Bee-Loud Glade (19 page)

26

E
very morning I emerge from my cave to stretch and scratch in its mouth and to present the performance of my regular wake-up routine to the world. First I lean left, hands on my hips, and push until my spine pops. Then the same to the right, before raising my arms up over my head and straining my body to reach as high as it can, up past the top of the cave's mouth toward the always blue, always untouchable sky. The ritual hasn't changed much over time, but the more mornings I've done it, the longer I've lived in this garden, the louder my body becomes: my back, my knees, my gas and my groans, everything is louder than it was long ago but my voice. I'm not sure I'd have a voice left if I tried to speak, or if it's atrophied over time and left behind little but a weak whisper. Perhaps someday I'll give it a try just to know, but not yet.

I went about breakfast as always, and climbed to my rooftop in time for sunrise and spent some time after the sky was lit blue with my eye on two squirrels who were chasing each other from branch to branch, from tree to tree, chattering and chirping and
tsktsking
each other before they finally got down to the business of mating far out on a thin branch that rose and fell so vigorously I thought it might break with the weight of their passion. But no, the branch held, the squirrels had their moment, and perhaps the next generation was secured for my garden.

They finished and went their separate ways—for the morning, I wondered, while gathering food, or had they parted for good?—and I thought back to another morning, other moments soon after sunrise, when Mrs. Crane came with her easel and paints. I moved to climb down from my cave but she said no, I should stay where I was, she would paint me there, in the first light of day. My face must have signaled that the sunrise had already ended, because she explained she would paint it from memory and imagination. Which was, I suddenly realized, what had been missing from my own paintings, and it seemed so obvious now—I'd been so caught up in giving Mr. Crane exactly what was in his garden that I never thought to paint the garden other than it was at the moment I painted. I'd been too caught up in the truth to get anything done.

“That's what I do, Finch, haven't you noticed? I pretend that things are what they aren't. I pretend everything is what I want it to be so I won't have to face what it is. That's what I'm told, anyway.” She sighed, loud enough that it carried up to me on my cave. “It won't be hard to paint a sunrise not so long after it's happened, not for someone whose whole life is pretend.”

She didn't seem quite herself, that particular morning, and in retrospect I suppose I knew something would happen. Her shoulders drooped, her whole body drooped—not really, of course, a body like that couldn't droop, but she carried herself like she was tired or bowed under weight. She painted quickly, with sharp, violent stabs of her brush. She didn't talk to me at all while she worked, which wasn't our normal routine. We worked a long time that day, and I found posing difficult because of her anger, the sour mood she radiated right up to me overhead. She kept me on edge, made me skittish and easily startled, and it was hard to fully focus on the nothing of what I was doing. She was still working when I became hungry for lunch, and when my body and mind both longed for their swim. She was still working as the sun blazed from yellow to orange; the ribbons of pollution in the sky to our west, out over the valley and ocean beyond, blossomed in purple and pink. It was the longest I'd posed at one time, the longest I'd ever held still, and as much as my body was screaming and sore and as much as I longed for my swim (and now wouldn't have it, as late as it was), I was pleased with myself and my effort, my effort at expending no effort at all and my accomplishment of sitting still for so long.

And Mrs. Crane had painted as long as I'd sat. She looked exhausted, her hair come undone and imperfect, one strap of her overalls hanging down on her arm, her face smeared with sweat and with paint, and the back of her neck badly sunburned—she looked a long way from the actress I'd seen on TV, or from the first time I'd seen her walking toward me down the hill, in the mist of the morning with a pail at her side. And I noticed now, at the end of our day and in fading light, that her toenails weren't even painted. I imagined the ways I might ask how she was, how I might ask if she was all right or if there was anything wrong. I imagined how Mr. Crane might ask her himself, and the conversations they might have that evening up in their big house, but then I stopped because I never liked to picture the inside of the house or to be reminded the big house was up there at all.

“What's here for you, Finch?” she suddenly asked, her old question again, and in thinning sunlight it was like her voice came out of the dark, disembodied. “What's here for any of us, except him? I don't know how you can stand it. I can't, not anymore, not all alone. It's too lonely here. Too far from town, too far from my friends. My family. My life. I should have gone back to my life a long, long time ago.”

I think now, so long after the fact, that I knew she was telling me something. That I knew she was asking me something, or inviting me to ask her. When my scribe reminds me what happened, how that final conversation of mine with Mrs. Crane came and went, I can't help but think I knew there was more to it than I let myself know—she must have known she was leaving, she must have already realized that change was awhirl in the world, a tornado sweeping across the estate, but had I?

How could I know, in my cave, in my silence, deep down in doing my job? Then again, how could I not?

I wonder, too, if I could have kept her from leaving. Maybe if I'd made a sign, or offered a gesture to show I understood what she was telling me. Just so she knew I was listening. But why would I have done that, and why would she have wanted to stay? She said she had a life to get back to, and I wouldn't have kept her from that so she could hang around talking to someone who wouldn't talk back. She was right: I can't imagine what there was for her here, and there would be even less with her husband gone as, by then, she must have known he would be. And I don't think she understood what there was here for me, she never saw what I saw, and I wasn't going to speak; she'd said once she thought she would make a good hermit, and once I'd almost agreed, but I suppose both of us were wrong. I wasn't going to risk my place in the garden—if I did know that trouble and changes were coming, I wasn't aware that I knew it. I was living too much in the moment, living like there were no past and no future and focused only on spending each day in the garden as if my contract would never be up. She had a life to go back to, she said, but I had a life to preserve and a job to be done.

We stood in the half-dark of the garden as the lights of the big house above us came on one after another, like a fire was burning its way through one room at a time.

“Good night, Finch,” she said, and I realized that while I'd been thinking she'd packed up her paints. And Mrs. Crane walked away up the hill for the very last time, though I didn't yet know it would be.

The evening drew the color out of her shadow in just a few seconds, and I watched her silhouette move off into the distance and dark. Then I climbed down and was surprised, but not really, to find my dinner steaming and ready to eat in my cave; it had arrived while I sat right above it, presumably by Smithee's invisible hand. More surprising was that Mrs. Crane's painting was in my cave, too, left behind and propped on my bed where I'd be sure to see it. It was dark in the cave, lit only by a small torch that stuck out of the nook on my wall where I'd wedged it, but I could make out enough of the painting to be confused.

It was me, on the cave as expected, but I didn't look much like myself. She'd captured my beard hanging over my chest, and my body looked accurately skinny and filthy and raw from all my scratching and scabs. But she'd painted me feathered, and crowned my head with a white plumage crest. And the sun wasn't rising behind me so much as it was bleeding, the colors the same as the ones in the sky, but somehow she'd made them look violent. And she'd painted the house, over my shoulder, but as she'd painted it had actually stood over hers. Mr. Crane was there, too, though we hadn't seen him that day. He was walking down the hill from the house in his usual gray suit, trailing a wake of money and blood, and leaving a dead, yellow swathe in the lawn.

I didn't know what to make of it. I didn't
want
to make anything of it, so I moved the canvas from my bed to the floor and into a shadow and went outside to my fire and dinner and a few cups of tea before going to sleep for the night. Had I known that was the last I would see of Mrs. Crane, I might have spent more time with her painting. But then again, maybe not, because it wasn't a picture I liked looking at. It wasn't something I wanted to see, so I went to sleep.

At some point in the night I was awakened, startled out of a dream that clung to me like a sticky film of sweat. Someone was talking outside my cave, close by and loud enough for me to make out two different voices but not quite what they were saying. I swung myself out of bed and padded to the mouth of the cave on my always bare feet—though they'd toughened to leather by then. I paused in my dark doorway to listen, and when I next heard the voices I could tell they were off by the blackberry brambles, and so I crept in that direction, keeping to the tree line to stay out of sight.

As I got close I saw the glow of two strap-on headlamps, bobbing around in the trees. Two men in black were making adjustments to one of the cameras badly hidden among the trees, two men in black like the one I'd spotted before, sneaking secretly over the river, but these two were talking, even laughing a little, not even trying to whisper, whereas the earlier intruder had made a show of his silence. Or hers. I crept closer, then stopped in the bushes to listen. Both of them were tall, and wiry-thin, and in their matching black outfits and masks I couldn't have told them apart if I'd needed to. They even sounded the same from where I listened.

“It's like they all fell for it,” said one of the men. “All of 'em, every bastard in the world with more money than brains. You'd think they'd know better, you know? That it was too good to be true. I mean, come on. I could've told them you can't make money like that, and what do I know about money?”

“Looks like about as much as they do,” said his partner, and they both laughed. As they talked, their headlamps ducked and wove across each other's masked faces.

One of the men held the boxy camera up to the underside of a branch, and the other tightened the metal straps that held it in place, whatever adjustment or repair they were making apparently made.

“No kidding. I mean, take this guy,” he said and gestured up toward the house on the hill with his head and a thumb thrown over the shoulder. “More money than God, and he thinks he can get away with whatever he wants. Thinks no one notices what he's up to, thinks no one's as smart as he is. So arrogant he made it easy for our source inside.”

The two of them crouched to repack a black bag of tools, and turn off then remove their headlamps. “Thinks we won't put it together. I mean, I've been working this case since you were in training. We've been on this guy since he was born. But I guarantee you, he'll
still
be surprised when it all comes down. They always are. The whole world'll see it coming, anyone who watches the news, but he'll be caught with his pants down and his head up his ass.”

Tools packed, the two of them turned away from me and moved toward the river, walking quickly with no regard for the branches they broke with their steps or the noise they made with their passage. I followed, but being as cautious as I was to move quietly, I couldn't keep up.

The last thing I heard was one man in black say to the other, “Once I actually did catch a guy with his pants down, and he wasn't alone...”

It had been a long time since I'd heard a two-way conversation, and had heard someone talk about money or news or the world past the edge of my garden. I mean, Mrs. Crane had talked about going back to that world, but she didn't talk about what she would find. So hearing these two voices didn't sit well, it left me unsettled in body and mind, and before I could go back to sleep I needed a swim to calm down, to wash what I'd heard from my head—not the words themselves so much as the sound of words at all—and to get fully back to myself, to my garden and river and cave, as if those men in black hadn't been there for me to overhear.

After my swim, refreshed and washed clean by meditations under the stars, I went back to bed and dreamed about floating on the river as I had just done; I take it as a mark of success, a sign that I'm on the right path, that I often dream about my own life—like there's nothing more I could imagine, like there's nothing better for me to desire.

When I woke up again before dawn, my breakfast was of course in its nook, but Mr. Crane was in my cave, too. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a gray suit and red tie (did he sleep in a suit?), with his head tilted forward to look at the painting left behind by his wife. His brow furrowed, his eyes alternated between squinting and opening wide, and he stared a long time at the canvas before releasing a long, heavy sigh.