Chapter 9 Arthur, Before
Arthur,
Before
Mom lifted the strap of her camera bag over her head and slung it across my shoulder, careful as always to not let her fingers touch my skin. “There’s a fresh roll inside,” she said.
My chest tightened, and I thought of the summer she’d rented out a darkroom and taught me the painstaking process of photo development.
The sharp bite of chemicals had filled my nose as we’d loaded the film reel into a developing tank.
Mom had explained each step, so patient with me then.
Developer first, to expose the image. A stop bath to neutralize it.
Fixer to remove all unexposed silver halides and make a picture permanent.
It was chemistry to her. Magic to me.
“Be good for Jack,” Mom said softly.
Emotion clogged the space between my ribs, making words impossible.
As she stepped off the porch, Mom wiggled her fingers, a sad little smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Jack walked her to the Volkswagen, quietly saying something as he opened her door that I didn’t quite catch. Mom huffed a laugh and shook her head.
“I’m sorry about your nose.”
I all but jumped out of my skin as Eva appeared, holding a bright yellow plate and a trio of blueberry muffins, her smile rueful.
Jack was speaking again. I strained to hear, my attention slipping off his daughter. Mom scrawled something on a scrap of paper spread on the dashboard, then held it out to Jack, who pocketed it.
“Do you like blueberries?”
“I… What?”
The bee girl set the plate down and hopped onto the porch rail, her legs swinging underneath her. It seemed a strangely childlike gesture for someone who appeared to be my age. Sixteen, maybe seventeen at the most?
“I should have asked, before. I’m not bad at streusel, if you’d prefer that.”
She was making it so hard to focus. I shook my head, though I didn’t have anything against muffins, really. I’d simply lost my appetite.
Jack stepped back, and Mom slammed the door shut, her plastic smile slipping. As the Volkswagen rolled, spitting dust in its wake, the last string of hope in me snapped.
“Do you—”
I turned and bolted into the mudroom, fleeing the incessant line of questions.
Jack had put me in a spare room off the kitchen. Its main features included towers of fabric stacked against the wall and an old metal sewing machine thick with dust.
I locked the door and plopped down onto the bed. The pillowcase smelled like lemons.
I slept fitfully, hating how Mom filled the empty space even when she wasn’t there. I hated that I cared, when she clearly didn’t give a shit about me. Who the hell dumped their kid off with a stranger, anyway?
The sewing room was a saccharine prison in Pepto-Bismol pink.
For days, I avoided the Moreaus, stewing in my irritation as I read my books behind a locked door.
But it seemed the more pages I turned, the more my anger calcified into something duller, something hard and cold.
The monster was numbing me up again. It was the only real defense we had.
When you can’t change something, you have to find a way not to care about it so much.
Jack kept a plate of leftovers for me on constant rotation in the fridge. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how the ribs and chicken thighs turned my stomach.
Every morning, a yellow plate of pastries was left outside my door, which I ignored.
On the fifth day, however, the smell of pancakes reached into my dreams. I woke to the waft of maple syrup. When I rolled, squinting, my eyes fixed first on a plate of fluffy golden pancakes on my side table, then on the bee girl perched on top of my dresser.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she chirped.
I bolted upright with a gasp. “You’re… you’re in my room!”
She used her toe to point to the steaming offering. “You didn’t eat my muffins.”
My mouth gaped open.
“You didn’t eat my scones.” Eva scowled and hopped off the dresser. “I’m not making you croissants. They’re too hard.”
“What are you—?”
She cut me off. “I’m sorry I broke your nose.”
When she pulled her braid over her shoulder like that, she exposed a whole new bouquet of freckles.
I caught sight of a honeybee nesting in her hair.
More stirred on the windowsill. A twinge of discomfort flicked through me.
Intellectually, I knew bees were a vital part of our ecosystem, but they bore a remarkable resemblance to wasps, and wasps were, objectively, assholes.
I still hadn’t forgiven the mean little bastards for an incident last spring when a nest in our campsite fell from its branch and the hive blamed me for its shoddy construction. I was sore and swollen for days.
“Can you not do that?” I asked, pointing to where Eva was swirling a finger through the air. A honeybee chased it, seemingly entranced by the movement, until finally it landed on her nail.
The bee girl cocked a brow at me. “What, this?” She blew on the honeybee, coaxing it into flight again.
I stiffened. “Yes.”
“She won’t hurt you.”
“If you’re nice,” the monster finished, remembering what she’d said before. It shared none of my apprehension. On the contrary, the beast seemed delighted, even charmed, by our visitor. “You really should have eaten her muffins.”
“Don’t say it like that.” I realized too late that I’d spoken the words aloud.
“You talk to yourself. A lot.” Eva snatched up the plate, thrusting the fork in my face. “Now. Eat this and forgive me.”
A honeybee perched on her knuckle. I swallowed a biting retort and snatched the fork and plate from her, annoyed at her dogged persistence and somewhat perplexed that she seemed somewhat insulted. I hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings, but I also wasn’t interested in being her friend.
The monster flicked me. “Be nicer.”
I sighed. Maybe it was right. At the very least, fighting off her aggressive hospitality was getting a little exhausting. I didn’t know if her stubbornness was a farm-kid thing, but it was becoming clear that she wouldn’t relent until I accepted an olive branch.
The first bite of pancake melted in my mouth. The sweet and salty contrast of butter and syrup made my eyes roll back a moment. I barely hid a groan.
Eva smirked, but she didn’t say anything, just held out a glass of milk to wash it down.
“You are very persistent,” I muttered, stabbing another bite.
“Sure am.”
I nodded to the bees in her braid. “What’s the deal with that, anyway?” They followed her everywhere. It was deeply unsettling.
Eva pursed her lips, seeming to consider. “I’ll tell you, if you answer a question.”
I paused with a bite in my mouth, surprised. “What question?” I garbled.
The monster heated my cheeks. “Would you chew your food?” it gritted out. “You’re embarrassing us.”
“Your touch. It… hurts things?”
I swallowed a too-large bite. How the hell had she figured that out?
Before I could answer, Jack peered around the corner. “Eva,” he chided. “I told you not to bother him.”
Eva looked at me sweetly. “Am I bothering you, Arthur?”
I fumbled a reply, finding the word bothering wholly inadequate and hating the trickle of feeling that my name in her mouth sent up my spine. She said it like a secret.
“See, Dad?” Eva smiled, all innocence. “We’re just eating.”
Jack plucked a green sprig from his hairline. I did a double take. Is that a sprout? “Eat up, then. Got a lot of work to do today.”
When he left, I turned to Eva. “What work?”
She smiled. “We’re uncapping honeycomb. You’ll love it.”
When she turned to go, I snatched my jeans and a dirty T-shirt off the floor, dressing quickly, then followed the bee girl down the hall, irritation sparking.
She plucked two aprons off a hook in the mudroom, tossing me one of them.
“We’ll start with uncapping the wax from the hives in our own backyard.
” A strand of hair fell into her eyes as she tied the strings at the small of her back.
“Then we’ll move on to the apiary just north of the Walkers’ orchard. ”
I clutched the linen apron, worn soft from years of use. “I don’t work for you. Or your father.”
Eva shrugged. “Your loss. There’s nothing like fresh honeycomb, believe me. And spring’s harvest is the sweetest. Though”—she slipped into a pair of sandals—“autumn has the deepest flavor. If you stay here long enough to see the asters and goldenrod bloom, you can try that too.”
“I’m not staying,” I snapped.
I didn’t realize I was trailing after her until the door to the cottage clapped shut behind me.
Eva opened the chicken coop, and for some reason, I followed her inside.
Immediately, the swell and beat of too many hearts pressed against me.
The monster was wide-awake, its alertness to signs of life making the close space insufferable.
“Do you like birds, Arthur?”
My face snapped to hers. The question was innocent enough, but something about the too-easy way it had rolled off her tongue caught my attention.
“Yeah. I do,” I said carefully.
The hens were calm as Eva reached into the nesting boxes and gathered egg after egg, setting each into the wide, square pockets of her apron.
An Orpington with deep rusty hackle feathers poked her head through the coop door.
I loosed a breath. This bird wasn’t free, but she was soft and feathered, like all my favorite things.
“If you touched one of them,” Eva said casually, “would it hurt?”
My stomach corkscrewed. Why would she ask me that?
Eva waited, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t—answer.
My mind filled with a hundred different times when the beating heart of something alive had painfully slowed to a halt because of me, killed to sate the hungry thing that lived beneath my skin.
I couldn’t tell her that even though I hated myself for it, it felt good, necessary on a cellular level.
I couldn’t tell her that like a shriveled sprout in the dirt, I needed nutrients, nourishment, life, and that when I was desperate, I would take it every time.
I couldn’t tell her I craved it.
“What about me?” Eva didn’t move closer, but she may as well have. I felt her attention like a weight and stepped back. “Would you hurt me?”
“No,” the monster rasped inside my head.
I swallowed. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, bee girl.”
Eva’s lips puckered, like she wanted to ask more, then changed her mind. She led me out of the coop, the back of her heels striped in dark green excrement.
I squinted into the too-bright light. Asters bloomed a path down from the cottage, their petals uncurling like soft little stars.
I could have sworn they weren’t there before.
When Eva bent and picked one, she scratched the head of the same fluffy gray-and-white kitten I’d seen my first day here. It nuzzled her leg, purring loudly.
“I can feel it when they die, you know.” Eva’s eyes met mine. I sucked in a breath when she held the flower out. “Will you show me?”
“I… I can’t—”
“I know you do it. I want to see.” Eva wiggled the flower’s stem. I watched the aster lengthen, the cut vine curling back to wind around her wrist.
“The flowers respond to her,” the monster said in amazement.
Eva’s expression grew more serious. “I’m not afraid of dead things, Arthur.”
That irritated me more than anything else. I snatched the aster from her and tore off my glove. I didn’t know how she could feel what I could do, but she was wrong to think I was anything less than a plague.
And I would prove it.
The instant the aster touched my skin, it wilted in my palm and its energy moved into me, unseen.
Within me, the monster straightened. “It tastes like honey,” it whispered in wonderment.
Eva watched, transfixed. I waited for the fear to come. I waited for disgust. Gingerly, she took the weed back, holding it up to the light, and I watched, mouth agape, as the dead thing came back to life again and bloomed for her.
“So.” Eva’s triumphant smile was a confirmation. “You’re like me.”