder is the name of the pigment he used, which he learned somewhere was a plant used to treat melancholy humours back in the seventeenth century. “Rose. I like it.”
“Me too,” she says, smiling through the gloom that floats and settles like dust motes in the air between them, between everything. She continues to look at her painting, on the opposite side of the room; she can feel its heartbeat.
He tries to start moving again, but without Silvia’s cooperation it’s impossible to get any momentum. “Listen,” he says finally, “you sit here and wait for me. I’m going to go get some stuff together.” He shrugs her off his shoulders and shuffles her onto the corduroy couch.
Then she’s alone again. She feels the emptiness as a presence all around her, and for a moment this offers a small comfort, but then her eyes meet her painted eyes and she recognizes herself, the Silvia she was before all this happened. When she was a girl and not a mother. When she was a different sort of nothing, a nothing that had the potential to grow into something else. Now she’s the nothing that comes after a loss, the kind that can never be recovered and transformed.
She starts to fall, falling further. The whole solar system is contained within the dark hollows of her skull. She closes her eyes. The buzzing of the bees has dulled since she left her room upstairs, but she knows for certain that it has not ended. Distance has not concluded anything.
The fall starts as soon as we’re born, she was taught, for all humans inherit the original sin. If only Eve hadn’t eaten that apple. “In sin my mother conceived me,” says Psalm 51, but this never made sense to Silvia: her mother could never sin, it was only other people’s mothers who lapsed. The apple falls far, far, far from the tree.
Rose. Rose, my baby Rose. Where is Rose? Where is Ibrahim?
With the palpable feeling that someone is looking at her, she turns around and finds herself facing the portrait of Cynthia. The black feeling comes back into her belly, a sudden stone.
The stubby golden wings, just like a bee’s; the red dot where a third eye would go; her round, bottomless, black-hole eyes.
They’re not her eyes, Ibrahim would say. They’re his eyes: he made them. He was the bee, Cynthia the flower, and the portrait is the honey.
Who is the queen, then?
XXXVII
“WHERE ARE WE GOING?”
Ibrahim is back with their bags. He doesn’t seem to have heard her.
“Are we leaving forever?”
His head moves in an indiscernible way. Dismissive, frustrated, despondent. Relief feels like ecstasy.
XXXVIII
IBRAHIM LOADS the few belongings he scraped together onto the back seat of Hartford’s car and eases Silvia into the front. “Thanks, man,” Ibrahim says to Hartford for the second time that night. Morning.
Hartford is standing off to the side of the car, rooted at the end of the gravel path, and Cynthia is on the front step of the main house, holding the sleeping baby. The way she stands and scans the scene reminds Ibrahim of a sphinx—eyes half open but all-seeing.
“Of course,” Hartford says. He holds Ibrahim’s gaze and then looks behind him, at Cynthia. “You go,” he says to Ibrahim. “I’ll keep an eye on things here.”
Ibrahim checks that Silvia is okay in the car before running up to the house to give his baby one last kiss on her forehead, nose, each cheek and palm. “We’ll be back soon, two days at the most.”
“Have you named her yet?” Cynthia asks.
“Oh, yes.” He feels protective about giving it away, as though the name is an essential part of her identity that he wants to safeguard. “Rose,” he says, smiling without thinking; he loves his baby and her name so much it spills over. “Her name is Rose.”
Cynthia looks down at the baby. “Hello, Rose.” The name, the first time it’s been spoken in her presence, seems to shimmer on her skin.
“I’ll call you when we get to the hospital,” Ibrahim says out of habit, forgetting, “and either way, I’ll be back to get the baby in the next day or two.”
“No rush, Ibrahim. You take care of Silvia. That’s your priority.”
“Thank you,” Ibrahim says, sincere, sad.
“Not at all.” Cynthia’s eyes shine.
The sun crests the horizon at the end of the driveway, and Ibrahim and Cynthia and Hartford all turn to face it.
XXXIX
IN THE CAR with the door open, Silvia can hear the sound of bees louder than before, even louder than in the upstairs hallway. It’s as if they’re all around her: here, in the car, in her head. She can’t see them yet, but she knows they’re near, they’re everywhere. The sun is rising directly before her, a copper penny slipping above the horizon, and the rays filter through her. A feeling of permanence, of strength outside herself. She can’t wait to leave here, to go home, wherever that is—these logistics don’t worry her so long as she and Ibrahim are together. A shadow passes through the light and then Ibrahim is there, at the window and then inside the car, by her side. He puts his hand on her knee.
“Ready?” He wears an expression she’s never seen on him before.
“You don’t have the baby?” she asks, as though he’s forgotten his arm.
What makes his expression different from any other time, she realises, is that it’s as if he’s wearing a mask. Usually so unguarded, he now has protection: assertiveness and stillness tentatively disguising whatever truth is beneath. “No,” he says, forcing himself to be calm. “Cynthia’s going to look after her while we go to the hospital.”
“The hospital?” is all she’s able to say before her voice sinks into her spleen and her hand
s start to shake uncontrollably. This isn’t possible—Cynthia can’t have won.
“We’re going to get you sorted out,” Ibrahim continues. “It’ll just be a few days and then we’ll be back, and we’ll go home. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“We have to bring the baby,” she says, trying as hard as she can not to cry—she wants to show him how strong she is. “We have to take the baby and just leave! I thought that was . . . ? Please, we need to leave right now and never come back.”
Ibrahim takes his hand off her knee and looks at his lap. The sun casts him in bronze and the buzzing is near-deafening, but she can hear him above the high whining of wings rubbing. “Silvia.” He looks at her and the mask is gone; all that is there is sadness. “She said you tried to attack her. The baby, she nearly fell.”
“What?” Silvia turns around and sees Cynthia standing on the front step holding the bundle of rags, and though she also faces the sun there is a shadow over her. “That’s not what happened, that’s not what happened at all. I was just trying to get her away from Cynthia and then I fell—she pushed me. I know what she’s going to do—she wants the baby, she’s going to keep her, and—” She stops herself before revealing the prophecy of her dream. She doesn’t want to scare Ibrahim; she can hold on to this burden herself; she can stop it from happening.
With everything left unsaid, Ibrahim starts the car. Silvia can’t peel herself away, though—she’s twisted backwards to watch Cynthia and her baby, her perfect baby Rose with ears like tiny teacups, and Hartford, standing on the path. They make a strange family portrait, those three—it hurts her heart—and then Silvia looks up: a cloud of bees, the source of the sound and the shadow, large as a hurricane. Everything is suspended.
“Ibrahim,” she says slowly, carefully, “stop the car. Look.”
He looks in the rearview mirror, not stopping. “What?”
The Honey Farm Page 27