“I think we missed the exit. I have no idea.” It rained harder and she turned the windshield wipers to high. The rain filled in the half-circles as soon as they were cleared.
“I don’t want this life,” she sobbed. “I want out. I’m sick of living. Fuuuuuck!” She screamed loud, a wail. A foghorn. I covered my ears. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” she screamed at the windshield. As if she were furious at the windshield.
I was four and strapped down by two belts in my car seat, facing forward beside her (this was before children sat in the backs of cars). In the cars that passed and the ones around us, I imagined peace, and I wished to be inside one of those cars instead. If only she would be the way she was before, in the daylight. One version of her was inaccessible to the other. As she was yelling, she said later, even if she could not stop herself, she was aware that I was old enough to remember this.
“I have nothing,” she said. “This life is shit. Shiiiiit.” She struggled to catch her breath. “I don’t want to live anymore! This shitty life. I haaaate this life!” Her throat was like gravel, her voice hoarse from yelling. “This hell life.”
She pushed hard on the pedal when she yelled, so the car leapt forward, ground down along the road, rain like spit flying, like she wanted the engine to be part of her voice.
“Fucking Time magazine. Fucking fucking fucker.” Fucker was sharper than fuck, had a spark at the end. It poked my sternum. She let out a yell, no words, shook her head side to side so her hair flew, bared her teeth, slapped the dash with the flat of her hand, made me jump.
“What?” she screamed at me, because I jumped. “Whaaaat?”
I remained stiff; I became the idea of a girl stiff in her car seat.
Suddenly she veered off the freeway with such violence I thought we were driving off the road to our death, but it was a ramp.
She pulled over, jammed on the brakes, and sobbed into her folded arms. Her back shook. Her sadness enveloped me, I could not escape it, nothing I could do would stop it. In a few minutes, she started driving again, took a freeway overpass toward another road. She continued to cry, but with less violence, and at some point I asked the cracked glass eye, the nick in the windshield where the pebble had hit, to watch the road for me, a kind of prayer, and I slept.
At the height of her hopelessness and noise, I’d felt a calm presence near us, even though I knew we were alone in the watery hell, the car jerking. Some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere, maybe sitting in the back seat. The presence could not stop it, could not help it, only watch and note it. I wondered later if it was a ghostly version of me now, accompanying my younger self and my mother in that car.
The next morning, the man who tended the bees wore a white crinkly suit with attached gloves and a hat with a net sewn in. The bees lived in a slatted box in the small backyard. From the side of the kitchen, an attachment at the back of the bungalow, we looked out at the yard. He called to me, motioning for me to come over and look.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.
“She’s fairly allergic to bees,” my mother called to him. Once I’d stepped on a bee and my foot swelled up; I couldn’t walk on it for a week.
“My bees are really happy,” he said. “They’re not going to sting.” He removed his hat while he spoke so we could see his face. “These are honeybees; they’re friendly,” he said.
“But you’re wearing a suit,” my mother said. “She’s in shorts. She has no protection.”
“It’s because I have to get in there, take their honey. Otherwise, I’d be dressed like you. They don’t want to sting you,” he said to me. “Do you know what happens to them if they do? They give up their life.” He paused. “Why would they want to give up their life to hurt you when they’re happy and you’re not doing them any harm?”
“Are you sure?” my mother asked him again. The setup looked wrong, but what did we know about bees.
“Yeah,” he said, putting on his hat. I’d never seen a hive up close.
“Okay …” my mother said, only partially convinced. I walked over to where he stood and looked down at the teeming, velvety mass. The bees made a shimmering brown carpet. Some flew higher, bobbing above like tiny balloons on strings. One landed on my upper cheek and began to walk in a circle. I didn’t know this circling was a kind of preparatory dance. When I tried to swipe it off, it was affixed, then it stung.
I ran back to my mother, who pulled me into the kitchen. The open windows carried her voice.
“What were you thinking?” she yelled at him, opening cabinets one after the other, then grabbing the baking soda, mixing it into paste with water in a bowl. “How dare you.” She squatted beside me, pulled the stinger out with tweezers, then patted the paste on my cheek with the pads of her fingers as it began to swell.
“What an idiot,” she muttered. “In a full body suit. Telling a girl she wasn’t in danger.”
When we had a little money to spare, we drove to Draeger’s Market, where a wall of rotisserie ovens behind the deli counter held rows of slowly turning meat. It smelled of sweet dirt and steam. You could tell the uncooked chickens because they were bright white with orange powder dusted on the surface; the cooked ones were brown and taut. She pulled a number.
“One half rotisserie chicken, please,” she said when our number came up. A man used what looked like garden shears to cut the bird in half, the ribs making a satisfying crunch. He slipped the half into a white bag lined with silver.
Back in the car she put the bag between us on the emergency brake and ripped the bag open and we ate the chicken with our fingers as the windows steamed up around us.
When we finished, she crumpled the bag around the bones and wiped my oily fingers with a napkin, then examined my palm. The place where my hand folds made grooves across the surface like a dry riverbed seen from a great height. No two people have the same lines, she’d explained to me, but everyone has a similar pattern.
She tilted the plane of my palm to make the indentations catch the light.
“Oh, God,” she said, wincing.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s just … not so good. The lines tatter.” Her face looked stricken. She went distant, quiet. We went over this same routine many times in different variations, accruing details as I got older, each time my mother making the same mistakes, as if it was new.
“What does that mean?” Panic in my chest, stomach.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. The lifeline, the curved one, this one—holes, bubbles.”
“What’s wrong with bubbles?”
“They mean trauma, fracturing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” I knew she wasn’t apologizing for the hand, but for my life. The start of my life that I didn’t remember. For how hard things were. She might have assumed I didn’t know what a family was supposed to look like, but once, around this time, as I’d chased a boy in a playground wearing a pair of too-big shoes, she overheard me say to him, scornfully, “You don’t even have a father.”
“What’s that line?” I asked, pointing to the one that ran from below the pinkie finger.