“God,” she says, “you’re so smooth everywhere.”
Maebh’s parents thought it wisest to send a person of unspecified gender along to keep an eye on their daughter. It is widely believed that we are asexual.
* * *
Our days are characterized by bees, by sunlight, by pollen, by water, by overripe fruit, by Maebh teaching me things she assumes someone eight years older ought to know. That’s just a spiderweb! Mud won’t make your toenails rot. Outside the city the temperature can vary more than twenty degrees. Hear the frogs?
The farmer and his wife are frightened of people from the city, and leave provisions in the earliest hours of the morning while we are still asleep. We wake to find milk and yogurt and cheese and nuts and bread and preserves and honey on the heavy wooden table in the kitchen.
Sometimes Maebh goes hours without looking directly at me; other times she stares at me so intently that I feel as though her eyes are penetrating through to the inside.
The Farm is two hundred acres. A barbed wire fence encircles all its overgrown orchards and neglected fields. I hold in my palm animals I have only ever seen on a computer screen. Ladybugs are the most charming example, but also snails, daddy longlegs, dung beetles.
I do not live in the state of terror I anticipated when Maebh’s parents proposed that, for a sum equivalent to five years’ wages in my position as head window-washer of their skyscraper, I accompany their daughter out of the city, beyond the dome, to the ancestral farm where, in a different era, their grandparents lived the good honest life of the earth.
It is possible — in fact, it is impossible not — to forget about the dangerous times in which we live.
Meanwhile, the disappearances continue in the city, and are occurring ever more frequently. Maebh’s parents command us to stay in the countryside and to enjoy The Farm. They thank me profusely, and apologize for the fact that this is lasting longer than expected.
Eventually, I — even I, who have always been careful of the days, who have kept a weekly calendar, who have measured out the hours with three clocks in a one-room apartment on the lowest level of an unclean skyscraper — lose track of time. I ask myself, is today the 11th? 15th? the 17th? the 22nd? the 29th? grateful that I do not know.
We suck on blades of grass. We let our feet harden and get muddy. We find strawberries growing in glens. We notice ornate tapestries of moss and lichen on the rocks at the westernmost edge of the property. We see the clouds puffing themselves up into creatures that fill half the sky. We lie on the porch watching the bees weave through the late afternoon. Only rarely do they sting us, and when they do we do not mind. Some days I am more of a boy and some days I am more of a girl. We hardly talk, and then sometimes we do.
“I should’ve been born in a different time,” Maebh says, grinding a blade of grass between her molars, reclining on the hot wooden floorboards of the porch, her breasts flattening beneath her sundress as she stretches her arms above her head.
This is how Maebh is, I know that now. She frequently says this kind of thing. The kind of thing that is full of longing. She is thoughtful, nostalgic, and melancholy, all the traits I have valued most in my twenty-five years. She is not flippant (though every morning at the stream she sprays me with frigid droplets from her hair and grins when I wince) nor foolish (though whenever she starts dancing to the music inside her head I wonder if she has filled too much of her brain with those shows teenage girls watch) nor spoiled (though she does get angry whenever she is hungry), nor immature, nor unkind, nor any of the things I anticipated.
“We both should have,” I say eventually.
“Both should have what?” she says. Maebh is not accustomed to me saying anything that goes beyond the obligations of my job.
“We both should have been born in a different time,” I say.
“Oh, yeah.” She shuts her eyes and smiles. “Tha’s right,” she coos. “We both shoulda been born in a different time. I coulda been a milkmaid. You coulda been a beekeeper.”
“I could have been a farmer,” I say, wishing to keep up. “You could have been a weaver.”
“Oh yeah,” Maebh says.
The next morning, we wake to find on the kitchen table a message from Maebh’s parents, which requests that we return to the city six days from now so Maebh can pack for boarding school, as August has almost come to an end.
* * *
On our fourth-to-last day, the bees disappear. There are only a few left, buzzing weakly above the long grasses, barely clearing the surface of the stream. Maebh is upset.
“Well damn,” she says, stomping through fields that have not been cultivated in half a century.
She is convinced that the bees have some secret hideout on some far corner of the property to which they are retiring now for fall. All day I follow Maebh around as she searches for the winter palace of the bees. She says she will be fine if she just knows where they are. We do not return to Main House till after dark. By then, there are only two bees lolling around the porch. We are dehydrated, our skin cut by brambles and rashes emerging on our legs. Maebh plunks herself down in the rocking chair and I stand, nervous, in the doorway. I have never seen her so mad and so sad.
“Maebh,” I say, desperate to distract her. “What an unusual name.”
“Irish,” she says.
“Yes?” I say politely.
“It means: she who intoxicates.”
I grip the doorjamb.
She who intoxicates.
“My parents,” she says. She sighs. “They have dumb ideas. B-h? How’s anyone supposed to know how to pronounce that?”
She looks out at the night, which already smells like dew. She has passed into that indifferent mode of hers.
“I’m going to sleep,” she says.
“I am going to sleep,” I echo.
* * *
Maebh comes into my bedroom very early the next morning. Immediately I am fully awake, my skin burning. I believe that this is it, that she will lie down beside me on the white sheet and everything will begin. But she hovers in the doorway.
“Quick!” she says.
Her voice, her urgency, her sundress. I reach for my trousers.
“No! Don’t!” she says. “Not necessary.”
Though I have often neglected to wear my hood at The Farm, I have never gone without trousers. The day is warm already — Indian summer, another phrase Maebh taught me — and it is not uncomfortable to be naked. Perhaps this is how she wants it to begin, in the tall dewy grass.
“Quick!”
I follow her down the path to the old orchard, which was overgrown at first but has been cleared by our feet. I am not one to tremble but I am trembling. She leads me to a twisted plum tree and points at a single woozy bee wavering around a speckled plum.
“Watch,” she whispers.
I stare at the bee. But it makes me dizzy. I look up at the strange silver clouds of morning, wondering how exactly it will begin.
“Watch!” she orders.
I obey, and suddenly there’s something halfway between a flash and a snap, an instantaneous flicker, and nothingness where the bee had been.
This is just how every disappearance is described in the newspapers. The swiftness of it, the sound and the light, and—
I never thought to worry about the possibility that the disappearances might come to the countryside. I always assumed Maebh’s parents knew something I didn’t about the scope of the calamity.
Maebh stares, her face radiant and dark (how much sun we have taken here!), at the place where the bee just vanished.