The Summer We Saved the Bees Read online

  Mom turned and looked at Curtis. “You deal with this. I’m so done with her right now.”

  Curtis drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Maybe she just ran into him. Maybe he’s going to Vancouver for some other reason.”

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “Where are we staying tonight?” I asked. “I mean, are we camping? Or…”

  “In Vancouver? No. We’ll stay with Eva and Mary.” She put her hand on Curtis’s arm. “I should call and let them know we’re on our way. They were probably expecting us to be on the earlier ferry.”

  “Who’s Eva and Mary?” Saffron asked.

  “Who are. Not who is,” I corrected her.

  “Old friends of mine,” Mom said. “You remember them, Wolf?”

  “Um…”

  “They visited us once on Lasqueti? Two daughters, a little younger than you?”

  I nodded. “Sort of. Is one of them black? And has really big hair?”

  “That’s Mary.” Mom laughed. “I’d forgotten about her afro. Do you remember their girls? You would only have been, hmm, maybe six or seven? I was pregnant with the twins. So their kids would have been maybe four and six, something like that.”

  I had a vague memory of two women and two little girls sitting in our tiny kitchen. Mostly what I remembered was the hair, because I’d never seen anything like it before.

  “Damn,” Curtis said, and I looked up to see Violet and Ty heading toward us.

  “Yours,” Mom said under her breath. “All yours. If I say anything, she’ll bite my head off.”

  Curtis rolled down his window, and Violet stalked over, still holding on to Ty’s arm. She glared at her father, bristling and ready for a fight.

  “Can we give Ty a ride?”

  “We’ve discussed this already. The van is full. We can’t take him, even if we wanted to.” Curtis looked at Ty. “Sorry.”

  “He could sit in the back,” Violet said. “On the bed.”

  “Without a seat belt?” Curtis shook his head. “That’s not even legal.”

  “Or safe,” Mom put in.

  “It’s okay, Vi.” Ty rubbed his head with both hands. His hair was buzzed so short it was more like stubble. “I’ll hitch a lift. No problem.”

  “You’re hitchhiking?” Mom leaned toward the open window. “Where are you going, Ty?”

  “Same as you guys,” Ty said lightly, like it was no big deal.

  “You’re following us? Across the country?” Mom’s voice rose.

  “You don’t own the road,” Violet said.

  Curtis put one hand on Mom’s shoulder in a calming gesture. “Violet, of course Ty is free to go wherever he wants. But we are doing this trip as a family.”

  “Fine. He’ll probably get picked up by some psycho,” Violet snapped. “Not like you care.”

  “That’s enough, Violet.”

  “You care more about a bunch of stupid bees.”

  “Get in the car,” Curtis said.

  Violet gave Ty a long kiss on the lips.

  “Blecchhhh,” Saffron said. “Gross.” Behind her, Whisper giggled softly.

  All around us, people were starting up their engines. “Violet. In the car. Now,” Curtis said.

  Violet slowly detached herself from the lip-lock and got into the van beside me. Ty stepped back, out of the way of our row of cars, and held out a hand, thumb up like a hitchhiker. The cars in front of us began driving slowly forward, and Curtis followed.

  Violet waved frantically out the window until Ty was out of sight. “If he gets murdered by some nutcase, it’ll be your fault,” she said.

  “That’s a horrible thing to say.” Mom shook her head. “I can’t believe you put us in this position.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t believe you put him in this position,” Violet snapped back.

  Here we go again, I thought, and put my headphones back on.

  Eva and Mary lived in a small house not too far from downtown Vancouver, but it was rush hour and it took us almost an hour to get there. I didn’t take off my headphones until we were pulling into their driveway. My stomach grumbled. I hoped they were going to give us dinner.

  “Well, here we are,” Mom said brightly. She unbuckled her seat belt, got out of the car and stretched. “Come on.”

  We all followed—the twins squirmy from sitting still, Violet withdrawn and gloomy, Curtis bringing up the rear. The house had wooden front steps and a wide porch and was painted in shades of bright yellow and blue. The front door flew open before Mom even knocked.

  “Jade! Oh! So good to see you!” A small woman burst out and threw her arms around my mother. She had short blond hair tucked behind her ears and wore a long white cardigan over a short pink-and-green sundress. “You look just the same,” she said, laughing.

  “Eva!” Mom hugged her back. “So do you.” She turned to us. “You remember Curtis? And his daughter Violet? And you’ve met Wolf, of course, and these are the twins. Saffron and Whisper.”

  Eva opened her arms in a welcoming gesture and gave us a wide smile. “Come in, come in! Dinner’s cooking, Mary will be home any time now, and the girls can’t wait to meet you all.”

  A few minutes later, we were all sitting around in an enormous open space that seemed to be their kitchen, dining room and living room combined. The walls were lined with built-in shelves that overflowed with books and games; a well-worn couch and a handful of comfy chairs were arranged in front of a large window, and a gray-around-the-muzzle sheepdog lay in front of an unlit woodstove.

  “Tess! Hazel!” Eva called up the stairs. “Come on down.”

  I could hear their feet on the wooden steps: thumpety thumpety thump. The dog lifted his head, made a funny wuffling noise and flopped back down when he saw the two girls appear. Hazel and Tess were small and blond like Eva, and both had long straight hair. Tess was taller and wore glasses, but otherwise it was hard to tell them apart.

  “Look at you two!” Mom said. She shook her head. “Last time I saw you, you were about the age my twins are now.”

  They both smiled politely and looked as uncomfortable as I felt. Adults always make such a big deal over the fact that kids grow. It’s weird: what do they expect us to do?

  “I can’t believe we’ve let so much time go by,” Eva said. “Life just gets so busy. Girls, Jade is one of my oldest friends. We actually had an apartment together for a while. In New York City!”

  Tess nodded, and I could tell she’d heard this before. She sat down on the floor beside the dog and started petting it, and Hazel sat down beside her. Something about this house—the dog, the bookshelves, the smell of dinner cooking, the coziness of it all—made me feel funny and kind of sad. We’d lived in our last place for three years, but the house had always had a borrowed, temporary feel to it. I wondered if we’d ever settle somewhere or if we’d just keep moving from now on.

  “So let me put on the rice, and then I want to hear all about your plans,” Eva said.

  The front door banged open and the black woman I’d vaguely remembered walked in, shrugging off a long raincoat and smiling around at us all. She didn’t have big hair anymore—it was buzzed super short. “Hello, Jade,” she said. “Good to see you again. Been too long.”

  “It has indeed,” Mom said. “Kids, this is Mary. Mary, you’ve met Curtis and Wolf and Violet…These are the twins. Whisper and Saffron.”

  Mary laughed. “You were pregnant with them the last time I saw you. And I don’t think I ever actually met Violet. I remember this one though.” She nodded a
t me and sat down to unzip her boots. “Bright pink raincoat and bare feet, out digging in the garden. You must have been, what, seven?”

  I nodded back at Mary. She was tall and dressed in a business suit, and she had dark-framed glasses and almost as many freckles as me. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a black person with freckles before.

  Mom ruffled my hair. “Wolf remembered you. Well, he remembered your afro.”

  Mary rubbed her cropped head and laughed again, and my face got hot. I stared at the dog and hoped that someone would change the subject.

  Eva sat down on the arm of the couch, beside my mother. “Tomorrow is the big day, right? Your first performance?”

  “That’s right. We should probably spend some time tonight getting ready. We left sooner than we’d planned, so…” Mom trailed off. “Well, the costumes and props are ready, but the kids haven’t even had a practice session.”

  “I thought we were just handing out flyers and stuff,” I said. As far as I was concerned, walking around in a bee costume was bad enough. I wasn’t planning on actually performing.

  “Well, I was thinking maybe the three of you could come out first. You’d attract attention—three kids in costume, flying around. And then I could come out and…”

  “Flying around,” I repeated flatly.

  “Maybe you could even do a little dance, Wolf?”

  I almost choked. “Yeah, no, I don’t think so.” I glanced at Tess and Hazel to see if they were laughing at me, but they were focused on Mom.

  “Bees can dance?” Hazel said.

  “Can we see your costumes?” Tess said at the exact same time.

  Mom grinned. “Yes, they can, and yes, you can.” She leaned toward them. “Actually, you’d be amazed at what bees can do. For instance, say a colony needs to choose a new home, and there are a couple of different possible places. They have a meeting—”

  Violet snorted. “Yeah. They sit around a table in a boardroom, and the queen bee does a PowerPoint presentation…”

  Mom frowned at her. “I’m quite serious. I mean, obviously they don’t use PowerPoint, but they really do have a meeting. One bee does a dance to explain why her hive idea is best, and then another bee does a dance to argue for her choice—”

  “Or his,” Tess put in.

  Mom smiled at her. “Actually, in this case it’s always her. The worker bees are female.”

  Tess tugged on the dog’s ear. “Huh. Figures that the girl bees have to do all the work.”

  “Do they really dance?” Hazel asked. “I mean, how can bees dance? What does it look like?”

  I wondered if she was picturing them in tutus and pointe shoes. “They just fly about in a pattern,” I told her. “I can show you on YouTube if you want.”

  Mom nodded. “Their meeting can last for a few days, until they come to an agreement, and then they all fly off together to whichever new home they’ve decided on.”

  “Wow.” Hazel got to her feet and did a little jump, tapping one foot against her other ankle. “I do ballet and jazz,” she said. “And I’m maybe going to learn tap this summer.”

  Tess interrupted her. “My mom said you’re going to talk about pesticides, right? And how they’re hurting the bees?”

  I wondered which mom she meant, and if she called both Eva and Mary Mom. It seemed like it would get awfully confusing. “That’s right,” I said. I looked at my mother. “You should show them the juggling part you do.”

  Hazel’s eyes widened. “You can juggle? Can you teach me?”

  “Sure,” Mom said, laughing.

  “But not right now,” Eva called out from behind us. “Because dinner is ready.”

  After dinner—chickpea barley casserole, salad and vanilla frozen yogurt with chocolate chips and banana slices—I showed Hazel and Tess some bee videos on YouTube, and Mom taught them some juggling tricks.

  “Just start with two balls,” she advised. “To get the feel of it. Practice throwing them and catching them in a figure-eight pattern, like this.” She tossed the balls from hand to hand. “See? When one ball is at the top of its arc, you release the other one.”

  “That looks easy,” Hazel said. “Can’t you do more than two?”

  Tess had picked up two balls and was trying it. “It’s not that easy, Hazel. Not if you really try to do it right.”

  Mom laughed. “I can do five, but then I miss a lot. I only do four in the show. It’s a bit different when you add the fourth—you can’t do the figure-eight pattern with more than three.” She threw a third ball, juggled with three for a few seconds and then, without stopping, grabbed a fourth ball and tossed it up into the air. Caught, tossed, caught. “Like that. See how it changes?”

  “Cool,” Hazel said. She dropped a ball and bent to pick it up. “What does juggling have to do with bees anyway?”

  “Nothing.” That was Violet, who was lounging on the couch, reading manga.

  I ignored her. “Show her, Mom,” I said. “Do a bit of your routine.”

  Mom started tossing the balls to me, one at a time, until she just had a single ball left. “I start with this blue-and-green one.”

  “The earth?” Tess said.

  She laughed. “You’re quick. Yes. The earth.” She held the ball gently, cradling it in both hands. “I talk about how for millions of years, there were no humans. Human evolution is just a tiny part of the planet’s history.”

  “We did that in school,” Hazel said. “We made a timeline all down the hallway, starting at the office, and people didn’t even start to exist until we were all the way up the stairs and past our classroom door. The whole time since people started was, like, two inches.”

  “That’s right,” Mom said. “And then, for many years, people took care of the earth. We saw the earth as our mother, and we saw all living things as connected. People hunted and gathered, but no one took more than they needed.”

  “And then?” Tess again. “Farming, right?”

  “Yes. Agriculture.” Mom looked at me, and I tossed her a second ball. “We started to farm the earth.” She juggled the two balls. “We destroyed animal habitats. Overfished the oceans. Cleared forests to plant crops. Turned grasslands to deserts…”

  I threw her the third ball.

  “Industrialization,” Mom said, catching it. “Economic development. Burning fossil fuels. Climate change. Water pollution. Overpopulation. Monoculture.” She looked at Tess. “I’d talk a bit about all of those, in the actual performance. Give examples, that kind of thing.”

  “What’s monoculture?” Hazel asked.

  I answered, because I’d done a lot of reading about this for my bee project. “Like in nature, lots of different stuff grows in one area, right? And in the old days, farms were like that. Now it’s all one thing—like a farm that is thousands of acres of wheat.”

  Hazel frowned. “Why’s that bad for bees?”

  “Because for most of the year, there’s nothing there for them to eat, right?” I said, and I looked at Mom for help.

  She nodded. “Right. Plus, if you have a huge amount of one thing, it’s like a dream come true for pests. So then you pretty much have to use pesticides…”

  “And that kills bees?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s kind of scary, hearing it all together like that,” Tess said.

  “That’s the idea.” Mom nodded at me, and I tossed her the fourth ball. “This one is a yellow-and-black ball,” she said. “In the show, I mean.”

  “For bees,” Hazel said.

  “That’s
right. Over the last decade, honeybees have been dying and disappearing at an ever-increasing rate. And it’s not just the honeybees. Indigenous bees are dying too.” She juggled the four balls faster and faster. “You know what we wouldn’t have, without bees to pollinate the plants?”

  “Flowers?” Hazel asked.

  Tess shook her head. “Think about it, Hazel.”

  Hazel’s eyes widened. “Fruit?”

  Mom nodded. “Apples. Pears. Cherries. Blueberries. Apricots. Nectarines. Raspberries. Peaches. Watermelon. Cucumber.” With every word, the balls flew higher into the air. “Alfalfa. Apricots. Pumpkins. Squash. And that’s just a start.”

  “Wow.” Hazel and Tess stared at the balls, following them around and around.

  There was a long silence, and Mom kept on juggling. “So how long can we keep this going?” she asked. “How long can we keep all these balls in the air before it all comes crashing down?”

  “And if they all die…Like, if bees became extinct…” Tess trailed off.

  “We’d be in big trouble,” Mom said. She stopped juggling and let the balls fall to the ground. Thud, thud, thud, thud. We all stared at them in silence for a few seconds.

  Eva cleared her throat and shook her head slightly. “But people are doing a lot of things to prevent that, right? And looking for alternatives…”

  “In some parts of China, all the wild bees got killed,” I said. “And now the apple and pear orchards have to be pollinated by hand. Like, workers going from flower to flower with pots of pollen and paintbrushes.”

  “Seriously?” Eva said. “That’s amazing.”

  Mom kneeled and gathered up the balls. “There aren’t enough people in the world to do the work the bees do.”

  Finally, the adults retired to the kitchen to drink wine and talk about people I’d never heard of. Violet curled up on the couch with her phone, texting Ty, and the twins decided to watch a video. Hazel put a dvd in for them, and Tess got the Monopoly board out.