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“I don’t want to go back to Grampy’s,” her son said in the car.
“Why not?”
“Dunno.” The little boy looked out his window, lip trembling.
She hired a babysitter and left the children with the teenager in the evenings, her son returning to his perpetual cheerfulness without his grandfather’s insults as part of his daily life.
“I’m sorry,” her mother-in-law said, wringing her hands. “He’sjust worried I baby the little one too much. And I do, I really do. It’s probably not good for him, and—”
“I’ll bring them whenever you want,” she said. “You let me know.”
“It’s genetic,” she overheard the old man seethe to his wife. “I warned him—I warned him his kids might look just as awful. And now the little girl’s got it on her face! Did it have to be the girl? On a boy it would be bad enough, but a girl?”
She unthinkingly stroked the white patches around her neck, the drips of pale that tripped along her cheeks, the places where the pearl of her hands met the pigmented skin of her arms.
“Stop that, please don’t say that,” her mother-in-law shushed, words that only made her father-in-law grow louder, tip into righteous outrage that blinded him to irony.
“Don’t you order me around in my own home!”
“Dear, it’s nothing, that vitiligo. Just a little color.” Her mother-in-law’s tone aimed for soothing, but was shot through with a current of distress. “I think—I think it’s beautiful.”
Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it just beautiful?echoed her mother’s voice in memory.
She felt tears rise, retreated to the bathroom to hide them.
Her mother-in-law, eyes rheumy, tummy sunken, skin yellowed, asked her if she believed in God. In heaven.
She knew what she was supposed to say. But instead, she told the older woman about standing in the garden signing the chimney sweep’s check, impatient to return to her drawings of the robotic pollinator.
“Good luck with this place,” he said, breaking through her thoughts of piezoelectric actuators flapping micro-thin ceramic wings. “Better you than me.”
When he finally left, she turned to go inside and noticed the bees.
They rolled in the petals and around the stamens of the wide-open roses. Flew to the lavender, legs and bodies collecting pollen from invisible filaments. She listened to their hum. Watched the perfection of their engineering. An immensely efficient, infinitely adaptable, pre-programmed, fully biodegradable, self-replicating pollinator that produced not only useful, clean-burning wax, but honey. Pure and utter elegance. The robo-pollinator, however advanced it had seemed moments before, was all at once eons, millennia, behind.
What a narrow place the chimney sweep imagined the afterlife to be, she’d decided, souls waiting only to frighten the living. If there was some great beyond, didn’t nature prove it would be more astonishing than people were capable of conceiving? After all, though a person had invented the robotic pollinator, nature had evolved the bee itself—a creation that outstripped all human capability.
“That’s lovely, dear,” the older woman said. “But it doesn’t really answer my question.”
She’d been the one to find her mother-in-law dead on the brand-new adjustable bed her in-laws had gotten as part of their buy-in to senior living. She’d found her on that pricey bed, the apartment so new she could smell the paint, the flooring planks of plastic pressed to look like wood. Not a place anyone would walk into and ask about ghosts. But in that bedroom her mother-in-law was cold, her mouth opened in a grotesque mime of a scream, eyes fixed on the ceiling, their whites shot through with blood, skin purpling.
Although she tried to close the mouth, the eyes, to disguise the horror of her mother-in-law’s final moments, rigor had set in and she couldn’t manage it. The soft towel she draped over the older woman’s face sank into the eye sockets, the open mouth, giving an effect so disturbing she’d immediately removed it. Instead she closed the door and quietly called the funeral home her mother-in-law hadpre-selected. Her body was wheeled out before her father-in-law woke from a nap in the guest bedroom (“I can’t sleep in the same room, not with all the groaning”). On seeing her nervously hop up from the couch, the man ignored the visible signs she’d been crying and immediately began complaining that dinner wasn’t ready.
Voice fracturing, she told him she was sorry, that his wife had died sometime that day, in her own bed, just as she’d wanted.
He took two rapid steps toward her and slapped her across the face with an open palm so violently it knocked her down to that pressed plastic floor.
“You,” he said standing over her, pointing an accusatory finger, “can’t be the one to tell me this.”
She scrambled up and backed away toward the door, grabbed her bag while keeping her eyes trained on him as though he were a snake, a venomous predator.
As she left, through the pain, the shame, the fury, the humiliation, all she said was “No.”
Her husband’s anger bloomed with her bruises. He fought with his father on the phone, the older man unrepentantly claiming she’d sneered at him, been cruel, had appeared happy.
The men didn’t speak at the funeral.
Her bruises faded. Her husband began saying things like “We’re all my dad has now” and “Do you really think Mom would’ve wanted him to be so alone?”
