Chapter 2 Arthur
Arthur
I still think you should have shaved the beard. You look like a muskrat.”
I cranked down the van’s window and let the breeze sift through my fingers. Appalachia was sweltering, a humid and unbearable heat from which my broken AC offered no relief. Slick with sweat and beyond the point of exhaustion, I had no patience for the monster’s vanity.
“This isn’t about me,” it scoffed. “Don’t you wonder what she’ll think of you after all these years?”
“No.” I flexed my grip on the steering wheel, eyes skipping to the royal-blue urn strapped into my passenger seat.
I did not wonder, and I did not care. This was not a social call.
A glowing saffron sunset reached its fingers between the sentinel pine and birch hugging the ditch. Despite my insistence, memories of the last time I’d driven down this very road flooded in. They tasted as bittersweet as the last dregs of an over-steeped cup of tea.
“Do you think she’ll like your new tattoos?”
Instinctively, I touched the inside of my forearm where one of the sleeves of ink began.
What had started as an act of defiance had metamorphosed into armor with every new design.
Little black songbirds flew up my skin, the arc of a wing shading the scar beneath.
Woodland details filled in the gaps between the varied species of birds and a curl of honeycomb rounding my left biceps.
The latter had been an impulse, really. A nostalgic dig of the knife that suddenly felt far too exposing. My face went hot.
“I do love it when you pine.”
I felt the monster tug our lips into a smirk and quickly rubbed the expression off with the back of my hand. “I’m not pining,” I muttered. I simply hadn’t expected coming back to feel like some kind of confession. I was a roll of film in a vat of chemicals, exposed too soon to the light. I was—
“Pining,” the monster singsonged.
I scowled.
Too soon, we rolled through the town of Audrey’s single, blinking stoplight.
I kept my eyes forward, unwilling to risk being recognized.
Old worn-out buildings in charming pastel lemon and cornflower blue blurred through my periphery.
The café. The school. The Honey Shoppe. I told myself the landmarks couldn’t bruise if I didn’t look too long.
My knuckles whitened as we drove past a pale chapel that was chipping old paint. Weeds climbed up its siding, and a harsh whistle drew my attention to the hole in the roof, where a clutter of dark birds circled overhead. My inhale sharpened to a blade.
Starlings.
While clever, their greedy and invasive nature too often disrupted the local ecosystem with their habit of driving other birds out of their nests. Farmers hated starlings, but my mother had loved them, charmed by their astounding gift for mimicry.
The monster let me stew in my thoughts until we turned off Main Street. We were getting close. I could practically taste the wax in the air, and outside, the road licked a black asphalt tongue around the edge of the Walkers’ pear orchards.
Déjà vu wrapped around me, thickening with every passing minute. I hadn’t driven this road in years, but my body remembered. Time, it seemed, wasn’t enough to patch the wound this place had carved in me.
“You have such a flair for the dramatic,” the monster complimented. I rolled my shoulders reflexively—an old habit that never succeeded in shaking its voice out of my head.
My stomach growled. After opening the glove box, I fished through the mess of honey sticks until I found a speckled cinnamon, then popped one end open with my teeth.
I knew I should cry for her. She was my mother, after all. I should have cried weeks ago. Instead, nausea twisted my empty stomach over in knots. My appetite had fled the moment I got the call that she was gone. If that was grief, I sure as hell didn’t know how to digest it.
But I could still choke down honey.
“I could help, if you’d let me.”
“No.” I didn’t want the monster’s help. It had made such offers before, and they always ended in disaster.
Whenever the monster gave in to its own strange appetite, I ended up with the tail of a squirrel between my fingers, or fish scales under my nails.
I didn’t need another animal husk staring at me dead-eyed and accusing.
I knew the monster’s work was wretched. Maybe even wicked.
But I was worse, for letting it use me, letting it take.
“It doesn’t have to be like that. We could—”
A loud pop jolted us both, stalling a surely horrific proposal.
The cab lurched up and down, the van sagging violently to the right.
“Shit!” I tapped the brakes and eased onto the road’s narrow shoulder.
Dust bloomed skyward where the wheel dug into the naked soil until the Volkswagen ground to a standstill.
I sat back, frustration heating my skin. This was the last fucking thing I needed today.
Stepping out into the ocean of heat, I rounded the van, crouched before the ruined tire, and ran my fingertips over the rubber tread until I hit a nail.
“You’re kidding,” I muttered.
If Fate was laughing at me, it sounded an awful lot like the whir of cicadas.
“Do we have a spare?”
“It’s a mess.” One more item on a never-ending list of things I’d broken and never repaired.
“So… we walk?”
I didn’t answer, nor did I fight when the monster turned my head to the wall of textured evergreens hugging the side of the road.
Dandelions speckled the ditch in sunny pops of yellow and wishing fluff.
Beneath us, rootscapes stretched to wrap the edge of a warren just out of sight.
The monster salivated, tuning our senses to the rolling tha-dump of a rabbit’s heartbeat, the mammal glow of life pulsing like a toothache behind my gums.
“You skipped breakfast,” it noted.
I shuddered. We shared too much, our edges too often blurring together.
Sometimes I dreamed of surrender. I could disappear into that cool, relaxing space in my head where I stopped feeling everything so acutely.
It would be so easy to give up control. A relief, even, to loosen my grip and let the monster—
“Stop it,” I snapped.
It flicked a tongue against my spine. “Just a taste?”
I opened my mouth to refuse, then all but choked at the sudden outpouring of life flooding my senses. I looked down to find my hand wrapped around a clump of milkweed.
“Oops.”
I snatched it back too late to stop the monster’s death-touch. The pink flower heads had wilted to a brown crisp. Relief eased my pounding headache, and I shoved to my feet, the taste of petals still slicking the back of my teeth.
“It’s okay,” the monster soothed.
I was shaking as I yanked open the passenger door. We’d stolen the life out of those weeds with a single touch. Flesh to flesh, dust to dust.
Nothing about that was okay.
It was too hot to leave my equipment in the van, so I tucked the urn under one arm and slung my camera bag over the other shoulder.
The bag was Mom’s. She’d picked it from a tourist stand at Four Corners the winter we drove west and filled our film rolls with Arizona’s red horizons.
The pattern of blue and orange fibers on the bag had faded, like everything between us.
It was the only thing of hers I’d inherited that didn’t hurt.
I locked the door and left the van behind, the sweet chemical scent of her perfume washing over me.
We couldn’t be more than a quarter mile from the farm. Every step felt heavy under the dark-eyed stares of wild sunflowers growing in the ditch. When I closed my eyes, I pictured the sunflower dress Eva Moreau had worn one bird-watching morning.
The day she’d kissed me.
I exhaled and pushed the memory away.
The word cottage did a mighty injustice to the structure ahead of me.
Its stone base held solid chestnut walls and a porch that had never sagged a day in its life.
At the crest of its gables, a ribbon of smoke seeped from a stone chimney.
Beside it stood the workshop where I’d learned how to uncap honeycomb and run frames through an extractor before pouring the honey into jars to sell.
From where I stood at the bend in the road, the greenhouse was behind the cottage, slightly obscured from view, as was the hill leading down to one of the Moreaus’ six apiaries. The dying sun soaked the glass in rose-gold light. I stalled in my tracks, struck by the sight.
A hollow of yearning widened in my chest.
I’m not afraid of dead things, Arthur.
I should have gone straight to the front door and knocked. Instead, I took a step off the path, toward the greenhouse, unaware that I was rubbing my honeycomb tattoo until I was nearly at the door.
There was no one inside, as far as I could tell. Greenbrier swathed the walls, a carpet of moss creeping from the outer wall over the doorjamb. When I reached out to touch the handle, the monster stepped in, stalling our hand midway.
“What are you doing, little death-touch?”
The maw of yearning in my chest opened a little wider. “I just want to see.”
This wasn’t the plan. I’d only meant to pop in, deliver Mom’s ashes to her damn honeyman, then get the hell out of here. This little glass house was dangerous.
The monster’s disapproval swelled as I shook off its hold and turned the knob, pushing the old door open on creaking hinges. My nose filled: vegetal with summer smells and rich, wild herbs.
My eyes fluttered, and for a moment, I was seventeen again.
Then the door to the workshop burst open.
I jerked back, startled, as a short woman flew like a gale across the yard, her long braid snapping behind her in the wind. Another—taller, with raven-dark hair—followed close behind, her heels sinking into the grass in punching steps. “Eva,” she panted. “Would you calm down?”
My heart gave a painful lurch of recognition.
“You want me to be calm?”
Even without the flood of wildflowers spilling from her shoes, I would have known the warm rasp of Eva Moreau’s voice anywhere. In a blindfold. In the dark.
“This is what not pining looks like?”
The monster was right. I’d spent the entire drive here raising a shield in preparation for this very moment. There was no reason to open old wounds. This wasn’t a homecoming, and I was the furthest possible thing from a prodigal.
But I hadn’t steeled myself for this: the blaze of her, shooting like a fallen star across the garden. Furious. Formidable.
I needed to get a grip. This was fine. I was fine.
“You’re sweating.”
Neither woman had looked back toward the greenhouse, where I stood, still holding my mother’s remains.
“Could you slow down? Hold on. Let me just…” Izzy growled and ripped her high heels off her feet, flinging them to one side.
“I don’t want to hear it, Iz.” Eva tossed a glower over her shoulder.
And froze.
When our eyes connected, the overbearing heat of the day took on a different shape. Instead of clinging to my skin, a flush of awareness, of aching recognition, sank right through to the core of me.
Izzy stumbled into her sister, who caught her before she could fall, then brushed past her, stomping toward me. Bewildered, Izzy spun, seeking the source of her sister’s abrupt change in demeanor.
“Ah.” Izzy’s voice went soft with sudden understanding, but I had eyes only for the woman charging toward me like a bull, cheeks flushed. A nauseating wave of wrongness flooded my senses.
I shouldn’t have come back.
Instinctively, I took a step back but stumbled, tripping over a rock. Air rushed from my lungs in surprise, and I hit the ground tailbone first, the urn slipping out of my grasp. It shattered on the stepping stones, spraying ashes across my cheek.
Eva came to an abrupt halt in front of me. “You,” she whispered, the pain in her voice like a striking bullet.
A memory flashed before me. In it, Eva was smiling as she coaxed my glove off finger by finger. I could still recall the first brush of her skin against mine, could still see the parting of her lips as she asked me the most dangerous question of all:
You trust me?
Beyond, someone else stepped out of the workshop, casting an enormous shadow across the lawn. I rolled to one side, panting with the effort it took to ignore my aching tailbone, and pushed to my knees, where I began anxiously scooping up ashes before the wind could blow them away.
But the urn, now completely shattered, could no longer hold them.
“Arthur?”
In her mouth, my name sounded almost delicate, the syllables preserved like a flower in a book. My throat went hard with grief. On my knees, with my hands still cupping the ashes, I felt suddenly like a supplicant come to beg her forgiveness.
I shoved to my feet and tossed my head to one side to get a stray lock out of my eyes, stacking my spine with a confidence I didn’t feel.
“Hey, bee girl.”