Mad Honey

by Jodi Picoult

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Each vision was a bead on a rosary of future memories; I prayed daily.

Better to have a boy, who would never be someone’s victim.

We were land-rich and cash-poor.

My beekeeping net became a funeral veil. The hive might well have been a coffin.

Asher may not have grown up in a household with two parents, but the one he has would fight to the death for him.

It is what I want most for Asher—the relationship I don’t have. I know that love isn’t a zero-sum game, but I’m selfish enough to hope he’s all mine for a little while longer.

I hoist the Christmas box into my arms again, thinking two things: that memories are so heavy; and that my son is entitled to his secrets.

The bee itself is considered a symbol of Christ: the sting of justice and the mercy of honey, side by side.

I sometimes wonder which of my prehistoric ancestors first stuck his arm into a hole in a tree. Did he come out with a handful of honey, or a fistful of stings? Is the promise of one worth the risk of the other?

“I’m not a hero,” I told my mother. “I’m just somebody who finally figured out how to stop being sad.”

I am so hungry for the parts of him that I don’t know yet I feel like I’ve been starving for decades and he’s a feast.

Her best friend is me; her second-best friend is herself. I call her Ranger Mom. On the surface you’d think she’s this calm, sweet-tempered person. Which she is, unless you try to mess with her daughter. At which point she would pull the brim of her ranger hat down low, and say, Mister? You have just made a serious mistake.

I open the door and there he is, with a smile that splits his face into fractions, and green eyes that make me think of June, when everything is in bloom.

“Lily, if you like Hawaiian pizza I’m afraid that might be the dealbreaker in our relationship.” But he’s smiling, and I think, Fuck, I can’t believe he is mine.

Nobody is a do-over of anybody else, and if you get to do anything at all on earth it’s live your own life, not be some sort of ghost version of somebody else’s.

I retreat to the door again, realizing that there isn’t any food I could cook that would fill the hole inside him. That I brought him a tray to make me feel better, not him.

This time I don’t bother with words; the ones we need don’t exist in the English language. Even the syllable grief feels like a cliff, and we’ve fallen.

Imagine a sorrow so deep that it batters the hatches of sleep; imagine drowning before you even realize you’ve gone under.

These people, who do not really see me, have no idea what they are missing.

It was the moment I realized that my son wasn’t a boy anymore, but somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, had become a man.

We are so lucky to have our children, even for a little while, but we take them for granted. We make the stupid assumption that as long as we are here, they will be, too, though that’s never been part of the contract.

When I stand up again, there are spots of thawed green grass where my palms were a moment earlier, proof that—against all odds—winter doesn’t last.

“But it’s not going to feel like this forever.” When Asher looks at me, he suddenly seems very, very old. “Not because I’ll stop missing her. Because I’ll get so used to that, it’ll become the new normal.”

He is right; you don’t ever recover from losing someone you love—even the ones you leave behind because you’re better off without them.

Sometimes when Asher looks at me, it’s like he’s a flower in a field and I’m a strange rain he just wants to drink in.

But he waits, patient, this tortured boy who thinks he has a hurricane brewing under his skin.

Being known, I think. This is what I am thankful for.

waiting for the sun to rise just so I can be sure it will.

The judge sounds bored. Tired. As if his entire life has not suddenly come apart at the seams, the way ours have. If you do this long enough, I wonder, do you even notice that the people in front of you are falling to pieces?

We turn a corner and are suddenly surrounded by reporters. A swarm of bees, I think. A shiver of sharks. A bask of crocodiles. A tenacity of reporters.

“Like someone stabbed me,” I say slowly, “and then blamed me for getting blood on the knife.” I suck in a breath. “When that stopped being only metaphorical, I left.”

I think there is a reason they call it falling in love. It’s the moment, at the top of the roller coaster, when your heart hangs in your throat. It’s the time between when you jump from the cliff and when you hit the ocean. It’s the realization that there’s no ground beneath your feet when you miss a step on the ladder, when the branch of the tree breaks, when you roll over and run out of mattress. Here’s what they do not tell you about falling in love: there’s not always a soft landing beneath you. It’s called falling, because it’s bound to break you.

My mother squats down next to us and pats Boris’s side. Her hand is a few inches away from mine, as if the fur is a conduit for candor. A lie dogtector.

I don’t know if you’re quite ready for that, my tutor had said tactfully. But let’s be real. When you’ve already failed at killing yourself, anything else you might screw up seems minor.

When my star falls from the sky, I will land in the arms of a posse like this. We get it, they’ll say. We’ve got you. Sisterhood, I think, is underrated.

Do not listen to anyone who tells you a broken heart is a metaphor. You can feel the cracks and the fissures. It’s like ice splintering under your feet; like the cliff crumbling beneath your weight.

It feels so terribly wrong, like a sunflower growing from scorched earth.

“The fields are so much bigger than I remember. It’s weird, what happens to memories, when they’re all you have.”

People always talk about how their love for you is unconditional. Then you reveal your most private self to them, and you find out how many conditions there are in unconditional love.

“Okay.” I point an invisible sword at the universe. “En garde,” I say.

“So what does that leave us with? A dead girl, a grieving boyfriend, and an opportunity for all of you to keep a tragedy from becoming even more tragic.”

He is a gentle, gentle spirit—but I have also seen him angry, and I have worn his bruises.

How many bruises of his have you worn Lily…

I keep trying to be an atheist, but it just won’t take. In spite of how much garbage there is in the Bible—like all the instructions on how to treat your slaves, and how women should pretty much accept that we’re destined to be the property of men—there is still something about faith that I cannot let go of. I do not know what this world is, but I know that it contains miracles that I cannot explain, and the love that people have for each other is the biggest mystery of all.

It’s a whole pyramid of bigotry, with people who most resemble the dominant culture at the top, and people whose difference makes them stand out at the bottom. It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another.

People want the world to be simple. But gender isn’t simple, much as some might want it to be.

“I love you so much that even using those words is like saying ‘the ocean’s just water.’ ”

“Lesson two. It’s not a curse word, you can speak up. And lesson three—you know what they say: if you’ve met one trans person, you’ve…” She smirks. “Met one trans person. What’s true for Lily might not be true for someone else.”

“Being gay or straight,” says Elizabeth, “is about who you want to go to bed with. Being trans—or cis—is about who you want to go to bed as.”

People tend to see the default that is presented, instead of the complexity of the truth: the gamine teenage girl, the charming cardiac surgeon. The innocent son.