Farthest House

by Margaret Lukas

  His blood pounded as he stared at the maelstrom, then he squinted and leaned farther over the steering wheel. He’d been so surprised by the swarm, his attention on the whole, he’d not seen Jonah just visible in the middle of the eddy. Jonah’s shirt was off, and he wore dark trousers, or no trousers beneath the cloak of bees, using his body as the black core they coiled around.

  Grabbing for the door handle, Clay yanked it open, mapping a frantic plan of action. He’d shake Jonah hard, dislodge the bees, throw his coat over both their heads, cover their faces as best he could, pull Jonah into the car and head for Dr. Mahoney’s office. And he’d pray he reached a phone before Willow stepped out.

  A wave of the angry horde swung right, the sound sending chills down his spine, and in the second before they swung back, he saw something more frightening than bees gone feral. Jonah stared at him. Defiance in his normally weak eyes. Not affected by stings, not writhing in pain, not flinging his arms trying to save himself. He stood upright, resolute, threatening.

  With the sound of bees in the air and Jonah’s stance, Clay slammed the car door shut again. He locked it and reached across and back, each lock clicking with an only mildly comforting sound. Jonah’s message was loud and clear: “Leave and don’t come back.” There was more, too, something about turfs and the order of things. Jonah wasn’t an extra on the scene, scuffling around on the periphery of Farthest House. He was a force.

  Clay clutched the steering wheel, veins in his hands pulsing to the surface. The scene was something straight out of Alfred Hitchcock: bees usually benign suddenly haywire, controlled by some demigod or dark gremlin. He had no way of knowing if Jonah could see and read his eyes, but if the old man could, he’d see the performance wasn’t working. Clay wasn’t breaking off his relationship with Willow.

  Nor was Jonah relenting, and Clay’s alarm increased. Had it been three minutes, five minutes? The longer the standoff continued, the more bee stings Jonah might receive. It was time to get him help and call Willow to warn her to stay inside. So his head told him, but his heart held him there. He couldn’t drive off until he knew more, until he was positive Willow would be safe until he reached help.

  The swaying tree of bees continued to hum and whine, a sound loud enough to be heard inside the car. When a bee buzzed at his ear, he jumped and swatted the insect and half a second later heard it hit against the back window, alive and angry. He tried to ease the cold from his shoulder muscles and unclench his jaw. With this kind of control over his bees, was Jonah responsible for Willow’s stings? All along she’d kept faith in him, sometimes spooked by Tory, always spooked by Mary, but her faith in Jonah unwavering. Yet, here was the swarm obeying Jonah. Clay’s mind searched for reasons. Was it possible Willow sent Jonah after receiving Mary’s pictures?

  The questions were for another time, and Clay shifted the car into reverse. Jonah was an old and mortal man—nothing super human, and he played with his life. Clay would go straight to the fire station, tell them they needed the ambulance and hazmat suits.

  As the car began rolling backwards, Jonah took a step forward, his arms lifted, flung in the air, and the swarm careened in a net, raining over the windshield and side windows in a hail of clicks.

  Clay felt encased in a glass hive. Angry buzzing filled his ears. He envisioned bees crawling over the undercarriage, filling the car’s engine, seeking and finding vents to the interior.

  42

  At the sound of sirens turning onto the drive, Willow forced herself out of bed and to the window. She felt like cloud, drifting, pushed by wind, but she managed her clothes, and clutching the stair rail, she hurried down. Prairie met her at the door of the kitchen, and with a cry of relief, Willow swept her up.

  She felt faint, but with Prairie on her hip, she met Tory at the window. “Is it Jonah?” Men in hazmat suits stood talking in a loose group, their headgear in their hands. Two others steered a stretcher into the back of an ambulance. Mable in a red caftan huddled over the gurney. “It is Jonah!”

  “Dr. Mahoney is there,” Tory said. “I’m sure Jonah will be fine.”

  As she raced for the door leading to the garden, Willow fought panic. Too recently, she’d watched her father’s body being rolled into an ambulance.

  Tory shouted at her. “Where are you going? His bees attacked him, and they might still be riled up. There’s absolutely nothing for you to do.”

  Stepping away from the door, Willow held Prairie tighter and reached for the support of a chair back.

  “Jonah,” Tory said with emphasis, “isn’t interested in seeing you.”

  Tory was right. There was no point in going out and certainly not with Prairie in tow. Jonah didn’t want to see her. He wanted Mable, only Mable.

  “You haven’t forgotten our appointment with my lawyer?” Tory asked. “The day after tomorrow?”

  “No.” The question was distracting and in light of Jonah’s condition, irrelevant. Mable would sit by Jonah’s bedside, a place near grace.

  “It’s shameful,” Tory said.

  “Shameful?”

  “Mable! Look how she’s fussing. Crawling into the ambulance after him. Doesn’t she care how people will talk? Just where does she think she’s going?”

  “We could go out the front door and follow.”

  Tory didn’t move. “You tax yourself worrying about the wrong things.”

  “You’re not worried about him?”

  “How long did Clay stay last night?” She paused, strain on her face. “I’m not running a brothel.”

  And I’m not running an old folk’s home, Willow just managed to keep from saying.

  “I’m going to my room. I’m not interested in going to the hospital.” As she stepped away, she pointed to the table. “There’s something for you.”

  The manila envelope had Willow’s name written on the front in large black letters. No stamps or postal markings, which meant it had been hand-delivered to the mailbox at the end of the drive. She shifted Prairie’s weight, opened the envelope, and drew out the pictures.

  Close to midnight, Willow carried Prairie to her crib and stood in the unlit room looking down at her daughter. They’d lain together in Mémé’s bed, turning picture-book pages until Prairie finally slept, and then for another two hours Willow counted and recounted the whorls of brass on the chandelier above the bed and stared out the turret windows at the dark sky and the stars, searching them for pathways to deeper space. Finally, she painted Prairie on an imaginary canvas: the small arms flung out, the smaller fingers in a slight upward curl, fingernails tiny as satin paint chips, the folds of her closed eyes, and the spheres of her cheeks. All in an attempt to distract herself from her fear that Jonah might die. She’d dreamed of one day having real time with him, and now, when he was in a hospital bed, he wanted nothing to do with her.

  Mable, in her last phone call, said he was stable, but the word didn’t put Willow at ease. Was stable good, or did it just mean, “not-yet-dead?” Stable for an old man, stable for the hour, or the night? If stable meant he’d live, would he be able to return to Farthest House? She felt shut out, but Tory was right, Jonah didn’t want her there. Showing up uninvited might cause his heart to heave and sink at the sight of her. He was too weak for upset. Suppose seeing him in his bed, machines strapped to him as they had been strapped to Papa, made her run out of the room? Then there was Prairie. Willow couldn’t leave her with all the upheaval in the house. Mary’s pictures were a flag waving in the air, shouting, I’m right here.

  She ran her hand from the top of Prairie’s head and down the child’s back, before stepping to the window. The garden was empty and quiet with no sign of Tory out on a late-night tramp. She left the room, went back to Mémé’s, and sat on the bed. The small door leading to the narrow staircase beckoned. How long since she’d painted, really painted? Not since seeing Papa consumed in flame? The realization packed ash around her heart. It was no wonder she used illness as an excuse to avoid working. Who might she
see next? Did that mean Doctor Mahoney was right, and she’d let herself sink to the level of a Sleeping Beauty: a dormant object, helpless, with all doors to the psychic closed?

  She rose and entered the narrow staircase where she ran her hands over the walls, still zinc white and absorbing what moonlight they could from the tiny window at the turn. She thought of Victorian novels and their long winding lighthouse staircases and the staircases in mythology.

  The attic smelled of wood rafters and dust. Moonlight gave just enough illumination. She imagined Mémé working at the desk, me painting at the easel, and herself as a child sleeping in the cottage bed surrounded by crayons and paint boxes.

  Two of the cardboard boxes the movers brought from her apartment were pushed against the back wall. She folded open the flaps of one and considered how long she’d been at Farthest House to only now be unpacking her tools. She removed a pad and charcoal pencil, avoided the desk and easel, and stepped outside onto the widow’s walk. There, with her back against the house she sat down and faced the night.

  Crickets, frogs, and myriad nocturnal creatures chirped and scurried and hunted below her. At tree-top level, she heard leaves rustling, awake and companionable. Sounds Mémé, maybe even Jeannie, also heard standing on that porch.

  “Pagan,” Sister Dominic Agnes once said of Mémé, but if the attic, the moon, the stars alert as votives, and the whispering trees were more pagan than a black, construction-paper chain, Willow would revel in the paganism. She wished Clay were there to share the beauty with her. Detained that afternoon by a sheriff full of questions, he arrived after the ambulance left with Jonah. She heard him running up the stairs, saw him burst through the door of her bedroom, and then slow down seeing her safe with Prairie on her lap. “Thank God,” he said. He frowned at seeing the two pictures on the bed. They were 8x10’s of his face, complete with half-goofy smiles and Mary leaning over his shoulder.

  Willow had remained sitting in the rose chair. “Jonah is stable.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Is it?”

  He studied her a moment and sat on the bed in front of her, turning over the pictures. Prairie smiled at him and stretched out her arms to crawl from Willow’s lap to his. “Those pictures,” he said, “don’t mean a damn thing.”

  “They mean everything. She’s still out there, Clay. Just waiting.” She lowered her voice to a whisper for Prairie’s sake. “They prove you aren’t safe either.”

  A line scored between his brows. He wanted to say he wasn’t running, not from her, not from Mary, and that he hadn’t run earlier when he left Jonah standing in the drive. He wished he could face the scene again to try and make better sense of it. He was certain the bees all left Jonah when they landed and struck his car, but his vision had been blocked. And after he left? What happened then? “Any idea when Jonah might come home?”

  “I haven’t heard. Thank God, Mable called an ambulance in time.”

  “I called the ambulance.” He sounded desperate, half glory-seeking, half rationalizing.

  “How did you know he’d fallen?”

  “He stood at the end of the drive, covered in his bees, not letting me pass. He didn’t fall. I went for help.”

  “You left him?”

  “There was nothing else I could do.”

  She wanted to fall into his arms, and she wanted to make him take his words back. “You drove away?” She wasn’t cursing him, only the craziness, like some dark shadow, that kept closing over everyone’s heads. “It’s been a horrible day,” she said. “I don’t blame you for anything, but my head is throbbing, and I’m too afraid for Jonah to think straight. On top of it, Tory is angry you stayed so long last night. I think you’d better just go.” She motioned to the overturned pictures, “Burn the damn things.”

  “Will you let me explain?”

  “I don’t care how she got them.”

  “Well, I do. Let me talk. I was in the cafeteria grading papers. First thing I know, this blonde is leaning over my shoulder, pointing, ‘Looky there.’ I look up and a camera flashes. I thought it was some joke, a mug shot I’d see in the student rag with some banal comment in a balloon over my head. Only after she left with her little friend—druggy, goth-looking—did it come to me: long hair, a turtleneck on a hot day, and her interest in me. I should have told you before. I’m sorry.” He watched her. “They don’t mean a thing. You know that.”

  “They mean everything,” she repeated. “I know they don’t mean you’re having sex with her or something, but they could mean you are her next target.”

  Alone on the widow’s walk, Willow watched the moon track its slow course across the sky. Using only moonlight, she doodled, her pencil marking erratic curves over first one sheet and then another and another, her mind swirling around the eddy of assigning shape to her vast emotions and her equally vast need for answers. At times, she gazed through the door and into Mémé’s aerie at the crone paintings crouched in the dark.

  By the time the first notes of a sparrow began waking other birds, she’d gone back inside, turned on lights, and placed a canvas on the easel. As the sun crested, tree shadows appeared on the lawn, one over the top of the next like thatch, all pointing west. Willow continued working.

  Later in the morning, she brought Prairie to the attic, and while the toddler prattled about, she painted. She painted during Prairie’s nap. Still later, Clay climbed the steps, and she smiled to feel the rub of his cheek against hers. “Keep working,” he said. “I’ve got the kid.”

  He turned to leave, but she reached for him, leaning against his chest and relishing the feel of his arms around her. “You can bring Prairie up,” she said. “You have your own work to do.”

  “I’m okay. Actually, I accomplished more today than I have all summer. I repacked Luessy’s papers and pitched my writing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to write the biography. If you were counting on it, I’m sorry.” She was surprised, but he went on before she could object. “We both know it wasn’t happening. I realize now that the whole project was something of a cop-out. Maybe a warm-up, but I need to go on.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He held her close. “The project helped me settle into Briarwood and Greenburr, but I’m settled now. I’m even going to survive Robbie’s death. When I think of Jonah, covered with bees, that took some courage. He put it all on the line, and you, here, all this,” he motioned around the attic, “art from the gut. Writing Luessy’s life story would be playing it safe, talking about someone else’s life rather than exposing my own. I need to write what’s in here.” He touched a fist to his chest. “Even if it’s hard.”

  They stood in an embrace. “Jonah did that on purpose?” Willow asked. “Why?”

  “It’s been driving me crazy. Was it just to show me that he has the courage, when he knows I don’t? Or because he needed to say he’s still a man, a force, despite his age and frailty? Maybe that act spoke to his past and settled a score on things he wished he’d done or hadn’t done. He also wanted to scare the crap out of me. You keep telling me he wants you gone. He doesn’t care about me, but was he trying to scare me so bad I’d take you away?”

  “Do you think he is siccing his bees on me?”

  “I don’t know. They’re his bees, and something has him upset enough to risk his life.”

  43

  Putting aside her fears for Jonah, Willow felt triumphant as she looked over her work area. Several brushes held remnants of paint, and tubes of color looked dropped or tossed onto her worktable. She had painted and without any visions of flames or bees dancing over the body of someone she loved.

  She stepped back to examine the work. The emerging picture still needed many more hours, even days, for saturations and shading there and there, but in her mind she saw the completed image: a huge, century-old turtle in a wash of gold light. Inside and beneath the great dome of its carapace, she sat cross-legged and wide-hipped. Her figure was a
composite of a wrinkled old woman and an oak tree. The tree crowned, green-leafed from the top of her head while her wider hips formed the tree’s base. In her lap lay a picture, not of a sister she inadvertently sacrificed, but a picture of herself now, as a young woman.

  The painting had come from the space of her dreams, and the magnitude of its message unspooled slowly. She lifted her hands, touched them to her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her breasts. No loose and creped skin, her face and breasts still vital, not the empty purses of Mémé’s last years. In the painting though, she’d reached arch age, an oak’s age. A rush of surety rose up through the soles of her feet. She would live to be the ancient crone who looked down at a younger Willow with motherly love.

  Willow’s euphoria expanded. She didn’t doubt or question, she closed her eyes, reached her arms out, and opened her hands. Reality was not the hard ball the world supposed. Reality was more a balloon—able to stretch on all sides to accommodate the miraculous.

  When the surge settled, she headed for the stairs and the people two stories below. If she remained in the attic even to clean her brushes and recap her tubes: Madder blue, Prussian green, terre-verte, and cadmium, she might pick up a brush, dab it in color, and be swept away for another twelve hours. She needed to hold Prairie, to tell her that from now on everything was going to be all right.

  Coming out of the staircase into Mémé’s room, Willow hurried across the floor, tossing her robe onto the bed, and pulling on the jeans she wore the day before. She opened the drawer on Mémé’s stacked sweaters and settled on a raspberry-peach of wool and angora.