olivia 1
December 7, 2018
the day of
From the moment I knew I was going to have a baby, I wanted it to be a girl. I wandered the aisles of department stores, fingering doll dresses and tiny sequined shoes. I pictured us with matching nail polish, me who had never had a manicure in my life. I imagined the day her fairy hair was long enough to be captured in pigtails, her nose pressed against the glass of a school bus window; I saw her first crush, prom dress, heartbreak. each vision was a bead in a rosary of future memories; I prayed daily.
Turns out I wasn’t a fan. . . just a martyr.
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When I gave birth and the doctor announced the sex of the baby, I didn’t believe it at first. he had done such a stellar job of convincing me of what he wanted that I completely forgot what I needed. But when I held Asher, slippery as a minnow, I was relieved.
Better to have a child, who would never be a victim of anyone.
most people in adams, new hampshire know me by name, and those who don’t know to stay away from my home. It’s often like this for beekeepers: like firefighters, we willingly put ourselves in situations that are everyone else’s nightmares. Honey bees are much less vindictive than their yellow jacket cousins, but people often can’t tell the difference, so anything that stings and buzzes is considered a potential hazard. A few hundred yards beyond the old cape, my colonies form a semicircular rainbow of hives, and most of spring and summer bees glide between them and the acres of flowers they pollinate, humming a warning.
I grew up on a small farm that had been in my father’s family for generations: an apple orchard that, in the fall, sold cider and donuts made by my mother, and in the summer, ate strawberries of choice. fields. we were land rich and cash poor. my father was a hobby beekeeper, as was his father before him, and so on, up to the first mcafee, who was an original settler from adams. it is far enough from the white mountain national forest to have affordable real estate. the town has a traffic light, a bar, a restaurant, a post office, a town park that used to be a communal sheep grazing area, and slade brook, a creek whose name was misspelled on a geological survey map of 1789, but which remained . Slate Brook, as it should have been spelled, got its name from the rock of the same name quarried from its banks, which was shipped far and wide to be made into headstones. slade was the last name of the town’s drunken local undertaker, who had a tendency to wander off when he was on a spree and who, ironically, killed by drowning in six inches of water in the creek.
When I first brought Braden to meet my parents, I told him that story. he had been driving at the time; his smile flashed like lightning. but who, he had asked, buried the undertaker?
Back then, we lived outside of DC, where Braden was a cardiac surgery resident at Johns Hopkins and I was working at the National Zoo, trying to raise enough money for a graduate program in zoology. We had only been together three months, but I had already moved in with him. We were visiting my parents that weekend because I knew, in my gut, that Braden Fields was the one.
On that first trip back home, I was so sure of what the future would bring. I was wrong on all counts. I never expected to be a beekeeper like my father; I never thought I would sleep in my childhood room again as an adult; I never imagined that he would set me up on a farm owned by my older brother, Jordan, and one time I couldn’t wait to leave. i married braden; he obtained a scholarship in the general mass; we moved to boston; I was the wife of a doctor. then, almost a year to the day of my wedding anniversary, my father didn’t come home one night after checking his welts. my mother found him, dead of a heart attack in the tall grass, with a halo of bees on her head.
my mother sold the land that had our apple orchard to a couple from brooklyn. she kept the strawberry fields, but she was completely lost when it came to my father’s hives. Since my brother was busy with a high-end legal career and my mother was allergic to bees, the apiary fell on me. for five years, he drove every week from boston to adams to take care of the colonies. after he was born asher, he would bring him with me, leaving him in the company of my mother while he checked for hives. i fell in love with beekeeping, the slow motion flow of pulling a frame out of a hive, where’s waldo? look for the queen I expanded from five colonies to fifteen. I experimented with bee genetics with colonies from Russia, from Slovenia, from Italy. I signed pollination contracts with the Brooklynites and three other local fruit orchards, installing new hives on their premises. I harvested, processed, and sold honey and beeswax products at farmers’ markets from the Canadian border to suburban Massachusetts. I became, almost by accident, the first commercially successful beekeeper in the history of McAfee Beekeepers. By the time Asher and I permanently moved to Adams, I knew I might never get rich doing this, but I could make a living.
My father taught me that beekeeping is both a burden and a privilege. you don’t bother the bees unless they need your help, and you help them when they need it. it is a feudal relationship: protection in exchange for a percentage of the fruits of their labor.
Taught me that if a body is easily crushed, develop a weapon to prevent that from happening.
taught me that sudden movements sting you.
I took these lessons too seriously.
On the day of my father’s funeral, and years later, on the day of my mother’s funeral, I told the bees. it is an old tradition to inform them of a death in the family; if a beekeeper dies and the bees are not asked to stay with their new master, they will leave. in new hampshire, the custom is to sing and the news has to rhyme. so I covered each cologne with black crepe, softly called, hummed the truth. my beekeeping net became a funeral veil. the hive might as well have been a coffin.
when I came downstairs that morning, asher was in the kitchen. We have a deal, whoever gets up first makes the coffee. my mug still has a wisp of steam coming out of it. he’s stuffing cereal into his mouth, absorbed in his phone.
“Good morning,” I say, and he growls back.
for a moment, he let me look at him. it’s hard to believe that the soft-core kid who cried when his hands got sticky with propolis from the hives can now lift a super-full of forty pounds of honey like he weighed no more than his hockey stick. Asher is over six feet tall, but even when he was growing up, he was never lanky. he moves with the kind of grace you find in bobcats, the kind that can steal a kitten or chick before you know they’re gone. Asher has my blonde hair and the same ghost green eyes, for which I have always been grateful. he has his father’s last name, but if i also had to see braden every time i look at my son, it would be a lot more difficult.
I catalog the breadth of her shoulders, the damp curls at the nape of her neck; the way the tendons in your forearms move and play as you scroll through your texts. it’s shocking, sometimes, to be confronted with this when a second ago he sat on my shoulders, trying to pull down a star and unravel a thread of the night.
“didn’t you practice this morning?” I ask, taking a sip of my coffee. asher has been playing hockey since we live here; he skates as easily as he walks. he was named captain as a junior and re-elected this year, as a senior. I can never remember if they have track time before or after school as it changes every day.
Her lips twitch in a slight smile and she types a reply into her phone, but doesn’t pick up.
“hello?” I say. I slide a piece of bread into the old-fashioned toaster, which is armed with duct tape that occasionally catches fire. breakfast for me is always toast and honey, never in short supply.
“I guess you have practice later,” I try, and then give the answer that asher doesn’t. “Why yes, Mom, thanks for taking such an active interest in my life.”
I cross my arms over my cable knit sweater. “Am I too old to wear this tank top?” I ask lightly.
silence.
“Sorry I won’t be here for dinner, but I’m running away with a cult.”
I narrow my eyes. “I posted that nude photo of you when you were a little kid on instagram for Thursday’s memory.”
asher growls noncommittally. my toast appears; I smear it with honey and slide into the chair directly across from Asher. “I would really prefer that you don’t use my master card to pay for your pornhub subscription.”
His eyes dart to mine so fast I think I can hear his neck snap. “what? ”
“oh hi,” I say softly. “It’s good to have her attention.”
Asher shakes his head, but hangs up the phone. “I didn’t use his master card,” she says.
“I know.”
“I used your amex”.
I laughed.
“also: never wear a tank top,” he says. “Jesus.”
“so you were listening.”
“How could I not do it?” Asher shudders. “just for the record, no one
someone else’s mother talks about porn over breakfast.”
“aren’t you the lucky one, then?”
“Well,” he says, shrugging. “Yes.” she raises her cup of coffee, clinks
to mine, and sips.
I don’t know what other parents’ relationships with their
are like.
kids, but the one between me and asher was forged in fire and maybe that’s why he’s invincible. even though he’d rather be caught dead than hugged after a winning game, when it’s just the two of us, we’re our own universe, a moon and planet linked in orbit. Asher may not have grown up in a two-parent household, but the one he does have would fight to the death for him.
“Speaking of porn,” I reply, “how’s lily?”
he chokes on his coffee. “If you love me, you will never say that phrase again.”
asher’s girlfriend is petite, brunette, with a smile so wide that it completely changes the landscape of her face. if asher is strength, then she is flamboyant, a goblin who keeps him from taking himself too seriously; a question mark at the end of his predictably popular life. Asher had no shortage of romantic entanglements with girls he’s known since kindergarten. Lily is a newcomer in town.
This fall they have been inseparable. Usually at dinner, it’s either lily did this or lily said that.
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“I haven’t seen her this week,” I say.
Asher’s phone rings. his thumbs fly, responding.
“oh, to be young and in love,” I ponder. “and unable to spend thirty seconds without communicating.”
“I’m texting dirk. she broke a cord and wants to know if I have more”.
one of the guys on his hockey team. I don’t have any real proof, but I’ve always felt that dirk is the guy who oozes charm whenever he’s in front of me and then when I walk away he says something vile, like your mom’s hot, bro.
“will lily be at your game on saturday?” I ask. she should come later for dinner.
Asher nods and puts the phone in his pocket. “I have to go.” “You haven’t even finished your cereal—”
“I’m going to be late.”
takes one last long sip of coffee, slides his backpack over his
shoulder and grabs the car keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter. he drives a 1988 jeep that he bought with the salary he earned as a counselor at a hockey camp.
“grab a coat!” I call, as he’s walking out the door. “is—”
his breath mists in the air; she slips behind the wheel and turns the ignition.
“snowing”, I finish.
December is when beekeepers catch their breath. Autumn is a whirlwind of activity, starting with harvesting honey, then handling mite loads and preparing the bees to survive a new hampshire winter. this involves mixing a heavy sugar syrup which is poured into a hive top feeder, then wrapping the entire hive to insulate it before the first cold snap. bees conserve their energy in the winter, just like the beekeeper.
I’ve never been very good with downtime.
There’s snow on the ground, and that’s enough to send me up to the attic for the box of Christmas decorations. They are the same ones my mother used when I was little: ceramic snowmen for the kitchen table; electric candles to put in each window at night, a string of lights for the mantelpiece. there’s also a second box, with our stockings and tree decorations, but it’s tradition that asher and i hang them together. maybe this weekend we’ll cut down our tree. we could do it after his game on saturday, with lily.
I’m not ready to lose him.
the thought stops me in my tracks. even if we don’t invite lily to come pick out a tree with us, to decorate it while he tells you the story behind the stick reindeer ornament he made in preschool or the impossibly tiny baby shoes for both him and me , which we always use. higher branches, soon another will join our group of two. It’s what I want most for Asher, the relationship that I don’t have. I know that love is not a zero sum game, but I am selfish enough to hope that it will be all mine for a while longer.
I dragged the first box up the attic stairs and heard asher’s voice in my head: why didn’t you wait? I could have taken it down for you. Peering through the open door to her bedroom, I roll my eyes at her unmade bed. It drives me crazy that she doesn’t tuck the sheets in; It drives him equally crazy to do it, when he knows he’ll be back in a few hours. With a sigh, I put down the box and walk into Asher’s room. he lifted the covers, smoothing the sheets on him. as I do, a book falls to the floor.
is a blank journal, on which asher has drawn with colored pencil. there is a bee, hovering over an apple blossom, so close you can see its jaws working and the pollen caught on its legs. there’s my old truck, a light blue 1960 ford that belonged to my father.
Asher has always had this softer side, I love him even more for that. when he was little it was clear that he had artistic talent, and once I even enrolled him in a painting class, but his hockey friends found out. when he messed up doing a passing drill, one of them said that maybe he should stop holding his cane like bob ross held a brush, and he dropped the art. now, when he draws, it is in private. he never shows me his work. but we also get college brochures in the mail from risd and scad, and I didn’t ask for them.
I turn the next few pages. there is a drawing that is clearly me, although he has captured me from behind, while I am standing at the sink. I look tired, spent. Is that what you think of me? I wonder.
a chipmunk, eyes bright with defiance. a stone wall a girl, lily?, with her arm over her eyes, lying on a bed of leaves, naked from the waist up.
Immediately, I drop the book as if it were on fire. I press my palms against my cheeks.
It’s not that I didn’t think he was intimate with his girlfriend; but then again, it’s not like we talked about it either. at one point, when he started high school, I proactively started buying condoms and dropped them off quite naturally along with the usual drugstore swag of deodorant, razors, and shampoo. asher loves lily, even if she hasn’t told me outright, i see it in the way he lights up when she sits next to her, how he checks her seatbelt when she gets in the car she.
After a minute, I mess up Asher’s sheets and comforter again. I tuck the journal under a fold of the bedclothes, pick up the pair of socks, and close the bedroom door behind me.
I pick up the Christmas box in my arms again, thinking of two things: that memories weigh so much; and that my son has a right to his secrets.
Beekeeping is the second oldest profession in the world. The first beekeepers were the ancient Egyptians. the bees were royal symbols, the tears of re, the sun god.
In Greek mythology, the nymphs taught Aristaeus, the god of beekeeping, to take care of the bees. He fell in love with Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice. when he was dodging his advances, he stepped on a snake and died. Orpheus went to hell itself to bring her back, and Eurydice’s nymph sisters punished Aristaeus by killing all of her bees.
the bible promises a land of milk and honey. the quran says that paradise has rivers of honey for those who protect themselves against evil. Krishna, the Hindu deity, is often shown with a blue bee on his forehead. The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of justice and mercy of honey, side by side.
the first voodoo dolls were molded with beeswax; an oungan might tell you to spread honey on a person to keep ghosts at bay; a manbo would make small cakes of honey, amaranth and whiskey, which, eaten before the new moon, could show you your future.
Sometimes I wonder which of my prehistoric ancestors first stuck his arm into a hole in a tree. Did she come out with a handful of honey, or a handful of stingers? Is the promise of one worth the risk of the other?
When the interior of the house is covered in its holiday jewelry, I put on my winter boots and a parka and walk the surface of the property to collect evergreen branches. this forces me to skate along the edges of the fields with the few apple trees that still belong to my family. against the frozen ground, they look insidious and witchy, their gnarled arms outstretched, the wind whispering with the voice of dead leaves, closer, closer. asher used to climb them; once he got so high I had to call the fire department to get him down, like he was a cat. I swing my handsaw as I slip into the woods behind the orchard, twigs snapping under my feet. there are so many trees whose feathered branches I can reach; most are taller than I can reach on tiptoe, but there is satisfaction in gathering what I can. the pile of pines, spruces, and firs grows, and it takes me three trips to bring it all back through the orchards to the farm porch.
When I have my raw materials (the branches and a spool of florist’s wire), my cheeks are flushed and shiny and the tips of my ears are numb. I place the evergreens on the porch floor, trim them with pruning shears, double and triple the branches to make them thick. In the Christmas box I took down earlier is a long string of lights that I’ll weave through my garland when I’m done with this step; then I can place the greenery around the front door frame.
I’m not sure what makes me think something is looking at me.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up and I turn slowly towards the barren strawberry fields.
In the snow, they look like a row of white cotton. so late in the year, the back of the field is shrouded in shadow. in summer, we have raccoons and deer chasing strawberries; from time to time there is a coyote. however, when it’s almost winter, the predators have mostly taken refuge in their dens—
I run to my hives.
Before it reaches the electric fence around them, the banana smell is pungent, the surest sign that the bees are angry. four hives are robust and silent, nestled tightly within their isolation. but the box all the way to the right has broken into splinters. I name all my queen bees after female divas: Adele, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Whitney, and Mariah. Taylor, Britney, Miley, Aretha and Ariana are in the apple orchard; in other contracts i have sia, dionne, cher and katy. the hive that has been attacked is celine’s.
one side of the electric fence has been crossed and trampled. wooden struts from the hive are scattered all over the snowy ground; pieces of Styrofoam have been torn to pieces. I trip over a piece of broken honeycomb with a bear print.
I squint at the dark line where the field turns to forest, but the bear is already gone. the bees would have literally killed each other to get rid of their attacker, stinging it away.
It is not the first time that a bear has attacked a hive, but it is the last thing that has happened in the beekeeping season.
I walk into the brush near the edge of the field, trying to find any remaining bees that might not have frozen. a little knot boils and drips, dark as molasses, onto the bare crotch of a sugar maple. I can’t see celine, but if the bees have escaped, there’s a chance she’s with them.
Sometimes, in spring, the bees form a swarm. you might find them like this, at the bivouac stage, the temporary site before they fly off to whatever they’ve decided their new home should be.
When bees swarm in spring it’s because they’ve run out of space in the hive.
When bees swarm in spring, they are full of honey, happy and calm.
When the bees swarm in the spring, you can often recapture them and place them in a new box, where they have plenty of room for their brood cells, pollen, and honey.
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this is not a swarm. these bees are angry and these bees are desperate.
“Stay,” I plead, and then run back to the farm as fast as I can.
It takes me three trips, each half a mile through the fields, skating on the snow. I have to get a new wooden base and an empty hive from a colony that failed last year, in which I will try to divert the bees; I have to get my bee kit from the basement, where I’ve stored it for the winter: my smoker and hive tool, some wire and a bee brush, my hat, veil, and gloves. I’m sweating by the time I’m done, my hands are shaking and have sausage fingers from the cold. Clumsily, I grab the few frames that can be saved from the bear’s attack and place them in the breeding box. I sew some of the freshly broken honeycomb onto the frames with wire, hoping the bees will be drawn to the familiar. when the new box is installed, I walk over to the sugar maple.
the light is so low now, because dusk comes early. I see the movement of the bees rather than their actual squirming outline. If asher were here, I could ask him to hold the brood box directly under the branch while I put the bees in it, but I’m on my own.
It takes me several tries to light a curl of birch bark to light my smoker; there is enough wind to make it difficult. Finally, a red ember crackles, and I drop it into the little metal pot, onto a handful of wood chips. the smoke comes out of the narrow neck while I pump the bellows several times. I take a few puffs near the bees; it dulls your senses and takes away the aggressive edge.
I put on my hat and veil and pick up the same handsaw I used on the evergreen branches. the branch is about six inches too high for me to reach. Cursing, I heave the broken wooden base of the old frame under the tree and gingerly try to balance on what’s left of it. the odds are about equal that I’ll get the branch sawed off or break my ankle. I almost cry with relief when the branch is free and I carry it slowly and gently to the new hive. I give it a sharp tug, watching the bees rain down into the box. I do this again, praying that the queen is one of them.
If it was warmer, I’d know for sure. a few bees gathered on the landing board with their butts out, fanning their wings and nasonovating, spraying pheromones for the strays to find their way home. that is a sign that the hive is the queen. but it’s too cold, so I take out each frame, scanning the frenzy of the bees. celine, thank god, she’s a marked queen: I see the green painted dot on her long, narrow back and pull her by the wings into a queen catcher, a little plastic contraption that looks like those butterfly tongs for the hair. the queen catcher will keep her safe for a couple of days while everyone gets used to the new home. but it also guarantees that the colony will not escape. sometimes bees just get up and go with their queen if they don’t like the circumstances. if the queen is locked up, they won’t leave without her.
I let a puff of smoke cover the top of the box, again hoping to calm the bees. I try to place the queen catcher between the comb frames, but my fingers are stiff from the cold and keep slipping. when my hand hits the edge of the wooden box, one of the worker bees stings me.
“motherson of a bitch“. I gasp, dancing backwards from the hive. A group of bees follows me, attracted by the smell of the attack. I cradle my palm, tears well up in my eyes.
I rip off my hat and veil, I bury my face in my hands. I can take all the best precautions for this queen; I can feed the bees sugar syrup and insulate their new brood box; I can pray as much as I want, but this colony has no chance of surviving the winter. they simply won’t have enough time to accumulate the honey reserves that the bear has stolen.
and yet. I can’t just give them up.
So I gently put the telescoping cover back on the box and picked up my bee kit with my good hand. in the other, I hold a snowball against the sting as a remedy. I trudge back to the farm. Tomorrow, I’ll give them the extra food goodness in a beehive feeder and wrap the new box, but it’s hospice care. there are some trajectories you can’t change, no matter what you do.
on the way home, i’m so absorbed in icing my throbbing palm that i don’t realize it’s past dinner time and asher’s not home.
the first time it happened, it was because of a password.
I had just signed up for facebook, mainly so I could see photos of my brother, jordan, and his wife, selena. Braden and I lived in a brownstone on Mass Ave while he did his general fellowship in cardiac surgery. most of our furniture came from suburban yard sales that we drove to on weekends. one of our best findings came from an elderly woman moving into an assisted living community. She was selling an antique rolltop desk with claw feet (I said it was a griffin; Braden said she was an eagle). It was clearly an antique, but someone had stripped the original finish off of it, so it wasn’t worth much, and more to the point, we could afford it. it wasn’t until we took it home that we realized it had a secret compartment: a narrow little sliver between the wooden drawers that was meant to look decorative, but came loose to reveal a place where documents could be hidden and papers. she was delighted, naturally, expecting the combination with an old safe full of gold bars or a steamy love letter, but all we found inside was a clip. I had practically forgotten it existed when I had to choose a password for Facebook and find a place to store it when I inevitably forgot what I had chosen. what better place than in the secret compartment?
we had initially bought the antique desk so braden could study at it, but when we realized his laptop was too deep for the space, it became decorative, hidden in an empty space at the bottom of the stairs. we kept my car keys, my purse, and the occasional plant that I hadn’t killed yet. That’s why I was so surprised to find Braden sitting across from it one night, fiddling with the hidden compartment.
“what are you doing?” I asked.
he reached inside and triumphantly pulled out the piece of paper. “Seeing the secrets you keep from me,” she said.
It was so ridiculous that I laughed. “I’m an open book,” I told him, but I took the paper from his hand.
raised his eyebrows. “what’s there?” “my facebook password”.
“so what?”
“then”, I said, “it’s mine”.
braden frowned. “If you had nothing to hide, you would show it to me.”
“what do you think I’m doing on facebook?” I said, incredulous. “You tell me,” replied Braden.
I rolled my eyes. but before she could say anything, her hand shot up
for the newspaper.
pepper70. that’s what it said. the name of my first dog and my year of birth. blatantly uninspired; something he could have discovered on his own. but the beginning of the whole stupid argument kicked in, and I yanked the page out before he could snatch it from me.
That’s when it changed: the tone, the atmosphere. the air went still between us, and her pupils dilated. she reached out, slashing like a snake, and grabbed my wrist.
On instinct, I backed away and ran up the stairs. thunder, him running after me. my name twisted on his lips. it was silly; it was stupid; it was a game but he didn’t feel like one, not the way my heart was pounding.
As soon as I got to our room, I slammed the door shut. Leaning my forehead against him, I tried to catch my breath.
braden opened it with such force that the frame splintered.
I didn’t realize what had happened until my vision turned white and I felt a hammer between my eyes. I touched my nose and my fingers came out red with blood.
“OMG,” Braden muttered. “my god, liv. Jesus.” She disappeared for a moment and then she was holding a hand towel to my face, guiding me to sit on the bed, stroking my hair.
“I think it’s broken,” I choked.
“Let me look,” he demanded. she gently removed the bloody cloth and with the tender hands of a surgeon she touched the edge of my forehead, the bone below my eyes. “I don’t think so,” she said, her voice frayed.
braden cleaned me up like glass and then brought me a bag of ice. by then, the stabbing pain was gone. it hurt, and my nose was stuffy. “My fingers are too cold,” I said, dropping the ice, and he picked it up and held it gently against me. I noticed that his hands were shaking and that he couldn’t look me in the eye.
Seeing him so shaken hurt even more than my injury.
So I covered his hand with mine, trying to comfort him. “He shouldn’t have been standing so close to the door,” I muttered.
Braden finally looked at me and nodded slowly. “no. you shouldn’t have.
…
I’ve sent half a dozen texts to asher, and he hasn’t responded. each one is a little more angry. For someone who seemingly has no problem interrupting his life to text his girlfriend and stab her, he has selective communication skills when he wants to. most likely he was invited to dinner somewhere and didn’t bother to tell me.
I decide that, as punishment, I’ll have her clean up the evergreens that are still scattered around the porch, since my bee stung hand hurts too much to finish stringing the garland.
On the kitchen table is a small bundle of newspapers, which I carefully unwrap. it was put in the decoration box by mistake, but it belongs to our Christmas decorations box. is my favorite: a hand-blown glass bulb in swirls of blue and white, with a dripping curl of frozen glass at the top through which a wire has been threaded for hanging. asher did it to me when i was six, after we left braden in boston and i got divorced. I had a booth at a county fair that fall, selling honey and beeswax products, and an artisan glassblower befriended Asher and invited him to come see her in her shop. Unbeknownst to me, she helped him make an ornament for me as a gift. I loved her, but what made it truly magical was that it was a time capsule. Frozen in that delicate globe was Asher’s childhood breath. no matter how old she was or how big she grew, she would always have that.
At that moment my cell phone rings.
asher. if he’s not texting, you know he’s in trouble.
“You better have a good excuse,” I start, but he cuts me off. “Mom, I need you,” Asher says. “I’m at the police station.” the words climb up the ladder in my throat. “what? are you okay?”
“I… I am… no.”
I look at the ornament in my hand, this piece of the past. “Mom,” Asher says, his voice cracking. “I think lily is dead.”