The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [130]
We stared at each other, and the sun went behind a cloud. The light in the kitchen changed from amber to gray. Her clothes deepened in color to rusted iron and bitter sage.
“Did Ted tell you that I sold him my house?”
From the look of shock on her face, I knew that he hadn’t, and I also knew, because I’d told her repeatedly of the situation with my mother, that she understood immediately what had happened.
“Is he…”
“Of course.”
“I’ll stop him!”
“Just let him.”
“Just let him?”
“Pack your stuff,” I said. “We’ll go now. Our age won’t be an issue in the city, and you can start a new practice. Leave Ted the house. Let’s go.”
Behind her, the dishwasher swished on, the water purred in and heated up. She turned away from me and faced the counter.
“I forgot to add the cups,” she said.
A cloud of steam shot out as she opened the door to put in two coffee mugs, but when she closed it and looked at me, I loved her again and I could not give her up.
“Buy my house from Ted. I’ll pay you back, and we can live there.”
“Is he working over there now?”
“Yes.”
She wiped her hands carefully, the way doctors do.
What had she decided? She walked out the front door and I followed her. The walk to my house was about a mile, and this was the first time that we had ever been seen in public together, which, for a moment, made me happy. And then, when we were almost at the house, I understood that the fact that she’d allowed herself to be seen in public with me meant our love was over for good.
WHEN WE ARRIVED, I saw that one crew was pulling out the front-porch columns, and another had started work on the rear wall of the house. Ted was in the back, in the gardens, and I tried not to gasp at the way he had allowed the workers to trample the blooms of portulaca and the still-green clumps of sedum into the mulched ground. The bees were everywhere, more than usual, and I felt a terrible guilt at having betrayed them. I apologized in a whisper as I looked around the back, as I saw Ted on the machine that he would use to tear into the back wall of the house.
C. shouted for him to quit. He turned off the engine and she walked over and began to talk to him, her back to me. But he was at an angle and I could see that although he was listening to what she was saying, he was actually looking at me. He looked at me as if I’d taken something from him. A hard look, an easy flicker. Although I was unaccustomed to seeing Ted with her, I did understand that he knew. On some level, not a conscious level but deep down, he knew, as a man knows. He turned from C. and restarted the machine—he rammed it forward. Its claw made a rip in the wall and he backed it up to make another, but before he could move forward again, there was a roar louder than the motor. A darkness poured from my house. A ripsaw whined. A sweetness exploded from the back wall, and Ted and C. were swarmed by the bees.
I was stung only twice, I think by young bees that did not know me.
I retrieved C. and carried her straight to the garage. When I went back for Ted, I saw that he had fallen under a moving cloud that had stung him into silence. Honey dripped from the gash he made in the clapboards; honey dripped from the backhoe. I walked over to him and stood there and watched the bees moving across his back. They seemed finished with their fury; some flew off to repair the hive. As I waited for him to move, I reached out and tasted the honey from the claw of his machine. It was dark in the comb, and rich with the care I’d put into the flowers. I took a bigger piece of comb, brushed off a bee or two, and stuffed the dripping wax into my mouth. C., who had come to the door of the garage, saw me do this. She said it was the most cold-blooded act she’d ever witnessed—me eating honey while I watched Ted lie unconscious underneath the moving bees.
I’ve always