Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

“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-lastday, 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 intomy 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.

* * *

We do notsend any message to Maebh’s parents. We do not tell the farmer there will soon be a disaster here. We do not talk about anything beyond The Farm. I wish I could say that we share a bed, or that we tell each other certain things. However, I can say we spend enough time lying on the porch with our bare arms flung above us that I memorize the pattern of the long brown hairs in Maebh’s armpits. I do not ask Maebh if she is scared. I know her well by now and I observe that she is not. She is waiting.

We enjoy large quantities of milk and preserves. Maebh consumes them with even greater zeal than before. Sometimes I am on the cusp of reaching out to stroke her. More than once I come close to blurting something. The words are right there, already in my mouth, swirling around on my tongue. But always Maebh stands up just then, or rolls away, or falls asleep.

These plums. This light.

* * *

On the daybefore we are supposed to return to the city, at that time when the sunlight gets richer and darker with each passing second, Maebh is wading through the grass ahead of me — the grass that only comes up to her thigh, that comes all the way up to my waist — carrying a rock we found, a rock covered in green moss and orange lichen as though someone decorated it. I am keeping an eye on Maebh. I do not think of her thighs as thighs — in my mind, I call them haunches. Haunches , that is the word in my mind when it happens.

The snap and the flash. The flash and the snap. The colorful rock thudding to the ground. The air into which she disappears — it does not even shimmer. There is nothing, just nothing. No bees disrupt the low sunbeams. Nothing makes any noise.

Even my howl is restricted to my insides, passing through my muscles but not exiting my body. This howl moves into my leg and I take a step, lifting my foot over the rock, the first step of many that will take me in the opposite direction of the city.

* * *

Here on theporch beside the muddy pond where five-legged frogs crawl over tumorous lily pads, someone dear to me asks why I always tell this story in the present tense. We lean back in our hand-hewn chairs, waving smoke sticks at the mosquitoes that churn around the slimy cattails. Soon it will be utterly dark in the abandoned swamp, no ambient light from anywhere, and we will retreat into the wooden cabin where the tilting floorboards remind us of the day we laid the clay foundation.

At the tail end of the wedding, as the last guests were fighting over whose coat was whose, the maître d’ took me aside. He’d had his eye on me all night; even when he’d handed me my third rosemary-cucumber martini in that dismissive way of his, still he’d had his eye on me.

I wondered, with some amazement, how he’d singled me out, my particular cocktail-length dress, my particular shoes; I was identical to every other drunk young lady at the wedding, in no way deserving of additional admiration or scorn, distinguished only by the fact that I happened to be the sole witness when the cancerous woman ran into the Ladies’ Room with a nosebleed (“Can I get you seltzer perhaps?” I said, because the blood was falling on her green silk jacket and I’ve heard seltzer can do some good against blood. “It’s my pancreas is all,” she replied; I couldn’t think of anything to say to that).

“I have to show you something,” the maître d’ said. They were the first words I’d heard from him, and while I wasn’t surprised that his tone was scornful, I was surprised that he would make such a forthcoming statement.

We were standing at the bottom of a staircase, one of those staircases with red carpeting running down the middle; it was up this staircase that he gestured.