It takes only three and a half minutes. Three and a half lousy minutes!
Beatrice’s muted voice hollers Sarah’s name, the “ah” long and echoing, while the bees slowly retract into their nest. As the minutes grind on, Sarah strains to detect any change in the child’s tone, but fear is not discernible in so muffled a version. Beatrice doesn’t come out, or even open the back door, and Sarah remembers how it is to be a child, the unspoken boundary between your life and out there. Your apartment. Your mom. Your kitchen table. You do not cross that boundary alone, and no one has to tell you that. Sarah’s mother never told her. She just knew: you wait.
Twenty minutes and the shouting has stopped. The feeling in Sarah’s stomach is both familiar and strange. A memory she had not remembered until now.
She slips from behind the garage, forces herself to sidle past the climbing rose she will later learn Melanie’s mother planted forty years ago. The Judge’s wife comes by several times a year to fertilize and trim the plant, worrying over its blooms because Melanie lacks a green thumb.
Sarah opens the door and hears Grayson crying, finds the two of them in his room. Beatrice has somehow gotten her brother out of the crib and sits with him on the floor, paging through his favorite book, her high-pitched voice wavering through tears, trying to interest him in what the zebra is going to do about his stripes.
When Sarah appears, instead of rushing to her, Bea levels a knowing, angry look. “I thought you left.”
“I just went outside a minute.” Sarah sits down cross-legged and takes the baby, rocking him against her chest, his feet anchored in the flesh of her folded thighs. “You should have come out.”
“Gray was crying.”
Sarah scowls. “Did you wake him up?”
Beatrice shakes her head. “He was crying and you weren’t here. I had to get him out of his crib.”
“Did you drop him?”
“He was crying because you left.”
Ah, Sarah thinks. Smart girl. Knows how to turn things around. But so does Sarah. “He was crying because you panicked. I’m gone a few minutes and you panic.”
“I didn’t panic.” Beatrice looks both defiant and ashamed.
“I was just in the backyard. Did you even look out the window?”
Pause. “Yes. You weren’t there.”
She’s lying, yet it’s Bea’s truth now. The narrative she will continue to tell herself. And her mother probably. Sarah’s chest tightens again. By four p.m. today she needs a more compelling narrative for Bea to pass along.
The narrative she provides is pain and pleasure.
Grayson sits in his highchair, swirling fingers in the crushed, seedy remains of raspberries, which he eats by the carton, as if they weren’t a dollar an ounce. It seems unlikely, but Sarah remembers picking raspberries with her mother. Unlikely because they had no car, so they must have gone with a friend. Sarah remembers only a few first names. Barb. Joan. Mindy. Without last names, there is no way to claw back the years.
With Bea back at her Play-Doh bakery, Sarah takes the baby outside and sets him near the bees’ nest, glancing around to be sure she’s unobserved before prodding it with a stick. When several bees emerge, she traps two in a glass jar laced with sugar water, then slides the lid of the jar away and presses its mouth against Grayson’s bare back, tapping hard on the bottom to startle the bees. To her surprise it works and one of the bees stings the baby. He lets out a wail that tumbles into gulping sobs.
Sarah pulls out the stinger, then rubs the wound, pressing hard enough to distract the nerves. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she tells the baby. “I had to do it. I had to.”
Inside she shows Beatrice. “Stay away from the back of the garage. There’s a bees’ nest in the ground. One of them stung your brother.” The red circle with its center puncture has already bloomed to two inches. While Grayson wails and Beatrice sits beside him singing, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, my baby,” Sarah makes an ice pack and applies it to the baby’s back.
Slowly, his crying diminishes and Sarah turns to Beatrice. “Do you want to make some real cupcakes?”
“It took no time at all to spot him,” Melanie tells Sarah.
They’re in the kitchen, Sarah washing frosting fingerprints from the cupboards while Melanie pretends to make headway on the counters. Long smears mixed with sprinkles and Red Hots — which Beatrice inexplicably adores — Pollock the white marble, but Melanie is only pinching individual candies, making no real progress, in an attempt to protect her silk blouse.
Bea greeted her mother nearly quivering with excitement—“Grayson almost died!”—and Sarah quickly intervened.
“A bee stung him. You have a big nest in the backyard. I iced the spot and watched him carefully. He had no trouble breathing, and the swelling was very slight. I gave him a dose of Tylenol for the pain.”
Melanie is pleased at her handling of the crisis. “I knew you were the one for us.”
Now Grayson is playing with some pots and plastic spatulas, Bea has taken herself off and Sarah knows she’s gotten away with it. There will be no mention of her disappearance. She applies another squirt of soap to the sponge and waves Melanie off.
From the safety of a counter stool, Melanie continues her story about a student. “He’s one of my Ethans.” There are three in her class, the name’s popularity having surged at the turn of the millennium. Melanie considered it herself, she tells Sarah, but aware of name contamination — every teacher develops strong associations with previous students that ruin otherwise good names — she chose Grayson instead. “Because it’s my dad’s name, I knew I’d always love it.”
Ethan K. is new at school and Melanie declares, “He’s going to be my problem kid.”
She ticks off the “flags” she found in his file. #1: He lives in an apartment on Moss Road. #2: No father listed. #3: Only one emergency contact listed, a man’s name, and under “Relationship” it says “friend.”
“Today I kept him in because he’s behind in language, so I have him there trying to squeeze out a paragraph about his summer, and I find out he’s alone all the time. His mother ‘works.’” Melanie does air quotes. “Okay, so has she ever heard of a babysitter? Or summer camp? I asked what he did all day and he says he plays his Nintendo DS. Lovely, right? No wonder he can barely eke out an English sentence. And he eats peanut butter sandwiches every day for lunch.”
“They’re filling, and cheap.”
“Right.” Melanie rolls her eyes.
As she details the many angry outbursts Ethan K. has had in the weeks since school started, Sarah realizes it could have been her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Schuppe, who reported her mother. She’d always assumed it was the neighbor, Mrs. Zabik, because she left the door to her apartment open, would have seen Sarah’s mother coming and going, and her mother had often warned Sarah not to give Mrs. Zabik any information. “Anything you say can and will be held against you.”
But what about Mrs. Schuppe and the teachers before her? They knew of all those days missed, heard her mother’s excuses. A rash. A doctor’s appointment. A family reunion. Or maybe Sarah herself told Mrs. Schuppe something incriminating. Listening to Melanie, she learns again what she already knew: everywhere, by everyone, things can and will be held against you. Things you never even thought to hide, like the street you live on or the emergency contact on your school form. It could have been something as simple as that which brought Sarah to the attention of Judge Grayson Cuppernell.