Chapter 38 Arthur
Arthur
There was nothing quite like honeycomb.
Still warm from the sun, the hexagonal cells split under my teeth. The rich, sweet flavor slicked back over my tongue and into my cheek in a sugared burst, viscous and heady.
It was summer.
And summer melted ice.
The wall holding me captive in my own mind dissolved in a trickle, the return to myself painful in the way of a numb limb reexperiencing the rush of blood flow. I gasped, biting my tongue in surprise as the monster’s hold sloughed off, leaving me heavy instead of weightless, my head pounding.
And I was reminded at once that sometimes it hurts to exist.
“Help her,” the monster begged aloud, and I didn’t know if it was speaking to me or to the spirit of the wood, my mother, who still watched silently, but the instant I took a breath, relief and agony twining with the swell of my lungs, something changed.
It started as a glow deep within my ribs. Over the years, I had gotten used to the monster’s awareness tuning my senses to the beating life surrounding us, but this awakening was different. Not a hunger to take but the pressure to grow. To create.
When I gasped, the ground at my feet burst into life with a crackle, daffodils jutting their thin green necks past the press of my knees, their sepals opening bright yellow faces to the sun.
My heart pounded, a newborn power pulsing beneath my skin.
It sang in my ears, sunlight spilling like a cracked yolk over the hills at dawn.
Shock rippled through me. This wasn’t Eva’s magic.
It was mine.
Human beings are not meant to hold the forest inside them, the spirit of the wood said, her voice gentler now than it had been before. That’s why it hurts, at first.
I looked at her and tried, for a moment, to see the mother I wanted to remember. She’d been the whole world to me, once. Now she was a stranger, pulling more questions to the surface than answers.
“What do I do?” I begged.
The aspens forming the shape of her groaned as she raised a bark-covered finger and pointed to the wound in Eva’s side. You heal.
I blanched. “I don’t know how!”
The spirit of the wood shrugged.
Eva’s words came back to me in a flash, stolen from years ago. I mend things, she’d said.
Her eyelids had closed and I felt her pulse growing ever fainter. There was no room for error, no time for mistakes. She had seconds, minutes at most.
Tenderly, I lifted a lock of hair out of her eyes. “You have to live, Ev.” A scant, delicate whisper as tears slid down my cheeks and dripped into her hair. “Please. Stay with me.”
I gathered her against me, my desperation lancing down into the rootscapes below, wilting the grass, then restoring it over and over. I was undone, unleashed, more broken than I had ever been. I was life and death, unbound by the sharp cut of my grief.
“Stay with me now,” I hoarsed out. “Stay with me forever, bee girl. I need to make things right between us. Don’t leave me before I get the chance.”
A nearby oak gave a loud moan as it crashed to the forest floor, the split of its trunk like snapping celery.
Honeybees buzzed furiously overhead. One of them landed on Eva’s shoulder.
Then another, in her hair. I held my breath and watched them gather, landing on her one by one.
It was a strange and beautiful sight, and I watched, immobilized by the sudden, overwhelming feeling of sacredness settling around us.
Something changed.
The glow in my chest ballooned down to my fingertips.
I couldn’t feel the monster, nor could I hear its voice, as sunshine and power poured into my limbs, filling my heart to bursting.
I gathered all the love I could muster for Eva, all the years spent missing her, all the ways she’d changed me and made me new.
The flowers around us seemed to sigh, the heartbeat of the earth so close I could taste it. I could take it.
But I didn’t want to take things anymore. I wanted to mend.
A heady sensation filled the gaps in my mind where the darkness lay. But this was not my monster. It was sweet, and it poured through me, through Eva too, bright and sweet as sticky, sugary gold. Every breath was honeyed. Every breath was life.
With a guttural pop, Eva’s ribs snapped back into place, expelling the lodged bullet into my palm. I gasped and dropped it in the grass.
Eva’s cheeks flushed pink. Her eyelids fluttered as she arched off the grass. I watched in awe as the skin around her wound knit itself closed, leaving behind a pale pink scar. Tears pooled in my eyes. Scars were okay. Scars were beautiful. Scars meant you still got to live.
“Ev?” I whispered, my voice shaking as I dragged her close. The world seemed to hold its breath as her eyelids fluttered, then opened.
“Arthur?”
With a sob, I gathered her to my chest. Eva clung to me, crying too.
My life had been a series of unsure things, the ground beneath me always shifting.
I’d traversed the dark more nights than I could count and knew too well the clawing pain of doubt and self-loathing.
But she was soil, a place where I could put down roots.
I’d known eight years ago as surely as I knew it now, because even then, when I saw only the parts of me that were hungry and lacking and frail, she saw me.
“You’re okay,” I promised. “We’re okay, bee girl.”
It took a minute for the panic to leave her eyes as she looked from me to the empty clearing. “But… Lenny?”
“Ran off,” I murmured, thumbing the soft apple of her cheek.
Eva’s gaze flicked to my face, and she touched the trail of blood running down my temple. “Your stitches…”
“I don’t even feel them,” I said reassuringly.
Eva shook her head and touched my brow. “No, I mean they’re gone.”
“What?”
“The infection,” she said in growing confusion, her brows knitting as she sat up. “It’s healed.”
I lifted my hand to touch where she pointed, and felt my lips pucker in surprise. She was right. Where the skin had been swollen and hot to the touch, now I felt only the smooth slice of a healed scar cutting through my eyebrow.
The honey had worked.
A meow drew my attention to where Bug was bolting toward us through the grass. The sight took me so by surprise that I didn’t even have time to retract my hand before she bumped her forehead against my knuckles.
Too late, I snatched my hand away.
But the snuggly fur ball didn’t seem fazed. She didn’t seize up in sudden rictus, and her heart beat fast as she leapt onto my lap.
The monster swirled around my spine, as stunned as I was.
“How…?” The words had hardly left my tongue before Bug dug her claws into my leg. “Ouch! No claws, please!”
Eva laughed in disbelief. “You can touch her!”
I blinked. I can touch her.
An idea formed, and I palmed the grass below me.
At first, the tendrils woke and swirled up over my fingers.
I passed Bug to Eva and closed my eyes, reaching for the monster in my depths.
I’d never tried to use the death-touch of my own accord, but I had to know something.
Slowly, it rose to the surface. As one, the blades of grass shriveled back into crisp yellow weeds.
I took a breath. When I let it go, the monster pulled back, working with me. The glow in my ribs pulsed like a tiny sun, and the grass grew back.
The spirit of the wood shifted, her leaves rippling over her torso in an illusion of hair as she held out the honeycomb again. Her breath filled the whole glade with the sound of rushing wind. For Jack, she said, the words sounding unsteady for the first time.
I accepted the proffered gift, a strange ache in my chest. It took me a moment to register it as gratitude. It wasn’t an emotion I was used to feeling when it came to the woman who’d raised me. I’d loved her forever and hated her nearly as long for not loving me back.
Or not loving me right.
But as I stared at the spirit of the wood, the curl of her shoulders surprisingly human, something in me softened.
I didn’t want to bear the weight of our bad days anymore. I didn’t know if I could forgive her yet, but for the first time in a long time, I knew I wanted to someday. There was a good person wrapped in all her mistakes. Just like me.
The monster swirled in my depths, calm and content for the first time in months as I resolved to try to let it all go, start anew, and plant a fresh beginning.
Remember your promise, said the spirit of the wood as she began to unravel, the cracking of branches and rustle of leaves an almost violent unmaking. Tell the bees.
“I will.” I stared, squeezing Eva’s hand, until the spirit was gone and the groan of the woods gave way to a new sound. I frowned, trying to place the distant thrum.
“What is that?” Eva asked, following my gaze.
My heart leapt in my chest.
There, beyond where the treetops met a saffron sky, a helicopter was pointed our way.