One
SASHA’S 22nd BIRTHDAY
JUNE 6
Sasha stepped off the sour-smelling bus hoping the taste of chaff in the air would guide her back to the farmhouse. Every night since her father had gone to prison, she had visualized walking up the sagging porch stairs, retracing the familiar path down the hall, fingertips recounting each dent in the scuffed chair rail, every flourish in the wrought-iron heat vents.
She hadn’t been this close to her childhood home in eleven years, but it had never felt farther away.
The hydraulic bus door screeched as it slammed closed. Sasha jumped sideways and the bus lurched away.
After six steps on the broken pavement, memory tingled in her feet, her knees, and the thumping space in her chest. When she first landed in state care, she used to spin herself dizzy to see if she could intuit which direction led back to the farm. No matter how long she spun, and even if she tripped or fell, she always recognized the beeline home before opening her eyes.
Flanking the desolate road, fields that once swayed with barley and rye now teemed with an untamed fervor that prodded at the dormant wildness in Sasha. She yanked up a tuft of tall grass, clotted dirt clinging to the roots. The earthy aroma, the precise mixture of life and decay that punctuated her childhood, greeted her like an old friend and conjured a longing to howl into the wind whipping her hair across her face.
Sometimes the vibrations in Sasha’s fingertips, ghosts of the bees she and her father once tended, swarmed her with aggression, attacking her from the inside. Too much lost when the bees died. Too much wrenched from her tattered, younger self. Other days, the gentle hum enveloped Sasha in tender, honey-soaked memories of her father’s beard and a world that had not yet come undone.
She no longer whipped her head around to chase rogue flickers in her peripheral vision. The barely audible hum of tiny, nonexistent wings hovering close to her ear rarely tempted her to close her eyes and hope anymore.
Her bees, like nearly all the pollinators, had disappeared more than a decade ago.
As Sasha trudged up the final hill toward her childhood home, the familiar buzz warmed her fingertips. She shook her hands out, forcing blood into her fingers, and clapped to dispel the phantom hum.
She shouldn’t have waited so long to return home. She had aged out of the state juvenile-care system four years ago. Since then, she had relentlessly promised herself she’d return to find the research her father buried. Soon, she repeated in her mind every night before slipping off to sleep. Soon.
But she couldn’t take time off work from the bike shop. The bus ticket cost too much. The walk from the bus stop was too long. Convenient reasons to avoid home made staying away an easy habit, one she could no longer indulge. Her father’s first parole hearing was scheduled in less than a month and she intended to unearth the documents he buried before his release. If he found them first, Sasha might never understand what she helped him hide all those years ago. She might never understand the truth about why he chose prison over her.
The media already hummed with news of the hearing. WILL THE LAST BEEKEEPER BE RELEASED EARLY? WILL THE LAST BEEKEEPER’S DAUGHTER TESTIFY ON HIS BEHALF?
The letter from her father’s lawyer requesting her presence at the parole hearing lay crumpled in a pocket of her backpack. Writing a dispassionate note on her father’s behalf instead of appearing in person had been the coward’s way out, but hadn’t she learned that maneuver from her dad, who chose to hide behind his secrets instead of parenting his motherless child?
The first night Sasha spent in the state home, she made herself three promises, and every night since she had renewed the vow before going to sleep. Find the research. Understand the truth. Rebuild a family.
But now, as she took the first steps toward acting on her oaths, she worried she wouldn’t find anything at the farm and would have nothing left to promise herself, other than rebuilding a family, which seemed more unlikely than unearthing the mythic lost documents.
Maybe it would be better not to try.
Dust from the road clung to the sticky saliva gathering in the corners of her mouth. Sasha adjusted the backpack on her aching shoulders and took a swig of water from a nearly empty bottle.
She stopped visiting her father in prison years ago. Not because she didn’t love him, but because she couldn’t take the bullying by other kids. But now, with the possibility of his imminent release, Sasha needed to know what she helped her father bury in the field all those years ago. She needed to understand why he chose to protect those documents instead of her. And more than anything, she needed to finally understand if it had all been her fault.
The weight of everything she owned thumped against her body as she swung her violin case to maintain momentum as she approached the driveway.
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING.
Hand-painted red letters on a sheet of plywood leaned against a large rock marking the driveway.
Fucking squatters.
Technically, the farm had defaulted to state ownership when her father went to prison. She had no legal claim, but this land belonged to her and she to it. Local officials wouldn’t notice if she camped out for a few nights. Squatters, however, would fight.
Sasha kicked the sign, the impact on the rubber toe of her boot reverberating in her knee. This was her home. She kicked it again, cracking the brittle wood, but not breaking it.
Sasha didn’t want a fight, but she refused to turn back.
What right did squatters have to turn her away?
She quickened her pace and passed the weatherworn barn that had once been her mother’s workshop. Her eyes stung as she faced the house she had been dreaming of for years, but her dehydrated body failed to conjure tears. The garden spilled onto the driveway in a tangled mess. Shutters hung at odd angles. A dry sob stuck in her throat when she saw the silvery leaves of her mother’s unruly lavender, lording over the weeds.
The tire swing she and her father used to beat like a piñata to vent their frustrations twisted in the wind, the rusty chain creaking with the familiar groan that made Sasha’s knees wobble.
She drank the last swallow of water, dropped her pack to the ground, and ignored the buzz building in her ears. It’s not real. They’re gone.
She knelt on the ground and leaned her elbows on her pack, taking in the familiar but altered scene. A tower of rusty bike wheels impaled on a spike stood in front of the porch. Of all things to survive time and looters. The day she and her father moved her hives to hide them in the forest, she had marked the hives’ location with the sculpture, a monument to all she and her father failed to protect.
As she ran a finger absentmindedly over the cracked leather of her violin case, something landed on the handle.
At first, she mistook the insect for debris carried by the wind, but the wind had stilled. Her throat tightened as the shiny stinger twitched.
A bee.
Her skin burned with the decades-old guilt of her role in the demise of the final bee colony. The last of their kind.
No one had seen a honey bee in the wild for eleven years.
Yet there it sat. A bee. A perfect, beautiful bee, taunting her. Haunting her.
Apis mellifera, her father’s voice boomed in her mind.
The Earth seemed to stutter on its axis as Sasha stared at the fuzzy body, the threadlike antennae. As the bee rose into the air in front of her, the whir of its wings stirred a faded memory as elusive as a forgotten color.
The vibrato hummed in her teeth as the bee lowered itself to walk across the violin case.
She squeezed her eyes shut against the mirage summoned by her desperate need to believe some bees had survived.
She had spent her first eleven years helping her father tend bees, and every year since trying to forget the hypnotic sound of being surrounded by them.
Sasha, of all people, didn’t fall for the bee-sighting hysteria. She knew the truth.
The bees were gone.
Sasha stared at the figment, willing it to dissipate. Was she so weak her mind could conjure a bee to appease the empty, aching space in her chest?
Entranced by the impossible creature—conjured by heat, dehydration, or the shock of being home—Sasha didn’t notice the man emerging from the farmhouse.
“Pick up your pack and turn around,” he shouted, a rifle on his shoulder aimed at Sasha’s chest.
Sasha jumped to her feet, knocking her pack over.
“Pilgrims are no longer welcome here.”
When she looked down, the imaginary bee had vanished.
Two
SASHA’S 22nd BIRTHDAY
JUNE 6
Sasha froze as the man stepped onto the porch, followed by another man and a woman, all of whom appeared to be in their mid-twenties.
“Are you lost?” A tall woman with light brown skin and long, wavy hair walked down the stairs toward Sasha. A swath of fabric wrapped around her waist flapped in the breeze.
Sasha didn’t answer.
“Our sign’s hard to miss.”
Sasha wiped the crust from the corners of her mouth and put her hands over her head.
“I’ll get you a drink,” the woman said. “Then you can move on.”
Sasha picked up her bag and violin case and followed the woman up the porch stairs. The scent of lavender gathered into a thick lump in her throat. She tried to swallow it down, but her throat was too dry, and she gagged.
The two men watched Sasha as she passed them, but they didn’t speak to her.
“Where do you source your water?” Sasha asked as she walked into her own kitchen. She placed her palm on the scored butcher block island, feeling the grooves carved by knives that might have been her mother’s.
“From a creek in the woods. We filter and boil it.” The woman poured a mug of water from a jug and handed it to Sasha.
Sasha assessed the slightly cloudy water.
“We’ve been here six months, and no one’s gotten sick.” The woman jumped up to sit on the butcher block in the exact spot Sasha’s mother used to sit. We have chairs, you know, her father used to tease.
There were no chairs in the kitchen now. She had expected that looters would have cleaned the house out, but seeing the empty space hurt like an old wound that refused to heal. This woman seemed too comfortable in Sasha’s house, sitting on Sasha’s counter.
“Are you thirsty or not?”
Sasha gulped the tepid water.
“Are you allowed to be here?” Sasha asked. Shaded squares on the faded yellow wallpaper outlined where her father’s watercolor paintings once hung.
“Are you allowed to be here? That’s the question you should be concerned with.” The woman folded her arms across her chest and squinted at Sasha.
“Can I stay?” Sasha clenched her jaw, wanting to yell at them, and kick them out of her home. “Just for a while.”
The two men walked into the kitchen.
“Sorry, we’re out of rooms,” the tall guy with the rifle said. He had blond hair, high, round cheeks, and a heavy brow.
“I can pay you. Just let me stay a week,” Sasha said. They could easily rob her and take all her money, but she couldn’t think of another option. “I need a place to rest up, then I’ll move on.”
“Are you a pilgrim?” the woman asked.
“A what?”
“Did you come to pay homage to the last bees? Or are you a conspiracy theorist trying to uncover ‘the truth’?” She waved air quotes as she said the truth.
“No.” Sasha’s response came out too aggressively, nearly a shout. “Who would do that?”
“You just happened to stumble on the home of the Last Beekeeper?”
Sasha dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands. If they forced her to leave, she wouldn’t be able to search for her father’s research, which mattered more than staking a claim on the house that should rightfully be hers. She tried to maintain a neutral, nonthreatening demeanor, but inside she seethed. What did they know about the beekeeper or the truth?
“I just want a place to sleep.”
The three friends exchanged glances.
“Money up front,” the blond guy said. “Don’t go in the bedrooms. And don’t take any of our food unless we specifically offer it to you.”
Copyright © 2023 by Julie Carrick Dalton
