Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shelly returned at the end of September so they could walk through the house one last time. The place had been emptied, the furniture sold or donated and her dad’s favorite wing chair shipped off to Riverside Gardens, where he was settling in.
“Remember we used to push the furniture aside and roller skate in here?” Shelly said as they paused at the threshold to the living room.
“We did?” The room was cavernous, and without furniture their footsteps echoed. “I don’t remember that.”
“Dad hated it, but Mom said the room was going to waste.”
“Sounds like something Mom would have said.” For a moment Cassie felt a familiar tingle of worry at the roller skating she didn’t recall, but so many other memories rushed up at her.
The way they jumped rope at the end of the driveway, waiting for the school bus in the morning.
The sweet, citrusy aroma that permeated the house when their mom baked her lemon cookies.
Who knew why Cassie remembered one thing and her sister another.
Memory was like that—messy and unpredictable.
Sort of like life. She nudged Shelly. “Remember that play kitchen we used to have in the corner? I left a cup of milk in the oven one time, and Mom went crazy trying to find the smell.”
Shelly’s eyes creased with laughter. “Oh my God, that’s right! She was convinced there was a dead mouse in the wall.”
They sat on the floor with their knees up, laughing at how the exterminator had torn up the walls looking for mice until her father finally located the sour milk.
Shelly quieted. “This is it. We won’t be back.”
Cassie leaned against her sister’s shoulder. Letting it go was bittersweet, but she felt a kind of lightness too. The house, stripped to its bones, exuded a quiet dignity. The floors would be refinished, the walls repainted. Another family would take up a life here.
And she had a life of her own.
Andrew stuck his head in the door, looking mildly surprised to see them sitting on the floor. “What are you doing?”
Cassie hoisted herself to her feet. “Just taking a minute.”
“Glenn’s outside with Grandpa. I told him what we’re doing, but he seems a little confused.”
“That’s all right.” She gave Andrew’s shoulder a squeeze.
“Thanks for getting him.” Andrew was finding his way, but it would be a long road.
As she’d feared, the trip to Dallas had been awkward and the family unwelcoming, but at least Andrew had made the effort.
And he was moving forward. Going to therapy and working part-time at Ciccarelli’s.
He’d started classes at UConn Stamford too.
Maybe he would transfer somewhere else after a semester or maybe not.
Life had a way of working itself out. You couldn’t foresee everything. You couldn’t foresee anything.
Outside, Glenn and her dad were talking. She gave them both a kiss. “Come inside with me,” she said to Glenn. “We have a couple of minutes.”
They walked through the front door, past the family room—the TV gone now, the room still. Through the kitchen and out to the sunporch, which had been emptied and swept clean.
“You left the birdhouse,” Glenn observed.
“The wrens will be back in the spring; it seemed a shame to take it down.”
They climbed the stairs and she showed him Shelly’s old room, then hers. Frederick had been packed away and the posters stripped from the walls, but the silhouettes remained. The girl she’d been was gone, but the house and all that happened here had shaped her.
She gazed out the window, where the field was dipped in dusk.
“Once my mom got sick I just wanted to get away. I thought if I did everything right I had a shot at my life turning out different. I mean, I didn’t actually believe that, but it terrified me that I had no control over my genetics.
So I threw myself into trying to manage everything else.
” She smiled lightly. “I’m in a good place now but just so you know, I’m never going to be a loosey goosey kind of person. ”
“Loosey goosey?” He looked amused, then turned serious. “You’re brave. You know that? You’re the bravest person I know.”
“No. My mom was brave. Waking up each day and trying to make sense of a world that was going sideways. That’s brave.” For a moment she faltered. “I hope I can be like her if it comes to that.”
He took her in his arms. “You’re already there in my book.”
“I’m glad you think so.” She rested her head on his chest. “Anyway, for now I’m working on loosey goosey.”
He kissed her forehead. “I’m very glad you’re staying. Have I told you that?”
She smiled up at him. “You might have mentioned it.”
. . .
Outside, her father was waiting with Andrew and Shelly. The light was fading and the bees would be settling in for the night. Time to get going.
“Where’s my bee stuff?” her dad said. “Is it in the house?”
Cassie looked at Shelly, who shrugged.
“Nothing’s left in the house, Daddy,” Cassie said. “The movers took it all. I have your smoker and all that at my place.”
“But I’m going to need it.”
“Glenn has a smoker.” She didn’t say they wouldn’t need to smoke the bees, that they weren’t going to open the hives.
Even though she’d explained they were moving the bees tonight, her dad was confused or had forgotten.
Or maybe he just wanted to believe nothing had changed.
That the house remained the same, waiting for him to walk in the door and resume his old life.
“Let’s see how things go,” she said gently.
Once they’d assembled at the hives, Andrew helped Glenn unload the ramp so they could muscle the boxes into the truck.
It was almost full dark now, bats flitting from the woods, swooping erratically in and out of the trees.
Terrifying if you didn’t know the good they did in the world.
Cassie aimed a flashlight so Glenn could staple the hive entrances closed for the short ride to his house.
“Why are you closing them up?” her father said. “They won’t be able to get out.”
“We’ll open them in the morning,” Glenn assured him. “It’s just so nobody gets lost on the way.”
“On the way to where?”
Glenn stopped what he was doing. “I know a place where they won’t be disturbed. Where it’s quiet and there’s fresh water and they can get healthy again. What do you think, should we take them there?”
Cassie waited, her heart suspended. Her father needed to come to this on his own. A decision he could still make. They could have moved the bees without him; it would have been simpler. But he needed to be here. Just as she’d needed to walk through the house one last time.
Her dad considered. The wheels turned more slowly now. Sometimes they got stuck, especially when he was tired. Mornings were better for him, but the bees had to be moved at night.
“I’ve never been to this place,” he said finally.
“I’m going to take you there now,” Glenn said, “so you can see.”
Her dad rode in the truck with Glenn and the rest of them followed, a small procession winding along the back roads of Laurelton with a slim moon keeping pace.
They were only going a few miles, but picking up and moving thousands of bees had to be done with care.
Glenn drove slowly, avoiding the bumps, easing to a stop when the lights turned red.
Cassie imagined the bees tucked up inside the warm belly of their hives, drowsy in the darkness.
No idea that they would wake up somewhere new.
But bees were resilient, and she wanted to believe they would thrive.
At Glenn’s house, Cassie and Shelly held their father’s hands so he wouldn’t trip in the dark as Andrew and Glenn rolled the hives across the yard.
An outside light switched on, and Lilah came down the stairs from the deck.
“This is Lilah.” Cassie introduced the girl.
She was lankier than the last time Cassie had seen her.
She’d shot up over the summer, on the cusp of becoming a teenager.
About to transform as all kids did to the adult they would become.
“Do you want to wait on the deck, Mr. Linden?” Lilah said. “The grass is sort of lumpy.”
“Do you, Dad?” Cassie asked. “We’ll sit with you.”
She should have known he wouldn’t hear of it. He planted himself next to Andrew and Glenn, watching intently as they wrestled the hives off the dolly. “How will the bees know where they are?” he said.
Glenn settled the first hive at the end of a long row. “As long as it’s more than two or three miles they reorient pretty easily. Might put some branches in front for few days so they notice something’s different.”
The new hives looked like all the others, a neighborhood of neat white and pastel boxes, front doors facing east where the sun would find them in the morning.
“I’ll bring you over whenever you like,” Cassie said. “You can check on how they’re doing.”
Her father’s brow furrowed. “There’s too many of them. I won’t be able to tell which ones are mine.”
“I know which are yours,” Glenn said gently. “Don’t worry.”
“But how will I know?” her father said.
Cassie sent Glenn a worried glance. Here, at the end, a wrinkle. The boxes blending in for her father, who still knew enough to know he wouldn’t recall. Anguished to lose this last link to himself and her mother in a confusing complex of indistinguishable beehives.
“I have an idea,” Lilah said and dashed back to the house, pale hair flying. She was back a minute later with a black marker. “We can write your name on your hives. That way you’ll know which ones are yours.”
Cassie held her breath. Would this fix be enough, or would her dad leave unhappy and distressed, forgetting in the morning that the hives had been moved, remembering only that something important was gone.
They were all silent, holding their collective breath. Then her dad’s face eased.
“Write it big in front,” he said.
And so Lilah did. Neatly penning LINDEN near the entrance to all three hives. In large letters so anyone could see.
“Is that okay, Daddy?” Cassie slipped her hand through his.
Her father nodded. “That’ll do.”
. . .
In the morning, when the sky lightened and the temperature rose, the bees would begin to stir.
Glenn would remove the entrance coverings and the foragers, whose job it was to go out into the world and return laden with nectar and pollen, would shake the sleep from their wings and crawl to the entrance of the hives.
They might see branches where none had been before or notice a new fragrance on the breeze, alerting them that something had changed.
The first ones would communicate this to the others and word would circulate through the hive, passed on with the touch of an antenna or the arch of an abdomen until the colony was astir with activity.
Then as the sun warmed their wings and the day brightened, the bees would lift off into the morning to explore their new home.