Chapter 4 Eva #2
“I wasn’t sure you’d pick up the phone,” Arthur said more softly.
Eva barked a laugh, though it didn’t feel funny. “I’m surprised you remember our number.”
Arthur’s posture slumped. “I remember everything.”
It was a match. Eva burned on the sulfurous wick of her fury, desperate to be angry instead of sad, to be sharp, if sharp meant she chose where she bled.
She resisted the impulse to grab a fistful of his T-shirt and drag him closer.
If he felt her nails wound his skin, would he understand?
She was a shard now. A jagged piece of what she’d been before.
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your sorry, Arthur.” His name was a barb that dug into her tongue when she spoke it aloud. Arthur’s exhale washed over her, maple and sweet. Eva’s heart beat fast, reminding her that she was not glass. She was flesh. She wouldn’t break for him.
She couldn’t break for him.
“Tell me the truth,” she demanded. Arthur licked his lips, his thumb rubbing the pads of the other four fingers. She’d forgotten that anxious habit. “Why did you come?”
He could have had the ashes shipped.
They stared at each other, Arthur’s pupils dilating as he took her in. For a moment, Eva thought he’d give her a real answer. But then his face closed off and he looked away. It felt like a flame snuffing out.
Eva watched him walk away, confusion hurting her chest. At the door to the workshop, he paused.
“It doesn’t matter why, Ev.”
Her breath rushed out of her lungs. Bastard.
Eva watched his shadow disappear, her whole body trembling.
It took her several minutes to feel ready to return to the house.
When she did, her path was marked by a trail of petite chamomile blossoms blooming in her every step.
Irritated, she threw open the kitchen door a little too loudly, and found her father hunched over a jar of vivid blue wildflowers.
“Oh. Sorry, Dad.”
Eva’s gaze dropped to the tea he’d chosen.
Every petal inside had been collected from her father’s favorite meadow on the mountain.
He used to hike to it every summer when she was a child, mapping caches of rare herbs he’d found en route and bringing home screens of drying blooms to bottle and save.
Always blue petals—cobalt, sea, and summer sky.
They sold every other herb in the Honey Shoppe, except this one.
Eva couldn’t remember the last time he’d made that trip.
“Good morning, honeybee.”
Eva’s breath hitched at the childhood endearment. She didn’t feel like his honeybee right now. That girl thought nothing bad would ever touch her golden little world. She was kind, not cruel and vindictive, as Eva had just been. She was gentle, and Eva didn’t feel gentle anymore.
She felt like a knife.
Crossing to where Dad stood, Eva wrapped her arms around his waist, careful not to irritate the skin around the sapling’s trunk. It was selfish to touch him when doing so put him more at risk. Eva’s gift could hurt her father.
But she needed him today.
“My girl.” Dad held her tight against him. “What’s wrong?”
So many answers swirled to the tip of her tongue. So much had gone wrong in such a short time.
Dad rubbed a circle over her spine. “Is it Arthur?”
That felt too hard, so Eva shook her head.
“Lottie, then?”
Yes. That was an easier, simpler anger to face. Eva nodded into his chest.
“Oh, love.” Dad pulled back and cupped her cheek, his hand so large it swallowed half her face. “Does it bother you to share your bees?”
Her heart gave a needful tug forward. Yes, it bothered her. But even more, she didn’t like the way he asked, like she was a child learning to share.
“I don’t know.”
Eva had spent many afternoons talking out her worries as she leaned against one of the many painted hive boxes, her head tilted back against the wood.
Sometimes she fell asleep to the sound of their hum and woke with a dozen or more bees perched on her body.
They didn’t sting her. They simply let her melt into their world.
Dad clearly wanted more, but thankfully the teakettle saved her from having to answer.
At the soft whistle, he stepped back and plucked her favorite teacup out of the cupboard.
Her mother, always the artist, had painted a cluster of forget-me-nots on the pale white porcelain, to match the hive boxes outside.
“I don’t need tea, Dad. You should sit down and rest.”
He ignored her protest and reached for the honeypot on the top shelf. “You’ll feel better if you drink.”
Frustration flared in her. Dad always did this.
He thought medicine was something found in roots and petals, and maybe it was, maybe it should be, but the feelings inside her wouldn’t be chased away by anything he could bottle up.
She wasn’t like Arthur, who had always been so eager to accept her father’s remedies, putting his faith in their tinctures and balms. Peppermint for stomachaches.
Feverfew for migraines. Calendula for bee stings. Arthur had been a sponge to all of it.
But more than anything, he’d loved tea.
“I wonder if he missed this,” Dad said softly as he slowly turned the wooden honey dipper over her teacup. When the heat made his glasses fog up, Dad lifted them off his nose and hooked them on his collar. Eva’s eyes tracked the movement.
Root. Skin. Flesh. Forest.
She ripped her gaze away. “I doubt it.”
Her father flicked her a look, securing the lid of the hinge-top jar back on. He’d cut himself shaving, leaving behind a tiny smear of red-green blood on his jaw.
Eva still remembered the day the sprout in his chest had broken skin. She’d been hanging herbs in the greenhouse when Dad had bellowed in pain. She’d found him, passed out, with blood smeared over his hand, as though he’d tried to dig it out himself.
Eva blinked, her vision blurring. Sometimes it was painful to remember what he’d been like before. Arthur’s reappearance had unearthed old and tender wounds. A dark pool of blood staining hardwood. A body on the floor. Starlings in the rafters.
Her father, forever changed.
“Lottie loved this tea,” Dad said, his voice catching. “I named it after her, you know.”
“What?”
Dad seemed to catch himself. “Oh, never mind,” he said as he held out her teacup.
“But you just said—”
“I know,” he cut in. “But those are just memories, honeybee.”
She wanted to protest, to demand he go back and explain what he’d meant by that. He had named his blue tea after Charlotte? Eva thought it didn’t have a name.
Her father laid a hand on her arm. “Let it go,” he said. “I’m just sad today.”
Guilt shut her up quick. Of course he was.
Eva raised the teacup to her lips, her chest warming at the first sip.
“You and Arthur talk yet?” Dad asked.
She nearly spat out her tea. It burned up her throat to her nose. “What?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dad said too calmly. “The two of you make things right?”
Eva’s throat closed with a sudden, hard lump of emotion. No, they hadn’t made things right. She didn’t think they ever would, and if she was being honest, she wasn’t sure she even wanted them to.
“I’m taking him to get that tire patched this morning, before we scatter Lottie’s ashes. I don’t know how long the boy will stick around after that.”
The way he eyed her made her feel as transparent as the glass in the windows. Eva broke their eye contact and took a sip of tea, hating the way her body reacted to those words. She wanted Arthur to go. So why did the thought of him leaving again still sting?
The silence in their little kitchen seemed to grow heavier with every passing second. Dad’s expression shifted, worry lines creasing the planes of his face. “He isn’t doing well, is he?”
The man at their door last night had been near unrecognizable from the boy Eva remembered.
Even this morning, she’d been forced to acknowledge the signs of self-neglect staring her in the face.
The deep exhaustion bruising Arthur’s eyes.
The too-thin frame. He was underweight again, and tapping, like he always did when he was anxious.
“No,” Eva admitted, setting her teacup back onto its plate. Not well at all.